by Sam Bourne
Now she let out a scream as someone, or something, gripped her arms, joined the wrists and pulled them back down behind her back, a manoeuvre whose speed seemed to rip her shoulder muscles.
The fog of semi-consciousness, which had persisted for the ten or fifteen seconds since she had woken up, now lifted.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Who the hell are you?’ she shouted.
Their answer was a question: ‘Is there anybody else in the apartment with you?’
‘First tell me who the fuck you are.’
‘I repeat, is there anyone else in this location?’
They pushed her towards her bedroom, her walk a stagger with her arms cuffed behind her back. They went in ahead of her, their weapons aimed at every possible angle to cover against an ambush.
‘Do you have a firearm in this location?’ Before she had a chance to process the question, it was repeated at full volume and with great urgency. ‘DO YOU HAVE A FIREARM, YES OR NO?’
‘No.’
They proceeded to search the room anyway. Maggie heard the other men do the same in the rest of the apartment. They checked the bed first, ripping off the covers and then the mattress, to allow a look through the wooden slats to see if anyone was cowering underneath. Next it was the bathroom and then the closets. They observed a routine. One would open the door, another would cover him by aiming his automatic weapon at anyone who might be hiding within. The commotion as they flung open doors or overturned chairs was ferocious. Maggie stood in the centre of it, two guns still trained on her despite the handcuffs, suddenly conscious how little she was wearing.
Now there was a shove in the middle of her back, pushing her forward, out of her bedroom and towards what used to be the front door. Behind, she could hear the clang of crockery and cutlery, as they pulled out every door and cupboard in the small kitchen.
They led her downstairs, still at gunpoint. Maggie thought she spotted the door of one of her neighbours’ apartments ajar just wide enough for a pair of eyes to follow her.
Now she was outside on the stoop, the stone cold under her bare feet. They pushed her further forward, down the two stairs and onto the sidewalk, where she felt a nick as her right sole was cut by a sliver of broken glass. The passenger door opened on a large SUV, parked right outside her building, its windows tinted. A hand placed itself on her head, pressing her to duck as someone pushed her into the car.
Now she was seated, wedged between two uniformed men, their bulk pressed against her. She was acutely conscious of the bareness of her legs, the thinness of her sleepwear, as they sandwiched her between them, her hands still manacled.
She resolved somehow to get a grip on this situation. In a voice that was calm and quiet, she said, ‘You need to get me some clothes right away. And then you need to explain why you have just broken into my home and searched it without a warrant, which is so blatant a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States that I could sue every single one of you.’
‘I need you to confirm your identity for me.’ The voice came from the passenger seat at the front of the car, where another uniformed man was sitting, his head fixed on the laptop in front of him. Maggie could not make out his face. She guessed he had been inside the car throughout.
‘I’m not going to confirm anything until you give me some answers.’
The man in front gave a glance to the man on Maggie’s left. He repeated, ‘Can you confirm your name is Margaret Costello?’
‘Tell me who you are and then I’ll think about telling you who I am. Because if you don’t already know my name, that suggests you’re handcuffing random strangers. Which is not good for you at all.’
The man sighed and half turned towards her. Now she had a glimpse of his profile. ‘We are a Special Weapons and Tactics team deployed at the instruction of the United States Secret Service.’
‘A SWAT team?’
‘Now, can you confirm you are Margaret Costello?’
‘Yes. But why on earth would—’
‘Margaret Costello, I am arresting you under United States Code, Title Eighteen, Section Eight Seven One, for the felony of threatening—’
‘What?’
‘—and the issuing of violent threats directed at—’
‘What the fuck are you talking about? This is completely crazy. Who am I meant to have threatened?’
‘You need to listen, Ms Costello. Do not interrupt me again. I am arresting you for the crime of threatening the President of the United States.’
Chapter Thirty-Nine
It’s six o’clock and this is Today. Good morning and these are the headlines.
A devastating fire has ripped through the British Library in London, destroying the country’s biggest collection of historical documents and rare works. The prime minister has called it ‘an attack on our nation’s memory and our very soul’, but the government has been criticized by those who say the intelligence services and even the armed forces – who were guarding the library – clearly did not do enough to protect it.
We’ll have coverage throughout the programme with leading historians on what this loss represents, as well as with security analysts and counter-terrorism experts. But first, our home affairs editor filed this report from the scene in central London a few moments ago:
The blaze is said to have begun in the early hours and to have accelerated at what a spokesman for the London Fire Brigade called ‘lightning speed’, reaching temperatures of more than six hundred degrees centigrade. It burnt through the Rare Books collection first, then spread through the Humanities and then into rooms holding priceless works relating to music, including the original score of Handel’s Messiah. Among the most cherished treasures reported destroyed is the Diamond Sutra, thought to be the world’s earliest dated printed book, traced to the year 868.
Also lost: multiple Bibles including Codex Sinaiticus, which represents the bulk of the second-oldest manuscript of the Bible in the world, written in what’s known as ‘koine Greek’; along with the legendary Lindisfarne gospels; two Gutenberg Bibles; the personal copy of Tyndale’s New Testament that belonged to Anne Boleyn; and two copies of the Magna Carta of 1215 which, following the fire two days ago at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, means that foundational document is now perhaps lost forever.
