The Chosen One Read online

  They snatched moments of conversation as he shook more hands, posed for camera-phone snaps or exchanged banter with a local reporter. He would break off – to admire a life-sized cow made entirely of butter or to have a bumper car ride with Josh – then pick up exactly where they had left off.

  Eventually he asked her to hop in the car that would take them to his next event, an evening speech in Cedar Rapids. Kimberley and the kids would be in the back; she could ride with him up front. When she looked puzzled as to how there would be room, he smiled. ‘I have the most crucial job on the “Baker for President” campaign: I’m the driver.’

  They talked for the entire two-hour journey, until the three Bakers in the back were fast asleep, the children’s heads resting on their mother’s shoulders. He listened as much as he talked. He wanted to know how she had started, asking her more about the work she had done as a volun teer in Africa, straight after graduation, than about the high-level shuttle diplomacy that had made her name in Jerusalem. ‘You don’t want to know this,’ she had said eventually, with an embarrassed wave of the hand.

  ‘No, I really do. Here’s why. You know who I’m going to be in this campaign? I’m going to be the hick. “The logger’s son from Aberdeen, Washington”.’

  ‘But that’s one of your great strengths. You’re the American Dream.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. The folks like that. But I’m running against Doctor Anthony Adams, PhD of New York. I’m the boy from the sticks. I’ve got to convince Georgetown and The New York Times and the Council on Foreign Relations – all that crowd – that I’m not too provincial to be President.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to be the outsider: Mr Smith goes to Washington and all that.’

  ‘No, Maggie. I want to win.’

  Soon he was telling her how, once he’d got a scholarship to Harvard, he’d met people who spent the vacations in Paris or London or jetted off for weekends in the Caribbean. He, meanwhile, had to go back to Aberdeen and work shifts in the lumber yard or at the frozen fish processing plant: his father had emphysema and there was no other way to pay the bills.

  ‘Eventually I got away. My first trip out of the country. And I went to Africa. Just like you.’

  He looked away from the road long enough for them to smile at each other.

  ‘I was in Congo, Zaire as it was then. Jeez, I saw some terrible things. Just terrible. And it’s still going on, if not there, then somewhere else. It’s like they’re taking turns: Rwanda, then Sierra Leone, then Darfur. The burning villages, the rapes, the children orphaned. Or worse.’ He glanced at her again. ‘I know you’ve seen some real horror yourself, Maggie.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Well, it’s a long time ago now.’ He paused for a long minute until she wondered if she was meant to say something. Then he spoke. ‘I believe I can win this thing, Maggie. And if I do, I want to do something that only an American president can do. I want to dedicate some of the enormous resources of this country to stopping all this killing.’

  She frowned.

  ‘I’m not talking about sending our army to invade places. We tried that already. It didn’t work out so well.’ Now it was her turn to smile. ‘We need to think of other ways to do it. That’s why I need you.’ He let that sentence hang in the air while she stared at him in disbelief.

  ‘Something tells me that you never forgot what you saw when you were twenty-one, Maggie. You never forgot it. It’s what makes you work so hard, even now, all these years later. Am I right?’

  Maggie looked out of the car window, picturing the position papers, conferences and endless meetings of which her life now consisted. Each day she felt she got further away from that angry twenty-one-year-old woman she had once been. But he was right. What fuelled her still was the fury she had felt then about all the violence and injustice – all the sorrow – in the world and the determination to do something about it. These days, her ideals seemed to have slipped so far into the distance, it was a struggle to glimpse them. But Stephen Baker had just reminded her that they were still there. She turned back to him and nodded.

  ‘And that’s how I am, too. I never forgot what I saw out there. And about eighteen months from now, I’m going to have a chance to do something about it. Something big.’ He shifted the car down a gear. ‘Will you be with me, Maggie Costello?’

  Now, nearly two years later, the President was reaching for a red plastic lunch box with one hand and opening the fridge with the other. ‘So what’s it to be, junior? Apple or pear?’

