Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

She pedalled furiously, feeling the strain in her calves and the heaving pressure on her lungs. No one had said cycling was going to be this hard. It was the cigarettes she blamed: she was fitter when she smoked.

So much for the fresh start. New job, new regime, she had told herself. Healthy eating; more exercise; quit the fags; no more late nights. If there was a plus to finding herself suddenly single, it was surely that she could now start each morning bright and early. And not just normal-human-being early, which 7.21am certainly counted as in Maggie’s book. No, she would start her day Washington early, so that a meeting at 7.30am would not feel like bumping into someone in the middle of the night. To the new Maggie, 7.30 would feel like an ordin ary moment in the heart of the working day.

That had been the plan, at any rate. Maybe it was because she had been born and raised in Dublin, only coming to America as an adult, that she didn’t fit. Whatever the explanation, Maggie was fast coming to the conclusion that she was innately out-of-sync with all these bright, shiny Washingtonians, with their polished shoes and impeccable self-discipline, because no matter how hard she tried to embrace the DC lifestyle, getting up at the crack of dawn still felt like cruel and unusual punishment.

So here she was, late again, whistling down Connecticut Avenue at a lethal speed, willing Dupont Circle to come into view but knowing that, even when it did, she would still be at least three to five minutes away from the White House and that was before she had chained up the bike, cleared security by putting her bag and BlackBerry onto the conveyor belt that fed the giant scanning machine, dashed into the ladies’ bathroom, torn off her T-shirt and cycle-clips, swabbed her armpits, used the hand-dryer to restyle her hair, wrestled her still-sweating body into her much-loathed regulation Washington uniform, a barely more feminine version of a man’s suit and shirt – and somehow altered her appearance from under-slept scarecrow to member of the National Security Council and trusted Foreign Policy Advisor to the President of the United States.

It was 7.37am by the time she stood, panting and still red-faced, before Patricia, secretary to Magnus Longley. She had been with Longley for more than forty years, they said; rumour was, he had scooped her out of the typing pool on his very first day of work at his father’s law firm. The pair of them had been around forever, he a monument in permanent Washington, she his stone base.

It had been Patricia who had summoned Maggie to this meeting, in a telephone message that had woken her blearily at 6.29am, only for her to fall back into a fatal doze that lasted another twenty-five minutes.

‘He’s waiting for you,’ Patricia said, peering above her glasses – attached by a string around her neck – just long enough to convey a sharp look of disapproval, for her lateness, of course; but for other more important reasons, too. That cold, lizard’s blink of a glance had taken in Maggie’s appearance from top to toe and found it sadly wanting. Maggie looked down and realized with some horror that her trousers, ironed so carefully last night in preparation for the next day but thrown on in haste this morning, were now unacceptably creased and marked at the ankles by a line of cycle grease. And then there was her autumn-red hair which, in a gesture of personal rebellion, she kept long and tousled in a town where women tended to keep it short and businesslike. Patricia’s expression conveyed more clearly than any words that no self-respecting young lady would have gone to work dressed like that in her day. And in the White House, too!

Maggie passed her hand through her hair one more time, in a futile bid to impose some order, and stepped inside.

Magnus Longley was a veteran Mr Fix-it who had served either in the House, Senate or the White House since the Carter era. He was the requisite greybeard appointed to balance out – and allay any anxieties over – the President’s youth and lack of Washington experience. ‘He knows where the bodies are buried,’ was what everyone said about him. ‘And he knows how to bury any new ones.’

His thin, aged head was down when she came in, poring over a neatly-squared pile of papers, a pen in his hand. He scrawled a comment in the margin before looking up, revealing a face whose features remained always neat and impassive. He still had all his hair which, now white, was combed perfectly into a parting.

‘Mr Longley,’ Maggie said, extending a hand. ‘I’m sorry I’m late, I was-’

‘So you think the Secretary of Defense is an asshole, is that right, Miss Costello?’

Maggie, parched already from the breakneck cycle ride, felt her throat run dry. Her hand, still outstretched and ignored, came down and reached shakily for the back of the chair facing Longley’s desk.

‘Shall I repeat my question?’ The voice was deep and strong, surprising from a man of his age, the accent creaking with old money and Park Avenue breeding. Longley was a New York aristocrat; his father had been a pal of FDR’s. He spoke the way Americans talked in 1940s movies, an accent halfway across the Atlantic to England.

‘I heard the question. But I don’t understand it. I never called the-’

‘No time for games, Miss Costello. Not in this office, not in this building. And no time for such infantile behaviour as this -’ the word punctuated with a loud flick of the fingers against a single sheet of paper.

Maggie tried to peer at the upside-down paper, suddenly full of dread. ‘What is that?’

‘It is an email you wrote to one of your colleagues at the State Department.’

Slowly a memory began to form. Two nights ago, she had worked late. She had written to Rob, over on the South Asia desk at State. He was one of the few familiar faces around; like her a veteran of pressure groups, aid organizations and eventually UN peace missions in horrible, forgotten corners of the world.

‘Shall I read the relevant paragraph, so that we’re clear?’

Maggie nodded, the recollection growing ever less hazy.

Longley cleared his throat, theatrically. ‘“Intel on AfPak suggests close collaboration with Islamabad”, et cetera, et cetera, “none of which seems to be getting through to the assholes at the Pentagon”-’

She had a nasty inkling of what was coming…

‘“-especially the chief asshole, Dr Anthony Asshole himself”.’ He placed the paper back on the desk and looked up at her, his gaze icy.

Now she remembered it all. Maggie’s heart fell with a sudden swoop into the pit of her stomach.

‘As you can imagine, the Defense Secretary is not too happy to be described in these terms by an official of the White House.’

‘But how on earth did he-’

‘Because-’ Magnus Longley leaned forward and across his desk, enabling Maggie to see the first signs of liver spots on his cheeks. ‘Because, Miss Costello, your friend at State is not quite as brilliant as you evidently think he is. He forwarded your proposal regarding intelligence co-operation with Pakistan to colleagues at the Pentagon. But he forgot to use the most important button on these goddamned machines.’ He gestured vaguely in the direction of his desktop computer, whose screen, Maggie noticed, was dark and very possibly coated with dust. ‘The delete key.’

‘No.’ The horrified response came out as a whisper.

‘Oh yes. The entire thread of messages.’ He handed her the print-out.

She took one look, noting the list of senior Pentagon officials who had been cc’d at the top of the email – including the handpicked, ultra-loyal advisors to the Defense Secretary – and felt the blood drain from her face. She stared down at the paper again, willing it to be untrue. But there it was in black-and-white: asshole. How on earth could Rob have made such an elementary mistake? How could she?