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- Herausgeber: Pantera Press
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
You can run from a killer – unless the killer is you … In top-secret talks in Barcelona, ex-spy Dr Tori Swyft seals a landmark deal over the Arctic that sends Washington DC and Moscow reeling. The next morning, she wakes beside two dead bodies … A nameless voice phones her, taunting her and revealing a shocking video that shows Tori as the murderer. Yet she has no memory of what happened. With Spanish police converging at her door, Tori flees, in a race against time to find The Voice and prove her innocence – before it's too late.
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You can run from a killer – unless the killer is you …
In top-secret talks in Barcelona, ex-spy Dr Tori Swyft seals a landmark Arctic deal with Beijingthat sends Washington DC and Moscow reeling. The nextmorning, she wakes beside two dead bodies …
A nameless voice phones her, taunting her and revealing a shocking video that shows Tori asthe murderer. Yet she has no memory of what happened.
With Spanishpolice converging at her door, Tori flees, in a race against time to findThe Voice and prove her innocence – before it’s too late.
Also by John M. Green
The Trusted
The Tao Deception
Nowhere Man
Born to Run
DOUBLE DEAL
Contents
About the Book
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
‘Whoever holds Greenland holds the Arctic. It’s the most important strategic location in … the world.’
– Director of Arctic Studies, US Naval War College
‘The United States [owning Greenland] would be nice. It’s essentially a large real estate deal.’
– Former US President Donald J. Trump
‘Between two evils, I always pick the one I’ve never tried before.’
– Mae West
In loving memory of Nigel Dunn (1948–2021)
1
Barcelona, Spain
Tori Swyft’s eyes were glued shut. Her head was pounding, her body quivering, yet this wasn’t a hangover. Couldn’t be.
At last night’s celebrations she’d let barely a drop of alcohol touch her lips. How could she risk any misstep when the treaty – the one she had personally negotiated – was ‘the first major shake-up of the Arctic’s balance of power since the Cold War’? And that was The New York Times speaking, not her.
With Tori’s help and guidance, Greenland – her client – chose China as its future polar partner, ending centuries of Danish colonial rule and decades as an American ally. If the US and Russia, the Arctic’s two prevailing powers, kept out of the way … a very big if … this new accord would unlock a vast treasure trove of prosperity for the tiny population of this icy nation.
For chrissakes, her eyes … They refused to open, no matter how much Tori rubbed them. Her world was totally dark. Pitch black.
This wasn’t eye gunk from sleep. It wasn’t conjunctivitis.
Glue?
Was it actual glue? Was that even possible?
Had someone – who? – glued her eyes shut?
Her skin prickled and her breath shortened as a quake of terror surged through her. Panic wasn’t the answer, she knew that, but her body wasn’t listening, her hands taking it upon themselves to scrub and yank at her eyes, every muscle in her face contorting as she tried to open a crack between her lids.
With her heart hammering, sweat flooding from her pores, the locomotive of panic kept roaring through her.
Breathe, she commanded, but even her nose wasn’t cooperating. Her nostrils were clogged too, so she inhaled through her mouth. Belly breaths, deep breaths.
Someone did this. To her.
Was it linked to the accord? Was it the Russians? The Americans?
Was this how they were going to play their hand?
The monster who’d done this, where was he? Close by, out in the blackness? Silently baring his teeth at her? Exulting in her terror?
She strained her ears but all she heard was the rumble of the air-conditioner and the sound of her own breathing.
No one was moving, no one crowing over what they’d done. To her.
She tried to sniff the air, to detect a scent – cologne, perhaps, the sourness of body odour, bad breath – but her nose was blocked.
She pressed a thumb over her nostrils, first one then the other, blowing hard, her hand catching the slugs of snot, which she wiped off on her pillow.
The rasp of her lungs, the pounding in her ears, the thump of her heart … she needed to slow it all down. Breathe, Tori, she told herself. Synch with something rhythmic, anything. The drone of the AC was the only thing.
Slow. Down.
Her heart rate was dropping and her nose began to sense an odour. It was not a welcome one. The first whiff was acrid, sour. The second was repulsive, stomach-churning, a stink Tori knew well but wished she did not, the same stench of death she’d gagged on two years ago in a Mosul hospital.
Her stomach heaved like it had that day in Iraq, the pit of her gut hurtling up to her throat. She whipped her head to the side, hoping her vomit would splatter the bastard who did this to her – if he was there.
He didn’t flip out, didn’t make a sound.
But that didn’t mean he wasn’t present, watching and smirking.
Tori knew the power of silences. Interrogation Techniques 101 at the CIA included a whole chapter on silences. She had applied them herself.
Now she brushed her fingers over her body. It was bare, varnished with sweat.
She understood.
Today, she, Tori Swyft, was the target.
She visualised her captor, leering at her from some vantage point, revelling in his handiwork as he calibrated his next move.
Confront him, she told herself. She wiped the puke off her lips with the back of her hand. ‘What do you want?’ She pushed out the question, her words dry and croaky.
She wanted his name, to make a connection, to remind the ghoul that I’m a person, not simply your captive, a standard tactic in hostage negotiation she’d also learnt from the CIA.
Except she knew it would not work. A man prepared to glue a woman’s eyes shut would know that game and refuse to play it.
He’d proffer his name when it suited him. If it suited him.
‘What do you want?’ she repeated, her voice clearer, firmer.
The monster said nothing.
