The Chosen One

43

Aberdeen, Washington, Saturday March 25, 19.00 PST

For the eleventh time in eight minutes, she looked at the clock. 7pm on a Saturday night in Aberdeen, three o’clock on Sunday morning in Dublin. She had promised her sister faithfully that she would leave her in peace. And she had already disturbed her once.

Maggie put aside the empty pizza carton, still decorated by congealed and processed cheese, that had represented her dial-up supper, delivered to the motel-room door. She badly wanted to call Nick du Caines – he might well know how to get out of this hole – but that was one of the thousands of numbers she had lost along with her phone.

She clicked on the TV, lighting upon C-Span’s replay in full of the President’s weekend radio address, which in a nod to the twenty-first century was now on camera too.

She found the remote and increased the volume.

‘For too long, these weapons have cast a shadow over our world,’ Baker was saying. ‘I am of the generation that grew up looking at a clock that stood, permanently, at five minutes to midnight. We were always on the brink of catastrophe. And as long as nuclear bombs exist, we still are.’

Despite her bruises and her aching ribs, she couldn’t repress a smile of disbelief and admiration that verged on wonder. She had drafted a policy statement about this during the campaign, assuming it would never get anywhere. How could it? After all, they lived in the real world. The world of politics.

But here he was, the President of the United States – under fire as never before, fighting a triple scandal and facing an army of enemies determined to eject him from the White House in the fastest-ever time – building towards the climax of a speech that she never thought she would hear.

‘That’s why I’m glad to tell you that I have just come off the phone with my Russian counterpart and he and I have agreed to meet in the coming weeks to take the first steps towards ridding the world of these weapons altogether. I will be sending a proposal to Congress…’

She looked over at her computer, still displaying the webpage of Vic Forbes. That man had set out to destroy the presidency of Stephen Baker. Forbes had started this entire chain of events that had left the man she believed in – and everything he, and she, stood for – hanging by the frailest of threads. There, on that screen, was the landmine he had buried deep and out of view – and it was still ticking.

She loved her sister, she really did. But some things were more important than Liz’s unbroken sleep. She dialled the number.

The phone rang twice. Then a croak remarkable for its coherence – and hostility: ‘This better be good.’

‘Liz, I’m really sorry-’

‘No, I mean this better be good. As in, “my-life-is-aboutto end-Liz-and-these-are-my-dying-words” good.’

‘OK, it’s not quite that good.’

‘Maggie, you stupid bloody cow, it’s gone three in the morning!’

‘I know, but-’

‘You know? So you can’t even blame the accident! I’d have forgiven you if you were confused from the accident!’

‘Oh right. Well, maybe I am a bit confused-’

‘Too sodding late.’ Maggie could hear the sound of a duvet, furiously thrown aside. ‘I’d only got back to sleep about ten bloody minutes ago. Jesus, Maggie, I could strangle you.’

‘I’m really sorry, Liz. But I am desperate.’ She wouldn’t mention Baker, and the need – for the sake of the world – to keep him in office. She would make it personal, an appeal to sisterly compassion. ‘Can I remind you that somebody did try to kill me last night? I think there’s something they’re trying to find out. My only chance is if I can work it out first. If I do that-’

‘You see, this is what I don’t get about you, Maggie. You seem to think that if you just know whatever it is you’re not meant to know, then you’ll be OK. Whereas the exact bloody opposite is the truth. You’re only in this fucking mess because you know too much!’

‘I don’t think that’s true.’

‘It bloody is! I don’t know anything and no one’s after me, are they? Bloody Mrs O’Neill on Limerick Street, she doesn’t know fuck all and she’s sound asleep right now. You see how it works? If you stay a million miles away from all this crap, then nothing happens. Simple.’

‘It’s not quite as simple as that-’

‘No, I can well believe that.’ Liz’s voice dipped, whether to avoid waking Calum or because she was going into one of her quiet – and therefore more terrifying – rages, Maggie could not yet tell. ‘I can see it’s way more complicated than that. This is about you needing adrenalin in your life, isn’t it – to convince you your life is worthwhile?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about you, Maggie. I’m talking about this insane way you live. Always travelling to the back end of arsehole, always dodging bullets. Why do you do it, Mags?’

‘I have a feeling you’re about to tell me, Liz.’

‘No, I really want to hear it from you. Go on. Tell me.’

