Bad Twins

by Rebecca Chance

  Jeffrey raised his free hand and pointed it at her almost menacingly.

  ‘You stay out of this, young lady!’ he ordered. ‘This is your sister’s achievement that they’re trying to ruin! If you can’t be helpful, say nothing at all!’

  ‘We will see,’ Adrianna chimed in, ‘what they can find. It is true that it might be hard to prove. These hackers are very clever, Jeffrey. But I’m sure that if they can prove it, they will. And maybe we can tell the press that we were hacked, to explain the situation?’

  Bella stared at her future stepmother, trying and failing to work out what was happening behind that beautiful, sculpted facade, what motivation Adrianna had for the way she was acting.

  ‘Well?’ Jeffrey barked. ‘Can we put out a statement saying we were hacked? Why not?’

  ‘Why not!’ Bella said slowly. ‘We don’t have to involve the police, after all. They won’t investigate unless we file a complaint—’

  ‘No police! I don’t want those buggers poking around in our systems!’ Jeffrey said, sitting up straighter. ‘You know what they’re like. Turn around and sell stories to the tabloids the moment they can. The trouble we’ve had with them in the past! You keep your security as tight as you can, but those bloody coppers still leak like sieves to the papers. I don’t want them near Bella’s new upgrade thingamawhatsit! If they can get any specs, they’ll try to sell them to—’ He named some of Sachs’s major rivals. ‘No. No police.’

  Despite her excellent physical self-control, Charlotte sagged infinitesimally in her chair from sheer relief. The gold inset at the neckline of her dress caught a ray of light from the chandelier and then went dull again.

  ‘If that’s your decision,’ Bella said, doing her best to sound reluctant. They never called Jeffrey ‘Daddy’ at work, but sometimes it felt impolite not to; this was a sentence that she felt should end with a title, or a ‘sir’.

  ‘He has said so,’ Adrianna commented, somehow managing not to make this statement sound dismissive. She patted her fiancé’s hand.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘you have decided. No police, but the press department can say that the company was hacked, correct?’

  Jeffrey beamed up at her.

  ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘You understand that, girls?’

  ‘We can also say that the upgrade’s actually working fantastically well,’ Bella suggested eagerly. ‘The online check-in and automatic room key delivery are going very smoothly, and so far the data from the daily room charge updates and minibar sensors is actually exceeding speed and accuracy targets. We’re monitoring client satisfaction and it’s extremely positive so far—’

  ‘Excellent!’ Adrianna interrupted, but again, in such a way that she seemed to be chiming in with Bella rather than cutting her off. ‘This is excellent. It sounds as if everything is proceeding very well, and the hacking is now stopped for good.’

  She looked from one sister to the other.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ she continued, ‘but I am a little tired. Of course I have not at all been working as hard as you two, so I must apologize! But the organization for the wedding is a lot to do.’

  ‘It has to be perfect,’ Jeffrey said fondly to her. ‘Absolutely perfect. Just as you want it.’

  ‘Barely a month to go!’ Bella said brightly. ‘Wow, you must be swamped with stuff!’

  ‘So much,’ Charlotte added, not to be outdone at sucking up to Adrianna. ‘No one realizes until they have to do it themselves, do they?’

  ‘As I said,’ Adrianna said politely, ‘I am not working as hard as you are, not at all. But I am tired just the same and maybe I will rest now, because later on I must go for my run.’

  The message of dismissal could not have been clearer. Bella and Charlotte rose from their seats in unison, missing Jeffrey’s delighted, eye-brightening reaction to his fiancée mentioning her plans to exercise later, the excited little wriggle of his body.

  ‘Let me walk you out,’ Adrianna said.

  She kissed the hand of Jeffrey’s she was holding, then replaced it on the armrest of the chair among the clusters of sculpted wooden leaves and flowers. Stepping off the dais without looking down, she swung her high heel back to find the steps in the manner of a Vegas showgirl descending a flight of stairs with her plumed head held high. Bella and Charlotte waited for her to lead the way, which she did, swinging open the heavy door very easily; it was clear that as well as practising regular cardio, Adrianna did not neglect her upper body work.

