The Chosen One

31

Washington, DC, Thursday March 23, 20.14

She rode the Metro home, itching to look in her bag. But she didn’t dare risk it. What if someone looked over her shoulder? What if she dropped it and someone picked it up? Come to think of it, what if – today of all days – she was mugged? She remembered those stories of government officials leaving laptops on trains or in the backs of cabs, prompting the loss of secrets vital to national security. She squeezed the bag between her thigh and her arm, twining the strap around her hand for good measure. If some lowlife felt like stealing a purse, he’d have to pick on someone else.

She walked the short distance from Cleveland Park station to her apartment, fighting the urge to look over her shoulder every other step. Her hand trembled as she put the key in the lock. Once it had slid in, the door didn’t swing open easily as it would usually; it seemed stiff. Maggie gave it a shove with her shoulder and it opened.

She reached for the light-switch. Her eye swept across the open-plan studio space, taking in the hall she stood in, the kitchen to her left and the rest of the living area. Had the cleaner come? She hadn’t asked her to. And yet there was a scent of something in the air, as if the place had been scrubbed. She closed the door behind her and shot the bolt.

She unzipped her bag, where she saw her purse, her phone, a lipstick – no sign of the envelope! Instantly, she began pulling items out of the bag, one after another until – thank Christ up above, there it was. Paranoia was infectious.

She opened up a kitchen cabinet, took down a bottle of Jameson’s. Drop or two of water, a sip standing up, then she moved over to the couch and let herself fall into it. Blood pumping, she picked up the envelope.

Inside was a two-page document, stapled together, the crest of the Central Intelligence Agency discreetly placed in the righthand corner. In the top left, a small mug-shot that, after a few moments, she recognized as a young Vic Forbes. In the centre in bold type, it simply stated the subject’s name: Robert A. Jackson.

The resemblance between the young Jackson and the Forbes who had been on television earlier that week was barely discernible. He had hair then, brown and straight but covering all his head; a moustache too. Large glasses of the kind everyone wore in the early 1980s but which looked comic now.

She began reading, taking each line slowly. It began with the year of his birth, then a summary of his education: high school in Washington, then college at Penn State. Spanish major. Three years in the Marines, then recruited to the Agency. Deployed almost immediately to Central and Latin America. First assignment, Economic Attaché, US Embassy in Tegucigalpa, two years. Later to San Salvador, this time as a Trade Attaché, eighteen months. Finally to Managua.

She looked at the dates. Jackson would have been there when those places were at their hottest: he was in Nicaragua during the precise period when Oliver North and his pals were funnelling weapons to the Contras and lying to Congress about it. Maybe Jackson, with his fluent Spanish, was the funnel.

He would have been young. In his early twenties, running around war zones, drinking tequila with paramilitaries, handing over rucksacks stuffed with CIA dollars. In her twenties she had been bumping up and down dirt roads from Eritrea to Kinshasa, hitching lifts from guerrillas in flatbed trucks. She wondered if the young Jackson had felt the same thrill she had, the unique charge that comes from being in a place where every day is a matter of life and death.

And then what for Bob Jackson? A long stint back at Langley, stretching through the late 1980s and into the next decade. Probably pacing the corridors, looking for a role. When the Wall came down, and all the proxy skirmishes of the Cold War were wrapped up, warriors like Bob Jackson were suddenly left twiddling their thumbs. Maggie looked at the photograph, imagining how he must have felt.

There was mention of a temporary assignment in Spain, which she saw would have coincided with the bombing of the Madrid railway, and a couple of other spells in Asia, also presumably related to what his political masters would have called the War on Terror.

She was still getting no sense of him at all.

On the next sheet were the personal details which revealed only how little there was to reveal.

Marital status: single.

Children: none.

Significant associations: negligible activity of which the Agency is aware.

So he had been a loner who had died utterly alone. She remembered again the hungry desire on his face caught on the CCTV camera at the Midnight Lounge and, for the first time, felt a twinge of sympathy. Maybe what she had seen in Forbes’s eyes had not just been simple lust, but a different need. For the warmth of another person.

Maggie pictured him, turning up week after week, Wednesday after Wednesday, sitting at the same small table in the dark, gawping at the jiggling, surgerized bodies – and then heading into the night, back to that spartan house on Spain Street, where he would spend the night in the comfort of his own right hand. Maybe that was why he had looked so excited on that grainy TV image. At last he was with somebody.

