The Chosen One Read online

  ‘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.’

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  ‘Let me correct that. He was one of our chosen ones. There are always several. Dozens of them in fact, in each generation. To allow for all eventualities: hedging, if you like. But of that cohort, Baker was our preferred one. If all went to plan, he was the one we wanted in the White House. And, guess what? Despite a couple of hitches along the way, all went to plan.’

  Waugh smiled, then took another sip of champagne.

  Maggie felt her throat turning to dust. So Baker was a hired gun, bought and paid for by the most venal institutions imaginable, the world’s biggest banks. The disappointment – in him, in the system, in her own poor judgment – seemed to be choking her from within. So much for all that grand talk of ethics and ideals, of changing the world. Baker was as rotten as all the rest of them, and he had played her. They all had played her, for the fool she was.

  Disappointment gave way to a rising resentment, an anger she now attempted to channel. ‘So it was you who got those opponents out of the way, in the governor’s race?’

  Waugh put his glass down. ‘Well, yes and no, Maggie. Yes in the sense that it was us who released the relevant information at the right time. And no, in that it was not me or any of my colleagues who forced the Republican nominee for Governor of the State of Washington to film his wife having sex with other men. He did that all by himself. Same goes for the Mayor of Seattle: no one forced him to use disparaging terms for the city’s Hispanic-American and Chinese-American communities.’ He smirked again, this time in mockery of politically correct convention. ‘We very rarely force anybody to do anything. That’s the joy of politics. It’s a human business. There’s human error. That’s the joy of it, but it can also be a huge pain in the ass. And that’s what we try to protect our clients from: unpredictability. To take the unpredictability out of politics. So that they – and we – can look to the horizon and say, whatever I have now I’m going to keep. In fact, I’m going to have more.’

  Maggie didn’t want to hear his philosophizing. She just wanted to have the facts straight in her mind; she needed something firm to hold on to. ‘And Chester’s love-child: was that you too?’

  ‘Well, it was his rather than mine, but yes.’

  ‘That revelation changed the presidential election. Chester never stood a chance after that.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘You did all this for Baker?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But why? Why would you work so hard to get Stephen Baker elected? He doesn’t even agree with you. He wants to take on the banks.’

  ‘That, Maggie, only makes him all the more credible. For the day he gets out his pen and vetoes the banking bill that threatens to cripple my business. That threatens to deny me and my colleagues the money that is rightfully ours.’

  A small light dawned in the darkness. Was it possible that Stephen Baker did not know he had been chosen, that his path had been smoothed all these years? Maybe it was him who had been played all along. Maggie shook her head, confused. ‘He’d never do it. Why would Baker veto a bill he believes in?’

  ‘Ms Costello, when are you going to get smart? This conversation is proving to be a major disappointment. I have junior analysts of the beer industry who are sharper than you are. Come on. How could I know with absolute certainty that he would veto that bill? Because one day, we’d knock on his door and tell him what we have on him. Lay it all out. Show and tell, like at elementary school.

  ‘We’d show him the photos of the Meredith Hotel, burnt to a crisp. Remind him we knew he was there. Maybe we wouldn’t even have to do that. We’d probably just have to say a single word.’ His voice dipped and he let out a breathy whisper, as if he were naming a sexy fragrance in a perfume ad: ‘Pamela.’

  ‘But there’s a photo of him in The Daily World, shaking hands with a senator in Washington. It was taken on the same day.’ Maggie could hear the desperation in her own voice.

  ‘Senator Corbyn was always a good friend to our industry. A most co-operative friend. If we asked him to shake hands with a bright young man from his home state, why would he refuse? And as for the date, well, who can blame the editors of The Daily World if they accepted the information they were given? They didn’t have the advantage we had: a copy of the photograph duly date-stamped, proving that that meeting between the Senator and the future President actually took place on March 17. Two days after the fire at the Meredith Hotel.’ Waugh paused for effect, to let this sink in, infuriatingly self-satisfied.

  ‘So we’d show him what we have and we’d give him a choice: of course we would. Veto the bill – or we reveal that you left a young girl to die. Simple. That’s how we do it. Don’t tell me you never wondered why politicians always break their promises, Maggie. Well, now you know.’

