Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

A box, familiar even to Maggie, had appeared in the middle of the screen, like a plaster across the bridge of Forbes’s nose. It demanded a password.

‘Let me do this, Liz.’

Maggie breathed deep, closed her eyes and then allowed herself a second smile. This was Forbes’s blanket, the insurance policy he had designed to render futile any attempt to silence him, the mechanism that would ensure his deadliest information would surface whether he was dead or alive. Without hesitation, she typed in the twelve letters that, she felt certain, would unlock the code.

S-T-E-P-H-E-N-B-A-K-E-R

Washington, DC, Sunday March 26, 08.41

‘That you, Senator?’

‘It is.’

‘Honour to be speaking with you, sir. Sorry to be calling you at home on the weekend. Caught you before heading off to church?’

‘You have.’ Rick Franklin took advantage of the recline mechanism on his chair, surveyed the view he enjoyed from this sixth-floor apartment in the Watergate and marvelled at the absurdity of Washington etiquette. Elected office always ensured formal deference, even from those who so clearly wielded greater power. So the two-bit chief executive of a nothing town would be hailed as Mr Mayor by the anchor of Good Morning America, even though on every measure of influence the genuflector outranked the genuflectee.

It wasn’t quite like that with Matt Nylind and Rick Franklin. Franklin was not only a senator, but one who had made the political weather for the last, turbulent week. Still, Nylind’s Thursday Session made him a genuine force in this town. In the business of political influence they were at least equals. Yet here was Nylind, touching the forelock.

‘I have quite a few items, Senator, if that’s OK with you.’

‘Fire away.’

‘Banking bill. Coming up soon. Democrats are foaming at the mouth on that one. Reckon they’ve got the numbers.’

‘In the House?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘To reach two hundred and eighteen?’

‘So they say.’

‘What about Delaney?’

‘Yeah, even “Delay” Delaney.’

‘But he’s from Delaware.’

‘Primary challenge.’

‘Right,’ said Franklin, wondering if there was any question he could ask to which Nylind would not know the immediate answer. ‘So this means-’

‘-that we need to switch to the Senate.’

‘You mean, wreck the bill there so that it voids whatever comes out of the House.’

‘Wouldn’t put it quite like that, sir. Prefer to say that a strong pro-growth Prosperity for America bill needs to come out of the body that looks to America’s long-term interests. That’s what the American people expect.’

It was part of Nylind’s genius, this. He never crafted so much as a tactic, let alone a policy, without framing the language in which it would be sold. Thanks to him, a Democratic proposal to levy the wealthiest Americans in order to fund expanded healthcare coverage became known as ‘the sick tax’ – and promptly fell to defeat. ‘Define the terms, define the battlefield.’ That’s what Nylind had said then and since, with the rest of the Republican party and the wider conservative movement – from the editorial board of the Weekly Standard to the production offices of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck – hanging on his every word.

‘I hear you,’ Franklin said. ‘But, as I know you know, I am not the ranking Republican on the Senate banking committee. Shouldn’t you be talking to Gerritsen?’

‘How can I put this, Senator? Whatever the formal hierarchy might be, the movement regards you as the lead man on this. Our representative, if you like.’

If Nylind was aiming to flatter, he had succeeded. Franklin couldn’t dispute the premise: Ted Gerritsen was one of the last remaining liberal Republicans in the Senate if not the planet. An old Maine ‘moderate’, beloved by official Washington and the press corps, he was from the era when the Republican base was the country club, not the megachurch. He couldn’t get enough of Stephen Baker – who had carried Gerritsen’s state the previous November – and there had been a rumour that he was in line for one of Baker’s ‘spirit of bipartisanship’ cabinet posts. Maybe Commerce or Trade Rep. Either way, it was no surprise that Nylind regarded him as utterly unreliable.

‘I’d need some back-up,’ Franklin said after leaving the statutory two-second pause required in Washington in order to be deemed ‘thoughtful’, a crucial piece of reputational armour.

‘You got it.’

‘Serious back-up. My staff have never led on a bill this size before.’

‘We got it all. Economists, lawyers, number-crunchers. Heck, we’ve even got a bill drafted!’

‘Oh, yeah? Where’d that come from?’

‘Well, as you know, sir, there are a lot of people in this town who have a direct interest in ensuring that Congress gets this issue right. They see the wisdom in sharing resources.’

Translation, thought Franklin: banking industry lobbyists have drafted the bill. He remembered that man who spoke at the last Thursday Session.

‘OK. Well, let’s fix a meeting. Cindy from my office and whoever you recommend from yours.’

‘Good to know, Senator. Good to know. Next item: some of us feel we might be losing momentum on the impeachment project.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘We still don’t have our Democrats on House Judiciary.’

‘That’s not my fault!’ Franklin shot back, instantly regretting the defensiveness of his tone, as if he were a pupil summoned to the principal’s office to account for himself. In a bid to assert his authority, he took his voice down half an octave. ‘That has to be a matter for the House leadership. That surely is their responsibility.’

‘Agreed, sir. But for that to happen, they need more.’

‘More? You saw the Post story today,’ he said, referring to an investigative piece on the Iranian Connection which had appeared on the front of the Washington Post that morning, setting out – in wonderfully mind-numbing detail – the chain of funds, offshore accounts and shell companies in the Caymans through which cash might, conceivably, have been funnelled from Tehran to the Baker for President campaign.

Franklin had immediately had Cindy email it to everyone who mattered, including Nylind. It was perfect. The abundance of numbers, dates and tedious minutiae made the charges look credible and serious, even if no one could be bothered to read the small print.

‘Sure, but I’m not talking about that,’ said Nylind. ‘I meant more on Forbes.’

‘But we don’t have any hard evidence on that, Matt. You and I would both dearly love to have something concrete implicating the President in Forbes’s death. But until we do, allegations about Forbes cannot be part of the case for impeachment. Right now the “high crimes and misdemeanours” referred to in the articles of impeachment relate only to the Iranian Connection. That’s all we got.’

‘Technically, that’s true, Senator. But only technically. Forbes is the mood music. He’s the soundtrack for the impeachment.’

‘You mean, how he died?’

‘And what beans he was about to spill. Both.’

‘The trouble is,’ said Franklin, adopting the superior tone of the man in the know, ‘it seems someone may be at work cleaning up all that mess. A dustbuster.’

‘That’s what I hear too, Senator.’

‘That’s what you hear?’

‘There’s not much that goes on that I don’t know about. And let’s face it, sir, you wouldn’t be talking to me now if that wasn’t true.’

Franklin felt uneasy. How was this possible? He had told no one, bar Cindy, about that Costello woman. He was holding on to that particular nugget, confidentially provided on a private and secure phone line by Governor Orville Tett, so that it could be deployed at the moment of maximum effectiveness. Yet here was Nylind hinting that he knew about it already.