COPYRIGHT

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2010

Copyright © Jonathan Freedland 2010

Jonathan Freedland asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007342600

Ebook Edtion NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007352548

Version 2016-10-17

DEDICATION

For Fiona, my sister – and a true heroine

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Forty-Four

Forty-Five

Forty-Six

Forty-Seven

Forty-Eight

Forty-Nine

Fifty

Fifty-One

Fifty-Two

Fifty-Three

Fifty-Four

Fifty-Five

Fifty-Six

Fifty-Seven

Fifty-Eight

Fifty-Nine

Sixty

Sixty-One

Sixty-Two

Sixty-Three

Sixty-Four

Sixty-Five

Sixty-Six

Sixty-Seven

Sixty-Eight

Epilogue

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

New Orleans, March 21, 23.35

He didn’t choose her, she chose him. At least that’s how it seemed. Though maybe that was part of her skill, the performer’s art.

He hadn’t stared at her, hadn’t fixed her with that steady gaze he knew freaked the girls out. He didn’t want to make anyone uneasy. So he pretended to be like those out-of-town guys, cool and unbothered. On a business trip, only visiting a strip club so they could say they had tasted the true New Orleans experience – letting their hair down, sampling a little sin. The city didn’t mind those guys. Hell, New Orleans had made a living out of them: sleaze tourism, nicely packaged.

So he did his best to act uninterested, even glancing down at his BlackBerry, only occasionally stealing a look at the stage. Not that that was the right word. Too big. The ‘performing area’ was little more than a jetty pushed out among the low-lit tables, a few square feet with barely enough room for a girl to peel off her bikini top, jiggle the silicone on her chest, bend over and show her g-stringed ass before blowing a few kisses to the men who had slotted a twenty under her garter belt.

The thrill of these places should have faded long ago, but somehow he kept coming back: this spot had been a fixture, every Wednesday night, for years. It wasn’t really about the sex. It was the dark he liked, the anonymity. He would get the odd greeting and smile of recognition from behind the bar, but that was it. Men here avoided one another’s gaze: if your eyes met, it was in your mutual interest to look away.

Still, he took no chances. He didn’t want any strangers recognizing him, not with everything that had happened. He didn’t want to chat. He needed to think.

Be calm, he told himself. Things are on track. He had dropped the bait and they had picked it up. So what if there was no word yet? He should give it time.

The amber pool of bourbon at the bottom of his glass was inviting. He stared into it, raised it to his lips and knocked it back in one sharp swallow. It burned.

He glanced back to the stage. A new girl, one he’d not seen before. Her hair was longer, her skin somehow not quite as plucked and smooth as the others’. Her breasts looked real.

He was guarding himself against giving her the Stare but it was too late. She was looking directly at him. And not the blank, dosed-up gaze of the girls who called themselves ‘Savannah’ and ‘Mystery’ either. She was seeing him, seeing right through to him. Had she recognized him, perhaps from the TV?

He fiddled with the BlackBerry again, the device slick from the moisture in his palm. He fought the urge to look up, only to surrender a few seconds later. When he did, she was still holding him in that steady gaze. Not the fake leer perfected by the girls who know how to kid a bald, drunk guy that he’s hot. This was something more genuine; friendly, almost.

Her spot was over and she was gone, ending with the obligatory shake of the rear. Even that seemed aimed in his direction.

To his relief, the machine vibrated in his hand, forcing him to be busy with something else. A new message. He scanned the first line. Another media request. Not what he was waiting for. He scrolled through the rest of the day’s email, pretending to read.

‘You know what they say: all work and no play—’

‘Makes Jack a dull boy.’

He interrupted her even before he had seen her face. She had pulled up a chair at the small, dark-wood table he had made his own. Even though he had never heard her speak, he knew from the first syllable that it was her.

‘You don’t look like a dull boy.’

‘And you don’t look like a stripper.’

‘Oh, really? You don’t think I’ve got the goods for—’

‘I wasn’t saying that. I was saying—’

She placed her hand on his, to silence him. The warmth he had seen in her eyes on stage was still there. Her hair hung loose, falling onto her shoulders. She could have been no more than twenty-five – nearly half his age – and yet she exuded a strange . . . what was it? Maturity. Or something like that, something you rarely saw in this sort of place. Alongside him, his hands clammy, stabbing at his email, she was a statue of calm. He signalled to the waitress to bring them a drink.

Then, in an accent that was not Southern, perhaps Midwest, maybe California: ‘So what kind of work do you do?’

The question brought a warm wave of relief. It meant she didn’t recognize him. He felt the muscles in his back relax. ‘I’m kind of a consultant. I advise—’

‘You know what,’ she said, her hand still on his, her eyes searching for the door. ‘It’s too stuffy in here. Let’s walk.’

He said nothing as she led him out onto Claiborne Avenue, the traffic still heavy even at this late hour. He wondered if she could feel, just through his hand, that his pulse was racing.

Finally, they turned down a side street. It was unlit. She walked a few yards, turning left into an alley. It ran along the back of a bar, one of the few around here that had survived Katrina. He could hear a party inside, the sound of a toast delivered through a muffled loudspeaker.

She stopped and turned to face him, stretching up on her tiptoes to whisper into his ear. ‘I like it outside.’

Long before he had absorbed and understood her words, the blood was surging towards his groin. The sensation of her voice, her breath in his ear, flooded him with desire.

He pressed her hard against the wall, reaching immediately for her skirt. She pushed her mouth against his, kissing him enthusiastically. Her teeth bit into his lower lip.

The skirt was up and he began working at his belt. She pulled away from his mouth, offering him her neck instead. His tongue fell on it instantly, taking in the scent of her for the first time. It was familiar – and intoxicating.

Her hands ignored his unbuckled belt and moved upward, heading for his face. She was touching him, her fingers gentle. They moved down to his neck and suddenly pressed on it hard.

‘You like it rough,’ he murmured.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, the index- and forefingers of her right hand now firmly on his windpipe.

He wanted to pull down her underwear, but she suddenly seemed to be further away from him, her crotch no longer tight against his. He heard himself rasping.

He tried to prise her fingers off his throat, but there was no budging them. She was remarkably strong.

‘Look, I can’t breathe—’ he gasped. He caught a glimpse of her eyes, two bright beads in the night. No warmth now.

‘I know,’ she said, her left hand joining her right in fully circling his throat.

There was no coughing or spluttering, just a slow wilting in her hands, as she choked the life out of him. He fell quietly, any noise drowned out by the drunken chorus of Happy Birthday coming from the bar.

She straightened her skirt, reached down to remove the BlackBerry from the man’s jacket pocket, and headed off into the night, her scent still lingering in the Louisiana air.

ONE

The previous day

Washington, DC, Monday March 20, 07.21

‘Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks. Crap and bollocks.’

First she’d been thinking it, now she was saying it out loud, the words carried off in the onrush of wind.

Maggie Costello twisted her wrist to get another look at her watch, the fifth time in three minutes. No getting away from it. 7.21am: she was going to be late. But that was OK. It was only a one-to-one meeting with the White House Chief-of-bloody-Staff.

She pedalled furiously, feeling the strain in her calves and the heaving pressure on her lungs. No one had said cycling was going to be this hard. It was the cigarettes she blamed: she was fitter when she smoked.

So much for the fresh start. New job, new regime, she had told herself. Healthy eating; more exercise; quit the fags; no more late nights. If there was a plus to finding herself suddenly single, it was surely that she could now start each morning bright and early. And not just normal-human-being early, which 7.21am certainly counted as in Maggie’s book. No, she would start her day Washington early, so that a meeting at 7.30am would not feel like bumping into someone in the middle of the night. To the new Maggie, 7.30 would feel like an ordinary moment in the heart of the working day.

That had been the plan, at any rate. Maybe it was because she had been born and raised in Dublin, only coming to America as an adult, that she didn’t fit. Whatever the explanation, Maggie was fast coming to the conclusion that she was innately out-of-sync with all these bright, shiny Washingtonians, with their polished shoes and impeccable self-discipline, because no matter how hard she tried to embrace the DC lifestyle, getting up at the crack of dawn still felt like cruel and unusual punishment.

So here she was, late again, whistling down Connecticut Avenue at a lethal speed, willing Dupont Circle to come into view but knowing that, even when it did, she would still be at least three to five minutes away from the White House and that was before she had chained up the bike, cleared security by putting her bag and BlackBerry onto the conveyor belt that fed the giant scanning machine, dashed into the ladies’ bathroom, torn off her T-shirt and cycle-clips, swabbed her armpits, used the hand-dryer to restyle her hair, wrestled her still-sweating body into her much-loathed regulation Washington uniform, a barely more feminine version of a man’s suit and shirt – and somehow altered her appearance from under-slept scarecrow to member of the National Security Council and trusted Foreign Policy Advisor to the President of the United States.

It was 7.37am by the time she stood, panting and still red-faced, before Patricia, secretary to Magnus Longley. She had been with Longley for more than forty years, they said; rumour was, he had scooped her out of the typing pool on his very first day of work at his father’s law firm. The pair of them had been around forever, he a monument in permanent Washington, she his stone base.

It had been Patricia who had summoned Maggie to this meeting, in a telephone message that had woken her blearily at 6.29am, only for her to fall back into a fatal doze that lasted another twenty-five minutes.

‘He’s waiting for you,’ Patricia said, peering above her glasses – attached by a string around her neck – just long enough to convey a sharp look of disapproval, for her lateness, of course; but for other more important reasons, too. That cold, lizard’s blink of a glance had taken in Maggie’s appearance from top to toe and found it sadly wanting. Maggie looked down and realized with some horror that her trousers, ironed so carefully last night in preparation for the next day but thrown on in haste this morning, were now unacceptably creased and marked at the ankles by a line of cycle grease. And then there was her autumn-red hair which, in a gesture of personal rebellion, she kept long and tousled in a town where women tended to keep it short and businesslike. Patricia’s expression conveyed more clearly than any words that no self-respecting young lady would have gone to work dressed like that in her day. And in the White House, too!

Maggie passed her hand through her hair one more time, in a futile bid to impose some order, and stepped inside.

Magnus Longley was a veteran Mr Fix-it who had served either in the House, Senate or the White House since the Carter era. He was the requisite greybeard appointed to balance out – and allay any anxieties over – the President’s youth and lack of Washington experience. ‘He knows where the bodies are buried,’ was what everyone said about him. ‘And he knows how to bury any new ones.’

His thin, aged head was down when she came in, poring over a neatly squared pile of papers, a pen in his hand. He scrawled a comment in the margin before looking up, revealing a face whose features remained always neat and impassive. He still had all his hair which, now white, was combed perfectly into a parting.

‘Mr Longley,’ Maggie said, extending a hand. ‘I’m sorry I’m late, I was—’

‘So you think the Secretary of Defense is an asshole, is that right, Miss Costello?’

Maggie, parched already from the breakneck cycle ride, felt her throat run dry. Her hand, still outstretched and ignored, came down and reached shakily for the back of the chair facing Longley’s desk.

‘Shall I repeat my question?’ The voice was deep and strong, surprising from a man of his age, the accent creaking with old money and Park Avenue breeding. Longley was a New York aristocrat; his father had been a pal of FDR’s. He spoke the way Americans talked in 1940s movies, an accent halfway across the Atlantic to England.

‘I heard the question. But I don’t understand it. I never called the—’

‘No time for games, Miss Costello. Not in this office, not in this building. And no time for such infantile behaviour as this—’ the word punctuated with a loud flick of the fingers against a single sheet of paper.

Maggie tried to peer at the upside-down paper, suddenly full of dread. ‘What is that?’

‘It is an email you wrote to one of your colleagues at the State Department.’

Slowly a memory began to form. Two nights ago, she had worked late. She had written to Rob, over on the South Asia desk at State. He was one of the few familiar faces around; like her a veteran of pressure groups, aid organizations and eventually UN peace missions in horrible, forgotten corners of the world.

‘Shall I read the relevant paragraph, so that we’re clear?’

Maggie nodded, the recollection growing ever less hazy.

Longley cleared his throat, theatrically. ‘“Intel on AfPak suggests close collaboration with Islamabad”, et cetera, et cetera, “none of which seems to be getting through to the assholes at the Pentagon”—’

She had a nasty inkling of what was coming . . .

‘“—especially the chief asshole, Dr Anthony Asshole himself”.’ He placed the paper back on the desk and looked up at her, his gaze icy.

Now she remembered it all. Maggie’s heart fell with a sudden swoop into the pit of her stomach.

‘As you can imagine, the Defense Secretary is not too happy to be described in these terms by an official of the White House.’

‘But how on earth did he—’

‘Because—’ Magnus Longley leaned forward and across his desk, enabling Maggie to see the first signs of liver spots on his cheeks. ‘Because, Miss Costello, your friend at State is not quite as brilliant as you evidently think he is. He forwarded your proposal regarding intelligence co-operation with Pakistan to colleagues at the Pentagon. But he forgot to use the most important button on these goddamned machines.’ He gestured vaguely in the direction of his desktop computer, whose screen, Maggie noticed, was dark and very possibly coated with dust. ‘The delete key.’

‘No.’ The horrified response came out as a whisper.

‘Oh yes. The entire thread of messages.’ He handed her the print-out.

She took one look, noting the list of senior Pentagon officials who had been cc’d at the top of the email – including the handpicked, ultra-loyal advisors to the Defense Secretary – and felt the blood drain from her face. She stared down at the paper again, willing it to be untrue. But there it was in black-and-white: asshole. How on earth could Rob have made such an elementary mistake? How could she?

‘Any case for the defence you’d like to make?’

‘Are you certain he knows?’ she asked feebly.

He gave her the first movement of a sneer.