‘Liz, I’m exhausted. I’m in a shitty motel in the middle of nowhere. I’m on my own. I hurt everywhere. I just need some help and I’ve turned to my sister. Is that too much to ask?’

‘I remember all the bullshit answers, Maggie. “Saving the world”, all that crap. “Making life better for children in war zones”, all that Miss World shite. But I don’t believe a word of it. Maybe once, when you started. But now it’s something else.’

Maggie could feel two competing emotions thudding through her veins, as if racing to reach her brain – or her heart – first. She had her money on anger, though sadness was not lagging far behind.

‘Go on, Dr Liz. Enlighten me.’

‘You’re trying to make up for it, Maggie.’

‘For what?’

‘For,’ and now Maggie heard the first silent note of hesitation in what had, until then, been an unstoppable flow, ‘for what you don’t have. For the husband you don’t have, for the boyfriends you don’t have, for the-’

‘And what else, Liz? What else am I fucking compensating for? What else don’t I have?’

But they both knew.

‘That’s why I reckon you phone me in the middle of the bloody night, Maggie. You want to wreck what I have because you’re jealous.’

‘That is NOT TRUE!’ The sound of her shout echoed around the motel room, making the walls ring. ‘Of course I’d love to have what you have – a great husband, a lovely boy. But for reasons I can’t sodding well be bothered to go into, I don’t have that option right now. I do what I do because I’m good at it. OK? I don’t know how or why, but that’s the way it is. All right? That’s the way I am. I tried it the other way – writing memos and going to meetings and wearing a fucking suit and doing what you’re meant to do – but I’m no good at it. Not the way I’m good at this.’

There was silence down the phone, both of them as shocked as each other by what they had just heard. Maggie cracked first, feeling the urge to lighten the atmosphere. ‘So though it’s been really interesting hearing the views of your therapist, do you think you could ask him to put Liz Costello on the phone? There’s something I need to ask her.’

‘How long since you spoke to Uri?’

‘Liz! I’m serious. I wouldn’t be calling unless I needed your help. Now will you help me or not?’

There was another long pause. Maggie could hear Liz breathing. Slowly she heard the rhythm change, the breaths coming softer now. Then she heard the pop of a bedside light being switched on.

‘What do you need?’

Maggie explained the dead end she had hit: the Freenet software had worked, bringing her to the victorforbes.gov site, but it was a brick wall. She prayed that her sister would fall into her usual patter when resolving one of Maggie’s computer crises – ‘Go to the menu bar, find settings, then tools, click on…’ – firing off a series of arcane instructions that would instantly and mysteriously unlock the riddle.

Instead Liz responded with a grunted ‘hmm’. In anyone else, you could put that down to sibling fury that had not yet subsided or else to the ungodly hour. But Maggie knew – having grown up in a house where the fiercest rows could pass as quickly as a summer storm – that it meant only that Liz had been confronted by a technical conundrum.

A series of noises down the phone confirmed that Liz had fired up her computer. ‘If this wakes up Calum, I promise you, I won’t speak to you till our ma’s funeral.’

‘Liz! Don’t talk like that.’

‘All right, I’m in. Give me the URL again.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’ve gone to the dark side. Freenet. What was that bloke’s name, Victor something?’

A few keystrokes later and Liz was muttering again. ‘Creepylooking guy. So remind me, what are we doing here?’

Maggie explained that she was convinced that Forbes, an internet pioneer, had somehow stashed his blanket online with this defunct and subterranean website the likeliest hiding place.

‘But there’s nothing here, Mags. Just that picture. It’s your classic single-page site. Just a flag in the soil. You know, Forbes reserving that domain for himself.’

‘Are you sure? This really is my best shot.’

‘That’s the thing about the darkweb. It’s mainly full of crap. It’s like that place in the Pacific Ocean where all the plastic garbage ends up. This is probably just some site your man set up and forgot about.’

‘When was all that internet pioneering stuff going on?’

‘Early eighties. And the only people doing it were the American military, some academics and a few beardy-weirdy hippies.’

‘But this picture is more recent than that.’

‘OK, let’s say you’re right and this is not just some early-days experiment. It’s still just a picture. There’s nothing else.’

‘He was in the CIA, Liz. Couldn’t he have-’

‘Oh, that is so cool. Actually that is too cool.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, that is genius.’

‘What is? Liz?’

