The Chosen One

45

Aberdeen, Washington, Sunday March 26, 08.55 PST

‘Turns out we’re a pretty good team, Mags,’ Liz had said, as they wrapped up what had been an hour’s phone call in the middle of the Dublin night.

‘Even if you think I’m wasting my life because I don’t have a husband and kids.’

‘I didn’t say that.’ There was a pause. ‘Did I? Blame it on lack of sleep.’

The password had worked immediately. No variations required, just the name of the President. Once she had keyed that in, the image at victorforbes.gov had suddenly appeared to turn into a square of dark, dull grey. Almost black. At first Liz had worried that she had failed to follow a protocol programmed by Forbes, that perhaps she had set off a booby trap he had laid that closed down the site to trespassers. But then she quickly checked a site on steganography and read that the apparent fade to black was a familiar trick. She had only to turn up the brightness on Maggie’s screen – a move so low-tech even Maggie understood it – and a new image revealed itself.

Though it was not really an image at all. Just six large numbers at the centre of the screen, separated by two slashes.

A date; American format. The month, slash, the day, slash, the year.

Working back, Liz discovered that Forbes had done some extra engineering on his apparently defunct website. It was programmed to a kind of timer: if the site remained unvisited for more than three days, then it would slowly emerge from Freenet, shedding its darkweb restrictions, and emerge onto the regular web.

‘Why three days?’ Maggie had asked. ‘Why not straight away?’

‘Because three days means you really are dead. You might have a heart attack and be away from your computer for forty-eight hours, but it doesn’t mean you’re dead. Three days gives you some buffer.’

As it happened, four days had passed since Forbes’s corpse had been found and that time-sensitive algorithm had now kicked in: the website’s underlying code had changed in such a way that soon the site would turn up on a search conducted not only by those using Freenet but anyone who typed the name Victor Forbes into Google. At that point, Liz explained, the encoded image would start yielding its secrets too. Hour by hour, the pixels in the Forbes self-portrait would start altering, so that the hidden image – the date – would reveal itself even if no one had had any idea it was there.

‘Smart guy, your Victor Forbes,’ Liz had said.

‘He’s not mine.’

‘Whatever. But he found a way to make sure that, if someone bumped him off, his little secret would rise up off the seabed and burst into the daylight.’

Maggie smiled. ‘You sure you don’t want to get back to writing again, Liz?’

‘You saying my choice to be a full-time mother is not valid?’

For a second, Maggie feared that she and her sister were about to plunge into yet another of their perennial sibling squabbles. Then Liz gave a small chuckle, announced that Calum was stirring and said goodbye.

Maggie sat there, staring at the screen. March 15, just over a quarter century ago, when both Robert Jackson and Stephen Baker would have been graduating college. Suddenly, she was certain that whatever Forbes had been trying to tell her from the grave must relate to the shared past of these two young men who had started out as friends and ended as lethal enemies.

More research to be done, and quickly. But starting where? Local papers from the time…Her fingers moving across the keyboard in a blur, she typed the words ‘Aberdeen Public Library’ into the search engine and, to her intense relief, the website told her a ‘community outreach’ effort meant that the library was now open for a few brief hours on Sunday mornings. What was more, the library did indeed keep the archive of The Daily World, the magnificently-named newspaper of Aberdeen, no doubt established in the era when a small town in the American West truly believed there was no limit to its potential.

She showered, aching at the effort of it, then packed her bags and requested a change of room, asking that someone come and move her bags later on in the day and tell her the new room number when she returned. This was a trick the Israelis and Palestinians used to deploy when engaged in secret negotiations. If you knew you were under surveillance, there was no point making it easy for those doing the watching. If you have to be a target, be a moving one.

By 10am she was standing outside the fine, arched entrance of the public library on East Market Street like a customer at the January sales, waiting for opening time. Once the door was unlocked, she headed straight for the newspaper archive.

‘No longer bound copies, I’m afraid,’ explained the librarian – early thirties, male, overweight and with a sibilant ‘s’. ‘They are on microfiche.’

‘Microfiche? I didn’t know that still existed.’

He gave Maggie a withering look, one that conveyed both resentment of her East Coast condescension and disdain for her ignorance of archival methods.

‘Do you need me to show you how to use the reader or,’ and here he allowed himself a bitchy smile, ‘maybe you remember using these at college? It must have all been microfilm back then, right?’

Swallowing a sharp response, Maggie smiled serenely and asked for a demonstration, explaining that she only needed to see the paper for two or three specific days in a specific year: the editions of March 15, March 16 and March 17. The librarian raised an eyebrow, but said nothing more. He showed her to a second-floor room, empty and municipal, then reappeared fifteen minutes later with little boxes that brought back to Maggie memories of her father’s old cine movies, each containing a spool of film. The librarian loaded the first one into the machine and then left her to it.

Maggie adjusted to the newspaper design of an earlier generation and started scanning the front page for anything relevant. A lead story on a budget crisis at the state capital, Olympia; a report on a resignation from the Aberdeen school board. Inside, car accidents, a high school basketball player set for a scholarship to Duke and a recipe column.

She was not deterred. Logic had warned her that the paper of March 15 might be a dead end. Whatever had happened on that day might well not be reported until the next day or the day after. She spooled forward to March 16 and cued up the front, the black-and-white image wobbling between the lines on the oversized screen. The lead this time was a statement by the Governor, something about agricultural subsidies. There was reaction from a union spokesman and another story forecasting healthy profits for logging. She turned to page two.

