The Chosen One

33

Washington State, Friday March 24, 11.11 PST

Maggie was too late for the red-eye to Seattle so she left on the dawn flight the next morning. Perhaps thirty-five minutes after landing she was in a white rental car, she couldn’t tell you what make, driving south-west along I-5, the fatigue almost overwhelming her. It was cumulative now, day after day without proper sleep. Besides, she couldn’t stop thinking about Stuart. The initial shock and sadness had given way to new feelings: anger – and fear.

The President’s words on the phone the previous day came back to her: Stuart was not a quitter. He was a fighter. I just refuse to believe…

She had been all too ready to believe it, a fact that now made her slightly ashamed. She had accepted without question that Stuart Goldstein had cracked under pressure, heading to the park in the early hours to slash his wrists.

But now she wondered at the convenience of it. Baker was in desperate trouble and Stu his most trusted and capable lieutenant. If the President was right – that they were facing nothing less than an attempted coup d’état – then it was not out of the question that the enemy, whoever they might be, might see fit to kill Goldstein. After all, someone had murdered Forbes.

But that made no sense: Forbes’s death was surely designed to help Stephen Baker. Goldstein’s death could only hurt him.

On the other hand, the effect of the Forbes killing – apparently so fortuitously solving a Baker problem – had been to damage Baker, enabling his opponents to hint that he was some kind of gangster. What if that had been the objective all along? In which case, couldn’t Forbes’s killers and Goldstein’s be one and the same, bent on taking down a troublesome new president?

The notion that Stu Goldstein – vast, lumbering, cunning and often gross, but also gentle, kind and motivated only by the idealist’s desire to make the world better – could have been murdered filled Maggie with fury. She was haunted by the image of someone stalking Stu, grabbing him from behind, striking terror into a man who, thanks to his bulk and a life of brainwork unrelieved by exercise, would have been utterly defenceless. She could imagine him screaming as his wrists were cut, his blood jetting out. And then his inert body dumped in Rock Creek Park.

Maggie shook her head to stop the images coming. Who could have done such a thing to a man like Stuart Goldstein? Incomprehension turned to fear. If these men had seen an advantage in killing Stuart, wouldn’t she be the very next target? If their motive was the thwarting of Baker’s efforts to defend himself, then surely there was every reason to remove her. She and Stuart were the presidential defence team. She wondered if her conversations and texts with Stuart had been secure. They had been using the White House’s encrypted communications system. But if Stu had been murdered, it had been done professionally; and people like that would have their ways of listening, watching, following…

She checked her rear-view mirror. There was a truck behind her. But behind that? She couldn’t tell. She relaxed her grip on the steering wheel. Her hands were trembling.

Not much further to go now. Soon she would arrive in Aberdeen. Washington State was as far away from Washington, DC as you could be, on the other side of the country, the other side of the continent. The drive had been long, the landscape monotonous but, she told herself, that was all to the good. It gave her a chance to think.

She turned on the radio, trying to negotiate its buttons with her free hand. She wanted music as a distraction, but made the mistake of hitting the AM band and came across Rush Limbaugh instead.

‘Here’s what kills me about the liberal news media, folks. This is what kills me.’ He paused, leaving two or three seconds for effect. ‘They have such a Short. Attention. Span. That’s right. They don’t pay attention. They forget to take their Ritalin or something, I don’t know. Let me give you an example. Cast your mind back just a few days ago. It was wall-to-wall Vic Forbes.’ He paused again, then fell into a sing-song delivery for the next phrase. ‘Wall to wall! You could not move for Vic Forbes. Fortyeight hours, he was all anyone wanted to talk about. Forbes on the President’s “psychiatric” episode. Forbes on the Iranian Connection. Then Forbes promises the big one.’ Another pause. ‘The BIG ONE, ladies and gentlemen. And what happens? He’s found dead and the liberal media forget what they’d been talking about twelve hours earlier. Clean forgot!’ Now he went high-pitched and effeminate, the prissy voice of the East Coast liberal. ‘“Whoops! Where was I? I forgot!” And of course, now it’s tributes on MSNBC and in the New York Times to that great liberal, Stuart Goldstein: the heavyweight champion of interest group, Democrat identity politics. That’s who he was, my friends. And heavyweight is the right word. The guy was heavier than I am! And that’s saying something.’

