To Kill The Truth Read online

  To Kill

  The

  Truth

  Sam Bourne

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Also by Sam Bourne

  Dedication

  Monday

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Tuesday

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Wednesday

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Thursday

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Friday

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Saturday

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Acknowledgements

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by

  Quercus Editions Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Jonathan Freedland 2019

  The moral right of Jonathan Freedland to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78747 489 5

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Also By Sam Bourne

  The Righteous Men

  The Last Testament

  The Final Reckoning

  The Chosen One

  Pantheon

  To Kill the President

  As Jonathan Freedland

  Bring Home the Revolution

  Jacob’s Gift

  The 3rd Woman

  For Jonny Geller

  Old friend and master agent.

  This is our tenth book together, so this one’s for you.

  Monday

  Chapter One

  Charlottesville, Virginia, 2.40am

  The past was present. At this late hour, he could feel it curl around him like smoke.

  Normally, when he was teaching, standing before an auditorium full of students, history felt as the word sounded: distant and dusty, even to him. The same was true in the library, surrounded by people. There too the events of long ago remained beyond the horizon, out of reach.

  But here, alone in this room, in the early hours, the years fell away. He had taken precautions to ensure modernity would not intrude: the phone was stilled, the computer sound asleep. It was just him and the documents, piled high on his desk. Outside, though it was too dark to see now, was the Lawn, the centrepiece of the University of Virginia’s founding campus here in Charlottesville, a marvel of landscaping designed by Thomas Jefferson himself. After nearly three decades in the history department, no one begrudged Professor Russell Aikman his office with a perfect view. Even in the darkness, the mere knowledge that the Lawn was there, just on the other side of the window, narrowed the gap between him and the America of centuries earlier.

  But it was the documents themselves, examined in solitude, that transported him. These were not the originals, so there was nothing sensory about this act of magic. It was not the smell or touch of these texts that sent Aikman tumbling back through time, though he knew the power of such a physical connection. He had, in the course of his career, touched the very parchment that, say, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton or, as it happens, Jefferson had scratched and etched with the hard nib of their quills. He had felt that strange kinship with ancestors that can flow through the fingertips, the sensation that both you and they had touched this same object, your skin and theirs somehow joined across the generations. But the link he felt on these late nights was not physical.

  No. The grip these documents exerted on him came only from their words. For Aikman, to read a sentence set down more than two hundred years ago was to connect with the mind of a fellow human being long gone, to be allowed into their thoughts. When he contemplated the wonder of it, he pictured those images from the space age days of his youth, when an American craft would ‘dock’ with its Soviet counterpart. Two individuals conquering a vast distance, holding out their hands and touching.

  He felt it that night, as he drilled down into the text placed at the centre of his desk. He lost himself in the words, a diver sinking deeper and deeper into dark water. Only when he heard the noise did he cannon upward, bursting through the surface and back into the present.

  He bolted upright, alert as a hare, his head darting from left to right. What was that? There were occasional sounds here at night: a rumble of the heating, a shudder of the air-conditioning, depending on the season. But this was more direct. It sounded like a creak in the corridor.

  ‘Hello?’ He felt ridiculous as he called out, but he did it again. ‘Hello there?’

  No reply. Of course not.

  He looked down and saw the array of papers on his desk as if they had been laid out by someone else. He hadn’t realized how much he’d written this night, already filling three separate sheets of his yellow legal pad, along with dozens of Post-it notes. After all these years, the process still mystified him, how these scraps of scribbled half-thoughts turned steadily, over time, into something that would be called history.

  He found his place once more, about two-thirds of the way through this diary of a Confederate soldier. A couple in Richmond had found it a matter of months earlier, in a stack of boxes they were about to throw out of a newly purchased nineteenth-century farmhouse. In fact, it was their daughter, fourteen years old, who had spotted it, an unbound sheaf of papers with little to announce that it was a journal. When she saw the references to battle, she thought the crumbling pages might date back to the Vietnam war. It took the family a while to understand what they had. But once they—


  There it was again. Unmistakable this time. The creak of a human footstep on a floorboard, no doubt about it.

  Aikman stood up, shifted around his desk and headed for the door. He felt his head grow dizzy, the colours swirling. He’d stood up too quickly.

