Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

‘I agree with you about that. I don’t think she has any idea.’ He looked up again, the diamond-bright eyes drilling into her. ‘Which is as it should be.’

‘Now why is that?’ Maggie was thinking of the photograph, unveiled a pixel at a time at Vic Forbes’s website.

Waugh put his champagne glass to one side, a signal that the conversation was about to become more serious. ‘Let me ask you a question, Miss Costello. You’re a clever woman. You served on the National Security Council of the President until last week. I am a humble bean-counter, but you have a grasp of politics. So tell me this. Have you never thought about how the great political leaders made it to the top?’

‘I’m not in the mood for a political science seminar.’

‘Have you never noticed how smooth their path was? How the luck always seemed to go their way?’

Maggie thought suddenly of her conversation with Uri.

Waugh was warming to his theme. ‘Take Kennedy. He won in 1960 by a whisker. Nearly seventy million votes cast, and the handsome, smart JFK edges it by a hundred thousand votes – which just happen to turn up late in the day in Chicago. Could so easily have gone the other way. But no. Kennedy got the break.

‘Or Reagan. Remember 1980? Carter sweating night after night to get those hostages out of Iran. Didn’t do him any good. Lost the election because the ayatollahs just wouldn’t let go. And then, just minutes after Reagan takes the oath, hey presto, the Iranians release every last one of them. Made him look like a hero.

‘Or Florida in 2000? Bush loses the popular vote but somehow ends up getting two terms in the White House. All thanks to a few recounts that got stopped in the nick of time and a ruling of the Supreme Court that came down to the decision of a single judge. Gore was a decent man, I suppose, but for some reason fate just didn’t smile on him.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘I want you to tell me, Maggie. I want you to work it out all by yourself. You’re the smart one. And it’s not just America, you know. In Britain, that nice, smiling guy with the teeth, remember him? He was prime minister for ten years – all because his party leader had a heart that gave out at the crucial moment. Are you really telling me you never thought about those things? You really thought it was all just a series of lucky accidents?’

Maggie’s head was throbbing. She told herself it was the shock, the shoving and gagging at the hands of Waugh’s meat-heads, or perhaps the bruises and smashed ribs from the car crash in Aberdeen or maybe simple sheer exhaustion. But she feared it was something else: the anticipation of a truth she had glimpsed some time ago, but did not want to see.

‘There are no accidents, Maggie. There is no luck. There was a pattern to all those events. There always has been and there always will be.’

Waugh looked out of the window, his earlier smile gone, and suddenly the affable vole was gone too, replaced by a reptilian predator. Maggie shivered. This was a dangerous topic, and, for her, probably lethal. She had seen what happened to anyone who knew too much.

‘Why are you telling me all this?’

He turned back to face her. ‘Oh, we always tell them in the end. We always find a way to let them know. That’s all part of the process.’

‘Who’s them?’

‘Those we choose.’

‘Choose?’

‘Maggie, you’re being very slow. Come on, you have a reputation to live up to. Yes, choose . We spotted Stephen at high school. We have our people everywhere, you know, in high schools, in colleges, keeping an eye out for the smart ones, the charismatic ones, the future stars. We started getting word of young Mr Baker: the captain of the debate team and all that. We sent someone in to take a closer look. They saw it straight away: so handsome, so clever. And that back-story. The son of a logger! He sounded like Abraham Lincoln.’

‘At school? You’re a banker and you were aware of Stephen Baker when he was at school ? What the hell is this?’

‘Oh, it wasn’t me then, Maggie. It was my predecessors at AitkenBruce, just like their predecessors before them, going back a long, long time, back to the days of McKinley and Taft and all the others you’ve hardly ever heard of. And it’s not just AitkenBruce either. We work together, all the big banks. We realized decades ago that more unites us than divides us. We have the same interests.

‘And it’s not just America any more, like it was in the early days. It’s a global economy now, money floating across borders like clouds in the sky. So we work with our colleagues in London and Frankfurt and Paris. And in Asia too: can’t move without Tokyo or Beijing. And the Middle East of course: too much oil – too much money – there to ignore those places, even if the regimes are a little, shall we say, unsavoury. This is a global enterprise. It has to be.’

‘And what exactly is this enterprise?’ Maggie could feel her legs going numb; she was desperate to stretch.

‘Talent-spotting. We’re the best talent-spotters in the business. Always have been. The original Aitken made his name that way, more than a century ago. That’s what we do – what we’ve always done. And we did it with Baker. We spotted him at high school and we watched him. Kept an eye on him. By the time he was at Harvard, we had made our decision.’

‘What decision?’

‘That he was to be it. Our chosen one.’

US air space, Monday March 27, 19.21

‘Let me correct that. He was one of our chosen ones. There are always several. Dozens of them in fact, in each generation. To allow for all eventualities: hedging, if you like. But of that cohort, Baker was our preferred one. If all went to plan, he was the one we wanted in the White House. And, guess what? Despite a couple of hitches along the way, all went to plan.’

Waugh smiled, then took another sip of champagne.

Maggie felt her throat turning to dust. So Baker was a hired gun, bought and paid for by the most venal institutions imaginable, the world’s biggest banks. The disappointment – in him, in the system, in her own poor judgment – seemed to be choking her from within. So much for all that grand talk of ethics and ideals, of changing the world. Baker was as rotten as all the rest of them, and he had played her. They all had played her, for the fool she was.

Disappointment gave way to a rising resentment, an anger she now attempted to channel. ‘So it was you who got those opponents out of the way, in the governor’s race?’

Waugh put his glass down. ‘Well, yes and no, Maggie. Yes in the sense that it was us who released the relevant information at the right time. And no, in that it was not me or any of my colleagues who forced the Republican nominee for Governor of the State of Washington to film his wife having sex with other men. He did that all by himself. Same goes for the Mayor of Seattle: no one forced him to use disparaging terms for the city’s Hispanic-American and Chinese-American communities.’ He smirked again, this time in mockery of politically correct convention. ‘We very rarely force anybody to do anything. That’s the joy of politics. It’s a human business. There’s human error. That’s the joy of it, but it can also be a huge pain in the ass. And that’s what we try to protect our clients from: unpredictability. To take the unpredictability out of politics. So that they – and we – can look to the horizon and say, whatever I have now I’m going to keep. In fact, I’m going to have more.’

Maggie didn’t want to hear his philosophizing. She just wanted to have the facts straight in her mind; she needed something firm to hold on to. ‘And Chester’s love-child: was that you too?’