To Kill the President

by Sam Bourne

  First he handed over a couple of rupees to a girl selling offerings for the saint: as always, he bought some sweets and a handful of red petals. The same combination favoured by his father.

  Next he took off his shoes, placing them in the rack to the right. He had dressed down to fit in, as he always did. But not enough. Apart from a couple of pairs of stout walking boots – backpackers’ – the rest of the footwear kept here barely passed for shoes at all. Most were little more than bound rags.

  Then to the shrine itself, with its fluted marble columns, its arches decorated in patterns of green, pink and gold, and then, inside the chamber, the walls of marble perforated in complex, latticed patterns, filigrees of intricate geometry. The surface of the marble was worn now, rubbed over the centuries by fingers like his. He looked up at the ceiling, painted in red, blue and more gold, just as he had done as a child. The chandeliers seemed nearer to him now than they did then, when they had seemed to be suspended from heaven itself.

  He took a second to assess his fellow pilgrims, pressing their hands or foreheads on the (relatively) cool stone. Some had tied glittering ribbons or shiny charms to the latticework, to bolster their prayer for recovery from illness, for success in exams, for a pregnancy, especially one that might bring a boy.

  Aamir did not feel the need to stay at the shrine long. His homage was less to the saint than to this place, and to those to whom it meant so much. Maybe it was no more than ancestor worship. The thought, even with its faint accusation of primitivism, didn’t bother him.

  In the marble courtyard, he paused to take in the sounds. With his friends, even with his wife, he affected to dislike Qawwali music, with its repetitive, percussive rhythms. But here in this place, he never failed to be moved by the music these men, seated cross-legged on thin carpets for hours on end, could make. They were said to be members of the same family that had played here for centuries. Ancestor worship, again.

  He headed off to find something to eat. And even then, when he had already been followed and watched for nearly thirty minutes, he had no inkling of the men whose eyes had never left him.

  He walked past the first food-sellers he came to (‘restaurants’ would be overstating it). He had a destination – his usual – in mind. With its tin plates and stained Formica tables, it was on no tourist map. But the spice of the bone marrow stew it brewed, the sweetness of the red onions, the texture of the na’an – to go anywhere else would be a betrayal.

  With the first bite, he was transported back to his childhood, the flavours working their instant magic. And yet, at the edges, there was a sensation of uneasiness. He looked up and saw a familiar face, smiling at him warmly: an old friend of his father’s. The man walked over to him, he stood and they embraced. The man said little, but he nodded with satisfaction at how the boy had turned out. As if his success was a collective triumph for the people of these streets.

  But that did not dispel the unease. Once the old man had gone, Aamir still felt himself watched. He scanned the tiny room, each table packed with people and with two dozen more standing, spilling out onto the street. Nothing he could see, except for one rapid movement: he had the feeling someone had turned his back to hide his face as soon as Aamir had looked up.

  His plate was only half-cleared, but he decided it was nevertheless time to pay up. He pressed several notes into the hands of the proprietor, paying his bill at least twice over, and darted out, slipping into the current of humanity that, he knew, would all but carry him away from here.

  Still the sensation did not leave him. He looked over his shoulder. The man who had moved so swiftly to avoid being spotted at the restaurant – lithe, his cheekbones pronounced – now held his gaze in a way that was cold, detached.

  Unnerved, Aamir turned to face forward and at that moment felt a hard shove into his left shoulder. The teenager who had bumped into him did not apologize or hesitate but marched on, disappearing into the throng. Aamir put an instinctive hand onto his shoulder. He had been hit hard; it ached.

  The road ahead was about to fork. He would take the left path, heading west, towards the crematorium, towards the car. He would phone ahead, then get out of here.

  He was about to dig into his pocket to pull out the phone, to feel its reassurance, when he felt another shove, from behind this time. He turned, to find another youth looking at him, smiling in a way that struck Aamir as … gloating. There could be no doubt about it: that push had been deliberate.

  Aamir swivelled again. The staring man from the restaurant was still staring, but now he was much closer. He was gaining on him.

  The sweat and the heat were becoming unbearable. Aamir could feel the cotton on his back getting stickier. A goat got in his way, so that he nearly fell. The smell of incense, sickly and cloying, from one of the scores of tiny shrines that dotted this area filled his nostrils. He wanted desperately to get away.

  He tried to move toward the left fork but the street was too full, the tide of humanity too strong. When he tried to move leftward, he was jostled and, unless he was now becoming paranoid, pushed back. He felt hands at his back, nudging, even steering him. He glanced around again, but couldn’t see the staring man.

  And now that he’d taken it, maybe the right fork hadn’t been such a bad move. He was heading towards the police station. He felt for his wallet. Still there. It meant he could prove who he was and demand some assistance, despite the state of his clothes.

  Now a new, much more pleasant scent reached him. There were stalls selling guava, melons and some early mangos brought into the city from the south. The street opened out into a small square, one that was coming up in the world. He saw the perfume shops and a few four-storey apartment buildings, with their hopelessly impractical, wannabe New York-style picture windows, and he breathed out.

