The Chosen One

11

Washington, DC, Tuesday March 21, 18.15

For the third time in two days, Maggie was in the White House Residence. ‘Maybe I should get myself sacked more often,’ she had said to Stuart. ‘It seems to be a good career move.’

This was an emergency meeting, called by the President. He wasn’t pacing this time; his exterior, at least, was calm and cool. He had chosen one of the wooden chairs, allowing him to stay upright even if everyone else would be forced to slump on a sofa.

Maggie looked around the room, five of them had been called here – Goldstein, her, Tara MacDonald, Doug Sanchez, and Larry Katzman, the pollster.

‘Thank you for coming,’ Baker said, steadily. ‘This is not a White House meeting, which is why we’re gathering in my home. You’ll notice my Chief of Staff is not here. This is a discussion among my campaign team. Old friends.’ He attempted a smile. ‘Some of you work in the White House. Some of you don’t.’

Maggie stared at her feet.

‘I need your advice,’ he went on. ‘This presidency is under sustained assault. We knew it would happen one day. But not as soon as this.’ He paused. ‘Stuart, remind us what we know.’

‘Thank you, Mr President.’ Stuart Goldstein cleared his throat and moved to the edge of the sofa he was on so that he could have a line of eye contact with everyone in the room.

He looked horribly uncomfortable. Maggie always felt for Stuart in casual situations. His body was not designed for it. He needed a suit and a hard chair, preferably on the other side of a desk. In casual clothes, or on a couch, he was lost.

‘Vic Forbes, from New Orleans, Louisiana, supplied MSNBC with two stories in the course of little more than a single news cycle. Both of these stories were calculated to cause maximum damage and both required deep investigative skills. Or inside knowledge.’

Maggie saw Tara MacDonald shift in her seat.

‘At the same time, he has made an indirect, but personal contact with the White House.’

Now both MacDonald and Sanchez sat to attention.

‘Last night someone posing as a friend of Katie Baker’s sent her a message via Facebook.’

There was a gasp.

Stuart went on. ‘This message effectively claimed responsibility for both the first MSNBC story and, in advance, the second. He said it would come in the morning and it did. He also made a very direct and personal threat against the President.’

There was a pause. All eyes were on Baker, who eventually spoke. ‘Tell them what he said, Stuart. His exact words.’

Goldstein cleared his throat. Maggie noticed that he looked nervous. Was that because he was not used to addressing a large group, like this one? No. As Maggie watched, a hint of colour appeared at the top of Goldstein’s cheeks, and she realized the source of his awkwardness. He was straying, however indirectly, into a wholly alien realm. Talking about Katie Baker and her friend Alexis, discussing live chat on Facebook, forced Stuart Goldstein – married to a fellow political consultant but without children – to enter the world of family life, of fathers and daughters, of vulnerable teenage girls, a world, in short, utterly remote from his own.

He began to read. ‘I have more stories to tell. The next one comes tomorrow morning. And if that doesn ’t smash his pretty little head into a thousand pieces, I promise you this – the one after that will. Make no mistake: I mean to destroy him.’

Tara MacDonald gasped, suddenly looking like the mother of four that she was, an angry and protective matriarch, as she shook her head and muttered, ‘That poor child.’ In an instant the fury that had been brewing inside the White House ever since the psychiatrist story first broke had a focus: loathing for this man who had not only sought to derail the Baker presidency in its infancy but had dared to prey on a child.

Stuart continued. ‘Secret Service traced the communication to a house in Bethesda, Maryland. They raided the property. The computer was there, but not the person. Turns out the machine was a dumb terminal. Guy was operating it remotely. Eventually he was traced to New Orleans.’

‘So he’s the same guy? Forbes?’ Sanchez, his voice urgent, as if that was all he needed to get his coat on, head out and find the man himself.

‘Yep.’

There was a subtle movement in seats, as people braced themselves for the meat of the discussion: what do we do now?

Stuart held up a fleshy finger. ‘There’s one more thing. Agent Galfano did some extra probing, based on the computer IP address in New Orleans. She examined the data records of the so-called liberal blogger who so ingeniously hacked into MSNBC’s emails, thereby revealing their source.’

One step ahead as always, Tara MacDonald shook her head. ‘Don’t tell me. New Orleans.’

‘Yep. Forbes.’

Sanchez whistled in apparent admiration. ‘The guy outed himself.’

A noise like a door opening out on a snowstorm came through the room. Anyone hearing it for the first time would have been puzzled. But these veterans of eighteen months on the road together were used to the sound of Stuart Goldstein sighing. ‘Seems so,’ he said.

Sanchez crinkled his forehead, in a way that recalled the precociously bright teenager he had obviously been all of seven or eight years ago. ‘Why the fuck would he do that?’

Now Maggie spoke. ‘So that we’d listen to him.’ All heads turned to her, including, she noticed, the President’s. ‘He knew what we’d do. He knew we’d trace his message to Katie. He wanted to be certain that once we’d found him, we’d know he was for real. He wanted us to match him up to the MSNBC source.’

Stuart came in behind her. ‘First rule of blackmail. It’s not enough to have the goods. Your target has to know you’ve got the goods.’

Baker decided he had heard enough. ‘Thank you, Stuart. Everyone, that is the background to the decision we need to make this evening. Who wants to go first?’

Tara MacDonald didn’t wait for the customary polite silence. ‘I wanna be clear what exactly it is we’re talking about here? Are we discussing negotiating with a blackmailer?’

Neither Baker nor Goldstein said anything.

