The Chosen One

by Sam Bourne

  Marital status: single.

  Children: none.

  Significant associations: negligible activity of which the Agency is aware.

  So he had been a loner who had died utterly alone. She remembered again the hungry desire on his face caught on the CCTV camera at the Midnight Lounge and, for the first time, felt a twinge of sympathy. Maybe what she had seen in Forbes’s eyes had not just been simple lust, but a different need. For the warmth of another person.

  Maggie pictured him, turning up week after week, Wednesday after Wednesday, sitting at the same small table in the dark, gawping at the jiggling, surgerized bodies – and then heading into the night, back to that spartan house on Spain Street, where he would spend the night in the comfort of his own right hand. Maybe that was why he had looked so excited on that grainy TV image. At last he was with somebody.

  She exhaled loudly and took another glug of whiskey. Christ, she still had her coat on. She should get up, have a shower, maybe eat. She got up and turned to head for the bathroom. As she did, she saw the winking light on her answering machine, which Liz had called ‘retro chic’ on her last visit. Reaching over, she pressed ‘play’.

  One message from a married friend asking why she hadn’t come to brunch. She had clean forgotten. Another from the dry cleaners saying her jacket was ready. Then the third:

  ‘Could have sent you a text, or an email or a bloody Tweet,’ it began, the accent unmistakable. ‘I could have scrawled on your Facebook wall, or tried to Instant Message you, or whatever it’s called, but something told me you’d want to hear a human voice on your return from the Lost City of Atlantis. Mags, it’s Nick here, sweetheart, keen to know how my brightest pupil performed in her Journalism for Beginners practical. With flying fucking colours if Tim from the Telegraph is to be believed, though it sounds as if you skipped out without a goodbye. Very rude of you. I do hope you have not betrayed our unspoken bond of fidelity, Ms Costello. As luck would have it, I’m in DC for a few days. Call me if you fancy a bowl of Ethiopian sludge in Adams Morgan. Or failing that a drink at the Eighteenth Street Lounge.’

  Her response surprised her. So often she would give Nick the brush-off. She was too busy or she was seeing Uri. But tonight she wanted to see him. It wasn’t simply that she needed company, though she did. The last visitor to her apartment had been Stuart: he had been sitting in her kitchen just yesterday, stuffing his ludicrous face with Cheerios, keeping the angst at bay. The memory brought a wave of grief, followed by a surge of panic. She was alone, and she needed help. This thing was too big for her, there were too many angles. Sanchez was bright, but he had not a fraction of Stuart’s nous or experience; nor his humanity. Besides, he was clearly nervous about even being seen with her, let alone speaking by phone or email.

  Her head was swimming: too many hours alone. On flights, in cabs, she had gone over it all, over and over again. She needed to know whether Jackson’s blackmail effort had been sanctioned by his former employers at the CIA or some other faction within the US government. Or was the President right, had Jackson been a mercenary, a dirty tricks specialist contracted to do a job, just as Nixon had hired old Company men to bug and burgle the Democratic enemy? And what bearing did any of that have on what was still a, if not the, key question: who might have wanted him out of the way?

  Not that she could be open with Nick du Caines. He always insisted that he was discreet. ‘Soul of discretion, Mags, I swear! You say it here,’ he would say, pointing at his ear, ‘and it goes direct to the vault. Triple locked. Titanium bolts.’ And then he would mime the act of closing a heavy door. But she could not risk it. Nick might have the best of intentions, but if he was drunk, or coked-up, and he was trying to get some Dutch intern at the World Bank into bed, who knew what he might say?

  They met at the Eighteenth Street Lounge, a place where the corners were dark enough, and the couches sufficiently battered, to play to Nick’s Hemingway fantasies: the seedy, world-weary ex-war correspondent. He leapt up when he saw her come through the unmarked door, embracing her and letting his hands run up and down her back. Trying it on before she’d even got her coat off. Throughout she kept her hand on her bag, inside which was the envelope Sanchez had handed to her at the station. She wanted to be within touching distance of that document at all times.

