The Chosen One (33 page)

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?’

‘Well, it was his rather than mine, but yes.’

‘That revelation changed the presidential election. Chester never stood a chance after that.’

‘That’s true.’

‘You did all this for Baker?’

‘Yes.’

‘But why? Why would you work so hard to get Stephen Baker elected? He doesn’t even
agree
with you. He wants to take on the banks.’

‘That, Maggie, only makes him all the more credible. For the day he gets out his pen and vetoes the banking bill that threatens to cripple my business. That threatens to deny me and my colleagues the money that is rightfully ours.’

A small light dawned in the darkness. Was it possible that
Stephen Baker did not
know
he had been chosen, that his path had been smoothed all these years? Maybe it was
him
who had been played all along. Maggie shook her head, confused. ‘He’d never do it. Why would Baker veto a bill he believes in?’

‘Ms Costello, when are you going to get
smart
? This conversation is proving to be a major disappointment. I have junior analysts of the beer industry who are sharper than you are. Come on. How could I know with absolute certainty that he would veto that bill? Because one day, we’d knock on his door and tell him what we have on him. Lay it all out. Show and tell, like at elementary school.

‘We’d show him the photos of the Meredith Hotel, burnt to a crisp. Remind him we knew he was there. Maybe we wouldn’t even have to do that. We’d probably just have to say a single word.’ His voice dipped and he let out a breathy whisper, as if he were naming a sexy fragrance in a perfume ad: ‘Pamela.’

‘But there’s a photo of him in
The Daily World
, shaking hands with a senator in Washington. It was taken on the same day.’ Maggie could hear the desperation in her own voice.

‘Senator Corbyn was always a good friend to our industry. A most co-operative friend. If we asked him to shake hands with a bright young man from his home state, why would he refuse? And as for the date, well, who can blame the editors of
The Daily World
if they accepted the information they were given? They didn’t have the advantage we had: a copy of the photograph duly date-stamped, proving that that meeting between the Senator and the future President actually took place on March 17. Two days
after
the fire at the Meredith Hotel.’ Waugh paused for effect, to let this sink in, infuriatingly self-satisfied.

‘So we’d show him what we have and we’d give him a
choice: of course we would. Veto the bill – or we reveal that you left a young girl to die. Simple. That’s how we do it. Don’t tell me you never wondered why politicians always break their promises, Maggie. Well, now you know.’

Maggie felt as if she had been punched, hard, in the stomach. She had clung to that photo of the young Stephen Baker shaking hands with the veteran senator just as tightly as Anne Everett had. They had both desperately wanted it to be true. But now she could not escape what Waugh had told her.

Of course she had believed in Baker more than any other politician she had ever known. So had everyone else. But that wasn’t the part of her that ached now. She had believed in Baker more than any
man
she had ever known, with perhaps two exceptions. She had been ready to turn her life upside down for him, because she truly thought he was different: that he was that rarest of people, a good man who would use his talents to make the world better and safer. Surrounded by a morass of lies and deceit, he had seemed…solid. Like a foundation you could build on.

Instead he was no better than Kennedy’s kid brother, the man who let a girl drown just so he could save himself.

The funny thing was, she wasn’t angry with Stephen Baker, not really. She was livid with someone else. Not Stuart Goldstein for insisting that Baker was ‘the real deal’. Not Nick, who had told her she’d be insane not to work for the coolest president of their lifetimes. She was furious with herself, for allowing herself to believe. She had let down her guard – hard-won, over long years – and this was her just reward.

But she was determined that Waugh should see nothing of the turmoil she was feeling. Let him think she had long known the truth about Baker and Pamela. ‘So Vic Forbes was
working for you,’ she said finally. ‘That blackmail message was really from you.’

He smacked his palms on the solid oak table so hard that the crystal glasses wobbled. ‘Christ, no! You think we operate the way that prick did? Give us some credit, please. We get a meeting in the Oval Office. We’re photographed going in. “Today the President hosted leaders from the finance industry”, all that garbage.’

Like the meeting you have scheduled tomorrow,
Maggie thought but did not say.

‘We go in through the front door. What Forbes did was cheap and nasty.’ Waugh looked affronted.

‘So he didn’t work for you?’