He allowed himself a little laugh, one that made Maggie want to rip the radio out of the dashboard and hurl it out the window. But he was still talking.

‘You see, even I’m at it now. Changing the subject. Let’s not get distracted. That’s how they are, folks. And that’s how the liberal elite want you to be too. Forgetful. They want you to forget that Mr Forbes was about to tell us something. Well, we don’t forget on this show. Not here, no sirree. Let’s go to a call. Bloomington, Indiana, you’re on…’

She listened to the caller for a while, who introduced himself as a ‘dittohead’, then went on to condemn Stephen Baker’s upcoming visit to China. She hit FM, found an alternative rock station and cranked the volume knob to full, hoping somehow to channel the new rage coursing through her. How dare he?

She checked the mirror once more. Still the same truck. She strained to see the driver, but the angle was too steep.

At least the landscape outside, while unchanging, was easy on the eye. Mile after mile of tall pine trees, scraping the sky like sharp pencils. She had passed mirror-clear lakes, forests dusted with Christmas-card snow and all of it bathed in a piercing blue light. Were it not for the noise of the logging trucks thundering past her on the interstate, laden with treetrunks stacked like cigarettes, she would have kept the window down, so that she could gulp in the cold, fresh air.

She had flown to Seattle without calling Sanchez. She knew she was meant to ‘liaise’ with him, but she wasn’t going to start deferring to a twenty-seven-year-old guy whose place of work prior to the White House was the corner table at Starbucks, Dupont Circle branch. Besides, their encounter at Union Station suggested contact was now officially difficult if not forbidden. She understood why. If she emailed or texted or phoned, it would show up on records. And he had outed Bob Jackson, CIA agent, to her. Of course, rationally, that shouldn’t matter: Jackson was already dead and there was no danger posed by revealing his affiliation to the CIA. But the connection between rationality and politics, Maggie had learned some time ago, was very slender indeed.

There was his safety to think of, too. If they really did face an enemy ready to kill, it helped no one to put Doug Sanchez in the firing line.

What was more, if she were honest, she didn’t want him trying to talk her out of it. What did she have? Little more than a hunch. That’s what Stuart would have said. She could hear him saying it: ‘You’re going backwards, Costello. We need to know what Forbes or Jackson or whatever the fuck his name is knew. You’re not writing his biography. “Tell me about your childhood”, and all that crap. You’re meant to be finding out what he had and where he hid it.’

That voice was nagging away at her even as she clocked up her hundredth mile from Seattle’s airport, even after the pine forests gave way to the lake and finally the sign saying ‘Welcome to Aberdeen’. A thin strip of new signage, in the same colours and typeface, had been added just below: ‘Onetime Home of President Stephen Baker’.

As she looked around the place – shabby and peeling in the way of all small towns that have lost the role that once shaped them – she wondered if she had made a bad mistake. She was a continent away from Washington, DC – where the President she believed in was fighting for his political life. Was she really going to help him by snooping around a place that was on the other side of America and might as well have been the other side of the world?

She had punched the zipcode for the high school into the satnav and now it led her straight into the car park. She checked her watch. Thanks to the three-hour time difference and her early flight, it was still only early afternoon. The place should still be functioning. She looked over her shoulder: no sign of that truck – or of any other vehicle she recognized.

There was a framed photograph of Stephen Baker in the hallway and, next to it, an eighth-grade art project: ‘Dear Mr President’, in which students of James Madison expressed, through a drawing or a poem, their hopes for their most famous alumnus. When she saw the earnest pictures of handshakes, one hand white, one hand black, or of a bruised and bandaged globe, she was taken back to her own school days, and the art-room of the convent. The world had been bruised by nuclear weapons back then, rather than global warming; but there were always wars, and the misery they caused. Not much had changed. Looking at the pictures reminded her of her earlier self, the earnestness that had inspired her to take up her chosen career, trying to bandage the world. And now these children were being inspired by their new president. A lump rose in her throat, reminding her why she was here.

‘Can I help?’

Maggie spun around to see a smiling woman with long straight hair. In an instant calculation, she guessed that she was Maggie’s age, but that motherhood, and life in Aberdeen, Washington, had added ten years.

