The Chosen One (12 page)

Washington, DC, Wednesday March 22, 22.15
‘So now it’s your decision.’

‘I know.’

‘You’ve spoken to colleagues. They say you’ll have the full weight of the Republican party in Congress behind you.’

‘They
say
that. You know how much verbal agreements are worth in this town.’

‘I do, sir. They’re not worth the paper they’re written on.’

That one word had done it, as she surely knew it would.
Sir.
Said like that, in that sweet, eyelash-fluttering way of hers. He felt his loins stirring. This little routine he had with Cindy always turned him on, but she was playing it more expertly than ever tonight, the demure-yet-pert Southern belle with a hint of sauce beneath that courtly exterior. She only had to call him ‘sir’ in that educated Charleston accent, and he was transported back to the nineteenth century: he was master of the house and she was bending over to submit to his will…

He looked at his watch: ten fifteen. He would have to act fast. But still he wanted to go through the arguments one last time. ‘If this is to work, Cindy, then the Forbes
stuff is critical. It’s just the lunatics right now, but we have to make the base
believe
. Tell me again. What’s Rush been saying?’

‘He’s saying the American people have the right to raise questions. No more than that.’

‘Beck?’

‘Good. He interviewed an expert on murder cases that were faked to look like suicide.’

‘So you think this could stick? If I’m to make this move, our folks have to be dead certain that Stephen Baker had Vic Forbes killed.’

Obligingly, Cindy turned around, giving him a chance to see her from behind, and bent over to retrieve a piece of paper from her briefcase – taking rather longer to do so than was strictly necessary.

‘We don’t have many allies down there, not after—’ She paused, reluctant to say the word that had inflicted such damage on Republicans. ‘After Katrina. Governor Tett is ours, obviously, but he’s surrounded by Democrats. Especially in New Orleans itself.’

‘Journalists?’

‘The good news is that the
National Enquirer
is sniffing around.’

‘That
is
good news.’

‘If there’s something to find, they’ll find it.’

He looked out of the window, contemplating the long sweep of twinkling lights that was the American capital. He watched the slow red winking at the top of the Washington monument.

‘You do realize how serious this is, don’t you, Cindy?’

‘I do.’

‘This is the big one. It’s the bunker-buster. If we get it right, Baker will be finished.’

‘And you, sir, will only just be started.’ She fluttered her eyelashes again, signalling a return to character. ‘Strike me hard if I’m wrong.’

That was it, the surge of lust was now too great to resist. Senator Rick Franklin glanced down at the portrait on his desk, the one that showed him and his four children smiling warmly at the lens, while his wife of eighteen years gazed adoringly up at him: the full Nancy Reagan, as that particular pose was known in the political communications industry. He turned the picture face down, so that it lay flat against the wood, right next to the discreet statuette he had received when he was anointed a ‘Hero of the American Family’ by the Christian Coalition.

He looked at his watch. If they were quick, there was time.

‘Now, Cindy, I am about to follow the rules of this house and administer the punishment that you deserve. First, is the outer door of the office locked in the usual fashion?’

‘It is, sir.’

‘Second, are you wearing that underwear that you know tempts your master?’

‘The one sir calls “the eyepatch”?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Yes, sir. I’m ashamed to say I am.’

They were practised enough, the Senator and his aide, that they could run through the whole ritual – all the way to climax (his) – in a matter of minutes.

Once it was done, he felt ready to make the move that he knew would define his career and might well alter the course of American history. He zipped up his fly, buckled his belt and nodded that Cindy, now straightening her stockings, should stay.

He dialled the number Cindy had put in front of him,
the first move in a sequence that he had never had to follow before; heard the operator answer and realized, with a rush of adrenalin, the import of what he was about to do.

‘This is Senator Rick Franklin. I need to speak to the President of the United States.’

New Orleans, Wednesday March 22, 23.45 CST

The device she had found had been burning a hole in Maggie’s pocket for the best part of an hour. Lewis Rigby had insisted they bury the hatchet with a drink. No hard feelings and all that.

Throughout their conversation, though her eyes didn’t waver, Maggie did not listen to a word the grubby little hack was saying. Instead all her brainpower was channelled into her fingertips, as she turned the object she had snatched from Forbes’s suit pocket over and over in her own.

It was round and flat, a disc; and yet it had buzzed. It was too thin to be a cellphone, even a novelty one. There were no buttons, nor one of those clam-shell flaps that might conceal them. A moment of panic seized her, one she hoped Rigby did not glimpse as she pretended to be fascinated by the story of how exactly he had come to tap the cellphone of the former mayor of Atlanta just in time to hear him call the Hot Guys chat line.

