The Chosen One

60

Teterboro Airport, New Jersey, Monday March 27, 18.42

For the best part of forty minutes Maggie had sat on the edge of the rear passenger seat, willing the cab driver – turbaned and listening to the BBC World Service – to go faster. He had given her a series of disapproving looks, as if her angst were so much cigarette smoke fugging up his cab. Taking out her compact, she could see why. She looked appalling, like some kind of strung-out addict, pale and drawn and raw around the eyes; hardly a suitable guise for the next stage in her plan. She repaired as much of the damage as she was able to, brushing the unfamiliar hairstyle into some kind of order, applying dabs of concealer, mascara, a touch of lipstick. All it succeeded in doing was papering over the cracks, but it was the best she could manage.

For the rest of the journey she had alternated glances over her shoulder, checking to see if they were being followed, with long spells spent staring at the photograph which she had kept up on her now-offline computer screen. She tried to look at it from different angles, to see if there was any way that the lean, handsome young man in the picture was not Stephen Baker.

She had tried and she had failed.

Could it have been doctored? You could do anything these days on Photoshop. But even as she grasped at that straw, she knew that Forbes would not have gone to such lengths to protect a bogus photograph. This was his ‘blanket’, the insurance policy designed to protect his life. The photo must be real.

And yet, she had seen the picture cherished for so long by Anne Everett, the clipping from The Daily World showing young Baker in Washington, DC, on the other side of the continent, on the very same day as the hotel fire. It made no sense.

Eventually the cab passed a sign for the General Aviation building and Maggie jumped out, thrusting a wad of bills into the driver’s hand. She looked at her watch: the plane was due to take off in fourteen minutes.

She did her best to straighten herself out and to walk tall. She needed to look like the kind of woman who knew her way around a private airfield for the highest-paying corporate customer.

She strode up to the reception desk. ‘I’m afraid this is very urgent. I’m here for the AitkenBruce flight to Washington that leaves in a few minutes? I have some important documents to deliver to them.’

‘Are they flying out of nineteen or twenty-four today?’

‘You know, they didn’t say. Could you check for me?’

The woman tapped away at her computer. ‘It’s runway nineteen. I’ll let them know you’re here.’

Maggie turned around and headed for the door, the voice of the receptionist calling after her: ‘Miss! Excuse me! Someone’s coming to meet you here. You’re not to go out there. Miss!’

As she walked headlong into the wind, vicious in this flat expanse of asphalt, it was a struggle to maintain her confident, head-up-shoulders-back stride. Eventually she broke into a jog. She passed a sign for Runway 1 and, a full five minutes later, Runway 6. It was no good. There was just too much ground to cover. Her sides heaved: her battered ribs complained. She looked at her watch. Six minutes to take-off. She was never going to make it. But she had to: she was perhaps the only obstacle standing between Roger Waugh and Stephen Baker; the only one who could unravel the mystery that tied them together. Taking a deep breath, she drove herself into a faster jog, cursing all the damage that cigarettes and her own bloody-minded refusal ever to visit a gym had done to her poor lungs.

Finally, she saw a marker indicating that she was at Runway 19. Three minutes to take-off. She stood where she was, near three parked, golfcart-style airport buggies, and looked straight ahead.

Before her, separated by a grass strip perhaps seventy yards wide, was the sleek body of a Gulfstream jet. The top half was painted white, with a long curve of black just below the seven passenger portholes. At the rear, flanking the tail, were the mighty jet engines, already revving up. The noise was so loud she could feel it vibrating through her breastbone.

Parked just alongside the open cabin door and the descended staircase was a vehicle no less elegant, a black Lincoln Town Car. That surely confirmed she had come to the right place. She was now in no doubt that that plane belonged to AitkenBruce and that inside that car sat its chairman and chief executive, Roger Waugh.

What was she to do now? Should she just stride up to the car, waving a sheaf of fictitious papers? Even if that worked, then what? She had come this far and yet now, so close, she was uncertain.

Unbidden, a question popped into her mind: What would Stuart say? She was just forming an answer when she felt the sudden and tight grip of a hand on each of her upper arms. A half-second later, there was a hand over her mouth and then – darkness.