Maggie smiled, remembering that Nick du Caines hadnt won a hatful of awards for investigative reporting by accident. Lascivious old lush, he might be, but he was still a journalist to the nicotine-stained tips of his fingers. I cant show you anything: you know that. All you can know is that I have reason to suggest you look in that direction. Anything you find, you need to share with me first. Publish it before its ready and therell be no more from me.
Thats not such a massive threat, Mags. Not if youve got the CIA bumping off a US citizen who just so happened to have criticized the President. Thats quite a big story all by itself.
Not if its only the tip of the iceberg.
What are you saying?
Im saying, be patient. Wait till you see the whole picture. I like what Im seeing right now, he said, licking his lips before raising his glass to them.
She let Nick walk her home swiftly, through years of experience, swivelling her head to offer her cheek when he moved in for the goodnight kiss. As always, his slobber was worse than his bite. He was a lech, but no more. He reached for her hand, kissed it and walked off into the night.
Once in her apartment, she opened her bag and pulled out Jacksons file. Something had been niggling at her all night, something that had struck a faint, muffled chord in her head earlier that she had not been able to identify.
She turned back to the first page and read it again, slowly. Her head was foggy with whisky and the bar. What the hell was it?
She looked at the first few facts, which she had skimmed over. The date of birth, the school, the college.
The school.
Again, she felt it, or rather heard it, a feeble echo in her head. The name was familiar, but she had no idea where from.
James Madison High School, Washington.
She found her BlackBerry and Googled it. It produced a list of dozens of James Madison High Schools, some in DC, some just outside, some with a guest speaker who had visited from Washington, DC.
Hold on, what if
She changed the search, making one small adjustment.
But she was too impatient to wait for the little device to load up with results of its search. She went to the pile of books stacked on the floor by the bookcase: the new ones, for which there had been no room on the already jammed shelves. She rifled through them, throwing aside the new tomes on the Middle East, the future of the UN and whither US foreign policy in the 21st century?.
At last. Running Man: Stephen Baker, His Insatiable Quest for Power and What it Means for America. By Max Simon PhD.
It was a hatchet job, gobbled up by the Fox constituency with a sales spike reported in the Deep South which had been torn apart in the New York Times Book Review and by a legion of liberal bloggers. She had picked it up at an airport the day before election day, telling herself it would bring good luck. (She couldnt even remember the convoluted superstitious logic behind that one: probably something about showing respect to the enemy.)
She had never got around to reading it; after the Baker landslide it suddenly didnt seem quite so relevant. But shed given it a glance and remembered that it did at least pretend to be a proper biography with a cursory chapter on Bakers childhood. Now she was flicking the pages furiously.
She saw a paragraph about Bakers birth, with some obviously bogus detail about the mother clasping the hand of her newborn son. She turned to the next page.
In those days Cliff Baker lived a nomadic life, pitching up wherever work could be found
More padding which she skipped. Here it was.
logging meant Washington State and for the teenage Stephen that prompted yet another move, starting at a new high school in his sophomore year. He enrolled, for what would be his last two years of education before attending Harvard, at the James Madison High School in Aberdeen, Washington.
That was it. Jackson hadnt been educated in Washington, DC as the casual reader of his CIA résumé would have assumed but in Washington State. She all but ran back to the couch to retrieve the BlackBerry that had now completed its search. Sure enough, it confirmed there was only one James Madison High School in the state of Washington.
Maggie could hear the sound of her own breathing. Finally she had found a connection between the President and the man she had seen buried in a lonely grave in New Orleans earlier that day. These two men one who had risen to the highest possible pinnacle, the other who had sought to bring him down had something in common. They had a shared past.
Stephen Baker and Vic Forbes had been at school together.
32
From Swampland, posted 20.13 Thursday March 20:
Call me naïve and idealistic, but if something good is to come out of the death of Stuart Goldstein let it be this: let the paranoid right in America shut the hell up. When the Presidents tormentor, Vic Forbes, was found dead and when every possible sign pointed to suicide the Right immediately cried foul play. Or rather they didnt cry; they whispered it, as invidious gossip and innuendo, hinting at it in the blogosphere and on Fox. The likes of Rick Franklin did nothing to stop such talk; on the contrary, they exploited it, allowing it to alter the atmospherics, to change the climate of opinion against Stephen Baker so that they could bring forward their spurious charges of impeachment against the President. Put simply, senior Republicans used conspiracy theories about Forbes to incubate the conditions in which they could hatch their plot to topple a legitimately elected president.
