Bad Twins

by Rebecca Chance

  ‘Bella?’ Nita asked nervously. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I need another diet Red Bull,’ Bella muttered. ‘No, don’t get up. It’ll do me good to move, even a little bit.’

  The fridge was fully stocked with cans and bottles of water, juice and energy drinks; there were trays of sushi and sandwiches and biscuits on the side tables, fruit and vegetable platters. Tal had tried to think of everything they might need as they holed up here troubleshooting the relaunch. Though the beta testing had gone very well, Bella’s team was nothing if not thorough, which had proved a godsend when the extent of the crisis became obvious.

  Bella had never drunk a Red Bull before in her life, and she was taken aback by how effective they were. She was on the sugar-free version, which tasted brutally like cough syrup and pencil shavings, but most definitely did what it said on the tin. She could almost feel the wings sprouting between her shoulder blades.

  ‘So we’re identifying two major problem areas,’ she said, popping the tab and swigging down the cold brown liquid from the can. She leant back against the fridge as the Red Bull trickled down her throat, feeling instantly revivified. ‘Missing reservations, mostly VIP ones. And misdirected ones, also VIPs: customers being sent to low-grade hotels rather than top-end ones. Look at what happened to the Countess of Rutland.’

  Everyone shuddered. The Countess was extremely beautiful, highly photogenic and American by birth. This last quality meant that, unlike a British aristocrat, who tended to be more restrained and less publicity-friendly, she had had no qualms at all about making the most enormous scene when she found herself, after a transatlantic flight, taken by her waiting limo not to the Sachs Park Avenue but right across town, over the George Washington Bridge and to the Sachs airport hotel in Newark, New Jersey.

  Even viewed in the most kindly, flattering light, Newark had never claimed to be renowned for its sophistication and elegance. And the airport Sachs was the most basic offering in the entire hotel collection. There is always an ugly duckling or two in all hotel chains, and the Newark AirSachs was one of the stumpiest, most tattered-feathered ducklings of all.

  It did good business and it was clean, but it had been overdue a revamp for a decade, and the photos of it the furious Countess had promptly uploaded to her social media were utterly depressing: brutalist concrete architecture, walls painted the shade of beige which never looks completely clean even when it is, and even more brutally patterned carpet. The Countess’s blonde glamour threw the backgrounds into even worse relief by contrast; she had apparently napped in the limo, hence not having noticed how long the ride was taking, and her eyes were bright, her skin glowing and luminous.

  ‘The driver kept insisting that her reservation was actually at the AirSachs, which didn’t help,’ Tal said, reading from the memo that the New York head of operations had sent after the incident. ‘The limo was our booking, sent as a courtesy because we’re making a big push to snag her as a regular client – our NYC guest relations head of department has been courting her hard. We stocked it with top-end champagne, all her favourite snacks, pillows and a blanket, a goodie bag of Elemis moisturizer and hand lotions . . .’

  ‘Good work,’ Bella muttered in parentheses. The Countess was fantastically rich, titled, beautiful, and never off her Instagram: she was a very important influencer. Like many of the hyper-rich, she adored freebies and discounts with a passion, and was very amenable to being spoilt by hotels and restaurants in return for gracing them with her mediagenic presence. ‘If that isn’t all completely ruined now.’

  ‘But that’s the glitch – the booking went through our system, and it didn’t occur to the driver that it was weird to be taking her from one airport to another,’ Tal continued. ‘She got out before she realized where she was and made a huge scene in the car park. Told the driver to take her to Park Avenue, but he said that wasn’t the reservation he had in the booking – trust me, we’re never using that company again! So she stormed into the hotel and told them to ring Park Avenue and sort it out, and while they were doing that, she started Instagramming. There’s a video where she’s standing in the car park with the noise of planes landing and taking off, it’s really loud . . . plus, other guests recognized her and started taking photos and uploading them to their social media! It’s practically gone viral! We could not have been more unlucky!’