‘I’ve read about this, but didn’t think anyone did it. But if anyone did it, it would definitely have been him.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Maggie could hear a furious hammering of keystrokes down the phone.

‘When was this guy in the CIA again?’

‘From the eighties till a few years ago.’

‘Perfect. I so bet I’m right. Liz Costello, you may never have cracked breastfeeding but you have cracked this motherfucker.’

Liz’s excitement was infectious. For the first time in days, Maggie felt herself smile properly. The exertion of her facial muscles hurt, sending a streak of pain to the back of her skull, but she didn’t care.

‘Steganography, Maggie. Steganography.’ She was speaking fast and getting faster. ‘Easily the coolest encryption ever thought of. Instead of a code that everyone knows is a code – so they immediately start trying to break it – you conceal your information in such a way that no one even suspects there’s a message there. Only you and the recipient know. Security through obscurity.’

‘Liz, you’ve completely lost me.’

‘That program didn’t work. Don’t worry, there’s tons more.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You’re the one who got the bloody A-levels in Latin and Greek. Have you forgotten?’

‘Every word.’

‘Steganography. Means concealed writing. It’s when a message seems to be something else entirely. So you think it’s a shopping list, but the real message is written between the lines – in invisible ink.’

‘But there’s nothing written here at all. It’s a picture.’

‘No one said it always had to be words. It can be anything. Some Persian tyrant once shaved the head of his most trusted slave, tattooed a message on his scalp, then waited for the hair to grow back and cover it up. Then he sent the slave off to his ally with instructions that, once he got there, he should shave off his hair and show them his head. Job done.’

‘So there are words hidden in this picture?’

‘That’s what I reckon.’

‘How the hell could he have done that?’

‘You don’t want to know, Maggie.’

‘Try me.’

‘Basically every pixel in a digital picture is made up of colour values, formed by strings of ones and zeroes. If you change one of those ones to a zero it will be invisible to the naked eye. The picture will still look the same. But all those little ones or zeroes you’ve changed can contain some extra information, besides the colours for the picture. You just need a program to piece it all together.’

Liz had been right: Maggie didn’t want to know. ‘So you reckon that’s what Forbes did to this picture?’

‘Yep. In the massive data of this picture, there’ll be a little parcel of hidden data. Just a few tweaks will have been enough. It’s not hard. Apparently al-Qaeda use it. You send a holiday snap; guys at the other end run it through a basic program and, bingo, you’ve got your instructions telling you to blow up the Statue of Liberty.’

Maggie winced. This was not the kind of thing to talk about on a phone line, not these days.

‘So is that what you’re doing, running it through a program?’

‘I am.’

‘Can I see?’

‘No.’ There was a pause. ‘Actually yes. I’ll remote access you.’

‘You’ll what?’

‘I’ll take over your computer and run it from here. Then you can see what I’m seeing.’

‘You can do that?’

‘Easily.’

‘Can anybody do that?’

‘Only if you give them all the info you’re about to give me.’

Methodically, Liz ordered Maggie around her computer telling her to open up System Preferences one moment, then to choose an option from the pull-down Tools menu the next – one baffling step after another. As far as Maggie was concerned, the entire process might as well have been black magic. And she couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that if Liz Costello, young mum in Dublin, could take control of her computer this easily so could those lurking in the dark who meant her only harm.

‘There,’ said Liz at last, invisibly moving the cursor around Maggie’s screen as if it were possessed by a demon. It was hovering over the photograph of Vic Forbes. ‘I’m on. And I think we may be in luck. You said he wanted this picture to be decoded, right?’

‘Yes, eventually.’

‘That’s why he’s gone for Mozaiq. Keep it mainstream.’

Maggie tried not to snort.

‘OK, here goes.’ Liz made a tum-tee-tum sound, the noise a tekkie makes when they’re waiting for a computer to perform a function. Eventually she said, ‘Oh. It’s encrypted.’

A box, familiar even to Maggie, had appeared in the middle of the screen, like a plaster across the bridge of Forbes’s nose. It demanded a password.

‘Let me do this, Liz.’

Maggie breathed deep, closed her eyes and then allowed herself a second smile. This was Forbes’s blanket, the insurance policy he had designed to render futile any attempt to silence him, the mechanism that would ensure his deadliest information would surface whether he was dead or alive. Without hesitation, she typed in the twelve letters that, she felt certain, would unlock the code.

S-T-E-P-H-E-N-B-A-K-E-R