She pictured him holding a knife and silently stepping closer, almost felt him hovering over her and running his tongue along the blade of a KA-BAR. In her harrowed imagination she saw his fingers around the leather-washer handle, his reflection in the polished Cro-Van steel blade, brain drunk with his power over the naked woman he’d blinded, the tingle of cold metal against his tongue.
The fear welling up inside her was a dead weight, a barrier to action. She shook herself. There was nothing to be gained if she kept imagining the worst.
What if this silence signalled his absence?
If he’d stepped outside – a possibility – she’d have a small window to make her escape, or at least to try.
Again she pulled at her eyelids, but still failed to wrench them apart. This time, though, her fingernail caught on a thin lip of gum, a hard thread like plastic that snaked across her lashes and fused them together.
She picked and scratched at it, ripping clumps of eyelashes out. But not enough to see.
Without thinking, she opened her mouth to scream, opened it wide, drawing in as deep a breath as she could, and stopped herself. If he really had stepped out, the racket would bring him back and then …
That smell and her glued eyelids told her what he was capable of.
She exhaled, closed her mouth and groped sideways for a nightstand, hoping to find a phone. Hers. Anyone’s.
As she reached out she experienced a sharp twinge in the crook of her arm. Felt a tiny lump, right over the bulge of a vein.
On top of whatever else the bastard had done, he’d drugged her.
2
Tori groped her left hand across the top of the nightstand beside the bed, its glass surface cold and strangely barren. She couldn’t feel a lamp, a clock, not even one of those ludicrous fifteen-dollar bottles of hotel water that housekeeping left in her room every night – the kind she always refused to open on principle but would have paid ten times for right now.
Her hand nudged something metallic. It slid away, almost falling off the edge. She caught it in time and ran her fingers down its tapering length … an open penknife.
Did her captor leave it behind as a threat? Or was it meant to tantalise her, a possible weapon to use against him, only to have him whip it away at the last minute?
She swung her legs to the side of the bed, keeping her feet away from where she anticipated the puddle of vomit had landed, and sat up. With her head spinning – she assumed from the drugs – she sat still, waiting for the wooziness to settle, half expecting this to be the moment her tormentor would say his piece. Yet he remained silent.
She weighed the small knife in her hand as a new fear came over her. What if the glue had got onto her corneas? Almost in a panic she pinched the hairs on her left lids between her thumb and forefinger and pulled. The suction popped and her lids lifted off her eyeball. Thank heavens.
She repeated the procedure with her right eye and thankfully got the same result.
Her eyelashes had done what eyelashes were meant to do, they’d trapped the foreign matter and stopped it from getting into her eyes.
She balanced the knife in her hand again and decided her only way forward was to cut off her lashes. It would make her look weird, but weird was not blind.
With her left hand she pulled at her lashes and with her right took the knife and worked gingerly at the hairs, just tiny nicks, chipping as close to the skin of her lids as possible without slicing into them.
3
In the room across the hotel hallway, Tori’s work colleague Frank Chaudry sat at the end of his bed, his eyes briefly on his left foot as he pulled on a sock then looked up again to catch the sub-titles scrolling across the bottom of the TV screen.
Yesterday had been epic. The best day in his post-MI6 career. He and Tori – well, Tori mainly – had tied up the Greenland–China deal in time to make the evening news bulletins in Europe and the mid-morning ones in America.
But this morning Barcelona TV was barely mentioning the story. That wasn’t really strange, not with the state funeral this afternoon overshadowing everything, and the buzz of all the global politerati starting to converge on the city. Prime ministers, chancellors, a couple of kings. Even US President Isabel Diaz was coming.
Frank and Tori had been present three days ago when Oriol Casals – president of Spain’s autonomous region of Catalonia and the host of the secret talks – took the fateful call. They watched the colour leach from his face as he dropped the phone.
His cousin’s heart attack in New York City hit him hard. Not only had they grown up together on the same street in Barcelona, she’d also gone into politics, in her case to become one of Catalonia’s – and Spain’s – favourite daughters. Once the country’s celebrated defence minister, it was only six months ago that Montserrat Vilaró i Mas was elected the youngest ever secretary-general of the United Nations. All of Spain loved her and called her Montse.
The bad news hit at a tense moment in the talks when Rao Songtian, China’s lead negotiator, was at his most intransigent. So Tori, God bless her, whipped up the death, and the funeral, as a spur to bring the deal to a close. Their host, Oriol Casals – Uri for short to people who were close to him – was about to become completely preoccupied with the arrangements for his cousin’s funeral. And, as Tori also knew, he had an election coming up.
The ante was upped even higher the next morning when America’s president called both Casals and Greenland’s newly elected prime minister. The US had got wind of the talks and was seeking a delay to give them time to put together a counteroffer to China’s, one that Greenland would find compelling.
‘This is brilliant,’ Frank remembered Tori whispering to him and Greenland’s leader, Nivikka Petersen, in a side room as she high-fived each of them. ‘Let’s go back in and really put the squeeze on China.’
Tori was class, thought Frank. She strode back into the negotiation room, sat directly opposite Rao Songtian, who was putting his own phone back onto the table, and regarded him coolly.
Not only did he return the stare but he spoke before she could. ‘I know.’
‘What do you know?’ Tori kept her tone light, playing out a standard tenet of negotiation, never assume.
‘I know that the United States knows,’ he said, his eyes glancing back at his phone. ‘You leaked these talks to them,’ he added and pushed back his chair, started to stand and turned to Petersen. ‘Madam Prime Minister, this breach of security is intolerable,’ he said. ‘On behalf of the People’s Republic of China, I regret to advise you that we are done here.’
