Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

‘This won’t take a second.’

‘Liz, this better be…’ She opened the laptop and waited as it came back to life. ‘All right, it’s on.’

‘OK, go to the Freenet page where…You know what, forget it. I’ve still got remote access, I’ll do it.’

Maggie watched as the cursor moved, apparently by magic, around her screen. From the internet browser it directed itself to the Freenet and from there to the eerie, unsmiling portrait that constituted victorforbes.gov. Maggie could see that Liz was typing in the password – the twelve letters of ‘Stephen Baker’ rendered as asterisks – that transformed that image into the page that glistened with just a single date. March 15, a quarter-century ago.

Now, though, only a vestige of the original image was visible. It appeared to be slowly fading away on the screen, as square by square it was replaced by another.

On an electronic post-it which Liz had somehow thrown up on the screen, the cursor began typing. Look very carefully.

Before her eyes, a photograph was materializing. It was old, grainy and black-and-white but it looked vaguely familiar.

As the pixels filled out, each one becoming more defined, Maggie saw what she was looking at. It was a newspaper shot of the Meredith Hotel, the night it all but burned to the ground. And there in the foreground were the guests, milling around on the street in a state of semi-dress, most in pyjamas or bathrobes.

Another message from Liz: Do you see who I see?

Maggie looked closely at the picture whose resolution was improving with each second. A cluster of three people were in sharpest focus, their faces wearing the panicked expressions of those caught up in a disaster. And now, with a shudder, she recognized him.

There, hugging himself against the cold night, watching the Meredith Hotel burn down was the man whose face Maggie, along with the entire American people and now the world, had come to know. Younger, unlined but undeniably the same person.

She was looking at Stephen Baker.

From TPM Muckraker posted at 16.45, Monday March 27:

You’ve gotta love this. With the exquisite timing of the damned, one of the President’s key tormentors has just suffered what you might call an ethics malfunction. Sen. Rusty Wilson was all set to play the role of Grand Inquisitor alongside Rick Franklin had the impeachment proceedings against President Baker moved from the House to the Senate. Something tells us Republicans will be revising those plans now.

For Sen. Wilson has just been on the sharp end of a rather unfortunate leak: to wit, the transcripts of every text and email exchange, and every phone conversation, between himself and a thirty-seven-year-old pharmaceutical industry lobbyist from his state who, as luck would have it, is a chesty blonde among whose qualifications for such a policy-intensive job include past service as a waitress at Hooters. The transcripts reveal the senator as a breathy and demanding lover, one prepared to see the sick people of his state pay over-the-odds for prescription drugs, if that would ensure the continuing loyalty of his young mistress.

Maybe this is why they call Republicans the Grand Old Party. Or should that be HOP? Because they certainly seem to be having a Helluva Party.

Be interesting to see if Baker’s persecutors on House Judiciary feel as eager as they were twelve hours ago to keep up their moralistic crusade against the President. Or maybe they should check their scripture. Can TPM Muckraker recommend Matthew 7:3? ‘And why behold you the mote that is in your brother’s eye, but consider not the beam that is in your own eye?’

Too early to say Baker’s out of the woods, but folks in the White House may be breathing a little easier just now…

Teterboro Airport, New Jersey, Monday March 27, 18.42

For the best part of forty minutes Maggie had sat on the edge of the rear passenger seat, willing the cab driver – turbaned and listening to the BBC World Service – to go faster. He had given her a series of disapproving looks, as if her angst were so much cigarette smoke fugging up his cab. Taking out her compact, she could see why. She looked appalling, like some kind of strung-out addict, pale and drawn and raw around the eyes; hardly a suitable guise for the next stage in her plan. She repaired as much of the damage as she was able to, brushing the unfamiliar hairstyle into some kind of order, applying dabs of concealer, mascara, a touch of lipstick. All it succeeded in doing was papering over the cracks, but it was the best she could manage.

For the rest of the journey she had alternated glances over her shoulder, checking to see if they were being followed, with long spells spent staring at the photograph which she had kept up on her now-offline computer screen. She tried to look at it from different angles, to see if there was any way that the lean, handsome young man in the picture was not Stephen Baker.

She had tried and she had failed.

Could it have been doctored? You could do anything these days on Photoshop. But even as she grasped at that straw, she knew that Forbes would not have gone to such lengths to protect a bogus photograph. This was his ‘blanket’, the insurance policy designed to protect his life. The photo must be real.

And yet, she had seen the picture cherished for so long by Anne Everett, the clipping from The Daily World showing young Baker in Washington, DC, on the other side of the continent, on the very same day as the hotel fire. It made no sense.

Eventually the cab passed a sign for the General Aviation building and Maggie jumped out, thrusting a wad of bills into the driver’s hand. She looked at her watch: the plane was due to take off in fourteen minutes.

She did her best to straighten herself out and to walk tall. She needed to look like the kind of woman who knew her way around a private airfield for the highest-paying corporate customer.

She strode up to the reception desk. ‘I’m afraid this is very urgent. I’m here for the AitkenBruce flight to Washington that leaves in a few minutes? I have some important documents to deliver to them.’

‘Are they flying out of nineteen or twenty-four today?’

‘You know, they didn’t say. Could you check for me?’

The woman tapped away at her computer. ‘It’s runway nineteen. I’ll let them know you’re here.’

Maggie turned around and headed for the door, the voice of the receptionist calling after her: ‘Miss! Excuse me! Someone’s coming to meet you here. You’re not to go out there. Miss!’

As she walked headlong into the wind, vicious in this flat expanse of asphalt, it was a struggle to maintain her confident, head-up-shoulders-back stride. Eventually she broke into a jog. She passed a sign for Runway 1 and, a full five minutes later, Runway 6. It was no good. There was just too much ground to cover. Her sides heaved: her battered ribs complained. She looked at her watch. Six minutes to take-off. She was never going to make it. But she had to: she was perhaps the only obstacle standing between Roger Waugh and Stephen Baker; the only one who could unravel the mystery that tied them together. Taking a deep breath, she drove herself into a faster jog, cursing all the damage that cigarettes and her own bloody-minded refusal ever to visit a gym had done to her poor lungs.

Finally, she saw a marker indicating that she was at Runway 19. Three minutes to take-off. She stood where she was, near three parked, golfcart-style airport buggies, and looked straight ahead.

Before her, separated by a grass strip perhaps seventy yards wide, was the sleek body of a Gulfstream jet. The top half was painted white, with a long curve of black just below the seven passenger portholes. At the rear, flanking the tail, were the mighty jet engines, already revving up. The noise was so loud she could feel it vibrating through her breastbone.