The Chosen One Read online

  Released back onto the airport concourse, Maggie tried to walk away as nonchalantly as possible, in case the cops were watching her. She forced herself to be patient, to take the elevator to another floor before whipping out her computer and acting on the information Nick du Caines had passed to her as his last, dying act.

  57

  New York, Monday March 27, 15.35

  She said the sequence over to herself once more, repeating it as she had heard it. There was no doubting it. It was NICK4.

  Sitting at the gate for a flight to Albuquerque, she checked again that neither Detective Bridge nor any of his men – nor anyone else for that matter – were around. No one that she could see. She would stay here, surrounded by people. It was broad daylight; there were crowds. Surely that would make her safe.

  She had been recalling the lecture her sister had given her about storing documents online, rather than on disks or memory sticks that could get lost down the back of the sofa or soaked in coffee. And then she had remembered how even Nick du Caines, in his little masterclass on journalism, had confessed that he had screwed up so often, he now wrote everything online, storing it up there ‘in the ether’.

  She played back in her head the sounds she had heard, forcing away the vile images they conjured, as her friend was horribly murdered. Concentrate, Maggie, she told herself fiercely. You have to do this for Nick: he died trying to make contact with you. Be strong and bloody well think it through. There was a message within that message: of that she was now sure. At first she had thought they were no more than desperate howls of pain. But Bridge had been right. There was a reason why Nick, while fighting for his life, had fumbled for his phone and dialled her number. He had to be communicating something. And when Bridge had played the recording for the second time, she had heard it. Each apparent sound of pain Nick had made had been different to the one before. That cry – Ennnn! – was not just an expression of terrible agony, of a man winded by a punch, though it might well be that as well. It was also the letter N. Ayyy was awful to hear but translated into the letter ‘I’. On it had gone until that final desperate noise – Phwaw: clearly the number four. She marvelled at the strength and ingenuity of such a feat and, not for the first time that day, felt glad to have known Nick du Caines.

  She flipped open her computer, watching as it latched on to the airport’s wifi signal. A few keystrokes and she was there, at the Googledocs website. She logged in, typing Nick’s name carefully and without spaces: nickducaines. Then the password, constructed from each letter and digit he had cried out: Nick4.

  Incorrect name and password.

  She tried again, this time spelling Nick’s name in capital letters. Now a new error message appeared.

  Incorrect password, insufficient characters.

  Damn. Nick’s effort, valiant though it had been, had been in vain. He had not lasted long enough to convey the last few letters.

  She stared at the screen. Nick4. What could that mean? What might 4 refer to? Guessing, she typed in Nick4duC.

  Incorrect password. You are approaching the maximum number of failed attempts. One more attempt allowed.

  She looked around, checking the faces of those nearby: a mother with children, a student listening with eyes closed to an iPod.

  Think.

  Then she looked at it again – Nick4 – and a teenage memory returned. They had all done it, carving it on park benches and on school desks. She had done it herself once: Maggie4Liam. Was it possible that Nick du Caines had been that soft-hearted? Somehow she wouldn’t have put it past him. She entered the password field and typed Nick4Maggie.

  She was about to press enter on this, her last attempt when something stopped her. She could hear Nick’s voice, on the phone or across the table in the bar. Now listen, Mags, when are you finally going to start moving those luscious lips of yours into the shape of a story for my newspaper?

  Mags.

  Carefully, so as not to hit enter by accident, she retyped so that the new password read simply Nick4Mags.

  Without fuss, as if it had been waiting for her, the page transformed itself, offering a list of documents. She was in. Poor, sweet Nick, sending her an adolescent valentine even in his last moments. She had never once taken his interest in her seriously.

  At a glance, she could see all his most recent stories, sorted by date. And there at the top, a document entitled New Orleans. She clicked it open, expecting a long, detailed memo, explaining all his findings. Instead there was a single line. Daniel Judd, aviation expert – followed by a phone number.