‘Oh yes, I’m looking for the Principal’s office.’

‘I’m the Principal’s secretary.’

‘Good. I wonder if I might-’

‘He’s busy with students right now. What’s your question?’ The smile remained fixed.

‘It’s about a former pupil at the school.’

‘Are you a journalist? All media inquiries go through-’

‘No,’ Maggie said, with what she hoped was a warm grin. ‘I’m not a journalist and it’s not about him.’

The secretary stood and said nothing. She was not going to make this easy.

‘My name is Ashley Muir,’ Maggie said, extending a hand. ‘I’m with Alpha, the insurance company. I’m here because one of our policyholders has, sadly, passed away. He left insufficient instructions as to beneficiaries and I-’

‘Do you have ID?’

‘I have my business card.’ Maggie opened her bag and pulled out the card she had been handed by Ashley Muir, Head of Government Relations for Alpha, at an awful Sunday brunch in Chevy Chase. He had called too, a couple of times, suggesting they go out on a date. She had said no but she was grateful to him now for giving her the only business card in her desk drawer that combined insurance and a female first name.

The secretary studied it for a moment. ‘This says something about the government.’

‘One of my duties is to look after policyholders who also happen to be federal employees.’ Maintain eye contact, Maggie told herself. Don’t look down or away: classic signal of an untruth. Reading other people’s body language was one of the skills you had to acquire in backroom diplomacy; but she was finding that deploying it on your own behalf was rather more difficult.

‘So what is it you want?’

‘I’m starting at the beginning, you see,’ Maggie said, moving towards the office, hoping it would send a subliminal cue to the woman to take her there. ‘Which is why it would be an enormous help if I could see the school record of the policyholder in question.’

‘Hmm,’ the secretary said, as she did indeed lead Maggie into the office. ‘Well, we don’t keep the records here.’

Maggie could feel her spirits sag. Wouldn’t that be typical: to trek the entire width of the American continent only to be told the papers were kept in – where? – some storage facility in Maryland, no doubt.

‘In fact,’ the secretary’s smile was now back, ‘I didn’t have any idea they were kept at all until last year.’ She paused, as if anxious that Maggie might not follow. ‘With the election and all.’

Maggie nodded, happy to play the pupil.

‘Then suddenly everyone wanted to see Stephen Baker’s school file: Vanity Fair, ABC News, Inside Edition. All of them. Had to call the files from that class up from the basement. But it was all there, yearbook entry, the whole deal.’

‘So the files are here, in the office, now?’

‘Oh, no. Once we’d got Stephen Baker’s file, we put the rest back into storage.’

‘I see.’ This was painful.

‘Oh, it was a wonderful thing to see. He was only here for a year or so, of course. But it was a nice picture. And his grade score. Through the roof!’ She laughed.

‘Yes, he seems like a very smart man.’

‘Well, people voted for him round here, I can tell you.’

Maggie felt a little warmer towards this woman at hearing that. ‘So about this file?’

‘Well, you’d need to fill out a form and we’d have to process the request, then I’d have to get Terry – our janitorial manager – to go down to the basement and retrieve it. So if you were able to come back, say next Thursday, then I-’

Instead of a frustrated grimace, Maggie managed to give her an apologetic smile. ‘The problem, I’m afraid, is that I’m based in Washington, DC. I can’t be here for a full week.’

‘We could mail it to you. If you just leave your address, I’m sure-’

‘Sadly, there is a degree of urgency. The courts will need notification of intestacy, before we can proceed to the probate process.’ She saw the baffled expression on the secretary’s face and pressed ahead, dredging her memory for any jargon she could remember that would sound suitably intimidating. ‘This will require an immediate declaration of kinship, heredity and outstanding claims on the estate. It’s a legal process and the courts could issue a subpoena against any person or individual who obstructs that process. Which would mean this school. Or indeed you.’ She felt cruel doing this to the poor woman, but there was too much at stake to play nice.

The smile had gone now.

‘There is one more thing I should explain. The policyholder left behind a considerable sum of money. There is scope in the terms of the policy for a facility fee.’ Maggie said these last two words slowly, so that they might sink in, then repeated them: ‘A facility fee to be paid to anyone who assists in the disbursement of funds.’ She leaned forward, ensuring that eye contact remained locked. ‘That too could of course include you.’

