by Sam Bourne
He knew Vincenzi would be a reliable ally. Sure, he was a Dino – Democrat in Name Only – and sure, everyone knew he couldn’t stand Baker, but Vincenzi’s presence at his side would give Franklin the lofty, bipartisan patina the media could never resist. ‘This is above party politics,’ they had both said in their statements. The press always lapped up that shit.
As for the phrase ‘special prosecutor’, that particular bolt of inspiration had only come to him as he headed over to the hastily arranged press availability. The nerds would say it was inaccurate, but they’d be too late. The poison arrow would already be in flight.
So Senator Franklin felt able to hum ‘Happy Days are Here Again’ as he straightened the blotter on his desk and moved the paperweight – the one that, if you looked closely, revealed a Confederate flag preserved as if in amber inside the thick glass. Things were going according to plan.
He carried on humming even as there was a gentle rap on the door. Cindy, his Head of Legislative Affairs, coming in with a smile he hadn’t seen since the night he was elected more than four years ago. It always gave him pleasure watching her move, her rear end tightly contained in a skirt that was never any lower than the knee. But now there was a spring in her step that gave him an extra pulse of enjoyment.
‘I can see you come bearing glad tidings, sweetheart.’
‘I do, sir, I do.’
They played these games, the Southern gentleman and the demure young lady, with dialogue sub-Gone With the Wind – but only when the political or personal weather was clement.
‘Pray tell.’
‘I do declare, Senator,’ she said with a girlish flutter that, even though he’d seen it a hundred times, still sent electricity to his groin, ‘that the source of MSNBC’s recent tales of woe has been – what’s the word – outed.’
‘Outed? Already? What the hell’s happened?’ The game was over. Too important for games.
‘Daily Kos. They’ve named him. Seems some liberal hacker broke into the MSNBC system and found the emails between their Washington bureau and the leaker. Then went ahead and named him on his own website. Kos picked it up.’
‘You sure the White House weren’t behind this?’
‘Can’t be sure. But Kos are adamant that it was some ultra-liberal crazy outraged his beloved Baker was being slammed. Seems to add up.’
‘And what have they found about him?’
‘The hacker?’
‘No! Fuck him. The leaker.’
‘All they have so far is that he’s late forties, white and from New Orleans.’
9
Washington, DC, Tuesday March 21, 10.55
‘Get in. I’ll brief you in the car.’
Maggie did as she was told, impressed by the authority of this woman, who could only have been in her late twenties. Maggie had seen her in the White House Residence, dressed like an au pair, young and unshowy. Her name was Zoe Galfano and she was the lead Secret Service agent assigned to the Baker children, with particular responsibility for Katie.
‘It’s a classic threat message,’ Zoe said, as Maggie strapped on her seatbelt. ‘Not especially unusual in the White House. Except this was different.’
‘Because it was addressed to Katie?’
‘That, and the fact that it’s not easy to get a direct message to her. Hijacking a Facebook identity took ingenuity.’
‘Was it hard to trace him?’
Zoe turned to look at Maggie with a smile. ‘We don’t know it’s a him.’
‘Right.’
‘No preconceptions. That’s part of the training.’
‘And all this internet stuff, you learn that too?’
‘I did. Figured I was never going to have the edge in the muscles department.’ She flexed a bicep. ‘So I decided to focus on those areas where I could compete with the men on a level playing field.’
‘I hear that,’ Maggie muttered, looking out of the window.
‘Graduated top of my class in psychology and computer studies.’
They were driving out of the District and into Maryland, two other agents following two cars behind. It was strictly against protocol for White House staff to meddle in Secret Service business, but Goldstein had spotted a loophole: ‘As of today, you’re not White House staff any more. You’re a family friend. Katie Baker wants you there, so you’re there.’
