Actually, it was still just the three of them. Katie had not yet come down despite Zoes summons. Kimberley decided shed 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 didnt 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!
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.
Whats happened? Whats 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 Presidents expression. She shook her head. Weve 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 dont 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 daughters 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 Sunshine 12 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 Katies schoolfriends: Alexis. Hed heard the name mentioned a few times.
No, Im not in bed. Im not really sick. And Im 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 doesnt 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.
6
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 wasnt 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.
Its 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?
Youve 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. Whats that in Gaelic?
You think this is part of some plan?
Two stories, two days running, on the same network. That doesnt 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, whos out to destroy this presidency.
But these stories have got nothing to do with each other. Theyre twenty-five years apart.
Which proves its 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. Im glad you called but why me? Shouldnt you be speaking to Tara and-
Did that thirty minutes ago. Iran. Youre 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.
Goldsteins 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 couldnt make out all the words but she could hear the urgency.
a doorstep at the Capitol, demanding a special prosecutor.
Stuarts 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 Goldsteins interrogation.
Stuart was off again. Ill 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. Dont 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 un seasonably warm evening in November when Baker had won. Shed 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 shed begun to lose faith that she, or anyone in these grand jobs, could ever deliver it.