The Chosen One (10 page)

‘First, you need to know if it was a suicide. Then you need to know if Forbes was alone.’

‘Does this look like the work of a lone gunman to you, Maggie? Think of the scale of the operation. The depth of the research. The media savviness. The unmanned computer in Maryland, relayed to New Orleans. All that would have taken time and money. Resources.’

‘So you need to know if he was part of a team. If he was, the threat is still there.’

‘Right. Who are they? Is this Republican dirty tricks? Foreign? Someone we haven’t thought of?’

‘And what is this nuclear secret he was about to drop?’

Goldstein pointed his finger directly at Maggie, a charades gesture she had come to love: he deployed it during their discussions-cum-tutorials, the sign that she had asked precisely
the right question or made the key point. ‘What indeed? What exactly do they have on Stephen Baker that convinced Forbes that he could blackmail the President of the United States?’

And, Maggie thought, could have made the President of the United States consider paying up. For that, surely, was what lay behind last night’s meeting: Baker would not have summoned them all unless he had been actually considering acceding to Forbes’s demands.

Her mind was whirring now, rattling through multiple questions, each one of which spawned dozens more – forming a vast, elaborate labyrinth that she could visualize. A decisiontree, the management gurus called it, depicting one question as it split off into two branches – yes and no – which themselves split off again and again. Most people would probably be terrified by the sight of such a thing, but Maggie revelled in the complexity of it. The diplomatic negotiations which had dominated her recent professional life worked the same way: you had to consider each path the parties might take, and then work out which tributaries and detours might lead off each path, always looking for the dead ends. But before any of that there was one large fork in the road.

‘You’ve got a lot of work to do,’ she said.

‘What do you mean “you”? I don’t like this “you”. It’s “we”, Maggie. You, me and Stephen Baker.’

‘Do I have to remind you again, Stuart? I was fired.’

‘And do I have to remind you that I already said that’s an advantage? Distance. Besides, you do this for him, there’s no way the President is not going to bring you back. He wants you to do that Africa thing.’ He took another plunge into the cereal box.

Maggie watched him munch, looking at her, waiting for an answer. She realized that she felt a twinge of disappointment at his last remark, dangling the carrot of a return to her old
job. If she were going to help, it wouldn’t be for that reason, for herself. It would be because she believed in Stephen Baker, believed in what he was trying to do, had believed him, in truth, from that very first car ride across the vast empty spaces of Iowa. She couldn’t stand by and watch his presidency destroyed by some cheap dirty tricks campaign. Too much was at stake.

‘OK,’ she said, finally. ‘You’d better go. I need to leave now.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Where do you think? I’m not going to get any answers here, Stu. I’m going to New Orleans.’

Email chatter, intercepted by the National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland. Thought to be the text of a statement issued by a key leader of violent jihadism, whereabouts unknown:

I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Mohammed is his messenger.

The head of the infidels worldwide has a new face, but the rotten heart is still the same. They try to trick and to deceive, but our nation, the Islamic world, is old and wise and will not be deceived. Baker is still the same infidel, still the same coward, even if he tries to wag his tail instead of baring his teeth.

But not all Muslims are as wise as they should be. Some forget how America has abused the people and sacred places of Islam for many decades, how with fire from the north to the south, from the east to the west, this Shaitan has slain our children. These unwise Muslims want to touch the hand of Baker, believing that he is reaching to them in the name of peace.

This has hurt our cause. Our enemies gloat that we are
losing our support, that our numbers are falling. I say to the warriors of Islam, these few words: we are now in a new struggle, to keep the faith of every Muslim, to prevent naïve brothers and sisters being tricked by the smiling face and honeyed words of the deceiver Baker.

May God find a way to remove this man, so that Muslims may see the true face of America once more.

God is great and he hates confusion. May peace and God’s mercy be upon you.

New Orleans, Wednesday March 22, 18.15 CST

The billboards on Interstate 10 told her she was in a different country, a universe away from the buttoned-up pieties of the capital. One sign promoted a gun show, the next a burlesque club with a slogan that made Maggie smile:
Ten beautiful girls and one ugly one!