‘Maybe his aides didn’t pass it on, maybe it hasn’t reached him.’ She could hear the desperation in her own voice.

Longley raised his eyebrows, as if to ask if she really wanted to pursue this line of argument. ‘He’s the one who raised it with me. Personally, this morning. He wants you gone immediately.’

‘It was just one word in one email. For Christ’s sake—’

‘Don’t take that tone with me, young lady.’

‘It’s just office banter. It was one remark—’

‘Do you even read the newspapers, Miss Costello? Or perhaps you are more of a blog reader?’ He said the word as if he had just caught a whiff of a soiled dishcloth. ‘Twitter maybe?’

Maggie decided this was part of Longley’s shtick, playing the old fart: he couldn’t be as out of touch as he liked to pretend, not when he had stayed on top in Washington for so long. She remembered the Style section interview she had read, in which Longley had claimed the last time he had stepped inside a movie theatre was to see Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity. ‘Have I missed much since then?’ he had asked languidly.

Now he was sitting back in his chair, relaxed. ‘Because you may have picked up that our Defense Secretary is – how can we put this? – not one of the President’s obvious loyalists.’

‘Of course I know that. Adams ran against him for the nomination.’

‘You are up-to-date. Yes. He may even run against him again.’

‘A primary challenge?’

‘Not inconceivable. The President has assembled what is admiringly referred to as “a team of rivals”. But as Lincoln understood, it may be a team, but they’re still rivals.’

‘So he—’

‘So he’s not going to let this go. Dr Adams wants to flex his muscles, show that his reach extends beyond the Pentagon.’

‘Which means he wants me out.’

The Chief of Staff stood up. Maggie wasn’t sure if the creak she heard was the chair or Longley’s knees.

‘That’s where we are. The final decision is not Dr Adams’s, of course. It rests in this building.’

What the hell did that mean? This building. Did Longley mean he would decide – or that whether Maggie kept her job or not would be settled by the President himself?

Longley had pulled his shoulders back, so that he could deliver his final remarks. ‘Miss Costello, I fear you forgot Longley’s First Rule of Politics. Don’t write so much as a note to the milkman in this town that you wouldn’t mind seeing on the front page of the Washington Post. Above the fold.’

‘You think Adams would leak it.’

‘Wouldn’t you? Revive stories about the Baker–Adams rift, implicitly putting himself on a par with the President? No thank you. The reason he’s inside the tent is so that he can piss out, not all over the Oval Office carpet.’

‘Does the President know about this?’

‘You seem to have forgotten that Stephen Baker is the President of the United States of America. He is not a human resources manager’ His mouth seemed to recoil from the phrase, as if uttering such an absurd, new-fangled term might stain his lips. ‘I don’t want to be unkind, Miss Costello. But there are hundreds of people who work for the President. You are not of a rank at which your employment would be of concern to him. Unless there is a reason you think otherwise, in which case perhaps you would be so good as to disclose that to me.’

So that meant the final decision rested with Longley. She was finished. Maggie balled her hands into fists as two instincts warred inside her: fight and flight. She certainly wanted to hit this sanctimonious prick, who appeared to be enjoying the situation far too much; at the same time she wanted to run home and throw herself under the duvet. Doing her best to control herself, she bit her lower lip, hard enough to get the zinc taste of blood.

Longley glanced casually at his watch, a vintage Patek Philippe, elegant, unfussy; unashamedly analog. ‘I have someone waiting for me, Miss Costello. No doubt we will speak again soon.’ She was dismissed.

Maggie passed Patricia on the way out who, she noticed, did not so much as look up, let alone make eye contact. No doubt a gesture of discretion she had learned in many long years of serving Magnus Longley, who had probably sacked enough people over the years to fill RFK Stadium.

She waited till she was in her own rabbit-hutch of an office, an eighth the square footage of the Chief of Staff’s, before she would even breathe out properly.

Once she was sure the door was closed, she used her forearm to sweep everything – two tottering piles of classified documents, magazines, paper bags from the deli, chewed pens and other assorted detritus – off her desk and onto the floor. The gesture made her feel good for about three-fifths of a second. She fell into her chair.

Was this going to be the story of this year, having a magical opportunity in her hands, only to screw it up royally? Forget this year, was this going to be the story of her bloody life? And all for the sake of one supremely stupid moment of unguarded honesty. Not that Adams wasn’t an arsehole: he was, First Class. But it was absurdly naïve to put it in an email. How old was she? Nearly forty, for God’s sake. When would she learn? For a woman who’d made her name as a skilled diplomat, a peace negotiator for Christ’s sake – with all the sensitivity, discretion and sureness of touch that required – she really was an idiot. Eejit, she could almost hear her sister Liz teasing her in fake bog-Irish.

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t had a chance. When she had got back from Jerusalem – hailed as the woman who had at last made a breakthrough in the Middle East peace process – she was, everyone told her, able to write her own ticket. She had been swamped with job offers, every think-tank and university had wanted her name on their headed notepaper. She could teach international relations at Harvard or write editorials in Foreign Affairs. There had even been a whisper from ABC News that, with the right training – and a suitable wardrobe – she might have the makings of on-air ‘talent’. One executive had sent a handwritten note: ‘I truly believe you are the woman to make international relations sexy.’

But it was none of this that had made her return to the States nearly three years ago so thrilling. Instead, and much to her amazement, things had actually worked out with Uri. She had wondered if the relationship would prove to be little more than a glorified holiday romance: they had, after all, come together during the strangest and most intense week in Jerusalem and he, out of his mind with grief after both his parents had died within days of each other, had hardly been thinking straight. She had learned long ago to be suspicious of relationships hatched on the road, especially those lent glamour and significance by the constant presence of danger and proximity of death. Love among the bombs felt delicious at the time, but it rarely lasted.

And yet when Uri had invited her to share his apartment in New York she hadn’t said no. True, she couldn’t quite bring herself to sign on the dotted line marked ‘official cohabitation’: she had kept her apartment in Washington, planning to divide her time between the two places. But when it came to it, both she and Uri simply found that they wanted to spend most nights in the same city – and in the same bed.

There had seemed to be no reason for it ever to stop. But somehow, just a few weeks ago, she had found herself sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, looking out at a gleaming Washington, DC – scrubbed up and ready for the inauguration of a new president – with Uri at her side, his voice cracking, saying that they had run out of road. That he still loved her, but that this was no longer working. She had made her choice, he said. She had voted with her feet, deciding that her work mattered above all else: ‘The bottom line, Maggie, is that you care about Stephen Baker more than you care about me. Or about us.’

And, even though the tears were falling down her cheeks, she hadn’t been able to argue. What could she say? He was right: she had dedicated the last year not to making a life with him, but to helping Stephen Baker become the most powerful man in the world. That he had won the presidency – against all the odds – felt almost miraculous. She had been so swept up in the euphoria of that triumph that she had forgotten to pay attention to her own life. Somewhere, in the back of her mind, she had thought that once things got back to normal, she would concentrate on making her relationship with Uri work; she would patch things up. But suddenly it was too late: he’d made his decision and there had been nothing she could say.

So now here she was, yet again, another relationship officially screwed up and on the verge of losing the very job that had sabotaged it. This was her life all over. Give Maggie Costello a shot at happiness or success and she’ll fuck up both. She wanted to howl like a banshee, to expel all her frustration and misery: but even in her despair she knew she wouldn’t do it. Washington was the buttoned-down town. No outward expressions of emotion wanted here. That was one of the reasons she was beginning to hate it, from the depths of her Irish soul. So instead, she put her head in her hands and muttered to herself, again and again: Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.

This bout of self-loathing was interrupted by a vibration somewhere near her thigh. She dug out her cellphone. Where the number should have appeared it just said: Restricted.

A voice she did not recognize spoke without saying hello. ‘Is this Maggie Costello?’

‘Yes.’

‘Please come to the Residence right away. He wants to speak to you.’

Confused, Maggie replied, ‘Who wants to speak to me?’

‘The President.’

TWO

Washington, DC, Monday March 20, 08.07

There was no time to visit the bathroom: she had been summoned to see him ‘right away’. But there was no way in the world she could go to the Residence looking like this. Maggie swung open the door to the Ladies’, praying she would run into no one that she would have to speak to.

Shit.

Tara MacDonald, Director of Communications, African-American mother of four and undisputed matriarch, first of the Baker campaign and now of the Baker White House – coiffed and confident in her midlife prime, coming out of the stalls and checking her make-up.

‘Hi there, Maggie, how you doing, sweetheart?’

Maggie froze, reluctant to take up her position in front of the vanity mirror. Lamely, she ducked her head and began to wash her hands.

‘I’m OK.’

‘You seem a little, I don’t know, agitated.’

Maggie turned to MacDonald with a harried attempt at a smile. ‘I’ve just been summoned. To the Residence. I thought I’d better . . .’ she nodded towards the mirror, ‘. . . you know, make myself presentable.’

The instant change in Tara’s expression – as if her smile muscles had been suddenly severed – told Maggie she’d made a mistake.

The older woman pursed her lips. ‘That right? The Residence. That’s quite an honour.’

‘I’m sure it’s nothing important. Probably wants some input ahead of the UN speech.’

‘Sweetheart, he has a National Security Advisor for that.’ Tara MacDonald went back to the mirror, but Maggie could see she was not done. ‘Well, ain’t you the insider. And there I was thinking you were just an NSC staffer.’

Maggie ignored the remark, staring at the mirror, aware that she had already been here a minute – which was a minute longer than she should have been. Besides, she had heard this kind of barb before.

The face that stared back at her looked pale and strained: no surprise, really, given the excruciating little scene that had just been played out in the Chief of Staff’s office. In the panicked dash to get here this morning she’d forgone her usual lick of paint: there had simply been no time to apply concealer to the dark shadows beneath her eyes or the tinted moisturizer that did its best to conceal the tiny crows’ feet that now perched at the corners of her eyes along with the cigarette-lines around her mouth. Just a touch of mascara and a sweep of nude lipstick was all she’d managed, and it showed. Not much evidence at the moment of what the gossip column of the City Paper had recently referred to as ‘the delectable Maggie Costello’.

After yet another attempt to restore swift order to her hair, she headed off – walking as fast as she could without triggering a security alert – through the press briefing room and then outside along the colonnade towards the White House Residence, home for little more than two months to Stephen Baker, wife Kimberley, their thirteen-year-old daughter Katie and eight-year-old son Josh.

The Secret Service agents ushered her through without so much as a question, clearly expecting her. Through one set of doors, then another and suddenly she was in what looked like any other American household at ten past eight in the morning. There were cereal boxes on the table, school bags spilling over with gym kit on the floor, and childish chatter in the air. Except for the minor matter of armed officers posted outside the door and state-of-the-art, encrypted communications equipment in every room, it looked like a regular family home.

Stephen Baker was not at the table scouring the New York Times over his half-moon reading glasses as she was expecting. Instead he was standing in the middle of the kitchen, jacket off, with an apple in his hand. Standing opposite him, three yards away and staring intently, was his son Josh – clutching a baseball bat.

‘OK,’ the President whispered. ‘You ready?’

The little boy nodded.

‘Here it comes. Three, two, one.’ He tossed the apple, slowly and at just the right height for it to make contact with the little boy’s bat.

Struck firmly, the fruit went flying past the President’s hand and splattered into the wall behind him.

A voice came from the next room, raised to full volume. ‘Josh! What did I say about ball games inside?’

The President made a mock-worried expression for the benefit of his son and then, conspiratorially, put his finger to his lips. In full voice he called out, ‘All under control, my love,’ as he retrieved the apple from the floor and wiped the pulp from the wall. Then, catching the eye of the Secret Service agent who had witnessed the entire episode, he mouthed, ‘You too. Not a word.’

Even here, without the trappings and grandeur of office, he was a striking man. Six foot three, with a full head of brown hair, he was always the first person in the room you noticed. He was lean, his features fine and sharp. But it was his eyes that grabbed you. They were a deep, penetrating green and – even when the rest of him was animated and quick – they seemed to operate at a slower pace, gazing levelly, never darting. During the TV debates, the camera seemed to seek them out, as if it were as mesmerized as the audience. When commentators wrote about Candidate Baker exuding calm and steadiness, Maggie was convinced it was not his answers or policy ideas they had in mind. It was his eyes.

And now they were looking towards her. ‘Hey Josh, look who’s here. Your favourite Irish aunt.’

‘Hi Maggie.’

‘Hi Joshie. How’s your new school?’

‘S’OK. I play baseball, which is cool.’

‘That is cool.’ Maggie was beaming. Josh Baker was a contender for America’s cutest boy and having first met him nearly two years ago she felt as if she had almost seen him grow up.

That first encounter had come on a summer Saturday in Iowa, at the State Fair in Des Moines. Stephen Baker had been there with his family – Josh, then aged six, kept nagging to ride on the bumper cars – as the candidate tried to endear himself to the ever-discerning, and crucial, people of Iowa. Baker was then the rank outsider in the Democratic field, the little-known governor of Washington State. His name recognition was zero, he had no national experience and carried no regional advantage: historically, Democrats liked governors from the South who might deliver a chunk of votes that would otherwise be hard to reach. Washington State? In a presidential primary, that counted as a disability.

Still, Rob – Maggie’s old pal from her Africa days, who had ended up in the State Department and had just dealt the death-blow to her nascent career – had been insistent. ‘Just meet him,’ he had said. ‘You’ll know right away.’

