The Chosen One

by Sam Bourne

  The killer held his breath, hoping whoever was there would go away. Then he heard another voice say, ‘I think we should break it down.’

  Hastily, he scanned the apartment for the fire escape, eventually finding it in the kitchen where a door led out onto a tiny balcony and, from there, to the narrow, wrought-iron staircase that zig-zagged its way down the exterior of the building. He fled, taking the stairs two at a time until he had reached ground level.

  Calmly, he walked from there to his car.

  Five floors up, his victim’s body lay discarded, the dead man’s fingers gnarled around his cellphone as if gripping the hand of a loved one for the last moment of his life.

  54

  Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Sunday March 26, 22.55 PST

  To her great relief the cab driver was still outside. He had waited nearly two hours, with only a single Christian radio station and the car heater for company. But he had waited. He had not been driven off the road, his brakes had not been sabotaged. He was still there.

  Maggie asked how long it would take to drive to Boise. He gave a snort of disbelieving, mirthless laughter. ‘Can you show me your money?’ He wanted to see the cash before he agreed to go any further. ‘Lotta crazy people in this state,’ he said by way of apology.

  Maggie took pleasure in pulling out five hundred-dollar bills and agreeing on that as the rate for the evening’s work.

  ‘Now can I ask a question?’ she asked.

  ‘You got it,’ he said, his spirits duly lifted.

  ‘If we end up driving through the night, would you mind if we didn’t speak for most of it?’

  He smiled and turned the ignition key.

  The darkness of the Idaho sky and the emptiness of the roads suited her perfectly. It reminded her of those countless night flights she had endured during the campaign, staring into the black nothingness. It was where she had done some of her best thinking.

  For a brief, blissful second she had believed she had finally unravelled the knot bequeathed by Vic Forbes. When Anne Everett admitted that her dead daughter had carried a torch for the current president of the United States, Maggie had almost pictured it, a series of strange symbols suddenly turning into regular words – the code breaking.

  The young, handsome Baker – Aberdeen favourite son and recent graduate of Harvard – had taken the adoring prom queen a couple of years his junior to bed in a downtown hotel, and there, somehow, she had died. It was a nuclear scandal that had just been sitting there all these years, waiting to be exploded by Vic Forbes, who – alone in the world, it seemed – knew of it and was ready to use it. But this theory had been shattered in less time than it took to think of it. That photograph of a young, eager Baker with Senator Corbyn taken on the other side of the country on the same day as the fire was definitive. If Forbes had ever gone public, Baker would have been able to rebut him instantly, simply by producing that photograph. The perfect alibi.

  Could Forbes have made such an elementary blunder? Could he really have invested so much of his life in – and constructed his entire blanket around – a provably false accusation?

  But that was not all that nagged at Maggie. She sat back in the car, letting the headrest take the strain on her still aching neck, as she thought back to the public library. Why on earth was that single page missing from the archive? Just one: page five. No others. Who had removed it?

  The answer was clear: it had to be the same man who had turned up at the home of Anne and Randall Everett the morning after their daughter’s death – breaking the news to them, for heaven’s sake – waving an improbable amount of cash in their faces and buying their silence, in perpetuity. Why would anyone do that? If it wasn’t Baker who had left Pamela Everett to die, who was it? And who was this other boy, for whose reputation a man had been prepared to pay tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of dollars and take the trouble of destroying part of a newspaper archive, in order to keep his secret from ever being known?

  Maggie could feel her ribs hurting, as well as her head. She desperately needed to talk this through with someone. She looked at her phone. Unregistered, pay-as-you-go, it should be safe. But she didn’t want to risk it. She leaned forward, lightly tapping the shoulder of the driver.

  ‘There’s an extra hundred for you if you let me use your cellphone.’

  He handed it to her, placing a theatrical finger across his lips. I’m sticking to our deal: no chat.

