The Chosen One

by Sam Bourne

  ‘I’ll put Sanchez on it. See if he can get that confirmed. The Secretary of State is waiting for me. Talk to Sanchez. And stay safe, Maggie. We need you strong, we need you healthy. I’m relying on you: we all are.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr President. I’ll do everything I can.’ She said the words, accepted the burden, but they rang hollow. What could she do, on her own? She wasn’t a detective. She wasn’t a spy or an investigator. She was just Maggie Costello, failed diplomat, failed White House staffer, failed friend, failed…everything.

  Her hands were trembling. She was standing at the gates of a cemetery, rain was in the air and Stuart Goldstein was dead. She felt a desperate, urgent need to be away from here. To be back home, in a hot bath, with a whiskey in her hand and none of this happening.

  She headed for the roadside and, as she climbed into a passing cab, she reached for her BlackBerry. Without thinking, led only by instinct and by need, she entered the area of her phone’s alphabetized contacts where she only rarely dared tread: U. For Uri.

  The phone rang three times. She knew that, if it went to voicemail, she would hang up. But, as so often in the past, he surprised her. He picked up. Without missing a beat, he said: ‘Hi. How’s my favourite ex-White House official?’

  She paused, not wanting her voice to betray her.

  ‘Maggie? You OK?’

  She nodded, knowing the uselessness of the gesture. She swallowed, determined to get a grip.

  ‘Maggie? What is it?’

  ‘Stuart’s dead.’

  ‘Oh, God. I’m so sorry. What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She could feel her nose twitching now, the sign that tears were about to follow. ‘They say it’s suicide. But I just can’t believe it.’

  ‘I know how close you were, Maggie. You always said he had such a big heart.’

  At that, she let out a full sob. These last few days had, she realized, left her like a coiled spring; she had been wound so tight.

  ‘Where are you, Maggie?’

  ‘I can’t say,’ she said, which only made her want to cry more. ‘In a cab.’

  ‘Do you want me to come down to see you?’

  She wanted to say that was what she wanted more than anything in the world – but it was impossible. ‘I just needed to hear your voice.’

  ‘OK, so I’ll talk,’ he said. Just hearing his accent, still alien even after all the time he had spent in the States, triggered something in her – despite everything that had passed between them.

  ‘You know what,’ he said. ‘I was thinking of you today. I was looking at some footage of Baker at the Iowa State Fair-’ The change in his tone suggested he was shifting the subject away from Stuart to safer ground, giving her something else to focus on. He was like that, Uri: sensitive to her moods. Too sensitive sometimes: he knew her too well.

  She tried to pull herself together, engage in the conversation. ‘Was I in the pictures?’

  ‘No,’ he said, the word dipping down in the sing-song voice you’d use to tell a child that the world doesn’t revolve around him. ‘No, none of you. But it did remind me of you. That’s where you first met him, wasn’t it?’

  ‘You make it sound like a love affair,’ she sniffed. ‘“First met him”.’

  ‘Well, there were always three of us in that marriage, Maggie,’ he said gently, the smile still in his voice. ‘You, me and the future President of the United States.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in an editing suite in Manhattan, listening to a million hours of interviews all on the same subject.’

  ‘You doing the Baker film?’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you? When did we last speak? It happened last month. PBS want ninety minutes. The full life story. Baker the man.’

  She did her best to sound enthusiastic. ‘Wow. That’s really good, Uri. Big job.’

  ‘Thanks, Maggie.’

  ‘You’d better hurry, though.’

  ‘It’s not looking good, is it? I don’t get it. The guy was Mr Invincible and now he’s fighting for his life.’

  That was too close to the bone. She felt the tears rising again. ‘It’s good to hear your voice, Uri.’ It came out as a gulp.

  ‘Yours too. You sure you’re OK?’