Maggie had stonewalled, resisting, refusing to be swayed by the barrage of calls, emails and texts that followed. Maggie Costello? Working for a politician? The idea was ridiculous. She had ideals, for God’s sake, and ideals had no place in the snakepit of modern politics. The young Maggie Costello had had nothing but contempt for politicians. She’d seen what they and other power-seekers had done to godforsaken bits of Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East, first as an aid-worker, latterly as a behind-the-scenes diplomat. It sounded corny, but as far as she was concerned there was only one mission that mattered: trying to make the world a better place, especially for those on the sharp end of war, disease and poverty. The way she saw it, politicians tended, at best, to get in the way of that process; at worst to profit by others’ disadvantage.

Besides, she’d argued to Rob, the election was more than a year away; Baker’s candidacy was just a few months old and the Beltway wisdom had already written him off as an also-ran. They suspected he was running as a future vice president, trying to get himself noticed. The only poll she had seen gave him a score of ‘negligible’, too small to measure. And anyway, what did she know about US presidential politics?

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Rob had insisted. ‘You know foreign policy. He’s governor of Nowheresville: the closest he gets to foreign policy is having lunch at the International House of Pancakes. Just go, just meet him and you’ll see what I mean. He’s different: he’s something special.’

So, sighing inwardly, she had gone to the Iowa State Fair and watched Baker mingling with the hog-farmers, eventually crowning a giant pig the winner of the hotly-fought Big Boar Contest. ‘He’s bigger than I am, he’s better looking – why isn’t he running for president?’ Baker had said to delighted cheers. She waited before introducing herself. She wanted to see him in action.

It didn’t take long to see he was a natural. His manner was easy, his interest in people shone through as genuine, not the synthetic sincerity of the blow-dried, bleached-teeth politicians usually deemed presidential material. Unlike most candidates, he knew there was a difference between listening and staying silent while you wait to speak again. He actually listened. And whatever quality it was that had won over her cynical friend, Rob, it seemed to be working on the usually wary folk of Des Moines – people who had grown sceptical of the procession of suitors who invaded their state every four years smiling brightly with their faces aimed towards the television cameras, making promises they never kept. Baker, on the other hand, had the crowd in his thrall: they watched him eagerly, mirroring his expressions, grinning when he grinned, reflecting back the warmth they felt from him. And unlike other candidates, who seemed to have been parachuted into such events from another planet, he genuinely seemed to be enjoying himself, making real human contact with the people around him, rather than using them as props for a photo opportunity.

Finally she stepped up to say hello.

‘So you’re the woman who brought peace to the Holy Land,’ he had said, wiping an oily hand on his apron as he paused from flipping chops on the outdoor grill beside the Iowa Pork Producers’ tent. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you.’

‘Nearly,’ she had replied. ‘Nearly brought peace.’

‘Well, nearly’s a hell of a lot further than anyone ever got before.’

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 volunteer 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 artificially 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 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!’

THREE

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.

Now he was handing a pen each to Donna, Christine and the congressional bigwigs. It was a White House tradition, one of dozens to have acquired the status of a religious rite: the President would sign a bill with multiple pens, so that he would have at least a dozen to present as souvenirs. Each one could be said to be ‘the very pen President Baker used to sign the . . .’

Aides were now beginning to nudge the President towards the lectern, to take questions from the press. He put out a restraining hand, signalling that he was not quite ready. He carried on speaking to the women who were huddled around him, one or two of them holding up camera-phones to get a snap of the man up close. He was standing, listening intently.

Maggie could hear the woman who had his attention.

‘. . . he took his belt off and began whipping my boy like he was a horse. What makes a man behave like that, Mr President? To his own son?’

The President shook his head in weary disbelief. Phil, the ‘body man’, placed his hand on Baker’s shoulder once again: the gesture that said, We really must wind this up. But the boss ignored him. Instead, he used his height to reach over the immediate circle of women who were surrounding him, searching for the hand of one of those who had held back. Maggie had noticed her already: unlike the others, she had been too shy to introduce herself. Ordinarily, those were the people who missed out; they never got their moment with the President. But Stephen Baker had noticed her, just as he always did.

It took Tara MacDonald to impose some discipline. She strode over to the huddle and addressed not the President but the women. ‘Ladies, if you could all take your seats,’ she said in the kind of commanding voice used to bringing hush to a church. ‘The President needs to take some questions.’

This was an innovation, one that Baker himself had insisted upon. Traditionally, presidents made themselves available to the press only rarely, doing occasional, set-piece press conferences. The rest of the time, reporters might try to hurl a question but it would usually die in the air, victim to the President’s selective deafness.

Baker promised to be different. If he did a public event, it would now end with a few minutes of light interrogation. The Washington punditocracy gave this fresh, transparent approach a life expectancy of about a fortnight: Baker would soon realize he’d made a rod for his own back and quit.

‘Terry, what you got?’

‘Mr President, congratulations on signing the Violence Against Women Act.’

‘Thanks.’ He flashed the wide signature smile.

‘But some people are saying this might be the first and last legislative achievement of the Baker presidency. This was the one thing you and Congress could agree on. After this, isn’t it going to be gridlock all the way?’

‘No, Terry, and I’ll tell you why.’

Maggie watched as the President went into a now-familiar riff, explaining that though his majorities in the House and Senate were narrow, there were plenty of people of goodwill who wanted to make progress for the sake of the American people.

He then took another question, this time on diplomatic efforts in the Middle East. Maggie felt a surge of anxiety, a leftover from the election campaign when it had been her job to make sure he didn’t stumble on the subject of foreign policy. No need for her to worry about that now.

Sanchez leaned in to say, ‘This will be the last question.’

Baker called on MSNBC.

‘Mr President, I’m sorry to come to a subject that might be awkward. Did you deceive the American people during the election campaign, by failing to reveal a key aspect of your own medical history – specifically the fact that you had once received treatment for a psychiatric disorder?’

FOUR

Washington, DC, Monday March 20, 09.24

There were perhaps two seconds of frozen silence as the question cut through the air, like a missile before impact.

Every head in the room swung around to look at Stephen Baker. His posture had remained the same, he had not collapsed in a heap, nor was he shaking his fist. But, Maggie saw, he was now gripping the lectern so tightly his knuckles had turned white. They matched the pallor spreading over his face as the blood drained from it.

He began to speak. ‘Like every other candidate for this office, I released a medical statement during the campaign. From my doctor. That statement included all the details he—’ Baker paused, looking down at the lectern as if searching for a script that wasn’t there. The pause, barely a second, seemed interminable. He looked up again. ‘All the details he deemed to be relevant. And I think now is the time to attend to the business of the American people.’ With that, he turned on his feet and headed for the door, a long snake of aides at his heels – leaving behind a loud chorus of ‘Mr President!’ bellowed by every reporter with a follow-up question.

The staff scattered in every direction. Goldstein, Maggie noticed, headed straight across the corridor towards the Oval Office; MacDonald and Sanchez went in the opposite direction, to the press room. En route to her own office, one of several bunched together next to the Press Secretary’s, she hesitated, standing in the doorway, looking in at those charged with handling the media: the scene was crazed, every person on a telephone, each one of them simultaneously hammering away at a computer. She could see MacDonald and Sanchez talking intensely: she lip-read Sanchez saying, ‘The trouble is, he looked like shit out there.’

Maggie felt both out of place and useless, like a sightseer at a fire station on full alert. With a start, she remembered her meeting with Magnus Longley that morning, his threat that her job hung by a thread. Soon she might indeed be no more than a sightseer here.

She turned to leave, taking one last glance at the TV screen. The Breaking News tag along the bottom conveyed a single, devastating sentence: ‘Source tells MSNBC: President Baker received psychiatric treatment for depression.’

No wonder Baker had turned the colour of ash. The word psychiatric reeked of political death. People might like to brag they were liberal and tolerant these days, but mental illness? Different story. Maybe if you were a celebrity, perched on Oprah’s sofa, admitting to a few years of therapy . . . But psychiatric treatment: that sounded like electrodes, rubber rooms and men in white coats. It was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Besides, Stephen Baker was not a movie star who could weep a few confessional tears on daytime TV and make it go away. He was the President of the United States. Americans could tolerate all manner of weaknesses in each other – especially if they were accompanied by contrition and redemption – but not in a president. They needed their president to be above all that, to be stronger than they were. Few men ever met that impossible standard. But a nation that looked to its leader to be a kind of tribal father never stopped expecting.

Voters would be rattled by this news, whoever was in the White House, Maggie knew that. But Stephen Baker had been lionized, ever since his campaign took off in the depths of the Iowa winter. Word had spread that, at last, a different kind of politician had arrived: one who really did seem to talk straight.

YouTube clips of him telling audiences what they didn’t want to hear became cult viewing. He told farmers outside Sioux Falls that ethanol subsidies would have to stop: growing corn to make oil made as much sense as distilling the finest whisky – then using it to clean out the drains. There had been some hecklers, but most of the crowd of farmers were slack-jawed. No candidate had ever dared to say such a thing, not to their face anyway. How come this guy wasn’t pandering to them like everyone else had?

‘I hate what you say, but it took some guts to come here and say it!’ shouted one woman, as wide as a truck, from the front row. Soon they were nodding and then they began applauding, more surprised by themselves than by the candidate standing before them. The three-minute video went viral.

Soon the press was writing up Baker as something more than a regular politician. He was a truth-teller, destined to lead the American people out of a dark moment in their history. The more overheated reporters became lyrical: ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man . . .’ What could have been an uncomfortable report in The New Republic, detailing some of the battles Governor Baker had fought, and the enemies he had made, in his home state of Washington concluded by quoting Jesus: ‘Only in his hometown . . . is a prophet without honour.’

Yet now he had been accused of failing to level with the nation. And instead of knocking back the charge, he had paled at the very words.

Maggie was stepping into her office when she saw Goldstein heading away from the Oval and towards the press area. No matter that he was way above her in the Washington food chain, Maggie regarded Stu as one of the few unambiguously friendly faces around here. They had whiled away many long hours on the plane during the campaign, talking while reporters tapped away at their keyboards, staffers dozed and Baker sat back, his iPod headphones jammed into his ears to prevent anyone attempting a conversation. She figured that if anyone knew the truth of the MSNBC story, it would be Goldstein – the man who’d been with Stephen Baker from the start.

She walked down the corridor so that she could meet him halfway, then cut to the chase. ‘We’re in the toilet, aren’t we?’

‘Yup. Somewhere round the U-bend and heading underground.’ He carried on walking. Given his bulk, he was advancing at quite a speed.

‘Is it true?’

‘Tell you what, why don’t you go over to the Oval right now, poke your head round the door and say, “Mr President, is it true that you used to see a shrink ’cause you were about to throw yourself off Memorial Bridge?”’

‘They didn’t say anything about suicide.’

‘No, Maggie, they didn’t. But check Drudge in about thirty minutes. I bet that’s where they get to.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Jesus is right.’

‘How bad’s it going to be?’

‘Well, as people used to say back when Dick Nixon was using this place to turn the Constitution into confetti, it’s never the crime, it’s always the—’

‘—cover-up.’

‘Most folks won’t mind if the President’s meshugge – a real loony tune,’ he gasped, his breath too short to reach the end of his sentence. She could see crumbs embedded on his lapels. ‘Just so long as they knew about it before they pulled the lever.’

‘They’ll be angry he didn’t reveal it in the campaign.’

‘You betcha,’ he said bitterly.

She couldn’t tell whether Goldstein was irritated that something he’d long known had leaked – or whether he was disappointed that the President had kept a secret from him.

‘What’s he going to do?’

‘He wants to make a personal statement. Right away.’

‘Is that a good idea?’

‘Right now, Maggie, nothing about this is good.’

It came back to her then, the brief flap during the campaign over medical records. Mark Chester, Baker’s much older opponent, had refused to disclose his, issuing a terse ‘doctor’s summary’ instead. Most expected Baker to seize the moment and release his records in full, waving his clean bill of health in Chester’s face, each rosy-cheeked detail drawing an implicit contrast with the Republican’s pale and brief account. But he had done no such thing, choosing to issue a doctor’s summary of his own. Everyone gave Baker credit for that: he had shown compassion, sparing the embarrassment of the older man.

Now, standing in a corridor of the West Wing, Maggie wondered if they’d all been duped. She had never considered that Baker might have taken the chance to avoid full disclosure not to play nice with Chester – but to cover up his own embarrassments. But it was what everyone would be thinking now. MSNBC would either have to be flat-out wrong – which would rank as one of the major journalistic blunders of modern times – or Stephen Baker would have to come up with a damn good explanation for why he hadn’t told the truth.

She headed back to her office, sat at the computer and tried to focus on drafting an options paper on Sudan. That was what she was here to do; that was what he had asked her to do in a conversation that already seemed to belong to a different era. But now she understood why people always said that the White House could only deal with one crisis at a time. You were too distracted to think of anything else.

She clicked on the TV. All channels were now on the MSNBC story. CNN was interviewing a man claiming to be an expert on depression.

The blogs were obsessed. She went to Andrew Sullivan.

This could be a defining moment for the republic. Mental illness is one of the last great taboos, a subject kept in the dark. And yet one in three Americans is affected by it. Stephen Baker should be brave, tell the truth and call for an end to prejudice.

She next went rightward, to The Corner.

Normally it takes at least a few years for a Democratic politician to start falling apart. Credit to Baker for speeding up the process. Now all he needs to do is show similar alacrity and fast-track his deficit-reduction plan.

Over at the liberal Daily Kos she detected definite anxiety:

MSNBC is so far citing just one unnamed source. They’d better have proof.

She glanced up at the TV; still no more news. Time seemed to have slowed to a crawl. Her mind was wandering, something in recent weeks she had been working very hard to avoid. She was back on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, replaying the conversation with Uri in her head. As the memory unspooled, she felt the melancholy creeping back inside her, like a vapour entering her lungs. To push it out and away, she reached for the Sudan file: maybe that bulging box of memoranda and cables, all classified, would help her tell the President what he needed to do. And distract her from herself.

