The Chosen One

PROLOGUE (#ulink_d561c3b4-d324-58e4-b3db-f55eaaa34b64)

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 (#ulink_bb56f58f-944e-56be-b5bb-f8d0b287a9d8)

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.