Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

He returned to the screen and watched the video through yet again, this time noticing something new. He sat up. Was that a noise he hadn’t heard before: a metallic clang, muffled but definitely there? He spooled back and replayed the same sequence. No sound this time. Must have been outside.

He needed to think how best to organize this material, for maximum impact. What would work best? Despite the full panoply of state-of-the-art software at his fingertips, including perhaps half a dozen first-class word-processing programs, he reached for the pad and pen and began jotting notes.

There it was again. Not the same noise, more of a creak this time and, if anything, louder.

‘Hello?’

Nothing.

‘Anyone there?’

He checked the clock at the top right of the screen. Past eleven.

He went back to the sheet of notepaper, scribbling in handwriting that no one but he could ever decipher the logical sequence as he now understood it. He imagined relaying it to Maggie, watching as a smile spread across her face, a smile of recognition as she understood the pattern he now understood. That smile could make a man fall in love with Maggie Costello.

Reaching a knot in the clear logical line he was trying to unspool on paper, he sucked on his pen, feeling the plastic flake off into his mouth. Anticipating a choke, he reached for the watery glass of whisky, glancing at the darkness of the window as he did so.

The sight of a man’s face peering in made him jump. Idiotically, he wondered how someone could be outside his window – here in a fifth-floor apartment.

It took him a half-second to understand the truth. That the face staring, dead-eyed, at him was in fact a reflection of a man standing inside – and just behind him.

By then it was too late. The man’s hands were on his shoulders, pinning him to his chair, and then on his neck. He tried to gasp but it was no good: the grip was too tight.

His own reaction surprised him. He writhed and clawed at his attacker but the strength in this man’s hands was insuperable; there was, he could tell instantly, a professionalism to this attack that guaranteed it would succeed. Suddenly, and with horrible certainty, he knew he was going to die.

All of this was measured in seconds. And throughout, the only face he could see was Maggie’s. Even in these desperate circumstances he registered this as a curious fact. He had not realized how much she meant to him. But suddenly all that mattered was knowing that if they were ready to kill him, they would be ready to kill her – and that thought gave him determination. Letting his hands fall as if in submission to his fate, he dug into his pocket and then, summoning the strength for a big push, gave a sharp lurch to his right to shake the man off. He knew it would not save his life, but it might at least delay his death by a moment or two.

As his attacker stumbled backwards, he gulped down oxygen. All his concentration was on his left hand. Adept at using the phone when he wasn’t looking at it, he jabbed at the buttons. The strangling hands were back on his neck now, attempting to get a grip as he writhed, while his own left hand remained deep in his pocket, searching for the green key that would start the call. With a superhuman effort he stopped himself from crying out straight away, knowing he needed to wait a few seconds for the machine to pick up and the message to play.

Now. He would do it now.

With his right arm he tried to lash out – backwards – at his assailant and, once again, the man had to take one hand off his victim’s neck to fend off the diversion.

‘Ennnnnn!’ he rasped, in what sounded like an exhalation of desperate pain.

His attacker had forced him off the chair now and onto his knees, so that he bore the full weight of his brutal killer on his shoulders. Somehow he had to find the strength to cry out once more.

‘Ayyyy!’ he shouted, though the sound that emerged was more like a whisper.

Out of frustration, perhaps, the attacker now took his hands off his prey’s neck and punched him instead, hard in the jaw. Even so, he did not flinch, instead seizing on the chance to cry out, ‘Seeeeeeeee!’

This continued for perhaps ten more seconds, even if it felt like the longest and most terrifying hour of his life. Somehow he found the energy to force his executioner to interrupt the job of asphyxiation – even, at one point, directing a fist into the man’s balls – and to do it often enough that eventually he had cried out five times.

It was then his strength left him. He could flail no more at the dead-eyed, grey-faced man in the cheap suit who was squeezing the life out of him. At last he surrendered, allowing him to kill him – as he had known he would.

He ended up on the floor of his own study, curled up and lifeless.

There was a noise outside in the hall. The attacker, unnerved by the sound of neighbours returning to the next-door apartment, moved swiftly – tearing off the top, scribbled sheet of the notepad on the desk and then using the device he had been given to wipe the computer’s hard drive.

The knock at the door interrupted his effort to frisk the man he had just killed.

‘Hello? Is everything all right in there?’ The knocking continued and was getting louder.

The killer held his breath, hoping whoever was there would go away. Then he heard another voice say, ‘I think we should break it down.’

Hastily, he scanned the apartment for the fire escape, eventually finding it in the kitchen where a door led out onto a tiny balcony and, from there, to the narrow, wrought-iron staircase that zig-zagged its way down the exterior of the building. He fled, taking the stairs two at a time until he had reached ground level.

Calmly, he walked from there to his car.

Five floors up, his victim’s body lay discarded, the dead man’s fingers gnarled around his cellphone as if gripping the hand of a loved one for the last moment of his life.

Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Sunday March 26, 22.55 PST

To her great relief the cab driver was still outside. He had waited nearly two hours, with only a single Christian radio station and the car heater for company. But he had waited. He had not been driven off the road, his brakes had not been sabotaged. He was still there.

Maggie asked how long it would take to drive to Boise. He gave a snort of disbelieving, mirthless laughter. ‘Can you show me your money?’ He wanted to see the cash before he agreed to go any further. ‘Lotta crazy people in this state,’ he said by way of apology.

Maggie took pleasure in pulling out five hundred-dollar bills and agreeing on that as the rate for the evening’s work.

‘Now can I ask a question?’ she asked.

‘You got it,’ he said, his spirits duly lifted.

‘If we end up driving through the night, would you mind if we didn’t speak for most of it?’

He smiled and turned the ignition key.

The darkness of the Idaho sky and the emptiness of the roads suited her perfectly. It reminded her of those countless night flights she had endured during the campaign, staring into the black nothingness. It was where she had done some of her best thinking.

For a brief, blissful second she had believed she had finally unravelled the knot bequeathed by Vic Forbes. When Anne Everett admitted that her dead daughter had carried a torch for the current president of the United States, Maggie had almost pictured it, a series of strange symbols suddenly turning into regular words – the code breaking.

The young, handsome Baker – Aberdeen favourite son and recent graduate of Harvard – had taken the adoring prom queen a couple of years his junior to bed in a downtown hotel, and there, somehow, she had died. It was a nuclear scandal that had just been sitting there all these years, waiting to be exploded by Vic Forbes, who – alone in the world, it seemed – knew of it and was ready to use it. But this theory had been shattered in less time than it took to think of it. That photograph of a young, eager Baker with Senator Corbyn taken on the other side of the country on the same day as the fire was definitive. If Forbes had ever gone public, Baker would have been able to rebut him instantly, simply by producing that photograph. The perfect alibi.