The Chosen One

62

US air space, Monday March 27, 19.21

‘Let me correct that. He was one of our chosen ones. There are always several. Dozens of them in fact, in each generation. To allow for all eventualities: hedging, if you like. But of that cohort, Baker was our preferred one. If all went to plan, he was the one we wanted in the White House. And, guess what? Despite a couple of hitches along the way, all went to plan.’

Waugh smiled, then took another sip of champagne.

Maggie felt her throat turning to dust. So Baker was a hired gun, bought and paid for by the most venal institutions imaginable, the world’s biggest banks. The disappointment – in him, in the system, in her own poor judgment – seemed to be choking her from within. So much for all that grand talk of ethics and ideals, of changing the world. Baker was as rotten as all the rest of them, and he had played her. They all had played her, for the fool she was.

Disappointment gave way to a rising resentment, an anger she now attempted to channel. ‘So it was you who got those opponents out of the way, in the governor’s race?’

Waugh put his glass down. ‘Well, yes and no, Maggie. Yes in the sense that it was us who released the relevant information at the right time. And no, in that it was not me or any of my colleagues who forced the Republican nominee for Governor of the State of Washington to film his wife having sex with other men. He did that all by himself. Same goes for the Mayor of Seattle: no one forced him to use disparaging terms for the city’s Hispanic-American and Chinese-American communities.’ He smirked again, this time in mockery of politically correct convention. ‘We very rarely force anybody to do anything. That’s the joy of politics. It’s a human business. There’s human error. That’s the joy of it, but it can also be a huge pain in the ass. And that’s what we try to protect our clients from: unpredictability. To take the unpredictability out of politics. So that they – and we – can look to the horizon and say, whatever I have now I’m going to keep. In fact, I’m going to have more.’

Maggie didn’t want to hear his philosophizing. She just wanted to have the facts straight in her mind; she needed something firm to hold on to. ‘And Chester’s love-child: was that you too?’

‘Well, it was his rather than mine, but yes.’

‘That revelation changed the presidential election. Chester never stood a chance after that.’

‘That’s true.’

‘You did all this for Baker?’

‘Yes.’

‘But why? Why would you work so hard to get Stephen Baker elected? He doesn’t even agree with you. He wants to take on the banks.’

‘That, Maggie, only makes him all the more credible. For the day he gets out his pen and vetoes the banking bill that threatens to cripple my business. That threatens to deny me and my colleagues the money that is rightfully ours.’

A small light dawned in the darkness. Was it possible that Stephen Baker did not know he had been chosen, that his path had been smoothed all these years? Maybe it was him who had been played all along. Maggie shook her head, confused. ‘He’d never do it. Why would Baker veto a bill he believes in?’

‘Ms Costello, when are you going to get smart? This conversation is proving to be a major disappointment. I have junior analysts of the beer industry who are sharper than you are. Come on. How could I know with absolute certainty that he would veto that bill? Because one day, we’d knock on his door and tell him what we have on him. Lay it all out. Show and tell, like at elementary school.

‘We’d show him the photos of the Meredith Hotel, burnt to a crisp. Remind him we knew he was there. Maybe we wouldn’t even have to do that. We’d probably just have to say a single word.’ His voice dipped and he let out a breathy whisper, as if he were naming a sexy fragrance in a perfume ad: ‘Pamela.’

‘But there’s a photo of him in The Daily World, shaking hands with a senator in Washington. It was taken on the same day.’ Maggie could hear the desperation in her own voice.

‘Senator Corbyn was always a good friend to our industry. A most co-operative friend. If we asked him to shake hands with a bright young man from his home state, why would he refuse? And as for the date, well, who can blame the editors of The Daily World if they accepted the information they were given? They didn’t have the advantage we had: a copy of the photograph duly date-stamped, proving that that meeting between the Senator and the future President actually took place on March 17. Two days after the fire at the Meredith Hotel.’ Waugh paused for effect, to let this sink in, infuriatingly self-satisfied.

