by Sam Bourne
It was as thorough a search as Maggie had ever endured, and given where she had travelled, the warlords whose lairs she had been led to, blindfolded and in the dead of night, that was saying something. While it was happening, and partly to make conversation, Maggie said, ‘So I notice that’s not a Secret Service uniform you’re wearing.’
‘I’m not Secret Service.’
‘Oh? Which bit do you work for then?’
The woman was running the palms of her hands across Maggie’s back, when she answered: ‘Presidential security.’ It took Maggie a moment to realize that what she was saying was, in fact, Presidential Security, a new private protection force established to run alongside the Secret Service. It was formed mainly out of the personal bodyguard the President had employed as a businessman. Inevitably the press had dubbed it his ‘Praetorian guard’, with the New York tabloids becoming particularly excited by the regiment of ‘glamazons’ who were increasingly seen – and photographed – at the President’s side. But this was the first time Maggie had encountered the new force in person.
Eventually the woman gave her a curt nod and brought McNamara back into the office. Maggie could not be sure, but she thought she heard her whisper, ‘She’s clean.’
‘Apologies again,’ McNamara said, retaking his seat behind his desk. ‘Everyone is on edge just now, you understand.’
‘Of course.’
‘So. Where were we?’ Maggie focused on McNamara’s Adam’s apple as she said the next few sentences. ‘I was asking you about Gary Turner, the agent who just died in Namibia. You see, I think he was there to dispatch a package sent by you. A “complicated drop”, you called it. In your exchange with Richard.’
McNamara swallowed, but recovered himself swiftly. ‘I don’t follow.’
‘Sorry,’ Maggie smiled. ‘I should try to make myself clearer. I’m always doing that!’ She smiled again, girlishly. ‘In your series of encrypted messages with Richard Parris, which Richard kept tucked away in a file, you discuss the delivery and dispatch of various “packages”. One of these packages was located in the Namibian jungle. As it happens, exactly coincident with that message, a group of CIA operatives were in the Namibian jungle, where they made a planned, coordinated attempt on the life of an American citizen: Ron Cain of Dallas, Texas.’ Maggie paused. ‘Tell me if I’m going too fast.’
She did not look down, did not consult her notes, maintained eye contact throughout. ‘I’ve looked into Mr Cain, to see what he could possibly have done to have aroused the interest of the Central Intelligence Agency. It turns out he had never been on the CIA’s radar before. No links to terror, never on a watch list, no links to suspected espionage against the United States. No connection with organized crime, no suggestion of sanctions-busting. Nothing.’
McNamara was holding She gaze. Neither wanted to be the first to break off.
‘Indeed,’ Maggie went on, ‘he has only one connection with the US government.’ She paused again, waiting for a question. But it didn’t come. ‘He is owed many millions of dollars by the President.’
‘Well, Maggie, you’re tireless, I’ll give you that. This sounds very interesting and I look forward to you compiling a full, detailed report which we can—’
‘I’m not done, Mac.’ She smiled again. ‘You see, it seems Ron Cain was the lucky one. Other business figures around the world were far less fortunate.’
McNamara sat back in his chair, feigning a smile. A change of tactic.
Maggie chose this moment to glance down at her notes, even though she didn’t need to. She turned over one sheet, to look at the next. She knew that in Washington what people like McNamara feared most was not a single accusation but a dossier full of them.
‘Your exchange with Richard mentions another “delivery” in Delhi. As it happens on that day, a Mr Aamir Kapoor also met an untimely death. And he too had business dealings with the President. He was the sole obstacle standing in the way of a very lucrative project in that city.’
McNamara’s smile had grown wider and less forced. ‘You know who you sound like, Maggie? You sound like the losers who made me a very rich man.’ He adopted the voice and facial expression of a paranoid nerd: ‘“Did you know that on 9/11, there was a delivery truck that re-routed off the New Jersey turnpike ten minutes before the first plane struck?” Circumstantial evidence, coincidence, two and two makes ten!
‘Maggie, I don’t want to be rude, but you’re sounding a little nutty. Weaving an elaborate conspiracy theory out of whole cloth. Some curry-eater gets run over in Delhi and you think the CIA did it? D’you think they might be sending secret messages to you through your TV set, Maggie? Perhaps you should check the microwave, too. What if all those beeps are really a code? I’ve got to admit, I expected better of you.’
Maggie had anticipated this. With a studied calm she did not feel, she said, ‘You’ve purged most of the awkward squad from Langley, Mac. Almost all of them. But there’s still a few holding on. And when they see something they don’t like, they talk. Especially to an old friend they trust. Like me.’
That seemed to slow, if not halt, McNamara. He sat back again, eyes narrowed.
‘You see, Mac, what they tell me is that this has become a new area of operations for the CIA. Like that “mid-Atlantic” package, for example.’
‘Maggie, this is not—’
‘That was how Richard described it to you, in what was clearly – from the context – a term you understood. I have to admit “mid-Atlantic” threw me a bit. I was looking at the Azores, Bermuda, all kinds of places. But then I read about Birkir Arnason.’
She was sure McNamara paled, just a shade.