  ‘Come with me for just a moment,’ Adrianna said once they were in the outer office. She walked past Tania’s desk, giving her a smile and nod of acknowledgement as she went.

  ‘Can I get you a tea or a water, Miss Rootare?’ Tania asked, and the sisters exchanged a swift glance to acknowledge the deference in Tania’s tone, which was much more noticeable than it had ever been for Jade.

  ‘No thank you, Tania,’ Adrianna said politely, sweeping past.

  She led the little procession all the way down the central corridor to the far end of the floor. The room which had once been a master bedroom was now, it turned out, a huge and sprawling gym, with machines and pulleys so complicated that they made Bella, who was not a gym rat, blink in shock. Ropes hung from the double ceiling, and from a metal T-bar frame dangled black straps with Velcro loops at their ends. Another metal frame could be spun a hundred and eighty degrees so that the boots fixed to one end would enable the wearer to hang upside down.

  A Pilates Cadillac Reformer with immaculate grey leather upholstery stood next to a Gyrotonics machine, all curved wood and strangely positioned pulley wheels. A tyre was propped against one wall, next to a Pilates barrel with a short ladder and a Wondachair, their upholstery matching the grey leather of the Reformer. As well as all this, there was a full complement of hand and free weights, the normal exercise machines one might expect to find in a gym and several that were more arcane, a trampoline and a padded gym floor.

  ‘I like to exercise,’ Adrianna said, perhaps unnecessarily.

  She walked over to a glass-fronted fridge and pulled out a bottle of green-tinged liquid.

  ‘I will not offer you anything to drink,’ she said, ‘as you will not be here long. I know you are very busy, but I want to make one thing very clear and simple for you.’

  Uncapping the bottle, she took a long swig of the foul-looking drink, managing not to leave a drop on her lips.

  ‘This story you are telling, both of you, but mainly you,’ she said, looking at Bella. ‘I do not believe it, but I do not care, okay? You have fixed the problem. That I do believe.’

  And now her green gaze, almost the exact colour of her health drink, passed on to Charlotte.

  ‘I think that whatever this problem really was, it would not be good for your father to hear about it,’ she said. ‘His heart is not so good. You understand, he must go ahead with our wedding. It would be a big problem for me if that did not happen. So nothing must worry him before then. I must make that very clear.’

  She did not take her eyes off Charlotte.

  ‘This competition he has set you, this saying that only one of you can be the boss and that you must all fight each other, it’s stupid,’ she said austerely. ‘I could not say anything when he started it, but it’s stupid, obviously. How do you get the best out of someone in this way? You don’t! You bring out the worst. It is clear that is what has happened. So.’

  She took another drink from the bottle.

  ‘I can guess what the real story is,’ she informed them. ‘But I have no interest in bringing it out to the world and giving your father a heart attack. So, we will work together. A new thing for you two, I think.’

  Her eyebrows flickered slightly, as if she were trying to register irony.

  ‘I will support this story,’ she said, ‘the hacking from outside, the rival hotel chain that hates us so much and wants to destroy us. I will make sure that you are not blamed by your father.’

  Bella and Charlotte were as hypnotize
d by Adrianna as Mowgli had been by Kaa in The Jungle Book; her eyes were shaped like long ovals rather than round, swirling saucers, but her voice was as smooth, her effect as mesmerizing. In the remake, Kaa had been voiced by Scarlett Johansson, and Adrianna’s voice was even huskier and deeper and more seductive than the actress’s.

  ‘But from now on,’ Adrianna continued, ‘if you do anything to upset your father before the wedding, anything at all, I will kill you. I am not exaggerating. I will kill you. You understand this, yes? We understand where we are? I will protect you from being disinhaired – ugh, is that right? Dis-in-hair-it-ed? I hate to get words wrong!’

  She looked genuinely cross, stamping one high-heeled foot on the rubber gym floor.

  ‘Disinherited,’ Bella volunteered in a tiny, frightened voice.