The TV announced a news alert. The network that had broken the story now confirmed that it had documentary evidence of Stephen Baker’s past treatment for depression. ‘MSNBC is satisfied these papers are genuine,’ the anchor declared with the portentous baritone Maggie guessed was usually reserved for presidential assassinations.

So it was true. Maggie sat back in her chair. Until now, she realized, she had held back her reaction, unsure what, exactly, she was meant to be reacting to. Now she no longer had that excuse.

She wanted to be like that blogger, full of compassion and apparently unfazed by the prospect of a president with a history of mental illness. She knew that should be her attitude, too, just as she knew she should eat organic food. But she couldn’t quite persuade herself to feel it.

Besides, she had the same attitude as the ‘folks’ Stuart had talked about. It wasn’t the crime – being depressed was surely no crime – it was the cover-up. If medical disclosure meant anything, it should have meant levelling with the electorate.

But that wasn’t quite it, either. Maggie knew it would have been risky, verging on suicidal, for a candidate to start blubbering about his time on the psychiatrist’s couch in the middle of a presidential election – especially when his opponent had allowed him to skip the details. She knew why he hadn’t been able to come clean with the voters. But that didn’t soothe the nagging sensation she felt somewhere between her brain and her gut. For a fleeting second, the sensation formed itself into a sentence: he should have come clean with her.

She tried to push the feeling away, clicking again on the refresh button on the New York Times website, not taking in a word she read. It was, she knew, ridiculous to regard this as a personal betrayal. There had been many people far more senior than her on the campaign team; Stephen Baker was under no obligation to share the stories of his past with her. He had told her no lies. It was not as if she had ever asked the question.

And yet the nagging feeling was still there. She had jacked in her job and gone to work for him nearly eighteen months ago, in those days when his staff could fit into a minivan and the pundits said he might be a realistic prospect in the presidential cycle after next. They had run up tens of thousands of air miles together. She had eaten in his home, played with his son and daughter and chatted with his wife. She had put her faith in him. And so had the country.

The Breaking News ident was flashing again on the TV. Maggie reached for the volume control. ‘This word just into us here at CNN: the President is to make an emergency statement.’

At Sanchez’s invitation, she watched it in the press room, fighting hard not to put her hands to her face and peer through splayed fingers, the way she used to watch teatime science fiction as a child.

‘My fellow Americans,’ he began, his voice steady, his face calm and businesslike. ‘I am not here to deny what you heard today. I am here to tell you what happened. With the frankness and candour that I should have shown earlier.

‘Long ago, in my early twenties, I hit a difficult patch in my life. I have not spoken about it before because the source of my unhappiness involved another person.

‘As you know, my mother died a few months back – in the very last week of the campaign, as it happens – so perhaps now it can be told. Though even now, as I brace myself to say these words, I tremble at the thought that I might be dishonouring her memory. But you need to hear the truth.

‘When I was a teenager, I suspected my mother was an alcoholic. It took me some time to reach that conclusion. When you’re thirteen years old and your mother sinks some vodka into her orange juice at breakfast, you don’t always notice. And if you do notice, you don’t always know that that’s not normal. That that’s not how all moms behave. But by the time I was in college, I knew for certain.

‘Once I was making my own way in the world, this knowledge began to eat away at me. Was I fated to follow in her path? To stumble the way she had stumbled? Would I too become an addict of alcohol?

‘I was laid low by these thoughts. And, yes, eventually I sought professional help. The help of a psychiatrist, among other folks. I wanted to know if my destiny had already been determined, if it was written in my genes.

‘Eventually I came out of what the poets call this “slough of despond”. But it was not the doctors who lifted me from that dark place. My mother, on hearing that I had sought help, was shaken out of her own disease. You might say it was a wake-up call. She woke up, joined AA and got sober. When she died last October, she was proud to say that she had gone twenty-four years, eight months and nineteen days without a drink. It was a great achievement. I’m as proud of her for that as she was of me for getting to the brink of the presidency. But it was private. And I chose to honour that.

‘Perhaps that was a mistake. But now I hope you understand. Why I needed the help in the first place and why I did not rush to tell you, the American people, all about it. I cannot know how you will react to this news. But I am taking the risk that you will respond as so many American families do when they are confronted with news that disappoints. With the generosity of spirit that made us – and makes us still – a great nation. Thank you.’

Maggie stood, staring, barely daring to breathe. In the silence, she heard the sound of a single pair of hands clapping. Then another and then several more, until there was loud, sustained applause. She was sure she heard Tara MacDonald give a single whoop.

Sanchez passed her his iPhone, already open at the Sullivan blog. She only had to read the first sentence: Stephen Baker has just reminded the American people why they chose him to be their president last fall.

‘OK, people,’ Tara yelled, silencing the last few claps of applause. ‘We’re not out of the woods yet. Fox and the others are going to be yakking all night about “the questions that still need to be answered”. We need to be ready.’ She shot a glare at Maggie and Sanchez standing together. ‘We don’t need to be talking to each other, we need to be talking to the American people. I want a list handed to me no more than ten minutes from now, giving the names of surrogates ready to be in front of a camera heaping praise on President Stephen Baker for being brave, for being honest and for being a devoted son. Any questions?’ She didn’t wait for a reply. ‘Good. Now get to it.’

Maggie decided to take the hint and leave, mouthing a thank you to Sanchez. Tara MacDonald was right to be cautious, but Maggie had lived in America long enough to know that the public would like what they had seen. They would not turf out a new, young president for the crime of loving his mother and worrying about the inheritance she might have passed to her son.

She was right, too. The cable networks were kind, hosting discussions about whether alcoholism was hereditary and on the usefulness of therapy. For a few blessed hours, authors of books with titles like Please Mommy, Stop and Talking Makes It Better replaced the usual political talking heads. Almost all spoke with compassion for Stephen Baker, though Rush Limbaugh had apparently taken to his microphone an hour after the President’s personal statement to ask his listeners, ‘Do we really want a whack-job with his finger on the button?’

The consensus in the White House was that Baker had dodged a bullet. Indeed, the relief lasted all the way until the next day. Except in the Baker household. Where it was about to vanish in the cruellest way possible.

FIVE

Washington, DC, Monday March 20, 19.16

Jen, those new sneakers are COOL!

Katie Baker read the messages on her new friend Jennifer’s Facebook wall and was all set to add her own. But her fingers hesitated over the keyboard. Back in Olympia, she would have hammered out a dozen messages by now but here it was so different. Her mom had told her she had to be triple careful. ‘Remember, sweetie: no names, no pictures.’

No pictures? That was so harsh! Everyone posted photos on their Facebook page but here – in fact, ever since November – she was told she couldn’t. ‘You can put up pictures, honey,’ Mom had said. ‘Just none that show you, your brother or any of your closest friends. Nothing that identifies you.’

Her brother? Like that was ever going to happen. She didn’t mind keeping that annoying jerk out of her pictures. But her friends? Why did she have to be the one who was different?

Oh, yes. Because her father was President of the United States, that’s why. Which was cool, no doubt. She had already met several of her favourite stars and she had been in People magazine – though in that picture she’d had to hold hands with her brother. Yeeuch!

Someone had sent a new message, which popped up on Jen’s wall.

I heard that Brandon invited you to the Zygotes show at the 9.30. Does that mean you two are like going out?!!

She began typing. OMG, Jen! If that is true, I am so jealous! I love the Zygotes!

She wondered if that gave away too much detail. The 9.30 hardly counted as giving away a place, did it? So the 9.30 Club was in Washington, DC. Was there anyone in the world who didn’t know that thirteen-year-old Katie Baker lived in Washington, DC?

She clicked out of Jen’s and back to her own Facebook page. What she saw when she got there made her frown.

Kimberley Baker was preparing supper, doing her best to keep things normal. Partly for her husband’s sake, mainly for her kids. Politically, the President of the United States might have survived what had happened today but she was not so sure how Stephen Baker would cope.

The most private thing about him was now public property. When they were going out it had been the last revelation he had made to her. Only once they had been together many months did he tell her about his mother’s alcoholism and the treatment he had sought. Once he had spilled everything, and she had responded with a long, tight hug, he had asked her to marry him. And now he had had to expose the secret he had guarded so zealously, on national television. She knew how much he would hate that.

Still, he was a strong man; he would survive. But what about Katie and Josh? To her surprise the kids had seemed to be doing OK. They had started school, made some friends; Katie had even been to her first DC slumber party. Of course, Kimberley had questioned the motives of both Jennifer, the classmate who had been so eager to make Katie her BF, and her equally keen parents. Kimberley didn’t need to open the Washington Post to know that the Bakers were now deemed the hottest social property in the city and any contact, even vicarious, was a major trophy.

She had wondered if this morning’s revelation would see all that come crashing down. She didn’t care about herself; she wouldn’t mind if she never went to another Washington party. But she couldn’t bear to imagine what her children might be put through. Stephen had agreed they would maintain the no-newspapers rule they had observed back west. Nor was it any kind of sacrifice to ban cable TV. And the staff were wonderful, never mentioning a thing.

But, she knew, that was not where the danger lurked. It was school, specifically the meanness of other children, that frightened her. She knew how cruel they could be. Yes, most of the pupils at the school they had chosen would be fawning over Katie and Josh, but it would only take one rebel, one troublemaker who saw there was sport to be had in teasing the daughter of the President of the United States. And what ammunition any would-be playground tormentor had just been handed. Psychiatric treatment.

And yet the children had said nothing about it. They had come home, picked up from the school gate by Zoe, the Secret Service agent masquerading as an au pair – albeit one who drove an armour-plated minivan with blacked-out windows – and bounded up the stairs as if nothing were out of the ordinary. In Josh’s case, Kimberley Baker knew that meant all had been well. Her son couldn’t hide anything, even if he wanted to.

But Katie offered no such assurance. Was her silence proof that nothing had happened, that she had survived the day without mockery – or evidence that she had suffered an indignity so great it could not be expressed?

There was a message from her friend Alexis.

Hi K, hope you’re feeling OK this evening. Sorry today was so hard. You seemed to be coping really well though. You’re one tough chick!

Katie Baker read it again, checking the name. It was definitely from Alexis, but it made no sense. Alexis hadn’t been at school today. She’d got that bug that was going round. How would Alexis know how she’d been coping?

She typed out a reply.

I don’t understand! Aren’t you in bed with that yukky bug thing?!!

Katie clicked open another window: tour dates for the band Emily and Hannah had said were the hot group of the year. She was about to hit the preview to hear some of their music when she heard a light knock on the door.

Her agent, Zoe, poked her head round the door, taking care to stay outside her room. ‘Your mom says it’s time you came down for dinner.’

‘’Kay. Be right there.’

The door shut and Katie closed the tab open to the band’s website. She was about to close down Facebook when she heard the message alert announcing Alexis’s reply. She glanced back towards the door. It would only take a minute.

The First Lady looked over at her husband, now chopping garlic for a tomato sauce. He was sitting on a stool tucked up against the breakfast bar, both tie and shoes off. Whenever she regretted her husband’s choice of career – which was often – Kimberley Baker fell back on this consolation. She had deployed the same line when he was Governor, too. As he had put it in at least three dozen interviews, before flashing that million-kilowatt smile, ‘At least I get to live above the shop.’

So she tried to savour this little scene of domesticity – the four of them having an evening meal together – and pretend that the National Security Advisor was not waiting just along the corridor.

Actually, it was still just the three of them. Katie had not yet come down despite Zoe’s summons. Kimberley decided she’d had it with relaying messages via the Secret Service agent, and was poised to shout with the full force of her lungs for her daughter to come to the table – and to hell with the dozens of officials and staff who would hear her screeching – when the door swung open.

‘Ah, good evening, young lady,’ said the President, his eyes still focused on his painstakingly slow work at the chopping board. He didn’t see what his wife saw: their thirteen-year-old daughter standing there with every last drop of blood drained from her face.

‘Katie, what is it?’ Kimberley cried. ‘Katie!’

The girl was staring straight ahead. Her mother grabbed her by her shoulders, trying to shake a response out of her.

‘What’s happened? What’s HAPPENED!’

Instinctively, Stephen Baker looked to the door. Had there been some kind of attack, had an intruder broken into the White House Residence? Zoe, having quietly entered the room behind her charge, read the President’s expression. She shook her head. We’ve seen nothing.

When he spoke, his voice conveyed the same steady calm that voters had warmed to even before he was elected. He knelt down so that he could look his daughter in the eye. ‘Was it something on the computer?’

She nodded.

‘One of your friends, saying something mean?’

‘I thought it was. At first.’

The President and his wife looked at each other.

‘What did they say?’

‘I don’t want to tell you.’

The President stood up and gestured towards Zoe. Swiftly, she left the room, returning a matter of seconds later holding an open laptop computer, its shell a blaze of tie-dye style, psychedelic swirls. Teen chic.

Kimberley took the machine from Zoe and looked at the screen. It was her daughter’s Facebook page. Katie had begged to be allowed to keep it and her parents had eventually relented, reluctantly and with strict conditions. No photographs of herself or anyone else who might identify her. No real names. No contact details. And an IP address arranged through the White House comms department that would reveal only the United States as her place of residence, with no town or city specified. Only her closest friends from back home in Olympia, with perhaps a few more added this week in DC, knew that Sunshine12 was in fact the daughter of the American President.

Stephen Baker scanned the screen, searching among the multiple open windows, banner ads and thumbnail photos for what had so distressed his daughter.

And then he found it. A message from one of Katie’s schoolfriends: Alexis. He’d heard the name mentioned a few times.

