The Chosen One Read online

  ‘They barely looked like the same person. You sure?’

  ‘I’m sure, sir.’ Shure, shir.

  ‘I used to call him Andrew at school. That’s how I came to think of him. Andrew Jackson, like the president. I just didn’t make the connection. What on earth’s this all about, Maggie?’

  ‘I wish I knew, Mr President. But I intend to find out.’

  ‘They’re calling me back in, Maggie. What do you need?’

  ‘They stole my wallet and my phone.’

  ‘OK, Sanchez will send you everything.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. But make sure he leaves no trail. Stuart wouldn’t want you accused of running a slush fund, paying someone like me to poke around into Jackson’s past. Tell him to be careful.’

  ‘Maggie, it’s you who has to be careful. I can’t afford to lose another person I trust. There are too few of you left.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr President.’

  She must have dozed off straight after the phone call, worn out by the effort of it, because nearly an hour had passed when she woke up. A handwritten telephone message had been left by her bedside from a Mr Doug of Dupont Circle. She smiled at Sanchez’s attempt at discretion.

  The door creaked open. Maggie looked up, struggling to focus. She could see that a woman had entered, middle-aged but in the dark it was hard to make out her features.

  ‘What an unexpected surprise to see you again,’ she said. ‘There you are, dear.’

  Dear.

  Maggie created a fist, a futile gesture for a woman with two broken ribs and a tube in her arm, but it was a reflex, the result of the bolt of fear and rage that had just coursed through her.

  Now the woman was coming nearer, approaching the bed. She had a syringe in her hand. Maggie recoiled.

  ‘No need to be scared, Maggie dear. No need to be scared at all. I have something that will make all the pain go away.’

  40

  Diplomatic cable:

  From the Head of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, Tehran

  To the Interests Section of the Islamic Republic of Iran, housed within the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Washington DC

  TOP SECRET. ENCRYPTION SETTING: MAXIMUM.

  You are to be congratulated. SB dangles by a silken thread. But the Supreme Leader is concerned about the matter of credit. Whatever is written in the West, it is imperative that believers understand the Islamic Republic to have played the critical role. Please advise what action you will take to ensure the wider Muslim world understands that, when the moment comes, the head of the snake did not simply fall off: it was severed! Ends.

  Editorial from The Guardian newspaper, London, Saturday March 25:

  For the past week, the world has watched events in Washington with something like incredulity. Sixty-four days have passed since Stephen Baker swore the oath of office as President of the United States. When he did so, it was not just Americans who hoped they were about to make a fresh start. The world dared to hope too.

  Yet a series of allegations, apparently timed to go off in sequence like a set of terrorist bombs, has left Mr Baker more vulnerable than would have seemed imaginable on that icy January morning of his inauguration. Extraordinarily, impeachment proceedings have begun against a president who has barely got his feet under the Oval Office table.

  This newspaper deplores that effort. Republicans determined to topple Mr Baker should pause, reflecting that they will not simply be removing the head of their own government. Bombastic though this may sound, they will be depriving the world of its de facto leader. For that is what the role of US president in the twenty-first century entails.

  Now is not the time. Not when the world faces so many grave problems, from bitter wars to a changing climate. And Mr Baker – who seems to understand those problems better than most – is not the right target. We are heartened by the news that one conservative Democrat on the House of Representatives judiciary committee has signalled that he will stay loyal to his president. We call on the remaining two waverers – those whose votes, were they to switch to the Republicans, would formally advance impeachment proceedings against Mr Baker – to do the right thing. It is not just America that needs them to act wisely. The entire world is watching.

  41

  Aberdeen, Washington, Saturday March 25, 11.25 PST

  ‘There really is nothing to be frightened of at all, dear.’

  Maggie reached for the cup of coffee, still hot, that had been left at her bedside. The woman was looming over her. If only Maggie could grab hold of it, she could throw the steaming liquid in her face. She stretched…

  And at that moment she saw the woman’s face clearly. Grey-haired, yes, but not, after all, the apparently kindly lady who had sabotaged her car at the school.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Maggie panted. ‘I thought you were someone else.’

  ‘It’s easy to get confused, dear. I was in the ambulance bay when they brought you in. You’d had quite a scrape. Now what about these painkillers?’

  ‘Painkillers?’

  ‘Yes, dear. The doctor says you should take them.’ She checked her watch. ‘Around now. I can either do it intravenously,’ she held up the needle, ‘or with tablets. What would you prefer?’

  Maggie nodded towards the tablets. She took the tiny paper cup from the nurse and put the pills on her tongue, then knocked back a swig of water.

  ‘Well done, dear.’

  The instant the nurse’s back was turned, Maggie popped the two tablets out of the side of her cheek where she had lodged them, and tucked them under her pillow. She waited for the door to creak shut.

  Right, that was it. Whoever it was who had tried to kill her once would doubtless be back to try again. She would not stay here a moment longer, a sitting duck. Lying here she could be injected, poisoned or smothered: it would be so easy.