‘Forbes? As it happens, he
did
work for us. Once. A long time ago. As I understand it, he did some of the very early groundwork on Baker, gathering material in Aberdeen. He gave us the tip-off about the hotel fire, stalking Baker there probably. Jerking off outside the room as Baker got it on with Pamela, for all I know. And he told us about the shrink, which enabled us to destroy all the files and billing records so that they never came to light.’

‘How did you do that?’ Maggie asked, astonished at the sheer reach and depth of this effort.

‘A break-in at the doctor’s office. No big deal. So Forbes gave us some early help. I’m told there was deep personal animus between him and Baker, which always comes in useful. Meant he was motivated to do the work.

‘But after that, no. He joined the CIA, went to Honduras or some other shithole. He was off our radar. We kept tabs on him, of course, but they grew looser. Other people took over the file. And he seemed to have moved on. And then, last week, he pops up all over the TV making those wild accusations.’

‘Not on your orders?’

‘Are you crazy? He was ruining everything! The guy had gone rogue, doing his own thing. I don’t know why. Maybe he was trying to get Baker to pay – waiting till he was settled into The Oval Office, reckoning he’d get maximum payout from a sitting president – though that seems nuts. Maybe it was just plain jealousy. He did hate the guy’s guts. Everything he wasn’t, all that.

‘Anyway, we didn’t care what was in his mind. We just knew he had to be stopped. He was threatening to throw away our greatest asset before we’d had a chance to use it. All those decades of work would have been for nothing. We’d have been powerless to control Baker.’

Maggie was thinking hard, despite the ache in her ribs growing ever more intense. The pain was becoming unbearable. She desperately needed to move. For a moment she considered asking him to loosen the restraints, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. She didn’t want to owe him even that. She shifted the inch or two her shackles allowed. ‘You say he’d only worked for you in the early days, in Aberdeen. So how come he knew about the Iranian donation?’

‘Well, that was confirmation he was off the reservation. Because that was expressly nothing to do with us. Even
we
didn’t know about that. Our information suggests that was an initiative out of Tehran, the mullahs wanting to embarrass Baker. You gotta remember, Maggie, there’s a helluva lot of people around the world who don’t like the idea of Stephen Baker as President. He’s too different.’

‘So how did Forbes know?’

‘Not sure. But, like I said, the guy was an obsessive. Not impossible that he went through every donation Baker received, then traced them. He was crazy enough.’

‘So you got him out of the way. Sent some bait into that strip club, led him away and that was that.’

Waugh said nothing.

Maggie pressed on. ‘And you did all that to save Stephen Baker?’

‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that. We needed to keep him in post. So that he would veto the bill.’

‘Why didn’t you save yourself the bother, and just let Chester win?’

‘Could have done that. Trouble was, our main asset there was the love-child. We weren’t confident that that was sufficiently proprietary – that it was going to remain exclusive. Too many moving parts, too many people sniffing around. Rumours had been circulating for years. With Baker, the Pamela information was hermetically-sealed. No one knew.’

‘Except Forbes.’

‘Right.’

‘So you sent a team into New Orleans, brought them out by private jet. You’re like your very own CIA.’

Waugh pretended to look offended again. ‘I like to think our quality control is rather superior to theirs.’

‘It wasn’t such a smart plan, though, was it?’ Maggie persisted, beating back the discomfort. ‘You bumped off Forbes and the next minute, the whole blogosphere’s lighting up with claims that Baker’s Tony Soprano.’

‘Call it the law of unintended consequences.’

‘He’s facing impeachment!’

‘I think you’ll find things are back on track now.’

‘You mean, the—’ She shook her head, too numbed to complete the sentence. So even this latest boost to Baker, the story of the Republican senator and the pneumatic lobbyist, had come from Waugh and his pals. They were behind everything. Maybe even that demo on Sunday, that had seemed to come out of nowhere. At that, Maggie’s fatigue and pain was replaced by a sudden onrush of anger. ‘So why Stuart? And why Nick? Why did you have to kill them?’

‘Now, now, Maggie. Don’t play the hysterical woman. You
can do better than that. With Stuart, we were left with no choice. Not after that phone call you had with him.’

‘Me? What phone call?’

‘The one where Goldstein – you know, “the man the President listens to more than any other” – threatened to urge Baker to resign. “Better to leave with some dignity,” he said. No, no, no. We could not have that. Not until the banking bill was dead and buried.’

