Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

Two minutes after she got back to the hotel, just as she was standing in the corridor and unlocking the door to her room, the phone vibrated. Stuart.

‘Stu, what the hell’s going on?’

‘Rick Franklin making his play for history.’

‘It can’t happen, can it?’

‘Can’t rule it out.’

‘But he hasn’t got the votes. I mean, we’re the majority party.’

‘ Meant to be the majority party. By a whisker. And that whisker is made up of Blue Dog assholes who will vote with the Republicans if they feel that’s where the wind is blowing.’

‘And is that where the wind is blowing?’

‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

‘On you partly, Maggie. You gotta find something to help our boy here.’

Maggie swallowed. She could hear the heart-busting stress down the phone and she was about to add another huge surge of it. ‘Well, I’ve found something. But I’m not sure it helps.’ There was a strange crackle on the line. ‘What’s that noise?’

‘Gherkins,’ Stuart said, crunching audibly and repulsively. ‘I haven’t eaten properly in forty-eight hours. I keep a jar in the office for emergencies.’ He belched. ‘So hit me, Maggie. I can take it.’

‘Forbes was at a strip club the night he died. He left there about an hour before the time of death. Left with a woman.’

‘Jesus.’

‘It’s not cast-iron proof but I think it adds up.’

‘Do the police know?’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone even knows he was there.’

‘Could it be a coincidence? Picks up a hooker, then offs himself? Or maybe he goes back with her, they fool around, it goes wrong and she panics. Worries that she’ll get blamed.’

‘I wondered about that, Stu. But there were no fingerprints at his house except his. It seems, I don’t know, professional. The woman was a dancer at the club, but she’d only started the day before Forbes died. Exactly the time Forbes started spilling the beans. And she hasn’t been seen since.’

‘OK.’ She could hear the sound of him thinking. Chewing and thinking. Finally: ‘The thing is, and this is about the only good news we have around here, New Orleans Police Department are winding up the investigation. Apparently the coroner says there’s no evidence to alter his verdict of accidental death by asphyxiation. And if there are no fingerprints at the scene-’

‘They could have killed him somewhere else, near the strip club. Then taken him back to the house, dressed him up, left him hanging. So long as they wore gloves, Forbes’s prints would be all over the house and they wouldn’t leave a trace. I know it sounds far-fetched, but it would make sense.’

‘Look, Maggie, I think the police just want to let this matter rest. Seems like some people down there are trying to be helpful.’

‘Who’s being helpful?’

‘It’s a Democratic town, Maggie. Of course the wingnuts are already blaming us for that as well. Obstruction of justice, all that crap.’

‘Stuart, at Forbes’s house, all the computer stuff had gone.’

‘The police. Bound to have removed it.’

‘I know. And they’ll have his phone and his BlackBerry.’

‘Yep.’

‘We know Forbes did everything by computer. The Facebook thing. The pretend hack of MSNBC emails. What I’m saying is, whatever it is I’m meant to be finding out – what exactly Forbes knew – it’s going to be on those machines. If we could-’

‘Can’t be done, Maggie. Our only route would be Secret Service. They could put in a request to impound. But what’s that gonna look like? White House poking its nose into a criminal investigation.’

‘But you could say he posed a security threat to the President’s daughter.’

‘ Posed . Past tense.’

‘All right. The Secret Service could say they were worried he had accomplices.’

‘To what?’

‘To his planned assault against Katie Baker.’

‘Yeah, but remember, Maggie, nobody knows about that. As far as anyone knows, Forbes was just the guy who popped up on cable posing as the brave truth-teller who was going to introduce the American people to the real Stephen Baker. They don’t know he was threatening a thirteen-year-old girl.’

‘Well, why don’t you-’

‘What, make that public? And thereby invite the press to notice that we hadn’t immediately gone to the police, despite his threats of blackmail, because we were worried he might actually have something?’

‘And then everyone would want to know why we were so frightened.’

‘Exactly. Which, incidentally, they want to know anyway. Forbes was on TV, remember, promising another big instal ment of the story. People are going to be digging already. Probably got private detectives crawling all over New Orleans right now.’

Maggie thought of Lewis Rigby. She had never asked for ID, she hadn’t Googled him. She had accepted his word that he was a reporter for the Enquirer . ‘Back to the computers, Stu. Are you saying that if it gets out that the Secret Service were looking through his machines-’

‘Except it won’t be Secret Service in the headline. It will be the White House. Which is all we need right now. We might as well put Stephen Baker in a Dick Nixon mask and be done with it.’

‘OK.’

‘Besides.’

‘Besides, what?’

‘Zoe – you know, the agent who took you to Maryland, on the raid? She reckons Forbes did it all in the air or something.’

‘In the air? What does that mean?’

‘Like I know. He didn’t store it on a machine, just on the internet.’

‘Oh, I get it.’ Maggie remembered Nick’s hairy biker story, as well as the stiff lecture she had once received from Liz, after her sister had found her on a visit back home, poised to pull out clumps of her own hair. Maggie had lost a crucial paper she had been working on for the UN’s Middle East envoy. She’d written it on her computer back in New York, then backed it up on a memory stick. She had even remembered to take the stick with her, keeping it safely in her pocket the entire flight home. Trouble was, her mother had insisted on throwing every item of Maggie’s clothing in the washing machine – including the pair of jeans with the memory stick still in the pocket. Every word on it was washed away in a blur of corrupted data. That was when Liz had walked into the bedroom they once shared, to find Maggie on her hands and knees, shaking the contents of her bag out onto the floor, just in case there was a hard copy of her precious paper buried inside, even though she knew that none had ever existed.

‘Mags, can I make a suggestion?’ she had said with calm smugness.

‘Not unless it involves you fucking right off,’ Maggie had said to the sister who had picked her up from Dublin Airport not much more than an hour earlier, after six months without seeing each other.

‘What do you do with your photographs?’

‘What?’

‘Where do you store them?’

‘In a bloody box, I don’t know!’

‘Because-’

‘If this is not connected with helping me get my document back I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Do you store your pictures on Flickr or a site like it?’

‘What the fuck is Flickr?’

‘Well, what I was going to say is, that’s what you should do with your documents. Don’t store them on the machine. Store them online. You get a password, you can work on them wherever you like, so long as you have internet access. And if you give your password to someone else, then you can both work on-’

It was then Maggie had thrown a shoe at her sister’s head. So she had never heard what exactly you could do if you shared your password, but she had got the rough idea.