by Sam Bourne
It’s too late at night for me to file more than a few speculative thoughts about this, so here goes with two. First, this has only come about because of the death of Vic Forbes. Sure, that name won’t appear on the charge sheet when it comes before the House Judiciary Committee in the morning. Franklin and his pals in the House will make the Iranian Connection the heart of the legal case against the President. They will say that the selling of influence to an enemy power constitutes the relevant violation of Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, which states: ‘The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High crimes and misdemeanors.’ But that’s the legal case. Make no mistake, the politics has the name Forbes all over it.
His death changed the political calculus in Washington. The rumors, the suspicion at the undeniably convenient timing of Forbes’s passing, all that has created bad atmospherics for Stephen Baker, a climate of suspicion where senior Republicans think they can accuse him of anything.
And, if Franklin is serious, he must reckon he can peel off enough conservative Democrats to make this thing pass. Let’s face it, there’s no shortage of Baker-skeptics among the Democrats who never liked the President – and all his idealistic talk of America showing an outstretched hand rather than a clenched fist to the world – anyway. If I were in the White House tonight, I’d be keeping a close eye on Dr Anthony Adams over at Defense.
Second, this will all move very fast. The Democratic majority is so slender, Republicans need only a couple of conservative Democrats to waver and the Judiciary Committee could agree to submit articles of impeachment for a vote of the entire House as soon as the start of next week. The clock is ticking on the Baker presidency. If there is even a shred of credible evidence that Forbes was indeed the victim of foul play, rather than a suicide, then the Baker presidency’s future will surely be measured in days…
24
New Orleans, Thursday March 23, 01.22 CST
Maggie was in the cab on the way back to the hotel, her breathing coming faster now, her mind racing through the implications. Only one question mattered, though the answer made her blood run cold.
Who would want Forbes dead?
In response, a single sentence kept repeating itself, a sentence she had repeatedly tried to banish.
I want him gone.
It was the most obvious explanation, the one that any cold-eyed observer would reach for. Cui bono? Wasn’t that the first question the analyst was meant to ask: who benefits? And who benefited more from the death of Victor Forbes than Stephen Baker?
For the fifth time in two minutes, she hit redial on Stuart’s number. Still busy. Situation grave, he had said. What the hell was happening over there?
They were driving past an empty plot. It looked like scrubland now but, given its location, it had almost certainly been a fully-inhabited residential block before the levees broke. There was a sign attached to the chickenwire fence, announcing a reconstruction project, with a photograph showing the gleaming faux-colonial houses that would arise on this spot. But it only made Maggie think how difficult it was going to be, breathing life into a city that had all but drowned.
Her BlackBerry, now set on silent, vibrated. She seized on it, thumbing the button frantically. ‘Stuart? Is that you?’
But there was only silence. The vibration had announced not a call but a message.
Stuart: Can’t get hold of you. Things insane here. Franklin and the Republicans launching impeachment proceedings against us in the morning. You have to get us something fast. Anything. Maggie, we’re depending on you. HE’S depending on you.
She felt her throat dry. Impeachment. It seemed that Forbes was going to achieve in death what he had set out to do at the end of his life – and bring down Stephen Baker.
The veins in her neck began to throb. How dare they? At long last, a truly decent, good man emerges from the swamp of politics, and what is their reaction? To tear him down, using the dirtiest, cheapest tricks imaginable. No wonder they couldn’t stand a giant like Stephen Baker. He exposed the rest of them for what they were: dwarves.
Her job was clear. She had to find something that would exonerate the President, proving that he had committed no crime. She needed to establish beyond all doubt that Forbes had taken his own life. That was her duty. Her duty to Stephen Baker. He’s depending on you.
And what had she done? The very opposite. She had found evidence that Franklin would seize on, suggesting the conspiracy crackpots were right. Forbes had been murdered.
Calm down. That fact alone did not necessarily implicate the President. Baker had allies, including those who would have seen Forbes as a threat to their own interests. What if one of them had decided to do Baker a favour – and take Forbes out?
Then she remembered the story Goldstein had pulled up at her kitchen table. ‘The Baker presidency turns into The Godfather’. The stories had proliferated wildly since then, each one nudging ever closer to accusing Baker of murder.
Could that be it? Might someone have despatched Forbes not to help Baker but to damage him, by making him look like a mafia boss whose enemies mysteriously ended up dead? After all, what she had discovered at the Midnight Lounge wouldn’t stay secret forever. If she were right that Forbes had been murdered, it would only be a matter of time before that information became public knowledge. Even if the Republicans did not make an outright accusation of murder, they could use the suspicion of it to insist that the President of the United States had to be removed from office.
Two minutes after she got back to the hotel, just as she was standing in the corridor and unlocking the door to her room, the phone vibrated. Stuart.
‘Stu, what the hell’s going on?’
‘Rick Franklin making his play for history.’