  Maggie felt as if she had been punched, hard, in the stomach. She had clung to that photo of the young Stephen Baker shaking hands with the veteran senator just as tightly as Anne Everett had. They had both desperately wanted it to be true. But now she could not escape what Waugh had told her.

  Of course she had believed in Baker more than any other politician she had ever known. So had everyone else. But that wasn’t the part of her that ached now. She had believed in Baker more than any man she had ever known, with perhaps two exceptions. She had been ready to turn her life upside down for him, because she truly thought he was different: that he was that rarest of people, a good man who would use his talents to make the world better and safer. Surrounded by a morass of lies and deceit, he had seemed…solid. Like a foundation you could build on.

  Instead he was no better than Kennedy’s kid brother, the man who let a girl drown just so he could save himself.

  The funny thing was, she wasn’t angry with Stephen Baker, not really. She was livid with someone else. Not Stuart Goldstein for insisting that Baker was ‘the real deal’. Not Nick, who had told her she’d be insane not to work for the coolest president of their lifetimes. She was furious with herself, for allowing herself to believe. She had let down her guard – hard-won, over long years – and this was her just reward.

  But she was determined that Waugh should see nothing of the turmoil she was feeling. Let him think she had long known the truth about Baker and Pamela. ‘So Vic Forbes was working for you,’ she said finally. ‘That blackmail message was really from you.’

  He smacked his palms on the solid oak table so hard that the crystal glasses wobbled. ‘Christ, no! You think we operate the way that prick did? Give us some credit, please. We get a meeting in the Oval Office. We’re photographed going in. “Today the President hosted leaders from the finance industry”, all that garbage.’

  Like the meeting you have scheduled tomorrow, Maggie thought but did not say.

  ‘We go in through the front door. What Forbes did was cheap and nasty.’ Waugh looked affronted.

  ‘So he didn’t work for you?’

  ‘Forbes? As it happens, he did work for us. Once. A long time ago. As I understand it, he did some of the very early groundwork on Baker, gathering material in Aberdeen. He gave us the tip-off about the hotel fire, stalking Baker there probably. Jerking off outside the room as Baker got it on with Pamela, for all I know. And he told us about the shrink, which enabled us to destroy all the files and billing records so that they never came to light.’

  ‘How did you do that?’ Maggie asked, astonished at the sheer reach and depth of this effort.

  ‘A break-in at the doctor’s office. No big deal. So Forbes gave us some early help. I’m told there was deep personal animus between him and Baker, which always comes in useful. Meant he was motivated to do the work.

  ‘But after that, no. He joined the CIA, went to Honduras or some other shithole. He was off our radar. We kept tabs on him
, of course, but they grew looser. Other people took over the file. And he seemed to have moved on. And then, last week, he pops up all over the TV making those wild accusations.’

  ‘Not on your orders?’

  ‘Are you crazy? He was ruining everything! The guy had gone rogue, doing his own thing. I don’t know why. Maybe he was trying to get Baker to pay – waiting till he was settled into The Oval Office, reckoning he’d get maximum payout from a sitting president – though that seems nuts. Maybe it was just plain jealousy. He did hate the guy’s guts. Everything he wasn’t, all that.

  ‘Anyway, we didn’t care what was in his mind. We just knew he had to be stopped. He was threatening to throw away our greatest asset before we’d had a chance to use it. All those decades of work would have been for nothing. We’d have been powerless to control Baker.’

  Maggie was thinking hard, despite the ache in her ribs growing ever more intense. The pain was becoming unbearable. She desperately needed to move. For a moment she considered asking him to loosen the restraints, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. She didn’t want to owe him even that. She shifted the inch or two her shackles allowed. ‘You say he’d only worked for you in the early days, in Aberdeen. So how come he knew about the Iranian donation?’

  ‘Well, that was confirmation he was off the reservation. Because that was expressly nothing to do with us. Even we didn’t know about that. Our information suggests that was an initiative out of Tehran, the mullahs wanting to embarrass Baker. You gotta remember, Maggie, there’s a helluva lot of people around the world who don’t like the idea of Stephen Baker as President. He’s too different.’

  ‘So how did Forbes know?’

  ‘Not sure. But, like I said, the guy was an obsessive. Not impossible that he went through every donation Baker received, then traced them. He was crazy enough.’

  ‘So you got him out of the way. Sent some bait into that strip club, led him away and that was that.’