Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

Could Forbes have made such an elementary blunder? Could he really have invested so much of his life in – and constructed his entire blanket around – a provably false accusation?

But that was not all that nagged at Maggie. She sat back in the car, letting the headrest take the strain on her still aching neck, as she thought back to the public library. Why on earth was that single page missing from the archive? Just one: page five. No others. Who had removed it?

The answer was clear: it had to be the same man who had turned up at the home of Anne and Randall Everett the morning after their daughter’s death – breaking the news to them, for heaven’s sake – waving an improbable amount of cash in their faces and buying their silence, in perpetuity. Why would anyone do that? If it wasn’t Baker who had left Pamela Everett to die, who was it? And who was this other boy, for whose reputation a man had been prepared to pay tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of dollars and take the trouble of destroying part of a newspaper archive, in order to keep his secret from ever being known?

Maggie could feel her ribs hurting, as well as her head. She desperately needed to talk this through with someone. She looked at her phone. Unregistered, pay-as-you-go, it should be safe. But she didn’t want to risk it. She leaned forward, lightly tapping the shoulder of the driver.

‘There’s an extra hundred for you if you let me use your cellphone.’

He handed it to her, placing a theatrical finger across his lips. I’m sticking to our deal: no chat.

For at least the third time, she dialled Nick du Caines’s home number, the only one of his she remembered. Voicemail, yet again. Where the hell was he? Shacked up in a love-drugs-and-booze-fest with some intern from ABC and screening calls? Probably.

She checked her watch. Midnight in Idaho, 8am in London. Worth a shot.

She used the browser of her BlackBerry to find the London number of Nick’s forever-ailing Sunday newspaper, dialled it on the driver’s phone – hoping he wouldn’t notice – and asked for the foreign desk.

A secretary answered. ‘Unusual call,’ Maggie began in her politest voice, explaining that she was a regular Washington contact of Nick du Caines and she had been trying to get in touch, though she had unfortunately mislaid his mobile number. She had a story that she was sure he would be interested in. Was there any chance they might help?

‘I think you’d better speak to the foreign editor,’ the woman said, an edge in her voice that Maggie didn’t like.

There was a delay until a man – early forties, plummy – came on the line.

‘I understand you’re a friend of Nick’s?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I’m afraid I have some rather bad news. We’ve only just heard. Nick is dead.’

Boise, Idaho, Monday March 27, 04.13 PST

Maggie spent the rest of the night alternating between two different kinds of pain. The shock of Nick’s death was beyond tears: she was numbed to the bone. She was empty; hollowed out. She sat in the cab like a husk, hardly able even to breathe, trying hard not to think. But her body seemed determined to force reality upon her. Emerging from the taxi as it pulled into Boise Airport in the early hours of the morning, she felt how the ache in her ribs had settled and deepened.

The foreign editor had told her there had been a break-in at Nick’s apartment, and that there had been signs of a struggle. His body had been badly beaten and ‘bore all the hallmarks of death by strangulation’. Police were interviewing neighbours, taking prints. But so far there were no witnesses.

Of course there would be no witnesses, Maggie thought. The people who had killed Nick were like the people who had killed Stuart. They were pros: they would leave no trace.

With hours to wait before the first morning flight out, she knew she should try to sleep. She tried curling up on a hard plastic airport chair but – no matter how exhausted she was – real sleep would not come.

She dozed off a couple of times, only to be woken once by the cold spreading across her skin, undefeated even by the swaddling of her coat, and the second time by the clear realization that a man – his face hidden – was standing over her, wearing the satisfied smile of a pursuer who has finally cornered his prey. She woke from the dream and sat bolt upright, clutching at her bag as if it were a weapon and getting ready to run, heart hammering against her sore ribs.

And at once the other source of pain returned. Nick is dead . The words she had heard down the telephone played as if on a loop in her head.

Now the guilt came like a rush. It was all her fault. She had offered his drunken, debauched, lecherous and brilliant head up to them. It was just as Liz said. The woman down the street in Dublin wasn’t getting strangled in the dead of night, because she had no knowledge that was connected with this goddamned mess. And neither had Nick du Caines – until Maggie had dragged him into it. And now he was dead.

Was she carrying some kind of curse, one that ensured all those she touched turned to stone? She thought of Stuart lying dead, his huge, bloated body beached in Rock Creek Park, bleeding from the wrists, and now Nick, strangled and battered and left for dead in his apartment in New York. All because of her.

Bile rose, acrid in her throat. Grabbing her bag, she dashed for the ladies’ bathroom and there heaved her guts up into a toilet bowl, gripping the edges convulsively, retching and retching till her guts felt as empty as her heart.

She wadded up some toilet paper, wiped her mouth and chin, flushed and went out to wash her hands. The huge overlit mirror was unforgiving in its judgment. Dark circles under bloodshot eyes, the newly-dyed hair brassy under the neon: she looked like the guilty fugitive she felt. For a moment she was gripped by the urgent desire to run away, to get on a plane and go somewhere, anywhere, far away from here – where she could do no more damage. She needed to talk to no one, in case she passed on whatever fatal virus she carried. She had become toxic, radiating death.

The idea lingered with her for a while. She pictured herself on some speck of an island in the South Pacific, holed up in a house that no one knew existed. And then she thought of the men whose hands had choked the life out of Nick and who had shoved those tablets into Stuart’s mouth and anger rose to replace the guilt. There were people out there who murdered to prevent the truth being told and their killing would stop only when someone made them stop. She had to find them and hunt them down. She had to make them pay for what they had done.

She squared her shoulders. It was time to stop feeling guilty for the crimes of others. She would defend herself, and she would drag the truth out into the daylight. She started walking around again, pacing and thinking, scrutinizing everyone she passed. Are you a part of this? Are you? After some minutes she noticed a man, apparently immersed in the Idaho Statesman , standing by the Departures sign, and wondered how long he had been there.

Think, she told herself. She had asked Nick to look into a single, specific aspect of the Forbes story: was there any evidence to link Forbes’s former employers, the CIA, with his death? She hadn’t considered that a life-threatening question to ask, not when Nick had won himself a shelf-full of trophies investigating CIA conduct in the war on terror. He had exposed the Agency’s working methods – and he had lived both to tell the tale and to drink his prize money.

Yet this latest investigation was clearly different. Whatever he had found had struck a CIA nerve that was too raw to be tolerated. CIA agents had been caught bundling men convicted of no crime into chartered aircraft and sending them to faraway corners of the globe where they could be tortured with impunity – and yet worldwide exposure of that truth had not driven the Agency to take Nick du Caines’s life. Someone, somewhere, clearly regarded a revelation of CIA involvement in the murder of Vic Forbes as more serious and more damaging even than the rendition story – and were ready to prevent it by killing again.