The Date Before THE DATE

The gloves had been drawn.

In the next few days, Chelsea Football Club, from the players to the coach, would be ready for FC Barcelona.

And they were not afraid.

While the Chelsea players were out running another lap, one of Barcelona's biggest secrets was starting to come loose.

"So. Nothing?"

Fabrizio was sitting in his office, elbow on the desk, phone pressed to his ear.

The voice on the other end belonged to Wayne. The reporter he had sent out weeks ago to find out what was happening at Barcelona.

Weeks. And not one of his contacts inside that club was talking.

Fabrizio knew something was going on there. He knew it the way you know weather is coming. But knowing something and proving it were two completely different professions, and that was exactly why he had sent Wayne over in the first place.

Normally, he would never have done something like this. Barcelona was the club he was closest to. The club where the lines ran both ways, where he had done them favours and they had done him favours, where a phone call got answered on the second ring.

And that was exactly the problem.

That was exactly why he had to know.

Because for FC Barcelona, of all clubs, the one he had more threads into than any other on earth, to go this quiet, this suddenly, this completely.

It is a massive secret.

And if he could find it. If he could uncover it and break it himself.

It would not just cement him as the number one journalist in football. It would put him on an entirely different level from every single person doing this job.

He was sure of it. His gut told him that was how big this thing was.

And he still could not find a thing.

"Yes, sir. Nobody is talking at all. I could not find anything going on."

Wayne's voice came through the speaker, flat with the fatigue of a man who had spent three weeks knocking on doors that did not open.

Fabrizio leaned back in his chair.

What is this, though. What is actually going on there.

"But." Wayne's voice came again. "I think you are right, sir."

Fabrizio stopped mid-thought.

"What makes you say so?"

There was a shift on the other end. Wayne's voice picked up, sharpened, went a few degrees faster.

"Well, sir. While I was investigating, I came across two Spanish journalists. Javi Miguel and Alfredo Martínez. Javi writes for AS. Alfredo works over at Onda Cero, the radio station."

"I am listening."

"So." Wayne was moving now. "A few months back, Javi was around when Carles Tusquets was talking. And Javi is insistent about what he heard."

"Tusquets." Fabrizio sat forward. "The man who was there after Bartomeu's forced resignation and before Laporta's election."

"Yes, sir. Exactly."

"Go on."

"Javi says Tusquets was complaining. Not about football. He kept talking about a mess. That was the word he used. A mess. And Javi says he was not saying it the way you say it about a bad transfer window or a difficult season. He said it like a man who had opened a door in a house he had just moved into and found something behind it." Wayne paused. "Javi told me the exact phrase stuck with him. Tusquets said, someone is going to have to explain this to people one day, and it will not be me."

Fabrizio's hand stopped moving on the desk.

"He did not say what it was," Wayne went on. "He would not go near it. Javi pushed and Tusquets shut the whole thing down and walked away from him. But Javi has been in this job twenty years and he swears on his life that whatever the man was talking about, it was not small, and it was not football."

"And get this, sir." Wayne's voice went up again. "Alfredo. The radio host. He had the previous chief executive on his programme, live, and the man let something slip. Nothing you could print. Nothing you could point at. But Alfredo has the audio, and he says the man got twitchy the second the questions came anywhere near the structure of the club. Then he corrected himself, mid-sentence, in a way you only do when you have just heard your own voice say something it should not have. Alfredo went back to the tape afterward and listened to it about forty times and could not stop thinking about it."

Fabrizio was very still now.

"And then," Wayne said, "while they were both digging around, Javi and Alfredo ran into each other. Same doors. Same people. Same nothing. So they worked out they were chasing the same animal and decided to hunt it together."

He let out a breath.

"But since Laporta came in, sir, it seems like every single channel has been closed. Every one. Doors that were open in November are welded shut now."

A pause.

"So while we might not know what is going on, sir, we know it is something. And we know it is big."

Fabrizio could not sit still.

Because that was it. That was the confirmation. For weeks he had been walking around with a feeling in his stomach and nothing at all to justify it, wondering if he had finally become one of those men who sees conspiracies in an empty inbox.

He was not mad. He was not unreasonable.

There was something there.

"Really?"

He heard his own voice come out too fast.

Wayne was smiling. Fabrizio could hear it through the phone.

"Yes, sir."

"Okay." Fabrizio was already going. "Okay. Listen to me. Get with those two. Both of them. Do not compete with them, work with them, share what you have, all of it. Three of you covering the same ground is worth more than three of you covering it separately. Then get to Tusquets and."

"We have, sir." Wayne cut in. "He is not talking either."

"Of course he is not." Fabrizio rubbed his forehead. "Fine. Then forget him. Do not waste another day on him."