What if she had been half-right? What if the buzzing sound had indeed come from the wardrobe, and from the suits, but she had reached into the wrong pocket? What if
she had had the chance to grab Vic Forbes’s cellphone, only to come away with a flipping bar coaster or whatever this piece of crap was?

They finally got back to the Monteleone where she made her excuses, though not before running into a crestfallen Tim, who gently asked whether her headache had cleared.

‘My what?’

‘Your headache.’

Christ, she’d completely forgotten. That had been her explanation for leaving the bar, hoping Tim wouldn’t notice that Rigby was waiting for her just outside. ‘Oh, yes. Right as rain. Thanks for asking.’

‘So perhaps you’ll join me for that nightcap we missed out on?’

She checked her watch: gone midnight. ‘You know I’ve had a long day, Tim. Flight down and all that. Would you hate me if I had an early night?’

Of course he wouldn’t, he insisted, his words brimming with the caring solicitude of an English gentleman, even as his eyes wondered if, since she was taking to her bed, she might want some company.

Once upstairs, having shaken him off and closed the door behind her, she plunged into her pocket and pulled the thing out. Fucking hell, if it wasn’t actually a poxy coaster after all. From the bloody ‘Midnight Lounge, S Claiborne Street’.

She threw it on the bed, convinced that she had screwed up royally. What the hell was she doing here? She was an analyst of international relations, a diplomat for Christ’s sake, and here she was, fannying around pretending to be a journalist, playing at being Sherlock bleeding Holmes. And she was crap at it. Somewhere in that house – in that
cupboard
– was Forbes’s BlackBerry, bursting with the information that would answer every one of the questions that would save Baker, and she had missed it, passing over the magic
lamp and reaching for the wooden spoon instead. She could curse—

There it was again. The buzz. The coaster was buzzing.

She picked it up and stared at it. At last she smiled. So that was what this was. She hadn’t seen one of these things in years. Not really the style of the kind of places she dined in these days. Not very Washington.

But maybe joints like the Midnight Lounge in New Orleans still went in for handing customers a pager while they waited for a table. Get a drink at the bar; when the pager buzzes, you can be seated. She wondered how the police could have missed it: but perhaps it would only have started going off again late in the evening, as the Midnight Lounge reopened for business.

And if it was still buzzing now, its batteries still alive, did that not suggest Forbes had picked it up recently, maybe even
very
recently?

She glanced at the bed, with its enticing offer of rest after an exhausting day that was already eighteen long hours old, and then back to the coaster.

She was damned if she knew how she would explain her miraculous resurgence of energy if she ran into Telegraph Tim, but she’d just hope to bloody well avoid him. Mind made up, she went downstairs, stepped outside and hailed a cab. ‘Midnight Lounge on South Claiborne Street please. As quick as you can.’

In her haste, she didn’t notice the man watching from the other side of the street. The same man who had seen her arrive from the airport, step out with that British journalist and then return with another person entirely – male, Caucasian, one hundred eighty pounds, five feet eleven – to the Forbes residence. Nor did she notice this man flag down a second cab, so that he could follow her into the New Orleans night.

Washington, DC, Wednesday March 22, 22.55

As Stuart Goldstein made his way to the Residence – a hop, skip and a jump for most White House employees, but not Stuart, whose last memory of hopping, skipping and jumping coincided with the Ford administration – he concluded that Stephen Baker was not like other men.

Of course, he knew that already. He had always known that, since they met in New Orleans nearly twenty years ago at a conference for rising stars in the Democratic firmament. Back then Baker had been the man to watch in the Pacific North-west, building up a defence practice in Seattle that had the town’s granola-eaters wetting their knickers in excitement at its fearlessness in acting for even the most under of underdogs.

Goldstein had taken instantly to Baker. Handsome, fluent, smart, he also had that rarest quality in a politician: courage. He had picked fights with powerful forces in the state, those whose asses most ambitious twenty-somethings would be bending double to kiss. And somehow he had done it without making them hate him. The guy had been just a few years out of law school and already they regarded him as a worthy
adversary. The big corporate boards, the lobby firms and logging interests all loved his profile: the son of a lumberman who had worked his way through college, pulling himself up by his all-American bootstraps. When it came to young Stephen Baker, they had only one question: how do we get him to come work for us?

But back then, in their first lunch a few months later at the Metropolitan Grill in Seattle, when the two had clicked intellectually, politically and tactically, Stu Goldstein had come away with a vague sense of dissatisfaction. It was a feeling that, in the early years, used to nag away at him: there was something missing, some layer he was not breaking through.