Just before she had got into Agent Galfano’s car, the identity of the alleged leaker of the MSNBC stories had begun to surface on a blog, though there had been no official confirmation from the network. And still no name. A white male from New Orleans was all they knew. Maggie’s first job was to see if the creep who had terrorized Katie and the guy who’d been feeding MSNBC were one and the same.
Zoe parked up. They were on a residential street in Bethesda, quiet on this midweek morning. The agent checked the address once more and looked back up at the house. Number 1157. Out loud, she confirmed that this was the right street, right block. Four houses away, a woman in her sixties was bending down, ostrich-style, apparently to examine the bottom of a rosebush. Zoe turned to Maggie. ‘We’re going to have to do this quietly.’ She spoke into the radio on her cuff. ‘Are you good to go, guys?’
Maggie heard nothing in reply.
‘Wait for my word, Ray. I’ll go first, walking pace, you two hang back a few yards. Remember, weapons are not to be visible. Repeat, not visible.’
She turned to Maggie. ‘Now, Ms Costello. The suspect is likely to be armed and dangerous. Do you understand?’
Maggie nodded.
‘I consider it a great risk that you’re here. But Mr Goldstein insisted that you accompany me at all times, so here you are. That means you do whatever I tell you to do. Duck, run, hit the floor. Instantly. Are we clear?’
‘We’re clear.’
She watched Zoe check out the house once more. Curtains open on the top floor, blinds, halfway between open and closed, on the ground. Garden neatly kept. No car in the driveway. Light on upstairs. She saw the agent feel for her gun, holstered just below her armpit.
Zoe raised her cuff once more. ‘Go.’
Not waiting for an answer, she opened the car door and strode purposefully up the path, not waiting for Maggie to catch up with her. She passed the mailbox, flipping it open in a single quick movement: empty. She glanced over her shoulder to see the pair from the other car start out on the sidewalk, three yards behind her.
They were not in uniform but they were hardly disguised. If the black SUVs with tinted windows didn’t give it away, the dark suits and curly wire in the ear surely did. Zoe had told Maggie that she had thought about putting in a request for different vehicles, but that would have meant form-filling and more explanation. Mr Goldstein had been clear: no widening of the circle and no time to waste.
The front door revealed nothing. No nameplate. Zoe looked back towards the other agents, one of whom was looking into the recycling bin, searching for old letters or envelopes that might yield a name. He shook his head.
Zoe rang the bell, moving her ear close to the door to pick up any footsteps. Maggie pictured the man inside, in a bathrobe, legs apart, his face blue from the computer screen, jerking himself off as he stared at the bodies of girls not much older than Katie Baker.
No preconceptions. That’s what Zoe had said.
The agent knocked on the door, loudly. Maggie saw her glance at her watch, give it five seconds and then nod to Ray. Without hesitation, he shouldered the full weight of his two-hundred-and-twenty-pound frame into the door, busting its lock on the first attempt.
Zoe was first in, legs astride, weapon brandished in a double-handed grip. Ray and partner followed; then it was Maggie’s turn. She hesitated, then stepped forward, the way she had once closed her eyes and jumped off the tallest rock at Loughshinny beach: don’t even think about it.
‘SECRET SERVICE!’ Galfano bellowed. ‘Put your hands up!’
Something caught the agent’s eye. She swivelled around, to see an archway le
ading to what seemed to be the kitchen. A nod towards Ray instructed him to join her and head that way. A flick of her revolver told the other agent, now in the doorway, to check out the upstairs.
She stepped forward gingerly, noting the change in the light coming from the kitchen. One pace behind, her heart banging in her chest, Maggie sensed it too. Someone was moving in there. Silently, but moving all the same.
‘We are agents of the United States Secret Service!’ Zoe shouted once more. ‘Come out with your hands up.’
The first noise, a kind of grinding sound. Was that a key turning in a backdoor lock? Was he getting away?
Zoe now rushed through the archway, her finger tight on the trigger. ‘Freeze!’
A half-second later they saw the source of both the change in the light and the noise. The image Maggie had had in mind had been half-right. There was a computer – but no man. Just a lonely machine on the kitchen table, the flickering green lights of a router right next to it.