No, I’m not in bed. I’m not really sick. And I’m not really Alexis either, to be honest. But I am sorry about your Dad. Must have been such a shock to find out about his past medical problems. Did he ever tell you about that when he sat at the end of your bed, stroking your hair and telling you a bedtime story? Did he tell you Grandma was a pisshead and he had to go to the head doctor because he was a mental case? My apologies for spilling the beans. Ooops. Silly me. But I wonder if you would be a doll and take a message to him from me. Thanks, sweetie. Tell him I have more stories to tell. The next one comes tomorrow morning. And if that doesn’t smash his pretty little head into a thousand pieces, I promise you this – the one after that will. Make no mistake: I mean to destroy him.

SIX

Washington, DC, Tuesday March 21, 05.59

Maggie got the call before 6am: Goldstein, sounding caffeinated. ‘Put on MSNBC. Now.’

She fumbled for the remote, down at the side of the bed. It wasn’t there. She reached across to the blank, empty space that made up the other half of the bed and found it marooned there, stabbed at the buttons until finally the screen fired up into a too-bright light.

‘It’s an ad for car insurance, Stu.’

‘Wait. We got a heads-up.’

There was the portentous sound of a station ident, a whizzy graphic and then the morning anchor, all glossy lips and improbably static hair. The image over her shoulder showed the President, the words strapped across the bottom of the screen: Breaking News.

‘Papers seen by MSNBC suggest Stephen Baker received campaign contributions that came, indirectly, from the government of Iran. Details are still sketchy but such a donation would constitute a serious violation of federal law, which prohibits candidates from receiving contributions from any foreign source, still less a government hostile to the United States. Live now to . . .’

Iran? What on earth did Stephen Baker have to do with Iran? They could not be serious. Something truly bizarre was going on here. Bizarre and sinister. Two bombshells in twenty-four hours. She knew every one of her White House colleagues would be asking the same question: ‘What the hell is going on?’

She could hear Goldstein barking an instruction to someone outside his office.

‘What the hell is this, Stu?’

‘You’ve probably got some Irish word for it, Maggie.’

‘For what?’

‘For when someone sets out to fuck you in the ass and stab you in the heart, all at the same time. What’s that in Gaelic?’

‘You think this is part of some plan?’

‘Two stories, two days running, on the same network. That doesn’t happen by accident, sweetheart. That means they have a leaker. A source.’ Goldstein paused just long enough to let out a wheeze. ‘Someone, in other words, who’s out to destroy this presidency.’

‘But these stories have got nothing to do with each other. They’re twenty-five years apart.’

‘Which proves it’s organized. Some well-resourced outfit, with enough money to do serious oppo.’

‘Stuart,’ Maggie said, now out of the bed and walking towards the shower. ‘I’m glad you called but why me? Shouldn’t you be speaking to Tara and—’

‘Did that thirty minutes ago. Iran. You’re our Middle East gal, remember. Need you to think about the angles. If this does not turn out to be bullshit, then who might have done this at that end? Government or rogue? And why now? What game are they— Shit.’

Goldstein’s cellphone rang, the first notes of the theme from The Godfather, the movie loved by all political obsessives. ‘This is how power works, Maggie,’ he had said when the film was screened on a return flight from California. ‘Watch and learn.’

He must have put the call on speaker because she could hear a voice, high-strung and rattled, at the other end. She couldn’t make out all the words but she could hear the urgency.

‘. . . a doorstep at the Capitol, demanding a special prosecutor.’

Stuart’s response was instant and ferocious. ‘That prick. Was he on his own or with colleagues?’

The voice: ‘One other. Vincenzi. You know, bipartisan bullshit: one Republican, one Democrat.’

‘Assholes.’

Maggie tried to say goodbye, but it was clear Stuart was not listening. He was absorbed in this new conversation, apparently unaware that he was still holding the receiver. All she could do was hang up. Or stay on the line and eavesdrop . . .

Stuart spoke again, a sound like a faulty air conditioner coming from his chest. ‘What did he say he wants? An independent counsel or a special prosecutor? What were his exact words?’

Maggie could hear a muffled sound, which she took to be the luckless official, whoever it was, squirming under the fire of Goldstein’s interrogation.

Stuart was off again. ‘I’ll tell you what difference it makes. Special prosecutors no longer exist. They were abolished. The only reason a person would start talking about special prosecutors is if they were either a moron – which the senator from Connecticut is not – or if they wanted to make a point.’

More muffled sound.

‘The point being that the words special prosecutor have a very particular sound in this town. The sound of Archibald Cox. Don’t tell me – sheesh. Am I the oldest freaking person in this White House? Archibald Cox? Watergate?’

Maggie tried to catch his attention. ‘Stuart? Stuart!’ But it was too late. She hung up.

They had now, she understood, entered a new realm of seriousness. If a Democrat was calling for an independent counsel to investigate a Democratic president, there was no way he could fight it. It was no longer ‘partisan’: now it was above party politics. Baker would have to agree. In the space of a few weeks he had gone from St Stephen – the coverline on a British magazine story about the new president – to Richard Nixon, under investigation.

Maggie felt as if she were standing on the deck of a ship taking on water. They had all been so euphoric that unseasonably warm evening in November when Baker had won. She’d been caught up in it, accepting the ribbing from Stu and Doug Sanchez, as they mocked her earlier pessimism. ‘Oh ye of little faith, Costello, who said it would never happen,’ Sanchez had said as he embraced her, maintaining the hug a moment or two longer than necessary, his hands brushing her bottom in a way that was not quite accidental. More than ten years her junior, he had a nerve, that boy. But it was that kind of night.

She had tranquillized her doubts, allowed herself to believe that this time it would be different. Her own experience told her that politics was bound to end in failure. She had seen it when she worked for the United Nations, where even the most elementary, obvious truths – ‘These people are dying and need help!’ – could get tangled up in turf wars, rivalries, bureaucratic indecision, vanity and, that most decisive of categories, ‘interests’. So often she had felt – she stopped saying the words, knowing that to utter them out loud made you a hippy, a naïf who could be ignored – that something must be done. And so often it had not been.

For years she had come to believe that the last truly worthwhile work she had done was back when she started out, as an aid worker in Sudan. Handing out sacks of grain from the back of the truck: that had value. The minute she had stepped back from the frontline, lured by the promise of helping more than one person at a time, she had been less use. The titles were grander – first she had been involved in policy, then strategy, finally, at the UN and the State Department, she had been at the highest levels of diplomacy – but she remained stubbornly unimpressed. Help was what she was interested in, and she’d begun to lose faith that she, or anyone in these grand jobs, could ever deliver it.

Then Stephen Baker had appeared. Reluctantly and despite herself, she had allowed the hide she had grown over her once-tender idealism to be pierced. He had done it to her, breaking through layer after layer of scepticism, until he had found the person underneath – the person she had not been since she was twenty-five.

Now, though, the ship was listing. She had got it wrong. Again. Politics would always rise up and strangle hope, like a weed choking a flower. She had been stupid to think it would be any different this time.

But another, sharper pain gnawed at her stomach. Maybe she had not only been wrong to forget that politics always intruded, always stood between good people and doing good. Maybe she had been wrong to assume that she was working for good people. For a good man.

After all, Goldstein had not denied the accusation. If this does not turn out to be bullshit was the best he could offer. Did that mean Baker had taken money from the Iranians? If he had, that made him an idiot – and worse.

By now, she was out of the shower and standing in a towel, staring at her wardrobe, wondering what you were meant to wear for a full-blown political crisis. A special prosecutor, Jesus.

The cellphone rang again, displaying ‘restricted’. Maggie grabbed it. ‘Stu, you didn’t need to call back.’

‘Excuse me?’ A woman’s voice. ‘Is this Maggie Costello?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you hold for Magnus Longley?’

Maggie felt her guts clench.

‘Miss Costello?’ The voice was dry enough to sand a table. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you so early but I thought it best to let you know of my decision immediately. I’m afraid Dr Adams is . . . adamant.’ Longley sounded pleased with his pun. ‘He insists that you be removed from your post. And I see no alternative but to bow to his wishes.’

Maggie felt as if someone had plunged a needle into her neck, mainlining fury directly into her bloodstream.

‘Does the President know about this?’

‘Perhaps you haven’t seen the news, but the President has rather a lot on his plate at the moment.’

‘I know that, but just yesterday he asked me—’

‘You should come in early this morning and clear your desk. Your White House computer log-in will expire at twelve noon. And you will need to surrender your pass.’

‘Don’t I get at least to—’

‘I fear my 6.45 meeting is due to start. Goodbye, Miss Costello. And thank you for your service.’

She stood there a full five seconds, the rage inchoate and rising. How could they do this to her? After all she had sacrificed? And just when she had so much to give? Not twenty-four hours ago, she had been asked by the President of the United States himself to draw up a plan to save lives – perhaps thousands or tens of thousands of lives – in Darfur. Besides, she was needed on this latest Iran problem. Stuart had said so.

And now that was all going to come to nothing because of, what? Calling a bloody pompous old git an asshole – when that was exactly what he was.

She turned around, raised her arm and was about to hurl the phone at the bedroom wall – bracing herself for the satisfaction of seeing it shatter – when it began to ring. That stopped her. Her arm raised aloft, she suddenly felt ridiculous. She looked at the display: Restricted.

She hit the green button. A woman’s voice again, different this time. ‘Please hold for the President.’

A second later, it was him. A voice known to millions, though in a tone heard only rarely and by those closest to him: ‘Maggie, I need to see you. Right away.’

SEVEN

Washington, DC, Tuesday March 21, 07.33

Baker had insisted they meet in the Residence: him, her and Stuart. Maggie called Goldstein immediately and explained that she’d just been fired. ‘I’ve got to surrender my pass by twelve noon, for Christ’s sake!’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘That means we’ve got a few hours.’

‘Is that meant to be funny?’

‘No. And Maggie? Come to my office first. I need to give you a heads-up before we go in.’

She was there twenty minutes later. Stuart was tearing his way through a memo, his eyes red and agitated. He looked awful.

She spoke from the doorway. ‘Is that the file on the Iranian?’

He didn’t look up but kept his eyes fixed on the document on his desk. ‘Known in this country as Jim Hodges, resident in the state of Texas.’

‘He’s a US citizen! So then we’re off the hook. The whole point is—’

‘But he’s also Hossein Najafi, citizen of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Who just happens to be a veteran of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, better known as the Revolutionary Guard.’

‘But he gave the donation as Jim Hodges. How was anyone to know that he was really—’

‘Because we’re meant to check these things!’ Now Goldstein was looking up, his voice raised, his eyes bugging out with rage. ‘We’re the fucking White House. He’s the fucking President of the United States. He sends people into wars. To die. He’s meant to know who he meets, for Christ’s—’

‘He met him?’

‘Yes! Some fundraiser. During the transition.’

‘So there’ll be a photograph.’

Stuart’s reply came in a quieter voice. ‘Yes.’

‘And people will ask why we didn’t have the basic intel to know we were letting an Iranian spy get close to the President-Elect.’

‘Yes.’ Stuart spread his hands across the table and let his head fall onto them. ‘And why—’

‘—on earth the Iranians would want to give money to Stephen Baker.’

‘You could make the ad now.’ He picked his head up and did a mock voiceover. ‘“The Ayatollahs like Stephen Baker so much they gave him cash. In secret. Is Baker working for you – or them?”’

‘It’s a nightmare,’ Maggie agreed.

‘But that’s not why he wants to see you. Us. Not completely, anyway.’

‘Why, then?’

Stuart hauled himself upright and told Maggie about the message sent to Katie Baker via Facebook. He reached for a piece of paper to read the final paragraph: And if that doesn’t smash his pretty little head into a thousand pieces, I promise you this – the one after that will. Make no mistake: I mean to destroy him.

‘Jesus.’

‘Oh yes.’ Stuart checked his watch. ‘He wants us over there right now.’

Inside the Residence, the difference in mood from the previous morning was palpable. Kimberley Baker had taken the children to school early – the White House breakfast event she was chairing on cervical cancer awareness would just have to start without her – so that they could be out of that atmosphere. She spent the journey repeating what she had said last night, over and over: reassuring Katie that Daddy was going to be fine, that the police would find and punish whoever sent that horrible message and she would make sure there would be no more of them.

The President was in the kitchen again, but this time he was pacing. Maggie had seen Stephen Baker receive all kinds of bad news during the campaign and, on all but a handful of occasions, he had remained calm, almost preternaturally so. He would keep his voice down, when others would raise theirs; he would be forgiving when any other candidate would be demanding instant revenge; he would stay seated when the rest would be leaping to their feet. But now he was pacing.

‘Thank you both for coming.’ He nodded towards two chairs but remained standing. ‘Maggie, I take it you now have the full picture?’

‘Yes, Mr President.’

‘And you know why you’re here?’

‘Not entirely, sir.’

‘The crank who wrote that message to my daughter. He warned there would be another big story “tomorrow morning”. And there was. Which means he’s no crank.’

Goldstein now spoke. ‘Or at the very least he’s a crank who knows how to hack computers. He must have identified the White House IP address, and worked backwards from there, searching teenage websites for a match. Then hacked into this girl’s—’

‘Alexis,’ the President added.

‘Right. Into her account. Smart.’

To her surprise, the President suddenly turned and fixed Maggie with his deep green gaze. Though this time, the steadiness was gone. He looked hunted. ‘You should have seen my daughter, Maggie. She looked terrified.’

‘It’s horrible.’

‘I always promised Kim that whatever happened we’d keep the kids out of it.’

Stuart replied. ‘And you have, sir.’

‘Until now, Stu. Until now.’

Both Maggie and Goldstein remained silent, while Baker resumed his pacing. Finally, she felt she had to speak.