Well, lets hope they have the decency to at least fall silent now. They have tried to paint the Baker White House as the Corleone family, murderously rubbing out its enemies. The result is that a good man a man whose life was dedicated to public service has been driven to his death. Stu Goldstein loved politics and could play hardball with the best of them. He loved the game. But whats been happening in Washington these last few days is not a game. This is politics as blood sport.
So let there now be a pause, a ceasefire, while those responsible for guiding our republic take a breath. Let both sides pause and reflect. And let this be Stuart Goldsteins legacy
From the comments thread at Fox Forum:
Re: Stu Goldstein found dead. Lamestream media are saying conservatives should stop accusing the Baker folks of being involved in Vic Forbess death, as if were somehow responsible for Goldsteins suicide. When I heard Goldstein had killed himself, my first reaction was, Sounds like a guilty conscience
From Twitter, Thursday March 23:
#stuartgoldstein Maybe Baker bumped him off just like Forbes: because he knew too much
#stuartgoldstein What if Franklin took out Goldstein, because he knew he was the 1 guy in White House who could defeat impeachment?
#stuartgoldstein I reckon Baker had Goldstein killed so that people would now suspect Republicans of murder
33
Washington State, Friday March 24, 11.11 PST
Maggie was too late for the red-eye to Seattle so she left on the dawn flight the next morning. Perhaps thirty-five minutes after landing she was in a white rental car, she couldnt tell you what make, driving south-west along I-5, the fatigue almost overwhelming her. It was cumulative now, day after day without proper sleep. Besides, she couldnt stop thinking about Stuart. The initial shock and sadness had given way to new feelings: anger and fear.
The Presidents words on the phone the previous day came back to her: Stuart was not a quitter. He was a fighter. I just refuse to believe
She had been all too ready to believe it, a fact that now made her slightly ashamed. She had accepted without question that Stuart Goldstein had cracked under pressure, heading to the park in the early hours to slash his wrists.
But now she wondered at the convenience of it. Baker was in desperate trouble and Stu his most trusted and capable lieutenant. If the President was right that they were facing nothing less than an attempted coup détat then it was not out of the question that the enemy, whoever they might be, might see fit to kill Goldstein. After all, someone had murdered Forbes.
But that made no sense: Forbess death was surely designed to help Stephen Baker. Goldsteins death could only hurt him.
On the other hand, the effect of the Forbes killing apparently so fortuitously solving a Baker problem had been to damage Baker, enabling his opponents to hint that he was some kind of gangster. What if that had been the objective all along? In which case, couldnt Forbess killers and Goldsteins be one and the same, bent on taking down a troublesome new president?
The notion that Stu Goldstein vast, lumbering, cunning and often gross, but also gentle, kind and motivated only by the idealists desire to make the world better could have been murdered filled Maggie with fury. She was haunted by the image of someone stalking Stu, grabbing him from behind, striking terror into a man who, thanks to his bulk and a life of brainwork unrelieved by exercise, would have been utterly defenceless. She could imagine him screaming as his wrists were cut, his blood jetting out. And then his inert body dumped in Rock Creek Park.
Maggie shook her head to stop the images coming. Who could have done such a thing to a man like Stuart Goldstein? Incomprehension turned to fear. If these men had seen an advantage in killing Stuart, wouldnt she be the very next target? If their motive was the thwarting of Bakers efforts to defend himself, then surely there was every reason to remove her. She and Stuart were the presidential defence team. She wondered if her conversations and texts with Stuart had been secure. They had been using the White Houses encrypted communications system. But if Stu had been murdered, it had been done professionally; and people like that would have their ways of listening, watching, following
She checked her rear-view mirror. There was a truck behind her. But behind that? She couldnt tell. She relaxed her grip on the steering wheel. Her hands were trembling.
Not much further to go now. Soon she would arrive in Aberdeen. Washington State was as far away from Washington, DC as you could be, on the other side of the country, the other side of the continent. The drive had been long, the landscape monotonous but, she told herself, that was all to the good. It gave her a chance to think.
She turned on the radio, trying to negotiate its buttons with her free hand. She wanted music as a distraction, but made the mistake of hitting the AM band and came across Rush Limbaugh instead.