The knock at the door interrupted his effort to frisk the man he had just killed.
Hello? Is everything all right in there? The knocking continued and was getting louder.
The killer held his breath, hoping whoever was there would go away. Then he heard another voice say, I think we should break it down.
Hastily, he scanned the apartment for the fire escape, eventually finding it in the kitchen where a door led out onto a tiny balcony and, from there, to the narrow, wrought-iron staircase that zig-zagged its way down the exterior of the building. He fled, taking the stairs two at a time until he had reached ground level.
Calmly, he walked from there to his car.
Five floors up, his victims body lay discarded, the dead mans fingers gnarled around his cellphone as if gripping the hand of a loved one for the last moment of his life.
54
Coeur dAlene, Idaho, Sunday March 26, 22.55 PST
To her great relief the cab driver was still outside. He had waited nearly two hours, with only a single Christian radio station and the car heater for company. But he had waited. He had not been driven off the road, his brakes had not been sabotaged. He was still there.
Maggie asked how long it would take to drive to Boise. He gave a snort of disbelieving, mirthless laughter. Can you show me your money? He wanted to see the cash before he agreed to go any further. Lotta crazy people in this state, he said by way of apology.
Maggie took pleasure in pulling out five hundred-dollar bills and agreeing on that as the rate for the evenings work.
Now can I ask a question? she asked.
You got it, he said, his spirits duly lifted.
If we end up driving through the night, would you mind if we didnt speak for most of it?
He smiled and turned the ignition key.
The darkness of the Idaho sky and the emptiness of the roads suited her perfectly. It reminded her of those countless night flights she had endured during the campaign, staring into the black nothingness. It was where she had done some of her best thinking.
For a brief, blissful second she had believed she had finally unravelled the knot bequeathed by Vic Forbes. When Anne Everett admitted that her dead daughter had carried a torch for the current president of the United States, Maggie had almost pictured it, a series of strange symbols suddenly turning into regular words the code breaking.
The young, handsome Baker Aberdeen favourite son and recent graduate of Harvard had taken the adoring prom queen a couple of years his junior to bed in a downtown hotel, and there, somehow, she had died. It was a nuclear scandal that had just been sitting there all these years, waiting to be exploded by Vic Forbes, who alone in the world, it seemed knew of it and was ready to use it. But this theory had been shattered in less time than it took to think of it. That photograph of a young, eager Baker with Senator Corbyn taken on the other side of the country on the same day as the fire was definitive. If Forbes had ever gone public, Baker would have been able to rebut him instantly, simply by producing that photograph. The perfect alibi.
Could Forbes have made such an elementary blunder? Could he really have invested so much of his life in and constructed his entire blanket around a provably false accusation?
But that was not all that nagged at Maggie. She sat back in the car, letting the headrest take the strain on her still aching neck, as she thought back to the public library. Why on earth was that single page missing from the archive? Just one: page five. No others. Who had removed it?
The answer was clear: it had to be the same man who had turned up at the home of Anne and Randall Everett the morning after their daughters death breaking the news to them, for heavens sake waving an improbable amount of cash in their faces and buying their silence, in perpetuity. Why would anyone do that? If it wasnt Baker who had left Pamela Everett to die, who was it? And who was this other boy, for whose reputation a man had been prepared to pay tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of dollars and take the trouble of destroying part of a newspaper archive, in order to keep his secret from ever being known?
The answer was clear: it had to be the same man who had turned up at the home of Anne and Randall Everett the morning after their daughters death breaking the news to them, for heavens sake waving an improbable amount of cash in their faces and buying their silence, in perpetuity. Why would anyone do that? If it wasnt Baker who had left Pamela Everett to die, who was it? And who was this other boy, for whose reputation a man had been prepared to pay tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of dollars and take the trouble of destroying part of a newspaper archive, in order to keep his secret from ever being known?
Maggie could feel her ribs hurting, as well as her head. She desperately needed to talk this through with someone. She looked at her phone. Unregistered, pay-as-you-go, it should be safe. But she didnt want to risk it. She leaned forward, lightly tapping the shoulder of the driver.
Theres an extra hundred for you if you let me use your cellphone.
He handed it to her, placing a theatrical finger across his lips. Im sticking to our deal: no chat.