  Maggie pulled out her phone and dialled. After two rings, a voice answered: male, cautious.

  ‘I’m a friend of Nick du Caines,’ she began. ‘He left a message on my machine just before he died. I think he-’

  ‘Died? Nick?’

  ‘I’m sorry, that was very insensitive of me. I thought you might have known. Did you know him well?’

  ‘Who is this? What happened to Nick?’

  Maggie explained the circumstances that had led to her call. There was a long silence and for a panicked moment she thought the man had hung up, but then he said, ‘How can I trust you? How do I know you didn’t kill Nick and now you’re after me?’

  Maggie was flummoxed. ‘I don’t know. All I can tell you is that Nick went to very great lengths to let me know how to reach you. He used his dying breaths to leave a message on my answering machine. It was-’

  ‘All right, get off this line. Call me on a payphone in thirty minutes. Number is-’ There was a shuffling of paper, then he rattled off a number at her.

  ‘Hold on, hold on.’ Maggie scrabbled one-handed in her bag for a pen. ‘Say that again-’

  ‘You have thirty minutes. Go buy unregistered, pay-asyou-go phones, as many as you can afford. Call me from one of those. After that, throw it away. Never use any of them twice. And don’t give the number to anyone.’ He repeated the number of the payphone, so quickly she barely had time to scribble it down, and hung up.

  Maggie did what she was told, rushing to a cellphone store in Terminal 3. She bought five phones with her now-dwindling cash supply and punched in the payphone number Judd had given her.

  He picked up – and spoke – on the second ring. ‘You say he left my number on your answering machine?’

  ‘No. Nick was smarter than that. A password, then a document.’

  ‘No one else has seen it?’ The voice sounded harried, feverish.

  Maggie looked at the screen, noticing the saved date for the New Orleans document was 10.54pm the previous evening – a few minutes before Nick had been fighting for his life – and that, according to its ‘properties’, it appeared not to have been opened again till now. ‘I don’t think so.’ She needed to get him to talk, before his nerves overcame him. ‘Listen, Mr-’

  ‘No names on the phone!’

  ‘Of course, sorry. Listen, it was me who put, er, our mutual friend on to the, um, issue that I think he was discussing with you. I was the one who mentioned it to him. I think he wanted me to know whatever it was you told him.’

  ‘I’m gonna do this real quick and I’m only gonna say it once. Are we clear?’

  ‘We’re clear.’

  ‘After we’re done, you destroy the phone. Clear?’

  ‘Sure. I understand your anxiety, Mr-’

  ‘No names! You’re damned right I’m anxious. This is some serious shit you’re wading into here, Missy, I can tell you.’ She heard the sound of traffic rushing past.

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Right then. Once only. At midnight thirty local time on March 22, a jet departed from Lakefront Airport, New Orleans, Louisiana, carrying seven passengers. The number of the aircraft was November-four-eight-zero-eight-Papa. That aircraft is registered to one Premier Air Executive Services, an air operator based in Maryland. Its prior history indicates use by the Company.’

  As Maggie suspected, the CIA.

  Judd wasn’t done. ‘That was its prior use. Two years
ago it shifted ownership. It is now entirely at the service of a single client.’

  ‘What kind of client?’

  ‘One time. I will not repeat this, you understand? Premier runs private jets exclusively for AitkenBruce.’

  Maggie couldn’t repress her surprise. ‘AitkenBruce? The bank?’

  But Judd was in no mood for discussion. He had one more fact to convey. ‘Today Premier submitted another flight plan. They have a Gulfstream 550 jet departing Teterboro, New Jersey for Washington Reagan at nineteen hundred hours. Looking back through the flight history, there’s only one person who makes that journey on that aircraft. And that’s the chairman of the bank.’

  58

  New York, JFK Airport, Monday March 27, 16.25

  Maggie’s thoughts whirled. A bank? What on earth could any of this have to do with a bank? And AitkenBruce speci fically. It made no sense. Forbes had no connection with finance in any form. What possible-

  The phone she had bought in Aberdeen vibrated, making her jump.

