The Chosen One

10

Washington, DC, Tuesday March 21, 14.26

‘Aren’t people going to talk?’

‘What? About you and me?’

‘Yes. Me, in here.’

‘Something tells me, Maggie, that people worked out long ago there’s not a chance of that happening: you’re not my type.’ And with that, a smile spread across the large, flushed, wobbling face of Stuart Goldstein, the first smile Maggie had seen in what felt like weeks but was actually less than thirty-six hours.

At his request, she had gone straight to his office as soon as she had returned from the raid on the Maryland house. He had had to put her on the visitors list at the bloody tourists’ entrance at Fifteenth and Hamilton Place; she had had to show her passport to gain admission to the White House.

‘I mean it, Stu. People will be suspicious.’

‘Maggie, right now we have seven senators calling for an independent counsel to investigate the President for “alleged financial links” to fucking Tehran. People in this building have got other things to worry about than your employment arrangements.’

Maggie bowed her head in a ‘you’re the boss’ gesture and continued her report back: the Secret Service was conducting an urgent trace on the dumb terminal they had discovered in Bethesda. They had so far narrowed down the location of the master computer to the south-eastern United States, but could not be more specific.

They were waiting for the TV to deliver what it had promised. Fifteen minutes earlier, Goldstein had had a call from a contact inside MSNBC warning him that the network was about to air a live interview with the source of its two recent stories on Stephen Baker. The partial identification in the blogosphere had given way to a full ID, once the collective investigative might of the internet had got to work.

The source had been named as Vic Forbes of New Orleans, Louisiana. Stu had immediately put one of his best researchers onto it: he knew he was in a race against both the media and the Republicans to know everything about Forbes that could be known. And then to define him. Crank, attack dog, dopehead. Whatever would shatter his credibility.

‘Here’s what I don’t understand,’ Maggie said, while the TV cut to a weather forecast. ‘The shrink thing. How come that didn’t come out before?’

‘I still haven’t quite figured that out. Not to my own satisfaction.’

‘Do you think the others knew and didn’t use it?’

‘No way. Adams and Rodriguez were trying to kill him in the primaries. And Chester in the general. They all had oppo research digging away, night after night, climbing all over his past. And the media, working twenty-four/seven.’

‘What about you? Did you know?’

‘Come on, Maggie. You’re my favourite Irishman and all that, but I can’t get into my personal relationship with him.’

‘So you did know.’

Goldstein smiled enigmatically, an expression which was accompanied by a counterpoint of snorting, as the exhalation that would normally have exited from his mouth re-routed via his nose. He really was monumentally unfit. ‘Whether I did or did not is not the important thing here. What matters is how the fuck did this Vic Forbes find out?’

‘Maybe he spoke to the shrink?’

‘Difficult. He died fifteen years ago.’

‘There would have been records. Papers.’

‘Nuh-uh. None.’

‘Bills?’

‘Put it this way, yours truly did not come down with the first shower of rain. I am used to the dirtiest dirty tricks. You don’t get to be a councilman in New York unless you know how to rip a guy’s heart out with your teeth. I made sure in Baker’s first race that the enemy couldn’t dig up any surprises.’

‘Because you had dug them up first.’

‘Exactly. Wielded the spade myself.’ He held up his hands, the effort of which once again altered the rhythm of his breathing. ‘Then I did it again for the governor’s race.’

‘With professional help this time, I bet.’

‘You’re damn right. I had two of Seattle’s finest – ex-cops actually – investigate Stephen Baker as if they were determined to convict him of a felony. Find out everything. Go through his phone bills, house deeds, mortgage payments, bank accounts, college transcripts. They hacked into his emails and tapped his phone for all I know. Spoke to everyone, interviewed old girlfriends, made sure there were no old boyfriends. If there was a wall Stephen Baker had pissed against, they went to sniff it. Then I did it all over again before he announced for President.’

‘Before?’

‘Oh yes. Not much point doing it afterwards, is there?’

‘And did they find anything?’

‘You know everything they found. So does the American people.’

Maggie smiled at the realization of it. ‘Of course. The big “I experimented with drugs” admission. Getting stoned rebranded as a science project. Experimented, my arse.’

‘Sure, it’s bullshit. But it worked, didn’t it? Once you get it out there, you get to define yourself-’

‘-before they define you. What about Iran?’

‘Well, that couldn’t come up during the campaign ’cause it hadn’t happened yet. That took some serious digging. Somehow Forbes knew what we didn’t know ourselves.’

‘You didn’t know Jim Hodges was Hossein Najafi?’

Goldstein jerked his head back, as if affronted. ‘Listen Maggie. Even my booba, may she rest in peace, knows that you don’t take money from fucking I-ran! Of course we didn’t know.’