‘This your first time in N’Awlins?’

Maggie nodded, not wanting to get into conversation with the cab driver just yet: she wanted to keep looking out of the window. She needed to think.

‘’At’s a pity,’ he replied, ignoring her attempt at aloofness. ‘Shoulda been here before Katrina. Not the same place no more.’

She surrendered: ‘Were you here the whole time?’

‘I stayed till I saw the water rise so high my church was drownin’. I went to Atlanta. My ma refused to leave. She ended up one of those bodies you saw on the evening news. Floating.’

‘Oh my God, I am sorry.’

‘Nothing for you to be sorry for, ma’am. You ain’t the
government. Not your fault. You doing the right thing, coming back to N’Awlins. We need all the visitors we can get.’

She had asked for the French Quarter, to be as close as she could get to Forbes. It also made for useful cover. She could be a tourist from Dublin too naïve to know anywhere else to stay. Or she could be a journalist.

It was a plaintive message on the machine from Nick du Caines, the dissolute New York-based correspondent of a much-loved, if ailing, British Sunday newspaper that had given her the idea. She had sat through enough of his anecdotes to know he treated his press card as if it were a magic ticket, granting admission to every ride at the fair. If Nick was to be believed, there was no one and nowhere to whom a journalist could not gain access.

If
Nick was to be believed, that is. Part of his charm, if you didn’t count the wreckage of his personal life and the complexion battered by three decades of ‘experimentation’ with vodka, whisky and every kind of drug the pharmaceutical industries – legal and illegal – had managed to generate, was the grey zone he inhabited when it came to the truth. Or
la veracité
, as he would doubtless refer to it, resorting to his comedy French accent whenever he wanted to skirt round a topic that might be awkward. (‘Mags, it’s late, you’re gorgeous, I am full of
ardeur
, so what about a little
liaison, dangereuse
or otherwise?’)

She had tried calling him as soon as she left home for New Orleans. While she raced around packing a bag, she called Nick’s cellphone at least three times. No point trying the office: he had sublet that to the correspondent from Danish television – ‘All on the QT, if you don’t mind, Mags: London would not be best pleased’ – preferring to work from home. Though that, Maggie suspected, was a laughable euphemism: from what she could divine, Nick du Caines didn’t work
during the week at all, instead building himself up to a fever which crested on Friday night as, in a sweat, he spewed out thousands of words, hammering away at his keyboard until dawn on Saturday – just making the lunchtime deadline in London.

So where the august correspondent would be at this hour of a midweek morning was anybody’s guess. Though you’d get good odds for the bed of a lonely, ex-pat European – the wife of the Belgian ambassador, perhaps, or that dark-eyed Kosovar who had worked for du Caines as a translator during the Balkan wars and somehow ended up in DC in his wake several years later.

No luck on the way to Reagan Airport, but there was a sign of life when she touched down at Louis Armstrong International: a busy signal. Now, just as her cab was navigating its way down streets with improbable names like Abundance, Cupid and Desire, she finally got through.

‘Mags! My long-lost comrade! What the hell is happening at the White House? Seems like the place is falling apart. Just heard on the old bush telegraph about your unwanted
au revoir
from there. Sounds like you got out just in time. Bastards, though, for firing you. Or “letting you go” as the tossers in HR would no doubt phrase it. Is there anything your Uncle Nick can do?’

‘Well, actually—’

‘Perhaps a brief tale in the paper, setting the record straight? You know, “The New McCarthyism that lost Baker his best diplomat”, that kind of thing? I love “New McCarthyism” stories: the posh papers’ version of “political correctness gone mad”. Might fight for space this week, though, what with—’

‘Nick—’

‘Still, any port in a storm. Things are terrible on the paper, threatened with a bloody—’

‘Nick!’

The cab driver turned round, a look of hurt on his face. Maggie pointed at the phone and mouthed an apology. Sure that she now had Nick’s silence, she lowered her voice. ‘Nick, there’s something I need.’

‘I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting to hear those words, Mags my love. Shall I come over at eight? Or right now? I love the afternoons.’

‘Not that, Nick. I need some advice.’

‘OK.’

