The Chosen One

It was 7.37am by the time she stood, panting and still red-faced, before Patricia, secretary to Magnus Longley. She had been with Longley for more than forty years, they said; rumour was, he had scooped her out of the typing pool on his very first day of work at his father’s law firm. The pair of them had been around forever, he a monument in permanent Washington, she his stone base.

It had been Patricia who had summoned Maggie to this meeting, in a telephone message that had woken her blearily at 6.29am, only for her to fall back into a fatal doze that lasted another twenty-five minutes.

‘He’s waiting for you,’ Patricia said, peering above her glasses – attached by a string around her neck – just long enough to convey a sharp look of disapproval, for her lateness, of course; but for other more important reasons, too. That cold, lizard’s blink of a glance had taken in Maggie’s appearance from top to toe and found it sadly wanting. Maggie looked down and realized with some horror that her trousers, ironed so carefully last night in preparation for the next day but thrown on in haste this morning, were now unacceptably creased and marked at the ankles by a line of cycle grease. And then there was her autumn-red hair which, in a gesture of personal rebellion, she kept long and tousled in a town where women tended to keep it short and businesslike. Patricia’s expression conveyed more clearly than any words that no self-respecting young lady would have gone to work dressed like that in her day. And in the White House, too!

Maggie passed her hand through her hair one more time, in a futile bid to impose some order, and stepped inside.

Magnus Longley was a veteran Mr Fix-it who had served either in the House, Senate or the White House since the Carter era. He was the requisite greybeard appointed to balance out – and allay any anxieties over – the President’s youth and lack of Washington experience. ‘He knows where the bodies are buried,’ was what everyone said about him. ‘And he knows how to bury any new ones.’

His thin, aged head was down when she came in, poring over a neatly squared pile of papers, a pen in his hand. He scrawled a comment in the margin before looking up, revealing a face whose features remained always neat and impassive. He still had all his hair which, now white, was combed perfectly into a parting.

‘Mr Longley,’ Maggie said, extending a hand. ‘I’m sorry I’m late, I was—’

‘So you think the Secretary of Defense is an asshole, is that right, Miss Costello?’

Maggie, parched already from the breakneck cycle ride, felt her throat run dry. Her hand, still outstretched and ignored, came down and reached shakily for the back of the chair facing Longley’s desk.

‘Shall I repeat my question?’ The voice was deep and strong, surprising from a man of his age, the accent creaking with old money and Park Avenue breeding. Longley was a New York aristocrat; his father had been a pal of FDR’s. He spoke the way Americans talked in 1940s movies, an accent halfway across the Atlantic to England.

‘I heard the question. But I don’t understand it. I never called the—’

‘No time for games, Miss Costello. Not in this office, not in this building. And no time for such infantile behaviour as this—’ the word punctuated with a loud flick of the fingers against a single sheet of paper.

Maggie tried to peer at the upside-down paper, suddenly full of dread. ‘What is that?’

‘It is an email you wrote to one of your colleagues at the State Department.’

Slowly a memory began to form. Two nights ago, she had worked late. She had written to Rob, over on the South Asia desk at State. He was one of the few familiar faces around; like her a veteran of pressure groups, aid organizations and eventually UN peace missions in horrible, forgotten corners of the world.

‘Shall I read the relevant paragraph, so that we’re clear?’

Maggie nodded, the recollection growing ever less hazy.

Longley cleared his throat, theatrically. ‘“Intel on AfPak suggests close collaboration with Islamabad”, et cetera, et cetera, “none of which seems to be getting through to the assholes at the Pentagon”—’

She had a nasty inkling of what was coming . . .

‘“—especially the chief asshole, Dr Anthony Asshole himself”.’ He placed the paper back on the desk and looked up at her, his gaze icy.

Now she remembered it all. Maggie’s heart fell with a sudden swoop into the pit of her stomach.

‘As you can imagine, the Defense Secretary is not too happy to be described in these terms by an official of the White House.’

‘But how on earth did he—’

‘Because—’ Magnus Longley leaned forward and across his desk, enabling Maggie to see the first signs of liver spots on his cheeks. ‘Because, Miss Costello, your friend at State is not quite as brilliant as you evidently think he is. He forwarded your proposal regarding intelligence co-operation with Pakistan to colleagues at the Pentagon. But he forgot to use the most important button on these goddamned machines.’ He gestured vaguely in the direction of his desktop computer, whose screen, Maggie noticed, was dark and very possibly coated with dust. ‘The delete key.’

‘No.’ The horrified response came out as a whisper.

‘Oh yes. The entire thread of messages.’ He handed her the print-out.

She took one look, noting the list of senior Pentagon officials who had been cc’d at the top of the email – including the handpicked, ultra-loyal advisors to the Defense Secretary – and felt the blood drain from her face. She stared down at the paper again, willing it to be untrue. But there it was in black-and-white: asshole. How on earth could Rob have made such an elementary mistake? How could she?

‘Any case for the defence you’d like to make?’

‘Are you certain he knows?’ she asked feebly.

He gave her the first movement of a sneer.

‘Maybe his aides didn’t pass it on, maybe it hasn’t reached him.’ She could hear the desperation in her own voice.

Longley raised his eyebrows, as if to ask if she really wanted to pursue this line of argument. ‘He’s the one who raised it with me. Personally, this morning. He wants you gone immediately.’

‘It was just one word in one email. For Christ’s sake—’

‘Don’t take that tone with me, young lady.’

‘It’s just office banter. It was one remark—’

‘Do you even read the newspapers, Miss Costello? Or perhaps you are more of a blog reader?’ He said the word as if he had just caught a whiff of a soiled dishcloth. ‘Twitter maybe?’

Maggie decided this was part of Longley’s shtick, playing the old fart: he couldn’t be as out of touch as he liked to pretend, not when he had stayed on top in Washington for so long. She remembered the Style section interview she had read, in which Longley had claimed the last time he had stepped inside a movie theatre was to see Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity. ‘Have I missed much since then?’ he had asked languidly.

Now he was sitting back in his chair, relaxed. ‘Because you may have picked up that our Defense Secretary is – how can we put this? – not one of the President’s obvious loyalists.’

‘Of course I know that. Adams ran against him for the nomination.’

‘You are up-to-date. Yes. He may even run against him again.’

‘A primary challenge?’

‘Not inconceivable. The President has assembled what is admiringly referred to as “a team of rivals”. But as Lincoln understood, it may be a team, but they’re still rivals.’

‘So he—’

‘So he’s not going to let this go. Dr Adams wants to flex his muscles, show that his reach extends beyond the Pentagon.’

‘Which means he wants me out.’

The Chief of Staff stood up. Maggie wasn’t sure if the creak she heard was the chair or Longley’s knees.

‘That’s where we are. The final decision is not Dr Adams’s, of course. It rests in this building.’

What the hell did that mean? This building. Did Longley mean he would decide – or that whether Maggie kept her job or not would be settled by the President himself?

Longley had pulled his shoulders back, so that he could deliver his final remarks. ‘Miss Costello, I fear you forgot Longley’s First Rule of Politics. Don’t write so much as a note to the milkman in this town that you wouldn’t mind seeing on the front page of the Washington Post. Above the fold.’

‘You think Adams would leak it.’