Sam Bourne: The Chosen One

‘Any case for the defence you’d like to make?’

‘Are you certain he knows?’ she asked feebly.

He gave her the first movement of a sneer.

‘Maybe his aides didn’t pass it on, maybe it hasn’t reached him.’ She could hear the desperation in her own voice.

Longley raised his eyebrows, as if to ask if she really wanted to pursue this line of argument. ‘He’s the one who raised it with me. Personally, this morning. He wants you gone immediately.’

‘It was just one word in one email. For Christ’s sake-’

‘Don’t take that tone with me, young lady.’

‘It’s just office banter. It was one remark-’

‘Do you even read the newspapers, Miss Costello? Or perhaps you are more of a blog reader?’ He said the word as if he had just caught a whiff of a soiled dishcloth. ‘Twitter maybe?’

Maggie decided this was part of Longley’s shtick, playing the old fart: he couldn’t be as out of touch as he liked to pretend, not when he had stayed on top in Washington for so long. She remembered the Style section interview she had read, in which Longley had claimed the last time he had stepped inside a movie theatre was to see Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity . ‘Have I missed much since then?’ he had asked languidly.

Now he was sitting back in his chair, relaxed. ‘Because you may have picked up that our Defense Secretary is – how can we put this? – not one of the President’s obvious loyalists.’

‘Of course I know that. Adams ran against him for the nomination.’

‘You are up-to-date. Yes. He may even run against him again.’

‘A primary challenge?’

‘Not inconceivable. The President has assembled what is admiringly referred to as “a team of rivals”. But as Lincoln understood, it may be a team, but they’re still rivals.’

‘So he-’

‘So he’s not going to let this go. Dr Adams wants to flex his muscles, show that his reach extends beyond the Pentagon.’

‘Which means he wants me out.’

The Chief of Staff stood up. Maggie wasn’t sure if the creak she heard was the chair or Longley’s knees.

‘That’s where we are. The final decision is not Dr Adams’s, of course. It rests in this building.’

What the hell did that mean? This building . Did Longley mean he would decide – or that whether Maggie kept her job or not would be settled by the President himself?

Longley had pulled his shoulders back, so that he could deliver his final remarks. ‘Miss Costello, I fear you forgot Longley’s First Rule of Politics. Don’t write so much as a note to the milkman in this town that you wouldn’t mind seeing on the front page of the Washington Post . Above the fold.’

‘You think Adams would leak it.’

‘Wouldn’t you? Revive stories about the Baker-Adams rift, implicitly putting himself on a par with the President? No thank you. The reason he’s inside the tent is so that he can piss out, not all over the Oval Office carpet.’

‘Does the President know about this?’

‘You seem to have forgotten that Stephen Baker is the President of the United States of America. He is not a human resources manager.’ His mouth seemed to recoil from the phrase, as if uttering such an absurd, new-fangled term might stain his lips. ‘I don’t want to be unkind, Miss Costello. But there are hundreds of people who work for the President. You are not of a rank at which your employment would be of concern to him. Unless there is a reason you think otherwise, in which case perhaps you would be so good as to disclose that to me.’

So that meant the final decision rested with Longley. She was finished. Maggie balled her hands into fists as two instincts warred inside her: fight and flight. She certainly wanted to hit this sanctimonious prick, who appeared to be enjoying the situation far too much; at the same time she wanted to run home and throw herself under the duvet. Doing her best to control herself, she bit her lower lip, hard enough to get the zinc taste of blood.

Longley glanced casually at his watch, a vintage Patek Philippe, elegant, unfussy; unashamedly analog. ‘I have someone waiting for me, Miss Costello. No doubt we will speak again soon.’ She was dismissed.

Maggie passed Patricia on the way out who, she noticed, did not so much as look up, let alone make eye contact. No doubt a gesture of discretion she had learned in many long years of serving Magnus Longley, who had probably sacked enough people over the years to fill RFK Stadium.

She waited till she was in her own rabbit-hutch of an office, an eighth the square footage of the Chief of Staff’s, before she would even breathe out properly.

Once she was sure the door was closed, she used her forearm to sweep everything – two tottering piles of classified documents, magazines, paper bags from the deli, chewed pens and other assorted detritus – off her desk and onto the floor. The gesture made her feel good for about three-fifths of a second. She fell into her chair.

Was this going to be the story of this year, having a magical opportunity in her hands, only to screw it up royally? Forget this year, was this going to be the story of her bloody life? And all for the sake of one supremely stupid moment of unguarded honesty. Not that Adams wasn’t an arsehole: he was, First Class. But it was absurdly naïve to put it in an email. How old was she? Nearly forty, for God’s sake. When would she learn? For a woman who’d made her name as a skilled diplomat, a peace negotiator for Christ’s sake – with all the sensitivity, discretion and sureness of touch that required – she really was an idiot. Eejit , she could almost hear her sister Liz teasing her in fake bog-Irish.

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t had a chance. When she had got back from Jerusalem – hailed as the woman who had at last made a breakthrough in the Middle East peace process – she was, everyone told her, able to write her own ticket. She had been swamped with job offers, every think-tank and university had wanted her name on their headed notepaper. She could teach international relations at Harvard or write editorials in Foreign Affairs. There had even been a whisper from ABC News that, with the right training – and a suitable wardrobe – she might have the makings of on-air ‘talent’. One executive had sent a handwritten note: ‘I truly believe you are the woman to make international relations sexy.’

But it was none of this that had made her return to the States nearly three years ago so thrilling. Instead, and much to her amazement, things had actually worked out with Uri. She had wondered if the relationship would prove to be little more than a glorified holiday romance: they had, after all, come together during the strangest and most intense week in Jerusalem and he, out of his mind with grief after both his parents had died within days of each other, had hardly been thinking straight. She had learned long ago to be suspici ous of relationships hatched on the road, especially those lent glamour and significance by the constant presence of danger and proximity of death. Love among the bombs felt delicious at the time, but it rarely lasted.

And yet when Uri had invited her to share his apartment in New York she hadn’t said no. True, she couldn’t quite bring herself to sign on the dotted line marked ‘official cohabit ation’: she had kept her apartment in Washington, planning to divide her time between the two places. But when it came to it, both she and Uri simply found that they wanted to spend most nights in the same city – and in the same bed.

There had seemed to be no reason for it ever to stop. But somehow, just a few weeks ago, she had found herself sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, looking out at a gleaming Washington, DC – scrubbed up and ready for the inauguration of a new president – with Uri at her side, his voice cracking, saying that they had run out of road. That he still loved her, but that this was no longer working. She had made her choice, he said. She had voted with her feet, deciding that her work mattered above all else: ‘The bottom line, Maggie, is that you care about Stephen Baker more than you care about me. Or about us.’