Frank watched. Tori’s gaze was unwavering, her back straight. ‘Rao,’ she said, ‘the leak did not come from us, you have my word. But Washington does know, that’s a fact. The other fact is they want Greenland at least as much as China does. More, perhaps. So here’s how we’ll play this. Walk out of here if you wish. We won’t stop you. But if you do I’ll pick up my phone,’ she put it on the table, ‘and as soon as you slam the door shut we’ll open talks with Washington. If you stay, we keep negotiating only with you but, with the US trying to bash down the door, your exclusivity will now end at 3 pm tomorrow. If you haven’t reached a deal with us by then, we will invite Washington to come in and join the party.’
Rao Songtian had sat back down.
Frank stared at his socks. Black. Like all his socks. Bland. Plain. Frank liked to blend in. Unlike Tori, who shone even in black, which was her trademark. Everything she wore was black. She said it was purely utilitarian, so everything went with everything else, but he wasn’t so sure, since it made the red of her hair crackle like flames across any room. At least he’d persuaded her to make a slight change for last night’s celebration, even if it was only to move from black to black and white.
4
Oahu, Hawaii
It was just a month earlier that Tori had been on her surfboard, moving up and down on the swells, manoeuvring and waiting for the right wave. Time had faded the freckles that bridged across her nose as a child surfing on Sydney’s famous northern beaches – these days her skin had a pasty bookish pallor. Yet out here the power of the sea offered her more solace than any book possibly could.
The incoming surge felt right and, grabbing her board’s rails, she raised her torso and flicked back her hair, flinging out a sparkling curtain of spray. The salt on her lips cracked as she fleetingly looked back and, at the perfect moment, she started paddling hard and caught the wave.
Close to shore, Tori heard gasps from the beach as she leant forward, placing her hands on the board, then her head and, after forming this human tripod of support, she kicked her legs back and out, arcing them up into the air above her into a headstand. Balancing herself upside down, a manoeuvre that for most surfers was near impossible, she let the wave glide her all the way in to the shore.
An hour later, Tori was sitting in a sun lounge on a rooftop terrace looking out to sea, though unsure what she was hoping to spy. A whale? A pod of dolphins?
Her phone vibrated but she ignored it. She’d even switched off her voicemail. This month, this break, was meant to be sacred. She’d put everything else on hold. Tori needed the water, the waves. The solace.
The phone didn’t care and vibrated again, more insistent this time.
She told her eyes not to look at it, but they disobeyed her. Axel Schönberg III the screen said.
She swung herself off the sun lounge and stepped closer to the rooftop’s balustrade, debating whether or not to answer.
Gazing out, she watched the waves, low and slow, rhythmic, carefree. A giggling rabble of children leapt in and out of the lacy froth at the shore. She was here alone, which was exactly what she needed. At least that’s what she told herself.
Axel was her boss at SIS, a secretive family-run firm that, under the one red-tiled roof in Boston, brought together the smarts of a Goldman Sachs and the wiles of a CIA. It was why so many MBAs and former security services personnel worked there. People like Tori. People like Frank.
SIS was a firm whose clients – kings, presidents and billionaires – only picked up the phone if their problem needed the special dose of discretion, guile or judgement that the publicity-shy Schönberg dynasty had been quietly mustering on their behalf for three generations.
She remembered that Axel – the third, and possibly the most successful of his family line – had personally signed off on her leave, agreeing to her request that no one disturb her. Yet here he was, calling her himself. ‘The soul does need time out,’ he’d nodded, ‘a time when we can shut ourselves off from ourselves, as much as from what’s swirling around us.’ He’d taken a long draw on one of his Montecristo cigars and Tori wondered if he’d been speaking to himself as much as to her as she watched his smoke ring drift up to the ceiling.
Despite his wealth and influence, Axel was an incredibly thoughtful and respectful employer, her best, in fact, so if he felt he needed to intrude on her sanctuary, it must be quite important.
Axel was old-school so she expected he’d start off with an abject apology, and he did. It was genuine, she knew that, but she also knew his clients trumped everything. Their needs won out over anything else.
‘Tori, it’s the Arctic. Greenland, specifically.’
The Hawaiian sun was still high, almost directly overhead, but the mere thought of ice and snow and blizzards sent a shiver through her skin.
5
‘Greenland?’ Tori repeated, while she pondered what could possibly be behind Axel’s call.
‘Tori, what do you know about Greenland? Geopolitically?’
‘Geopolitically? Didn’t Donald Trump have some cockamamie plan to buy Greenland from Denmark a few years ago?’
‘Not so cockamamie, actually,’ said Axel pensively.
She heard water glugging into a tumbler. Once it would have been champagne, but Axel was a different, thinner man now and he’d taken to honing his new body shape like a man running a hot knife through the butter he no longer let himself slather on a morning muffin.
Apart from whales and polar bears and the impact of climate change on the ice sheet, and the blustering attempt by ex-President Trump to purchase it, Tori’s mental search engine didn’t have much on Greenland. ‘Axel, can we stop the twenty questions? All I know is that Greenland is a huge icy landmass with a tiny population.’
‘Yes, with a squeeze, Yankee Stadium could seat every single Greenlander, man, woman and reindeer, all 56,000 of them. It’s such a small population that the country is only economically viable because they’ve got a Juulimaaq … to a Greenlander, that’s Santa Claus.’
Where was this going?
‘Every Christmas, Denmark slides down Greenland’s chimney and pops a half-billion dollars into their budget stocking.’
‘What’s in it for the Danes?’ she asked. ‘It can’t be charity.’