  ‘That hotel’s a shitheap,’ Bella said bluntly. ‘A total shitheap. Every time the budget rolls around, we choose not to make the AirSachs hotels a priority. And we get away with it because the really ugly ones are located so well for the terminals, we work very hard on having the best shuttle service of all the airport chains, we have high staffing levels and we keep them spotless. Much cheaper to do all those things than to redecorate. Honestly, it’s barely a three-star, even by airport hotel standards. But we get good ratings on consumer sites because the travellers get a better-than-average breakfast and we keep the prices competitive.’

  She looked at the can of energy drink in her hand.

  ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘That really kicked in. I just lectured all of you about stuff you already knew.’

  ‘Actually,’ Tal suggested, ‘it made me think that when we do the upgrade for those AirSachs, we could see if the Countess would cut the ribbon on the Newark one? It would be a nice gimmick!’

  ‘I love it,’ Bella said, drinking more Red Bull. ‘Make a note. We’ll give her literally whatever she wants to do it. Wait. What did you just say?’

  Tal stammered: ‘Uh, the Countess—’

  ‘No! Before that! I cut in on you with that rant about the AirSachs being a shitheap!’

  Nita’s eyes were wide with shock: Bella never used this kind of language in the workplace, or indeed outside of it. But the combination of her nerves being run ragged by the scale of this disaster and the Red Bull she was mainlining was ripping away the polite facade, revealing a much less ladylike version of Bella.

  ‘Tal was talking about the Countess Instagramming,’ a team member said.

  ‘I said it was really unlucky,’ Tal said. ‘Her, of all people, taken to that, uh, not very nice hotel—’

  ‘You can say shitheap,’ Bella said absently. ‘I did. Wait! Unlucky! That’s it! Unlucky!’

  She waved the can in the air, her blue eyes blazing.

  ‘Unlucky!’ she repeated. Some drops of energy drink spilled on the carpet, but no one was going to point that out to their wild-eyed boss.

  ‘Okay!’ Bella said, finishing the Red Bull and striding over to the table, crunching the empty can in her hand and chucking it in the bin as she went. ‘Two major problem areas. Any other really famous celebs being misdirected to shitheaps?’

  ‘Wayne Burns – the footballer – he and his husband were taken to the conference hotel in DC, in Silver Spring,’ another member of the team volunteered. ‘Instead of the Sachs on Dupont Circle. And then they were given the worst room in the hotel, right next to the elevator and the entrance to the car park. It’s technically a basement – it doesn’t even have full windows.’

  Everyone shuddered. Despite its pretty name, Silver Spring had been built as a conference centre and office park. There was little in it but huge, brutally functional office buildings, hotels ditto, and chain restaurants. It was hard to see the dapper Burnses enjoying a stay there whose highlights would be shopping for discount clothes at Men’s Wearhouse, followed by a meal at Panera Bread or Red Lobster, even with the latter’s well-known endless shrimp offer.

  ‘They were super-nice about it, apparently, which made everyone feel so much worse,’ he added.

  Bella heaved a deep breath.

  ‘So this huge VIP guest relations push, which was going so well, is actually one of the things that’s screwed us,’ she summarized. ‘Because we wanted to give them a totally customized, airport-to-hotel experience and get them loving the Sachs brand even before they got to the bloody hotels, and all it took was a change of schedule sent to the limo driver to mess the whole thing up
!’

  She looked around the table.

  ‘Tal, Nita, stay with me. Everyone else, the priority is to contact our best hotels, the top echelon, and tell their guest relations team to double-check the details of any VIP bookings which have limo pickups they organized. Look for VIPs who are media-worthy. Not just the rich ones, the famous ones. That’s our number-one priority for troubleshooting – restoring those VIPs’ bookings wherever we can, getting ahead of the curve. You all know your areas. I want reports in two hours.’

  There was a bustle of movement, Bella practically shooing the rest of the team out of the room and back to their offices. By the time they had grabbed their tablets and laptops and hurried out, and she turned to look at Nita and Tal, she could already see that Nita, at least, had connected the dots.

  ‘Unlucky,’ Nita echoed, looking up at her boss.

  ‘Right? What are the chances?’