‘You know who he is, right? I didn’t. He’s not exactly a household name. He’s an Icelandic app developer. Big in online gaming. Iceland: who knew?’ Another smile. ‘Well, a few weeks ago he came to a very nasty end. He’s this super-experienced climber and hiker and yet, somehow, on a clear, crisp morning – not windy or stormy, perfect visibility – he falls into a geothermal pool and is not just burned, Mac, he’s dissolved. Really sweet guy, by the sound of things. Major philanthropist. He’d already endowed three children’s hospitals and he wasn’t even thirty. But, get this. He too had a connection to the President’s business interests. He refused to sell his company, which was meant to be the last link in a global chain that would make the President billions. The President really, really wanted his company. But Birkir kept saying no. Silly Birkir.’
‘Maggie, you’re embarrassing yourself. Just piling one coincidence onto another.’
Now Maggie leaned forward, the smile gone. In a quiet, but firm voice she said, ‘No Mac, I’m afraid you’re the one embarrassing yourself. Shaming yourself and this office. What I have here,’ she tapped the dossier, ‘is prima facie evidence of your abuse of American service personnel to advance private, commercial interests. You did it in Africa, you did it in India. You sent the CIA to kill some tech entrepreneur in Iceland and – we haven’t even got to this yet – to murder a corporate lawyer out walking his dog on the English east coast.’ She glanced down at her papers. ‘Not one of these people posed a military threat to the United States. Yet you sent armed Americans onto the territory of some of our closest allies to murder innocent people, just to boost the profits of companies belonging to the President. You used the United States military as a private army. And now a young American, who signed up to do his patriotic duty, is dead in an African hospital. What are you going to tell his family, Mac? That he gave his life attempting to rub out a business rival of the President? How do you think Sergeant Turner’s parents will take that?’
McNamara stayed rocking back in his chair, using the tilt function to its fullest, twirling a pencil in his hand. He said nothing for a moment and then another. Eventually he spoke, his clear blue eyes now full of a steel that she hadn’t seen before.
‘Richard was right. You’ve got balls. It took balls to come here and say all this to me. Big balls. You took a ris
k, because you must have known that you could leave here now and – well, God knows what could happen to you, Maggie. Your car could skid out of control, say, or something awful could happen to, I don’t know, your sister’s kids—’
‘So that was you.’
‘Look, Maggie. You know how this works. Or if you don’t, you should. Once Richard kindly let me know that he’d seen your notepad – which showed you had the whole thing worked out – I had to take action, you understand that. I couldn’t risk you getting in the way.’
‘You mean, you didn’t want me stopping an attempt on the life of the President.’
‘Let’s say I didn’t want you stopping nature from taking its course.’
‘Nature! You wanted an assassination attempt to go ahead, so that you could mount your coup. Nice and controlled, mind. The way the Secret Service do their job, you knew no one would ever get close enough to do a headshot. As long as you had the President in a vest, he’d be OK. And you were determined to make it happen, removing any obstacles in the assassins’ path. Which meant scaring me away. And you were prepared to risk the lives of a couple of children to do it. Jesus.’
He was smiling. ‘I have no comment to make at this time.’
‘And now you’re threatening to do it again.’
‘Oh no. I’m just talking hypotheticals here, Maggie. Just hypotheticals. But you know, the world is an unpredictable place. And then suddenly your dossier, pfff’ – he made an explosion gesture with his hands – ‘it’s gone.’
Maggie made a conscious effort to regain her composure, to maintain at least the appearance of calm. ‘Oh, don’t you worry about my dossier. I’ve made arrangements for that. An electronic version of this document is stored in a folder that stays locked and encrypted. But if – for any reason – I fail to log in and open that file for three full days, then it’s programmed to publish itself online. On multiple platforms and to a string of email addresses. It will also make clear exactly why I’ve disappeared and who’s responsible. So getting rid of me would only make your problem much worse.’
‘My problem?’
‘Yes, Mac. Your problem. I have here the evidence that you have been running an illegal covert military operation from the White House. You did not have the authorization of Congress to run this operation, which was directed against civilians, including an American citizen, and which was conducted, in part, on the territory of our allies.’ And now she came to the sentence that mattered most. ‘You will go to jail for many years for doing that without the explicit permission of the President.’
Now it was his turn to grin. ‘Oh you are sweet, Maggie. I can see what Richard saw in you. Besides his sense of duty to me, I mean. You’re so innocent. Is that a Catholic thing? I thought it was all sin and darkness with you people. Maybe it’s because you’re a girl. Listened to the nuns more than you should have.’
‘Why am I sweet, Mac?’
‘Because you understand so little about the world. And so little about him. Why do you think we did all this? Two years! Of rallies and speeches and debates and balloons and God Bless America, in nothing towns talking to nothing people, with their stupid hats and all their dumb, dumb “hopes and dreams”? Such stupid people, Maggie. I mean, really, you should have been there. These lines of morons and in-breds, with one tooth in their head and a flag in their hands, ready to believe absolutely anything. I felt sorry for them, I still do. But the President had their number from the start: “easy marks”, he called them. You could tell them you’re going to bring their jobs back, re-open the mines, bring back the horse-and-buggy – whatever you like – and they’d lap it up. Even when it was there, written down in black and white, that what you were actually planning was a tax break for the top one per cent, paid for by the removal of their healthcare. I mean, really.