‘Sorry, Mr President. I’m not sure I’m completely clear on what needs to be done here. On what you want us to do.’

Baker looked to Stuart and nodded, giving Goldstein the cue to answer on his behalf.

‘This has to be handled extremely carefully, Maggie. We need to know who this man who contacted Katie is. If he really is the source of these stories and is determined to reveal more, we need to identify him. Fast.’

‘Can’t the Secret Service help? He made a direct threat against you.’

Once again Baker said nothing, looking to Stuart.

‘The agent assigned to Katie is running a trace.’

‘Good,’ said Maggie. ‘So we’ll see what she finds out.’

Now the President spoke. ‘I need someone I trust involved, Maggie.’

‘You can trust the Secret Service.’

‘They will investigate the threat to my life.’ Stuart leaned forward. ‘But this is not just a physical threat, is it? This is political. Someone is out to destroy this presidency. Two leaks, carefully timed for maximum impact. And threatening another.’

Maggie nodded. ‘I know.’

‘Which is why we need our own person on it. Someone who cares. Someone who has the resources to do, you know, unusual work.’

‘What do you mean, unusual?’

‘Come on, Maggie. We know what you did in Jerusalem. Put it this way, you weren’t just drafting position papers, were you?’

‘But I don’t even work for you any more!’ It had come out louder and angrier than she had planned. The intensity of her outburst surprised even her.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ the President said quietly.

‘Longley runs his own show, you know that, Maggie.’ Stuart paused, then brightened. ‘But it doesn’t mean you can’t help. If anything, it’s better. You have distance. Arm’s-length.’

‘Deniability, you mean. You can disown me.’ She was staring hard at him.

The President drew himself up to full height and let his eyes bore into her. ‘I need you, Maggie. There is so much we hoped to achieve. Together. To do that, I need to stay in this office. And that means finding this man, whoever he is.’

She held his gaze for a long second or two in which she thought of the conversation they had had in this same place twenty-four hours earlier. She thought of the barely started options paper for Darfur on her computer, of the helicopters that this president was ready to send and the lives they would save. She pictured a Darfuri village about to be torched to the ground and the militiamen on horseback poised to set it ablaze; she saw them reining in their animals and turning around, because they had heard the sound of choppers in the sky that told them they would be seen and caught. She thought of all that and the certainty that nobody other than Stephen Baker would lift a finger to help those villagers.

‘All right,’ she said, still looking directly into the deep green of his eyes. ‘We find him. Then what?’

Stuart answered. ‘We see what he wants. We ask what—’

The President wheeled round to address his closest advisor directly. ‘I hope you’re not suggesting I engage in dialogue with a blackmailer—’

‘Not you. Nowhere near you. A million miles from you.’

‘You mean you?’

‘Not even me. Or at least not a me that anyone could identify as me.’

‘No way.’

‘He said he has one more story that will—’

‘Well, I’m not going to authorize any such thing. And you know better than to ask.’

Stuart gestured an apology, heaved himself up out of his chair, muttering a ‘one, two, three’ under his breath as he undertook the necessary exertion. Maggie followed his lead and headed for the door.

I’m not going to authorize any such thing. Both Maggie and Stuart knew what that meant. They had been given their orders. Deniability, the lubricant of high-level politics. The message had been clear. Do whatever you have to do. Just make sure it has nothing to do with me.

As they walked back to the West Wing, Maggie turned to Stuart. ‘We better start drawing up a list.’

‘A list of what?’

‘Of everybody who wants to drive Stephen Baker from office.’

EIGHT

Washington, DC, Tuesday March 21, 09.16

In the office of the junior senator from the great state of South Carolina, they liked to pride themselves on the knowledge that a visitor had only to cross the threshold to feel as if he had stepped inside the Old South. The receptionist on duty was usually blonde, under thirty, wearing a floral print and always ready with a welcoming smile, a ‘Yes sir’ or a ‘Yes ma’am’. Nearly always a ‘Yes sir’. Outside that door, they could offer no guarantees. You entered the swamp that was Washington, DC at your own risk. But here, once you were a guest of Senator Rick Franklin, you were south of the Mason-Dixon line.

The visitor, once he’d helped himself to the pitcher of iced water in the waiting area, would notice more than the Southern smiles. His eye would be caught first, perhaps, by the bronze plaque above the reception desk depicting the Ten Commandments, as if etched on two tablets of stone. Not for Senator Franklin the niceties of separating Church and State in a public building.

Then, if he were especially vigilant, he would spot the TV monitor tuned not to CNN or MSNBC, as would be the case in most Democrats’ offices, nor even Fox News, as in most Republicans’, but to the Christian Broadcasting Network. Midterm elections might be nineteen months away, but there was fundraising to be done – and it paid to give the folks the right impression.

That was the outer area. Once a visitor had pierced the perimeter, and entered the private office of the Senator himself, he would get a rather earthier glimpse of the realities of political life. In here, it was Fox or MSNBC, usually the latter. ‘Know thine enemy,’ Franklin would say.

In the last twenty-four hours, however, it had hardly felt like an enemy. The network, usually pilloried in Franklin mailings as news for arugula-munching liberals, had been making the weather on the Baker presidency; and for those on Franklin’s side of the aisle it had felt like sunshine. Some of his colleagues had simply sat back and enjoyed the show. First, St Stephen of Olympia revealed as some kind of wacko, in need of treatment. The joy of it was that story still had some distance to run. What kind of treatment exactly? Were electric shocks involved? Was he ever an in-patient? Was there a ‘facility’ that might be photographed, complete with exterior shots of a building reminiscent of the Cuckoo’s Nest, that could run on a loop on Fox?

Senator Franklin could feel the saliva welling as he imagined the meat still to be picked off that particular bone.

And this morning the Iranian Connection. Iron law of scandal: gotta have a good name. ‘The Iranian Connection’ did the job perfectly. Exotic and dramatic, like a movie, but with the added threat of somewhere dark and scary. Sure the details were obscure, the experts unintelligible bald guys captioned on TV as ‘forensic accountants’, but that only made it better. The liberal editorial boards could sweat through their tieless shirts explaining that there was ‘no case to answer’, but that wouldn’t wash with the folks. Oh no. They would see a blizzard of numbers and laws and rules – and they would conclude that, whatever the fine print might say, Mr Perfect President was no longer as pure as the driven snow.

Which is why he had got on the phone to his Democratic colleague within minutes of the story breaking. Calling for an independent counsel was the no-risk move. If the investigation found nothing, then Franklin could claim to have performed a public service, getting to the bottom of baseless rumours. If it found something, then bingo! And, in between, day after day of stories full of mind-numbing detail on campaign finance law and on the horror show that was the Iranian regime. The mere fact that these subjects were raised in the same breath as Stephen Baker would generate a quite perfect stench of scandal. Voters would be forced to conclude, as they had so many times before, ‘Ain’t no smoke without fire.’

He knew Vincenzi would be a reliable ally. Sure, he was a Dino – Democrat in Name Only – and sure, everyone knew he couldn’t stand Baker, but Vincenzi’s presence at his side would give Franklin the lofty, bipartisan patina the media could never resist. ‘This is above party politics,’ they had both said in their statements. The press always lapped up that shit.

As for the phrase ‘special prosecutor’, that particular bolt of inspiration had only come to him as he headed over to the hastily arranged press availability. The nerds would say it was inaccurate, but they’d be too late. The poison arrow would already be in flight.

So Senator Franklin felt able to hum ‘Happy Days are Here Again’ as he straightened the blotter on his desk and moved the paperweight – the one that, if you looked closely, revealed a Confederate flag preserved as if in amber inside the thick glass. Things were going according to plan.

He carried on humming even as there was a gentle rap on the door. Cindy, his Head of Legislative Affairs, coming in with a smile he hadn’t seen since the night he was elected more than four years ago. It always gave him pleasure watching her move, her rear end tightly contained in a skirt that was never any lower than the knee. But now there was a spring in her step that gave him an extra pulse of enjoyment.

‘I can see you come bearing glad tidings, sweetheart.’

‘I do, sir, I do.’

They played these games, the Southern gentleman and the demure young lady, with dialogue sub-Gone With the Wind – but only when the political or personal weather was clement.

‘Pray tell.’

‘I do declare, Senator,’ she said with a girlish flutter that, even though he’d seen it a hundred times, still sent electricity to his groin, ‘that the source of MSNBC’s recent tales of woe has been – what’s the word – outed’.

‘Outed? Already? What the hell’s happened?’ The game was over. Too important for games.

‘Daily Kos. They’ve named him. Seems some liberal hacker broke into the MSNBC system and found the emails between their Washington bureau and the leaker. Then went ahead and named him on his own website. Kos picked it up.’

‘You sure the White House weren’t behind this?’

‘Can’t be sure. But Kos are adamant that it was some ultra-liberal crazy outraged his beloved Baker was being slammed. Seems to add up.’

‘And what have they found about him?’

‘The hacker?’

‘No! Fuck him. The leaker.’

‘All they have so far is that he’s late forties, white and from New Orleans.’

NINE

Washington, DC, Tuesday March 21, 10.55

‘Get in. I’ll brief you in the car.’

Maggie did as she was told, impressed by the authority of this woman, who could only have been in her late twenties. Maggie had seen her in the White House Residence, dressed like an au pair, young and unshowy. Her name was Zoe Galfano and she was the lead Secret Service agent assigned to the Baker children, with particular responsibility for Katie.

‘It’s a classic threat message,’ Zoe said, as Maggie strapped on her seatbelt. ‘Not especially unusual in the White House. Except this was different.’

‘Because it was addressed to Katie?’

‘That, and the fact that it’s not easy to get a direct message to her. Hijacking a Facebook identity took ingenuity.’

‘Was it hard to trace him?’

Zoe turned to look at Maggie with a smile. ‘We don’t know it’s a him.’

‘Right.’

‘No preconceptions. That’s part of the training.’

‘And all this internet stuff, you learn that too?’

‘I did. Figured I was never going to have the edge in the muscles department.’ She flexed a bicep. ‘So I decided to focus on those areas where I could compete with the men on a level playing field.’

‘I hear that,’ Maggie muttered, looking out of the window.

‘Graduated top of my class in psychology and computer studies.’

They were driving out of the District and into Maryland, two other agents following two cars behind. It was strictly against protocol for White House staff to meddle in Secret Service business, but Goldstein had spotted a loophole: ‘As of today, you’re not White House staff any more. You’re a family friend. Katie Baker wants you there, so you’re there.’

Just before she had got into Agent Galfano’s car, the identity of the alleged leaker of the MSNBC stories had begun to surface on a blog, though there had been no official confirmation from the network. And still no name. A white male from New Orleans was all they knew. Maggie’s first job was to see if the creep who had terrorized Katie and the guy who’d been feeding MSNBC were one and the same.

Zoe parked up. They were on a residential street in Bethesda, quiet on this midweek morning. The agent checked the address once more and looked back up at the house. Number 1157. Out loud, she confirmed that this was the right street, right block. Four houses away, a woman in her sixties was bending down, ostrich-style, apparently to examine the bottom of a rosebush. Zoe turned to Maggie. ‘We’re going to have to do this quietly.’ She spoke into the radio on her cuff. ‘Are you good to go, guys?’

Maggie heard nothing in reply.

‘Wait for my word, Ray. I’ll go first, walking pace, you two hang back a few yards. Remember, weapons are not to be visible. Repeat, not visible.’

She turned to Maggie. ‘Now, Ms Costello. The suspect is likely to be armed and dangerous. Do you understand?’

Maggie nodded.

‘I consider it a great risk that you’re here. But Mr Goldstein insisted that you accompany me at all times, so here you are. That means you do whatever I tell you to do. Duck, run, hit the floor. Instantly. Are we clear?’

‘We’re clear.’

She watched Zoe check out the house once more. Curtains open on the top floor, blinds, halfway between open and closed, on the ground. Garden neatly kept. No car in the driveway. Light on upstairs. She saw the agent feel for her gun, holstered just below her armpit.

Zoe raised her cuff once more. ‘Go.’

Not waiting for an answer, she opened the car door and strode purposefully up the path, not waiting for Maggie to catch up with her. She passed the mailbox, flipping it open in a single quick movement: empty. She glanced over her shoulder to see the pair from the other car start out on the sidewalk, three yards behind her.

They were not in uniform but they were hardly disguised. If the black SUVs with tinted windows didn’t give it away, the dark suits and curly wire in the ear surely did. Zoe had told Maggie that she had thought about putting in a request for different vehicles, but that would have meant form-filling and more explanation. Mr Goldstein had been clear: no widening of the circle and no time to waste.

The front door revealed nothing. No nameplate. Zoe looked back towards the other agents, one of whom was looking into the recycling bin, searching for old letters or envelopes that might yield a name. He shook his head.

Zoe rang the bell, moving her ear close to the door to pick up any footsteps. Maggie pictured the man inside, in a bathrobe, legs apart, his face blue from the computer screen, jerking himself off as he stared at the bodies of girls not much older than Katie Baker.

No preconceptions. That’s what Zoe had said.

The agent knocked on the door, loudly. Maggie saw her glance at her watch, give it five seconds and then nod to Ray. Without hesitation, he shouldered the full weight of his two-hundred-and-twenty-pound frame into the door, busting its lock on the first attempt.

Zoe was first in, legs astride, weapon brandished in a double-handed grip. Ray and partner followed; then it was Maggie’s turn. She hesitated, then stepped forward, the way she had once closed her eyes and jumped off the tallest rock at Loughshinny beach: don’t even think about it.

‘SECRET SERVICE!’ Galfano bellowed. ‘Put your hands up!’

Something caught the agent’s eye. She swivelled around, to see an archway leading to what seemed to be the kitchen. A nod towards Ray instructed him to join her and head that way. A flick of her revolver told the other agent, now in the doorway, to check out the upstairs.