  She looked first at her hand, at the needle embedded in the largest vein. Grimacing from the pain, she removed it slowly, grabbing a tissue from the box by her bed to staunch the blood.

  Next she levered herself forward away from the pillow, so that she was supporting her back with her own strength. She pulled back the duvet. For the first time she saw that she was wearing a standard hospital robe, the words Grays Harbor stencilled across it in the style of a prison uniform.

  Now, with a massive exertion, she swung first one leg and then the other off the edge of the bed and slid her bottom forward till her feet touched the ground. Gingerly, she transferred her weight onto them and to her relief, realized that she could walk. Clearly she had sustained the most serious injuries in her top half.

  She made it across the room to the chair where her overnight bag sat like an old friend. She unzipped it, finding trousers and a shirt inside. It took nearly ten minutes to dress herself.

  She was about to leave when she remembered the note from Sanchez, still by the bed. She shuffled over and retrieved it, then moved towards the door, and froze. There, a full-length mirror projected back an image that stopped her short. Her right cheek shone with a red bruise and there were dark, deep lines around and underneath her eyes. She looked like an inmate of a women’s refuge.

  Cracking open the door, she tried to swing her bag casually over her shoulder – a movement that made her want to howl with pain – and began to make her escape. With all the strength she could muster, she walked past the nurses’ station – no shuffling allowed now – determined not to look back.

  She had gone perhaps five paces when she heard a voice behind her. ‘Miss? Excuse me?’

  She was just a few feet from the double doors leading away from here.

  ‘Miss?’

  Over her shoulder, as nonchalantly as she could manage, she called out: ‘She seems much better! Thanks.’ She pushed the doors open and left.

  The signs offered little help. Geriatrics upstairs, obstetrics downstairs, X-rays along the corridor. And then, separately, something else: student halls of residence.

  Sh
e hobbled in that direction, wincing at the pain as she headed down two flights of stairs. Before long she was away from the wards and in a series of corridors containing a series of identical doors.

  Finally she found what she was looking for: an exit sign. Her hunch had been vindicated. The medical students had their own separate entrance – one that, Maggie hoped, would not be monitored by whoever was watching her.

  The fresh air was a shock to her, colder than she was expecting. It seemed to slap her in the face, the wind whipping her with a sudden, sharp sense of how alone she now was. Battered and penniless in the middle of nowhere, she had no way of contacting the outside world, and no one, anyway, she could contact. Her closest ally was dead, almost certainly murdered. She had no real friends, no boyfriend and no family on the entire continent.

  So she would just have to rely on herself. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  The walk to the main road was long and agonizing. She dreaded how easily, out in the open, she would be spotted by her pursuers. At last she flagged down a cab and slumped into the back seat.

  ‘Where can I take you?’the diner

  ‘Heron Street.’ She tried to smile, then saw the driver look her over in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘I’m getting there.’

  She pulled out the message from Doug and looked at it properly for the first time.

  There is a safe way to do this. Go to Heron Street. And remember, we always believed in Western unity.

  The road was wide, more a highway than a street, and as the driver passed Sidney’s Casino, a building with all the glamour of a large garden shed, and several open-air car dealerships, their forecourts crammed with discounted Dodges and Chevys, she felt her brow furrow. Why would Sanchez send her here?

  And then she saw it, the tall flagpole-style sign for Safeway. She smiled at the simplicity of it and asked the driver to wait, forming a guess for the last piece of Sanchez’s attempt at a puzzle.

  She only had to look around the supermarket for thirty seconds to see it. A counter, close to the checkout lines, below the instantly recognizable bright yellow-and-black sign: Western Union.

  And remember, we always believed in Western unity.

  She gave her name to the young, much-pierced girl behind the glass window who promptly asked for ID. Maggie began to explain, that was the whole point, everything she had had been stolen: passport, driver’s-

  ‘Hold on, there’s a note on my system here? Says I’m meant to check your face against this?’ The same upspeak Maggie would have heard back home, on O’Connell Street.

  The girl produced an A4 envelope which bore the crest of the State of Washington. She tore it open and out fell a credit-card-sized rectangle of clear plastic: a driver’s licence, with Maggie’s face on it.

  ‘Looks like you,’ the girl said.

  Good old Sanchez.

  ‘So that’s your ID, which means I can give you this.’ The girl disappeared, returning with a wad of clean, crisp bank notes. She counted off five thousand dollars and sent Maggie on her way.

  The cab took her next to Jacknut Apparel, the clothes store where she was about fifteen years above the target age and where she bought a T-shirt that would have been too much even for her teenage self: scrawled across her front, graffiti-style, were the words ‘evolution, revolution, retribution’ on a garment so tight it was hell-bent on drawing attention to her chest. In Washington, women went to great lengths to find clothes that would make their breasts if not exactly disappear, then at least become irrelevant. In DC, gender-neutral was a compliment. Not here, it seemed.