  ‘The IT people have been saying from the beginning they don’t understand why any of our previous reservations were affected,’ Nita observed. ‘I was so busy telling them to fix this mess I didn’t stop to register that as much as I should have. But yes, it makes sense. Everyone anticipated that the major area for potential problems would be when people tried to make new bookings – the 3D room-visualizing, the sliding scale of the reward scheme discounts – but that doesn’t seem to be happening.’

  ‘Actually, the new tech seems to be working fine, which is so ironic!’ Tal said, looking up from her laptop. ‘I just got a report. They’re saying it’s a moderate success – which, you know, is fantastic in their terms. Fifteen per cent fewer glitches on average than they anticipated, and the new points icons are working really well visually – consumers seem to be finding them very easy to understand. And barely any hitches with the virtual check-ins!’

  ‘So it’s not us,’ Bella said. ‘It’s not our team. It’s someone from the outside who looked at our upcoming bookings and cherry-picked the ones that would get the most publicity possible. Catalina, the Countess of Rutland, Wayne Burns and his husband. This was designed to make us look as bad as possible.’

  ‘Why not just crash everything? The whole system?’ Tal asked. ‘I mean, perish the thought—’

  ‘My guess is that would have been too obvious,’ Bella said, her brain on Red Bull firing machine-gun fast. ‘It would have signalled clearly that we’re under cyber-attack. Whereas this just looks like we completely fucked up, which is much more damaging.’

  Nita and Tal’s gloomy nods confirmed the accuracy of this guess.

  ‘We’ll do a thorough inquest afterwards,’ Bella said. ‘But right now, I want you to assign a handful of people you totally trust to looking for whatever’s doing this, root down and dig it out. You get what I’m saying, don’t you? Handpick them. Talk about it between the two of you and make sure you agree. Take them off everything else, isolate them so no one else can hear what they’re saying, so gossip doesn’t spread that we think we’ve been sabotaged. Find the bug, or the back door to our system, whatever it’s called. You two have been working with IT so closely over the last few months—’

  ‘I know exactly who to pick,’ Nita said, standing up. She glanced at Tal. ‘We can compare names quickly, but I’m sure we’ll both agree on the core group.’

  ‘I don’t need to tell you to be discreet about briefing them,’ Bella said. ‘The main thing is to get it fixed so we stop these games that someone’s playing with us. But it’s almost as important that they don’t do anything that would stop us tracing it back. I need evidence, if I can get it. Tell them not to do anything that would kill the trail, if there is one.’

  She bit her lip.

  ‘I have to go up to the twentieth floor in a few hours to make a report,’ she said, something that Nita and Tal, of course, knew perfectly well. ‘If there’s anything I can say to actively demonstrate that we were sabotaged, for God’s sake try to give me something. I mean, we’re not Big Pharma or an arms manufacturer! We can’t possibly be expected to have protected ourselves against a cyber-attack, can we?’

  Both Nita and Tal shook their heads vigorously as they hurried from the room. Bella felt a rush of exhaustion sweep over her. The revelation that the partial crash of the Sachs booking systems, the erasure or change of some of the records, had almost certainly been a deliberate act, felt like a physical blow from which she was still recovering. And the effort of controlling herself so that she did not blurt out her suspicions to her team had been extremely hard.

  Bella slumped forward, resting the palms of her hands on the table, the bones of her arms locked, bracing to take some of her weight. She was scared that if she sat down, she would fall fast asleep.

  Then she thought: Well, why not go to sleep? There’s nothing for me to do. I’ve given everyone their tasks, and I’ll be only sitting around waiting until they’re finished . . .

  She remembered Charlotte, the day that Jeffrey had summoned them all to the Maida Vale house; Bella had hunkered down in her office to prep, while Charlotte had rung up the Nicky Clarke salon for an emergency appointment, turning up in Warwick Avenue looking sleek and beautiful and like a million dollars. Bella had felt then that her sister had a distinct advantage. So why not take a leaf out of her book by turning up as fresh and rested as possible at the meeting?