She stepped forward gingerly, noting the change in the light coming from the kitchen. One pace behind, her heart banging in her chest, Maggie sensed it too. Someone was moving in there. Silently, but moving all the same.

‘We are agents of the United States Secret Service!’ Zoe shouted once more. ‘Come out with your hands up.’

The first noise, a kind of grinding sound. Was that a key turning in a backdoor lock? Was he getting away?

Zoe now rushed through the archway, her finger tight on the trigger. ‘Freeze!’

A half-second later they saw the source of both the change in the light and the noise. The image Maggie had had in mind had been half-right. There was a computer – but no man. Just a lonely machine on the kitchen table, the flickering green lights of a router right next to it.

Zoe lowered her gun and stepped towards the machine. She could see from the blinking cursor that the computer was functioning. She turned to Maggie. ‘I’m sorry, Ms Costello, this seems to have been a wild goose chase. I really—’

But Maggie stopped her. ‘Look—’

The cursor was moving, apparently of its own accord. They watched as it zipped around the screen, finding the Word icon, clicking it open to reveal a blank document. And now words began to appear on the screen, letter by letter, typed by some unseen hand.

Welcome to my home. Sorry I’m not in. Do make yourself comfortable. Do I take it from your visit that your boss is keen to talk?

TEN

Washington, DC, Tuesday March 21, 14.26

‘Aren’t people going to talk?’

‘What? About you and me?’

‘Yes. Me, in here.’

‘Something tells me, Maggie, that people worked out long ago there’s not a chance of that happening: you’re not my type.’ And with that, a smile spread across the large, flushed, wobbling face of Stuart Goldstein, the first smile Maggie had seen in what felt like weeks but was actually less than thirty-six hours.

At his request, she had gone straight to his office as soon as she had returned from the raid on the Maryland house. He had had to put her on the visitors list at the bloody tourists’ entrance at Fifteenth and Hamilton Place; she had had to show her passport to gain admission to the White House.

‘I mean it, Stu. People will be suspicious.’

‘Maggie, right now we have seven senators calling for an independent counsel to investigate the President for “alleged financial links” to fucking Tehran. People in this building have got other things to worry about than your employment arrangements.’

Maggie bowed her head in a ‘you’re the boss’ gesture and continued her report back: the Secret Service was conducting an urgent trace on the dumb terminal they had discovered in Bethesda. They had so far narrowed down the location of the master computer to the south-eastern United States, but could not be more specific.

They were waiting for the TV to deliver what it had promised. Fifteen minutes earlier, Goldstein had had a call from a contact inside MSNBC warning him that the network was about to air a live interview with the source of its two recent stories on Stephen Baker. The partial identification in the blogosphere had given way to a full ID, once the collective investigative might of the internet had got to work.

The source had been named as Vic Forbes of New Orleans, Louisiana. Stu had immediately put one of his best researchers onto it: he knew he was in a race against both the media and the Republicans to know everything about Forbes that could be known. And then to define him. Crank, attack dog, dopehead. Whatever would shatter his credibility.

‘Here’s what I don’t understand,’ Maggie said, while the TV cut to a weather forecast. ‘The shrink thing. How come that didn’t come out before?’

‘I still haven’t quite figured that out. Not to my own satisfaction.’

‘Do you think the others knew and didn’t use it?’

‘No way. Adams and Rodriguez were trying to kill him in the primaries. And Chester in the general. They all had oppo research digging away, night after night, climbing all over his past. And the media, working twenty-four/seven.’

‘What about you? Did you know?’

‘Come on, Maggie. You’re my favourite Irishman and all that, but I can’t get into my personal relationship with him.’

‘So you did know.’

Goldstein smiled enigmatically, an expression which was accompanied by a counterpoint of snorting, as the exhalation that would normally have exited from his mouth re-routed via his nose. He really was monumentally unfit. ‘Whether I did or did not is not the important thing here. What matters is how the fuck did this Vic Forbes find out?’

‘Maybe he spoke to the shrink?’

‘Difficult. He died fifteen years ago.’

‘There would have been records. Papers.’

‘Nuh-uh. None.’

‘Bills?’

‘Put it this way, yours truly did not come down with the first shower of rain. I am used to the dirtiest dirty tricks. You don’t get to be a councilman in New York unless you know how to rip a guy’s heart out with your teeth. I made sure in Baker’s first race that the enemy couldn’t dig up any surprises.’

‘Because you had dug them up first.’

‘Exactly. Wielded the spade myself.’ He held up his hands, the effort of which once again altered the rhythm of his breathing. ‘Then I did it again for the governor’s race.’

‘With professional help this time, I bet.’

‘You’re damn right. I had two of Seattle’s finest – ex-cops actually – investigate Stephen Baker as if they were determined to convict him of a felony. Find out everything. Go through his phone bills, house deeds, mortgage payments, bank accounts, college transcripts. They hacked into his emails and tapped his phone for all I know. Spoke to everyone, interviewed old girlfriends, made sure there were no old boyfriends. If there was a wall Stephen Baker had pissed against, they went to sniff it. Then I did it all over again before he announced for President.’

‘Before?’

‘Oh yes. Not much point doing it afterwards, is there?’

‘And did they find anything?’

‘You know everything they found. So does the American people.’

Maggie smiled at the realization of it. ‘Of course. The big “I experimented with drugs” admission. Getting stoned rebranded as a science project. Experimented, my arse.’

‘Sure, it’s bullshit. But it worked, didn’t it? Once you get it out there, you get to define yourself—’

‘—before they define you. What about Iran?’

‘Well, that couldn’t come up during the campaign ‘cause it hadn’t happened yet. That took some serious digging. Somehow Forbes knew what we didn’t know ourselves.’

‘You didn’t know Jim Hodges was Hossein Najafi?’

Goldstein jerked his head back, as if affronted. ‘Listen Maggie. Even my booba, may she rest in peace, knows that you don’t take money from fucking I-ran! Of course we didn’t know.’

‘Were we set up? Someone sent Hodges in here to embarrass us?’

‘Maybe. Maybe the Iranians did it. Make Baker look like an asshole. Right now, though, the only thing that bothers me about Hodges is how Forbes knew about him. And about the shrink.’ He stared at the TV. ‘I want to know who this bastard is.’

In the end, she was disappointed. Vic Forbes did not look like a monster or a pantomime villain. In truth, his face, as he stared dead-on at the camera, conducting a satellite interview from a studio in New Orleans, was forgettable. It was lean, like one of the whippets her grandfather’s friends used to keep in Dublin. His nose seemed to be pinched, too thin at the bridge. He was bald, save for some slight grey at the temples, which had Maggie put his age at around fifty, though it was perfectly possible that he had looked the same way when he was thirty.

If she had guessed how this scene would have played out, she would have imagined embarrassment would at least feature in it somewhere. Maybe shame was too much to ask for in this day and age, but you’d think a man who had anonymously smeared the President would at least have the courtesy to seem uncomfortable, even if he couldn’t bring himself to squirm in his chair.

But Forbes was having none of it. Maggie watched mesmerized as he batted away a series of questions as if he’d been doing this all his life.

Describing himself as a ‘researcher’, he insisted he was aligned with ‘no party and no faction’, a phrase that, to Maggie’s ears at least, reeked of pomposity.

‘I am a truth-teller, if you will,’ he said. ‘I had this information – this truth – and I felt guilty that I wasn’t sharing it with the American people. It’s an old-fashioned phrase, but I believe they have a right to know. They have a right to know who their president really is.’

‘But how did you get it?’ the interviewer asked. ‘Surely the American people have a right to know that too, don’t they?’

Maggie felt her own fist clench, involuntarily. Come on.

‘Well, Natalie,’ he began.

Good, thought Maggie. He seemed flustered.

‘The thing is . . . Look, in an ideal world . . .’

Maggie glanced at Stuart, who was as transfixed as she was, hoping that they were witnessing the unravelling of Vic Forbes on live television.

‘The point I would make, Natalie, is to ask you this: would you reveal your sources, if your network had broken a story like this without my help? Of course you wouldn’t.’ Maggie felt the air deflate out of her. ‘And nor would anyone ask you. That’s a basic principle of journalism.’

‘Yes, but you’re not a journalist, are you, you scumbag bastard!’ Stuart hurled an empty Styrofoam cup at the TV.

The same sentence ran through Maggie’s head, on a repeat loop: Who is this guy?

Stuart’s phone rang. He stabbed at it, putting it on speaker. ‘Hey, Zoe, whaddya got?’

Maggie heard the agent’s voice, stiff and correct. ‘It’s still very early in our inquiries, Mr Goldstein.’

‘I know that. And I also know that electronic data of this kind is complex and searches can take several weeks—’ his voice was rising, ‘—and that it’s impossible to be certain, I know all of that, Zoe. But I need to know. WHAT. HAVE. YOU. GOT?’

The sound of shuffled papers was finally followed by an intake of breath.

‘OK, Mr Goldstein. Our preliminary investigation—’

‘Zoe.’

‘New Orleans. We think the person who sent that message to Katie Baker’s Facebook page was white, male, extremely adept with computer technology and from New Orleans, Louisiana, sir.’

He hung up, shooting one eye at Maggie, the other on the TV.

‘So, Stu, he’s the same guy, right?’

‘Confirmed,’ Goldstein said, staring at the screen, watching Forbes perform. ‘How come this guy’s so good? All that BS about “the people’s right to know”. Where did that come from? He looks like shit; he’s sweating. But he’s impressive. He’s careful. He’s like a goddamn politician.’

Without taking his eye off the screen, he reached for the remote and hit pause. (A set-top box, allowing the pausing and rewinding of live TV, was now an essential tool of the trade: it meant never having to miss an enemy gaffe again.) He rewound and watched the last minute again.

‘What are you looking for?’ Maggie asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he murmured. ‘But I’ll know it when I see it.’

There he went again, more guff about his ‘duty’ to lay out the facts before the American people. He couldn’t play judge and jury, but people should know he was serious and the President should know he was serious.

But on this second viewing Goldstein was not listening. He was looking. And now he saw what he had glimpsed so fleetingly. Maggie could see it too. A movement of the eye, still looking at the camera but no longer as if trying to meet the gaze of the unseen interviewer: he was, instead, looking into the audience. More than that, he seemed to be addressing someone specific.

The President should know I’m serious.

Goldstein hit pause once more, freezing Vic Forbes at the moment he lifted his eyes, the signal that he was speaking to an audience of one.

The President should know I’m serious. Deadly serious.

ELEVEN

Washington, DC, Tuesday March 21, 18.15

For the third time in two days, Maggie was in the White House Residence. ‘Maybe I should get myself sacked more often,’ she had said to Stuart. ‘It seems to be a good career move.’

This was an emergency meeting, called by the President. He wasn’t pacing this time; his exterior, at least, was calm and cool. He had chosen one of the wooden chairs, allowing him to stay upright even if everyone else would be forced to slump on a sofa.

Maggie looked around the room, five of them had been called here – Goldstein, her, Tara MacDonald, Doug Sanchez, and Larry Katzman, the pollster.

‘Thank you for coming,’ Baker said, steadily. ‘This is not a White House meeting, which is why we’re gathering in my home. You’ll notice my Chief of Staff is not here. This is a discussion among my campaign team. Old friends.’ He attempted a smile. ‘Some of you work in the White House. Some of you don’t.’

Maggie stared at her feet.

‘I need your advice,’ he went on. ‘This presidency is under sustained assault. We knew it would happen one day. But not as soon as this.’ He paused. ‘Stuart, remind us what we know.’

‘Thank you, Mr President.’ Stuart Goldstein cleared his throat and moved to the edge of the sofa he was on so that he could have a line of eye contact with everyone in the room.

He looked horribly uncomfortable. Maggie always felt for Stuart in casual situations. His body was not designed for it. He needed a suit and a hard chair, preferably on the other side of a desk. In casual clothes, or on a couch, he was lost.

‘Vic Forbes, from New Orleans, Louisiana, supplied MSNBC with two stories in the course of little more than a single news cycle. Both of these stories were calculated to cause maximum damage and both required deep investigative skills. Or inside knowledge.’

Maggie saw Tara MacDonald shift in her seat.

‘At the same time, he has made an indirect, but personal contact with the White House.’

Now both MacDonald and Sanchez sat to attention.

‘Last night someone posing as a friend of Katie Baker’s sent her a message via Facebook.’

There was a gasp.

Stuart went on. ‘This message effectively claimed responsibility for both the first MSNBC story and, in advance, the second. He said it would come in the morning and it did. He also made a very direct and personal threat against the President.’

There was a pause. All eyes were on Baker, who eventually spoke. ‘Tell them what he said, Stuart. His exact words.’

Goldstein cleared his throat. Maggie noticed that he looked nervous. Was that because he was not used to addressing a large group, like this one? No. As Maggie watched, a hint of colour appeared at the top of Goldstein’s cheeks, and she realized the source of his awkwardness. He was straying, however indirectly, into a wholly alien realm. Talking about Katie Baker and her friend Alexis, discussing live chat on Facebook, forced Stuart Goldstein – married to a fellow political consultant but without children – to enter the world of family life, of fathers and daughters, of vulnerable teenage girls, a world, in short, utterly remote from his own.

He began to read. ‘I have more stories to tell. The next one comes tomorrow morning. And if that doesn’t smash his pretty little head into a thousand pieces, I promise you this – the one after that will. Make no mistake: I mean to destroy him.‘

Tara MacDonald gasped, suddenly looking like the mother of four that she was, an angry and protective matriarch, as she shook her head and muttered, ‘That poor child.’ In an instant the fury that had been brewing inside the White House ever since the psychiatrist story first broke had a focus: loathing for this man who had not only sought to derail the Baker presidency in its infancy but had dared to prey on a child.