  Restricted.

  But no one knew this number. And why would they call the second she had finished speaking to Judd? Had someone been listening in, waiting to pounce?

  She picked up the device as if it were coated in poison, pressing the green button to answer the call, but saying nothing. And then she heard that voice.

  ‘Maggie? Is that you?’

  Uri.

  Panic flooded through her. She spoke fast, thinking of Stuart and Nick and the curse that seemed to leave all those she touched dead. ‘Don’t call this number again. Give me a number where I can call you.’

  Her abruptness shocked him; a sudden wariness in his voice, he replied, ‘I’m in an edit suite. The number is, hang on, what is the number here?’ There was a second voice, barely audible. Hurry. Eventually, Uri gave her the number; Maggie scribbled it down, then ordered him to hang up.

  She binned the phone she’d used to call Judd, though the waste of a perfectly good phone went against her entire upbringing, picked another and called Uri back.

  ‘Maggie, what the fuck is going on?’

  ‘It’s a long-’

  ‘Don’t tell me: “It’s a long story.”’

  ‘Seriously, Uri. Anyone who talks to me is in danger. Grave danger.’

  ‘Come on, Maggie, that’s a bit melodramatic. There’s-’

  ‘Remember my friend Nick? He was killed last night.’

  There was a beat of silence. ‘Jesus. I’m sorry, Maggie.’

  ‘I so want to talk, Uri. Just to have a chance to talk. For as long as we like.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  She hesitated. She knew it made no sense to say it out loud. But it was a virgin phone; it should be safe. ‘I’m at JFK.’

  ‘I’m coming. Right now.’

  She tried to argue, insisting it was too far, there was no time, but he bulldozed through her resistance the way she allowed him and no one else to do. By the time she had told him exactly where she was sitting, he was already in a cab.

  Her pulse was throbbing now, with a new, gentler kind of fear. How long since she had seen Uri? Not since the inauguration; more than two months. She looked at her reflection in the window: she hardly recognized herself. And there was so much they hadn’t said.

  She turned back to the computer, still open at Nick’s Googledocs account. Focus, she told herself. Focus. There was only one thing she was meant to think about now. She went to the search field and typed ‘AitkenBruce’.

  She had heard of the bank, of course; everyone had. It was famous for its squillionaire traders and executives, rewarding themselves with telephone number salaries and even fatter bonuses. But how it could be caught up in all this, she couldn’t imagine.

  Google led her to AitkenBruce’s own website. It was full of corporate puff: pictures of smiling employees – most of whom seemed to be either young, female or black, projecting an image of perfectly inclusive diversity – and blurbs about the generous philanthropic activity the ‘AitkenBruce family’ was engaged in around the globe. She clicked out of it almost immediately.

  A fresh search revealed a long piece in the Sunday Times magazine, headlined: ‘The True Masters of the Universe: Inside the World’s Richest Bank’.

  She scanned the first few paragraphs, which revealed an institution with more cash in its coffers than many governments, one whose assets topped a trillion dollars and whose top brass routinely went on to take up posts in the commanding heights of the world’s economies. At any one time, the ranks of the AitkenBruce old boys’ association would include either a US Treasury Secretary, German finance minister or head of the European Central Bank – and sometimes all three at once.

  Now there was a chunk of more familiar stuff about mind-boggling pay. ‘Last year, Chairman and Chief Executive Roger Waugh took home a staggering $73m, to add to the $600m he already owns in AitkenBruce stock,’ the magazine reported, before detailing the yachts moored in Monaco and apartments overlooking Central Park, the private islands in Dubai and country estates in Oxfordshire, owned by the bank’s senior management.

  The article explained that men this rich used their money in part to insulate themselves from those who were poorer than they were, which essentially meant everyone. ‘Forcefielding’, they called it: never flying commercial, but only by private jet; never stepping in a taxi, still less public transport, but seeing the world only through the tinted windows of a Lincoln Town Car.