  ‘Can’t I have candy?’

  ‘No, young man, you cannot. Apple or pear?’

  ‘Apple.’

  Stephen Baker wheeled around, an expression of deep seriousness on his face. ‘That’s not so you can use it to play baseball, is it?’

  The boy smiled. ‘No, Dad.’

  ‘Josh.’

  ‘I promise.’

  The President put the fruit into the box, clipped the top shut then placed it in his boy’s hand. Then he bent to kiss his son on the top of his head. Maggie noticed that he shut his eyes as he did it, as if in a moment of grateful prayer. Or just to savour the smell of Josh’s hair.

  ‘OK, young man, scram.’

  Just then, Kimberley Baker came in, clutching a bag bulging with gym gear. Blonde and pretty as a peach in her college days, she was now usually described as ‘rounded’ or, by the less kind, ‘plump’. Magazines had obsessed about her weight when her husband first announced, the celebrity press zooming in on cellulite patches or a close-up of her rear-end in an ill-advised trouser-suit. She had gone on daytime TV, told how she had gained weight when Katie was born and how she had tried multiple diets – ‘including all the nutty ones!’ – to take the pounds off, but failed each time. Now, she said, she was comfortable with who she was and had decided to devote her energies to something more worthwhile than her waist size. The women in the audience had stood and cheered their approval, the host had hugged her and, within a day or two, she was declared a role model for female empowerment.

  No less important, the political cognoscenti had decided that Kimberley Baker was an enormous asset to her husband. Female voters, in particular, had long been sceptical of Barbie doll, Stepford political wives; they liked what it said about

  Stephen Baker that his wife was a real, rather than arti ficially flawless, woman. That she was from Georgia, thereby connecting him with the vote-rich South, was an added bonus.

  The Bakers could not say they were used to life in the White House, even if Tara MacDonald had already briefed People magazine that they were loving it. But Kimberley was certainly making an effort, chiefly for the children’s sake. She had been worried about it from the start, anxious about an eight-year-old boy and a thirteen-year-old girl entering the most vulnerable time in their young lives in front of the gaze of the entire world. She remembered her own adolescence as one long stretch of blushing embarrassment: the notion of enduring that with a battery of cameras permanently in your face, scrutinizing your clothes and your hair and relaying those images around the globe, seemed truly unbearable. During the campaign, Stephen Baker always got a laugh when he joked that the only two people who truly wanted him to lose the election were his opponent and his wife.

  Now Kimberley was fussing over both Josh and her shy, gauche, pretty teenage daughter, bundling them out of the door and into the hands of a casually-dressed, twenty-something woman who looked like an au pair. In fact, she was Zoe Galfano, one of a Secret Service detail whose sole duty was the protection of the Baker children.

  ‘Maggie, something to drink? Coffee, hot tea, juice?’

  ‘No thanks, Mr President. I’m fine.’ The phrase still snagged in her throat on its way out, but there was no getting around it. Everyone addressed him the same way, including his closest advisors and oldest friends, at least inside the White House. He had realized early on in the job that if he asked some people to call him by his first name, then those to whom he had not made the same offer would
<
br />   feel offended. He’d end up telling everyone, ‘Call me Stephen,’ and that was too casual. Better to keep it formal – and consistent.

  He checked his watch. ‘I want to talk about Africa. I saw your paper. The killing’s starting up again in Sudan; there’s hundreds of thousands at risk in Darfur. I want you to work up an option.’

  Maggie’s mind started revving hard. Magnus Longley was all but certain to take her job away, and yet here was the President offering the opportunity she had always dreamed of. The timing was perverse – and painful. But she felt a rush of the same optimism that had always got her into trouble – and also got things done. She took a deep breath. Perhaps, somehow, the whole Asshole Adams debacle would melt away.

  ‘An option, for action?’ she asked.