He started tapping the desk.

"Here is what you do. Stop going at the top. Everybody goes at the top, that is why the top has learned to say nothing. Do not chase Bartomeu. Do not chase Laporta. Those men have lawyers and they have reasons and they will give you a warm handshake and forty minutes of absolutely nothing."

He leaned in.

"Go to the middle. The directors who were sitting in those rooms with Tusquets. The people who were on the committees. The ones who saw the same papers the president saw and had to actually do the work on them. They had access to everything, and nobody has ever bothered to protect them, because nobody has ever bothered to ask them anything. Find the one who is bitter. There is always one who is bitter."

"Yes, sir."

Then Fabrizio stopped.

"And those two. Javi and Alfredo." His voice changed. "Everything they told you. Are you sure you can trust it?"

The question came out of nowhere and landed hard.

There was a beat on the other end.

"My gut says they are telling the truth," Wayne said.

Fabrizio did not answer straight away.

"Hmm."

He looked at the ceiling.

"Okay, then."

He started thinking out loud, the way he always did when a thing was starting to take shape.

"With everything they said. Whatever this is, it has been going on since before Laporta. Before the election. It goes back into Bartomeu's time, or at the very least it started there. And it is serious enough that the first thing Laporta did on arriving was shut down every single line of communication out of that club."

He tapped his desk again.

"He has even started restructuring the place."

"Apart from the sporting director's office," Wayne said, "he has not actually removed anyone yet."

Fabrizio stopped tapping.

"Say that again."

"He has not removed anyone. Not the executives. Not the finance people. Nobody from the old regime, apart from the sporting side."

Fabrizio sat back slowly.

"That is." He shook his head. "That does not happen. Wayne, that does not happen. A new president comes in and the first thing he does, the very first thing, is he cleans house. He puts his own people in the chairs. That is the whole point of winning an election. And Laporta has not touched them."

He put a hand on his chin.

"Which means whatever this thing is, it is important enough that it has his entire attention. He is not rushing his own men into the executive positions because he is busy with something else. Something that matters more to him than that."

He went quiet.

"But what could it be."

He muttered it to himself, staring at nothing.

Then he sat up.

"Wayne. While you were out there. What are the major priorities at Barcelona right now? What are they actually working on? What do people talk about? Maybe we can get at it sideways."

"Well." Wayne thought about it. "From the sense of things, almost everything is the Champions League. It is all anyone talks about. Every conversation goes back to Porto within about two minutes. Then there is the documentary they are doing for the season, there is still work happening on that. And, ehm."

He paused.

"Oh. Yes. Messi's contract renewal is still there. I have not really heard much about it, though."

Fabrizio's hand came off his chin.

"Wait." He cut straight across him. "They are still on that?"

Wayne stopped.

"Sir?"

But Fabrizio was not really talking to him anymore.

"That is true." He was muttering. "That is true, I have not heard anything on it either. Not a word. Not in weeks. What is taking them so long?"

His voice trailed off. His eyes moved across the desk without seeing any of it.

Then, sharply:

"Wayne. The Messi contract. What stage are they in, exactly?"

The question caught Wayne completely off guard.

"Sir." He fumbled. "I am. I am not sure. I have not been on that, I was on the other thing, so I did not."

Fabrizio was not listening.

Because something was happening in his chest, the thing that had been happening to him since he was twenty-two years old and had learned to trust it more than any source he had ever cultivated.

Something here was wrong.

"Hmm." He said it out loud. "Something seems wrong here."

"Sir?"

"Think about it." Fabrizio started moving in his chair. "The only times, the only times in his entire career, that a Messi contract renewal has ever dragged. The first was after the Neymar business. He was unhappy with the club, with the direction of it, with how it was being handled. And that one went on for months. Months. Do you remember?"

"Yes, sir."

"And the second was last year. After the eight-two against Bayern. He was unhappy again, with the way the club was being run, with the lack of seriousness in it, with all of it. That is when he sent the burofax. That is the second time."

He was getting deeper into it, the pieces sliding.

"So."

He stopped.

"So this does not make sense."

His voice came up louder.

"Why would he be unhappy now? Eh? Why? They just won the league. They are in the final of the Champions League. He has a seventeen-year-old next to him putting up numbers nobody has ever seen. His team is playing the best football it has played since Luis Enrique. There is no reason. There is not a single reason on this earth for Lionel Messi to be dragging his feet on a renewal right now."

He went very quiet.

"It does not make sense."

And then it arrived.

"Then that means."

He said it out loud, slowly, and it changed the temperature of the room.

"Then that means it is Barcelona themselves who are postponing it."

The moment the words were in the air, Fabrizio knew.