  He looked for a street address; he would phone his driver and tell him to meet him here. He dug into one pocket, then another, then patted himself before he understood. Shit. So that’s what that little performance back there had been. A basic hustle. The man with the staring eyes and the teenage shove-artists were in cahoots, a tag-team intent on depriving him of his phone. To think he’d grown up on these streets; he was as naïve as those women. He would walk to the police station.

  These streets were far emptier than the ones he’d left behind; darker too. He came to a crossroads. It was so dark, it was hard to make out. Taking a right would bring him into a more residential area. He needed to go left.

  And there he was, as if he’d been waiting for him. The same staring man, alone. Aamir turned to take the other road, but found four men standing in his path. Among them, Aamir felt sure, was the one who had shoved him the second time. The expression on his face had graduated from a gloat to a smirk.

  Deciding to take the initiative, he pulled out his wallet, removed a thick wad of notes and said, ‘Here. That’s nearly forty thousand rupees. Take it. It’s yours. And leave me alone.’

  The men did not move. They just stood and stared, like their leader.

  Aamir glanced back towards the road from which he’d emerged. That too was now blocked, by another knot of young men. They had the same look of hungry menace.

  He would not be beaten by them. He might be in his forties, but he was no sap. He was not a tourist. He was a native of this godforsaken place; he’d outrun tougher bastards than these punks. And so he ran.

  He headed left. With only one man to beat, it was the obvious choice. Though he told himself the real reason was that that’s where he had wanted to go in the first place – and he was feeling bloody-minded.

  He dodged past the staring man, who put up next to no resistance – indeed, he all but stepped out of the way. Aamir credited his own genius and the element of surprise for that. See, these hoodlums liked to pose tough, but when it came to it, they weren’t man enough for a fight. Dumb kids, Aamir thought to himself: they should have taken the money.

  He looked over his shoulder. Now they had started their pursuit
, though languidly. Aamir was sure he saw a glint of metal. He ran harder.

  He took a little dogleg that guided him past the petrol station. The men behind were gaining on him: he could not only hear their footsteps, but feel the heat of them, or was that his imagination? He remembered the blade and forced himself to run harder.

  It had been too many years since Aamir had lived on these streets. Otherwise he’d have remembered that once you were past the petrol station you needed to stop running. If you didn’t, you’d run straight out onto the Mathura Road, a four-lane highway where the traffic was constant and unruly.

  And where a man could be knocked down by a Mercedes moving at speed, killed so fast and amid such heat and noise that it’d barely be noticed – and where no one would think it was anything but an innocent, if tragic, accident.

  23

  Washington, DC, Thursday, 3.43am

  How did Richard manage to sleep like that, she wondered. Still, almost soundless, deeply unconscious, turned away from her. Perhaps it was a fitness thing.

  An ex had once wanted to film her sleeping, but she had refused him outright. Cameras in the bedroom were banned, as far as she was concerned: they were just one click and one break-up away from spelling ‘revenge porn’ in capital letters. So she had no proof of what she looked like when asleep. But her strong guess was that she was a restless sleeper, shifting, turning and resettling and, probably, muttering throughout. Perhaps it was a nicotine and booze thing.

  Whatever the explanation, she was awake now. Her mind was flipping like a TV remote. Sometimes she was rerunning the tape of her conversation with Mary Rajak, the comms officer who had looked as traumatized as any victim of sexual assault and as terrified as anyone who had stared into the abyss of nuclear apocalypse had every right to be – but something else too. Her eyes, in their sunken hollows, had struck Maggie as the eyes of a woman whose heart had been broken.

  She stared at the ceiling. Now she was picturing Richard and the beautiful, glossy, long-limbed First Daughter. They were suited to each other. They both could have walked straight out of a perfume ad in a magazine, with their perfectly sculpted features and treadmill bodies.

  Stop, she told herself. Enough. If you’re not going to sleep, then think about what matters. She reached for the floor by the side of the bed, and the stack of not-yet-read editions of the New Yorker. Somewhere in there was a pad. There. She had a pen on the nightstand, next to the radio. Finally she fumbled for her phone, turned on the little torch, then arranged herself so that it lit up the long yellow pages.

  Start with Kassian and Bruton. What did she know? They had both rushed to the White House in the dead of night, averting what would have been a catastrophe. Kassian had then cancelled everything to go to New York. Why New York? Straight after a near-war with North Korea: it could only be the UN. Nothing else made sense. But he hadn’t gone to the UN itself; Maggie had checked. So where? And to see whom? Surely not …

  She rearranged herself, and looked at what she’d written so far. It looked like gibberish. Next to her, Richard was lying with the sheet draped across his waist. She wondered what would happen if she lifted it, ever so lightly. She didn’t want to wake him, but she loved looking at him there, the length of his back, the curve of his buttocks and jut of hip masked by the Egyptian cotton. They had had sex just a couple of hours ago, but she was hungry again … She pushed the thought away.

