The Chosen One (19 page)

She saw a paragraph about Baker’s birth, with some obviously bogus detail about the mother clasping the hand of her newborn son. She turned to the next page.

In those days Cliff Baker lived a nomadic life, pitching up wherever work could be found…

More padding which she skipped. Here it was.

…
logging meant Washington State and for the teenage Stephen that prompted yet another move, starting at a new high school in his sophomore year. He enrolled, for what would be his last two years of education before attending Harvard, at the James Madison High School in Aberdeen, Washington.

That was it. Jackson hadn’t been educated in Washington, DC – as the casual reader of his CIA résumé would have assumed – but in Washington
State.
She all but ran back to the couch to retrieve the BlackBerry that had now completed
its search. Sure enough, it confirmed there was only one James Madison High School in the state of Washington.

Maggie could hear the sound of her own breathing. Finally she had found a connection between the President and the man she had seen buried in a lonely grave in New Orleans earlier that day. These two men – one who had risen to the highest possible pinnacle, the other who had sought to bring him down – had something in common. They had a shared past.

Stephen Baker and Vic Forbes had been at school together.

From Swampland, posted 20.13 Thursday March 20:

Call me naïve and idealistic, but if something good is to come out of the death of Stuart Goldstein let it be this: let the paranoid right in America shut the hell up. When the President’s tormentor, Vic Forbes, was found dead – and when every possible sign pointed to suicide – the Right immediately cried foul play. Or rather they didn’t cry; they whispered it, as invidious gossip and innuendo, hinting at it in the blogosphere and on Fox. The likes of Rick Franklin did nothing to stop such talk; on the contrary, they exploited it, allowing it to ‘alter the atmospherics’, to change the climate of opinion against Stephen Baker so that they could bring forward their spurious charges of impeachment against the President. Put simply, senior Republicans used conspiracy theories about Forbes to incubate the conditions in which they could hatch their plot to topple a legitimately elected president.

Well, let’s hope they have the decency to at least fall silent now. They have tried to paint the Baker White House as the Corleone family, murderously rubbing out its enemies. The result is that a good man – a man whose life was dedicated to public
service – has been driven to his death. Stu Goldstein loved politics and could play hardball with the best of them. He loved the game. But what’s been happening in Washington these last few days is not a game. This is politics as blood sport.

So let there now be a pause, a ceasefire, while those responsible for guiding our republic take a breath. Let both sides pause and reflect. And let this be Stuart Goldstein’s legacy…

From the comments thread at Fox Forum:

Re: Stu Goldstein found dead. Lamestream media are saying conservatives should stop accusing the Baker folks of being involved in Vic Forbes’s death, as if we’re somehow responsible for Goldstein’s suicide. When I heard Goldstein had killed himself, my first reaction was, ‘Sounds like a guilty conscience’…

From Twitter, Thursday March 23:

#stuartgoldstein Maybe Baker bumped him off just like Forbes: because he knew too much…

#stuartgoldstein What if Franklin took out Goldstein, because he knew he was the 1 guy in White House who could defeat impeachment?

#stuartgoldstein I reckon Baker had Goldstein killed so that people would now suspect Republicans of murder…

Washington State, Friday March 24, 11.11 PST

Maggie was too late for the red-eye to Seattle so she left on the dawn flight the next morning. Perhaps thirty-five minutes after landing she was in a white rental car, she couldn’t tell you what make, driving south-west along I-5, the fatigue almost overwhelming her. It was cumulative now, day after day without proper sleep. Besides, she couldn’t stop thinking about Stuart. The initial shock and sadness had given way to new feelings: anger – and fear.

The President’s words on the phone the previous day came back to her:
Stuart was not a quitter. He was a fighter. I just refuse to believe…

She had been all too ready to believe it, a fact that now made her slightly ashamed. She had accepted without question that Stuart Goldstein had cracked under pressure, heading to the park in the early hours to slash his wrists.