Now she read more slowly, her eye taking in each line, searching for the words Forbes, Jackson or Baker. She peered at every photograph, leaping when she saw a page four headline ‘Destined for greatness’ above a group shot of smiling young people. They were around the right age: Washington State students set to embark on the then-novelty of a junior year abroad. There was a Locke, a Chan, a Rosenbaum and a Massey. Not a Baker or Jackson in sight.

She looked at the next page: six. Nothing there either. Mainly ads on seven, letters on eight, more ads on nine and then an advice column, financial tips and, eventually, sport. Maggie felt her energies wilt, the dull throb in her ribs returning. The paper for March 17 proved just as empty.

She spooled back, reviewing what she had seen, now at half the pace. Still nothing. Then she did the same for the March 16 edition. Page one, news: nothing there. Two, taken up by an ad containing cut-out coupons for the Safeway supermarket and a story about sales of new cars. Three, a follow-up on yesterday’s report on budget negotiations in Olympia and a half-hearted attempt at international news with three in-brief items from around the world including one, Maggie noticed, reporting the death of a soldier in Belfast.

Four, that picture of smiling young Washingtonians heading to Europe. She stared at the faces. Was one of them Forbes, under yet another name? Was Baker there? But no matter how hard she stared, she could not conjure them up.

Next was page six, a preview of a vintage car rally coming at the weekend. Then the ads on page seven.

She went back. Had she nudged the controls on the machine too fast? What had happened to page five?

She lined up page four and inched the wheel along. Up came page six. She did it again, even more slowly. There was no mistaking it. Four was followed by six. There was no page five.

After she had tracked him down, the librarian did nothing to conceal his irritation at being interrupted about such a banal matter. As he accompanied her back up the stairs, he asked a series of questions that assumed she was at fault, bungling the operation of what was a pretty elementary machine.

‘You see,’ Maggie demonstrated, partly relieved to see that the problem had not magically corrected itself – a habit that, in her experience, afflicted all machines whenever she summoned assistance. ‘Four. Then six. No five.’

‘Maybe it was just a page of ads and so was not transferred onto microfilm?’

‘I thought of that,’ Maggie replied, immediately spooling to the several pages comprised solely of ads which had nevertheless made the transfer onto microfilm.

‘Well, that is odd, I grant you,’ he said finally, his voice softening. ‘I’ve never seen that before. I’ll need to report that right away. This is library property. You’re sure you didn’t do anything to it?’

Again, Maggie had to bite back a sharp reply. ‘Completely sure. Are there any other copies of that day’s newspaper around, do you think? What about at the office of The Daily World itself?’

‘They gave their entire hard-copy archive to us eight or nine years ago.’

‘So hard copies exist somewhere?’

‘They did. But we couldn’t afford to store them. So we put them on microfilm.’

‘The originals were destroyed?’

“Fraid so.’ His disappointment seemed sincere. ‘It happened to dozens of American papers. Their whole archives – just incinerated. Some papers were saved, by collectors. But not this one.’

‘So you’re telling me that page five of The Daily World for that date has vanished? It doesn’t exist anywhere?’

‘Not quite. The World digitized some of its archive. So if you know what you’re looking for, you can search their database. You just-’

‘The whole point is I don’t know what I’m looking for.’

He gave her a look, as if she had just confirmed his earlier, low assessment of her.

‘What I mean is, I’ll know it when I find it. It relates to this town or this area on that day.’

‘But you don’t know what “it” is, right?’

‘That’s right.’

The librarian drew up his shoulders and adopted the demeanour of an official. She saw him looking at the bruise on her forehead. ‘Are you sure you need to deal with this today? Maybe you could take a break and come back tomorrow…’

Maggie took a deep breath. Of course, she looked like a wreck; worse, even: mad. She had an idea. ‘Forgive me for being so demanding. And thank you for your help. It’s possible I’ve made a mistake with the year. Do you think I could trouble you for microfilm copies of the same paper and the same dates – but for the following year?’

He eyed her warily, as if dealing with an animal he hoped he had pacified but which could turn wild at any moment.

She smiled, a move that usually worked wonders but which seemed to have little impact on this man. When it became clear she was not going to give up, he sighed and said, ‘March 15, 16 and 17, right? For the following year?’

‘If you would.’

This time she checked the page numbers first. All three sets were complete, no pages missing. She started with the newspaper for March 15, exactly a year after the date Victor Forbes had gone to such trouble to secure for posterity.

The front page once again offered nothing of obvious relevance, a story about a new defence contract that would benefit Boeing, one of the state’s big employers, with knock-on effects for suppliers in Aberdeen. More mundane, local tedium on the subsequent pages.

Maybe she was chasing down the wrong alley here. Maybe the event Forbes had in mind was some national or international happening, some political landmark, far away from Aberdeen and the little Jackson-Baker soap opera. Perhaps she needed to be searching not the Aberdeen Daily World, but the New York Times or Washington Post.

She would check one last time, working from the last page back to the front. Sports, agony column – no emotional confession of jealousy from an R Jackson: she checked – letters, financial, ads, puff piece about a local hotel reopening…

Maggie had not read the story properly first time round, just taking in the headline and scanning the text for names. But this time she caught the caption.

Staff at the Meredith Hotel prepare for today’s grand reopening, one year to the day since the blaze that nearly destroyed the establishment.