  He’d ordered a Scotch for her already. ‘Your favourite malt,’ he promised.

  They talked first about Stuart, Nick nodding in all the right places. Then they talked about New Orleans, Nick urging her to tell mocking stories about Telegraph Tim and to describe her skilful integration into the press pack, taking it all as a compliment to his teaching skills.

  ‘Now, Mags, are you able to tell me what any of this is about, so that the beloved and historic newspaper that I work for might at least have something resembling a story?’

  ‘Still losing money?’

  ‘Millions. And the beancounters will soon be wondering why they need a US bureau when they could just as easily rely on “bloggers”.’ He fairly spat out the word, impersonating as he did so the cringing, mealy-mouthed voice of a Dickensian bookkeeper, which is how he always depicted the accountants who he claimed ran his newspaper.

  ‘It’s nothing you can use yet, but actually I can tell you something.’

  Light spread across Nick du Caines’s face, his eyes widening in an expression of childlike joy. ‘She loves me!’ he bellowed, at an embarrassing volume. ‘Hallelujah, Miss Costello. The words I’ve yearned to hear from your lips more keenly than any others – save, of course, for “Nick, will you undo my-”’

  She gave him a look.

  ‘Sorry. I’m all ears.’

  ‘At this stage I have no more than a suspicion. I know everyone’s been thinking the same thing, but I really do think Forbes may have been killed.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘No actual proof yet.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Something tells me it was done professionally.’

  He sat up straight: if he’d been a dog, his ears would have pricked up.

  ‘What I want you to look into, as inconspicuously as you can, is whether there is any evidence, any evidence at all, of involvement by the,’ she dropped her voice to the barest whisper, ‘CIA.’

  ‘Fuck me sideways.’

  ‘Not a word, Nick.’

  He took a swig of his drink. When he looked at her again, his expression was deadly serious. ‘You wouldn’t be asking this unless you already had some evidence. I can’t proceed unless I see that. Or at least know what it is.’

  Maggie smiled, remembering that Nick du Caines hadn’t won a hatful of awards for investigative reporting by accident. Lascivious old lush, he might be, but he was still a journalist to the nicotine-stained tips of his fingers. ‘I can’t show you anything: you know that. All you can know is that I have reason to suggest you look in that direction. Anything you find, you need to share with me first. Publish it before it’s ready and there’ll be no more from me.’

  ‘That’s not such a massive threat, Mags. Not if you’ve got the CIA bumping off a US citizen who just so happened to have criticized the President. That’s quite a big story all by itself.’

  ‘Not if it’s only the tip of the iceberg.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying, be patient. Wait till you see the whole picture.’ ‘I like what I’m seeing right now,’ he said, licking his lips before raising his glass to them.

  She let Nick walk her home – swiftly, through years of experience, swivelling her head to offer her cheek when he moved in for the goodnight kiss. As always, his slobber was worse than his bite. He was a lech, but no more. He reached for her hand, kissed it and walked off into the night.

  Once in her apartment, she opened her bag and pulled out Jackson’s file. Something had been niggling at her all night, something that had struck a faint, muffled chord in her head earlier that she had not been able to identify.

  She turned back to the first p
age and read it again, slowly. Her head was foggy with whisky and the bar. What the hell was it?

  She looked at the first few facts, which she had skimmed over. The date of birth, the school, the college.

  The school.

  Again, she felt it, or rather heard it, a feeble echo in her head. The name was familiar, but she had no idea where from.

  James Madison High School, Washington.

  She found her BlackBerry and Googled it. It produced a list of dozens of James Madison High Schools, some in DC, some just outside, some with a guest speaker who had visited from Washington, DC.

  Hold on, what if…

  She changed the search, making one small adjustment.

  But she was too impatient to wait for the little device to load up with results of its search. She went to the pile of books stacked on the floor by the bookcase: the new ones, for which there had been no room on the already jammed shelves. She rifled through them, throwing aside the new tomes on the Middle East, the future of the UN and ‘whither US foreign policy in the 21st century?’.

  At last. Running Man: Stephen Baker, His Insatiable Quest for Power and What it Means for America. By Max Simon PhD.

