Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

‘I see two scenarios, Maggie, and they both stink of shit. First scenario, and I admit this stinks even worse than the other, is that someone tells their best pal at the Times that “you’ll never guess what the President said”…’

‘No one would do that.’

‘Not even deliberately. Just chatting, shooting the breeze. You know what DC is like: people talk. They can’t help themselves.’

‘Then you shouldn’t have gathered the team. Not if you don’t trust them.’

‘If it had been up to me, we wouldn’t have.’

At this, Maggie couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow. Stuart Goldstein usually observed the discipline of a Tudor courtier, dutifully deferential to the protocol of collective responsibility: he would defend any decision of the king as if it were his own. Maggie had never before heard him reveal a disagreement between himself and Stephen Baker, at least one which did not end in the eventual vindication of the President, offered as self-deprecatory evidence of the almost supernatural judgment of the man they all worked for. (‘I told him, you don’t need to visit in person. Do it by phone. But he insisted. And you know what? He was right.’)

But this was different. And even though it hardly amounted to lacerating criticism, Maggie noted it as a sign that the tectonic plates were shifting somehow; that this crisis was real.

‘If that happens, Maggie, if it gets out that he said those words a matter of hours before Forbes was found dead, then…’ His voice trailed off, as if the thought was too awful even to voice out loud.

‘So what’s the other scenario?’

‘That no one leaks. But that the President’s most senior aides, his most trusted counsellors, do what you did: file away what you heard in some corner of the brain, where it never quite goes away. That some little piece of them will be thinking, “That was funny. Baker said he wanted Forbes gone and look, hey fucking presto, Forbes was gone the very next morning.”’

‘But if they don’t say anything, then - ’

‘Then it’s still a disaster!’ Stuart pounded the table again. His usually cheerful, gnome-like countenance was gone, transformed by sorrow or anger, Maggie couldn’t quite tell which. ‘Maggie, do you know how long a presidential term is? In days?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘It’s fourteen hundred and sixty days. Do you know how many days we’ve had? Sixty-one. That’s all. Can you imagine if he has to stagger on for fourteen hundred fucking days without the trust of his most senior advisors? If they think what you were thinking, the moment you heard the news just now?’

Maggie stared into her coffee, reluctant to meet Stuart’s gaze – chiefly because she could not deny what he had just said.

‘We have to know the truth, Maggie. Everything. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to rebut all the lies and the conspiracy theories that are building and spreading right now.’ He gestured towards his iPhone, as if it held a lethal virus that was growing with every second. ‘We need to get the facts, Maggie. The full story. Otherwise the Stephen Baker presidency is going down.’

Maggie held his gaze and then, in a new tone, brisk and businesslike, she began working through the questions to be answered.

‘First, you need to know if it was a suicide. Then you need to know if Forbes was alone.’

‘Does this look like the work of a lone gunman to you, Maggie? Think of the scale of the operation. The depth of the research. The media savviness. The unmanned computer in Maryland, relayed to New Orleans. All that would have taken time and money. Resources.’

‘So you need to know if he was part of a team. If he was, the threat is still there.’

‘Right. Who are they? Is this Republican dirty tricks? Foreign? Someone we haven’t thought of?’

‘And what is this nuclear secret he was about to drop?’

Goldstein pointed his finger directly at Maggie, a charades gesture she had come to love: he deployed it during their discussions-cum-tutorials, the sign that she had asked precisely the right question or made the key point. ‘What indeed? What exactly do they have on Stephen Baker that convinced Forbes that he could blackmail the President of the United States?’

And, Maggie thought, could have made the President of the United States consider paying up. For that, surely, was what lay behind last night’s meeting: Baker would not have summoned them all unless he had been actually considering acceding to Forbes’s demands.

Her mind was whirring now, rattling through multiple questions, each one of which spawned dozens more – forming a vast, elaborate labyrinth that she could visualize. A decisiontree, the management gurus called it, depicting one question as it split off into two branches – yes and no – which themselves split off again and again. Most people would probably be terrified by the sight of such a thing, but Maggie revelled in the complexity of it. The diplomatic negotiations which had dominated her recent professional life worked the same way: you had to consider each path the parties might take, and then work out which tributaries and detours might lead off each path, always looking for the dead ends. But before any of that there was one large fork in the road.

‘You’ve got a lot of work to do,’ she said.

‘What do you mean “you”? I don’t like this “you”. It’s “we”, Maggie. You, me and Stephen Baker.’

‘Do I have to remind you again, Stuart? I was fired.’

‘And do I have to remind you that I already said that’s an advantage? Distance. Besides, you do this for him, there’s no way the President is not going to bring you back. He wants you to do that Africa thing.’ He took another plunge into the cereal box.

Maggie watched him munch, looking at her, waiting for an answer. She realized that she felt a twinge of disappointment at his last remark, dangling the carrot of a return to her old job. If she were going to help, it wouldn’t be for that reason, for herself. It would be because she believed in Stephen Baker, believed in what he was trying to do, had believed him, in truth, from that very first car ride across the vast empty spaces of Iowa. She couldn’t stand by and watch his presidency destroyed by some cheap dirty tricks campaign. Too much was at stake.

‘OK,’ she said, finally. ‘You’d better go. I need to leave now.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Where do you think? I’m not going to get any answers here, Stu. I’m going to New Orleans.’

Email chatter, intercepted by the National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland. Thought to be the text of a statement issued by a key leader of violent jihadism, whereabouts unknown:

I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Mohammed is his messenger.

The head of the infidels worldwide has a new face, but the rotten heart is still the same. They try to trick and to deceive, but our nation, the Islamic world, is old and wise and will not be deceived. Baker is still the same infidel, still the same coward, even if he tries to wag his tail instead of baring his teeth.

But not all Muslims are as wise as they should be. Some forget how America has abused the people and sacred places of Islam for many decades, how with fire from the north to the south, from the east to the west, this Shaitan has slain our children. These unwise Muslims want to touch the hand of Baker, believing that he is reaching to them in the name of peace.

This has hurt our cause. Our enemies gloat that we are losing our support, that our numbers are falling. I say to the warriors of Islam, these few words: we are now in a new struggle, to keep the faith of every Muslim, to prevent naïve brothers and sisters being tricked by the smiling face and honeyed words of the deceiver Baker.