‘About being a journalist. I can’t tell you much about it yet, but I promise when I can you’ll get it first.’

‘A story?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh bless your little Irish heart. What is it you need to know?’

For the next ten minutes, Nick du Caines proceeded to teach the core elements of a crash course in journalism’s black arts. They agreed that she would be Liz Costello of the
Irish Times
: if anyone were to be mischievous enough to check up on her via Google – ‘A loathsome practice, but increasingly common these days,’ lamented Nick – then they would at least find something. The fact that the Costello byline would be attached to witty reports on Dublin nightlife would be a problem, but a surmountable one.

‘Say you’re comparing the two scenes for a long article for the magazine,’ Nick advised, before exciting himself with another thought. ‘Say you’re writing it for the travel section: a post-Katrina piece, “Return to New Orleans”. They’ll be so grateful they won’t care if you don’t have a press card.’

‘And why don’t I have a press card?’

‘Say you were mugged. That’ll make them even more desperate to make you love them.’

‘Won’t they start asking me for details? Taking witness statements, all that crap?’

‘Good point. Say it happened in DC. You’re applying for a new one. In the meantime, any questions, they’re to call your bureau chief in Washington, one Nicholas du Caines.’

‘What if they Google you?’

‘They never do. Name’s too difficult. And remember you never write, you
file.
It’s never an article, it’s a
piece.
And don’t save anything onto the machine. My laptop was once crushed under a motorbike by some hairy biker: lost a three-thousand-word feature on the new Hell’s Angels. Those memory sticks are fucking useless too. Save everything online, Mags. In the ether.’ He sighed. ‘New Orleans, eh? It’ll be a riot.’

Nick warned her that the city would be swarming with journalists after the Forbes death: ‘I’d be there myself if it wasn’t for the fact that the foreign desk is even more broke than I am.’ She was to head for the hotel where all the reporters would be staying. There’s always one, he explained. He promised that the second he had rung off, he would call his mate from the
Telegraph
and find out the name. Within two minutes, there was a buzz on her BlackBerry:
The Monteleone. Demand a room that doesn’t look over the street. Bloody loud at night.

The second she got out of the cab, she was hit by a scent that reminded her of a combination of Africa and Washington in August: the sub-tropical tang of damp and decay, with a hint of sweetness. She looked around, instantly hit by the lushness that seemed to tumble off every Paris-style balcony, vivid purple bougainvillea or trailing plants of dense green. The place seemed to ooze with fertility, drunken and heady.

It was still early, but Nick had told her to head for the bar all the same: thanks to the time difference, the European hacks would all be off deadline by now. Even their ‘damned bloody websites’ would be asleep. ‘They’re better anyway,’ Nick had said. ‘Much more forthcoming than our tight-lipped
American colleagues, most of whom stay on the bloody mineral water all night.’

The Carousel Bar was the kind of place that would normally make Maggie recoil: it had, God help us, a theme – the circus, complete with a spinning merry-go-round, elaborately decorated, in the centre of the room. But there were also black-and-white portraits of past guests, among them Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and William Faulkner, which made her feel rather more forgiving.

She spied a group of half a dozen – five men, one woman – at a corner table. Past experience told her this was the foreign press corps; and she was right. There, sipping at a vile-looking concoction, was a man who perfectly matched Nick’s description of his
Telegraph
pal – sandy-haired, gawky, eager.

‘Tim?’ she asked, prompting the man to his feet, simultaneously putting down his drink and offering a handshake. His face bore the expression Maggie had seen ever since she turned eighteen, a look that even the most sophisticated men were not fully able to conceal, one that contained both a split-second act of assessment and the passing of a positive verdict. She felt rumpled after the flight and she was exhausted after the last two days. But the gaze of Tim from the
Telegraph
, probably ten years her junior, told her that whatever it was she had had at eighteen had not completely vanished.

‘Hurricane?’ he said, raising his glass with a smile. ‘The post-Katrina cocktail of choice, apparently.’

Remembering Lesson One in Nick du Caines’s journalism for beginners course, Maggie insisted she would get this round – taking orders for more Hurricanes from the rest of the table. As she did, she noticed a man at a corner table, alone. Dark-haired, thin-faced and older than the others, he had a laptop open and was speaking softly into a cellphone. Was he a journalist too?

