by Bourne, Sam
‘I’m helping her out.’
‘That’s the first thing I’ve heard that makes me think she might have a shot at the White House. If she’s smart enough to hire Maggie Costello . . .’
‘About this browsing history thing, I was just wondering—’
‘That came to us first actually.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, one of my colleagues. Covers Capitol Hill. There when he got in this morning. We discussed it, decided it wasn’t for us.’
‘Really?’ Instantly, she regretted her tone. She’d sounded incredulous, as if unable to believe Jake had passed on that story. She’d known enough journalists to appreciate her own mistake: no fear gripped them more tightly than the fear they’d missed a story. She rowed back fast. ‘I mean, surely you didn’t even need to discuss it. It’s tabloid crap, isn’t it?’
‘That’s what we thought,’ he said, though he sounded unconvinced by her reversal. ‘Uncertainty over provenance, authenticity. Privacy issues. Use of encrypted, personal data. And the whole thing just didn’t, I don’t know, smell right.’
‘The sex stuff?’
‘Sorta. I wasn’t comfortable with it.’
Maggie remembered that Jake had, more than once in their dealings over the years, reminded her that the Times was a ‘family newspaper’. She imagined what he would have made of the whips, chains and butt plugs that featured on BDSM.com.
‘I’d be very interested in hearing more about that, Jake. In seeing anything that might shed light on the, like you said, provenance of the material. Could we meet?’
There was a pause as he took in what she had said. The key words were ‘seeing’ and ‘meet’.
An hour later, they were in their usual rendezvous point: the food court of Union Station. Reliably, constantly heaving, it was an easy place to sit unnoticed – far enough away from the usual watering holes favoured by Washington types. And Maggie still loved that high, domed ceiling. Union Station, even in its relatively recent, restored incarnation, was one of the few buildings in America that at least felt old. Compared to Europe, it was a new-build. By American standards, it was Stonehenge.
Jake was already there when she arrived, having found a table outside Shake Shack. He stood up, his jacket less creased and a smidgeon more expensive than in the old days, gave Maggie an awkward embrace, resettled his glasses on the bridge of his nose, gestured for her to sit down, then indicated the two cardboard coffees in front of him. ‘I took the liberty of ordering for you.’
She took a sip. ‘So, Jake. The story came to the Times first.’
‘I don’t know that we were first. But before TMZ. Fact that it surfaced there makes me think lotsa folks came to the same decision we did.’
‘The Post?’
‘Right. It wasn’t there, was it? Or on TV. Not even Drudge.’
‘Why do you think that is?’
Jake leaned back, stretching out at his elbows as if using an unseen chest expander. Back when he’d been a beat reporter, covering the intelligence agencies, Jake Haynes had always struck Maggie as crabbed somehow, a neurotic ball, waiting to crank out the next story. Now that he was the boss, he had filled out a bit. As if he could take his time, even relax a little.
‘Not for use, Maggie, but I think New York just felt a little nervous going after, you know—’
‘A woman?’
‘A woman who had been raped. Excuse me, a high-profile woman who had been raped. Who may be a candidate for president. Who, if she was – and even if she isn’t – has a following among a very particular demographic.’
‘Young, progressive women who think the Times is too centrist, too male and terminally unwoke?’
Jake smiled. ‘That’s what I never understood with you, Maggie. Why ask the question when you always know the answer?’
‘Not always, Jake. Like in this case, I have a question I can’t answer.’
‘Which is?’
‘Who leaked you Natasha Winthrop’s browser records?’
‘You know I can’t tell you that.’
‘I know.’
‘And I also don’t know the answer.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘I can’t tell whether I should believe you.’
‘You should because, one, I’m a nice guy.’ He smiled, a feeble attempt at sweetness, all but fluttering his eyelashes. ‘Two, you are the one person in Washington that I really would not dare to shit.’
‘Because I’m too valuable a source.’
‘That, and because you’ll find me out. But I haven’t got to three yet.’
‘Sorry. Three.’
‘And, three, none of us knows who leaked this material. Totally anonymous drop. That’s one of the reasons we were nervous, actually. You know me. I’m old school. I like to see the whites of their eyes. I don’t mind being manipulated. I just—’
‘“—like to know why I’m being manipulated.”’
‘You’ve heard me say that before?’
‘Once or twice.’
‘Huh.’
‘So this came to you, what, via Signal or Telegram or something?’
‘Actually, no. That was old school too. Well, kind of modern old school.’
Maggie furrowed her brow. Jake leaned down, to one side, and into his bag. ‘It came like this.’
He produced a USB drive, a memory stick, and laid it on the table. It had no distinguishing marks, just the brand name of the manufacturer.
‘Can I have this?’
‘No, Maggie, you cannot have this. Jeez.’
‘But, it’s been published now. What difference would—’
‘Because that is material about a public figure submitted in confidence to the New York Times. You are working for said public figure. I hand that over to you – and therefore to her – what kind of precedent is that? Besides, she – you – may have ways to work out the identity of the source from that drive.’