‘Originally it was, kind of. A mix of altruism and post-colonial guilt. But in more recent times it’s become a down payment on the future, staking a claim on the bounty that climate change is bringing to the Arctic.’
‘Bounty?’ Tori blurted out, thinking Axel’s new diet must be making him too weak to think straight.
‘Tori, our warming planet has grim downsides but for the Arctic there are a few positives as well. As the ice melts, a diamond mine of potential reveals itself. Remember, Greenland was actually green once.’
‘So what’s this about? Potential farmland?’
‘And mining, oil and gas, fishing. Huge opportunities for tourism. With all that becoming possible, shipping and international trade will be early and huge beneficiaries. Russia got onto this years ago and already they’ve got forty icebreakers plying the Arctic with more on the production line. America, on the other hand, has been slow off the mark, a single operational icebreaker with a second that seems to spend its summers and winters in drydock for repair.’
While Tori still didn’t follow where Axel was going, that was not unusual. He often approached a topic obliquely. ‘Axel,’ she said, ‘you’re not about to tell me SIS has accepted a job to work on Greenland for Russia, are you?’ If Russia was his client, she’d sit the deal out. The country’s current president, Maxim Vladimirovich Tushkin, was dark and primal, a chunk of dirty black coal as far from a diamond as she could imagine.
‘Heavens no. It’s our good friend President Hou Tao—’
She almost whistled into the phone. Putting China and Greenland together would be huge. Not necessarily a good thing, but it would be massive. ‘You’ve persuaded China to step into Denmark’s, er, clogs?’
‘Actually, the word for clogs in Danish is træsko, but yes … President Hou is keen.’
‘But isn’t his attention on the BRI? China is spending trillions on it.’ Tori had read a lot about China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Via this vast infrastructure and investment project involving between sixty and seventy other countries, China was building the modern Silk Road – land and sea routes – to gain better and cheaper ways to ship its goods to Europe across Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.
‘Tori, Hou is a deep-thinking strategist. Yes, he’s building the BRI but he also wants to advance a Plan B, an alternative and competitive route that can zip his ships to Europe even faster, even cheaper. If he can seize an opportunity like that, China will be far less beholden to foreign powers. That Plan B is the new Polar Silk Road.’
‘Are you telling me that Greenland is his key to carving that out?’
‘Exactly. He’ll pare twenty days off China’s shipping times to Europe if their cargo freights go via Greenland instead of the traditional route that winds through the South China Sea, the Molucca Straits and the Suez. That’s a time-save of forty per cent. The current forty-eight days at sea cuts back to twenty-eight. It’s not just the time-to-market benefit, it’s also the savings in charter and fuel costs and dodging the huge port charges all those countries on the way are thrusting their hands out for. Shipping is the bread and butter of his Plan B, but the cream is mining and—’
‘So Donald Trump wasn’t a complete airhead.’
‘On this issue.’
‘If this is China’s Plan B, why the urgency?’ Tori asked, code for why couldn’t this wait till I got back from leave?
‘Because this is a charms race, Tori.’
She wondered if she’d misheard. ‘Did you say arms race?’
‘No. This is about charm, and resources, both of which President Hou has in abundance. The thing is, Russia won’t accept a Chinese push into what they consider their territory lying down. America won’t either. They’ve tried to court Greenland before – incompetently – and they’ll try again. When Trump’s thought bubble flew out of his mouth everyone slapped him down … Greenland, the Danes, the media, the Twitterverse, you name it. But here’s the thing, Tori. The day after Isabel Diaz moved into the Oval Office we … I … gave Hou a call and, while I can’t claim credit for the actual idea, we did fast-track his thinking. We told him that if a new administration in DC decided to dust off Trump’s idea, they’d approach it properly and professionally so he needed to move before they did. The elections in Greenland last month gave us the perfect opportunity, so now it’s all systems go, go, go. We started working seriously on this just after you went on leave and—’
‘Whoa, Axel.’ A scrap of intel from Tori’s CIA days had come back to her. ‘Greenland hosts a number of US military bases. DC will never countenance China wangling its way in—’
‘Which is why we’re playing Hou’s cards very close to our chest. By the way, he’s not our client. Greenland is. The new prime minister agreed this strategy with me long before she won the election. You’ll really like her. Nivikka Petersen. She’s quite the dynamo. An old family friend, actually.’
Of course she was. Tori smiled. For a century the three Axel Schönbergs had been gathering friends and influence as matter-of-factly as Elton John collected sparkly jackets and Grammy awards. ‘How much of a friend?’
‘When Junior took me to Greenland for our fishing trips Nivi was our deckhand. Her dad was our guide.’
It was bizarre, Tori thought, to hear her boss, not exactly a young man, referring to his late father, Axel II, as ‘Junior’ or his grandfather Axel as ‘Senior’. It always reminded her of an old joke: What’s the difference between an eccentric and a screwball? Money.
She pictured Axel holding up a glass of sparkling water, Badoit maybe, and watching the bubbles playfully rise to the surface the same way his family’s connections inevitably did.
It wasn’t only the past that was another country. The rich were too, Tori decided. They definitely did things differently.
6
‘Nivikka’s party romped in,’ Axel was telling Tori. ‘Won the election by a landslide, or an avalanche. Whatever.’
Tori detected a twinkle of pride in his voice. ‘You funded her campaign?’
‘Tori, please! SIS never has and never will soil its hands with grubby politics. Well, not this century.’
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘but you’ve been advising her on this prospect with China since before the election?’