Curators and staff have been arriving here during the night, many of them in tears at what they say is a truly irrecoverable loss. The BBC spoke to one librarian weeping over what she said was the destruction of one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. Another said he was grieving over what had been the sole surviving manuscript copy of the poem Beowulf. ‘It feels like the end of the world,’ he said between tears, referring to the series of similar fires that have struck across the globe in just a matter of days. ‘Soon there will be nothing left.’
Our home affairs editor is there. In the last few minutes, reports are emerging of a similar blaze at the British Library’s storage facility in Boston Spa in West Yorkshire. That building, largely out of sight of the public on a trading estate near Wetherby, houses many of the library’s less frequently used documents, including much of its comprehensive collection of newspapers. A spokesman says he fears that the fire there has ‘destroyed our record of the last two centuries’.
We had hoped to be joined now by one of the country’s most eminent historians, but I’m afraid we’ve just learned that he’s been taken ill in the last hour . . .
Chapter Forty
US Secret Service field office, Washington DC, 9.38am
‘Let me say from the start: this will be pro bono. I won’t take a cent of your money.’
‘That’s really not necessary, I can—’
‘I insist. And that’s final. Consider it a favour to Stuart. That said, if you decide at a later date to sue the Secret Service for wrongful arrest, unwarranted detention and gender bias, seeking damages of one hundred and fifty million dollars, then I will of course be only too happy to assist in y
our defence on a strict no-win, no-fee basis, taking either twenty per cent of damages or thirty million dollars, whichever is the greater.’
‘I haven’t really—’
‘I’m kidding.’
‘Oh. Right.’
‘So you got some clothes, yes? I don’t recommend you try out what they have here. Orange might not be your colour. I’m kidding! And did you eat yet? They give you something to eat?’
‘I didn’t really feel—’
‘Course not. You’ve been up all night. Who wants to eat? Besides, you’re in shock. Who wouldn’t be?’
Maggie had met Andrew Goldstein just once, at the funeral of Stuart: his older brother, her mentor. He wasn’t as physically large as Stuart – his stomach was the size of a seat cushion rather than an entire unit of upholstery – and his field was law rather than politics. But there was enough of Stuart in the accent, in the posture, in the dizzying pendulum swings from Catskills stand-up to earnestness and back again, that she automatically extended some of the ease she always felt with Stuart to his brother.
If you’re ever in trouble, call Andrew. He’s a sonofabitch, of course, but let him be your sonofabitch.
Maggie had spoken to him a few months ago, when she had to testify at those hearings on the Hill. But Andrew had handed her over to a colleague. His expertise, he said, remained ‘down in the gutter, with all the low-lifes’. He was not a constitutional, human rights or even corporate lawyer. His field was crime. Usually based in Manhattan, he had taken the dawn shuttle to meet her here on L Street, where she had been in a ‘holding room’ – or cell – since just before five am.
‘So obviously this is bullshit,’ he said. ‘And I say that because I know what my brother, olev l’shalom, said about you. Which is that there was no one, besides our grandmother, he trusted more. And maybe not even her. Said you were on the side of the angels. I’m on the side of the Mets, but all the same.’
Maggie offered an exhausted smile, her first for so long that she felt the muscles strain as she did it. What made it harder was the sheer frustration at being locked up like this today of all days. It was Friday, the day of the verdict in the Keane trial. The Bookburner’s deadline would pass today. And here she was, off the field and utterly useless.
‘That said,’ he went on, ‘it’s not what I thought it was.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Swatting. When you called me – waking up Mrs Goldstein from her much-needed beauty sleep, I might add – I thought, OK, we know about this. It’s a thing assholes do. They call 911, they say, “The woman in apartment seven is holding a hostage at gunpoint. Please, help me, help me, come quick!” And so the police send a SWAT team. Assault rifles, flak jackets, infra-red sights, the whole kaboodle. They have to. They can’t take the risk that you’re not some psycho who’s about to blow your boyfriend’s head off. No offence.’
Maggie gestured. None taken.
‘But the asshole who made the call is doing that purely to fuck up your life. It happens. Neighbours fall out. They send in a SWAT team.’
‘But this isn’t that?’
‘No. It’s not. This time, the call came from the White House.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of this.’ Andrew pulled out his laptop, tapped a few buttons, breathing heavily just the way Stuart used to, and finally pressed play on an audio file.
There was a beep, signalling the start of a voicemail message. Then Maggie heard her own voice.
This is Maggie Costello, former special assistant to the president in the office of the White House Counsel. I know a lot more about this president than any of you realize. Enough to bring him down. And if information won’t do it, I’ll just have to find another way. Remember, I’m a US citizen: the Second Amendment applies to me too!
Maggie fell back in her seat. Her body seemed to belong to someone else. And now her voice, saying those things.
‘Play that again.’