She exhaled loudly and took another glug of whiskey. Christ, she still had her coat on. She should get up, have a shower, maybe eat. She got up and turned to head for the bathroom. As she did, she saw the winking light on her answering machine, which Liz had called ‘retro chic’ on her last visit. Reaching over, she pressed ‘play’.

One message from a married friend asking why she hadn’t come to brunch. She had clean forgotten. Another from the dry cleaners saying her jacket was ready. Then the third:

‘Could have sent you a text, or an email or a bloody Tweet,’ it began, the accent unmistakable. ‘I could have scrawled on your Facebook wall, or tried to Instant Message you, or whatever it’s called, but something told me you’d want to hear a human voice on your return from the Lost City of Atlantis. Mags, it’s Nick here, sweetheart, keen to know how my brightest pupil performed in her Journalism for Beginners practical. With flying fucking colours if Tim from the Telegraph is to be believed, though it sounds as if you skipped out without a goodbye. Very rude of you. I do hope you have not betrayed our unspoken bond of fidelity, Ms Costello. As luck would have it, I’m in DC for a few days. Call me if you fancy a bowl of Ethiopian sludge in Adams Morgan. Or failing that a drink at the Eighteenth Street Lounge.’

Her response surprised her. So often she would give Nick the brush-off. She was too busy or she was seeing Uri. But tonight she wanted to see him. It wasn’t simply that she needed company, though she did. The last visitor to her apartment had been Stuart: he had been sitting in her kitchen just yesterday, stuffing his ludicrous face with Cheerios, keeping the angst at bay. The memory brought a wave of grief, followed by a surge of panic. She was alone, and she needed help. This thing was too big for her, there were too many angles. Sanchez was bright, but he had not a fraction of Stuart’s nous or experience; nor his humanity. Besides, he was clearly nervous about even being seen with her, let alone speaking by phone or email.

Her head was swimming: too many hours alone. On flights, in cabs, she had gone over it all, over and over again. She needed to know whether Jackson’s blackmail effort had been sanctioned by his former employers at the CIA or some other faction within the US government. Or was the President right, had Jackson been a mercenary, a dirty tricks specialist contracted to do a job, just as Nixon had hired old Company men to bug and burgle the Democratic enemy? And what bearing did any of that have on what was still a, if not the, key question: who might have wanted him out of the way?

Not that she could be open with Nick du Caines. He always insisted that he was discreet. ‘Soul of discretion, Mags, I swear! You say it here,’ he would say, pointing at his ear, ‘and it goes direct to the vault. Triple locked. Titanium bolts.’ And then he would mime the act of closing a heavy door. But she could not risk it. Nick might have the best of intentions, but if he was drunk, or coked-up, and he was trying to get some Dutch intern at the World Bank into bed, who knew what he might say?

They met at the Eighteenth Street Lounge, a place where the corners were dark enough, and the couches sufficiently battered, to play to Nick’s Hemingway fantasies: the seedy, world-weary ex-war correspondent. He leapt up when he saw her come through the unmarked door, embracing her and letting his hands run up and down her back. Trying it on before she’d even got her coat off. Throughout she kept her hand on her bag, inside which was the envelope Sanchez had handed to her at the station. She wanted to be within touching distance of that document at all times.

He’d ordered a Scotch for her already. ‘Your favourite malt,’ he promised.

They talked first about Stuart, Nick nodding in all the right places. Then they talked about New Orleans, Nick urging her to tell mocking stories about Telegraph Tim and to describe her skilful integration into the press pack, taking it all as a compliment to his teaching skills.

‘Now, Mags, are you able to tell me what any of this is about, so that the beloved and historic newspaper that I work for might at least have something resembling a story?’

‘Still losing money?’

‘Millions. And the beancounters will soon be wondering why they need a US bureau when they could just as easily rely on “bloggers”.’ He fairly spat out the word, impersonating as he did so the cringing, mealy-mouthed voice of a Dickensian bookkeeper, which is how he always depicted the accountants who he claimed ran his newspaper.

‘It’s nothing you can use yet, but actually I can tell you something.’

Light spread across Nick du Caines’s face, his eyes widening in an expression of childlike joy. ‘She loves me!’ he bellowed, at an embarrassing volume. ‘Hallelujah, Miss Costello. The words I’ve yearned to hear from your lips more keenly than any others – save, of course, for “Nick, will you undo my-”’

She gave him a look.

‘Sorry. I’m all ears.’

‘At this stage I have no more than a suspicion. I know everyone’s been thinking the same thing, but I really do think Forbes may have been killed.’