‘Have you? Worked out the source?’
‘No.’
‘Have you tried?’
‘I gave it to the tech guys to look over, but once we made the decision not to run the story, we took it no further.’
Maggie turned the drive over in her hands before pushing it back across the table, allowing Jake to pick it up and put it in his breast pocket.
‘Anything else on there?’ she asked. ‘Of interest, I mean. Old documents, anything else about Natasha Winthrop?’
‘Nothing. They’d been thorough. The drive was clean. Unused. All it had was the search history for a specific period. Last four weeks. Tons of legal stuff; material relating to the hearings, obviously. Some shopping. Lots of email. And the, you know, dating sites.’
‘And were they all in that same, what’s the word? That same vein?’
‘Yes, they were. TMZ rendered the story accurately.’
‘All dominance, bondage—’
‘The main sites were all in that vein, yes. But the searches zeroed in on this specific sub-category, you might call it.’
‘Rough sex?’
‘And rape. Yes.’
‘And was there any direct contact between her and—’
‘Apparently it was just searching and browsing. I didn’t review all the material myself, but the reporter who it was sent to said that it was just, you know, swiping back and forth. Kind of like window shopping.’
‘Nothing more direct? Between Natasha Winthrop and—’
‘Nothing like that, no.’ He paused, as if waiting for one more question. Maggie tried to read his face.
‘You say the drive was “sent to” a reporter. You mean it was “sent” sent? In the mail?’
Now Jake Haynes smiled, as if Maggie had solved the puzzle he had set her.
‘Did it come just like th
at? In an envelope?’
He nodded. ‘Like I said, old school.’
‘And do you still have the envelope?’
‘As it happens . . .’ he said, bending down once more into his bag. He came out with a small, padded brown envelope. He moved it across the table.
Maggie looked at the address label on the front: typewritten, from a printer. She turned it over. No return address. She turned it back over, clocking Jake’s smile of anticipation. Finally she looked at the postmark. In an instant she understood his excitement.
There, clear and unmistakable, was printed the origin of this parcel. Two words that instantly set a thousand wheels turning in Maggie’s mind.
Langley, Virginia.
Chapter 15
London, two weeks earlier
At first, the woman found it exciting. Like the noise, the heat, the steam, the sweat and the constant, vein-bulging pressure, the shouting and swearing issuing from the two men in charge – the head chef, whose name was above the door, and his faithful sidekick, the manager – struck her as confirmation that she had arrived. Wasn’t this how a professional kitchen was meant to look and sound?
That helped her shrug it off, initially at least. The yelling in someone’s face – the ‘hairdryer treatment’, the other kitchen staff called it – was surely no more than proof of the passion and intensity necessary to run a top-flight restaurant. The same went for that time the chef threw a small, but heavy, pan at the head of one of the girls who, like her, was on work experience. Perhaps because it missed its target, none of the other ‘workies’ even talked about it.
The woman noticed a pattern. If one of the younger men in the kitchen made a mistake, there’d be a quiet word in the ear. But if she or one of the other women messed up by, say, holding a dessert plate in such a way that the blood-red coulis ran and left a visible trace on the rim, then it’d be an instant hairdryer.
Once, shortly after closing time on a Saturday evening, at close to one am, the woman was tasked with cleaning the floors. She registered that it was the third time that week that she had been given that job. She noted that the young man who had started work experience the same day she had had not been asked to do it even once. She did not say anything. Instead, she squeezed out the mop and set to work, telling herself that such chores were all part of what she was here to learn: mastery of the kitchen.
After she had mopped and scrubbed and cleaned, she heard the restaurant manager approaching. She was glad, thinking he would see how hard she had worked.
He glanced down at the floor and said, ‘No. Not good enough.’
The woman assumed he was joking, that any minute now he would say: ‘Just kidding. Nice job. See you in the morning.’ The floor was spotless.
The man, seeing her smile, said, ‘Not nearly good enough. Do it again.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me. Do it again. Here, I’ll give you a hand.’ He extended a foot to the bucket of filthy water and, with one expertly aimed kick, knocked the whole thing over. The woman watched as the grey, foetid liquid spread its filth across the surface that she had spent the last forty minutes bringing to a shine.
The woman decided that it was a test, one that she would not fail. She would not cry. Instead, she picked up the now-empty bucket, went to the tap, filled it up and started again. She did not fall into bed that night until well past three am.
After that, the woman resolved to stay inside a protective armour of her own making. She would not listen to either the chef or the manager, unless they were talking directly to her, and she would screen out everything but their specific instructions.
So when she heard the chef refer to grapeseed oil as rapeseed oil, putting undue emphasis on the first syllable, she made it float out of her mind as soon as it floated in. The woman also did that, though it took more effort, when she caught the manager complaining that a chicken breast was ‘drier than an eight-year-old’s snatch’.