  Baker was about to reply when a head popped around the doorframe. Stu Goldstein, Chief Counselor to the President: the man who had masterminded the election campaign, the man who occupied the most coveted real estate in the White House, the room next door to the Oval Office. The veteran of New York City political combat who stored a million and one facts about the politics of the United States in a phenomenal brain atop a wheezing, morbidly obese body.

  ‘Mr President. We need to go across to the Roosevelt Room. You’re signing VAW in two minutes.’ A small turn of the head. ‘Hi Maggie.’

  Baker took his jacket off the back of a kitchen chair and swung his arms into it. ‘Walk with me.’

  The instant he began moving she could see the Secret Service agents alter their posture, one whispering into his lapel, ‘Firefly is on the move.’ Firefly, the codename allocated to Baker by the Secret Service. The bloggers had been kept busy for a week, deconstructing the hidden meaning of that one.

  ‘What kind of options are you after, Mr President?’

  ‘I want something that will get the job done. There’s an area the size of France that’s become a killing field. No one can police that on the ground.’ As they walked, a pair of agents hovered close by, three paces behind.

  ‘So you’re talking about the air?’

  He looked Maggie in the eye, fixing her in that cool, deep green. Now she understood.

  ‘Are you suggesting we equip the African Union with US helicopters, Mr President? Enough of them to monitor the entire Darfur region from the sky?’

  ‘It’s like you always said, Maggie. The bad guys get away with it because they think no one’s looking. And no one is looking.’

  She spoke slowly, thinking it through. ‘But if the AU had state-of-the-art Apaches, with full surveillance technology – night vision, infra-red, high-definition cameras – then we could see exactly who’s doing what and when. There’d be no place to hide. We could see who was torching villages and killing civilians.’

  ‘Not “we”, Maggie. The African Union.’

  ‘And if people know they’re being watched-’

  ‘They behave.’

  Maggie could feel her heart racing. This was what anyone who had seen the massacres in Darfur had been praying for for years: the ‘eye in the sky’ that might stop the killing. But the African Union had always lacked the wherewithal to make it happen: they didn’t have the helicopters to monitor the ground below, and so the killers had been free to slaughter with impunity. Now here was the American President vowing to give them the tools the dead and dying had been crying out for. The spark of excitement was turning into a flame – until she remembered that she was about to lose her job.

  ‘We only have very narrow majorities in the House and Senate, sir. Do you think-’

  He smiled, the wide, bright smile of a confident man. ‘That’s my job, Maggie. You give me some options.’

  By now they had arrived in the West Wing, standing in the corridor just outside the Roosevelt Room. An aide tried and failed to hand him a text, another stepped forward and reminded him who was in the front row and needed to be acknowledged. A third leaned forward and applied four precise dabs of face powder for the sake of the TV cameras. Someone asked if he was ready and he nodded.

  The double doors were opened and an unseen tenor voice bellowed out the words that were simultaneously thrilling and wholly familiar.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States!’

  3

  Washington, DC, Monday March 20, 08.55

  She watched as a packed Roosevelt Room rose to its feet, adults acting like schoolchildren, standing to attention at the sight of the man in charge. Everyone did that, wherever he went. She was almost used to it.

  They were applauding him now, a room full of some of the most senior politicians in the country. Most were smiling wide, satisfied smiles. Sprinkled among them were a few faces she did not recognize. Women, though not dressed in the brightly-coloured, tailored suits favoured by their Washington sisters. It took Maggie a moment to work out who they were. Of course. The victims. An occasion like this was not complete without victims.

  She tried to sneak in discreetly, in the tail of the entourage, but still she caught the eye of Tara MacDonald, which registered surprise and irritation, noting that Maggie had entered the room with the President.