  Maggie scrolled down, looking for anything which might connect AitkenBruce to Forbes, let alone explain why a Company jet might have been despatched to New Orleans to assist in his murder. Had Forbes, in some earlier incarnation perhaps, been a corporate whistleblower? Or had he been blackmailing the bank as well as the President?

  She lingered over the section which detailed how AitkenBruce made its vast fortune. For one thing, these bankers worked all hours, never taking holidays, often staying in the office so late there would be no time to go home before morning. For another, AitkenBruce didn’t waste its time with the little guy: its customers were governments, from Europe to the Persian Gulf, multinational mega-corporations and only the very richest individuals – a reclusive billionaire stashing his fortune in some Caribbean hideaway, a Saudi sheikh or even the reviled rules of an unstable rogue state.

  But knowledge was its secret weapon. If an investor was thinking about getting into, say, timber, AitkenBruce could help because it counted the world’s biggest timber companies among its corporate clients. In addition, major investors in the same field were probably also paying the bank for its advice, so the bank knew what they were up to, too. AitkenBruce had every angle covered, which could only help when the bank came to decide how to invest its own money. The article quoted an unnamed critic saying that investing in a world that included AitkenBruce was like gambling in a casino where the house knows every hand at the table: you might pick up a few dollars, but the house wins every time.

  She scrolled past the section detailing the stellar career of the bank’s alumni, stopping at a photograph of Waugh, the boss. He was fiftyish, bald and nothing to look at. If the caption had read ‘Accountant living in New Jersey’, it would have been utterly plausible. And yet here was the top man. If anyone knew what connected AitkenBruce to Forbes, it surely would be him.

  She skipped back a few paragraphs. ‘No one doubts the extraordinary access and influence of an institution like AitkenBruce. Its links to the White House are solid-’ Maggie glanced at the date: the story had been written nearly a year before Stephen Baker had been elected. ‘And the bank will be watching the coming presidential contest closely. Once again, the moneymen are covering all their bases. Quarterly figures published by the Federal Election Commission confirm that Waugh and his fellow honchos at AitkenBruce gave hefty donations to both Democrats and Republicans.’

  Maggie looked away from the computer towards the midafternoon passengers, some flicking through magazines, others mutely watching CNN on the airport s
creens. Then she moved her cursor to the Search field and typed ‘Stephen Baker + Roger Waugh’.

  To her surprise, the first entry was billed as a ‘News’ result, posted a matter of hours ago. It took her to a page on politico.com listing the President’s appointments for the next day. There at 9am was ‘President Baker meets representatives of America’s financial community’, listing the personnel involved.

  So that was why Waugh was travelling to Washington tonight. He was going to meet the President.

  And yet Waugh was somehow tangled up with the death of Forbes and maybe everything else that had happened in this crazy week. A sudden alarm drove through her like a surge of electricity. It would be madness to let Waugh come within a hundred yards of the Oval Office before the President understood what the hell was going on. And that meant Maggie had to find out.

  She opened up a new tab and checked out Teterboro Airport, reading that it was a tiny ‘relief’ airport in New Jersey, but very popular with ‘private and corporate aircraft’ because it was just twelve miles from midtown Manhattan. Slightly farther from JFK, but she could make it if she got going right away.

  Just then there was a tap on her shoulder.

  She froze. And then she heard his voice.

  ‘I nearly didn’t recognize you. What’s with the haircut?’

  She hadn’t planned it; she’d had no idea how this moment would feel. But the sight of him now, in his trademark dark jeans and white shirt, his full head of lustrous, almost-black hair, made her stand up and close her arms around him.

  They stood like that, saying nothing, holding each other like any other couple having an airport goodbye, for a minute or longer. It had been so long since she had felt the warmth of another human being, so long since she had felt his touch. She wanted to breathe in the smell of him, the scent that instantly transported her back to the thousand different moments of love they had shared.