Andrew pressed play once more and watched Maggie’s face as she listened. The words hadn’t changed, nor had their order. It was still Maggie’s voice, clearly, unmistakably issuing a barely coded death threat to the President of the United States. The reference to the right to bear arms could mean nothing else.
‘When was that message left?’
‘Secret Service are saying they picked it up at,’ Andrew checked his notepad, ‘two forty-one am.’
‘Where was it left?’
‘On the direct line of the White House Chief of Staff. A number known to very few people, outside current and former employees. Where were you at that time?’
‘I was in my apartment. In bed.’
‘Any alibi who can confirm that?’
Maggie made a face, just to register the implicit intrusion into her private life, an area Stuart strayed into only very gingerly.
‘I was in bed alone, Andrew.’
‘Shame. So theoretically you could have made that call?’
‘Theoretically I could have climbed the Eiffel Tower. But I didn’t. I was fast asleep. Andrew, I was completely shattered.’
Andrew sat back in his chair, then pushed it further back until he risked tipping over – a signature Stuart move.
‘I hear you, Maggie,’ he said at last. ‘Trouble is, I also hear you.’ He nodded towards the laptop. ‘We agree that’s your voice, right?’
Maggie agreed it was.
Andrew suddenly leaned forward, his chair snapping back into an upright position. ‘Hold on. There was a case, fifteen years ago. Chicago, I think. Sleepwalker. Murder, acquitted on grounds of diminished responsibility.’
He wasn’t looking at Maggie, just thinking aloud, his eyes darting left and right. ‘This would be different, sure, but the same principle. We’d just need to show—’ He interrupted himself to make eye contact with his client. ‘Do you have a history of talking in your sleep? Forget that. Do you have someone who might be willing to testify that you tend to talk in your sleep? Former lovers, ex-husbands, family members.’
Maggie thought of Liz, picturing her in a witness box as she detailed the sleeping arrangements of the bedroom they shared in Quarry Street. She then imagined Uri, telling the court of his nights with Maggie Costello. And then the clerk introducing a surprise witness: Richard . . .
‘No one’s ever told me I talk in my sleep.’
‘All right. Maybe they’ve not told you. Doesn’t mean you didn’t do it.’
‘You think that’s our best line of defence?’
He was clicking the locks on his briefcase, readying himself for departure. ‘Right now, I think it’s the only line of defence. If you think of a better one, call me.’
Maggie said goodbye and returned to her cell. Her body was still crying out for sleep, the accumulated exhaustion of the last several days not relieved by the hour or two she had got before the SWAT team had battered down her door. She contemplated the thin, narrow, hard mattress and laid herself down.
That recording Andrew had played to her was conclusive, not only of her guilt but of her deterioration. That she could make such a call was itself shocking: to realize that she had that much anger roiling away within her, anger that she was clearly repressing during her conscious hours. But to discover that she could do such a thing – threatening violence against the president, for heaven’s sake – and then forget she had even done it, that shook her to her core.
Was she losing her mind? Was that what this work was doing to her, was that what it had already done? She had always told herself that she thrived on pressure, that the urgency, the adrenalin, the constant high stakes – things that might drain someone else – instead fed and sustained her. People who are not us don’t understand that stress is not the same as pressure, Stuart used to say. Stress only comes when you have more, or less, pressure than you can handle. Don’t forget the ‘less’, Maggie. Just as dangerous. Talented people who are underused get stressed out. He then proceeded to tell her of the political consultant who had litera
lly driven into a ditch during a North Carolina senate race, such was his despair at his boss, a candidate who wouldn’t let the campaign manager manage the goddamn campaign.
But maybe Stuart was wrong. Perhaps the pressure had finally metastasized into stress. There’d been so much of it, after all. Not just these last few days, but everything she had done these last few years. Was her unconscious seething with so much fury and, let’s face it, unhappiness, that it had now taken to issuing death threats to former colleagues in her sleep? She closed her eyes and wondered what was coming next. Not just legal proceedings but, doubtless, psychological assessments culminating in a conversation with Andrew Goldstein which she could hear even now.
Maggie, I want you to listen to me. I think you need to plead guilty. On grounds of diminished responsibility. It means you won’t go to jail. You’ll be in a hospital. It’ll be safe and then we can review . . .
She played back the tape in her head.
This is Maggie Costello, former special assistant to the president in the office of the White House Counsel. I know a lot more about this president than any of you realize. Enough to bring him down. And if information won’t do it, I’ll just have to find another way. Remember, I’m a US citizen: the Second Amendment applies to me too!
Jesus Christ, who talked like that? Did she? And yet it was unmistakable. Unlike the body in the porn video, this voice was hers. That was her accent – part Dublin, part too many years in Washington, DC. There was no one else who talked that way. No one could even impersonate it. Occasionally someone would try, but most American attempts at an Irish accent degenerated into Boston via the Kennedys.
Maggie felt a pulse somewhere in the back of her head, a low-voltage twinge that she understood only a second or two later as the stirring of a thought. It was a memory, prompted by that fleeting thought of the Kennedys.