‘It can’t happen, can it?’
‘Can’t rule it out.’
‘But he hasn’t got the votes. I mean, we’re the majority party.’
‘Meant to be the majority party. By a whisker. And that whisker is made up of Blue Dog assholes who will vote with the Republicans if they feel that’s where the wind is blowing.’
‘And is that where the wind is blowing?’
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On you partly, Maggie. You gotta find something to help our boy here.’
Maggie swallowed. She could hear the heart-busting stress down the phone and she was about to add another huge surge of it. ‘Well, I’ve found something. But I’m not sure it helps.’ There was a strange crackle on the line. ‘What’s that noise?’
‘Gherkins,’ Stuart said, crunching audibly and repulsively. ‘I haven’t eaten properly in forty-eight hours. I keep a jar in the office for emergencies.’ He belched. ‘So hit me, Maggie. I can take it.’
‘Forbes was at a strip club the night he died. He left there about an hour before the time of death. Left with a woman.’
‘Jesus.’
‘It’s not cast-iron proof but I think it adds up.’
‘Do the police know?’
‘I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone even knows he was there.’
‘Could it be a coincidence? Picks up a hooker, then offs himself? Or maybe he goes back with her, they fool around, it goes wrong and she panics. Worries that she’ll get blamed.’
‘I wondered about that, Stu. But there were no fingerprints at his house except his. It seems, I don’t know, professional. The woman was a dancer at the club, but she’d only started the day before Forbes died. Exactly the time Forbes started spilling the beans. And she hasn’t been seen since.’
‘OK.’ She could hear the sound of him thinking. Chewing and thinking. Finally: ‘The thing is, and this is about the only good news we have around here, New Orleans Police Department are winding up the investigation. Apparently the coroner says there’s no evidence to alter his verdict of accidental death by asphyxiation.
And if there are no fingerprints at the scene-’
‘They could have killed him somewhere else, near the strip club. Then taken him back to the house, dressed him up, left him hanging. So long as they wore gloves, Forbes’s prints would be all over the house and they wouldn’t leave a trace. I know it sounds far-fetched, but it would make sense.’
‘Look, Maggie, I think the police just want to let this matter rest. Seems like some people down there are trying to be helpful.’
‘Who’s being helpful?’
‘It’s a Democratic town, Maggie. Of course the wingnuts are already blaming us for that as well. Obstruction of justice, all that crap.’
‘Stuart, at Forbes’s house, all the computer stuff had gone.’
‘The police. Bound to have removed it.’
‘I know. And they’ll have his phone and his BlackBerry.’
‘Yep.’
‘We know Forbes did everything by computer. The Facebook thing. The pretend hack of MSNBC emails. What I’m saying is, whatever it is I’m meant to be finding out – what exactly Forbes knew – it’s going to be on those machines. If we could-’
‘Can’t be done, Maggie. Our only route would be Secret Service. They could put in a request to impound. But what’s that gonna look like? White House poking its nose into a criminal investigation.’
‘But you could say he posed a security threat to the President’s daughter.’
‘Posed. Past tense.’
‘All right. The Secret Service could say they were worried he had accomplices.’
‘To what?’
‘To his planned assault against Katie Baker.’
‘Yeah, but remember, Maggie, nobody knows about that. As far as anyone knows, Forbes was just the guy who popped up on cable posing as the brave truth-teller who was going to introduce the American people to the real Stephen Baker. They don’t know he was threatening a thirteen-year-old girl.’
‘Well, why don’t you-’
‘What, make that public? And thereby invite the press to notice that we hadn’t immediately gone to the police, despite his threats of blackmail, because we were worried he might actually have something?’
‘And then everyone would want to know why we were so frightened.’
‘Exactly. Which, incidentally, they want to know anyway. Forbes was on TV, remember, promising another big instal ment of the story. People are going to be digging already. Probably got private detectives crawling all over New Orleans right now.’
Maggie thought of Lewis Rigby. She had never asked for ID, she hadn’t Googled him. She had accepted his word that he was a reporter for the Enquirer. ‘Back to the computers, Stu. Are you saying that if it gets out that the Secret Service were looking through his machines-’
‘Except it won’t be Secret Service in the headline. It will be the White House. Which is all we need right now. We might as well put Stephen Baker in a Dick Nixon mask and be done with it.’
‘OK.’
‘Besides.’
‘Besides, what?’
‘Zoe – you know, the agent who took you to Maryland, on the raid? She reckons Forbes did it all in the air or something.’
‘In the air? What does that mean?’
‘Like I know. He didn’t store it on a machine, just on the internet.’