Even after they had endured their first failed campaign together, and then their first success – with all those endless hours on the road, just the two of them, in Baker’s beat-up old stationwagon, Baker driving because Goldstein had never learned how – it was no different. Stu’s wife might joke that Baker spent more time with her husband than she did. And it was true. Probably also true that no one knew Stephen Baker better than he did. But still, he would say. There was some part of him he didn’t really know.

Until recently, it had stopped bothering him. He gave up thinking about it around the time they took the Governor’s Mansion. Baker was, he decided, simply not like other men. You could get to know most guys over a beer; two for the complicated ones. But Baker was carved from different timber. That was why you could spend eighteen hours a day with him on the road, sharing motel rooms during that attorney-general’s race, and still not truly know him. And that was why he would one day be President of the United States.

So it was hardly a surprise that he had no idea what to expect from the late-night conversation they were about
to have. He had had the call summoning him to the Residence, but that had come from the operator: no clue to gauge the mood.

Would Baker be as anxious as he had been – and as he had been unable to conceal – last night, when he had wished Vic Forbes gone? Would he be pacing, would he demand to know what the hell Goldstein was going to do to save his skin, would he want detailed updates on what Maggie Costello had found in New Orleans? Would he be fretting about the rising level of noise from the wilder shores of talk radio and cable TV, hinting there was something fishy about the strangely convenient demise of Vic Forbes?

Or would he have found some relief in the simple fact that Forbes had indeed now ‘gone’? Would he feel, as Stu himself had felt at various points during the day, that if Forbes truly had taken his plutonium-coated secret to the grave with him, then there was no political challenge, no amount of political heat, they could not withstand and eventually repel?

As it turned out, the President’s reaction seemed to fall into the latter category. He spoke about the First Lady’s spirits rather than his own. He said Kimberley was, frankly, grateful that the lowlife who had dared prey on Katie would never bother them again.

‘And you? What do you think about it?’

‘I think, Stuart, that a problem which was already consuming far too much White House time – for which, I hasten to add, I blame myself not you – need distract us no more.’

‘It’s a relief, right?’

‘Yeah, it’s a relief.’ He allowed himself a smile. Not the full wattage beam that was known around the world, but a more intimate version, one that lit up only the room rather than the greater metropolitan area. ‘Those stories were giving me a headache. And there didn’t seem to be any easy solution.’

‘Except the one that landed in our lap.’

‘Not sure I would put it like that, Stuart.’

‘No. Of course not.’

There was a pause. In the silence, Goldstein reminded himself that whatever history they shared, Baker was now in another realm, one that prevented him talking like a buddy, even if he wanted to. But he couldn’t leave without asking the question.

‘Mr President, is there anything at all that I should know about Vic Forbes and his death?’

‘What do you mean, Stuart?’

‘I mean, is there anything at all I ought to be aware of about these events. Something that would, um, enable me to manage this process…?’ He was flannelling, because he didn’t want to say it outright.

‘Stuart, you’ve known me a long time. In my entire political career, every path that I’ve taken, you’ve known about. You’ve taken most of them – hell, you’ve taken
all
of them – with me.’

‘For me to do my job—’

‘Stuart, you know all there is to know.’

The tone was final. The President picked up the papers at his side, a gesture that signalled the meeting was over. Goldstein began the mammoth effort required to eject himself from the sofa.

‘Before you go, Stu: this morning I found myself remembering a golden Goldstein rule.’

‘What’s that, sir?’

‘Never forget the base.’

‘If I said it, it must be true.’

‘We need to mobilize them. We have enemies out there, girding themselves for battle. The Iran thing is going to be very hard for us. We need our friends saddled up.’

‘What do you have in mind?’

‘An outreach effort. Below the radar at this stage. But finding a way for them to keep talking to us and for us to keep talking to them.’

‘For example?’

‘Nothing showy, nothing that will look defensive. Just getting obvious people to talk to their constituencies. Get Heller in front of the Jews, get Williams on a few black radio stations.’

‘The Vice President’s got his hands full with the Helsinki process, but if—’

‘I know. Just something to be aware of. Like I said, nothing over the top. But best to be ready. Thanks, Stu.’

He had just reached the door when the phone rang. The private line.

Baker looked at his watch and gave Goldstein a raised eyebrow. Who could be calling who would be put through this late? Some foreign leader, asking for urgent help? He picked up the phone, silently indicating that Stuart should stay.

‘Yes. Good evening, Senator.’

Goldstein made a face.
Who?

Baker mouthed back a single word: Franklin.

Franklin? What the hell was that prick doing phoning here, and at this time? Goldstein watched his boss listening intently. Then he saw a change in him he had never witnessed before. The telephone conversation ended with Baker saying, ‘Senator, I appreciate the courtesy of the call. Good night.’ But Stuart was hardly paying attention to the words. He was transfixed by the sight of the President of the United States turning the colour of death.