‘Naturally,’ he said, the word slipping off his tongue like a drop of morning dew from the petal of a pure white rose.
‘And she genuinely believes Greenlanders will be happy to live under China’s, er, patronage?’
Axel chuckled. ‘I didn’t exactly say that, Tori. The perfect outcome is we tie up a brilliant deal with China, one Greenland will be very happy with. But then we encourage America and Russia, ideally America, to barge in and … you know … overbid.’
‘You’re planning to run an auction for a country? That’s actually a thing?’
‘Not for their sovereignty. Greenland will keep that. But a race to win first dibs over pretty much everything else. Their ports, natural resources, military facilities, shipping lanes, fishing rights. Sotheby’s will have nothing on SIS if we’ve got Tori Swyft banging the gavel. The richer the terms you strike with China, the better for our client, and the more the other two rival powers will fall over themselves to up the ante and come out ahead. At minimum, they’ll be desperate to stop China gaining a firm foothold in the Arctic. At maximum, they’ll want all that Greenland offers for themselves.’
Tori’s mind was spinning.
Axel went on. ‘Also, a globally significant deal like this needs an honest broker who—’
‘Aren’t we – you – the broker, Axel?’
‘Absolutely not. Like I said, we’re the trusted adviser to Greenland. China trusts us too, which is a bonus, but our actual client is Greenland. The broker sitting in the middle, the person who’ll bring the two sides together and smooth the tensions that Tori Swyft will inevitably cause when she squeezes China for every drop of value, that person is the president of Catalonia. He’s another friend, by the way.’
Of course he was. Tori shook her head.
‘You’ll like Uri,’ he said. ‘Everyone does. Well, the powers in Madrid don’t but that’s not saying much. There hasn’t been a leader in Barcelona they’ve got on with for years.’
‘Because of the independence campaign?’
‘Exactly. But everyone else loves him. He’s got one of those long Continental names, Oriol Casals i Castanyé. Oriol Casals for short or, to really close friends, Uri. We’ve known each other since we were boys. His father was a Catalan hero, you know. Garrotted by Franco’s men. And now Uri is the president of Spain’s richest and most prosperous region, and forever grateful for the pension Junior gave his mother and the scholarship that funded his education. Consequently, he’s very happy to host our talks in beautiful Barcelona.’
‘What does that mean, practically speaking?’
‘He’ll start with the ceremonial stuff and will be available whenever there’s a sticky issue that you and China can’t agree on. He is running an important Spanish region so he can’t be at the talks all the time, but he will be close by. He’s allocated us a convenient private section of the government palace for the negotiations, so you’ll be away from prying eyes. I’m calling you from the courtyard right now. You’ll find the palace a simpatico venue to do the horse-trading on a deal of this import. A stately neoclassical façade behind which you and SIS will bring two ancient cultures together, China and Greenland. We – you especially, Tori – will be making history.’
She noted that Axel hadn’t asked her if she’d work on it, and she knew he wouldn’t. Her boss had lost his paunch but not his cheek.
She planned to come back to that question soon enough but had a few others to ask first. ‘Isn’t Greenland the logical place to hold the talks?’
‘If a Chinese delegation put a toe on the ice, it wouldn’t take thirty seconds for the vultures of the global media to swoop in on it. In Greenland, Tori, everyone is someone’s daughter, brother, sister, cousin, aunt, whatever. And before you ask, holding the talks in China isn’t an option either.’
She nodded. ‘That would show weakness on Greenland’s part. Hence Barcelona: neutral territory, millions of visitors coming and going again, so no one stands out. But why me, Axel?’ She watched the sea foam calling to her, glistening as it crept up the sand. ‘You seem to have everything under control and, frankly, I’d really prefer to stay here.’
‘Tori, if I had an alternative I—’
‘You’ve been front, centre and behind all of this, Axel. You started it so shouldn’t you be the one to finish it?’
‘Until an hour ago that was my plan. I would never have called you, Tori. I know how important … But an emergency in Saudi Arabia has cropped up. The king phoned – he and I were at Harvard together – and the poor fellow is frantic. Just between us …’
As she listened to the details of the unfolding Saudi crisis she understood why Axel had to drop everything else for it and that, unfortunately, meant the same for her.
Which made an issue scratching at the back of her brain even more important. ‘Axel, China’s developed a pretty dubious reputation for drowning poor countries in huge amounts of—’
‘You mean debt-trap diplomacy. Yes, a lot of world opinion, or should I say a lot of self-interested Western opinion, claims that China has a policy of seducing Third World countries with cheap loans for grand projects they want but can’t afford, and that when those projects blow out, as they often do, the locals suddenly discover they can’t even afford to make the interest payments to China let alone pay back the principal, so China forecloses, and they win a stranglehold over the projects as well as over the key components of the country’s economy. Conquest by debt.’
‘Exactly.’
‘That’s what people say but Hou doesn’t see it that way. But as Greenland’s adviser and his friend, I was upfront with him from Day One about that, making it plain that Greenland, and SIS, won’t have a bar of any deal if there’s even a sniff of that kind of thing. Not only does Hou understand, he’s bending over backwards. He wants this to become the benchmark deal that proves to the world they have misunderstood China’s past conduct.’
‘How?’
‘We’ve already nutted out some protections. Yes, China will be lending our client billions but Hou’s already agreed for Greenland to have a ten-year holiday from having to pay any interest at all. Ah, Tori, my car is pulling up. I need to go, so Francis will update you with the rest. He’s been working on this with me so he’s, er, full bottle on everything. Isn’t that what you Australians say? Whatever, he’s all over the detail. He and I both think the two of you can wrap this up in two weeks, three at the outside, which means we’ll get you back to Hawaii before your beach towels dry.’
