Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

She listened to the caller for a while, who introduced himself as a ‘dittohead’, then went on to condemn Stephen Baker’s upcoming visit to China. She hit FM, found an alternative rock station and cranked the volume knob to full, hoping somehow to channel the new rage coursing through her. How dare he?

She checked the mirror once more. Still the same truck. She strained to see the driver, but the angle was too steep.

At least the landscape outside, while unchanging, was easy on the eye. Mile after mile of tall pine trees, scraping the sky like sharp pencils. She had passed mirror-clear lakes, forests dusted with Christmas-card snow and all of it bathed in a piercing blue light. Were it not for the noise of the logging trucks thundering past her on the interstate, laden with treetrunks stacked like cigarettes, she would have kept the window down, so that she could gulp in the cold, fresh air.

She had flown to Seattle without calling Sanchez. She knew she was meant to ‘liaise’ with him, but she wasn’t going to start deferring to a twenty-seven-year-old guy whose place of work prior to the White House was the corner table at Starbucks, Dupont Circle branch. Besides, their encounter at Union Station suggested contact was now officially difficult if not forbidden. She understood why. If she emailed or texted or phoned, it would show up on records. And he had outed Bob Jackson, CIA agent, to her. Of course, rationally, that shouldn’t matter: Jackson was already dead and there was no danger posed by revealing his affiliation to the CIA. But the connection between rationality and politics, Maggie had learned some time ago, was very slender indeed.

There was his safety to think of, too. If they really did face an enemy ready to kill, it helped no one to put Doug Sanchez in the firing line.

What was more, if she were honest, she didn’t want him trying to talk her out of it. What did she have? Little more than a hunch. That’s what Stuart would have said. She could hear him saying it: ‘You’re going backwards, Costello. We need to know what Forbes or Jackson or whatever the fuck his name is knew. You’re not writing his biography. “Tell me about your childhood”, and all that crap. You’re meant to be finding out what he had and where he hid it.’

That voice was nagging away at her even as she clocked up her hundredth mile from Seattle’s airport, even after the pine forests gave way to the lake and finally the sign saying ‘Welcome to Aberdeen’. A thin strip of new signage, in the same colours and typeface, had been added just below: ‘Onetime Home of President Stephen Baker’.

As she looked around the place – shabby and peeling in the way of all small towns that have lost the role that once shaped them – she wondered if she had made a bad mistake. She was a continent away from Washington, DC – where the President she believed in was fighting for his political life. Was she really going to help him by snooping around a place that was on the other side of America and might as well have been the other side of the world?

She had punched the zipcode for the high school into the satnav and now it led her straight into the car park. She checked her watch. Thanks to the three-hour time difference and her early flight, it was still only early afternoon. The place should still be functioning. She looked over her shoulder: no sign of that truck – or of any other vehicle she recognized.

There was a framed photograph of Stephen Baker in the hallway and, next to it, an eighth-grade art project: ‘Dear Mr President’, in which students of James Madison expressed, through a drawing or a poem, their hopes for their most famous alumnus. When she saw the earnest pictures of handshakes, one hand white, one hand black, or of a bruised and bandaged globe, she was taken back to her own school days, and the art-room of the convent. The world had been bruised by nuclear weapons back then, rather than global warming; but there were always wars, and the misery they caused. Not much had changed. Looking at the pictures reminded her of her earlier self, the earnestness that had inspired her to take up her chosen career, trying to bandage the world. And now these children were being inspired by their new president. A lump rose in her throat, reminding her why she was here.

‘Can I help?’

Maggie spun around to see a smiling woman with long straight hair. In an instant calculation, she guessed that she was Maggie’s age, but that motherhood, and life in Aberdeen, Washington, had added ten years.

‘Oh yes, I’m looking for the Principal’s office.’

‘I’m the Principal’s secretary.’

‘Good. I wonder if I might-’

‘He’s busy with students right now. What’s your question?’ The smile remained fixed.

‘It’s about a former pupil at the school.’

‘Are you a journalist? All media inquiries go through-’

‘No,’ Maggie said, with what she hoped was a warm grin. ‘I’m not a journalist and it’s not about him.’

The secretary stood and said nothing. She was not going to make this easy.

‘My name is Ashley Muir,’ Maggie said, extending a hand. ‘I’m with Alpha, the insurance company. I’m here because one of our policyholders has, sadly, passed away. He left insufficient instructions as to beneficiaries and I-’

‘Do you have ID?’

‘I have my business card.’ Maggie opened her bag and pulled out the card she had been handed by Ashley Muir, Head of Government Relations for Alpha, at an awful Sunday brunch in Chevy Chase. He had called too, a couple of times, suggesting they go out on a date. She had said no but she was grateful to him now for giving her the only business card in her desk drawer that combined insurance and a female first name.

The secretary studied it for a moment. ‘This says something about the government.’

‘One of my duties is to look after policyholders who also happen to be federal employees.’ Maintain eye contact, Maggie told herself. Don’t look down or away: classic signal of an untruth. Reading other people’s body language was one of the skills you had to acquire in backroom diplomacy; but she was finding that deploying it on your own behalf was rather more difficult.

‘So what is it you want?’

‘I’m starting at the beginning, you see,’ Maggie said, moving towards the office, hoping it would send a subliminal cue to the woman to take her there. ‘Which is why it would be an enormous help if I could see the school record of the policyholder in question.’

‘Hmm,’ the secretary said, as she did indeed lead Maggie into the office. ‘Well, we don’t keep the records here.’

Maggie could feel her spirits sag. Wouldn’t that be typical: to trek the entire width of the American continent only to be told the papers were kept in – where? – some storage facility in Maryland, no doubt.

‘In fact,’ the secretary’s smile was now back, ‘I didn’t have any idea they were kept at all until last year.’ She paused, as if anxious that Maggie might not follow. ‘With the election and all.’

Maggie nodded, happy to play the pupil.

‘Then suddenly everyone wanted to see Stephen Baker’s school file: Vanity Fair , ABC News, Inside Edition. All of them. Had to call the files from that class up from the basement. But it was all there, yearbook entry, the whole deal.’

‘So the files are here, in the office, now?’

‘Oh, no. Once we’d got Stephen Baker’s file, we put the rest back into storage.’

‘I see.’ This was painful.

‘Oh, it was a wonderful thing to see. He was only here for a year or so, of course. But it was a nice picture. And his grade score. Through the roof!’ She laughed.

‘Yes, he seems like a very smart man.’