‘So you killed him?’

‘The coroner’s report says he took his own life.’

A nauseating wave of guilt passed over her, as she imagined, yet again, Stuart lying dead in Rock Creek Park. She had been ready to believe he had taken his own life – just as this fucker, Waugh, had wanted her to. She flexed her muscles against the restraints, but the plastic ties cut into her flesh, allowing her no movement. Waugh was right to have bound her: if she could, she would have smashed her fist right into his face. How would that be for ‘playing the hysterical woman’?

‘As for Nick,’ he continued. ‘I’m afraid that was your fault. You involved him. He found out about this—’ he gestured at the smooth, noiseless interior of the jet, ‘—and New Orleans. The line that led you to us. We couldn’t risk him publishing that in a newspaper. No way.’

‘So why not me?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I asked you before and you didn’t answer me. Why not kill me? I know that you wanted to because, like I said, you tried.’

Waugh gave her the hint of a smile. It was chilling. ‘I repeat, we’ve come to realize, Maggie my dear, that you’re more useful to us alive than dead. At least for the time being.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Because you’re going to work for us. Negotiate the deal. Isn’t that your forte? Maggie Costello the great negotiator?
Besides, we know you’re close to Baker; you’re one of the few people he trusts. All that “integrity” you both share.’ He released a smile, short and nasty. ‘In ten minutes this plane will land in Washington, DC – and you’re going to see the President.’

Washington, DC, Monday March 27, 20.16

The car hummed along sleekly, gliding down George Washington Memorial Parkway with its view of the Potomac, now glittering in the moonlight. They had taken away her phone, so she couldn’t call ahead. She would have to turn up at the visitors’ entrance to the White House and explain herself.

As they had untied her, she had considered delivering a delayed, but richly-deserved response to her imprisonment, hoiking up a big ball of spit and launching it into Waugh’s face, but had baulked at the futility of it. Whatever small satisfaction it would have provided, the meat-heads would have paid her back with interest.

Besides, Waugh had not let her go without a warning. Standing on the tarmac in the corner of Reagan National Airport that was reserved for private jets, waiting to step into one of the two glistening limos that had pulled up just a few yards from the aircraft, he said, ‘Maggie, I haven’t been chairman of our little fraternity for very long. There are some of my colleagues – in Frankfurt or London or Dubai – who will say I should have been firmer with you some
time ago. But I’m trusting you to live up to your reputation: to achieve better terms than I could. That’s why I told you everything. So that Baker doesn’t nurture any delusions about defying our will. I trust you to convey what I have said so that he understands he has no choice in this matter.

‘And if there are any heroics, he will pay and you will pay. Severely. And so will those you love.’ He had fixed her then with those chilly eyes, holding the look for two, three, four seconds. ‘I don’t think you doubt that we can do it. So God speed – and don’t disappoint me.’ With that, he stepped into the Lincoln and drove away, leaving her with just one of the bodyguards for company. She cast a quick, sideways glance at the man. Could she outrun him? He was muscle-bound, meaty; she had broken ribs and was utterly out of condition. He’d catch her in no time. She was going to have to be cleverer than that, and bide her time.

The guard then looked left and right before speaking into his lapel: ‘The Principal has departed. Repeat, the Principal has departed.’

That tiny moment stayed with Maggie as they took the 14th Street exit off I-395 and headed into downtown Washington.
The Principal
. Roger Waugh had his own secret service detail as well as his own version of Air Force One on which she had just taken an involuntary ride. This man for whom no one had ever voted and whom hardly anyone had ever seen, conducted himself as if he were the true power in the land, with the elected President of the United States a mere puppet whose strings occasionally became tangled and needed straightening out.

The dread thought weighing on Maggie as she saw the familiar landmarks emerge from the dusk was that when it came to the true balance of power in this country and the world, Waugh had spoken the truth.

She yawned, long and hard. She wanted desperately to
fall into a deep sleep, one that might clear her head, allowing her to make a fresh start on this strange, awful riddle, to find time to think, talk to Uri and make a plan.

Uri.

Waugh had been explicit, leaving his warning hanging so that there could be no doubt.
You will pay
, he had said,
and so will those you love
. They had been at JFK: they must have seen her with Uri. The thought of that chilled her.