Stuart continued. ‘Secret Service traced the communication to a house in Bethesda, Maryland. They raided the property. The computer was there, but not the person. Turns out the machine was a dumb terminal. Guy was operating it remotely. Eventually he was traced to New Orleans.’

‘So he’s the same guy? Forbes?’ Sanchez, his voice urgent, as if that was all he needed to get his coat on, head out and find the man himself.

‘Yep.’

There was a subtle movement in seats, as people braced themselves for the meat of the discussion: what do we do now?

Stuart held up a fleshy finger. ‘There’s one more thing. Agent Galfano did some extra probing, based on the computer IP address in New Orleans. She examined the data records of the so-called liberal blogger who so ingeniously hacked into MSNBC’s emails, thereby revealing their source.’

One step ahead as always, Tara MacDonald shook her head. ‘Don’t tell me. New Orleans.’

‘Yep. Forbes.’

Sanchez whistled in apparent admiration. ‘The guy outed himself.’

A noise like a door opening out on a snowstorm came through the room. Anyone hearing it for the first time would have been puzzled. But these veterans of eighteen months on the road together were used to the sound of Stuart Goldstein sighing. ‘Seems so,’ he said.

Sanchez crinkled his forehead, in a way that recalled the precociously bright teenager he had obviously been all of seven or eight years ago. ‘Why the fuck would he do that?’

Now Maggie spoke. ‘So that we’d listen to him.’ All heads turned to her, including, she noticed, the President’s. ‘He knew what we’d do. He knew we’d trace his message to Katie. He wanted to be certain that once we’d found him, we’d know he was for real. He wanted us to match him up to the MSNBC source.’

Stuart came in behind her. ‘First rule of blackmail. It’s not enough to have the goods. Your target has to know you’ve got the goods.’

Baker decided he had heard enough. ‘Thank you, Stuart. Everyone, that is the background to the decision we need to make this evening. Who wants to go first?’

Tara MacDonald didn’t wait for the customary polite silence. ‘I wanna be clear what exactly it is we’re talking about here? Are we discussing negotiating with a blackmailer?’

Neither Baker nor Goldstein said anything.

‘Because that’s a whole world of pain we’re entering if we go there. I mean, do we really think something like this could ever stay secret? I don’t mean whatever shit this guy’s holding, I mean the fact that we talked to him. Do we really think that’s going to stay underground? Uh-uh.’

Sanchez fiddled with his watch. ‘Doesn’t it depend a little on what we think the guy might have?’

Maggie felt the air suck out of the room. You had to admire the balls of the guy, the fearlessness of youth and all that. But there was only one person who could answer that question and you didn’t want to be the one to ask him.

There was, to everyone’s relief, a knock on the door. A butler, probably seventy years old. ‘Sir, I have an urgent note from the Press Office. For Mrs MacDonald.’

Baker beckoned the man forward; he walked in stiffly and presented the piece of paper to her. She pulled on the glasses that hung around her neck on a chain and read rapidly. Then she cleared her throat. ‘Forbes has just released a statement. Most networks are only quoting it in part, but apparently there’s a full version on Drudge. It reads as follows. “I want to make clear that the further information I hold on Stephen Baker does not relate to the way his campaign was funded nor to the state of his health.”’

Maggie realized she was holding her breath. So was everyone else. MacDonald kept reading.

‘“It’s about his past. An aspect of his past that I think will shock many Americans. An aspect of his past that the President has not shared with the nation. An aspect of his past he may not even have shared with his own family.”’

Maggie felt a new mood enter the room. It was a sensation she dimly recalled from her teenage years at home in Dublin. She could picture her younger self, sitting on the couch beside her sister Liz, cringing as a vaguely sexual scene appeared on the TV; her father getting up out of his chair, fumbling to change the channel. That was the sensation she could feel spreading over her and, surely, everyone else in this room: embarrassment. Sheer, hot-faced, look-away embarrassment.

What mortifying secret might the President have kept from his own wife? No one could bring themselves to look at him.

Maggie stole a glance at Stuart: he too was avoiding Baker’s gaze. But she could see that Stuart Goldstein’s embarrassment was already compounded by something that shook him much more: political panic.

How much more of this could this new presidency take? Here was a committed assassin, somehow armed with weapons-grade dirt, determined to destroy Baker. He had already landed two direct hits and now, it seemed, he was preparing for a third. Surely there would be a fourth. And a fifth. The confidence of Vic Forbes – swaggering even in this written statement – suggested he would not rest until he had finished the job. And Baker was no more.

Her voice dry, Tara spoke again. ‘There’s one last paragraph. “I do not plan on providing the full details today. I just wanted the American people to be aware that I have them. I wanted everyone following this story, especially those following it real close, to know I have them.”’

The gall of it was stunning. Vic Forbes was using a combination of live television and the internet to present a blackmail demand to the President of the United States.

Stuart did not let the silence linger. ‘Like I said, this is an attempt to destroy the President. Ideas for what we should do, people.’

Tara MacDonald spoke first. ‘I say we do a Letterman. We go to the police and then we go on TV. We expose Forbes for what he is, a cheap scumbag felon.’

Larry Katzman, the pollster, piped up. ‘I worry about that. Initial response can be positive, but there’s great volatility. Once you go public with something like this, it kind of gives people free rein—’

‘They can say what the hell they like about you,’ added Sanchez, clearly making the effort to substitute one four-letter word for the other he had in mind. ‘Makes it legitimate. Remember, David Letterman could only make his move because he fessed up to whatever the blackmailer had. Got in his retaliation first.’

The pollster responded, emboldened. ‘In other words, the critical variable is the nature of the, er, allegations, the charges . . .’ His voice trailed off, as he reached for the glass of water on the coffee table in front of him.

Tara MacDonald stepped in again, perhaps, thought Maggie, as an act of compassion, protecting the dweeby pollster from twisting in the silence for a second longer. ‘Seems we’re out of good options. If we say nothing, Forbes is gonna keep coming at us, letting off these bombs. If we try to fess up, then the bomb’s gonna be going off anyway. OK, it’s gonna be us pressing the detonator and that helps. But we still don’t know what damage it’s gonna do.

‘Which leaves making contact with this prick and trying to cut some kind of deal. Which I don’t even want to think about. I mean, even if we managed to pull it off, which I have to tell you I seriously doubt, do we really think it would stay quiet? Of course, it wouldn’t. Because nothing in this town ever does.’

Now Sanchez added his voice. ‘I have to say, this is bad enough.’ When he saw a quizzical eyebrow from Goldstein, he gestured around the room. ‘This. This meeting. Just imagine this on Glenn Beck: White House operatives sat around in the Residence discussing possible negotiations with a—’

‘All right, all right,’ Stuart interrupted. ‘We get the idea. A series of dead ends. But right now there are also rather too many known unknowns. We don’t know what Forbes knows and we need to. Somehow, between now and tomorrow, we need to be inside Vic Forbes’s head. Whatever he has—’

But he didn’t get to finish his sentence. Stephen Baker, the cool, steady, unflappable Stephen Baker, the man who had barely put a foot wrong in a two-year, outsider’s presidential campaign, the man who had debated much more experienced rivals without ever slipping up, the man who had never broken a sweat even when his poll numbers were in the tank and his bank accounts dry – Stephen Baker finally snapped.

He slammed his fist onto the table and raised his voice, something his team had never seen or heard before. ‘Vic Forbes! VIC FORBES! I don’t want to hear that man’s name again? Do you understand me?’ He shook his head then, his voice much quieter, he murmured, almost to himself: ‘I want him gone.’

TWELVE

Washington, DC, Wednesday March 22, 06.35

She was with Liz, in the shady area at the back of their garden. They were holding hands, Liz tugging her, a five-year-old girl impatient to show her big sister what she had found. They were wading through grass that had grown taller than they were, brushing their bare arms. Any second now, they would find it. It would be here, at the bottom of the garden.

A loud siren yanked her from sleep and bolted her upright. Her heart was thumping. The siren sounded again, though now Maggie realized it was the ringer on her cellphone, left on her bedside table. She squinted at her watch: 6.35am.

‘Hello.’

‘Maggie. It’s Stuart. Did I wake you?’

‘No. Not at all.’ It was a reflexive lie. No one in Washington ever admitted to being asleep, not even at 6.35am. In DC setting the alarm for 7am counted as a lie-in.

‘Sorry about that. Anyway, put the TV on.’

‘Is this like some kind of daily service? Because I don’t remember signing up.’

‘Now.’ There was something different in Goldstein’s voice. Not so much panic as a kind of manic energy.

Maggie’s eyes were still closed, as if she were half-expecting to glimpse whatever it was Liz had promised to show her. She fumbled for the remote, knocking over both a glass of water and her watch in the process.

‘Jesus.’

‘My first reaction too.’

‘Hold on, I haven’t got it on yet.’ She leaned over the bed, to grope on the floor there. Her hand was met with a discarded T-shirt and a pair of sneakers, as well as an eye-mask she’d once picked up on a business class flight.

At last, the remote. She aimed it at the small box in the corner and waited for it to glow into life. It was tuned to MSNBC: unable to sleep, she’d been watching a re-run of Olbermann in the middle of the night.

Still squinting, she gasped at what she saw. ‘Fucking hell.’

‘My sentiments exactly.’

She couldn’t say anything else, even though she knew Stuart was waiting for an instant reaction. But she simply couldn’t speak. All she could do was stare at the words streaming across the bottom of the screen.

Breaking News: Vic Forbes found dead in New Orleans.

THIRTEEN

The Corner, National Review Online, posted March 22, 07.39:

It’s too early to speculate, details are sketchy, yadda, yadda, yadda. (The fullest account so far seems to come from AP.) Suffice it to say, we know what Democrats would be howling right now if there were a Republican in the White House. Don’t we? Well, conservatives should not sink to their level. Instead, we should do no more than point out that some deaths are more convenient than others. And for Stephen Baker the death of Vic Forbes is very convenient indeed.

From the comments thread, Talking Points Memo, March 22, 08.01:

We shouldn’t speak ill of the dead and I don’t want to speak ill of Vic Forbes. Like everyone else in Washington, apparently, I never knew the guy, never even heard of him until this week. But I would be lying if I said that a deep wave of relief did not come over me when I heard the news just now. I’m not proud of that, but there we are. I want to be honest. Bottom Line: Forbes was trying to destroy the elected president of this country and that was a threat not only to Baker and the Democrats – though it most certainly was that – but to the United States constitution. With his death, that clear and present danger to the republic has passed . . .

FOURTEEN

Washington, DC, Wednesday March 22, 06.37

Maggie kept staring at the screen, which showed a residential street in New Orleans, a row of timber-clad houses in light blues and greens, with the one clearest in vision now behind yellow-and-black tape. Even from here, the words were in focus: Police Line Do Not Cross.

She clicked channels: same street, different angle. With a reporter doing a stand-up. She could hear Stuart breathing heavily into the phone, waiting for her to speak. She turned up the volume on the TV.

‘. . . few details at this hour, Tom. What sources are telling this network unofficially is that the circumstances in which Mr Forbes was found were—’ and here the reporter made a great show of looking down and checking his notebook, ‘—bizarre.’

‘Bizarre?’ echoed Maggie.

‘Let me in and I’ll tell you.’

‘You’re here?’

‘Cab just pulled up.’

Now she needed to absorb the strangeness both of what she had just heard on the television and the notion of Stuart Goldstein in her apartment building. Whatever affinity she felt for him as a colleague, she would never have described him as a friend. He hadn’t been to her place, she hadn’t been to his; that line had never been crossed.

‘You’re here,’ she said again, uselessly. ‘Can you give me five minutes?’

‘Two.’

Under the duvet, she was wearing only a man’s T-shirt – white, large and bearing the name of an Israeli basketball team. It had belonged to Uri, though she had never worn it while they were together. But last night she had dug it out, smelling it before putting it on, even though she knew the scent of him had been washed away long ago.

As she rushed to pull on a pair of jeans and to find a sweater, grateful that Stuart would take longer than most to get into her building, into the elevator and out again, she kept one ear on the intriguing tale tumbling out of the TV.

‘. . . we’re not able to disclose all the circumstances of Mr Forbes’s death at this time, Dan, and that’s not only because some of our sources are speaking only on background. It’s also because this is a family network and it’s still early on in the day.’

What were they talking about? What on earth had happened to Vic Forbes that they couldn’t give the details? Last night she and the rest of the band of brothers who had got Stephen Baker elected President had sat there facing a series of brick walls. There had been no good options. Whichever path they took, Vic Forbes with his bald head and his thin, bland, smiling face had stood there blocking their escape.

And now he was gone, helpfully magicked away and just in the nick of time.

She heard the knock on the door and the unmistakable sound of Stuart Goldstein’s breathless panting outside. She did a last scope of the apartment, scanning for potential embarrassment. Now that she had closed the door to her bedroom, the place looked tidy enough. One of the advantages of Washington hours: you were barely home long enough to make the place a mess.

But still, and even in just that brief glimpse, she had seen something that had made her not quite embarrassed – no dirty laundry on the floor – but ever so slightly ashamed. In that short, stabbing second she experienced the apartment as if through the eyes of another.

She had seen that it was elegant, located in the much-admired art-deco grandeur of the Kennedy-Warren building, and stylishly furnished, with a sprinkling of items that hinted at her past life of constant and exotic travel. But she had also seen that it was, however subtly, empty. That it was, visible to the naked eye, the home of a person alone. And, her eye falling on the crisping leaves of a dying ficus, one without the nurturing ability even to keep a houseplant alive.

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