The woman tried to adopt the same approach when one of the two men would squeeze past her in the kitchen, putting a lingering hand on her back or her bottom. Or when one of the pastry chefs got pregnant and carried on working until she was in her eighth month, and the head chef kept asking if she was lactating yet, because – and these were his words – he wanted her to pump her breast milk into a bottle ‘so I can drink it’. The pastry chef pretended she hadn’t heard that remark and left the room. Which meant she didn’t hear her boss turn to the restaurant manager for a long disquisition on the nature of sex with a pregnant woman.
One night the restaurant was closed for a private function and the woman was carrying a tray of fried oysters, accompanied by caviar crème fraiche and served in large spoons. The head chef called her over to where he was holding court with a group of VIP guests, all men. He promptly picked up one of the spoons and shoved it in the woman’s mouth. She found herself gagging and saw that the chef was grinning. The woman understood then that that was the point. That was the thrill. He could force himself down the throat of a young woman and she couldn’t do a thing about it.
Not long afterwards, the woman talked about her situation with a university friend who was already doing a paid job at a law firm. The friend’s first response was obvious: ‘Why don’t you complain?’
The woman explained that that was hardly an option. There was no HR department, no line manager, just the two men themselves. If she said anything, she’d be out. And she needed this on her CV; she would need them to write her a reference.
They discussed the one senior woman in the kitchen. ‘Why don’t you talk to her?’
But that too was not an option. ‘I don’t know what happened there, or what they’ve got on her, but she totally covers for them.’
And so she said nothing. Right up until the day the head chef went further, as the woman always feared he would. Thanks to that conversation with her friend, the novice lawyer – who had discussed the situation with an older colleague – she was prepared.
It happened at night, after closing time. Not mopping the floor this time, but when she was putting chairs on tables. She did as she told herself she would. When the moment came, when he moved towards her, she glanced towards the heavens, putting her faith in the only thing she believed might help her.
Chapter 16
Washington, DC
Langley, Virginia.
Maggie was focused on those two words, squinting hard at them as if they might, just through the power of her gaze, yield their secrets.
She was back at her kitchen table, the screen of her laptop filled with an image of the small, padded brown envelope that Jake Haynes had, like a magician, produced from his bag. He hadn’t let her take the envelope away, though naturally Maggie had asked. He had drawn a line regarding the journalistic ethics of protecting the anonymity of a source, deciding that while showing Maggie how the information had reached his office skirted close to that line, surrendering the evidence would have crossed it. Maggie could just about work out that logic, not least by framing it the way Jake would have done: how would this look as a paragraph in the Washington Post? In a statement, the New York Times confirmed that Mr Haynes handed some of the material to a former White House official . . .
So she didn’t blame him for refusing her request. But nor did she blame herself for taking, when he’d gone to get a refill of coffee, a couple of discreet photos with her phone, just for her own reference.
Langley, Virginia.
She tried to think through the options methodically. Start with the obvious, and work your way out from there. That was the advice, often repeated, of her mentor, Stuart Goldstein, whenever an event had multiple possible explanations. So: start with the obvious.
Someone at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, wanted to take down Natasha Winthrop. What’s more, they did not care if it were – or perhaps actively hoped it to be – kn
own that the CIA desired that outcome. A Langley postmark: you might as well take out an ad.
Which raised the second possibility. That someone wanted to implicate the CIA. Quite heavy-handed, but that might not matter. Which nodded to a sub-possibility: that the prime objective was to divert attention away from the real source. In which case, posting it from Langley would count as a blunt, but effective, decoy.
She looked again at the photo. The envelope was covered with stamps, rather than franked. That meant the sender had avoided visiting a post office, or using home mailing software, both of which would have left a trace. Basic precautions.
Maggie got up and began to pace. Start with the CIA scenario. Why would anyone in that agency care about Natasha Winthrop? She knew what they’d say on Twitter: that this was an establishment plot to destroy a woman who threatened their interests, a potential president who challenged the powers that be. As for the giveaway postmark, what would the online natterers say about that? That the deep state was now so arrogant, it was all but giving the finger to democratic norms: it positively wanted the America sheeple to know who was boss.
Did Maggie buy any of that? A year or so ago, her answer would have been an emphatic, laughing no. The very idea was ridiculous. But now, in the era of a president who made jokes-not-jokes about installing himself in the Oval Office for life, who treated the Attorney-General as his own personal lawyer and regarded the Department of Justice as a gang of heavies to be set on his enemies, why not? Once it would have been outlandish to imagine a sitting president deploying the CIA against a political rival. These days, and given everything Maggie had seen from this White House, it was wholly conceivable.
On the other hand, and for related reasons, there were enough people around ready to believe such a thing that it made for a highly convenient alibi. What if the leaker had not been taking orders from the man in the White House, but from one of the crowded pack of contenders on the other side of the partisan divide, all of them jostling for the right to take him on? Popping that USB stick in a parcel marked Langley, Virginia, simultaneously kneecapped a rival – one who had novelty and excitement on her side – and handed the progressive base an immediate villain, all in one go. Yes, it was crude, but these days crude worked. Nuance got lost; nuance was for losers.