  Tal and Nita were not in the outer office, having both gone down to select their crack IT team; they had locked the main door for security. It was unprecedented for the office to be unattended during work hours, but so was the scale of today’s events. Nita was so well organized that finding the contact details of the agency through which she booked Bella’s hair and make-up was easy enough. By offering to pay double rate for the short notice, Bella secured a booking in an hour and a half for both services.

  Then she put a Post-it note on her own door explaining that she was napping, set an alarm on her mobile to wake her in an hour, kicked off her shoes and pushed the two armchairs to face each other. Propping the cushions behind her, she curled up in one chair, stretched her legs onto the other, and closed her eyes. It was a testament to her exhaustion that, despite the energy drink still running through her veins, she passed out almost at once, her head slumping into the plaid pillows, the slow sounds of quiet snoring rumbling around her office.

  Her dreams were vivid and tumultuous. Catalina stepped out of one of her videos to berate the Countess of Rutland, who promptly started dancing with her and Wayne Burns. Aeroplanes landed and took off behind them, and Bella was on one of them, walking up the aisle towards the cockpit; she reached out and opened the door and the pilot turned to glance at her. It was Charlotte, the uniform cap with its gold trim perched jauntily on her head, her hair cascading over her shoulders in the most perfect waves that Nicky Clarke’s nimble fingers could achieve. She looked at her twin sister over her shoulder and started to laugh; she laughed and laughed even as she turned back to the controls and shoved the nose of the plane down, and Bella tumbled forward as the plane went into a dive, headed to crash into the earth below, the emergency warnings ringing louder and louder . . .

  It was her phone alarm ramping up to make sure it was heard. Bella jerked awake, sitting upright, her legs numb, sweat dampening her hairline. She put a hand up and felt her forehead: it too was beaded and clammy. Bella could only be grateful that she had had the foresight to book hair and make-up appointments before her confrontation with her father on the twentieth floor.

  The roar of the hairdryer in her ears, the tug of the hairdresser’s big round brush, pulling Bella’s head first in one direction and then the other, the tines digging briefly into her skin each time, the slightly acrid smell of hair singeing under the heat of the straightening irons used to smooth the little flyaways at her hairline; it was hypnotic. She could see why Charlotte used this last-minute strategy to get herself meeting-ready. It wasn’t just the sensation of the fat, heavy curls bouncing glamorously on your shoulders, the fact that your hair was lifting regally off your scalp rath
er than hanging there limply; it was the sheer distraction of the noise, the heat, the smell of hair and hairspray, which blocked her from concentrating on anything else. It was the first time in days that she had been awake without worrying about the worst professional crisis she had ever had to firefight.

  ‘There you go!’

  The hairdresser set down the styling tongs and extracted a hand mirror from her case, holding it up to show her client the volume she had achieved.

  ‘Lovely,’ Bella said, already pushing back her chair.

  ‘You really have great hair,’ the young woman said sycophantically. ‘It made my job very easy.’

  ‘Thanks! Can you pack up as fast as possible? I’m on a very tight deadline.’

  Bella was already walking over to the door of her office. She pulled it open to see Nita, back from her foray into the IT department, practically leaping to her feet, so eager was she to let her boss know what she had found out. Bella told the hairdresser to see Tal for her tip, the last word putting a smile on the young woman’s face as she hurried out.

  ‘You’ve got something, right?’ Bella said, swinging round to look at Nita, propping her bottom against her desk, feeling her curls move with satisfying weight around her head. This truly worked, this emergency blow-dry technique: unquestionably, she felt more confident, more in control.

  ‘Oh, Bella,’ Nita said, taking a deep breath. ‘We’ve been thinking and thinking about how to tell you! Do you want to sit down?’

  Bella shook her head and reached out wordlessly for the tablet Nita was carrying.

  ‘We hired a kid someone knows on a forum,’ Nita said, holding it back for a moment. ‘A hacker. It took him no time at all. He was able to pinpoint exactly when the bug entered our system, and which computer. It was out of work hours, and the IT team were here almost round the clock, which means it was accessed in the early morning by someone who was able to come in any time without being flagged by security . . .’