But now she wondered at the convenience of it. Baker was in desperate trouble and Stu his most trusted and capable lieutenant. If the President was right – that they were facing nothing less than an attempted
coup d’état
– then it was not out of the question that the enemy, whoever they might
be, might see fit to kill Goldstein. After all, someone had murdered Forbes.

But that made no sense: Forbes’s death was surely designed to help Stephen Baker. Goldstein’s death could only hurt him.

On the other hand, the effect of the Forbes killing – apparently so fortuitously solving a Baker problem – had been to damage Baker, enabling his opponents to hint that he was some kind of gangster. What if that had been the objective all along? In which case, couldn’t Forbes’s killers and Goldstein’s be one and the same, bent on taking down a troublesome new president?

The notion that Stu Goldstein – vast, lumbering, cunning and often gross, but also gentle, kind and motivated only by the idealist’s desire to make the world better – could have been murdered filled Maggie with fury. She was haunted by the image of someone stalking Stu, grabbing him from behind, striking terror into a man who, thanks to his bulk and a life of brainwork unrelieved by exercise, would have been utterly defenceless. She could imagine him screaming as his wrists were cut, his blood jetting out. And then his inert body dumped in Rock Creek Park.

Maggie shook her head to stop the images coming. Who could have done such a thing to a man like Stuart Goldstein? Incomprehension turned to fear. If these men had seen an advantage in killing Stuart, wouldn’t she be the very next target? If their motive was the thwarting of Baker’s efforts to defend himself, then surely there was every reason to remove her. She and Stuart were the presidential defence team. She wondered if her conversations and texts with Stuart had been secure. They had been using the White House’s encrypted communications system. But if Stu had been murdered, it had been done profes
sionally; and people like that would have their ways of listening, watching, following…

She checked her rear-view mirror. There was a truck behind her. But behind that? She couldn’t tell. She relaxed her grip on the steering wheel. Her hands were trembling.

Not much further to go now. Soon she would arrive in Aberdeen. Washington State was as far away from Washington, DC as you could be, on the other side of the country, the other side of the continent. The drive had been long, the landscape monotonous but, she told herself, that was all to the good. It gave her a chance to think.

She turned on the radio, trying to negotiate its buttons with her free hand. She wanted music as a distraction, but made the mistake of hitting the AM band and came across Rush Limbaugh instead.

‘
Here’s what kills me about the liberal news media, folks. This is what kills me.’
He paused, leaving two or three seconds for effect.
‘They have such a Short. Attention. Span. That’s right. They don’t pay attention. They forget to take their Ritalin or something, I don’t know. Let me give you an example. Cast your mind back just a few days ago. It was wall-to-wall Vic Forbes.’
He paused again, then fell into a sing-song delivery for the next phrase.
‘Wall to wall! You could not move for Vic Forbes. Fortyeight hours, he was all anyone wanted to talk about. Forbes on the President’s “psychiatric” episode. Forbes on the Iranian Connection. Then Forbes promises the big one.’
Another pause.
‘The BIG ONE, ladies and gentlemen. And what happens? He’s found dead and the liberal media forget what they’d been talking about twelve hours earlier. Clean forgot!’
Now he went high-pitched and effeminate, the prissy voice of the East Coast liberal. ‘
“Whoops! Where was I? I forgot!” And of course, now it’s tributes on MSNBC and in the
New York Times
to that great liberal, Stuart Goldstein: the heavyweight champion of interest
group, Democrat identity politics. That’s who he was, my friends. And heavyweight is the right word. The guy was heavier than I am! And that’s saying something.’

He allowed himself a little laugh, one that made Maggie want to rip the radio out of the dashboard and hurl it out the window. But he was still talking.