He knew. This was it. This was the thing. His gut was not whispering anymore, it was standing up and pointing, and every instinct he had spent twenty years sharpening was telling him the same thing at once.

If I can crack this, I get everything. This is the thread. Pull this one and the whole thing comes apart.

"But why."

He muttered it, and he was genuinely lost.

"Why would you postpone it? Why would you postpone Lionel Messi?"

Wayne's voice came through.

"Well, sir. Unlike with Mateo, no club on earth would even think about trying to snatch Messi off them. Nobody is coming for him. So it is not like Barcelona have to rush to get him signed."

"Yes." Fabrizio nodded slowly. "Yes, I guess. But."

"And it could just be that they are doing it to bring his salary down." Wayne was moving ahead of him now. "I mean, it is well known what he was on under Bartomeu. The numbers were downright insane. There is no way Laporta walks in and signs off on something like that again, not with the state of things. So maybe they are just dragging it out to squeeze the number and that is."

"No."

Fabrizio cut him off.

Then immediately faltered.

"Oh, no, yes." He shook his head at himself. "I mean, yes, that is plausible. That is completely plausible. But."

He stopped.

"It does not feel like what is going on."

He sat there with it, that gut of his going, refusing to settle.

"I mean, if that was the case, then why."

He did not finish.

Because one of the phones on his desk started ringing.

Fabrizio looked over at it. There were several of them lined up along the edge of the desk, each one a different line, each one belonging to a different set of people. They existed for exactly one reason. So that the second another outlet or another site put something out, he would know about it, and he could get his own version up before anybody had finished reading theirs.

"Hold on," he said into Wayne's line.

He picked up the other phone.

"Go for Fab."

He listened.

He nodded.

"Ehn. Ehn."

He nodded again.

"Hmm."

And then he stopped nodding.

He sat completely still, the phone against his ear, his eyes going wide and fixed on the middle of his own desk.

"Thank you," he said.

He put it down.

He sat there for a second.

Then he reached over and picked up the line Wayne was still holding on, and brought it back to his ear.

"Wayne. I just got news."

He breathed out. He made himself calm down.

"Joan Laporta just announced it. At a dinner. Right now."

He let out a long breath.

"He announced the reconstruction of the Camp Nou."

...

While the cat and mouse between Joan Laporta and the reporters was still going on, Mateo, on his date with his girlfriend, found himself in a heated argument about animals.

"You cannot be serious. Feline supremacy is just standard, to be honest. Like, who prefers dogs? Really? That is all just propaganda."

Completely unaware of the headache he was currently causing an entire football club in England, far removed from whatever Fabrizio was feeling in his office, and nowhere near the announcement Joan Laporta had just made at a dinner across the city, Mateo King was still here. In this restaurant. A few feet away from Olivia, who at this stage had her mouth already open, loaded and ready to fire back at what he had just said.

This was where he had been for over an hour now. The table between them was covered. Plates everywhere, stacked at the edges, pushed to the sides to make room for more. Small dishes with nothing left in them but oil. A bread basket down to crumbs. Two glasses, a jug of water, the candle burned lower than it had been.

Mateo's plate was clean. Not clean the way a person leaves a plate, clean the way a plate looks when somebody has finished a thing properly and given it the respect it deserved. Olivia's still had a little food on it. Though given she had not touched it in about ten minutes, it was genuinely difficult to tell whether she was that engrossed in the conversation or whether she was simply done and had not gotten around to admitting it yet.

"You cannot actually mean this." Olivia was laughing, and shocked, and both at once. "You really think cats are better than dogs?" She shook her head at him. "You really do not have any taste. You."

"Wow." Mateo cut across her, laughing. "I do not have taste?"

Olivia's eyes went wide. "No. You do not."

They were both laughing now. And then Mateo tilted his head, and he looked at her across the table, and when he spoke his voice had gone somewhere softer. "Well. I disagree with that."

Olivia caught it. She caught all of it, the look and the voice and the way he had said it, and something came up in her cheeks that she could do absolutely nothing about. She rolled her eyes. "Yeah. Getting back on point."

Mateo laughed.

"But seriously." Olivia gathered herself. "I like cats. I actually do. But no way over dogs. I mean, come on. Dogs are man's best friend."

Mateo rolled his eyes. "A title they do not deserve."

"What?" Olivia burst out laughing. "What?"

"Yes. They do not." Mateo was smiling now, laughing along with her, but he was also completely committed. "It is just like lions being called the kings of the jungle when they do not even live in the jungle." He threw a hand up, exasperated with the entire animal kingdom.

Olivia sat back. "Oh, really?"

"Yes. Really."

She picked up her glass and took a long, deliberate sip of water, and set it back down. "Well then, Mister Nat Geo Wild." She folded her hands. "Which animal is man's best friend?"

