The Chosen One

54

Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Sunday March 26, 22.55 PST

To her great relief the cab driver was still outside. He had waited nearly two hours, with only a single Christian radio station and the car heater for company. But he had waited. He had not been driven off the road, his brakes had not been sabotaged. He was still there.

Maggie asked how long it would take to drive to Boise. He gave a snort of disbelieving, mirthless laughter. ‘Can you show me your money?’ He wanted to see the cash before he agreed to go any further. ‘Lotta crazy people in this state,’ he said by way of apology.

Maggie took pleasure in pulling out five hundred-dollar bills and agreeing on that as the rate for the evening’s work.

‘Now can I ask a question?’ she asked.

‘You got it,’ he said, his spirits duly lifted.

‘If we end up driving through the night, would you mind if we didn’t speak for most of it?’

He smiled and turned the ignition key.

The darkness of the Idaho sky and the emptiness of the roads suited her perfectly. It reminded her of those countless night flights she had endured during the campaign, staring into the black nothingness. It was where she had done some of her best thinking.

For a brief, blissful second she had believed she had finally unravelled the knot bequeathed by Vic Forbes. When Anne Everett admitted that her dead daughter had carried a torch for the current president of the United States, Maggie had almost pictured it, a series of strange symbols suddenly turning into regular words – the code breaking.

The young, handsome Baker – Aberdeen favourite son and recent graduate of Harvard – had taken the adoring prom queen a couple of years his junior to bed in a downtown hotel, and there, somehow, she had died. It was a nuclear scandal that had just been sitting there all these years, waiting to be exploded by Vic Forbes, who – alone in the world, it seemed – knew of it and was ready to use it. But this theory had been shattered in less time than it took to think of it. That photograph of a young, eager Baker with Senator Corbyn taken on the other side of the country on the same day as the fire was definitive. If Forbes had ever gone public, Baker would have been able to rebut him instantly, simply by producing that photograph. The perfect alibi.

Could Forbes have made such an elementary blunder? Could he really have invested so much of his life in – and constructed his entire blanket around – a provably false accusation?

But that was not all that nagged at Maggie. She sat back in the car, letting the headrest take the strain on her still aching neck, as she thought back to the public library. Why on earth was that single page missing from the archive? Just one: page five. No others. Who had removed it?

The answer was clear: it had to be the same man who had turned up at the home of Anne and Randall Everett the morning after their daughter’s death – breaking the news to them, for heaven’s sake – waving an improbable amount of cash in their faces and buying their silence, in perpetuity. Why would anyone do that? If it wasn’t Baker who had left Pamela Everett to die, who was it? And who was this other boy, for whose reputation a man had been prepared to pay tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of dollars and take the trouble of destroying part of a newspaper archive, in order to keep his secret from ever being known?

Maggie could feel her ribs hurting, as well as her head. She desperately needed to talk this through with someone. She looked at her phone. Unregistered, pay-as-you-go, it should be safe. But she didn’t want to risk it. She leaned forward, lightly tapping the shoulder of the driver.

‘There’s an extra hundred for you if you let me use your cellphone.’

He handed it to her, placing a theatrical finger across his lips. I’m sticking to our deal: no chat.

For at least the third time, she dialled Nick du Caines’s home number, the only one of his she remembered. Voicemail, yet again. Where the hell was he? Shacked up in a love-drugs-and-booze-fest with some intern from ABC and screening calls? Probably.

She checked her watch. Midnight in Idaho, 8am in London. Worth a shot.

She used the browser of her BlackBerry to find the London number of Nick’s forever-ailing Sunday newspaper, dialled it on the driver’s phone – hoping he wouldn’t notice – and asked for the foreign desk.

A secretary answered. ‘Unusual call,’ Maggie began in her politest voice, explaining that she was a regular Washington contact of Nick du Caines and she had been trying to get in touch, though she had unfortunately mislaid his mobile number. She had a story that she was sure he would be interested in. Was there any chance they might help?

‘I think you’d better speak to the foreign editor,’ the woman said, an edge in her voice that Maggie didn’t like.

There was a delay until a man – early forties, plummy – came on the line.

‘I understand you’re a friend of Nick’s?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I’m afraid I have some rather bad news. We’ve only just heard. Nick is dead.’