‘You see, even I’m at it now. Changing the subject. Let’s not get distracted. That’s how
they
are, folks. And that’s how the liberal elite want
you
to be too. Forgetful. They want you to forget that Mr Forbes was about to tell us something. Well, we don’t forget on this show. Not here, no sirree. Let’s go to a call. Bloomington, Indiana, you’re on…’

She listened to the caller for a while, who introduced himself as a ‘dittohead’, then went on to condemn Stephen Baker’s upcoming visit to China. She hit FM, found an alternative rock station and cranked the volume knob to full, hoping somehow to channel the new rage coursing through her. How dare he?

She checked the mirror once more. Still the same truck. She strained to see the driver, but the angle was too steep.

At least the landscape outside, while unchanging, was easy on the eye. Mile after mile of tall pine trees, scraping the sky like sharp pencils. She had passed mirror-clear lakes, forests dusted with Christmas-card snow and all of it bathed in a piercing blue light. Were it not for the noise of the logging trucks thundering past her on the interstate, laden with treetrunks stacked like cigarettes, she would have kept the window down, so that she could gulp in the cold, fresh air.

She had flown to Seattle without calling Sanchez. She knew she was meant to ‘liaise’ with him, but she wasn’t going to start deferring to a twenty-seven-year-old guy whose place of work prior to the White House was the corner table at Starbucks, Dupont Circle branch. Besides, their encounter at Union Station suggested contact was now officially difficult if
not forbidden. She understood why. If she emailed or texted or phoned, it would show up on records. And he had outed Bob Jackson, CIA agent, to her. Of course, rationally, that shouldn’t matter: Jackson was already dead and there was no danger posed by revealing his affiliation to the CIA. But the connection between rationality and politics, Maggie had learned some time ago, was very slender indeed.

There was his safety to think of, too. If they really did face an enemy ready to kill, it helped no one to put Doug Sanchez in the firing line.

What was more, if she were honest, she didn’t want him trying to talk her out of it. What did she have? Little more than a hunch. That’s what Stuart would have said. She could hear him saying it: ‘You’re going backwards, Costello. We need to know what Forbes or Jackson or whatever the fuck his name is knew. You’re not writing his biography. “Tell me about your childhood”, and all that crap. You’re meant to be finding out what he had and where he hid it.’

That voice was nagging away at her even as she clocked up her hundredth mile from Seattle’s airport, even after the pine forests gave way to the lake and finally the sign saying ‘Welcome to Aberdeen’. A thin strip of new signage, in the same colours and typeface, had been added just below: ‘Onetime Home of President Stephen Baker’.

As she looked around the place – shabby and peeling in the way of all small towns that have lost the role that once shaped them – she wondered if she had made a bad mistake. She was a continent away from Washington, DC – where the President she believed in was fighting for his political life. Was she really going to help him by snooping around a place that was on the other side of America and might as well have been the other side of the world?

She had punched the zipcode for the high school into the satnav and now it led her straight into the car park. She
checked her watch. Thanks to the three-hour time difference and her early flight, it was still only early afternoon. The place should still be functioning. She looked over her shoulder: no sign of that truck – or of any other vehicle she recognized.

There was a framed photograph of Stephen Baker in the hallway and, next to it, an eighth-grade art project: ‘Dear Mr President’, in which students of James Madison expressed, through a drawing or a poem, their hopes for their most famous alumnus. When she saw the earnest pictures of handshakes, one hand white, one hand black, or of a bruised and bandaged globe, she was taken back to her own school days, and the art-room of the convent. The world had been bruised by nuclear weapons back then, rather than global warming; but there were always wars, and the misery they caused. Not much had changed. Looking at the pictures reminded her of her earlier self, the earnestness that had inspired her to take up her chosen career, trying to bandage the world. And now these children were being inspired by their new president. A lump rose in her throat, reminding her why she was here.

‘Can I help?’

Maggie spun around to see a smiling woman with long straight hair. In an instant calculation, she guessed that she was Maggie’s age, but that motherhood, and life in Aberdeen, Washington, had added ten years.