‘Oh, I get it.’ Maggie remembered Nick’s hairy biker story, as well as the stiff lecture she had once received from Liz, after her sister had found her on a visit back home, poised to pull out clumps of her own hair. Maggie had lost a crucial paper she had been working on for the UN’s Middle East envoy. She’d written it on her computer back in New York, then backed it up on a memory stick. She had even remembered to take the stick with her, keeping it safely in her pocket the entire flight home. Trouble was, her mother had insisted on throwing every item of Maggie’s clothing in the washing machine – including the pair of jeans with the memory stick still in the pocket. Every word on it was washed away in a blur of corrupted data. That was when Liz had walked into the bedroom they once shared, to find Maggie on her hands and knees, shaking the contents of her bag out onto the floor, just in case there was a hard copy of her precious paper buried inside, even though she knew that none had ever existed.
‘Mags, can I make a suggestion?’ she had said with calm smugness.
‘Not unless it involves you fucking right off,’ Maggie had said to the sister who had picked her up from Dublin Airport not much more than an hour earlier, after six months without seeing each other.
‘What do you do with your photographs?’
‘What?’
‘Where do you store them?’
‘In a bloody box, I don’t know!’
‘Because-’
‘If this is not connected with helping me get my document back I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Do you store your pictures on Flickr or a site like it?’
‘What the fuck is Flickr?’
‘Well, what I was going to say is, that’s what you should do with your documents. Don’t store them on the machine. Store them online. You get a password, you can work on them wherever you like, so long as you have internet access. And if you give your password to someone else, then you can both work on-’
It was then Maggie had thrown a shoe at her sister’s head. So she had never heard what exactly you could do if you shared your password, but she had got the rough idea.
She could hear Stuart still munching. It must have been his sixth straight gherkin. ‘Bottom line, Maggie: I’m not sure there’s anything on those computers worth finding. Which means you need to find another way into this. I don’t know what that is, but you’re going to have to find it. If Forbes was murdered, you have to find out who did it. Every minute we can’t come up with an answer to that, someone else fills in the blank with Stephen Baker.’
‘There’s the woman who picked Forbes up.’
‘What, the stripper?’ The sound of mastication was appalling, even down the phone. ‘No point. If you’re right, that she was some kind of professional, then she’s not exactly going to have left her business card behind, is she?’
It was true. She had flitted into the Midnight Lounge, under the bullshit name of Georgia with, no doubt, the bullshit papers to match, and flitted right out again. If she had been smart enough to wipe her prints from Forbes’s house, it was unlikely Maggie was going to be able to find her.
‘Also,’ Stu continued while building up to a swallow. ‘If she was a hired gun then it’s not the gun we’re interested in, is it? It’s who did the hiring. That’s what we need to find out. Urgently.’
‘I know.’ She wished he would stop telling her how much pressure she was under: she knew. Her mind had been churning with this and this alone for nearly nineteen unbroken hours.
‘And don’t forget, Maggie. We also need to know what bag of shit Forbes was about to tip over our heads.’
‘Right.’
‘And who else knows what’s inside that bag.’
‘Got it.’
‘Maggie?’ He sounded different, as if signalling a change in direction.
‘Yes, Stu?’
His voice was softer now, the voice of the early hours of the morning. ‘We’ve kind of given our lives up for this guy, haven’t we?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You and me. I have a wife and all, but I spend more time with CNN than I do with Nancy. And let’s face it, you’re married to the job.’
Maggie felt a sting of something like shame. Hadn’t Uri said exactly the same thing, that her devotion to the job had made their relationship impossible? They had fought and fought over that. Perhaps Uri was right, perhaps she had sacrificed their relationship for the sake of Stephen Baker. Which only made the current situation more unbearable. If the Baker presidency collapsed, it would all have been for nothing.
Stuart spoke again. ‘We can’t let this thing go down. Not like this. Not so early. He’s hardly had a chance to do any of the things we dreamed o
f, that you dreamed of. We haven’t saved the world yet, Maggie.’
Despite herself, Maggie smiled. Saving the world. She knew Stuart was teasing her, as he always had: the passionate idealistic woman among all those pragmatic, political men. But she also knew that even Stuart – cynical, poll-watching Stuart – only worked as hard as he did because he believed it too. That was the magic of Stephen Baker: he made idealism possible. When he spoke, changing the world was no longer some naïve adolescent dream, but something achievable and within reach. That was why he had been the first politician she had ever truly trusted. She would do anything – anything – in her power to stop those out to destroy him.
Injecting confidence into her voice, she said, ‘We’re not going to let it go down. We’re going to survive this. Just like we survived everything else. Remember, when Chester-’
‘This is different, Maggie. We both know it. In the morning, I’m going to start counting the votes. See if Franklin has enough of our guys – even potentially – to win this thing.’
‘And if he does?’
‘I was thinking of telling the President he should resign.’
‘Jesus Christ, Stuart.’
‘Don’t go nuts, Maggie. Think about what it would mean to fight on. Wading through all this shit. And what do the history books say then? That Baker was removed from office after less than two months. Better to leave with some dignity.’
‘Like Nixon you mean?’