Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

Now Franklin felt an additional tremor of panic. There’s not much that goes on that I don’t know about. Was this some kind of threat? Did Nylind know about him and Cindy? Did ‘the movement’ know about every action, every dumb indiscretion, every sexual encounter, that occurred even within its own ranks? At this moment, hearing Nylind’s even, unflappable breathing down the phone, he was terrified that the answer was yes.

‘So let’s be candid with each other. What exactly is it you’re hearing?’

‘I have very few details.’

Irritated now, resentful that this, this activist was as well informed as he was, if not better, Franklin did not so much raise his voice as enhance it, adding some heft as he demanded, ‘Why don’t you tell me what details you do have?’

‘I’m not playing games with you, sir. We really don’t know much.’

‘I understand that. Now, I repeat. What is the little you do know?’

‘There seems to be some kind of lone, intelligence-gathering operation. By a woman formerly on the National Security team at the White House.’

Shit. So he really did know.

‘Our worry is that she might be standing between us and our storyline.’

‘Our storyline?’

‘Yes, sir. On Forbes. If she’s cleaning up all the mess, that hurts us with the impeachment push. We need that stuff, sir, and she’s getting in our way.’

The ‘sir’ thing was needling Franklin more than ever now. He had a strong urge to get Cindy in here. Best way to drain off some of the aggression he was feeling. Like sugar into alcohol, he found his anger could turn seamlessly into lust – and it certainly beat an hour of circuit-training in the Capitol Hill gym.

‘So what is it you’re asking me to do, Matt?’ Matt. Put him in his place.

‘I suppose I’m suggesting you keep on doing what you’re doing – but more so. Whatever resources you and other colleagues have deployed so far, we need to step it up a gear. We need to get ahead of this thing. Take radical action if necessary.’

He should only know, Franklin thought to himself. But all he said was, ‘OK. Was there something else?’

‘Oh yes, some good news. Christian Coalition are planning a new push, ahead of the next fundraising cycle. Their theme is the True American Family. They want to highlight a few beacons of family values. Some from sport – that great golf guy – some from music, and one or two from politics. I suggested you and your wife and your three sons were a perfect example of the True American Family. They are very excited about this.’

‘Wow,’ said Franklin, tepidly, thinking only of Cindy in her eyepatch underwear, bent over his desk. ‘That’s great.’

‘This will give you a major fundraising advantage, sir.’

‘I know it.’

‘You see, Senator, the Movement not only taketh. It giveth too.’

‘I appreciate it, Matt. I really do.’

Franklin hung up and rubbed at his temples. Everything about the phone call suggested progress. He was to be entrusted with a key ideological task on the banking bill; he was seen as the lead player in the Forbes business and now he was to be held up as a poster boy for family values. It all spelled career gold. Iowa and New Hampshire were not much more than three years away.

And yet, something nagged at him. It was not just Nylind’s apparent omniscience, it was his manner – as if he were the general and Franklin a subordinate, expected to take instruction. What else to make of the attempt at withholding information, the unstated hint that this was beyond Franklin’s level? Above his paygrade, as they said in these parts. Maybe that was how it always was between the operatives and the horseflesh, but Nylind was worse than most at disguising the fact.

Franklin gazed at his power wall, the collection of framed photographs to his right. A few showed visiting foreign leaders whose names he could barely remember, there to suggest a national security expertise he did not have. Another of him with the US commander in Iraq, included for the same reason and to underscore his patriotism. And, in the centre, a smiling handshake with the last Republican president. He loved that photograph.

He needed to get to work right away. But first there was that itch to deal with.

He reached for his phone, found the last text message he had received and hit reply.

Master requires his little lady, forthwith and without delay.

Aberdeen, Washington, Sunday March 26, 08.55 PST

‘Turns out we’re a pretty good team, Mags,’ Liz had said, as they wrapped up what had been an hour’s phone call in the middle of the Dublin night.

‘Even if you think I’m wasting my life because I don’t have a husband and kids.’

‘I didn’t say that.’ There was a pause. ‘Did I? Blame it on lack of sleep.’

The password had worked immediately. No variations required, just the name of the President. Once she had keyed that in, the image at victorforbes.gov had suddenly appeared to turn into a square of dark, dull grey. Almost black. At first Liz had worried that she had failed to follow a protocol programmed by Forbes, that perhaps she had set off a booby trap he had laid that closed down the site to trespassers. But then she quickly checked a site on steganography and read that the apparent fade to black was a familiar trick. She had only to turn up the brightness on Maggie’s screen – a move so low-tech even Maggie understood it – and a new image revealed itself.

Though it was not really an image at all. Just six large numbers at the centre of the screen, separated by two slashes.

A date; American format. The month, slash, the day, slash, the year.

Working back, Liz discovered that Forbes had done some extra engineering on his apparently defunct website. It was programmed to a kind of timer: if the site remained unvisited for more than three days, then it would slowly emerge from Freenet, shedding its darkweb restrictions, and emerge onto the regular web.

‘Why three days?’ Maggie had asked. ‘Why not straight away?’

‘Because three days means you really are dead. You might have a heart attack and be away from your computer for forty-eight hours, but it doesn’t mean you’re dead. Three days gives you some buffer.’

As it happened, four days had passed since Forbes’s corpse had been found and that time-sensitive algorithm had now kicked in: the website’s underlying code had changed in such a way that soon the site would turn up on a search conducted not only by those using Freenet but anyone who typed the name Victor Forbes into Google. At that point, Liz explained, the encoded image would start yielding its secrets too. Hour by hour, the pixels in the Forbes self-portrait would start altering, so that the hidden image – the date – would reveal itself even if no one had had any idea it was there.

‘Smart guy, your Victor Forbes,’ Liz had said.

‘He’s not mine.’

‘Whatever. But he found a way to make sure that, if someone bumped him off, his little secret would rise up off the seabed and burst into the daylight.’

Maggie smiled. ‘You sure you don’t want to get back to writing again, Liz?’

‘You saying my choice to be a full-time mother is not valid?’

For a second, Maggie feared that she and her sister were about to plunge into yet another of their perennial sibling squabbles. Then Liz gave a small chuckle, announced that Calum was stirring and said goodbye.

Maggie sat there, staring at the screen. March 15, just over a quarter century ago, when both Robert Jackson and Stephen Baker would have been graduating college. Suddenly, she was certain that whatever Forbes had been trying to tell her from the grave must relate to the shared past of these two young men who had started out as friends and ended as lethal enemies.