‘So we’d show him what we have and we’d give him a choice: of course we would. Veto the bill – or we reveal that you left a young girl to die. Simple. That’s how we do it. Don’t tell me you never wondered why politicians always break their promises, Maggie. Well, now you know.’

Maggie felt as if she had been punched, hard, in the stomach. She had clung to that photo of the young Stephen Baker shaking hands with the veteran senator just as tightly as Anne Everett had. They had both desperately wanted it to be true. But now she could not escape what Waugh had told her.

Of course she had believed in Baker more than any other politician she had ever known. So had everyone else. But that wasn’t the part of her that ached now. She had believed in Baker more than any man she had ever known, with perhaps two exceptions. She had been ready to turn her life upside down for him, because she truly thought he was different: that he was that rarest of people, a good man who would use his talents to make the world better and safer. Surrounded by a morass of lies and deceit, he had seemed…solid. Like a foundation you could build on.

Instead he was no better than Kennedy’s kid brother, the man who let a girl drown just so he could save himself.

The funny thing was, she wasn’t angry with Stephen Baker, not really. She was livid with someone else. Not Stuart Goldstein for insisting that Baker was ‘the real deal’. Not Nick, who had told her she’d be insane not to work for the coolest president of their lifetimes. She was furious with herself, for allowing herself to believe. She had let down her guard – hard-won, over long years – and this was her just reward.

But she was determined that Waugh should see nothing of the turmoil she was feeling. Let him think she had long known the truth about Baker and Pamela. ‘So Vic Forbes was working for you,’ she said finally. ‘That blackmail message was really from you.’

He smacked his palms on the solid oak table so hard that the crystal glasses wobbled. ‘Christ, no! You think we operate the way that prick did? Give us some credit, please. We get a meeting in the Oval Office. We’re photographed going in. “Today the President hosted leaders from the finance industry”, all that garbage.’

Like the meeting you have scheduled tomorrow, Maggie thought but did not say.

‘We go in through the front door. What Forbes did was cheap and nasty.’ Waugh looked affronted.

‘So he didn’t work for you?’

‘Forbes? As it happens, he did work for us. Once. A long time ago. As I understand it, he did some of the very early groundwork on Baker, gathering material in Aberdeen. He gave us the tip-off about the hotel fire, stalking Baker there probably. Jerking off outside the room as Baker got it on with Pamela, for all I know. And he told us about the shrink, which enabled us to destroy all the files and billing records so that they never came to light.’

‘How did you do that?’ Maggie asked, astonished at the sheer reach and depth of this effort.

‘A break-in at the doctor’s office. No big deal. So Forbes gave us some early help. I’m told there was deep personal animus between him and Baker, which always comes in useful. Meant he was motivated to do the work.

‘But after that, no. He joined the CIA, went to Honduras or some other shithole. He was off our radar. We kept tabs on him, of course, but they grew looser. Other people took over the file. And he seemed to have moved on. And then, last week, he pops up all over the TV making those wild accusations.’

‘Not on your orders?’

‘Are you crazy? He was ruining everything! The guy had gone rogue, doing his own thing. I don’t know why. Maybe he was trying to get Baker to pay – waiting till he was settled into The Oval Office, reckoning he’d get maximum payout from a sitting president – though that seems nuts. Maybe it was just plain jealousy. He did hate the guy’s guts. Everything he wasn’t, all that.

‘Anyway, we didn’t care what was in his mind. We just knew he had to be stopped. He was threatening to throw away our greatest asset before we’d had a chance to use it. All those decades of work would have been for nothing. We’d have been powerless to control Baker.’

Maggie was thinking hard, despite the ache in her ribs growing ever more intense. The pain was becoming unbearable. She desperately needed to move. For a moment she considered asking him to loosen the restraints, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. She didn’t want to owe him even that. She shifted the inch or two her shackles allowed. ‘You say he’d only worked for you in the early days, in Aberdeen. So how come he knew about the Iranian donation?’

