Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

Maggie nodded towards the tablets. She took the tiny paper cup from the nurse and put the pills on her tongue, then knocked back a swig of water.

‘Well done, dear.’

The instant the nurse’s back was turned, Maggie popped the two tablets out of the side of her cheek where she had lodged them, and tucked them under her pillow. She waited for the door to creak shut.

Right, that was it. Whoever it was who had tried to kill her once would doubtless be back to try again. She would not stay here a moment longer, a sitting duck. Lying here she could be injected, poisoned or smothered: it would be so easy.

She looked first at her hand, at the needle embedded in the largest vein. Grimacing from the pain, she removed it slowly, grabbing a tissue from the box by her bed to staunch the blood.

Next she levered herself forward away from the pillow, so that she was supporting her back with her own strength. She pulled back the duvet. For the first time she saw that she was wearing a standard hospital robe, the words Grays Harbor stencilled across it in the style of a prison uniform.

Now, with a massive exertion, she swung first one leg and then the other off the edge of the bed and slid her bottom forward till her feet touched the ground. Gingerly, she transferred her weight onto them and to her relief, realized that she could walk. Clearly she had sustained the most serious injuries in her top half.

She made it across the room to the chair where her overnight bag sat like an old friend. She unzipped it, finding trousers and a shirt inside. It took nearly ten minutes to dress herself.

She was about to leave when she remembered the note from Sanchez, still by the bed. She shuffled over and retrieved it, then moved towards the door, and froze. There, a full-length mirror projected back an image that stopped her short. Her right cheek shone with a red bruise and there were dark, deep lines around and underneath her eyes. She looked like an inmate of a women’s refuge.

Cracking open the door, she tried to swing her bag casually over her shoulder – a movement that made her want to howl with pain – and began to make her escape. With all the strength she could muster, she walked past the nurses’ station – no shuffling allowed now – determined not to look back.

She had gone perhaps five paces when she heard a voice behind her. ‘Miss? Excuse me?’

She was just a few feet from the double doors leading away from here.

‘Miss?’

Over her shoulder, as nonchalantly as she could manage, she called out: ‘She seems much better! Thanks.’ She pushed the doors open and left.

The signs offered little help. Geriatrics upstairs, obstetrics downstairs, X-rays along the corridor. And then, separately, something else: student halls of residence.

She hobbled in that direction, wincing at the pain as she headed down two flights of stairs. Before long she was away from the wards and in a series of corridors containing a series of identical doors.

Finally she found what she was looking for: an exit sign. Her hunch had been vindicated. The medical students had their own separate entrance – one that, Maggie hoped, would not be monitored by whoever was watching her.

The fresh air was a shock to her, colder than she was expecting. It seemed to slap her in the face, the wind whipping her with a sudden, sharp sense of how alone she now was. Battered and penniless in the middle of nowhere, she had no way of contacting the outside world, and no one, anyway, she could contact. Her closest ally was dead, almost certainly murdered. She had no real friends, no boyfriend and no family on the entire continent.

So she would just have to rely on herself. It wouldn’t be the first time.

The walk to the main road was long and agonizing. She dreaded how easily, out in the open, she would be spotted by her pursuers. At last she flagged down a cab and slumped into the back seat.

‘Where can I take you?’the diner

‘Heron Street.’ She tried to smile, then saw the driver look her over in the rear-view mirror.

‘You OK?’

‘I’m getting there.’

She pulled out the message from Doug and looked at it properly for the first time.

There is a safe way to do this. Go to Heron Street. And remember, we always believed in Western unity.

The road was wide, more a highway than a street, and as the driver passed Sidney’s Casino, a building with all the glamour of a large garden shed, and several open-air car dealerships, their forecourts crammed with discounted Dodges and Chevys, she felt her brow furrow. Why would Sanchez send her here?

And then she saw it, the tall flagpole-style sign for Safeway. She smiled at the simplicity of it and asked the driver to wait, forming a guess for the last piece of Sanchez’s attempt at a puzzle.

She only had to look around the supermarket for thirty seconds to see it. A counter, close to the checkout lines, below the instantly recognizable bright yellow-and-black sign: Western Union.

And remember, we always believed in Western unity.

She gave her name to the young, much-pierced girl behind the glass window who promptly asked for ID. Maggie began to explain, that was the whole point, everything she had had been stolen: passport, driver’s-

‘Hold on, there’s a note on my system here? Says I’m meant to check your face against this?’ The same upspeak Maggie would have heard back home, on O’Connell Street.

The girl produced an A4 envelope which bore the crest of the State of Washington. She tore it open and out fell a credit-card-sized rectangle of clear plastic: a driver’s licence, with Maggie’s face on it.

‘Looks like you,’ the girl said.

Good old Sanchez.

‘So that’s your ID, which means I can give you this.’ The girl disappeared, returning with a wad of clean, crisp bank notes. She counted off five thousand dollars and sent Maggie on her way.

The cab took her next to Jacknut Apparel, the clothes store where she was about fifteen years above the target age and where she bought a T-shirt that would have been too much even for her teenage self: scrawled across her front, graffiti-style, were the words ‘evolution, revolution, retribution’ on a garment so tight it was hell-bent on drawing attention to her chest. In Washington, women went to great lengths to find clothes that would make their breasts if not exactly disappear, then at least become irrelevant. In DC, gender-neutral was a compliment. Not here, it seemed.

She paid off the cab and slowly made her way two blocks down to a hair salon. She wondered about a radical cut, maybe even the cropped, peroxide number worn by the manager at the Midnight Lounge, but decided it was likely to attract too much attention. So she went half way, asking the stylist to turn her russet-brown, shoulder-length cut into a mid-length bob with blonde highlights. She didn’t love it, but she looked different and that was all that counted. Glancing at the mirror, with new clothes and hair, she decided she still looked bashed-up – but at least nothing like a White House official, whether current or recently fired.

She had a few more things to get. At the top of her list was a bulk order of extra-strength painkillers, a BlackBerry, a new laptop – with built-in, ready to go internet access – some basic cosmetics, a full-sized bottle of Jameson’s and a place to stay.

She decided on the Olympic Motel, which looked suitably down-at-heel and anonymous. She unlocked the door to her room to be hit by an aroma that combined cigarette smoke and disinfectant. It would do perfectly. The bed invited her to sleep for the rest of the day. But she knew she had to get to work right away.

She held the BlackBerry, shiny and new, and dialled the one number, other than the White House, she remembered by heart.