They had not hesitated to kill Stuart and Nick, when faced with the mere prospect of a disruption to their plans. How much more determined would they be faced with total exposure? And yet she was able to hold that threat over them: they had handed her that weapon. But that was what so few people understood about information. It was indeed a weapon – a sword whose blade was double-edged.

They were here now. The bodyguard nodded at her, nudging her to get out and complete the task she had been set by his boss ‘the Principal’.

She got out at 15th and Hamilton Place and looked upward, seeing the two red lights at the pinnacle of the Washington Monument, blinking in the moonlight. She remembered looking upward at that cool, solid needle after completing her very first day’s work at the White House. She had allowed herself to wonder if they were about to make history, if one day there might even be a Baker Monument in this town. She shook her head in disbelief that that was little more than two months ago.

She approached the White House security station, the low-ceilinged cabin wide enough to accommodate two scanning machines and an airport-style arch, through which all visitors had to pass. A guard, young and with a soldier’s buzzcut, beckoned her to open the glass door and enter. She began her explanation, that she was Maggie Costello, former official of the White House and that Doug Sanchez was expecting her.
They scanned their list of scheduled appointments and shook their heads. Reluctantly, feeling like a traitor who had slipped into her former comrades’ barracks only to poison them in their sleep, she told the guard on duty to call Sanchez’s office.

While she waited she tried to digest all she had heard in that short, vile flight. The scale and comprehensiveness of their operation was breathtaking. They had thought of everything, not just paying hush money to Pamela Everett’s grief-stricken parents, but getting a United States senator to pose with young Baker so that he would have a perfect alibi, printed and published in the local newspaper. They had taken the time to remove the relevant page of
The Daily World
from the archive in Aberdeen, such was their determination to leave no trace.

A moment she had forgotten floated back into her mind: Principal Schilling telling her that he had sent the Baker file to his presidential library, but had noticed that it was ‘unusually thin’. Now she knew why.

‘Maggie! Is that you?’ It was Sanchez, looking as if he had lost ten pounds in weight and had had only ten hours of sleep in the several days since she had last seen him. He moved past the security equipment and, having approached warily, now opened his arms for a hug. Maggie let him hold her, hating herself for what she was about to do. She could feel her eyes tingling: she was just so exhausted.

‘So what’s this, you go off the grid in the Pacific North-West and change your whole look?’ Sanchez said, as he walked her into the lobby, then turned left towards the Press Secretary’s office.

Maggie kept her head down as she walked, hoping not to make eye contact with anyone she knew, hoping she wouldn’t have to talk to, or explain herself, to anyone. She wouldn’t know where to begin. Inevitably she glimpsed
the one person she least wanted to see: the silver-haired Chief of Staff, Magnus Longley, slipping out of one corridor and into another, a portfolio tucked under his arm. She shuddered at the sight of him. He spotted her too. Taking a second to confirm that, despite her new look, it was indeed her, he shot her a glare that clearly said, ‘What are you doing here? I thought I fired you.’

‘So what the hell happened, Maggie?’ Sanchez, drawing back her attention.

‘It’s such a long story, Doug. And the only person I can tell it to right now is the President. I’m sorry.’

He gave her a long, compassionate look which left her feeling more guilty than ever. Then he nodded, suggested Maggie take a seat in his office and embarked on the short stroll down the corridor to the President’s personal secretary.

Maggie looked at the TV, tuned to MSNBC. She had been here only a few days ago, but now it felt like a different lifetime. The juvenile egghead from the New Republic was on:

‘…I think the word of the hour is “exit strategy”. I’ve been talking to House whips and they say the numbers are just not there on Judiciary for the Republicans to move forward with this thing. Democrats are closing ranks behind the President and those two crucial waverers are no longer wavering. So, as I say, I think the pressure is now on the Republicans to find a way out of this without losing too much face.’

The interviewer was nodding: ‘And what’s turned things around for the President?’

‘Well, the implosion of Senator Wilson is certainly a factor…’

Maggie sighed, knowing that everyone in this building would be jubilant at that news, believing it to be a rare stroke
of good fortune. Believing that Baker’s lucky streak had at last been restored.

But all she could think of was Waugh’s smirking face.

Sanchez appeared in the doorway. ‘He’s ready for you now.’