The Chosen One

41

Aberdeen, Washington, Saturday March 25, 11.25 PST

‘There really is nothing to be frightened of at all, dear.’

Maggie reached for the cup of coffee, still hot, that had been left at her bedside. The woman was looming over her. If only Maggie could grab hold of it, she could throw the steaming liquid in her face. She stretched…

And at that moment she saw the woman’s face clearly. Grey-haired, yes, but not, after all, the apparently kindly lady who had sabotaged her car at the school.

‘I’m sorry,’ Maggie panted. ‘I thought you were someone else.’

‘It’s easy to get confused, dear. I was in the ambulance bay when they brought you in. You’d had quite a scrape. Now what about these painkillers?’

‘Painkillers?’

‘Yes, dear. The doctor says you should take them.’ She checked her watch. ‘Around now. I can either do it intravenously,’ she held up the needle, ‘or with tablets. What would you prefer?’

Maggie nodded towards the tablets. She took the tiny paper cup from the nurse and put the pills on her tongue, then knocked back a swig of water.

‘Well done, dear.’

The instant the nurse’s back was turned, Maggie popped the two tablets out of the side of her cheek where she had lodged them, and tucked them under her pillow. She waited for the door to creak shut.

Right, that was it. Whoever it was who had tried to kill her once would doubtless be back to try again. She would not stay here a moment longer, a sitting duck. Lying here she could be injected, poisoned or smothered: it would be so easy.

She looked first at her hand, at the needle embedded in the largest vein. Grimacing from the pain, she removed it slowly, grabbing a tissue from the box by her bed to staunch the blood.

Next she levered herself forward away from the pillow, so that she was supporting her back with her own strength. She pulled back the duvet. For the first time she saw that she was wearing a standard hospital robe, the words Grays Harbor stencilled across it in the style of a prison uniform.

Now, with a massive exertion, she swung first one leg and then the other off the edge of the bed and slid her bottom forward till her feet touched the ground. Gingerly, she transferred her weight onto them and to her relief, realized that she could walk. Clearly she had sustained the most serious injuries in her top half.

She made it across the room to the chair where her overnight bag sat like an old friend. She unzipped it, finding trousers and a shirt inside. It took nearly ten minutes to dress herself.

She was about to leave when she remembered the note from Sanchez, still by the bed. She shuffled over and retrieved it, then moved towards the door, and froze. There, a full-length mirror projected back an image that stopped her short. Her right cheek shone with a red bruise and there were dark, deep lines around and underneath her eyes. She looked like an inmate of a women’s refuge.

Cracking open the door, she tried to swing her bag casually over her shoulder – a movement that made her want to howl with pain – and began to make her escape. With all the strength she could muster, she walked past the nurses’ station – no shuffling allowed now – determined not to look back.

She had gone perhaps five paces when she heard a voice behind her. ‘Miss? Excuse me?’

She was just a few feet from the double doors leading away from here.

‘Miss?’

Over her shoulder, as nonchalantly as she could manage, she called out: ‘She seems much better! Thanks.’ She pushed the doors open and left.

The signs offered little help. Geriatrics upstairs, obstetrics downstairs, X-rays along the corridor. And then, separately, something else: student halls of residence.

She hobbled in that direction, wincing at the pain as she headed down two flights of stairs. Before long she was away from the wards and in a series of corridors containing a series of identical doors.

Finally she found what she was looking for: an exit sign. Her hunch had been vindicated. The medical students had their own separate entrance – one that, Maggie hoped, would not be monitored by whoever was watching her.

The fresh air was a shock to her, colder than she was expecting. It seemed to slap her in the face, the wind whipping her with a sudden, sharp sense of how alone she now was. Battered and penniless in the middle of nowhere, she had no way of contacting the outside world, and no one, anyway, she could contact. Her closest ally was dead, almost certainly murdered. She had no real friends, no boyfriend and no family on the entire continent.

So she would just have to rely on herself. It wouldn’t be the first time.

The walk to the main road was long and agonizing. She dreaded how easily, out in the open, she would be spotted by her pursuers. At last she flagged down a cab and slumped into the back seat.

‘Where can I take you?’the diner

‘Heron Street.’ She tried to smile, then saw the driver look her over in the rear-view mirror.

‘You OK?’

‘I’m getting there.’

She pulled out the message from Doug and looked at it properly for the first time.

There is a safe way to do this. Go to Heron Street. And remember, we always believed in Western unity.

