Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

It was not posed the way the CIA picture was posed – with that high-school yearbook gaze into the middle distance and just to the left of the lens. Instead Forbes was staring at the camera, face-on and unsmiling. The visual grammar was that of a passport photo, even a police mugshot. But the way it filled the entire screen made it more sinister, as if Forbes was Big Brother watching Winston Smith through the telescreen. Instantly Maggie knew that Forbes had taken the picture himself. Everything about this portrait, starting with the eyes, screamed solitude.

She clicked on it, expecting it to link her through to other pages, but nothing happened. There were no other links around the side or at the bottom. Indeed, there was no text at all.

She clicked again, then again, as if that might coax it into life. There was something missing. Yet, that this was the hiding place, the locker into which Forbes – foreseeing his own murder – had stashed his blanket, she was more certain than ever.

There was only one way to break in – and, though it would hurt, she was ready to do it.

Aberdeen, Washington, Saturday March 25, 19.00 PST

For the eleventh time in eight minutes, she looked at the clock. 7pm on a Saturday night in Aberdeen, three o’clock on Sunday morning in Dublin. She had promised her sister faithfully that she would leave her in peace. And she had already disturbed her once.

Maggie put aside the empty pizza carton, still decorated by congealed and processed cheese, that had represented her dial-up supper, delivered to the motel-room door. She badly wanted to call Nick du Caines – he might well know how to get out of this hole – but that was one of the thousands of numbers she had lost along with her phone.

She clicked on the TV, lighting upon C-Span’s replay in full of the President’s weekend radio address, which in a nod to the twenty-first century was now on camera too.

She found the remote and increased the volume.

‘For too long, these weapons have cast a shadow over our world,’ Baker was saying. ‘I am of the generation that grew up looking at a clock that stood, permanently, at five minutes to midnight. We were always on the brink of catastrophe. And as long as nuclear bombs exist, we still are.’

Despite her bruises and her aching ribs, she couldn’t repress a smile of disbelief and admiration that verged on wonder. She had drafted a policy statement about this during the campaign, assuming it would never get anywhere. How could it? After all, they lived in the real world. The world of politics.

But here he was, the President of the United States – under fire as never before, fighting a triple scandal and facing an army of enemies determined to eject him from the White House in the fastest-ever time – building towards the climax of a speech that she never thought she would hear.

‘That’s why I’m glad to tell you that I have just come off the phone with my Russian counterpart and he and I have agreed to meet in the coming weeks to take the first steps towards ridding the world of these weapons altogether. I will be sending a proposal to Congress…’

She looked over at her computer, still displaying the webpage of Vic Forbes. That man had set out to destroy the presidency of Stephen Baker. Forbes had started this entire chain of events that had left the man she believed in – and everything he, and she, stood for – hanging by the frailest of threads. There, on that screen, was the landmine he had buried deep and out of view – and it was still ticking.

She loved her sister, she really did. But some things were more important than Liz’s unbroken sleep. She dialled the number.

The phone rang twice. Then a croak remarkable for its coherence – and hostility: ‘This better be good.’

‘Liz, I’m really sorry-’

‘No, I mean this better be good. As in, “my-life-is-aboutto end-Liz-and-these-are-my-dying-words” good.’

‘OK, it’s not quite that good.’

‘Maggie, you stupid bloody cow, it’s gone three in the morning!’

‘I know, but-’

‘You know? So you can’t even blame the accident! I’d have forgiven you if you were confused from the accident!’

‘Oh right. Well, maybe I am a bit confused-’

‘Too sodding late.’ Maggie could hear the sound of a duvet, furiously thrown aside. ‘I’d only got back to sleep about ten bloody minutes ago. Jesus, Maggie, I could strangle you.’

‘I’m really sorry, Liz. But I am desperate.’ She wouldn’t mention Baker, and the need – for the sake of the world – to keep him in office. She would make it personal, an appeal to sisterly compassion. ‘Can I remind you that somebody did try to kill me last night? I think there’s something they’re trying to find out. My only chance is if I can work it out first. If I do that-’

‘You see, this is what I don’t get about you, Maggie. You seem to think that if you just know whatever it is you’re not meant to know, then you’ll be OK. Whereas the exact bloody opposite is the truth. You’re only in this fucking mess because you know too much!’

‘I don’t think that’s true.’

‘It bloody is! I don’t know anything and no one’s after me, are they? Bloody Mrs O’Neill on Limerick Street, she doesn’t know fuck all and she’s sound asleep right now. You see how it works? If you stay a million miles away from all this crap, then nothing happens. Simple.’

‘It’s not quite as simple as that-’

‘No, I can well believe that.’ Liz’s voice dipped, whether to avoid waking Calum or because she was going into one of her quiet – and therefore more terrifying – rages, Maggie could not yet tell. ‘I can see it’s way more complicated than that. This is about you needing adrenalin in your life, isn’t it – to convince you your life is worthwhile?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about you, Maggie. I’m talking about this insane way you live. Always travelling to the back end of arsehole, always dodging bullets. Why do you do it, Mags?’

‘I have a feeling you’re about to tell me, Liz.’

‘No, I really want to hear it from you. Go on. Tell me.’

‘Liz, I’m exhausted. I’m in a shitty motel in the middle of nowhere. I’m on my own. I hurt everywhere. I just need some help and I’ve turned to my sister. Is that too much to ask?’

‘I remember all the bullshit answers, Maggie. “Saving the world”, all that crap. “Making life better for children in war zones”, all that Miss World shite. But I don’t believe a word of it. Maybe once, when you started. But now it’s something else.’

Maggie could feel two competing emotions thudding through her veins, as if racing to reach her brain – or her heart – first. She had her money on anger, though sadness was not lagging far behind.

‘Go on, Dr Liz. Enlighten me.’

‘You’re trying to make up for it, Maggie.’

‘For what?’

‘For,’ and now Maggie heard the first silent note of hesitation in what had, until then, been an unstoppable flow, ‘for what you don’t have. For the husband you don’t have, for the boyfriends you don’t have, for the-’

‘And what else, Liz? What else am I fucking compensating for? What else don’t I have?’

But they both knew.

‘That’s why I reckon you phone me in the middle of the bloody night, Maggie. You want to wreck what I have because you’re jealous.’

‘That is NOT TRUE!’ The sound of her shout echoed around the motel room, making the walls ring. ‘Of course I’d love to have what you have – a great husband, a lovely boy. But for reasons I can’t sodding well be bothered to go into, I don’t have that option right now. I do what I do because I’m good at it. OK? I don’t know how or why, but that’s the way it is. All right? That’s the way I am. I tried it the other way – writing memos and going to meetings and wearing a fucking suit and doing what you’re meant to do – but I’m no good at it. Not the way I’m good at this.’