  Crisply, as the applause was still subsiding, Stephen Baker began directing those in the first row to gather behind him. Knowing the drill, they formed a semi-circle, standing as he sat at the desk. Maggie identified the key players: majority and minority leaders from the Senate, whips and committee chairs from the House, along with the two lead sponsors of the bill from both chambers. Closest to him was Bradford Williams, solemn and distinguished: the former congressman whose selection to be the first African-American vice president had been notched up as yet another one of Stephen Baker’s historic breakthroughs.

  ‘My fellow Americans,’ the President began, setting off the loud clatter of two hundred cameras, a pandemonium of motors and bulbs. ‘Today we gather to see the new Violence Against Women Act signed into law. I’m proud to sign it. I’m proud to be here with the men and women who voted for it. Above all, I’m proud to be at the side of those women whose courage in speaking out made this law happen. Without their honesty, without their bravery, America would not have acted. But today we act.’

  There was more applause. Maggie smiled to herself as she noticed there was not so much as a note on the table, let alone a fully-scripted speech. The President was speaking off the top of his head.

  ‘We act for women like Donna Moreno, whose husband beat her so badly she was hospitalized for two months. We act for women like Christine Swenson, who had to fight seven years of police indifference before she could see the man who raped her convicted and jailed. They are both here in the White House today – and we welcome them. But we act for those who are not here.’

  Maggie glanced at the people she had joined, lined up against the far wall nearest the door, the traditional zone occupied by the senior aides to the President. It was a curious bit of choreography. On the one hand, it signalled their status as mere staff, serving at the pleasure of the President. They stood like butlers, hovering several paces away from the dining table, awaiting instructions. Everyone else was allowed to sit: even the press corps.

  And yet, to be among this group was a mark of the highest possible status in Washington. It said you were close to the President, even one of the indispensables who needed to be ‘in the room’. While the invited guests sat bolt upright, their suits pressed and their hair fixed for their big day at the White House, the staffers slumped against the wall, their ties loose, as if this were no more than another day at the office. Maggie looked at the Press Secretary, Doug Sanchez, young and good-looking enough to have caught the interest of the celeb magazines: he had his head down, barely paying attention to proceedings, scrolling instead through a message on his iPhone. Aware he was being watched, he looked up and smiled at Maggie, nodding in the direction of the President and then back at her, with a lascivious raise of the eyebrows. Translation: I saw you and him arrive together…

  ‘For the women who have
been attacked and not believed, even by the law-enforcement officers who should have protected them,’ the President was saying now. ‘For the wives who have been made prisoners in their own home. For the daughters who have had to fear their own fathers. Each of them is a heroine and – from today – they will have the law on their side.’

  More applause as President Stephen Baker reached for the first of a set of pens fanned out on the desk before him. He signed his name, then reached for another pen to date the document, then several more to initial each page.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘It’s done.’

  The guests were on their feet again, the cameras clacking noisily. The President had come around in front of his desk to shake hands with those who had come to witness the moment. There were double-clasps with the congressional leaders, a hand placed on the forearm to convey extra warmth, hugs with the leaders of the key national women’s organizations and then a more hesitant, careful extension of the hand to the first of the ‘victims’ carefully selected by the White House Office of Public Engagement.

  Suddenly the cameras began to whirr more insistently so that the room was lit by the strobe of a hundred flashbulbs. Several journalists were on their feet, craning to see over the photographers. Maggie could only just glimpse the source of their interest. Christine Swenson had placed her arms around the President’s shoulders and was resting her cheek on his chest. Tears flowed down her face. ‘Thank you,’ she was saying, over and over. ‘Thank you for believing me.’

  ‘If that isn’t leading Katie Couric tonight, I’m David Duke.’ It was Tara MacDonald, hardly glancing up from her BlackBerry

  Maggie couldn’t take her eyes off Swenson, sobbing with gratitude. Only as an afterthought did she look at the President. He had placed his arm around the woman, enveloping her in a fatherly hug – even though he was at least a decade younger than she was.

  Eventually the embrace broke up, the President handing Swenson a handkerchief so that she could dry her eyes.