‘Oh yes, I’m looking for the Principal’s office.’

‘I’m the Principal’s secretary.’

‘Good. I wonder if I might—’

‘He’s busy with students right now. What’s your question?’ The smile remained fixed.

‘It’s about a former pupil at the school.’

‘Are you a journalist? All media inquiries go through—’

‘No,’ Maggie said, with what she hoped was a warm grin. ‘I’m not a journalist and it’s not about him.’

The secretary stood and said nothing. She was not going to make this easy.

‘My name is Ashley Muir,’ Maggie said, extending a hand. ‘I’m with Alpha, the insurance company. I’m here because one of our policyholders has, sadly, passed away. He left insufficient instructions as to beneficiaries and I—’

‘Do you have ID?’

‘I have my business card.’ Maggie opened her bag and pulled out the card she had been handed by Ashley Muir, Head of Government Relations for Alpha, at an awful Sunday brunch in Chevy Chase. He had called too, a couple of times, suggesting they go out on a date. She had said no but she was grateful to him now for giving her the only business card in her desk drawer that combined insurance and a female first name.

The secretary studied it for a moment. ‘This says something about the government.’

‘One of my duties is to look after policyholders who also happen to be federal employees.’ Maintain eye contact, Maggie told herself. Don’t look down or away: classic signal of an untruth. Reading other people’s body language was one of the skills you had to acquire in backroom diplomacy; but she was finding that deploying it on your own behalf was rather more difficult.

‘So what is it you want?’

‘I’m starting at the beginning, you see,’ Maggie said, moving towards the office, hoping it would send a subliminal cue to the woman to take her there. ‘Which is why it would be an enormous help if I could see the school record of the policyholder in question.’

‘Hmm,’ the secretary said, as she did indeed lead Maggie into the office. ‘Well, we don’t keep the records here.’

Maggie could feel her spirits sag. Wouldn’t that be typical: to trek the entire width of the American continent only to
be told the papers were kept in – where? – some storage facility in Maryland, no doubt.

‘In fact,’ the secretary’s smile was now back, ‘I didn’t have any idea they were kept at all until last year.’ She paused, as if anxious that Maggie might not follow. ‘With the election and all.’

Maggie nodded, happy to play the pupil.

‘Then suddenly everyone wanted to see Stephen Baker’s school file:
Vanity Fair
, ABC News, Inside Edition. All of them. Had to call the files from that class up from the basement. But it was all there, yearbook entry, the whole deal.’

‘So the files are here, in the office, now?’

‘Oh, no. Once we’d got Stephen Baker’s file, we put the rest back into storage.’

‘I see.’ This was painful.

‘Oh, it was a wonderful thing to see. He was only here for a year or so, of course. But it was a nice picture. And his grade score. Through the roof!’ She laughed.

‘Yes, he seems like a very smart man.’

‘Well, people voted for him round here, I can tell you.’

Maggie felt a little warmer towards this woman at hearing that. ‘So about this file?’

‘Well, you’d need to fill out a form and we’d have to process the request, then I’d have to get Terry – our janitorial manager – to go down to the basement and retrieve it. So if you were able to come back, say next Thursday, then I—’

Instead of a frustrated grimace, Maggie managed to give her an apologetic smile. ‘The problem, I’m afraid, is that I’m based in Washington, DC. I can’t be here for a full week.’

‘We could mail it to you. If you just leave your address, I’m sure—’

‘Sadly, there is a degree of urgency. The courts will need notification of intestacy, before we can proceed to the probate process.’ She saw the baffled expression on the secretary’s
face and pressed ahead, dredging her memory for any jargon she could remember that would sound suitably intimidating. ‘This will require an immediate declaration of kinship, heredity and outstanding claims on the estate. It’s a legal process and the courts could issue a subpoena against any person or individual who obstructs that process. Which would mean this school. Or indeed you.’ She felt cruel doing this to the poor woman, but there was too much at stake to play nice.