‘Well, that was confirmation he was off the reservation. Because that was expressly nothing to do with us. Even we didn’t know about that. Our information suggests that was an initiative out of Tehran, the mullahs wanting to embarrass Baker. You gotta remember, Maggie, there’s a helluva lot of people around the world who don’t like the idea of Stephen Baker as President. He’s too different.’

‘So how did Forbes know?’

‘Not sure. But, like I said, the guy was an obsessive. Not impossible that he went through every donation Baker received, then traced them. He was crazy enough.’

‘So you got him out of the way. Sent some bait into that strip club, led him away and that was that.’

Waugh said nothing.

Maggie pressed on. ‘And you did all that to save Stephen Baker?’

‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that. We needed to keep him in post. So that he would veto the bill.’

‘Why didn’t you save yourself the bother, and just let Chester win?’

‘Could have done that. Trouble was, our main asset there was the love-child. We weren’t confident that that was sufficiently proprietary – that it was going to remain exclusive. Too many moving parts, too many people sniffing around. Rumours had been circulating for years. With Baker, the Pamela information was hermetically-sealed. No one knew.’

‘Except Forbes.’

‘Right.’

‘So you sent a team into New Orleans, brought them out by private jet. You’re like your very own CIA.’

Waugh pretended to look offended again. ‘I like to think our quality control is rather superior to theirs.’

‘It wasn’t such a smart plan, though, was it?’ Maggie persisted, beating back the discomfort. ‘You bumped off Forbes and the next minute, the whole blogosphere’s lighting up with claims that Baker’s Tony Soprano.’

‘Call it the law of unintended consequences.’

‘He’s facing impeachment!’

‘I think you’ll find things are back on track now.’

‘You mean, the-’ She shook her head, too numbed to complete the sentence. So even this latest boost to Baker, the story of the Republican senator and the pneumatic lobbyist, had come from Waugh and his pals. They were behind everything. Maybe even that demo on Sunday, that had seemed to come out of nowhere. At that, Maggie’s fatigue and pain was replaced by a sudden onrush of anger. ‘So why Stuart? And why Nick? Why did you have to kill them?’

‘Now, now, Maggie. Don’t play the hysterical woman. You can do better than that. With Stuart, we were left with no choice. Not after that phone call you had with him.’

‘Me? What phone call?’

‘The one where Goldstein – you know, “the man the President listens to more than any other” – threatened to urge Baker to resign. “Better to leave with some dignity,” he said. No, no, no. We could not have that. Not until the banking bill was dead and buried.’

‘So you killed him?’

‘The coroner’s report says he took his own life.’

A nauseating wave of guilt passed over her, as she imagined, yet again, Stuart lying dead in Rock Creek Park. She had been ready to believe he had taken his own life – just as this fucker, Waugh, had wanted her to. She flexed her muscles against the restraints, but the plastic ties cut into her flesh, allowing her no movement. Waugh was right to have bound her: if she could, she would have smashed her fist right into his face. How would that be for ‘playing the hysterical woman’?

‘As for Nick,’ he continued. ‘I’m afraid that was your fault. You involved him. He found out about this-’ he gestured at the smooth, noiseless interior of the jet, ‘-and New Orleans. The line that led you to us. We couldn’t risk him publishing that in a newspaper. No way.’

‘So why not me?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I asked you before and you didn’t answer me. Why not kill me? I know that you wanted to because, like I said, you tried.’

Waugh gave her the hint of a smile. It was chilling. ‘I repeat, we’ve come to realize, Maggie my dear, that you’re more useful to us alive than dead. At least for the time being.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Because you’re going to work for us. Negotiate the deal. Isn’t that your forte? Maggie Costello the great negotiator? Besides, we know you’re close to Baker; you’re one of the few people he trusts. All that “integrity” you both share.’ He released a smile, short and nasty. ‘In ten minutes this plane will land in Washington, DC – and you’re going to see the President.’