Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

‘A policeman found me?’

‘Yes, they’ll be coming later. They have some questions for you, too, I’m afraid.’

Maggie felt herself grimace.

‘For now, you just need to get some rest. Are there people you’d like us to contact?’

At that Maggie felt a different kind of pain, but no less sharp. ‘Um,’ she began, as a single face formed in her mind, a face she felt she had just seen.

‘A partner perhaps? A family member?’

‘Not just yet, thank you.’

‘But there may be people concerned-’

Maggie asked for some time to think and, then, for her phone. The nurse left the room only to return a second or two later, this time with a look – part baffled, part melancholy – that only added to Maggie’s confusion.

‘Are you sure you had your phone with you, Ms Costello?’

‘It’s Maggie,’ she said, still slurred. ‘And yes. It’s always on me. It would have been in my jacket. Or bag.’

‘We have an overnight bag. Also two earrings, one bottle of Allure perfume, one lip balm-’ She was scanning an inventory of some kind. ‘No phone.’

A suspicion began to grow, like a spreading stain.

‘What is that list you’re looking at?’ Now she was hearing the strangeness of her own voice. What ish that lisht…

‘It’s the police inventory. They have to do it for all NCA’s.’

Even raising an eyebrow in inquiry hurt, but the nurse got the message.

‘Non-conscious admissions.’

‘Oh. Do you have a small black notebook on that list?’

The nurse scanned it up and down, then turned it over, then back again.

‘No.’

Maggie felt a shudder pass across her skin. ‘A laptop? Wallet?’

The woman shook her head apologetically.

‘I need to make a telephone call. An urgent one.’

‘There’ll be plenty of time for that.’

‘No. Now.’

The nurse stepped forward and reached for Maggie’s hand. What she thought was a moment of tenderness was then revealed as something else. The main vein on her right hand was punctured by a cannula, a small tube attached in turn to a long, clear line. The nurse checked it, then produced a cuff to measure Maggie’s blood pressure, pressed an unseen button that made her right arm feel as if it had become instantly inflated, and popped a thermometer under her tongue. All in what seemed like a single moment.

‘I’m in bad shape, aren’t I?’ Maggie said, indecipherable through the thermometer.

‘You fell from a fast-moving car, so that would be a yes. You have a couple of broken ribs, but your legs and arms are intact. And we’ll keep checking that head of yours. Though, from what I heard earlier, you’d be on the Grays’ quiz team ahead of me. Try to get some rest.’

At last Maggie allowed the thought she had repressed to break surface. She could hear the voice that she had instantly found soothing.

Oh, don’t worry about that, dear.

The woman in the car park had seemed kind and genuine and Maggie had swallowed it all, obeying the instruction to stay in the driving seat while she fiddled with the engine – hidden by the hood and safely unseen. She had moved fast; a professional who knew exactly what she was doing.

A thoroughly efficient job, so deft that the woman, or her accomplice, must have followed Maggie onto the highway, watched her careen towards what they surely assumed was her death and then rushed to the car, opened it, stolen the key items and fled – all before the police or paramedics had got within a hundred yards of her.

That they had taken her phone, her computer and her notebook confirmed it. The President had been right. The moment those three letters – CIA – had been mentioned, he had been seized by what she had then regarded as excessive alarm. Talking of the plot against Kennedy, jumping to the conclusion that Stuart had not taken his own life – no matter how glum and melancholy he had been – telling her to watch herself, just in case. As so often, Stephen Baker grasped the reality of the situation faster and more fully than anyone.

He had been very clear: they faced a ruthless and determined adversary. Now she knew that they – whoever they were – were ruthless enough to kill.

A sudden flashback to last night: the car in front, getting closer, the brake lights bleeding bright red, the sight of those two heads in the back seat, two kids…

They were ready to kill more than just her. They had chosen a method – tampering with the brakes – that would almost certainly have led to the deaths of others.

She felt her body flood with rage. These people had murdered Stuart and had been ready to murder her, even if that meant killing two innocent children. She hated them with a loathing she could barely contain. She wanted to save Stephen Baker and his presidency, of course, now more than ever, given that it was under such cold-blooded assault. But she wanted something else, too: she wanted the people behind all this to pay for what they had done. She wanted revenge.

She could feel a trembling in her hands; it made the tube vibrate. Probably her body reacting to the sudden infusion of adrenalin her own fury had generated. Calm down, she told herself. Calm down.

As a diversionary tactic, she tried to think through exactly what information was in the hands of those who had tried to kill her. She tried to do it methodically, starting with her phone. The recent calls list was a disaster: it would immediately implicate the White House. It would reveal calls to Stuart’s direct line and to Sanchez. Also to a couple of cab companies in New Orleans and in DC, and to Nick du Caines. Maybe Uri.

The laptop didn’t contain much: she’d done next to nothing by email. But her notebook would have everything Schilling, the school principal, had told her. Whoever was holding it now would have all the information on Jackson/Forbes and the simmering, fraternal feud between him and the young Stephen Baker. If she was in a race against these people, she had just lost.

Or perhaps they already knew everything she had discovered, had known it for years. That brought her no relief. It just meant that they now knew that she knew. Maybe that was why she had become a target. She knew too much.

She looked around the room, the white walls suddenly revealed as a pale magnolia. A tentative wave of nausea began to rise in her throat. Why had the nurse not given her any water?

Now she was seized by a new alarm. How could she be sure this was a hospital? What if the CIA had simply spirited her away from the roadside and brought her to some closed hideaway, dressed up to look like a hospital when in reality it was anything but? This could be just a regular bedroom in one of their safe houses, with a few flickering machines brought in for effect…

She turned onto her side and, ignoring the pain now spreading across her chest, reached for the side table where there sat a chunky, beige phone. She grabbed for it, her hand flailing vainly. Still on her side, she pushed herself further towards the edge of the bed, the tenderness of her arms now revealed to her in sharp, searing sensations. She extended her arm once more and this time made contact.

The receiver was hers and she used the cord to reel in the rest of the phone. As she tugged at the spiral flex, she could hear the purr of a dial tone, a sound which offered some provisional reassurance. The base unit was now next to her on the bed, alongside her head. Too close to read it easily, she could see three printed lines identifying the institution and giving assorted numbers. The four words that counted were Grays Harbor Community Hospital.

So the nurse had not lied. Either that or this was a ruse too elaborate to be plausible. Occam’s Razor, Maggie. Occam’s Razor.