  ‘Dis-in-her-it-ed. Thank you. I will make sure that does not happen. But if you do anything to make your father stressed—’

  ‘We won’t!’ Charlotte babbled. ‘We promise. We won’t make any problems with Daddy, or at the wedding.’

  Those extraordinary green eyes of Adrianna’s flashed fire, no longer a python but an angry dragon.

  ‘At the wedding?’ she hissed.

  ‘I mean, up to the wedding! At the wedding! The whole time! There won’t be any problems!’

  Bella had not heard Charlotte this panicked for years, not since she was a little girl. She herself had not been able to scare her into this state, even though she had Charlotte squarely in the frame for the vicious attack on her twin sister’s career. But Adrianna was a force of nature, and Charlotte was stammering apologies in a way she had not even done with their father.

  Adrianna let Charlotte run all the way down, like a wind-up toy stuttering to a halt, before she said, ‘Good. There will be no problems.’

  An expression flickered across her face. It was new, and it took Bella some time to identify, as she had never seen Adrianna look dreamy before.

  ‘I am very excited about the wedding,’ Adrianna said, her head tilted to one side, her eyes almost soft with anticipation. ‘In Venice. I love Venice! Everything will be perfect. The canals, the food, the wine – everything. I went there once when I was a little girl, and I promised to myself that I would get married there, travel in the private motorboats, eat at the best restaurants, all the very best.’

  Her eyes narrowed into green slits.

  ‘And nothing,’ she said, ‘nothing in the world will make a problem for my perfect wedding!’

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  There is a very expensive company specializing in destination weddings which offers what is called a cloud-bursting service, guaranteeing blue skies on the day in question. A light aircraft takes off at dawn, with a team of highly specialized meteorologists aboard, directing the pilots; the meteorologists’ job is to fire mini rockets into any clouds they find, filled with silver iodide crystals that freeze the water droplets.

  After a while, the increased weight of the frozen droplets causes them to fall, first as snow, then, melting, as rain. A brief early shower, and then the skies are clear and blue. Since the droplets swell as they freeze, as the clouds break up it looks as if they’re exploding, hence the name ‘cloud bursting’. It is also known as cloud seeding, because the fine silver particles falling into the clouds are like gigantic handfuls of seeds being sown.

  Cloud bursting is often used for commercial purposes. The obvious ones are to improve weather conditions at airports or to lessen hail damage to crops. But it is also employed in the opposite way, to make weather more extreme, specifically for ski resorts that need to be sure of having enough snowfall. It was invented in Soviet Russia to ensure good weather for its huge rallies, and China has taken up the practice for its public holidays, using it to cause heavy rainfall the day before in order to disperse pollution.

  Of course, totalitarian countries can make decisions at which democratic ones will baulk. Cloud bursting is by no means cheap.

  Music festivals have considered using it, but have been deterred by the cost, as festivals run for several days. The wedding company charges a basic price of £100,000 for the one-off service, more if the location is very remote or the clouds particularly heavy. It was used at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where money was famously no object, and rumour says it was used before the wedding of Prince Hugo to his bride Chloe, though that will never be confirmed, as the outcry of the British populace at the expense would be full-throated fury.

  Adrianna, with her unlimited wedding budget, had seriously considered hiring a cloud-bursting team, but her planner had regretfully had to inform her that the city of Venice had already rejected all previous requests for permits, citing environmental concerns over the repeated use of silver iodide. Fortunately, the weekend of the extended wedding celebrations was sunny and clear. Guests had flown in from all around the world to attend, and were ferried around the city by a fleet of private water taxis, providing the perfect opportunity for the paparazzi to snap photographs of the bridal party and the most socially prominent invitees.

  It was not a large wedding, but it was a star-studded one. Jeffrey, with his habitual cunning, had come up with the idea of inviting Catalina, the Earl and Countess of Rutland, and Wayne and Andy Burns. This was ostensibly in order to apologize to them for the whole bookings disaster, but in reality to create positive PR which would cancel out the previous bad headlines, demonstrating that the celebrities affected had forgiven the company.