That Frank Chaudry – or Francis as Axel always insisted on calling him – was up to speed and on the case was more than welcome. Frank was super-smart, incredibly diligent and a guy who always thought outside the box.
Tori couldn’t help remembering her first day at SIS when he walked through her office door, devastatingly dark and handsome with a charming British reticence and a voice that thrummed like salted caramel on the tongue.
‘So you need me in Barcelon—’
‘Your first stop will be Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. After my jet gets me back to Boston, it’ll swing over to Hawaii with Francis on board to pick you up and take you both there. We’ve got a natural break in the talks. The Chinese team are going back home for Ancestor Day or Tomb-Sweeping Day, something like that. This way you get the opportunity for Francis to introduce you to Nivikka, for her and her people to get comfortable with you, as well as a few days for Francis to bring you up to speed before you all head back to Barcelona to wrap it up.’
A shadow floated over Tori and she looked up. A red-tailed tropicbird, otherwise silky white, was gliding in the thermal, its resplendent coral red streamers trailing behind it.
While she owed Axel and understood he needed someone to step in and run the deal, she really wanted to stay in Hawaii. She tried one last shot.
‘Couldn’t Henry step in?’ Henry Harvey was an SIS veteran who’d worked there longer than any other director bar Axel.
‘Henry is stuck saving Venezuela’s bacon in Caracas. Tori, this will be over before you know it. The hula dancers won’t even realise you’ve been away. Call me when you get to Nuuk.’
Even the name of the capital city sounded like someone beating their arms across their body to keep out the cold. She grabbed a beach towel off the deck tiles and wrapped it round her shoulders.
7
Barcelona
President Casals got to his office in the Generalitat Palace at 6 am despite the celebrations the previous night for the deal-signing. With two significant official functions on the day’s schedule – one of them very personal – he needed extra time to go over the speeches and make them perfect. At 2 pm, he’d be giving the eulogy at the state funeral for his cousin, Montse. Earlier, late morning, he’d be cutting the ribbon for Catalonia’s driverless car show, showcasing his region’s tech prowess.
His faithful chief of staff Maria Noguera was waiting for him, as usual. No matter what time her boss arrived at the palace, Maria was always there with a steaming cup of café amb llet and a plate of carquinyolis, the crunchy almond biscuits he loved. She also had his daily stomach-turner ready for him, a print copy of the morning’s El Mundo newspaper.
He could have read it online on his way in but he needed the sugar from the biscuit to give him the fortitude to withstand the inevitable attack. Since his election, not a single editorial in Spain’s national daily had rated him better than appalling. He dunked a biscuit in his coffee, popped it in his mouth and spread open the pages.
‘Fill de puta!’ he exclaimed, soggy chunks of biscuit spraying out over the paper. He looked up to apologise for his language but thankfully Maria wasn’t in the room. Clearly, she’d already read the piece and knew to make herself scarce until he stopped shouting.
He put his head back down and read the opening paragraph in full:
Catalan President Oriol Casals i Castanyé has learned nothing from his predecessors’ mistakes. Despite all the work there is for him to do at home, we see him once again prancing about on the global stage. Yesterday he was bumping shoulders with China and Greenland. Today it will be a conga line of world leaders. The man sucks up any excuse to distract the public from his weak leadership and tarnished image …
Since when was brokering such a brilliant deal a distraction, he fumed. Bringing China and Greenland together was a masterstroke, and his efforts put Catalonia, and Spain of course, right at the centre of it. Without him …
And what were they implying about the state funeral for one of Spain’s greatest daughters? Was Montse’s death a distraction too? Gilipolles! Assholes!
He was about to call out to Maria when she walked in with a file of papers in her hand and a grim look that silenced him.
‘It’s the autopsy report on Montse,’ she said. ‘The coroner was up all night working on it. Uri, it’s bad. Really bad.’
8
Air Force One, over the Atlantic
President Isabel Diaz smiled at the chief steward. For her, politics was similar to hospitality – the industry where she’d pulled herself up – and she appreciated the impact a simple smile or a nod could have on people.
The steward, dressed as always in perfect crisp white, was a five-year veteran of Air Force One. As he leant over to remove the dishes he winked at the First Man. Davey twinkled back, sucked the red sauce off his fingers then signed, ‘Thank you, Chief Danny. The burger was good, but not as good as one of Isabel’s.’
The officer looked quizzically at the president who, for once, was glad her crew’s American Sign Language skills were still fairly feeble. She tousled her ten-year-old stepson’s blond locks and signed to the boy, ‘Chef Lisa’s burgers are delicious, Davey. Besides, it’s not polite to diss her or Chief Danny when they’ve stayed up all night to please us.’
That said, she couldn’t help thinking that the boy was actually correct. While Lisa’s food was excellent, her burgers did lack the decades of devotion that Isabel had spent in perfecting her own, let alone the family restaurant chain she’d built to prove it.
The child signed back, a cheeky smile on his face, ‘Isabel, did you know I can sign how your burgers are the best in the world in six languages! Six! Montse taught me.’ He picked up his milk with both hands and guzzled it, then put the glass down.
Isabel took her napkin and wiped the white moustache off his upper lip. He gazed up at her with his big blue eyes. She knew what was coming. He’d been begging the same thing from the moment she told him they were flying to Barcelona.
‘Can I sign your speech for you at Montse’s funeral? Please? I’ve been learning it in International Sign,’ a fact to which every passenger and crewmember on board Air Force One could attest. ‘Please? Please?’