  When he opened the door, he could see nothing. The corridor was in darkness. He stepped forward, clapping his hands. He told himself his only purpose was to activate the motion-sensitive lighting. It was an unintended side effect that the noise broke the silence, providing him with the reassurance of his own presence.

  ‘Hello?’ he said again, peering into the corridor of faculty offices, adjusting his eyes to the bright light. ‘Mr Warner, is that you?’

  Silence.

  ‘Is there something you need? Is there someone you need me to call?’

  He scanned the doors of his colleagues, each one shut and expressionless. In the light, he noticed which doors were unmarked and which decorated, either with bumper stickers for long-forgotten, defeated liberal candidates or with a form attached to a clipboard, letting students know their office hours and when they would be available for a drop-in visit, complete with ballpoint pen dangling on a string for those keen to book an appointment. Old school, Aikman thought to himself of what had once seemed a voguish innovation: the young faculty did all that online these days. He looked at his own door, adorned only with his name.

  One last try and he would go back in. Perhaps a gentler tack might coax his brilliant, but troubled, student out of the shadows. ‘Adam, if you need me to take you to the hospital, I can do that. Just say the word. No need to skulk around in the middle of the—’

  He was cut off mid-sentence. The lights had gone out, their automated time expired, the sudden darkness taking him by surprise. He considered requesting an extension by waving his arms around again, but thought better of it. He turned his shoulder and headed back inside towards his desk. The door behind him swung steadily back towards the latch, without ever quite meeting it.

  Slower than he once was, Russell Aikman had only just reached his chair when the door opened again. When he looked up, he could barely make out the face of his visitor. The light from his desk lamp, pooled on the spread of papers, didn’t reach that part of the room. He may have squinted but if he did, it was only for a split-second.

  Was that time enough to see the intruder make a small movement – a small rub of the eyebrow – which seemed to act as a cue for the arm to arc upwards until it was held straight ahead, the hand unwavering, as it trained itself directly on the space just between the target’s eyes? Did Russell Aikman have the time to understand what was happening to him, to comprehend that this was his very last second of life? Did he know that at that moment his present was sinking forever into the past?

  Chapter Two

  Washington DC, 12.05pm

  Maggie Costello wriggled in her seat for the fifth time in as many minutes. She was straining to concentrate. It wasn’t that the spectacle unfolding on stage before her wasn’t riveting. It was. The arguments traded across the floor in this packed university lecture theatre were compelling. But still it was hard to stay focused. The noise outside was just too great.

  She could hear the chants; they all could. They’d heard them as they made their way in, coming from the two armies of protesters facing off against each other, separated into two blocs on either side of the entrance path into the auditorium by a thin, struggling line of campus police reinforced by officers of the MPD, Washington’s metropolitan police department.

  On one side were the students, backed by allies who’d travelled in from New York, Philadelphia and beyond. They were young and unmissably diverse: Latino women, black men – one of them wearing mock-manacles around his wrists, linked by a chain to a collar around his neck – and plenty of white demonstrators draped in Pride flags, their arms tattooed and their faces multiply pierced. Their loudest, most consistent battle cry: ‘No platform for racists!’ and, pertinently for today, ‘Slavery is real!’

  Ranged against them were ranks of white men in an unofficial uniform of beige chinos and white (and occasionally black) polo shirts. Most were carrying shields, some rectangular, shaped like those wielded by riot police, some circular, like those favoured by comic book super-heroes. They were decorated with a variety of patterns that Maggie struggled to identify. Of course she recognized the Iron Cross, adopted and adapted by the Third Reich, and the Confederate flag of the old south. But the rest of the assorted triangles and crosses were new to her: they seemed to be variations on the swastika theme, hinting at some ancient Nordic pattern. Several were in a distinct white-and-red, nodding to the colours of the Crusades. At first, Maggie, watching from just a few yards away, had tried to decipher each one; a few of them she looked up on her phone. But there were so many that, after a while, they merged into a blur.

  Their chants were more direct. ‘Blood and Soil’ was a favourite refrain, as was ‘You will not replace us’, often reworked as ‘Jews will not replace us.’ But the one that struck Maggie with greatest force, and which seemed to be tailored especially for the occasion, was, ‘Don’t know, don’t care/Nothing happened, nothing’s there.’