‘So why do you think he put up with it? Why do you think he went to these shitty places to talk to these shitty little people? You don’t think he had better things to do, girls half his daughter’s age he wanted to bang? He did it because he wanted power. And this is what you don’t get: the whole point of power is to use it. That’s the whole fucking point.
‘Your crowd never understood that, your beloved former president especially. He was always “exercising restraint” or “engaging in power-sharing” with our allies and all that horseshit. No! If you have power, you use it. If you don’t, you lose it. That’s what your president did: he watched his power, American power, get steadily weaker and weaker. It was like Superman and kryptonite: it was painful to watch. Our country was waning before our eyes.
‘Well, not now. This man has power and he is using it. And this is the amazing thing. This is the beautiful thing. The more he uses it, the more of it he has! He’s getting stronger every day.
‘And his wealth is part of that power, Maggie. That’s why they fear him in India and Russia and the Persian Gulf and all those other dirty, brown shit-holes. They know he’s rich. And they respect that. He gets what he wants. They respect that too. So, sure, a few retards are dumb enough to stand in his way and they get taken out. But that only helps. It makes the others fear him more. And if they fear him, they fear the United States. That’s another thing you and your friends never realize.’ His voice was rising. ‘It’s not the Massachusetts Feminist Collective of Basket Weavers out there, you know. There are no points for being soft and gentle and kind and understanding. You act like that, you’ll get eaten alive. You “draw a line in the sand” and then do nothing, well, guess what? Next time you try to draw a line, everyone will walk all over it – and walk all over you.
‘It’s about power, Maggie. Personal power. You’re always going on about “the importance of the UN” and the WTO and NATO and all that shit, all the international organizations and “multilateral alliances”, when the only thing real people – billions of them – really understand is the individual. The mighty individual. A king, an emperor – that’s what they understand. That’s what they want. A world where one ruler gets his way by scaring the shit out of all the others. Now, at long last, we have one of those, a real ruler, in the White House.
‘So of course the CIA should be doing whatever it takes to make him stronger. The taller he stands, the taller America stands. That’s their mission, isn’t it?’
Maggie jumped in. ‘So you ordered the CIA to kill those men without the President’s explicit permission?’
‘Of course I didn’t! Are you not listening to me? This is what the President wants. I give him what he wants.’
‘Well, Mac. You can tell that to the judge when he sends you down for putting an American soldier in harm’s way. That that’s what you thought the President wanted. I should warn you, lots of people in your position have tried that line over the years. It never works out so well.’
Now McNamara pulled out his phone and started jabbing at the buttons. ‘You think I’m stupid, is that it? You think I’m as stupid as those assholes who wound up taking the rap for their bosses? No way. Not going to happen. I told him, “Mr President, these people – Cain, Kapoor, Arnason, that English guy – they have been a pain in your ass for years. Well, now you are the most powerful man in the world. You have the world’s most powerful military at your disposal. If you want these men taken out, then just say the word.”’
‘And what did he say?’
McNamara hit a few keys and then held up his phone.
She listened as a voice, loud, clear and unmistakable, filled the room.
OK, sounds good. Get it done.
Then she heard McNamara’s voice, even louder. The tone was different, more deferential than she was used to. ‘All right, Mr President. We’ll have these taken care of. And clearly there will be some legal issues. There might be people at Langley who are worried—’
I thought you got rid of all of them, wasn’t—
‘We did, we did. But if anyone says, “Look, these are not military targets. They don’t pose a threat, it’s illegal—”’
; We went through all this with the, you know, the torture thing? Just tell them: when the President does it, that means it’s not illegal. OK?
Now it was Maggie’s turn to pale. She fell back in her seat, as if she’d been winded.
McNamara smiled. ‘You see, I’m covered. My own little insurance policy. And before you get any ideas, I’ve got that recording backed up and stored in several places. No way they’re getting Mac McNamara.’
‘You’re smart.’
‘At last. Something we can agree on! You go after me, you’re going after the President of the United States. And you really don’t want to do that. Not this guy, not now. Not with the so-called evidence you’ve got. A few deaths in strange places that no one’s heard of? Never going to fly. Those messages you say you’ve got, me and Richard engaging in a bit of locker-room banter? We’ll just say they’re doctored. Forgeries. Fake news. And then we get it out on a few blogs that you’re a disgruntled former employee, a partisan for the former president, who, sadly, recently went off the rails.’ He adopted his news voice. ‘“According to White House sources, Miss Costello started making increasingly wild accusations. She even confronted the highly respected Chief of Staff Robert Kassian, accusing him of plotting a presidential assassination. Amid security concerns, her access pass was revoked. ‘I’m afraid she was very disturbed,’ one source said, citing the recent, acrimonious break-up with senior White House aide Richard Parris, which Miss Costello could not accept.”’