  For at least the third time, she dialled Nick du Caines’s home number, the only one of his she remembered. Voicemail, yet again. Where the hell was he? Shacked up in a love-drugs-and-booze-fest with some intern from ABC and screening calls? Probably.

  She checked her watch. Midnight in Idaho, 8am in London. Worth a shot.

  She used the browser of her BlackBerry to find the London number of Nick’s forever-ailing Sunday newspaper, dialled it on the driver’s phone – hoping he wouldn’t notice – and asked for the foreign desk.

  A secretary answered. ‘Unusual call,’ Maggie began in her politest voice, explaining that she was a regular Washington contact of Nick du Caines and she had been trying to get in touch, though she had unfortunately mislaid his mobile number. She had a story that she was sure he would be interested in. Was there any chance they might help?

  ‘I think you’d better speak to the foreign editor,’ the woman said, an edge in her voice that Maggie didn’t like.

  There was a delay until a man – early forties, plummy – came on the line.

  ‘I understand you’re a friend of Nick’s?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’m afraid I have some rather bad news. We’ve only just heard. Nick is dead.’

  55

  Boise, Idaho, Monday March 27, 04.13 PST

  Maggie spent the rest of the night alternating between two different kinds of pain. The shock of Nick’s death was beyond tears: she was numbed to the bone. She was empty; hollowed out. She sat in the cab like a husk, hardly able even to breathe, trying hard not to think. But her body seemed determined to force reality upon her. Emerging from the taxi as it pulled into Boise Airport in the early hours of the morning, she felt how the ache in her ribs had settled and deepened.

  The foreign editor had told her there had been a break-in at Nick’s apartment, and that there had been signs of a struggle. His body had been badly beaten and ‘bore all the hallmarks of death by strangulation’. Police were interviewing neighbours, taking prints. But so far there were no witnesses.

  Of course there would be no witnesses, Maggie thought. The people who had killed Nick were like the people who had killed Stuart. They were pros: they would leave no trace.

  With hours to wait before the first morning flight out, she knew she should try to sleep. She tried curling up on a hard plastic airport chair but – no matter how exhausted she was – real sleep would not come.

  She dozed off a couple of times, only to be woken once by the cold spreading across her skin, undefeated even by the swaddling of her coat, and the second time by the clear realization that a man – his face hidden – was standing over her, wearing the satisfied smile of a pursuer who has finally cornered his prey. She woke from the dream and sat bolt upright, clutching at her bag as if it were a weapon and getting ready to run, heart hammering against her sore ribs.

  And at once the other source of pain returned. Nick is dead. The words she had heard down the telephone played as if on a loop in her head.

  Now the guilt came like a rush. It was all her fault. She had offered his drunken, debauched, lecherous and brilliant head up to them. It was just as Liz said. The woman down the street in Dublin wasn’t getting strangled in the dead of night, because she had no knowledge that was connected with this goddamned mess. And neither had Nick du Caines – until Maggie had dragged him into it. And now he was dead.

  Was she carrying some kind of curse, one that ensured all those she touched turned to stone? She thought of Stuart lying dead, his huge, bloated body beached in Rock Creek
Park, bleeding from the wrists, and now Nick, strangled and battered and left for dead in his apartment in New York. All because of her.

  Bile rose, acrid in her throat. Grabbing her bag, she dashed for the ladies’ bathroom and there heaved her guts up into a toilet bowl, gripping the edges convulsively, retching and retching till her guts felt as empty as her heart.

  She wadded up some toilet paper, wiped her mouth and chin, flushed and went out to wash her hands. The huge overlit mirror was unforgiving in its judgment. Dark circles under bloodshot eyes, the newly-dyed hair brassy under the neon: she looked like the guilty fugitive she felt. For a moment she was gripped by the urgent desire to run away, to get on a plane and go somewhere, anywhere, far away from here – where she could do no more damage. She needed to talk to no one, in case she passed on whatever fatal virus she carried. She had become toxic, radiating death.