  The pregnant Catalina, who was back home in LA after her tour, had politely declined on the grounds that travelling to Italy would be too disruptive to her growing family. However, the Rutlands and the Burnses had happily accepted the opportunity to celebrate with Jeffrey and his new bride. The Earl, in particular, was a huge football fan and as excited as a small boy to be a guest at the same event as Wayne, one of the acknowledged stars of the contemporary game.

  Adrianna and her planner had truly thought of everything. The female guests had been briefed to select outfits in which they would be happy to be photographed stepping in and out of water taxis onto piers by lurking paps who would be crouching down in the gunwales of their own taxis to achieve angles as unflattering as possible. Specific warnings had been issued about short skirts, which offered opportunities to unscrupulous men with long lenses, and spike heels, which might get caught in the boards of the piers.

  The newspaper coverage so far had been superb. A magnate of Jeffrey Sachs’s status and connections was guaranteed a stream of fawning articles about the beauty of the bride, the elegance of the arrangements and the attractiveness of his family, with the respective ages of the happy couple presented in the simplest factual terms. Online gossip sites, however, were disrupters with no loyalty to Jeffrey, no markers he could call in, and they had happily gone to town on the age difference. The guests, of course, avidly read those sites daily to see coverage of themselves, while pretending to their hosts that they had no idea of their existence.

  It was universally agreed that the celebrations so far had been wonderfully organized, and Adrianna was fast becoming a style icon. She and the Countess of Rutland had not only struck up a friendship, they were both aware of how spectacular they looked when photographed together. The two women were tall and statuesque, with superb curves and Amazonian figures; Adrianna was a brunette, the Countess a blonde, which provided an excellent visual contrast, and they were never seen without their hair cascading perfectly around their faces, their make-up flawless and camera-ready.

  It helped, too, that their styles were so similar. Both dressed in classic, expertly tailored clothes. The Countess was famous for her white jeans, which showed off every contour of her toned and liposuctioned body. Adrianna had also packed a pair of white jeans, and after a discussion on the first evening, they had coordinated for the next day’s lunch, which was to be held on the small island of Torcello.

  By the time the various guests arrived at the island, the shot of the two women in their matching jeans standing to
gether in the bow of a water taxi speeding down the Grand Canal – their manes of hair lifted by the breeze, their beautiful faces half covered by huge designer sunglasses, their light sweaters belted smoothly to demonstrate the perfection of their figures – had already gone viral. The paparazzi had followed the convoy of taxis all the way north to Torcello, which lay in the archipelago of the Venetian lagoon, close to the two most famous of the small islands: Burano, known for its lacemakers, and Murano, with its glass-blowing workshops.

  The Locanda Cipriani, the restaurant where the lunch was held, had hosted almost every member of the British royal family over the years, and been the location for many celebrity weddings, including that of Princess Alexandra of Greece. Adrianna would have loved to follow in the Princess’s footsteps and marry in a location chosen by royalty. Unfortunately for her, however, when you married a hotel tycoon, you did not celebrate your nuptials in someone else’s establishment. The ceremony would be held at a privately owned palazzo on the Grand Canal, stunningly grand, though with less of a history of visiting royalty.

  Torcello was a tiny island, with only a few dozen permanent residents. Being mostly composed of vegetable plots and the grounds of the Locanda, it was the perfect location for rich hosts who wanted to hold an event in complete seclusion. The lavish gardens which led off the beautiful restaurant were not visible from the water, so that paparazzi in motorboats were unable to capture any shots of the party as they gathered for pre-lunch aperitivi, working up an appetite for the menu of carpaccio, gratin of tagliatelle verdi – one of the signature dishes of the restaurant – semolina gnocchi alla torcellana, grilled scampi and monkfish and John Dory, followed by sorbets and little crepes filled with crème anglaise.

  The children ran around the garden, playing hide-and-seek around the pomegranate trees, the American vines that were trained about the gravel walk, the rose bushes and the landscaped shrubberies. Jeffrey’s grandchildren George, Emily, Posy and Quant were more or less the same age as their two uncles, Jade’s sons Brutus and Roman. However, this kind of age anomaly was so normal in these circles, where rich men traded their wives in for younger versions as casually as other people did leased cars, that no one batted an eyelid.