Mateo heard what she had just called him. He produced two of the driest laughs in recorded history. "HA. HA. So funny."

"HAHAHAHAHA." Olivia lost it completely. She was gone, doubled over her own joke, one hand flat on the table, absolutely delighted with herself.

And Mateo, watching her laugh that hard at a thing she herself had said, felt the smile on his own face just keep getting bigger. He was not even laughing at the joke anymore. He had stopped caring about the joke about four seconds ago. He just watched her.

"Okay." He finally sat forward. "Well. Let me drop some knowledge on you."

"Ooh." Olivia was still wiping her eye. "Knowledge, ehn?"

"Yeah." Mateo went smug. "Knowledge." He held up a finger. "Man's best friend should be the horse."

Olivia stopped. "The horse?"

"Yes. The horse." He spread his hands like he was presenting evidence. "Think about it. After all those years. Being our entire mode of transport. Carrying us into wars. Dying under us in wars. Building basically every civilisation on earth on their backs. And then, after all of that, we go and hand the title to a slobbering mess that eats its own sick." He shook his head. "It is the ultimate betrayal."

Olivia was listening to him with her chin in her hand, shaking her head slowly. "You say the most unexpected things sometimes." She was smiling. "It is just so funny."

Mateo laughed. "Well, me."

Olivia straightened up. "I actually love dogs." She looked off for a second. "Once I move out of my parents' place, I have always wanted to foster a dog. Always. It is one of the three pets I want."

Mateo blinked. "One of three?"

"Yeah." Olivia nodded. "So, my dad is allergic to dogs. So when I was small, like three, I asked for a dog. And obviously he could not do that. So he got me a snake."

Mateo, who had been drinking water, choked. He coughed hard, one hand going to his chest, the other slamming the glass down. "Oh, God."

Olivia was already half out of her seat, reaching across the table. "Sorry. Sorry, are you."

"I am fine." Mateo waved her off, still coughing, eyes watering. "I am fine, I am fine." He got himself back under control and sat up. "But how." He was still catching his breath. "How do you even go from a dog to a snake? How does a man make that leap? This your dad." He shook his head. "Wow."

Olivia shrugged, entirely unbothered. "I was also confused, honestly. I think it had something to do with the fur? Like, no fur, no allergy. I guess that was his logic." She smiled. "But I actually loved it. I really loved Stripes."

Mateo stopped. "Stripes." He said the name back to her, slowly. "Stripes."

"Stripes."

He decided to let it go. "Okay. What about the third one? You said three dream pets."

"Oh, yeah." Olivia nodded. "I have always wanted a bird as well."

Mateo stared at her. "Wait." He held up three fingers and counted them off. "A dog. A snake. And a bird." He started laughing. "You have to be the weirdest person I have ever met in my entire life."

"Excuse me." Olivia pointed at him. "What about you? Who hates dogs? Who does that?"

Mateo shrugged. "I have my reasons."

Olivia went quiet. Then her head tilted. "Wait."

Mateo looked up.

"Wait, I think I have got it."

"Got what?"

"Your hatred for dogs." A smile started spreading across Olivia's face, and it was not a nice smile. It was the smile of a woman who has just solved something and is going to enjoy it. She put her hands under her chin and went coy. "Awwwwnn."

"Olivia."

"Awwn, my baby." She tilted her head at him. "Did a dog bite you when you were small?"

"For your information," Mateo said, with as much dignity as he could locate, "it did not bite me."

"I KNEW IT." Olivia was already laughing.

"It did not bite me."

"I knew it. I knew it, I knew it."

Mateo took a breath. And then, at a volume that could charitably be described as under his breath: "It just chased me for a couple of blocks."

Olivia put both hands over her face. "I KNEW it had to be that. I knew it. Because how, HOW, can a person not like dogs?"

"A dog chasing me," Mateo said, sitting up very straight, "has no bearing whatsoever on my reasoning for why I do not like dogs. None. These are two completely separate positions."

Olivia scoffed. "Yeah. Right."

"They are."

"Sure."

And then they were just looking at each other. The laughter came down slowly, the way it does, and it left something behind it.

The candle was low between them. The room was warm and old and gold. Somewhere behind a wall, very faintly, an old man was saying something to an old woman.

They were both smiling.

Mateo reached across the table. His hand found hers, and he took it, and turned it over, and held it.

Olivia looked down at their hands. Then up at him. Her cheeks did the thing they always did.

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

Mateo's thumb started moving, slow, back and forth across the back of her hand.

"I am having a great time," he said.

Olivia felt it. His thumb. His hand around hers. The whole warm gold room and the low candle and the boy on the other side of the table looking at her like that.

She smiled. "Me too."