  The idea lingered with her for a while. She pictured herself on some speck of an island in the South Pacific, holed up in a house that no one knew existed. And then she thought of the men whose hands had choked the life out of Nick and who had shoved those tablets into Stuart’s mouth and anger rose to replace the guilt. There were people out there who murdered to prevent the truth being told and their killing would stop only when someone made them stop. She had to find them and hunt them down. She had to make them pay for what they had done.

  She squared her shoulders. It was time to stop feeling guilty for the crimes of others. She would defend herself, and she would drag the truth out into the daylight. She started walking around again, pacing and thinking, scrutinizing everyone she passed. Are you a part of this? Are you? After some minutes she noticed a man, apparently immersed in the Idaho Statesman, standing by the Departures sign, and wondered how long he had been there.

  Think, she told herself. She had asked Nick to look into a single, specific aspect of the Forbes story: was there any evidence to link Forbes’s former employers, the CIA, with his death? She hadn’t considered that a life-threatening question to ask, not when Nick had won himself a shelf-full of trophies investigating CIA conduct in the war on terror. He had exposed the Agency’s working methods – and he had lived both to tell the tale and to drink his prize money.

  Yet this latest investigation was clearly different. Whatever he had found had struck a CIA nerve that was too raw to be tolerated. CIA agents had been caught bundling men convicted of no crime into chartered aircraft and sending them to faraway corners of the globe where they could be tortured with impunity – and yet worldwide exposure of that truth had not driven the Agency to take Nick du Caines’s life. Someone, somewhere, clearly regarded a revelation of CIA involvement in the murder of Vic Forbes as more serious and more damaging even than the rendition story – and were ready to prevent it by killing again.

  Shortly after four thirty in the morning, she felt the vibration of a text arriving on her BlackBerry. It was from her sister:

  Call me urgently. Something strange is happening. Liz.

  She was half-way through dialling the Dublin number when another message arrived, this time from Sanchez.

  The police want to see you. Now. Take the next plane to New York.

  56

  New York, JFK Airport, Monday March 27, 14.41

  They met her off the plane, a detective in plain clothes with two uniformed officers hanging close by. They led her away from the other passengers, towards what they called an ‘interview suite’, in fact a blank room containing a desk and three chairs.

  The detective introduced himself as Charles Bridge. In his early forties, African-American and unsmiling, he got straight to business.

  ‘Want to thank you for coming to New York right away. We appreciate that.’

  Maggie nodded, her heart throbbing. What was this about?

  The detective glanced at a piece of paper. ‘It took us a while to get hold of you, you know.’

  ‘Yes?’ Maggie said, reluctant to offer anything more.

  Still examining the piece of paper, he said, ‘Yep. A long time. Tried your cell, that just rang out. No response on email. Seemed like you’d just disappeared.’

  ‘My phone was stolen. Along with my wallet and computer. In Washington State.’

  ‘That right?’ Bridge looked at the paper again then back up at Maggie. ‘Do you know why we wanted to see you, Miss Costello?’

  ‘I know that my friend Nick du Caines is dead.’

  ‘That’s right. Why else? If you had to guess.’

  Maggie thought of the drink she’d had with him last Thursday. If she mentioned it, she would have to say what they discussed. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Because, Miss Costello, the last call Mr du Caines made was to you. To your number.’

  ‘To me?’

  ‘That’s right. To your home number.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘His phone says he placed the call at three minutes past eleven last night. Your answering machine confirms that. And, based on what the neighbours have told us, about the noises coming from Mr du Caines’s apartment, we think that’s the time of death.’

  ‘Did you just say my answering machine confirms that? How do you know that?’

  ‘We’ve got the machine, Miss Costello.’

  ‘You’ve what? How?’

  ‘We tried to contact you by all available means, calling your home number, your cellphone. We contacted your employer-’ he glanced back down at his sheet of paper, ‘-excuse me, your former employers at the White House, and they had no idea how to reach you. We had no choice but to obtain a warrant and make an entry into your apartment and impound the machine.’