‘I’m not sure I follow, Miss Muir.’

‘The point is that we believe the policyholder died without a will. We think he left a lot of money with no one to give it to. My duty is to be absolutely sure that he did not leave any family or dependants behind and – once I’m sure of that – well, then the sum has to be distributed somehow, doesn’t it?’ She laughed and the secretary’s eyes widened.

‘In previous situations like this, schools have been recipients for such monies. And of course there would be compensation for your time and effort in helping us conduct our inquiries.’

‘So what would you need exactly?’

‘All I would need is for you to take me to wherever those files are kept, so that I can take a quick look at the one belonging to our client and then I will be on my way.’

‘That’s all?’

‘That’s all. I’m in the business of friends and family. That’s what I’m looking for: friends and family.’

The smell of bullshit was filling her own nostrils, but somehow Maggie sensed it was working.

The light was fluorescent, the smell stale. Upon rows and rows of metal shelves, mounted on Meccano-style uprights, were hundreds of cardboard boxes. Each one was labelled in the thick but fading ink of a marker pen. She began reading off the years. 2001-2, 2000-1…

The secretary had just asked the difficult question Maggie had been hoping to avoid – whose file is it you’re looking for? – when she was called away to deal with a fourteen-year-old boy with a nosebleed. She nudged Maggie through a pair of double-doors, then unlocked another dark green door before rushing upstairs with a pack of tissues, calling back over her shoulder, ‘I’ll be back shortly!’

Maggie was left alone, accompanied only by the gurgling of hot water pipes. She didn’t have much time. With her head angled, she read quickly along the sides of these old brown boxes. 1979-80, 1978-79, 1977-78…

Turning the corner, she found at last the right year. She pulled the box down and, with no table to rest on, set it on the ground and knelt beside it, coughing as the dust of the floor rose to her throat.

Inside were two parallel rails on which hung a series of dark green files. She did a quick flick through the Bs: the Baker file was gone, no doubt removed during last year’s campaign, when journalists kept asking for it. A few Cs, a large number of Ds, a handful of Es; on and on until, at last, there it was.

Jackson, Robert Andrew

There was a home address, which Maggie swiftly scribbled in a notebook. There was a mother, Catherine Jackson, but by the word ‘father’ only a blank.

Copies of his school report, including praise for his leadership of the debate team. High scores for history and for Spanish, decent in maths. Not what she needed. She turned the pages fast, hoping something would pop out, something that-

What was that?

A sound, close by. Metallic, but not the banging of a pipe. It came from further away and yet it was definitely down here, in the bowels of this building. It sounded somehow deliberate. Man-made.

She scoured the file, speed-reading. There was another reference to the debate team, written by a Mr Schilling. The date was three years after the first one: Jackson would have been seventeen.

…Robert’s contribution to the debate team has not been quite as enthusiastic as it was previously. I suspect the loss of the captaincy of the team made him a little sore. If he is to pursue a political career, he needs to learn that every career includes its defeats!

A political career. Maggie kept going. A letter to Mrs Jackson from the Principal, suggesting a meeting at the school to resolve the ‘disciplinary matter we discussed on the phone’. A reference accompanying an application to Harvard. A rejection letter from Harvard.

Finally, at the back of the file, a photocopied page from the high school yearbook. In the photograph Jackson wore the same expression Maggie had seen on his CIA file: smiling and hopeful, but with a hint of something else, too. Arrogance, determination or youthful ambition – it was hard to tell.

Keeping the file on the floor, she replaced the box on the shelf and was just reaching for the lid when she heard the same metallic sound again, this time nearer. Inside the room.

Over her right shoulder she saw nothing but more rows of boxes. Over the other were the heavy pipes of the school heating system. Suddenly aware that she was alone in a closed, dark underground room, she felt a desperate need to get out.

The sound came again and it was getting closer.

She bent down to pick up the file, pausing to shepherd a few loose sheets back between the covers, and when she came back up, she could tell the light had changed. The area where she had stood was no longer in shadow.

She turned around. There, framed in the light between two rows of shelves, just a few feet away from her, was the outline of a man. Fixed, still – and staring at her.