For at least the third time, she dialled Nick du Cainess home number, the only one of his she remembered. Voicemail, yet again. Where the hell was he? Shacked up in a love-drugs-and-booze-fest with some intern from ABC and screening calls? Probably.
She checked her watch. Midnight in Idaho, 8am in London. Worth a shot.
She used the browser of her BlackBerry to find the London number of Nicks forever-ailing Sunday newspaper, dialled it on the drivers phone hoping he wouldnt notice and asked for the foreign desk.
A secretary answered. Unusual call, Maggie began in her politest voice, explaining that she was a regular Washington contact of Nick du Caines and she had been trying to get in touch, though she had unfortunately mislaid his mobile number. She had a story that she was sure he would be interested in. Was there any chance they might help?
I think youd better speak to the foreign editor, the woman said, an edge in her voice that Maggie didnt like.
There was a delay until a man early forties, plummy came on the line.
I understand youre a friend of Nicks?
Thats right.
Im afraid I have some rather bad news. Weve only just heard. Nick is dead.
55
Boise, Idaho, Monday March 27, 04.13 PST
Maggie spent the rest of the night alternating between two different kinds of pain. The shock of Nicks death was beyond tears: she was numbed to the bone. She was empty; hollowed out. She sat in the cab like a husk, hardly able even to breathe, trying hard not to think. But her body seemed determined to force reality upon her. Emerging from the taxi as it pulled into Boise Airport in the early hours of the morning, she felt how the ache in her ribs had settled and deepened.
The foreign editor had told her there had been a break-in at Nicks apartment, and that there had been signs of a struggle. His body had been badly beaten and bore all the hallmarks of death by strangulation. Police were interviewing neighbours, taking prints. But so far there were no witnesses.
Of course there would be no witnesses, Maggie thought. The people who had killed Nick were like the people who had killed Stuart. They were pros: they would leave no trace.
With hours to wait before the first morning flight out, she knew she should try to sleep. She tried curling up on a hard plastic airport chair but no matter how exhausted she was real sleep would not come.
She dozed off a couple of times, only to be woken once by the cold spreading across her skin, undefeated even by the swaddling of her coat, and the second time by the clear realization that a man his face hidden was standing over her, wearing the satisfied smile of a pursuer who has finally cornered his prey. She woke from the dream and sat bolt upright, clutching at her bag as if it were a weapon and getting ready to run, heart hammering against her sore ribs.
And at once the other source of pain returned. Nick is dead. The words she had heard down the telephone played as if on a loop in her head.
Now the guilt came like a rush. It was all her fault. She had offered his drunken, debauched, lecherous and brilliant head up to them. It was just as Liz said. The woman down the street in Dublin wasnt getting strangled in the dead of night, because she had no knowledge that was connected with this goddamned mess. And neither had Nick du Caines until Maggie had dragged him into it. And now he was dead.
Was she carrying some kind of curse, one that ensured all those she touched turned to stone? She thought of Stuart lying dead, his huge, bloated body beached in Rock Creek Park, bleeding from the wrists, and now Nick, strangled and battered and left for dead in his apartment in New York. All because of her.
Bile rose, acrid in her throat. Grabbing her bag, she dashed for the ladies bathroom and there heaved her guts up into a toilet bowl, gripping the edges convulsively, retching and retching till her guts felt as empty as her heart.
She wadded up some toilet paper, wiped her mouth and chin, flushed and went out to wash her hands. The huge overlit mirror was unforgiving in its judgment. Dark circles under bloodshot eyes, the newly-dyed hair brassy under the neon: she looked like the guilty fugitive she felt. For a moment she was gripped by the urgent desire to run away, to get on a plane and go somewhere, anywhere, far away from here where she could do no more damage. She needed to talk to no one, in case she passed on whatever fatal virus she carried. She had become toxic, radiating death.
The idea lingered with her for a while. She pictured herself on some speck of an island in the South Pacific, holed up in a house that no one knew existed. And then she thought of the men whose hands had choked the life out of Nick and who had shoved those tablets into Stuarts mouth and anger rose to replace the guilt. There were people out there who murdered to prevent the truth being told and their killing would stop only when someone made them stop. She had to find them and hunt them down. She had to make them pay for what they had done.