‘Because that’s a whole world of pain we’re entering if we go there. I mean, do we really think something like this could ever stay secret? I don’t mean whatever shit this guy’s holding, I mean the fact that we talked to him. Do we really think that’s going to stay underground? Uh-uh.’

Sanchez fiddled with his watch. ‘Doesn’t it depend a little on what we think the guy might have?’

Maggie felt the air suck out of the room. You had to admire the balls of the guy, the fearlessness of youth and all that. But there was only one person who could answer that question and you didn’t want to be the one to ask him.

There was, to everyone’s relief, a knock on the door. A butler, probably seventy years old. ‘Sir, I have an urgent note from the Press Office. For Mrs MacDonald.’

Baker beckoned the man forward; he walked in stiffly and presented the piece of paper to her. She pulled on the glasses that hung around her neck on a chain and read rapidly. Then she cleared her throat. ‘Forbes has just released a statement. Most networks are only quoting it in part, but apparently there’s a full version on Drudge. It reads as follows. “I want to make clear that the further information I hold on Stephen Baker does not relate to the way his campaign was funded nor to the state of his health.”’

Maggie realized she was holding her breath. So was everyone else. MacDonald kept reading.

‘“It’s about his past. An aspect of his past that I think will shock many Americans. An aspect of his past that the President has not shared with the nation. An aspect of his past he may not even have shared with his own family.”’

Maggie felt a new mood enter the room. It was a sensation she dimly recalled from her teenage years at home in Dublin. She could picture her younger self, sitting on the couch beside her sister Liz, cringing as a vaguely sexual scene appeared on the TV; her father getting up out of his chair, fumbling to change the channel. That was the sensation she could feel spreading over her and, surely, everyone else in this room: embarrassment. Sheer, hot-faced, look-away embarrassment.

What mortifying secret might the President have kept from his own wife? No one could bring themselves to look at him.

Maggie stole a glance at Stuart: he too was avoiding Baker’s gaze. But she could see that Stuart Goldstein’s embarrassment was already compounded by something that shook him much more: political panic.

How much more of this could this new presidency take? Here was a committed assassin, somehow armed with weapons-grade dirt, determined to destroy Baker. He had already landed two direct hits and now, it seemed, he was preparing for a third. Surely there would be a fourth. And a fifth. The confidence of Vic Forbes – swaggering even in this written statement – suggested he would not rest until he had finished the job. And Baker was no more.

Her voice dry, Tara spoke again. ‘There’s one last paragraph. “I do not plan on providing the full details today. I just wanted the American people to be aware that I have them. I wanted everyone following this story, especially those following it real close, to know I have them.”’

The gall of it was stunning. Vic Forbes was using a combination of live television and the internet to present a blackmail demand to the President of the United States.

Stuart did not let the silence linger. ‘Like I said, this is an attempt to destroy the President. Ideas for what we should do, people.’

Tara MacDonald spoke first. ‘I say we do a Letterman. We go to the police and then we go on TV. We expose Forbes for what he is, a cheap scumbag felon.’

Larry Katzman, the pollster, piped up. ‘I worry about that. Initial response can be positive, but there’s great volatility. Once you go public with something like this, it kind of gives people free rein-’

‘They can say what the hell they like about you,’ added Sanchez, clearly making the effort to substitute one four-letter word for the other he had in mind. ‘Makes it legitimate. Remember, David Letterman could only make his move because he fessed up to whatever the blackmailer had. Got in his retaliation first.’

The pollster responded, emboldened. ‘In other words, the critical variable is the nature of the, er, allegations, the charges…’ His voice trailed off, as he reached for the glass of water on the coffee table in front of him.

Tara MacDonald stepped in again, perhaps, thought Maggie, as an act of compassion, protecting the dweeby pollster from twisting in the silence for a second longer. ‘Seems we’re out of good options. If we say nothing, Forbes is gonna keep coming at us, letting off these bombs. If we try to fess up, then the bomb’s gonna be going off anyway. OK, it’s gonna be us pressing the detonator and that helps. But we still don’t know what damage it’s gonna do.

‘Which leaves making contact with this prick and trying to cut some kind of deal. Which I don’t even want to think about. I mean, even if we managed to pull it off, which I have to tell you I seriously doubt, do we really think it would stay quiet? Of course, it wouldn’t. Because nothing in this town ever does.’

Now Sanchez added his voice. ‘I have to say, this is bad enough.’ When he saw a quizzical eyebrow from Goldstein, he gestured around the room. ‘This. This meeting. Just imagine this on Glenn Beck: White House operatives sat around in the Residence discussing possible negotiations with a-’

‘All right, all right,’ Stuart interrupted. ‘We get the idea. A series of dead ends. But right now there are also rather too many known unknowns. We don’t know what Forbes knows and we need to. Somehow, between now and tomorrow, we need to be inside Vic Forbes’s head. Whatever he has-’

But he didn’t get to finish his sentence. Stephen Baker, the cool, steady, unflappable Stephen Baker, the man who had barely put a foot wrong in a two-year, outsider’s presidential campaign, the man who had debated much more experienced rivals without ever slipping up, the man who had never broken a sweat even when his poll numbers were in the tank and his bank accounts dry – Stephen Baker finally snapped.

He slammed his fist onto the table and raised his voice, something his team had never seen or heard before. ‘Vic Forbes! VIC FORBES! I don’t want to hear that man’s name again? Do you understand me?’ He shook his head then, his voice much quieter, he murmured, almost to himself: ‘I want him gone.’