The road was wide, more a highway than a street, and as the driver passed Sidney’s Casino, a building with all the glamour of a large garden shed, and several open-air car dealerships, their forecourts crammed with discounted Dodges and Chevys, she felt her brow furrow. Why would Sanchez send her here?

And then she saw it, the tall flagpole-style sign for Safeway. She smiled at the simplicity of it and asked the driver to wait, forming a guess for the last piece of Sanchez’s attempt at a puzzle.

She only had to look around the supermarket for thirty seconds to see it. A counter, close to the checkout lines, below the instantly recognizable bright yellow-and-black sign: Western Union.

And remember, we always believed in Western unity.

She gave her name to the young, much-pierced girl behind the glass window who promptly asked for ID. Maggie began to explain, that was the whole point, everything she had had been stolen: passport, driver’s-

‘Hold on, there’s a note on my system here? Says I’m meant to check your face against this?’ The same upspeak Maggie would have heard back home, on O’Connell Street.

The girl produced an A4 envelope which bore the crest of the State of Washington. She tore it open and out fell a credit-card-sized rectangle of clear plastic: a driver’s licence, with Maggie’s face on it.

‘Looks like you,’ the girl said.

Good old Sanchez.

‘So that’s your ID, which means I can give you this.’ The girl disappeared, returning with a wad of clean, crisp bank notes. She counted off five thousand dollars and sent Maggie on her way.

The cab took her next to Jacknut Apparel, the clothes store where she was about fifteen years above the target age and where she bought a T-shirt that would have been too much even for her teenage self: scrawled across her front, graffiti-style, were the words ‘evolution, revolution, retribution’ on a garment so tight it was hell-bent on drawing attention to her chest. In Washington, women went to great lengths to find clothes that would make their breasts if not exactly disappear, then at least become irrelevant. In DC, gender-neutral was a compliment. Not here, it seemed.

She paid off the cab and slowly made her way two blocks down to a hair salon. She wondered about a radical cut, maybe even the cropped, peroxide number worn by the manager at the Midnight Lounge, but decided it was likely to attract too much attention. So she went half way, asking the stylist to turn her russet-brown, shoulder-length cut into a mid-length bob with blonde highlights. She didn’t love it, but she looked different and that was all that counted. Glancing at the mirror, with new clothes and hair, she decided she still looked bashed-up – but at least nothing like a White House official, whether current or recently fired.

She had a few more things to get. At the top of her list was a bulk order of extra-strength painkillers, a BlackBerry, a new laptop – with built-in, ready to go internet access – some basic cosmetics, a full-sized bottle of Jameson’s and a place to stay.

She decided on the Olympic Motel, which looked suitably down-at-heel and anonymous. She unlocked the door to her room to be hit by an aroma that combined cigarette smoke and disinfectant. It would do perfectly. The bed invited her to sleep for the rest of the day. But she knew she had to get to work right away.

She held the BlackBerry, shiny and new, and dialled the one number, other than the White House, she remembered by heart.

‘Uri, it’s me. Maggie.’

‘Maggie! I tried calling you. Over and over. What happened to you?’

‘Long story.’

‘You always say that.’

‘But it’s really true this time.’

‘You sound…different. Are you OK?’

‘I was in an accident, but-’

‘What! What happened? Are you-’ He sounded genuinely alarmed.

‘I’m fine, really.’ She strove to keep her voice steady. ‘I’m going to be OK. I just need your help.’

‘Do you need me to come there, because-’

‘No. I need to ask you about…intelligence.’

They had rarely spoken about it, and he had always refused to provide more than the sketchiest details, but they both knew that Uri Guttman had performed his military service in Israel in the intelligence corps and that he had risen to a pretty senior, if unspecified, rank.

So now, swiftly, she gave him a very thin outline of what had happened to her. She had been investigating an issue – she could not say what – which centred on a former agent of the CIA. She had traced him to Aberdeen, had spoken to his former high school principal, had helped a nice old lady with her car battery and then found her brakes were shot and had had to jump from a speeding car.

‘Jesus, Maggie. You never learn, do you?’

‘What does that mean?’

‘About staying out of trouble.’

‘I didn’t ask to-’

‘The whole point of the Baker job was that you were meant to quit being in shitholes dealing with shitty people who want to kill each other, and you were going to have a nice desk in Washington and-’

‘That was the plan, yes. But we didn’t bank on the President fighting for his political life after two months, did we?’

‘You and danger, Maggie. It’s like some chemical attraction or something.’

‘I thought you wanted to help me.’

‘OK. Another time. What do you want to know?’