  She could still make them out now, from her seat in the back row of the lecture theatre. They were muffled but unambiguous, even when they clashed with and overrode each other. Sometimes the words were drowned out by the percussive beat of men pounding their shields with sticks and, at intervals, the chants would merge into a single crescendo, a collective surging sound, which, Maggie guessed, meant one side had rushed against the other.

  Of the three speakers on stage, improbably seated in chat-show formation around a low circular table bearing three glasses of water, only one seemed unfazed by the noise outside. His name was Rob Staat and he was the reason for the protests. He had emerged as the chief media spokesperson and defender of William Keane, the notorious self-styled historian who had become a hero to the American, and increasingly global, far right. Keane was currently at the centre of what the media had, inevitably, hailed as the ‘trial of the century’.

  Keane, even his enemies had to admit, was a floridly charismatic figure, in his white suits and insistence on old-world southern courtesies – all ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, sir’ee’ – and the thirty-something Staat was a pale substitute. But thanks to a constant quarter-smile that played on his lips, threatening to flourish into a full-blown smirk, he managed to arouse Maggie’s loathing all the same.

  Against Staat was Jonathan Baum, a scholar from Georgetown’s history department. Usually a solid, methodical speaker, he was now visibly unnerved. He reached for his water glass often, the microphone on his lapel picking up the audible gulp as he drank. Perched on his lap was a large file, which he would rummage through while Staat talked, as if searching for the document that would settle the matter once and for all. Whenever the rhythmic pounding of stick against shield outside resumed, he’d look up, startled.

  Seated between them was Pamela Bentham, heiress of the same Bentham family that had endowed this theatre along with the newly established Bentham Center for Free Speech to which it was attached. Besides a few opening remarks, she said almost nothing, content to let the two antagonists dominate proceedings while she maintained a studied neutrality. Maggie watched her – mid-fifties, expensively coiffed, wearing spectacles whose necessity Maggie questioned – as she swivelled to face whichever man was speaking, nodding along with each point intently. She was working hard to ignore the pandemonium outside but, Maggie noticed, one Bentham hand was gripping the other, as if to stop it from shaking.

  In a way, it was impressive, Maggie concluded. Not so much the chairing, as the determination. This Bentham woman was putting her mouth where her money was, turning up in person, rather than contenting herself with a mere donation, to ensure this debate took place, despite all the pressure there had been on the university to stop it. And doing it simply to insist on the right to free speech.

  Most instit
utions would – and indeed had – run a mile from the Keane trial. It could only bring trouble. Maggie was sure that the university grandees’ collective heart had sunk when Bentham suggested airing the issues on campus. Everything about it screamed unsafe space.

  And yet there was no doubting its importance. Americans had been gripped by the trial, with plenty of the cable networks carrying long stretches of it live. That was partly thanks to Keane and his courtroom antics. But it was also because of what was at stake.

  Keane had sued the African-American writer Susan Liston for libel over a paragraph in a book she’d written on the alt-right, in which she had referred to Keane as a ‘slavery denier’. His case, brought before a federal court in Richmond, was simple. He could not be a slavery denier because there was nothing to deny. Black people had never been slaves in the United States.

  Staat was now parroting Keane’s arguments, the same ones everyone present had seen Keane make a hundred times before. Slaves’ testimony was unreliable; slave owners’ testimony was unreliable; the documents were unreliable. He used the word ‘myth’ a lot, Maggie noticed, as if it were a one-word rebuttal or perhaps an expletive. ‘Myth!’ he said again now, for the dozenth time.

  Maggie looked around the lecture theatre. The first rows were packed with journalists, as were the seats surrounding her at the back. The entire rear of the hall was a thicket of tripods and TV cameras. As for the rest, it was a mixture of university notables, especially those associated with the Bentham Center, doubtless keen to ingratiate themselves with their patron, and handpicked graduate students. It seemed the Georgetown authorities hadn’t wanted to take the risk of letting in undergrads, who were liable to whip out placards, heckle Staat or rush the stage. (Clearly, Maggie concluded, the Center for Free Speech had decided free speech had its limits.)

  While Staat was off on a riff about the nature of libel, Maggie wondered about herself: was she here as a grad student or as a notable? She’d never really thought about her exact status at this institution. It was enough that she was here.