‘Fuck.’

‘No actual proof yet.’

‘OK.’

‘Something tells me it was done professionally.’

He sat up straight: if he’d been a dog, his ears would have pricked up.

‘What I want you to look into, as inconspicuously as you can, is whether there is any evidence, any evidence at all, of involvement by the,’ she dropped her voice to the barest whisper, ‘CIA.’

‘Fuck me sideways.’

‘Not a word, Nick.’

He took a swig of his drink. When he looked at her again, his expression was deadly serious. ‘You wouldn’t be asking this unless you already had some evidence. I can’t proceed unless I see that. Or at least know what it is.’

Maggie smiled, remembering that Nick du Caines hadn’t won a hatful of awards for investigative reporting by accident. Lascivious old lush, he might be, but he was still a journalist to the nicotine-stained tips of his fingers. ‘I can’t show you anything: you know that. All you can know is that I have reason to suggest you look in that direction. Anything you find, you need to share with me first. Publish it before it’s ready and there’ll be no more from me.’

‘That’s not such a massive threat, Mags. Not if you’ve got the CIA bumping off a US citizen who just so happened to have criticized the President. That’s quite a big story all by itself.’

‘Not if it’s only the tip of the iceberg.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying, be patient. Wait till you see the whole picture.’ ‘I like what I’m seeing right now,’ he said, licking his lips before raising his glass to them.

She let Nick walk her home – swiftly, through years of experience, swivelling her head to offer her cheek when he moved in for the goodnight kiss. As always, his slobber was worse than his bite. He was a lech, but no more. He reached for her hand, kissed it and walked off into the night.

Once in her apartment, she opened her bag and pulled out Jackson’s file. Something had been niggling at her all night, something that had struck a faint, muffled chord in her head earlier that she had not been able to identify.

She turned back to the first page and read it again, slowly. Her head was foggy with whisky and the bar. What the hell was it?

She looked at the first few facts, which she had skimmed over. The date of birth, the school, the college.

The school.

Again, she felt it, or rather heard it, a feeble echo in her head. The name was familiar, but she had no idea where from.

James Madison High School, Washington.

She found her BlackBerry and Googled it. It produced a list of dozens of James Madison High Schools, some in DC, some just outside, some with a guest speaker who had visited from Washington, DC.

Hold on, what if…

She changed the search, making one small adjustment.

But she was too impatient to wait for the little device to load up with results of its search. She went to the pile of books stacked on the floor by the bookcase: the new ones, for which there had been no room on the already jammed shelves. She rifled through them, throwing aside the new tomes on the Middle East, the future of the UN and ‘whither US foreign policy in the 21st century?’.

At last. Running Man: Stephen Baker, His Insatiable Quest for Power and What it Means for America. By Max Simon PhD.

It was a hatchet job, gobbled up by the Fox constituency – with a sales spike reported in the Deep South – which had been torn apart in the New York Times Book Review and by a legion of liberal bloggers. She had picked it up at an airport the day before election day, telling herself it would bring good luck. (She couldn’t even remember the convoluted superstitious logic behind that one: probably something about showing respect to the enemy.)

She had never got around to reading it; after the Baker landslide it suddenly didn’t seem quite so relevant. But she’d given it a glance and remembered that it did at least pretend to be a proper biography with a cursory chapter on Baker’s childhood. Now she was flicking the pages furiously.

She saw a paragraph about Baker’s birth, with some obviously bogus detail about the mother clasping the hand of her newborn son. She turned to the next page.

In those days Cliff Baker lived a nomadic life, pitching up wherever work could be found…

More padding which she skipped. Here it was.

…logging meant Washington State and for the teenage Stephen that prompted yet another move, starting at a new high school in his sophomore year. He enrolled, for what would be his last two years of education before attending Harvard, at the James Madison High School in Aberdeen, Washington.

That was it. Jackson hadn’t been educated in Washington, DC – as the casual reader of his CIA résumé would have assumed – but in Washington State. She all but ran back to the couch to retrieve the BlackBerry that had now completed its search. Sure enough, it confirmed there was only one James Madison High School in the state of Washington.

Maggie could hear the sound of her own breathing. Finally she had found a connection between the President and the man she had seen buried in a lonely grave in New Orleans earlier that day. These two men – one who had risen to the highest possible pinnacle, the other who had sought to bring him down – had something in common. They had a shared past.

Stephen Baker and Vic Forbes had been at school together.