By the time she came back to the table, Tim had already filled everyone in: she was Liz from the
Irish Times
, a pal of Nick’s and therefore to be welcomed.

‘Where we got up to, Miss Costello,’ explained Francesco from
Corriere della Serra
– a bald man in his late forties, who nevertheless gave off a whiff of foreign correspondent glamour, starting with his battered photographer’s jacket and its countless pockets – ‘was the police statement today that they are “looking for no one else” in connection with Forbes’s death.’

‘Means they are treating it as suicide,’ added Tim keenly.

‘And what do we think of that?’ said Maggie, taking a sip of her cocktail. Sickly sweet, it made her gag: how anyone would want to drink this over a glass of Jameson’s was beyond her.

‘I don’t see how they could do anything else,’ said Francesco. ‘There was no sign of a break-in at the apartment,’ he said, counting the fingers off his hand for emphasis. ‘There were no fingerprints except his own. And this is a known form of sexual – how do you say –
fetish
.’

‘The Louisiana coroner might call it death by misadventure.’ It was the woman, whose voice sounded Home Counties English to Maggie but who was, apparently, the New York correspondent for
Der Spiegel
. Like the others, she had got on a plane the moment Forbes’s death was announced: since they’d been in New Orleans since lunchtime, they were now officially experts. ‘It’s not a suicide if Forbes didn’t want to take his own life.’

‘It seems,’ said Tim, turning to face Maggie, his voice lowering as if he was hoping to turn the group conversation into a more intimate exchange between the two of them, ‘as if our Mr Forbes was so thrilled at his success in wounding the President, that he wanted to celebrate, as it were.’

‘And we think Forbes was into the whole autoasphyxiation thing?’

‘Oh, yes. He was a gasper, all right.’ Tim smiled, pleased with himself.

‘A gasper?’

‘That’s the word for it, I’m told: those who get their kicks being choked.’ Seeing Francesco straining to join their conversation, Tim decided to say more, to keep Maggie to himself. ‘We have a piece from our medical correspondent which says Forbes fits the profile completely. Middle-aged man; risk-taker; thrill-seeker; loner.’

‘We know all that, do we?’

‘And don’t forget the New Orleans factor.’

‘What’s that?’

‘N’Awlins!’ He attempted a Southern drawl, without success. ‘The Big Easy, the Big Sleazy. He lived just off Bourbon Street, for God’s sake. This is sin city, and he was right in the middle of it. He fits the bill perfectly.’

‘Is that what the
Telegraph
is saying tomorrow?’

‘That’s what
I’m
saying. Can’t speak for the bloody comment pages. The editor
loathes
Baker, thinks he’s some crazed socialist. He asked the foreign desk to get me to write “The ten clues that say Forbes was murdered”. Been reading too many blogs.’

‘That would be a cracking story, though, wouldn’t it?’ Maggie said, before noticing that the woman from
Der Spiegel
was staring at her. Was she jealous? Had Maggie got between her and young Tim?

‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’

‘I don’t think so. Not unless you spend time clubbing by the Liffey.’ Maggie could hear her own accent change, dialling up the Irish.

‘No, you definitely look familiar.’ Still the cut-glass English accent, with impeccable idiom, but now the German undercurrent had become audible. ‘Were you in a magazine?’

‘I’m not a model, if that’s what you mean.’ Maggie saw Francesco and Tim break into appreciative smiles. She didn’t like where this was going. ‘Actually, I get this a lot. I have one of those faces. People say I look like a lot of people.’

‘Must be that then.’

Maggie smiled in what she hoped was a sisterly fashion, but elicited only a cool response. She glanced down at the pile of BlackBerrys and phones on the table: it would only take a couple of searches of the name Costello and this woman would soon have her rumbled.

A phone call came for Francesco and, thankfully, the moment was broken. Seizing his chance, Tim turned to her and suggested the two of them go out for a bite of dinner. ‘We could compare notes on the story if you like – though, obviously, only if you think that’s useful.’