The Chosen One

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 (#ulink_84db0a99-d087-52c6-a223-80138b8705f1)

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?’