‘At the funeral in New Orleans, the retired man from, er, the Company said a whole lot of stuff I didn’t understand.’

‘But you pretended you did.’

‘Right.’

‘Like?’

‘Like blankets.’

‘Say again?’

‘He said there would have been no point killing the man we’re talking about because, “He’d have prepared his blanket.”’

‘That’s what he said? “He’d have prepared his blanket.”’

‘Yes. Those words.’

‘Exactly?’

‘Yes. I wrote it down afterwards.’ Shit. That was also in the notebook.

‘OK, we have something different in Hebrew but it sounds like a similar idea.’

‘Similar idea to what?’

‘We call it karit raka. It means a soft pillow. Like it guarantees you a soft landing if you get in trouble.’

‘My brain’s not working at full strength, Uri.’

‘Well, normally you only use the karit in an emergency, like when you’ve sent out a distress signal. Inside your pillow, which might be back at base, will be a package of information that might help your organization find you and get you out of trouble.’

‘OK.’

‘But you could also use a karit another way. Your guy said “there would be no point” killing the man because of his blanket, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So that suggests he was using it as a different kind of insurance policy. I’ve heard of this too.’ He paused, as if thinking it through. ‘Let’s say I know something sensitive.’

‘OK.’

‘And I think there would be people willing to kill me to keep whatever I know secret. It might even be the organization I work for now, or worked for in the past. I may know things they don’t want to get out.’

‘Yes.’ Maggie was thinking of Forbes/Jackson and the CIA.

‘Then I might make up a karit – a pillow or blanket or whatever – that would sit somewhere, a bundle of information that would be released automatically the moment I died.’

‘And the potential killers would know you had done it, so that would deter them from killing you. Because once you’re dead, whatever they were trying to keep hidden would come out anyway.’

‘Precisely. That makes me feel good, Maggie. Maybe your head didn’t get so banged after all.’

‘A bundle of information, you say. Like where? In a vault or something?’

‘It used to be that way. Now most guys in this line of work do it virtually. Online or something. Or so I hear.’

‘So you hear, Uri?’ Maggie said with the same smile in her voice she always deployed when she tried to squeeze a past secret from him. She was trying to think through all the questions now rushing into her mind.

‘But it obviously didn’t work. The guy I’m talking about died. It didn’t stop his killers killing him.’

‘Either he hadn’t prepared his blanket, and the bad guys knew that. Or he had, but they felt sure they could get to it before it was made public or whatever. Or they knew what was in it and weren’t frightened. Or it’s still out there. And they’re desperate to find it.’

Desperate sounded about right: desperate enough to send a car with no brakes onto the highway, where it could have killed God knows how many innocent people.

She said nothing, working through the permutations. It was Uri who spoke next: ‘Sounds like they think you’re ahead of them, Maggie.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Maggie?’

‘Let me ask you something, Uri. If it were you. If you had a blanket, if you had a karot-’

‘A karit-

‘You know what I mean. Where would-’

‘I was never quite at the karit level. But my father was, in his day. And you know what he used to say? Not just about this, about all intel things. Again and again, the same quote. From some Brit. “If you want to keep a secret, announce it on the floor of the House of Commons.”’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Hide it in plain sight. The one place no one thinks to look. If Churchill wanted to give the code for the D-Day landings, he’d do it in a speech to Parliament. What German would think to look there?’

‘You think Company men like Forb-, like the subject of my inquiry-’

‘Don’t worry, Maggie. I guessed already.’

‘Bastard.’

‘Don’t forget your question.’

‘I’m wondering whether someone who worked, you know, for the Company, would do the same thing: hiding in plain sight.’

‘The one thing I learned about intel was how similar these guys are. The spy books have that right: a spook from London and a spook from East Berlin have more in common with each other than either of them do with their own wives.’

‘Hide in plain sight. That’s good. Thanks, Uri. For everything.’

He was telling her she didn’t have to thank him, that her only job was to concentrate on getting well, but she wasn’t listening to his voice. She was listening intently instead to other sounds coming through the phone. She had heard a door closing, the bustle of another person in the room and then a change in the register of Uri’s voice. That confirmed it: a new girlfriend, turning her own key in the door to the apartment Maggie had once regarded as home.

Now, her own voice altered, she wound things up. ‘Listen, that’s great!’ she said, the tone false and perky, grating to her own ears. ‘I owe you one.’

‘Maggie, listen, if-’

‘Gotta go! We’ll talk soon.’ She decided to expel from her mind immediately the sound she had just heard, the sound of domesticity and intimacy between Uri and a woman who was not her.