Zoe lowered her gun and stepped towards the machine. She could see from the blinking cursor that the computer was functioning. She turned to Maggie. ‘I’m sorry, Ms Costello, this seems to have been a wild goose chase. I really-’
But Maggie stopped her. ‘Look-’
The cursor was moving, apparently of its own accord. They watched as it zipped around the screen, finding the Word icon, clicking it open to reveal a blank document. And now words began to appear on the screen, letter by letter, typed by some unseen hand.
Welcome to my home. Sorry I’m not in. Do make yourself comfortable. Do I take it from your visit that your boss is keen to talk?
10
Washington, DC, Tuesday March 21, 14.26
‘Aren’t people going to talk?’
‘What? About you and me?’
‘Yes. Me, in here.’
‘Something tells me, Maggie, that people worked out long ago there’s not a chance of that happening: you’re not my type.’ And with that, a smile spread across the large, flushed, wobbling face of Stuart Goldstein, the first smile Maggie had seen in what felt like weeks but was actually less than thirty-six hours.
At his request, she had gone straight to his office as soon as she had returned from the raid on the Maryland house. He had had to put her on the visitors list at the bloody tourists’ entrance at Fifteenth and Hamilton Place; she had had to show her passport to gain admission to the White House.
‘I mean it, Stu. People will be suspicious.’
‘Maggie, right now we have seven senators calling for an independent counsel to investigate the President for “alleged financial links” to fucking Tehran. People in this building have got other things to worry about than your employment arrangements.’
Maggie bowed her head in a ‘you’re the boss’ gesture and continued her report back: the Secret Service was conducting an urgent trace on the dumb terminal they had discovered in Bethesda. They had so far narrowed down the location of the master computer to the south-eastern United States, but could not be more specific.
They were waiting for the TV to deliver what it had promised. Fifteen minutes earlier, Goldstein had had a call from a contact inside MSNBC warning him that the network was about to air a live interview with the source of its two recent stories on Stephen Baker. The partial identification in the blogosphere had given way to a full ID, once the collective investigative might of the internet had got to work.
The source had been named as Vic Forbes of New Orleans, Louisiana. Stu had immediately put one of his best researchers onto it: he knew he was in a race against both the media and the Republicans to know everything about Forbes that could be known. And then to define him. Crank, attack dog, dopehead. Whatever would shatter his credibility.
‘Here’s what I don’t understand,’ Maggie said, while the TV cut to a weather forecast. ‘The shrink thing. How come that didn’t come out before?’
‘I still haven’t quite figured that out. Not to my own satisfaction.’
‘Do you think the others knew and didn’t use it?’
‘No way. Adams and Rodriguez were trying to kill him in the primaries. And Chester in the general. They all had oppo research digging away, night after night, climbing all over his past. And the media, working twenty-four/seven.’
‘What about you? Did you know?’
‘Come on, Maggie. You’re my favourite Irishman and all that, but I can’t get into my personal relationship with him.’
‘So you did know.’
Goldstein smiled enigmatically, an expression which was accompanied by a counterpoint of snorting, as the exhalation that would normally have exited from his mouth re-routed via his nose. He really was monumentally unfit. ‘Whether I did or did not is not the important thing here. What matters is how the fuck did this Vic Forbes find out?’
‘Maybe he spoke to the shrink?’
‘Difficult. He died fifteen years ago.’
‘There would have been records. Papers.’
‘Nuh-uh. None.’
‘Bills?’
‘Put it this way, yours truly did not come down with the first shower of rain. I am used to the dirtiest dirty tricks. You don’t get to be a councilman in New York unless you know how to rip a guy’s heart out with your teeth. I made sure in Baker’s first race that the enemy couldn’t dig up any surprises.’
‘Because you had dug them up first.’