  She wanted to tell the truth, she wanted to let it all out, to hear what sense he could make of Stu’s apparent suicide, of what she had just heard in the cemetery, to piece it together, like co-conspirators, just as they had when they first met, back in Jerusalem. Those days had been terrifying – and violent – and yet she looked back on them now as among the happiest times in her life. Despite herself, and when she hadn’t really been looking, she had fallen in love.

  ‘I wish I could talk about it. But I’m on assignment. You know, usual rules apply.’ With an iron will she staunched the tears.

  ‘Mother’s the word.’

  ‘Mum’s the word.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? And how’s your colloquial Hebrew getting on?’

  Despite everything, she smiled, imagining the dark curls of hair on his head, remembering the smell of him next to her. And that nearly undid her resolve. ‘I’d better go, Uri. There’s another call coming in.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Thanks, Uri.’

  ‘Anytime. And if you want to talk, you know where I am. Day or night.’

  She pressed the red button, ending the call. A moment later, as if to keep her honest, the phone rang. Sanchez.

  ‘We need to meet, Maggie. Urgently. Come back to Washington. Not here. I’ll text you the time and place. There’s something I need to give you. As quick as you can.’

  She hung up, her heart pounding, thinking, Now what?

  And thousands of miles away a man she had never met was listening to every word.

  29

  Undisclosed location, Thursday March 23, 18.00 GMT

  ‘Are we on a secure line?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Maximum encryption.’

  ‘Good.’ He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table, bracing himself for the start. The technology was state of the art, but he still resisted this form of communication. Call him old-fashioned, but he preferred to look a man in the eye. Or several men, in this case.

  The technical people had reassured him that there was no chance this call could be monitored by any intelligence agency, domestic or foreign, or indeed by any non-state actor. He knew, rationally, that he should accept that. But he envied his predecessors. They had operated at a time when all this would have been done in person. They would have sat opposite each other, face to face. Not in a windowless room, deep underground, staring only at a bank of monitors. Bad enough if it was just one person he needed to speak to. But a conference call?

  Still, there was no alternative. The discussion was urgent and this was the way it would be done.

  ‘Gentlemen, we’ve all been following recent events.’

  There was a murmur of agreement.

  ‘I know there is some concern about – how shall I put it? – the law of unintended consequences.’

  A voice chipped in, on the line from Germany. ‘I worry that the cure might be worse than the disease.’

  He cut him off, eager to maintain his authority. ‘I understand these misgivings. But I would urge colleagues not to underestimate the man we have chosen.’

  ‘I agree.’ Another voice, this time from New York. ‘He is not to be underestimated. But my colleague in Germany is right. Removing Victor Forbes has created at least as many problems as it has solved.’

  Once again he felt the need to re-establish command. Had his predecessor ever been challenged like this? Perhaps he should have asked him during the transition. ‘Gentlemen, as I said before, I understand the anxiety. My strong view is that we removed a problem that posed an absolute and immediate threat. If it had been allowed to stand, our entire project would have been jeopardized. We acted swiftly and efficiently.

  ‘Now, admittedly, that move has left us with other challenges. But non
e of these, on its own, endangers us. They are manageable.’

  ‘What about Goldstein?’ Germany again.

  ‘As the chair of this group, I acted on live intelligence. The risk that he could have rendered our project void was too great.’

  ‘All right,’ said the voice from New York. He wondered if these two, Germany and Manhattan, were operating in some kind of tag team. Had they liaised with each other before the conference call? Should he be worried?

  ‘I’m happy to accept the decisions that have been taken. But it’s time to secure our asset, as it were,’ New York continued. ‘Otherwise, we risk defeating the whole object.’

  ‘Understood,’ he said, eager to seize on that declaration of support, however tepid. ‘That will be the next phase of our work.’

  There was a murmur of agreement.

  ‘One last thing, gentlemen. It seems as if there is someone looking more closely at the Forbes case than we might have hoped. A woman. I wanted everyone to be clear that we are aware of her – and that we will ensure she causes us no trouble.’

  ‘Make sure we do.’ A first intervention from London.

  ‘You have my word,’ the chairman said. ‘She will be removed from the picture if necessary.’