Hide in plain sight. Concentrate on that.

She could see how that would work for Winston Churchill. He was famous, everything he did was in plain sight. But what did that mean for Vic Forbes/Robert Jackson? What counted as plain sight for a man who had spent most of his life hiding in the shadows?

She cracked open the new computer, waited for all the software to load up and then Googled the name Robert Jackson. She found an academic in Kansas and a councilman in Palo Alto, but no sign of the CIA agent. At least that meant no one else, including the legions of anonymous sleuths of the internet, was likely to have discovered his real identity – no one, that is, except the people who had driven her off the road and now had her notebook.

Next she tried Vic Forbes, bringing up reams of stories from the world’s press, including a long feature on Newsweek’s website: The short life and strange death of Vic Forbes – the anatomy of an attempt to shakedown the President.

She scanned the piece at a ferocious rate, impatient to see if the magazine had discovered that Forbes had also made a personal attempt to blackmail Stephen Baker. It had not: it was using ‘shakedown’ less than literally. Most of the article was speculation, wondering if Forbes had backers among Baker’s enemies, noting that in his Tuesday tour of the network studios Forbes had run into, and then had an apparently ‘intense and engaged’ conversation with Matt Nylind, impresario of the legendary Thursday Session, in which DC’s conservatives wargamed the week ahead. That was among a handful of interesting nuggets the piece had turned up but there was no hint of the material she had discovered. Most described him only as a New Orleans-based researcher.

She went back to the search pages, seeing a long string of video results. Clips of Forbes’s multiple TV interviews, alongside a couple of news reports on his death. She clicked on the first available interview, conducted the day he had been ‘unmasked’ as the source of MSNBC’s bombshell stories on Baker.

The sound was tinny on her machine and the video slow, but Maggie listened intently to every word.

‘Like I say, I have no hidden agenda. My only interest is transparency. The American people should know everything about the man who now rules them. They have that right.’

Was there some coded message Forbes was conveying, if only she was smart enough to hear it? Was she meant to note down the first letter of each sentence? Or perhaps the last? And of all the interviews he’d given, which was the crucial one?

A wave of aching tiredness fell over her. She slowly lay down on the bed, feeling the pain in her ribs afresh. It felt good, though, to rest her head on the pillow and close her eyes.

Hide in plain sight.

The whole point of a blanket, if she had understood Uri correctly, was that the information it contained could be retrieved easily – by others – after one’s death. If it were too deeply hidden, it would serve as no kind of deterrent. What had been buried would simply remain hidden.

Forbes had to be sure his information would break cover. And that meant there had to be some kind of timing mechanism, like a safety deposit box programmed to pop open a certain number of hours or days after his death.

Now her mind was running fast. Such a device would work only if it somehow knew its owner had died. How could that happen?

It could be a parcel, held with a lawyer, who would know to release it in the event of his client’s death. But that didn’t seem likely. Everything Forbes had done, he had done alone: would he have entrusted such a valuable secret, such a powerful secret, to a fellow human being?

Besides, what had been the motif of his assault on President Baker? Technology. He had hacked into Katie Baker’s Facebook account, sending messages via a dumb terminal. He had even contrived to hack into MSNBC’s system, using a fake online identity.

What had the school principal said about young Jackson? He was what you would call nowadays a geek, fascinated by computers at a time when everyone else thought the limits of the virtual universe were marked by a game of Space Invaders.

Of course Forbes would have hidden his blanket online. And there the timing mechanism would be simple, even Maggie could see that. You’d just create some site that you made sure to visit every day or every week. If, for whatever reason, you didn’t log in, the site would know. A technical wiz like Forbes would surely have no problem programming a site to do something crazy after it had been left untouched for a specified amount of time, like emailing his blanket out to those who would know exactly what it meant and what to do with it – a list of addresses Forbes had keyed in before his death, as his posthumous insurance policy.

Maggie felt a surge of energy run through her. She was sure she was right. But one stubborn question remained.

Where the hell was it?

Muttering the words ‘hide in plain sight, hide in plain sight’ to herself, she typed in the most obvious place she could think of.

Vicforbes.com

Nothing. Nothing for.net or.org either. Same with victorforbes and robertjackson, robertandrewjackson, andrewjackson and bobjackson.

How the hell was she meant to crack this? It was just her and a laptop in this stinking bloody motel room. What was she meant to do?

And then it came. The one person who would know the answer.