The Chosen One (32 page)

‘You may be able to handle all this, Maggie, but I’m not sure we can. Not if something happened to you. Ma and me—’

‘You haven’t told her anything!’

‘Course I haven’t.’ A loud sniff. ‘But Jesus, Maggie, you had me worried.’ Now the contagion seemed to have spread, as the phone was filled by the noise of a child sobbing. ‘Oh, it’s OK, Calum pet. Mummy’s OK.’ There was rustling and more sniffing. ‘There you go, love. Oh look, Peppa Pig’s on.’

‘Liz, I can call another time.’

‘No! You’ve got to see this.’

‘See what?’

‘Get your computer out, get online.’

‘Hang on. I haven’t any time, I’ve—’

‘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.

Parked just alongside the open cabin door and the descended staircase was a vehicle no less elegant, a black Lincoln Town Car. That surely confirmed she had come to the right place. She was now in no doubt that that plane belonged to AitkenBruce and that inside that car sat its chairman and chief executive, Roger Waugh.

What was she to do now? Should she just stride up to the car, waving a sheaf of fictitious papers? Even if that worked, then what? She had come this far and yet now, so close, she was uncertain.

Unbidden, a question popped into her mind: What would Stuart say? She was just forming an answer when she felt the sudden and tight grip of a hand on each of her upper arms. A half-second later, there was a hand over her mouth and then – darkness.

Teterboro Airport, New Jersey, Monday March 27, 19.01

‘Now tell me this isn’t the way to travel.’ The accent was New York, the manner self-satisfied. He spoke again, rapidly, as if he had forgotten something. ‘Forgive me. Where are my manners? Guys, you can take all that stuff off now.’

As the black hood was lifted off her face, light seemed to flood into her eyes. She heard a muffled sound of protest: her own. Now one of the two bodyguards who had dragged her onboard the plane sharply pulled back the strip of duct tape that had sealed her mouth, so that her first audible sound was a howl. It was mixed with a gasp of relief, for now she was able to gobble whole greedy gulps of air – rather than relying on tiny sniffs of the stale oxygen inside that hood.

‘Nice to see you, Miss Costello. Welcome aboard. We’ll be taking off any moment. I don’t need to tell you to fasten your seatbelt.’

At that, Maggie tried to move only to realize that she was tied to the armrests at the side of her chair, her elbows and wrists pinned so flat it was if she were a nervous flier tightly clinging to the furniture. Her legs would not move either: they were tied to each other.

She could feel the plane straightening on the runway. Now it began picking up speed, the noise increasing. It was taking off. ‘Where the hell do you think you’re taking me? This is kidnapping. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

‘Come on, Maggie. Let’s not get off on the wrong foot.’ He looked down at her shackled leg. ‘No pun intended.’

Maggie stared at this man directly opposite her, his face corresponding with the picture she had looked up of Roger Waugh. He was bald, with small, mischievous eyes wearing, to her surprise, a rumpled suit and a tie of drab blue. If you didn’t know it already, you would never guess that this was the boss of the largest banking group in the world.

The interior of this jet would have given a clue, though. She was facing Waugh, nestled in a wide seat clad entirely in soft, cream leather. Between them was a table, in smooth, polished oak. They appeared to be the only two passengers, save for two middle-aged men with meaty necks in crisp suits: the security detail. The same men, she assumed, who had grabbed her from the tarmac outside.

‘You’ve got a funny idea of kidnapping, Maggie. There’s a full bar on this plane, with a selection of Château Mouton Rothschild which you can drink from Baccarat crystal glasses. The carpets alone cost more than your apartment. And if you fancy a snooze – or, rather, if I fancy a snooze – I can go into the cabin where there’s a double bed and rest my head on any one of four pillows which – you’re gonna love this, Maggie – are made entirely from Hermès scarves.’

‘I couldn’t give a shite how rich you are: you’ve kidnapped me.’ Maggie heard the Irish in her accent, a sure sign she was under stress.

‘I like to think of it as a meeting. You clearly didn’t come to that armpit in New Jersey to admire the scenery: you wanted to see me.’

Maggie’s brain was spinning. Perhaps it was lack of oxygen;
or the sheer shock of the situation. She needed to get a grip. ‘How do you know what I wanted? How the hell do you know who I am?’

His eyes were disturbingly piercing, though you didn’t notice that at first glance. They seemed to bore right into her. ‘Oh come on, Maggie. You don’t get to be me if you don’t know what’s going on. We’ve been following you, every step of the way. New Orleans, Aberdeen, Coeur d’Alene, JFK this afternoon. Don’t disappoint me: you knew we were there, right?’

Maggie thought of the man across the street from the Midnight Lounge; the headlights in the distance on the way to see Anne Everett. She hadn’t been paranoid: her instincts had been right all along.

‘So why didn’t you just kill me, like you killed Stuart Goldstein and Nick du Caines? It’s not like you didn’t try.’

‘An act of over-zealousness. Call it irrational exuberance.’ He quirked a smile, as if they were co-conspirators sharing a joke. ‘I’m afraid I was feeling a little pressure from colleagues. And though I detest failure, there was an upside in this case. It meant I could think again, revisit the issue, if you like. I came to see you’re of much greater use to us alive.’

His smile widened, as if he expected her to be playfully intrigued by this remark.

But Maggie refused to play along. Turning her head from that penetrating gaze, she looked out of the porthole, trying to make her brain work. Who were these ‘colleagues’? And in what way could he possibly think she was of use to them? Unable to process it all, she asked simply, ‘Where are we going?’

‘We’ll come to that. Now why don’t you ask me what you wanted to ask? What you came all this way to ask.’ He settled back in his seat, smiling out of his bald, vole-like
head as if he were getting ready to start an amusing parlour game.

At that moment, a woman appeared – early thirties, absurdly pretty – with two flutes of champagne. She nodded sweetly at Waugh as she placed his glass on the table before him, then did the same for Maggie, apparently oblivious to the fact that this particular passenger was in shackles, and then discreetly withdrew.

Maggie clutched at a thought. ‘People will have seen, you know. What just happened there. Grabbing me – the gag, the hood.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. You know the one thing these private aviation guys learned doing all the rendition work? You’d be amazed what you can get away with in broad daylight. That little corner of the airfield is more or less reserved for us. Not a soul around. And those that are there are paid too well to look too closely.’ He sipped his champagne. ‘Mmm. That’s very good. You really ought to – oh, there I go again. Sorry, you can’t. Silly me. Would you like me to help you?’

Maggie glared at him.

‘Please yourself. I always find a meeting goes so much better with champagne. So, to business. We’ve had to take your phone. Or rather, phones. So many of them, Maggie! One could almost become suspicious of what you were up to. But no phones. We can’t risk a recording of this conversation. And Harry and Jack here say they’ve frisked you thoroughly and you’re not wired. Which is good. So let’s get to the heart of the matter. I gather you’ve spoken to Mrs Everett. So now you know almost everything.’

Maggie stared back at him. ‘I know that she has kept a terrible secret for a very, very long time. That someone – probably you – paid her a lot of money to keep quiet about what happened to her daughter. But I don’t think she has any idea why.’

Waugh looked downward, brushing a speck of dirt off his creased trousers. Maggie decided the costume was deliberate, a way for this billionaire banker not to appear ostentatious when in public: crumpled suits when visible, Baccarat crystal when out of sight.

‘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.’