The Chosen One

12

Washington, DC, Wednesday March 22, 06.35

She was with Liz, in the shady area at the back of their garden. They were holding hands, Liz tugging her, a five-year-old girl impatient to show her big sister what she had found. They were wading through grass that had grown taller than they were, brushing their bare arms. Any second now, they would find it. It would be here, at the bottom of the garden.

A loud siren yanked her from sleep and bolted her upright. Her heart was thumping. The siren sounded again, though now Maggie realized it was the ringer on her cellphone, left on her bedside table. She squinted at her watch: 6.35am.

‘Hello.’

‘Maggie. It’s Stuart. Did I wake you?’

‘No. Not at all.’ It was a reflexive lie. No one in Washington ever admitted to being asleep, not even at 6.35am. In DC setting the alarm for 7am counted as a lie-in.

‘Sorry about that. Anyway, put the TV on.’

‘Is this like some kind of daily service? Because I don’t remember signing up.’

‘Now.’ There was something different in Goldstein’s voice. Not so much panic as a kind of manic energy.

Maggie’s eyes were still closed, as if she were half-expecting to glimpse whatever it was Liz had promised to show her. She fumbled for the remote, knocking over both a glass of water and her watch in the process.

‘Jesus.’

‘My first reaction too.’

‘Hold on, I haven’t got it on yet.’ She leaned over the bed, to grope on the floor there. Her hand was met with a discarded T-shirt and a pair of sneakers, as well as an eye-mask she’d once picked up on a business class flight.

At last, the remote. She aimed it at the small box in the corner and waited for it to glow into life. It was tuned to MSNBC: unable to sleep, she’d been watching a re-run of Olbermann in the middle of the night.

Still squinting, she gasped at what she saw. ‘Fucking hell.’

‘My sentiments exactly.’

She couldn’t say anything else, even though she knew Stuart was waiting for an instant reaction. But she simply couldn’t speak. All she could do was stare at the words streaming across the bottom of the screen.

Breaking News: Vic Forbes found dead in New Orleans.