Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

Washington, DC, Thursday March 23, 20.14

She rode the Metro home, itching to look in her bag. But she didn’t dare risk it. What if someone looked over her shoulder? What if she dropped it and someone picked it up? Come to think of it, what if – today of all days – she was mugged? She remembered those stories of government officials leaving laptops on trains or in the backs of cabs, prompting the loss of secrets vital to national security. She squeezed the bag between her thigh and her arm, twining the strap around her hand for good measure. If some lowlife felt like stealing a purse, he’d have to pick on someone else.

She walked the short distance from Cleveland Park station to her apartment, fighting the urge to look over her shoulder every other step. Her hand trembled as she put the key in the lock. Once it had slid in, the door didn’t swing open easily as it would usually; it seemed stiff. Maggie gave it a shove with her shoulder and it opened.

She reached for the light-switch. Her eye swept across the open-plan studio space, taking in the hall she stood in, the kitchen to her left and the rest of the living area. Had the cleaner come? She hadn’t asked her to. And yet there was a scent of something in the air, as if the place had been scrubbed. She closed the door behind her and shot the bolt.

She unzipped her bag, where she saw her purse, her phone, a lipstick – no sign of the envelope! Instantly, she began pulling items out of the bag, one after another until – thank Christ up above, there it was. Paranoia was infectious.

She opened up a kitchen cabinet, took down a bottle of Jameson’s. Drop or two of water, a sip standing up, then she moved over to the couch and let herself fall into it. Blood pumping, she picked up the envelope.

Inside was a two-page document, stapled together, the crest of the Central Intelligence Agency discreetly placed in the righthand corner. In the top left, a small mug-shot that, after a few moments, she recognized as a young Vic Forbes. In the centre in bold type, it simply stated the subject’s name: Robert A. Jackson.

The resemblance between the young Jackson and the Forbes who had been on television earlier that week was barely discernible. He had hair then, brown and straight but covering all his head; a moustache too. Large glasses of the kind everyone wore in the early 1980s but which looked comic now.

She began reading, taking each line slowly. It began with the year of his birth, then a summary of his education: high school in Washington, then college at Penn State. Spanish major. Three years in the Marines, then recruited to the Agency. Deployed almost immediately to Central and Latin America. First assignment, Economic Attaché, US Embassy in Tegucigalpa, two years. Later to San Salvador, this time as a Trade Attaché, eighteen months. Finally to Managua.

She looked at the dates. Jackson would have been there when those places were at their hottest: he was in Nicaragua during the precise period when Oliver North and his pals were funnelling weapons to the Contras and lying to Congress about it. Maybe Jackson, with his fluent Spanish, was the funnel.

He would have been young. In his early twenties, running around war zones, drinking tequila with paramilitaries, handing over rucksacks stuffed with CIA dollars. In her twenties she had been bumping up and down dirt roads from Eritrea to Kinshasa, hitching lifts from guerrillas in flatbed trucks. She wondered if the young Jackson had felt the same thrill she had, the unique charge that comes from being in a place where every day is a matter of life and death.

And then what for Bob Jackson? A long stint back at Langley, stretching through the late 1980s and into the next decade. Probably pacing the corridors, looking for a role. When the Wall came down, and all the proxy skirmishes of the Cold War were wrapped up, warriors like Bob Jackson were suddenly left twiddling their thumbs. Maggie looked at the photograph, imagining how he must have felt.

There was mention of a temporary assignment in Spain, which she saw would have coincided with the bombing of the Madrid railway, and a couple of other spells in Asia, also presumably related to what his political masters would have called the War on Terror.

She was still getting no sense of him at all.

On the next sheet were the personal details which revealed only how little there was to reveal.

Marital status: single.

Children: none.

Significant associations: negligible activity of which the Agency is aware.

So he had been a loner who had died utterly alone. She remembered again the hungry desire on his face caught on the CCTV camera at the Midnight Lounge and, for the first time, felt a twinge of sympathy. Maybe what she had seen in Forbes’s eyes had not just been simple lust, but a different need. For the warmth of another person.

Maggie pictured him, turning up week after week, Wednesday after Wednesday, sitting at the same small table in the dark, gawping at the jiggling, surgerized bodies – and then heading into the night, back to that spartan house on Spain Street, where he would spend the night in the comfort of his own right hand. Maybe that was why he had looked so excited on that grainy TV image. At last he was with somebody.

She exhaled loudly and took another glug of whiskey. Christ, she still had her coat on. She should get up, have a shower, maybe eat. She got up and turned to head for the bathroom. As she did, she saw the winking light on her answering machine, which Liz had called ‘retro chic’ on her last visit. Reaching over, she pressed ‘play’.

One message from a married friend asking why she hadn’t come to brunch. She had clean forgotten. Another from the dry cleaners saying her jacket was ready. Then the third:

‘Could have sent you a text, or an email or a bloody Tweet,’ it began, the accent unmistakable. ‘I could have scrawled on your Facebook wall, or tried to Instant Message you, or whatever it’s called, but something told me you’d want to hear a human voice on your return from the Lost City of Atlantis. Mags, it’s Nick here, sweetheart, keen to know how my brightest pupil performed in her Journalism for Beginners practical. With flying fucking colours if Tim from the Telegraph is to be believed, though it sounds as if you skipped out without a goodbye. Very rude of you. I do hope you have not betrayed our unspoken bond of fidelity, Ms Costello. As luck would have it, I’m in DC for a few days. Call me if you fancy a bowl of Ethiopian sludge in Adams Morgan. Or failing that a drink at the Eighteenth Street Lounge.’

Her response surprised her. So often she would give Nick the brush-off. She was too busy or she was seeing Uri. But tonight she wanted to see him. It wasn’t simply that she needed company, though she did. The last visitor to her apartment had been Stuart: he had been sitting in her kitchen just yesterday, stuffing his ludicrous face with Cheerios, keeping the angst at bay. The memory brought a wave of grief, followed by a surge of panic. She was alone, and she needed help. This thing was too big for her, there were too many angles. Sanchez was bright, but he had not a fraction of Stuart’s nous or experience; nor his humanity. Besides, he was clearly nervous about even being seen with her, let alone speaking by phone or email.

Her head was swimming: too many hours alone. On flights, in cabs, she had gone over it all, over and over again. She needed to know whether Jackson’s blackmail effort had been sanctioned by his former employers at the CIA or some other faction within the US government. Or was the President right, had Jackson been a mercenary, a dirty tricks specialist contracted to do a job, just as Nixon had hired old Company men to bug and burgle the Democratic enemy? And what bearing did any of that have on what was still a, if not the, key question: who might have wanted him out of the way?