  30

  Washington, DC, Thursday March 23, 19.41

  Doug Sanchez’s instructions had been clear. The information he had to give her could not be conveyed over the phone or by email or by fax. They had to meet face to face. She was to take the next plane to DC and then head straight to Union Station and stand facing the Amtrak departures board. In happier times she might have laughed at the intrigue of it all, political operatives pretending they were secret agents. But that talk of the Kennedy assassination and the CIA had come from the President himself. It was clear Stephen Baker genuinely felt he could no longer trust anyone.

  There was a sudden flurry of movement, as passengers who had previously been waiting suddenly took off in a hurry. She looked up at the departures board to see that it had at last revealed the track number for the Acela Express to New York, leaving in ten minutes. In the throng of people, she felt herself jostled. She looked to her left and there was Doug Sanchez, handsome in raincoat and scarf, looking straight up at the board.

  He kept his gaze upward, prompting her to do her own bit of playacting. She pulled out her BlackBerry, smiling and saying hello as if it had just vibrated with a new call.

  ‘Maggie, listen. This is radioactive. It is a federal crime to leak the identity of a CIA agent.’

  ‘Even a dead one.’

  ‘In the eyes of the law, I’m not sure. In the eyes of Fox News, definitely.’

  ‘So I was right. Forbes is ex-CIA.’

  His gaze was still fixed on the board. ‘Took a whole bunch of crap to confirm it, but yes. The trouble is, none of our people are in there yet. Fucking Senate. It’s all holdovers from the last crowd.’

  ‘So who helped you?’ Maggie asked, still grinning into her phone and looking in the opposite direction.

  ‘The number three there is a holdover from the crowd before the last crowd. One of ours.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He did more than was required. I asked for a simple yes or no. Was Forbes an agent or wasn’t he? But then he sent me his personnel file.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Not all of it. A summary.’

  ‘What’s it say?’

  ‘That you were right. Jackson is the same age as Forbes. He retired three years ago. Served everywhere, Saudi, Pakistan. Central America in the eighties.’

  ‘Why’d he quit?’

  ‘Doesn’t say. Just says “discharged”. That could mean anything. Could be straight retirement.’

  ‘OK. What else?’

  ‘There’s a full résumé. I didn’t even read it properly. We need deniability on this. Like I say, I didn’t ask for the whole nine yards.’ He paused. ‘I’ve been wondering if this is some kind of set-up. Send it to us, see what we do with it.’

  ‘So there has to be no trail on this, I get it.’

  ‘Nothing. Remember the legendary “Josh diary”?’ White House staffers lived in fear of that story: the young aide whose personal diary had been subpoenaed in some long-forgotten presidential investigation, allowing a grand jury and teams of lawyers to pore over the exact details of when he’d broken up with his girlfriend and why. All of which leaked of course. An independent counsel – or a special prosecutor – would demand everything: telephone, fax and email records would be just the start of it. They had to ensure there was no record of Sanchez passing this information to her.

  ‘So how do we do this?’

  ‘I’m going to drop the stack of newspapers under my arm-’

  ‘Max!’ Maggie gave a false laugh, as if her friend on the phone had said something hilarious.

  ‘I’ll drop them, you’ll bend down to help me out, you’ll give me everything back-’

  ‘Except-’

  ‘Except the brown envelope. Ready?’

  ‘OK.’

  He counted to three, then dropped the papers. A whole pile went from under his arm: the Washington Post, two blue document wallets, a pile of A4 computer print-outs. Instantly, Maggie bent down so that she was opposite Doug as he apologized profusely.

  ‘I’m such an idiot,’ he said. ‘Thank you so much.’

  ‘I’ll call you right back,’ Maggie promised her imaginary friend. ‘There you go,’ she said to Doug, smiling brightly. She handed him back a wad of paper, keeping hold of the brown envelope.