  She paid off the cab and slowly made her way two blocks down to a hair salon. She wondered about a radical cut, maybe even the cropped, peroxide number worn by the manager at the Midnight Lounge, but decided it was likely to attract too much attention. So she went half way, asking the stylist to turn her russet-brown, shoulder-length cut into a mid-length bob with blonde highlights. She didn’t love it, but she looked different and that was all that counted. Glancing at the mirror, with new clothes and hair, she decided she still looked bashed-up – but at least nothing like a White House official, whether current or recently fired.

  She had a few more things to get. At the top of her list was a bulk order of extra-strength painkillers, a BlackBerry, a new laptop – with built-in, ready to go internet access – some basic cosmetics, a full-sized bottle of Jameson’s and a place to stay.

  She decided on the Olympic Motel, which looked suitably down-at-heel and anonymous. She unlocked the door to her room to be hit by an aroma that combined cigarette smoke and disinfectant. It would do perfectly. The bed invited her to sleep for the rest of the day. But she knew she had to get to work right away.

  She held the BlackBerry, shiny and new, and dialled the one number, other than the White House, she remembered by heart.

  ‘Uri, it’s me. Maggie.’

  ‘Maggie! I tried calling you. Over and over. What happened to you?’

  ‘Long story.’

  ‘You always say that.’

  ‘But it’s really true this time.’

  ‘You sound…different. Are you OK?’

  ‘I was in an accident, but-’

  ‘What! What happened? Are you-’ He sounded genuinely alarmed.

  ‘I’m fine, really.’ She strove to keep her voice steady. ‘I’m going to be OK. I just need your help.’

  ‘Do you need me to come there, because-’

  ‘No. I need to ask you about…intelligence.’

  They had rarely spoken about it, and he had always refused to provide more than the sketchiest details, but they both knew that Uri Guttman had performed his military service in Israel in the intelligence corps and that he had risen to a pretty senior, if unspecified, rank.

  So now, swiftly, she gave him a very thin outline of what had happened to her. She had been investigating an issue – she could not say what – which centred on a former agent of the CIA. She had traced him to Aberdeen, had spoken to his former high school principal, had helped a nice old lady with her car battery and then found her brakes were shot and had had to jump from a speeding car.

  ‘Jesus, Maggie. You never learn, do you?’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘About staying out of trouble.’

  ‘I didn’t ask to-’

  ‘The whole point of the Baker job was that you were meant to quit being in shitholes dealing with shitty people who want to kill each other, and you were going to have a nice desk in Washington and-’

  ‘That was the plan, yes. But we didn’t bank on the President fighting for his political life after two months, did we?’

  ‘You and danger, Maggie. It’s like some chemical attraction or something.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to help me.’

  ‘OK. Another time. What do you want to know?’

  ‘At the funeral in New Orleans, the retired man from, er, the Company said a whole lot of stuff I didn’t understand.’

  ‘But you pretended you did.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Like blankets.’

  ‘Say again?’

  ‘He said there would have been no point killing the man we’re talking about because, “He’d have prepared his blanket.”’

  ‘That’s what he said? “He’d have prepared his blanket.”’

  ‘Yes. Those words.’

  ‘Exactly?’

  ‘Yes. I wrote it down afterwards.’ Shit. That was also in the notebook.

  ‘OK, we have something different in Hebrew but it sounds like a similar idea.’

  ‘Similar idea to what?’

  ‘We call it karit raka. It means a soft pillow. Like it guarantees you a soft landing if you get in trouble.’

  ‘My brain’s not working at full strength, Uri.’

  ‘Well, normally you only use the karit in an emergency, like when you’ve sent out a distress signal. Inside your pillow, which mig
ht be back at base, will be a package of information that might help your organization find you and get you out of trouble.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘But you could also use a karit another way. Your guy said “there would be no point” killing the man because of his blanket, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So that suggests he was using it as a different kind of insurance policy. I’ve heard of this too.’ He paused, as if thinking it through. ‘Let’s say I know something sensitive.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And I think there would be people willing to kill me to keep whatever I know secret. It might even be the organization I work for now, or worked for in the past. I may know things they don’t want to get out.’

  ‘Yes.’ Maggie was thinking of Forbes/Jackson and the CIA.

  ‘Then I might make up a karit – a pillow or blanket or whatever – that would sit somewhere, a bundle of information that would be released automatically the moment I died.’

  ‘And the potential killers would know you had done it, so that would deter them from killing you. Because once you’re dead, whatever they were trying to keep hidden would come out anyway.’

  ‘Precisely. That makes me feel good, Maggie. Maybe your head didn’t get so banged after all.’

  ‘A bundle of information, you say. Like where? In a vault or something?’

  ‘It used to be that way. Now most guys in this line of work do it virtually. Online or something. Or so I hear.’

  ‘So you hear, Uri?’ Maggie said with the same smile in her voice she always deployed when she tried to squeeze a past secret from him. She was trying to think through all the questions now rushing into her mind.

  ‘But it obviously didn’t work. The guy I’m talking about died. It didn’t stop his killers killing him.’

  ‘Either he hadn’t prepared his blanket, and the bad guys knew that. Or he had, but they felt sure they could get to it before it was made public or whatever. Or they knew what was in it and weren’t frightened. Or it’s still out there. And they’re desperate to find it.’