‘Were we set up? Someone sent Hodges in here to embarrass us?’

‘Maybe. Maybe the Iranians did it. Make Baker look like an asshole. Right now, though, the only thing that bothers me about Hodges is how Forbes knew about him. And about the shrink.’ He stared at the TV. ‘I want to know who this bastard is.’

In the end, she was disappointed. Vic Forbes did not look like a monster or a pantomime villain. In truth, his face, as he stared dead-on at the camera, conducting a satellite interview from a studio in New Orleans, was forgettable. It was lean, like one of the whippets her grandfather’s friends used to keep in Dublin. His nose seemed to be pinched, too thin at the bridge. He was bald, save for some slight grey at the temples, which had Maggie put his age at around fifty, though it was perfectly possible that he had looked the same way when he was thirty.

If she had guessed how this scene would have played out, she would have imagined embarrassment would at least feature in it somewhere. Maybe shame was too much to ask for in this day and age, but you’d think a man who had anonymously smeared the President would at least have the courtesy to seem uncomfortable, even if he couldn’t bring himself to squirm in his chair.

But Forbes was having none of it. Maggie watched mesmerized as he batted away a series of questions as if he’d been doing this all his life.

Describing himself as a ‘researcher’, he insisted he was aligned with ‘no party and no faction’, a phrase that, to Maggie’s ears at least, reeked of pomposity.

‘I am a truth-teller, if you will,’ he said. ‘I had this information – this truth – and I felt guilty that I wasn’t sharing it with the American people. It’s an old-fashioned phrase, but I believe they have a right to know. They have a right to know who their president really is.’

‘But how did you get it?’ the interviewer asked. ‘Surely the American people have a right to know that too, don’t they?’

Maggie felt her own fist clench, involuntarily. Come on.

‘Well, Natalie,’ he began.

Good, thought Maggie. He seemed flustered.

‘The thing is…Look, in an ideal world…’

Maggie glanced at Stuart, who was as transfixed as she was, hoping that they were witnessing the unravelling of Vic Forbes on live television.

‘The point I would make, Natalie, is to ask you this: would you reveal your sources, if your network had broken a story like this without my help? Of course you wouldn’t.’ Maggie felt the air deflate out of her. ‘And nor would anyone ask you. That’s a basic principle of journalism.’

‘Yes, but you’re not a journalist, are you, you scumbag bastard!’ Stuart hurled an empty Styrofoam cup at the TV.

The same sentence ran through Maggie’s head, on a repeat loop: Who is this guy?

Stuart’s phone rang. He stabbed at it, putting it on speaker. ‘Hey, Zoe, whaddya got?’

Maggie heard the agent’s voice, stiff and correct. ‘It’s still very early in our inquiries, Mr Goldstein.’

‘I know that. And I also know that electronic data of this kind is complex and searches can take several weeks-’ his voice was rising, ‘-and that it’s impossible to be certain, I know all of that, Zoe. But I need to know. WHAT. HAVE. YOU. GOT?’

The sound of shuffled papers was finally followed by an intake of breath.

‘OK, Mr Goldstein. Our preliminary investigation-’

‘Zoe.’

‘New Orleans. We think the person who sent that message to Katie Baker’s Facebook page was white, male, extremely adept with computer technology and from New Orleans, Louisiana, sir.’

He hung up, shooting one eye at Maggie, the other on the TV.

‘So, Stu, he’s the same guy, right?’

‘Confirmed,’ Goldstein said, staring at the screen, watching Forbes perform. ‘How come this guy’s so good? All that BS about “the people’s right to know”. Where did that come from? He looks like shit; he’s sweating. But he’s impressive. He’s careful. He’s like a goddamn politician.’

Without taking his eye off the screen, he reached for the remote and hit pause. (A set-top box, allowing the pausing and rewinding of live TV, was now an essential tool of the trade: it meant never having to miss an enemy gaffe again.) He rewound and watched the last minute again.

‘What are you looking for?’ Maggie asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he murmured. ‘But I’ll know it when I see it.’

There he went again, more guff about his ‘duty’ to lay out the facts before the American people. He couldn’t play judge and jury, but people should know he was serious and the President should know he was serious.

But on this second viewing Goldstein was not listening. He was looking. And now he saw what he had glimpsed so fleetingly. Maggie could see it too. A movement of the eye, still looking at the camera but no longer as if trying to meet the gaze of the unseen interviewer: he was, instead, looking into the audience. More than that, he seemed to be addressing someone specific.

The President should know I’m serious.

Goldstein hit pause once more, freezing Vic Forbes at the moment he lifted his eyes, the signal that he was speaking to an audience of one.

The President should know I’m serious. Deadly serious.