In truth, Isabel was as keen as Davey for him to do it, but she’d screwed up, asking the Catalan president about it during the same phone call with him two days ago when she’d raised the Greenland talks.
Oriol – only those close to him called him Uri – had exploded. Not about Davey’s request, but about the leak – the talks were top secret. ‘It was Madrid, wasn’t it?’ he raged; Spain’s national government constantly spying on Catalonia was bad enough without them leaking its secrets to foreign powers, let alone secrets that belonged to two other friendly nations.
Point blank, she told Oriol he was wrong, which was easy to do because he was. She didn’t tell him the complete truth, though. She’d have hell to pay if Greenland discovered that the five-star cybersecurity contractor they’d hired to protect their parliament’s digital network was ultimately controlled by the CIA.
Raising Davey’s request in the same call was imprudent, yet she’d done it and couldn’t undo it.
Montse, like her stepson, had lost her hearing. In her case it was nine years ago when, as Spain’s distinguished secretary of defence, she suffered a bout of meningitis after a mission to north Africa. Never one for half measures, Montse later perfected signing and gained fluency in six signing languages, making her a natural to take on the United Nations role.
There were still a few hours left before the service so Isabel hoped Oriol would recall the close friendship Montse had developed with her and, importantly, Davey, and change his mind.
Isabel first clicked with Montse years ago, during a Congressional Committee fact-finding tour to Madrid. Six months ago, when Montse got elected as secretary-general and moved to New York City, they became even closer, with Montse flying to Washington DC as often as both women’s frenetic schedules allowed, once a month on average, when she took the third place-setting for dinner at the Residence.
Inspiring as a public figure, Montse sparkled in private, and especially with Davey. Their dinner conversations, all in sign language, were raucous. On one occasion, Montse held her hands up to stop the laughing, a serious look cast across her face, her eyes darting left and right as if she was checking no one was listening, and then joked how the infamous eighteen minutes missing from the Watergate tapes weren’t blank at all, it was just President Nixon signing his okay to the conspiracy. Davey had no idea what a water gate or a conspiracy was but he laughed along anyway.
In her head, Isabel started playing back the opening line she’d crafted for the eulogy. One of the world’s greatest listeners has left us.
She wasn’t sure if people in the deaf community would welcome it as the tribute she intended or see it as a slight. Saying those words inside La Sagrada Familia – a basilica Isabel had yearned to visit since childhood – would amplify them, so she needed them to be perfect. To sing to Montse’s song. One of the world’s greatest listeners has left us.
The steward handed her the phone. ‘Madam President, it’s President Casals.’
She looked across at Davey, hoping Oriol was calling to say yes, but he began sharply and with no greeting, his tone short and clipped, like a man barely constraining his emotions. ‘Montse did not leave us.’
‘What?’ Did a copy of her draft eulogy get leaked to him? Had Casals started to eavesdrop on her?
He continued. ‘What I’m about to tell you – from the coroner’s report – must stay confidential until after the funeral.’
Isabel knew there hadn’t been an autopsy in New York when Montse died there last week because, as was standard practice for a diplomat dying on an overseas posting, Spain had flown the body home immediately. Oriol explained the local report had come through overnight and his call to Isabel was his first after breaking the news to his own country’s president. ‘Madam President, I know you and Montse were very close. It breaks my heart to tell you this but she was assassinated.’
Isabel felt as if her plane had suddenly dropped a few hundred metres and she gripped the edge of her table. In shock, she managed, ‘But the doctors … they said it was a heart attack.’
‘That was correct but incomplete.’ Oriol sighed. ‘Montse did have a cardiac arrest but the coroner found it was caused by an arterial embolism. A person unknown injected an air bubble into her bloodstream.’
9
Barcelona
Tori managed to snip just enough lash off one eyelid to get a slit of her sight back, not that it helped much since the room itself was pitch black. She needed some light and a mirror to complete the job safely, so she fumbled her way past the nightstand and felt along the wall until she got to a door she hoped was the bathroom.
The lights didn’t work. The bastard who’d done this to her had either cut the power or removed the bulbs, though when she tapped around and found the makeup mirror above the sink, she discovered the one light he’d neglected to neuter. It wasn’t super bright but it was enough to get the job done.
Finished, she blinked several times, big, wide-open blinks, and pulled her brows up high, relieved her eyelids were working perfectly. She took a deep breath, then leant forward into the mirror to check out her handiwork. Going lash-free wasn’t as creepy as she’d expected and, except for a drop of blood where she’d nicked her bottom left lid, she wondered if anyone would actually notice.
She drew back from the mirror and when her eyes began adjusting to the room she saw the rest of the blood.
On the towel. In the sink.
On her, too. A river of crimson down her right arm. Splatters of red on her right breast. On her stomach. Down her right leg. All of it on her right side, none on her left.
She spun on her heels and poked her head back into the bedroom but it was still too dark inside even with the dim light from the makeup mirror and the sliver of light seeping in beneath the front door.
The smell, too … all the effort to get her sight back had taken her mind off it. The reek of vomit was hers, but not the rest.
Bloody and naked, she gaped into her hotel room as the hazy outline of her bed and what was on it started to take shape.
10
Again, Tori wanted to scream but held it in, instead jerking back the drapes so that streaks of morning sun lit up a savagery that was beyond anything she’d witnessed before, in Afghanistan, Iraq, anywhere.
A man and a woman, or what was left of them, were right beside where Tori had been lying, their bodies hacked and mutilated. The bed was soaked with their blood and entrails.