  It was a hatchet job, gobbled up by the Fox constituency – with a sales spike reported in the Deep South – which had been torn apart in the New York Times Book Review and by a legion of liberal bloggers. She had picked it up at an airport the day before election day, telling herself it would bring good luck. (She couldn’t even remember the convoluted superstitious logic behind that one: probably something about showing respect to the enemy.)

  She had never got around to reading it; after the Baker landslide it suddenly didn’t seem quite so relevant. But she’d given it a glance and remembered that it did at least pretend to be a proper biography with a cursory chapter on Baker’s childhood. Now she was flicking the pages furiously.

  She saw a paragraph about Baker’s birth, with some obviously bogus detail about the mother clasping the hand of her newborn son. She turned to the next page.

  In those days Cliff Baker lived a nomadic life, pitching up wherever work could be found…

  More padding which she skipped. Here it was.

  …logging meant Washington State and for the teenage Stephen that prompted yet another move, starting at a new high school in his sophomore year. He enrolled, for what would be his last two years of education before attending Harvard, at the James Madison High School in Aberdeen, Washington.

  That was it. Jackson hadn’t been educated in Washington, DC – as the casual reader of his CIA résumé would have assumed – but in Washington State. She all but ran back to the couch to retrieve the BlackBerry that had now completed its search. Sure enough, it confirmed there was only one James Madison High School in the state of Washington.

  Maggie could hear the sound of her own breathing. Finally she had found a connection between the President and the man she had seen buried in a lonely grave in New Orleans earlier that day. These two men – one who had risen to the highest possible pinnacle, the other who had sought to bring him down – had something in common. They had a shared past.

  Stephen Baker and Vic Forbes had been at school together.

  32

  From Swampland, posted 20.13 Thursday March 20:

  Call me naïve and idealistic, but if something good is to come out of the death of Stuart Goldstein let it be this: let the paranoid right in America shut the hell up. When the President’s tormentor, Vic Forbes, was found dead – and when every possible sign pointed to suicide – the Right immediately cried foul play. Or rather they didn’t cry; they whispered it, as invidious gossip and innuendo, hinting at it in the blogosphere and on Fox. The likes of Rick Franklin did nothing to stop such talk; on the contrary, they exploited it, allowing it to ‘alter the atmospherics’, to change the climate of opinion against Stephen Baker so that they could bring forward their spurious charges of impeachment against the President. Put simply, senior Republicans used conspiracy theories about Forbes to incubate the conditions in which they could hatch their plot to topple a legitimately elected president.

  Well, let’s hope they have the decency to at least fall silent now. They have tried to paint the Baker White House as the Corleone family, murderously rubbing out its enemies. The result is that a good man – a man whose life was dedicated to public service – has been driven to his death. Stu Goldstein loved politics and could play hardball with the best of them. He loved the game. But what’s been happening in Washington these last few days is not a game. This is politics as blood sport.

  So let there now be a pause, a ceasefire, while those responsible for guiding our republic take a breath. Let both sides pause and reflect. And let this be Stuart Goldstein’s legacy…

  From the comments thread at Fox Forum:

  Re: Stu Goldstein found dead. Lamestream media are saying conservatives should stop accusing the Baker folks of being involved in Vic Forbes’s death, as if we’re somehow responsible for Goldstein’s suicide. When I heard Goldstein had killed himself, my first reaction was, ‘Sounds like a guilty conscience’…

  From Twitter, Thursday March 23:

  #stuartgoldstein Maybe Baker bumped him off just like Forbes: because he knew too much…

  #stuartgoldstein What if Franklin took out Goldstein, because he knew he was the 1 guy in White House who could defeat impeachment?

  #stuartgoldstein I reckon Baker had Goldstein killed so that people would now suspect Republicans of murder…

  33

  Washington State, Friday March 24, 11.11 PST

  Maggie was too late for the red-eye to Seattle so she left on the dawn flight the next morning. Perhaps thirty-five minutes after landing she was in a white rental car, she couldn’t tell you what make, driving south-west along I-5, the fatigue almost overwhelming her. It was cumulative now, day after day without proper sleep. Besides, she couldn’t stop thinking about Stuart. The initial shock and sadness had given way to new feelings: anger – and fear.