  ‘Thanks,’ Doug said, making eye contact for the first time. She saw that he was genuinely rattled; a redness around his eyes testifying to nights deprived of sleep. Maybe he too had been pole-axed by Stu’s death. She began to like him more.

  Under his breath, he said, ‘Don’t let us down, M. We need you. He needs you.’ And then he turned and walked away.

  31

  Washington, DC, Thursday March 23, 20.14

  She rode the Metro home, itching to look in her bag. But she didn’t dare risk it. What if someone looked over her shoulder? What if she dropped it and someone picked it up? Come to think of it, what if – today of all days – she was mugged? She remembered those stories of government officials leaving laptops on trains or in the backs of cabs, prompting the loss of secrets vital to national security. She squeezed the bag between her thigh and her arm, twining the strap around her hand for good measure. If some lowlife felt like stealing a purse, he’d have to pick on someone else.

  She walked the short distance from Cleveland Park station to her apartment, fighting the urge to look over her shoulder every other step. Her hand trembled as she put the key in the lock. Once it had slid in, the door didn’t swing open easily as it would usually; it seemed stiff. Maggie gave it a shove with her shoulder and it opened.

  She reached for the light-switch. Her eye swept across the open-plan studio space, taking in the hall she stood in, the kitchen to her left and the rest of the living area. Had the cleaner come? She hadn’t asked her to. And yet there was a scent of something in the air, as if the place had been scrubbed. She closed the door behind her and shot the bolt.

  She unzipped her bag, where she saw her purse, her phone, a lipstick – no sign of the envelope! Instantly, she began pulling items out of the bag, one after another until – thank Christ up above, there it was. Paranoia was infectious.

  She opened up a kitchen cabinet, took down a bottle of Jameson’s. Drop or two of water, a sip standing up, then she moved over to the couch and let herself fall into it. Blood pumping, she picked up the envelope.

  Inside was a two-page document, stapled together, the crest of the Central Intelligence Agency discreetly placed in the righthand corner. In the top left, a small mug-shot that, after a few moments, she recognized as a young Vic Forbes. In the centre in bold type, it simply stated the subject’s name: Robert A. Jackson.

  The resemblance between the young Jackson and the Forbes who had been on televisio
n earlier that week was barely discernible. He had hair then, brown and straight but covering all his head; a moustache too. Large glasses of the kind everyone wore in the early 1980s but which looked comic now.

  She began reading, taking each line slowly. It began with the year of his birth, then a summary of his education: high school in Washington, then college at Penn State. Spanish major. Three years in the Marines, then recruited to the Agency. Deployed almost immediately to Central and Latin America. First assignment, Economic Attaché, US Embassy in Tegucigalpa, two years. Later to San Salvador, this time as a Trade Attaché, eighteen months. Finally to Managua.

  She looked at the dates. Jackson would have been there when those places were at their hottest: he was in Nicaragua during the precise period when Oliver North and his pals were funnelling weapons to the Contras and lying to Congress about it. Maybe Jackson, with his fluent Spanish, was the funnel.

  He would have been young. In his early twenties, running around war zones, drinking tequila with paramilitaries, handing over rucksacks stuffed with CIA dollars. In her twenties she had been bumping up and down dirt roads from Eritrea to Kinshasa, hitching lifts from guerrillas in flatbed trucks. She wondered if the young Jackson had felt the same thrill she had, the unique charge that comes from being in a place where every day is a matter of life and death.

  And then what for Bob Jackson? A long stint back at Langley, stretching through the late 1980s and into the next decade. Probably pacing the corridors, looking for a role. When the Wall came down, and all the proxy skirmishes of the Cold War were wrapped up, warriors like Bob Jackson were suddenly left twiddling their thumbs. Maggie looked at the photograph, imagining how he must have felt.

  There was mention of a temporary assignment in Spain, which she saw would have coincided with the bombing of the Madrid railway, and a couple of other spells in Asia, also presumably related to what his political masters would have called the War on Terror.

  She was still getting no sense of him at all.

  On the next sheet were the personal details which revealed only how little there was to reveal.