The woman, naked, was face down in the middle of the mattress, her legs spread, rivers of red oozing out of her body and pooling at her sides. Her skull cleaved by a hatchet, her brown hair – was it brown? – caked in blood. Razor blades, twenty or so, stuck out of her back as if a crazed ninja had been flinging shuriken throwing stars at her.
The hatchet, with its half-moon blade, was familiar, a traditional Greenlander’s ulu like the one Prime Minister Petersen always carried on her belt and which Tori saw her use daily to cut fruit, slice bread, even once to shock some sense into China’s delegation.
The killer had posed the man on the far side of the bed in a sickening bondage tableau. A sheet was draped over his lower half, drenched in red up to his chest, and a studded black fetish hood obscured his face. His arms were hitched above his head, his lats thick and taut and slathered in blood, his wrists bound to the bedhead with yellow plastic cable ties.
Who were these people? Why were they in her room, in her bed? What monster had done this to them? To her? And why? Where was he? Lurking under the bed? In the walk-in closet?
She grabbed the lamp from the sideboard and, in a single move, yanked its cord out of the wall and raised it shoulder-high, ready to swing it. She crouched down and peeked under the mattress only to find that the bedframe was so low to the floor that even the single black sock she found there would’ve had trouble slithering in.
She got up, lamp still held high, and jerked open the door to the walk-in robe, ready to attack. Apart from her wheelie bag, backpack and her clothes hanging there, the closet was empty.
Whoever he was, he’d left.
She set the lamp down on the floor and slid the security chain across the front door. A useless gesture, perhaps.
She looked back at the bed. The only part of the sheet that was still white was the hollow where she’d been sleeping, the contour of her right arm and right leg proof of where her own body had acted as a dam, holding back the woman’s blood.
Crime scene or not, she stepped over to the bed. The woman’s face was buried in the pillow, her right hand flat beside it, the fingernails freshly painted gold like the sun streaming through the window, a sight the woman would never witness again.
Tori reached over. No pulse, the woman’s skin chill.
Like anyone with even basic training in the field, Tori knew the Glaister equation, the formula used the world over to estimate a victim’s time of death. Normal body temperature minus current temperature divided by blah blah. The victim’s current temperature was supposed to be taken rectally but Tori wasn’t doing that to the app on her watch. Approximation would have to do, so she pressed the clock face up against the woman’s wrist, waited ten seconds, pulled it off and did the calculations.
The woman took her last breath five hours ago, maybe six, which meant she’d been murdered at around 1 or 2 am.
Tori was about to turn the woman’s head, to check if she knew her, but the move brought her face close to the man’s dead brown eyes, staring at her out of the holes in his face mask.
Her hand flew to her mouth. Frank? Was this Frank?
With all the blood it was hard to know. Only small splotches of his skin poked through, seemingly olive or tan. Thankfully, not Frank’s deeper brown. To take herself to his side of the bed, she had to step over a crumpled pile of clothes. The outfit lying on top was hers, the black and white polka dot dress she’d worn last night, the one Frank had urged her to buy. Except now it was splattered red like a slaughtered Dalmatian.
‘Black. You always wear black, Tori.’ He’d said it with the same eye roll she reserved for the scratchy jacket he seemed to live in, a tweed in baby-poop green.
‘I like black. I love black,’ she’d told him, not for the first time. People often said it set off the fire in her red hair and the green sparkle of her eyes, but it was practicality, not vanity. Tori was no fashionista. She might have had the body for it but she didn’t have the temperament. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ she said. ‘I’ll splash out on this polka dot thingy – which is black and white – provided you buy a decent jacket, one that doesn’t instantly evoke fusty armchairs, fox hunting or Pip pip, dear chap.’ Frank’s jacket had been a running joke between them. ‘For the son of Pakistani immigrants,’ she told him the first week they’d met, ‘you’re more Eton and Oxford than someone who actually went to Eton and Oxford.’
‘Actually Tori, I graduated from both of those fine institutions.’ He laughed it off, but then he was a gentleman so he would, if only to help her feel less awkward. For a woman who prided herself on never stereotyping, she’d really screwed up.
That was then. This time, she bought the dress and he bought a jacket.
She knew it was weird to be pondering trifles like that right now but looking down at the blood-spattered dress, taking in the carnage all around her, desperately hoping the man wasn’t Frank, she needed to focus on trivia, to find a life raft of normality in a roiling sea of revulsion.
Nothing in this room was normal and it was dawning on her that nothing would ever be normal for her again.
Briefly she closed her eyes and held her breath before she checked the man’s neck for a pulse, the man she couldn’t bring herself to think of as Frank.
She felt nothing. Nothing except the chill of his skin.
She pulled back from the bed, trying to decide whether or not to unfasten his mask, when a glimmer flickered up from the floor – a wristwatch. She took a hotel pen from the desk and bent down, slid it into the band and picked it up, dangling it in the fetid air. The clock face, she saw, was cracked and the time frozen at 1.32 am, almost six hours ago, telling her she’d made a pretty good estimate of the time when the couple were slaughtered.
The watch was a Blancpain, a Fifty Fathoms ‘bathyscaphe’ model that looked very expensive, which meant it could not be Frank’s. Moths would fly out of Frank’s wallet before he’d ever stump up for a pricey piece like this.
So if this was the victim’s watch he couldn’t be Frank. But what if it was the assailant’s?
If she unclipped the face mask she’d know one way or the other. Except she couldn’t bring herself to do that. Not yet.