  The President’s words on the phone the previous day came back to her: Stuart was not a quitter. He was a fighter. I just refuse to believe…

  She had been all too ready to believe it, a fact that now made her slightly ashamed. She had accepted without question that Stuart Goldstein had cracked under pressure, heading to the park in the early hours to slash his wrists.

  But now she wondered at the convenience of it. Baker was in desperate trouble and Stu his most trusted and capable lieutenant. If the President was right – that they were facing nothing less than an attempted coup d’état – then it was not out of the question that the enemy, whoever they might be, might see fit to kill Goldstein. After all, someone had murdered Forbes.

  But that made no sense: Forbes’s death was surely designed to help Stephen Baker. Goldstein’s death could only hurt him.

  On the other hand, the effect of the Forbes killing – apparently so fortuitously solving a Baker problem – had been to damage Baker, enabling his opponents to hint that he was some kind of gangster. What if that had been the objective all along? In which case, couldn’t Forbes’s killers and Goldstein’s be one and the same, bent on taking down a troublesome new president?

  The notion that Stu Goldstein – vast, lumbering, cunning and often gross, but also gentle, kind and motivated only by the idealist’s desire to make the world better – could have been murdered filled Maggie with fury. She was haunted by the image of someone stalking Stu, grabbing him from behind, striking terror into a man who, thanks to his bulk and a life of brainwork unrelieved by exercise, would have been utterly defenceless. She could imagine him screaming as his wrists were cut, his blood jetting out. And then his inert body dumped in Rock Creek Park.

  Maggie shook her head to stop the images coming. Who could have done such a thing to a man like Stuart Goldstein? Incomprehension turned to fear. If these men had seen an advantage in killing Stuart, wouldn’t she be the very next target? If their motive was the thwarting of B
aker’s efforts to defend himself, then surely there was every reason to remove her. She and Stuart were the presidential defence team. She wondered if her conversations and texts with Stuart had been secure. They had been using the White House’s encrypted communications system. But if Stu had been murdered, it had been done professionally; and people like that would have their ways of listening, watching, following…

  She checked her rear-view mirror. There was a truck behind her. But behind that? She couldn’t tell. She relaxed her grip on the steering wheel. Her hands were trembling.

  Not much further to go now. Soon she would arrive in Aberdeen. Washington State was as far away from Washington, DC as you could be, on the other side of the country, the other side of the continent. The drive had been long, the landscape monotonous but, she told herself, that was all to the good. It gave her a chance to think.

  She turned on the radio, trying to negotiate its buttons with her free hand. She wanted music as a distraction, but made the mistake of hitting the AM band and came across Rush Limbaugh instead.

  ‘Here’s what kills me about the liberal news media, folks. This is what kills me.’ He paused, leaving two or three seconds for effect. ‘They have such a Short. Attention. Span. That’s right. They don’t pay attention. They forget to take their Ritalin or something, I don’t know. Let me give you an example. Cast your mind back just a few days ago. It was wall-to-wall Vic Forbes.’ He paused again, then fell into a sing-song delivery for the next phrase. ‘Wall to wall! You could not move for Vic Forbes. Fortyeight hours, he was all anyone wanted to talk about. Forbes on the President’s “psychiatric” episode. Forbes on the Iranian Connection. Then Forbes promises the big one.’ Another pause. ‘The BIG ONE, ladies and gentlemen. And what happens? He’s found dead and the liberal media forget what they’d been talking about twelve hours earlier. Clean forgot!’ Now he went high-pitched and effeminate, the prissy voice of the East Coast liberal. ‘“Whoops! Where was I? I forgot!” And of course, now it’s tributes on MSNBC and in the New York Times to that great liberal, Stuart Goldstein: the heavyweight champion of interest group, Democrat identity politics. That’s who he was, my friends. And heavyweight is the right word. The guy was heavier than I am! And that’s saying something.’