‘Exactly. Wielded the spade myself.’ He held up his hands, the effort of which once again altered the rhythm of his breathing. ‘Then I did it again for the governor’s race.’
‘With professional help this time, I bet.’
‘You’re damn right. I had two of Seattle’s finest – ex-cops actually – investigate Stephen Baker as if they were determined to convict him of a felony. Find out everything. Go through his phone bills, house deeds, mortgage payments, bank accounts, college transcripts. They hacked into his emails and tapped his phone for all I know. Spoke to everyone, interviewed old girlfriends, made sure there were no old boyfriends. If there was a wall Stephen Baker had pissed against, they went to sniff it. Then I did it all over again before he announced for President.’
‘Before?’
‘Oh yes. Not much point doing it afterwards, is there?’
‘And did they find anything?’
‘You know everything they found. So does the American people.’
Maggie smiled at the realization of it. ‘Of course. The big “I experimented with drugs” admission. Getting stoned rebranded as a science project. Experimented, my arse.’
‘Sure, it’s bullshit. But it worked, didn’t it? Once you get it out there, you get to define yourself-’
‘-before they define you. What about Iran?’
‘Well, that couldn’t come up during the campaign ’cause it hadn’t happened yet. That took some serious digging. Somehow Forbes knew what we didn’t know ourselves.’
‘You didn’t know Jim Hodges was Hossein Najafi?’
Goldstein jerked his head back, as if affronted. ‘Listen Maggie. Even my booba, may she rest in peace, knows that you don’t take money from fucking I-ran! Of course we didn’t know.’
‘Were we set up? Someone sent Hodges in here to embarrass us?’
‘Maybe. Maybe the Iranians did it. Make Baker look like an asshole. Right now, though, the only thing that bothers me about Hodges is how Forbes knew about him. And about the shrink.’ He stared at the TV. ‘I want to know who this bastard is.’
In the end, she was disappointed. Vic Forbes did not look like a monster or a pantomime villain. In truth, his face, as he stared dead-on at the camera, conducting a satellite interview from a studio in New Orleans, was forgettable. It was lean, like one of the whippets her grandfather’s friends used to keep in Dublin. His nose seemed to be pinched, too thin at the bridge. He was bald, save for some slight grey at the temples, which had Maggie put his age at around fifty, though it was perfectly possible that he had looked the same way when he was thirty.
> If she had guessed how this scene would have played out, she would have imagined embarrassment would at least feature in it somewhere. Maybe shame was too much to ask for in this day and age, but you’d think a man who had anonymously smeared the President would at least have the courtesy to seem uncomfortable, even if he couldn’t bring himself to squirm in his chair.
But Forbes was having none of it. Maggie watched mesmerized as he batted away a series of questions as if he’d been doing this all his life.
Describing himself as a ‘researcher’, he insisted he was aligned with ‘no party and no faction’, a phrase that, to Maggie’s ears at least, reeked of pomposity.
‘I am a truth-teller, if you will,’ he said. ‘I had this information – this truth – and I felt guilty that I wasn’t sharing it with the American people. It’s an old-fashioned phrase, but I believe they have a right to know. They have a right to know who their president really is.’
‘But how did you get it?’ the interviewer asked. ‘Surely the American people have a right to know that too, don’t they?’
Maggie felt her own fist clench, involuntarily. Come on.
‘Well, Natalie,’ he began.
Good, thought Maggie. He seemed flustered.
‘The thing is…Look, in an ideal world…’
Maggie glanced at Stuart, who was as transfixed as she was, hoping that they were witnessing the unravelling of Vic Forbes on live television.
‘The point I would make, Natalie, is to ask you this: would you reveal your sources, if your network had broken a story like this without my help? Of course you wouldn’t.’ Maggie felt the air deflate out of her. ‘And nor would anyone ask you. That’s a basic principle of journalism.’
‘Yes, but you’re not a journalist, are you, you scumbag bastard!’ Stuart hurled an empty Styrofoam cup at the TV.