  And then, that evening they had gone to Dr Frankel’s house. Why would you go to see the President’s physician? There were only two possible explanations: either you had something to tell the doctor or there was something you wanted him to tell you. But what? Did they believe the President was hiding something? Or was there a medical secret that Kassian or Bruton knew and which they needed to convey to Frankel? But that made no sense. The doctor would know all there was to know …

  Richard seemed to shudder. She held still. She didn’t want him to stir. She needed to think, to keep writing. If he woke, he would be bound to ask what she was working on. The pair of them had become good at policing the Chinese wall they had constructed between them, even if Richard was always climbing up, trying to sneak a peek over the top at her side. They joked about it, how his work in Commerce must be boring, given that Maggie rarely probed him about anything, while hers was obviously riveting, judging by the way he questioned her about it all the time. ‘You get to hear all the office gossip and call it your job, Mags. Go on, just throw me a tiny little morsel.’

  He had a point. The Counsel’s office dealt with staff issues: ethics, conflicts of interest, disciplinary matters. It was her job to know where the bodies were buried. If the roles had been reversed she’d have been just as inquisitive. Curiosity was natural. Still, you couldn’t last a day in a role like hers unless you had the ability to be discreet. You had to hold onto your secrets, keeping them back even from those you loved. Even from those who lay so close you could inhale the smell of their skin …

  She forced herself to concentrate. The late-night visit to the home of Dr Frankel. It was obvious. It had to be connected to what had happened the previous night. She circled the names of Kassian and Bruton. They had clearly been petrified. They believed their boss had come within a whisker of blowing up the planet. They thought he was out of his mind. They went to see the doctor to ask if it was true. Was he mentally unstable? And if he was …

  It was a hot night. She imagined the President’s daughter. Was she in bed now, wearing next to nothing? Was her husband there with her? If he was, was she actually thinking about Richard? And what had Richard been doing on his phone earlier, when Maggie came out of the shower? Was he texting that woman? Was he?

  For fuck’s sake, get a grip, Maggie told herself. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been jealous like this. As a teenager perhaps, in Dublin, with Liam Mangan, her first love. Uri always had a string of beautiful women trailing after him, but he had never seemed interested in anyone but her. Edward had been possessive and jealous and Maggie had hated it. She wondered now if this was what it had been like for him: the runaway imagination, the pictures in your head, visualizing your lover with someone else …

  Maggie shifted her position again, as if that might force her to shift thoughts. She wondered about using her phone to turn on the air-con. If there was one thing about new technology that she loved, it was that. The app on her phone, with its little icon of a house with a chimney, that allowed her to warm up the place, or cool it down, even when she wasn’t there – or when she was, but couldn’t be bothered, as Liz put it, to move her ‘lazy Irish arse out of bed’. Liz had called her ‘an old slattern’ for installing it – and then promptly installed one of her own. ‘Not that I ever use it,’ she insisted in a string of texts that struck Maggie as ever so slightly defensive. ‘Last time I turned the central heating on, whole place filled with bloody smoke. Besides, it’s *roasting* in Atlanta …’

  Focus, Maggie. Focus. What if the President was, you know, mentally unstable? What would that mean? Was that what the Chief of Staff and the Defense Secretary wanted the doctor to tell them? Course not. They knew that already. They knew it would mean Frankel would have to declare the President was unable to exercise his duties … Oh my God, that was it.

  Now it all came at once, with the clarity of the sleepless. She started scribbling furiously. They’d gone there to demand the White House physician certify the President as mentally incompetent and the doctor had refused. And then a few hours later he was dead. Of course they had killed him. Of course they had. Of course, of course, of course. Once he knew what they were thinking, that they planned to overthrow the President, he knew too much. Just a word from him and the two of them would be destroyed – jailed for sedition or treason or whatever the fuck it was. So they went round the next morning, or called him out maybe – yes that was it, they called him out on a house call or they got someone to do it, someone else, a hit man, or a contract killer or maybe a soldier. Which was why Bruton had seen someo
ne from SOCOM! He got special ops to do it!

  No, no, scratch that. Think. That didn’t make sense. Frankel was already dead by the time Bruton had the meeting – just yesterday morning – with the ‘no name supplied’ guy. Whoever that was, Bruton must have been seeing him about something else.

  And now, at last, another thought broke the surface. Something her subconscious mind had known for a while, perhaps as soon as she had spotted that reference to SOCOM in Bruton’s diary, maybe even before. People can know something without knowing they know it, or being able to admit they know it, even to themselves. She had to overcome her reluctance to write it down – or even to think it.

  Yet it was so obvious. She sat upright, eyes wide. Thwarted in their attempt to have the President removed from office on medical grounds, they had decided they had no alternative. First they had to kill Jeffrey Frankel. And then they would kill the President.

  The night was quiet. Richard was still, the street was silent. But inside her head, it was throbbing. She had a crush of thoughts, falling over each other, roaring like the sound of the sea in a shell when you put it to your ear. Blood, rushing through her veins.

  Part of her was appalled at what she thought she had uncovered. She imagined the consequences for America, already so divided against itself. The country would be plunged into civil war. Look at how the Kennedy assassination had haunted America for decades. No matter how much you hated this man – and, my God, there was every reason to hate him – this, surely, was not the way to get rid of him. If the reason to oppose him was because he was trashing democracy, then how could you justify removing him by the most undemocratic means of all: assassination? You’d be destroying democracy in order to save it. It was madness.