Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

‘We are agents of the United States Secret Service!’ Zoe shouted once more. ‘Come out with your hands up.’

The first noise, a kind of grinding sound. Was that a key turning in a backdoor lock? Was he getting away?

Zoe now rushed through the archway, her finger tight on the trigger. ‘Freeze!’

A half-second later they saw the source of both the change in the light and the noise. The image Maggie had had in mind had been half-right. There was a computer – but no man. Just a lonely machine on the kitchen table, the flickering green lights of a router right next to it.

Zoe lowered her gun and stepped towards the machine. She could see from the blinking cursor that the computer was functioning. She turned to Maggie. ‘I’m sorry, Ms Costello, this seems to have been a wild goose chase. I really-’

But Maggie stopped her. ‘Look-’

The cursor was moving, apparently of its own accord. They watched as it zipped around the screen, finding the Word icon, clicking it open to reveal a blank document. And now words began to appear on the screen, letter by letter, typed by some unseen hand.

Welcome to my home. Sorry I’m not in. Do make yourself comfortable. Do I take it from your visit that your boss is keen to talk?

Washington, DC, Tuesday March 21, 14.26

‘Aren’t people going to talk?’

‘What? About you and me?’

‘Yes. Me, in here.’

‘Something tells me, Maggie, that people worked out long ago there’s not a chance of that happening: you’re not my type.’ And with that, a smile spread across the large, flushed, wobbling face of Stuart Goldstein, the first smile Maggie had seen in what felt like weeks but was actually less than thirty-six hours.

At his request, she had gone straight to his office as soon as she had returned from the raid on the Maryland house. He had had to put her on the visitors list at the bloody tourists’ entrance at Fifteenth and Hamilton Place; she had had to show her passport to gain admission to the White House.

‘I mean it, Stu. People will be suspicious.’

‘Maggie, right now we have seven senators calling for an independent counsel to investigate the President for “alleged financial links” to fucking Tehran. People in this building have got other things to worry about than your employment arrangements.’

Maggie bowed her head in a ‘you’re the boss’ gesture and continued her report back: the Secret Service was conducting an urgent trace on the dumb terminal they had discovered in Bethesda. They had so far narrowed down the location of the master computer to the south-eastern United States, but could not be more specific.

They were waiting for the TV to deliver what it had promised. Fifteen minutes earlier, Goldstein had had a call from a contact inside MSNBC warning him that the network was about to air a live interview with the source of its two recent stories on Stephen Baker. The partial identification in the blogosphere had given way to a full ID, once the collective investigative might of the internet had got to work.

The source had been named as Vic Forbes of New Orleans, Louisiana. Stu had immediately put one of his best researchers onto it: he knew he was in a race against both the media and the Republicans to know everything about Forbes that could be known. And then to define him. Crank, attack dog, dopehead. Whatever would shatter his credibility.

‘Here’s what I don’t understand,’ Maggie said, while the TV cut to a weather forecast. ‘The shrink thing. How come that didn’t come out before?’

‘I still haven’t quite figured that out. Not to my own satisfaction.’

‘Do you think the others knew and didn’t use it?’

‘No way. Adams and Rodriguez were trying to kill him in the primaries. And Chester in the general. They all had oppo research digging away, night after night, climbing all over his past. And the media, working twenty-four/seven.’

‘What about you? Did you know?’

‘Come on, Maggie. You’re my favourite Irishman and all that, but I can’t get into my personal relationship with him.’

‘So you did know.’

Goldstein smiled enigmatically, an expression which was accompanied by a counterpoint of snorting, as the exhalation that would normally have exited from his mouth re-routed via his nose. He really was monumentally unfit. ‘Whether I did or did not is not the important thing here. What matters is how the fuck did this Vic Forbes find out?’

‘Maybe he spoke to the shrink?’

‘Difficult. He died fifteen years ago.’

‘There would have been records. Papers.’

‘Nuh-uh. None.’

‘Bills?’

‘Put it this way, yours truly did not come down with the first shower of rain. I am used to the dirtiest dirty tricks. You don’t get to be a councilman in New York unless you know how to rip a guy’s heart out with your teeth. I made sure in Baker’s first race that the enemy couldn’t dig up any surprises.’

‘Because you had dug them up first.’

‘Exactly. Wielded the spade myself.’ He held up his hands, the effort of which once again altered the rhythm of his breathing. ‘Then I did it again for the governor’s race.’

‘With professional help this time, I bet.’

‘You’re damn right. I had two of Seattle’s finest – ex-cops actually – investigate Stephen Baker as if they were determined to convict him of a felony. Find out everything. Go through his phone bills, house deeds, mortgage payments, bank accounts, college transcripts. They hacked into his emails and tapped his phone for all I know. Spoke to everyone, interviewed old girlfriends, made sure there were no old boyfriends. If there was a wall Stephen Baker had pissed against, they went to sniff it. Then I did it all over again before he announced for President.’

‘Before?’

‘Oh yes. Not much point doing it afterwards, is there?’

‘And did they find anything?’

‘You know everything they found. So does the American people.’

Maggie smiled at the realization of it. ‘Of course. The big “I experimented with drugs” admission. Getting stoned rebranded as a science project. Experimented , my arse.’

‘Sure, it’s bullshit. But it worked, didn’t it? Once you get it out there, you get to define yourself-’

‘-before they define you. What about Iran?’

‘Well, that couldn’t come up during the campaign ’cause it hadn’t happened yet. That took some serious digging. Somehow Forbes knew what we didn’t know ourselves.’

‘You didn’t know Jim Hodges was Hossein Najafi?’

Goldstein jerked his head back, as if affronted. ‘Listen Maggie. Even my booba , may she rest in peace, knows that you don’t take money from fucking I-ran! Of course we didn’t know.’

‘Were we set up? Someone sent Hodges in here to embarrass us?’

‘Maybe. Maybe the Iranians did it. Make Baker look like an asshole. Right now, though, the only thing that bothers me about Hodges is how Forbes knew about him. And about the shrink.’ He stared at the TV. ‘I want to know who this bastard is .’

In the end, she was disappointed. Vic Forbes did not look like a monster or a pantomime villain. In truth, his face, as he stared dead-on at the camera, conducting a satellite interview from a studio in New Orleans, was forgettable. It was lean, like one of the whippets her grandfather’s friends used to keep in Dublin. His nose seemed to be pinched, too thin at the bridge. He was bald, save for some slight grey at the temples, which had Maggie put his age at around fifty, though it was perfectly possible that he had looked the same way when he was thirty.

If she had guessed how this scene would have played out, she would have imagined embarrassment would at least feature in it somewhere. Maybe shame was too much to ask for in this day and age, but you’d think a man who had anonymously smeared the President would at least have the courtesy to seem uncomfortable, even if he couldn’t bring himself to squirm in his chair.