  ‘You broke into my apartment?’

  ‘Our colleagues in Washington made an entry on our behalf, yes.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Maggie’s mind was racing as she thought of what was there, what might have been seen. Had she left anything out that might point to the Forbes business? ‘And did you find anything, on my machine, I mean?’

  ‘We’ll come to that, Miss Costello. Right now, I’m just puzzled why a man who is being beaten and strangled, who would have known he was at the end of his life, would call your number in his death throes. We’ve heard the message. He doesn’t even try to speak to you. Why would anyone do that?’

  ‘What are you suggesting, Detective?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything. I’m just wondering. I mean, he didn’t dial your cellphone, did he?’

  ‘I told you, my cellphone was stolen. That number didn’t work any more.’

  ‘But he calls your home number. Almost like that was the only way he could lead us to you.’

  ‘Lead you to me? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Nothing to understand right now, Miss Costello.’

  ‘I don’t like your tone, Detective.’ Maggie could feel her face growing flushed. ‘I don’t like what you’re insinuating. Nick du Caines was a very dear friend of mine. And I was on the other side of the country when he died. I’ve just flown in from bloody Idaho.’

  ‘You need to keep calm, Miss Costello. I’m not insinuating anything. I’m just asking some questions.’

  ‘I want to hear this message.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure-’

  ‘It’s my property. It was on my machine, he left it for me.’

  ‘This is evidence in the case now, Miss Costello, I can’t-’

  ‘That answering machine is my legal property. And right now I am a witness, no more. If you want to arrest me, go ahead. Until you do, I have the right to hear what’s on that tape.’

  The detective pulled out his phone and retreated to the corner of the room to make a call. He was talking in a low voice, apparently to a superior. He returned to his chair looking glum. ‘Apparently, the advice is that we should play the message to you. See if you can shed any light on it.’

  He produced a laptop computer, pressed a few keys and then clicked on an audio file. From the machine’s small speakers, Maggie now heard a beep, followed by a distant sou
nd of objects clattering off a desk.

  Then she heard Nick, bellowing in pain. He must have been winded by an almighty punch: Ennnnn!

  It was terrible to listen to, the horror of it real and direct. Even distorted by transmission to her answering machine and from there to the audio file, she could hear the fleshy thud of blows to Nick’s body followed by exhalations of pain:

  Ayyy !

  To think she had brought this on him. It was as if she were there, watching as Nick gasped and kicked out, the breath of life squeezed out of him.

  It lasted another full, murderous minute, until an electronic voice announced: You have ten more seconds to complete your message. There was a last gasp from Nick – Phwaw! – and finally it was over.

  Maggie’s head was dipped low as she stared at the floor. The detective spoke again.

  ‘It’s harrowing to hear. I know that. But why would he do it? Like I said before, he doesn’t do anything except leave a recording of his own death. There’s no message to you.’

  A small spark suddenly broke through Maggie’s grief. ‘Can you play it again, please?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Just play it again.’

  ‘Did you hear something?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Reluctantly, he clicked on the file a second time, watching Maggie closely throughout as she listened. Ninety seconds later, he raised his eyebrows. ‘So?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Detective. I was wrong.’ She had to look away from him as she lied, repeating what she had heard in her mind, just to be sure.

  ‘Any idea why he would call you at such a time?’

  ‘Look, Mr Bridge. This is awkward. I had a drink with Nick last Thursday. He was an old friend but he always wanted it to be something more. He said some things to me last week.’ She looked up briefly at the detective, so that their eyes met. ‘Romantic things. I wonder if Nick was just trying to say goodbye.’

  The detective held her gaze and Maggie willed herself to meet it without flinching or flushing. Then, apparently satisfied, he nodded to the uniformed men that the interview was over, packed his computer away and showed Maggie to the door – after he had taken her new cellphone number. ‘We’ll be in touch again if we need any more from you, Miss Costello.’