To Kill the President

by Sam Bourne

  She went to look at the thermostat on the wall. It was set at twenty-one and the dial was in black, a sign that the heating was not on. She felt the radiators: cold. But the iPad was adamant: it was still lit in orange, the boiler striving to reach thirty degrees.

  Of course. This was not Maggie’s heating app that she was looking at. It was Liz’s, still left on what had been Liz’s iPad. (Maggie had been meaning to ‘wipe the machine’, as her sister put it, but naturally she had never got around to it.) Maggie went back to the sofa, fleetingly lamenting a climate now so out of whack you needed to put the heating on in Georgia in May.

  Right, she needed to get a sense of the President’s movements over the next few days. In the last week or so, he had barely appeared in public. She suspected all events had been cancelled, making way for the rolling crisis meetings that were happening in the Oval on North Korea. She imagined Kassian and Bruton sitting there, shooting the occasional glance at each other, wondering if they were making a terrible mistake. Or alternatively, did the President say things at those meetings that only confirmed them in their resolve, convincing them afresh that he posed a danger?

  She tried to open the browser on the machine to start some new lines of inquiry. Once again it refused her. Only the heating app was open. For some reason it refused to disappear. Maggie pressed at the temperature controls, touching the down arrow. It had no effect. She touched it again. Still nothing. She stabbed at other, random buttons on the display. None had any effect. The dial remained on orange, the central heating on and impossible to turn off.

  And then, in an instant, it came to her. A second later she felt such nauseating dread she thought she might be sick there and then.

  Please God, no.

  Liz had done the job herself, hooking up her boiler to this app. But it hadn’t worked. Last time I turned the central heating on, whole place filled with bloody smoke. Besides, it’s *roasting* in Atlanta …

  It came back to Maggie now with full force. Liz never used her central heating. She had been warned that while her old boiler could cope with hot water, it was dangerous for heating: it could cause fire or generate clouds of carbon monoxide.

  Yet now it was switched on.

  Maggie checked the time. Jesus Christ, the kids would be fast asleep. And what was it Liz had said? I’m off to bed now – early, I know, but I’ve got a horrible headache coming on.

  Maggie knew enough about carbon monoxide poisoning to know that was how it worked. It didn’t fill the room with billowing clouds of grey, foul smoke. It was odourless, slipping under the doorway and filling the corridors before you even knew it. The headache came first, then the dizziness and vomiting and, if you didn’t get out, death.

  She reached for the phone and dialled her sister’s home number. It was ringing.

  Come on, come on. Please Liz, pick up. Pick up.

  ‘You’ve reached Liz, Paul, Callum and Ryan. Sorry we can’t get to the phone right now. But leave a message after the tone.’

  ‘Liz, it’s Maggie. Please, listen to me – I think there’s a gas leak or something in your apartment. Get the children out right now! Please, Liz – I’ll explain later. Please, please, pick up if you can hear me.’

  But something about the sound made Maggie sure that this was one of those electronic voicemail systems: her message was being stored digitally, but it was not being broadcast around the house. No one could hear her, she was sure of it.

  Maggie tried the cellphone number for her sister.

  Call failed. Retry?

  She did it again, with the same result. Then she tried the cellphone for Paul. Again: Call failed. Retry?

  She thought of Callum, lying there breathing in those noxious fumes. She pictured Ryan, crying out for his mother. And Liz, unconscious and unable to help.

  Jesus, what the hell was she to do?

  She would have to call 911 and explain. Her fingers were quaking but there were the words again.

  Call failed. Retry?

  Someone had blocked her phone.

  She picked up her landline, so rarely used. No dial tone. Good Christ, they had blocked off every phone in the place.

  Please, please God. Let them live. Please don’t let those boys die.

  She ran out of the apartment and into the corridor, knocking on doors of neighbours she had never met. But it was getting late. This was Washington, some would be asleep – or at least preferring to be selectively deaf rather than get involved with a stranger. She was pounding on the doors now, one after another. ‘Please, please – this is an emergency.’

  Finally, a door at the far end of the corridor opened and an Indian-American woman stood there, in a T-shirt and not much else. Maggie felt sure she recognized her, though she couldn’t tell where from.

  Maggie looked straight at her and said, ‘I need to call 911. Right now. My phones are not working.’

  Without asking for a word more explanation, the woman opened the door wider and ushered Maggie in. Standing in a doorway on the other side of the living room was a man in boxer shorts who also looked oddly familiar.

  She took the phone and jabbed out the three digits. A dispatcher came on and Maggie babbled a description of the situation that would have made no sense to anyone.

  ‘Slow down, sweetheart.’

  Maggie closed her eyes. The truth was, she wanted to break down into fast, hot tears. She wanted to curl up into a ball. She wanted to cry out to Jesus, Mary and Joseph. She could handle all the shit they kept throwing at her – when it was just her – but not this. Not this.

  Instead, she made herself dig deep and focus. As calmly as she could, she explained that the lives of two children were in immediate danger. They needed to contact their colleagues in Atlanta, Georgia, and send urgent help to the following address because a carbon monoxide leak was underway, poisoning a sleeping family at this very moment. Inevitably she had to repeat each point at least twice. The address, three times.

  Eventually she put the phone down and looked up to see a glass of whisky, stretched out to her. ‘Or a cup of sweet tea?’ said the woman whose apartment this was. ‘Whichever you prefer.’

  Maggie downed the Scotch, said thank you and began to head towards the door. But the woman placed a hand lightly on her shoulder. ‘Why don’t you stay here, just until you know what’s going on?’ The kindness in her voice made Maggie’s eyes prick.

  It was perhaps seven minutes later that her phone, now apparently unblocked, rang.

  Maggie picked it up. Then she heard the words she had feared:

  ‘Is that Maggie Costello? This is the Atlanta Fire Department.’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice was quiet, meek.

  ‘Your family members are currently being ferried by ambulance to Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta.’

  ‘Are they alive?’

  ‘Yes, they are.’

  Maggie closed her eyes and breathed out.

  ‘The children are unconscious, but I think they’re going to be OK.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  ‘Him and the people on this street you contacted. They’re the ones you want to thank.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘They got here before we did. They had the presence of mind to break the door down. I think they might well have saved your family’s life.’

  ‘I don’t unders—’

  ‘I need to attend to things here. Thanks for your vigilance.’ And he hung up.

  Maggie looked up at the couple, now in dressing gowns, who had taken her in. She pointed at the phone. ‘I think they’re going to be OK. Thanks so much.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to stay here? Or have another drink?’

  ‘No, that’s OK. But thank you so much for what you did. I can’t thank you enough.’ Maggie rose slowly out of the chair and walked down the corridor back to her apartment.

  Once inside, she collapsed into a chair and, for the first time, allowed herself to sob long, desperate tears.

  What ter
rible thing had she done that had caused those two little boys to be exposed to such grave danger? Why hadn’t she just stayed out of this mess? OK, so Frankel had not killed himself: why couldn’t she have just looked the other way like every other fucker in Washington? What did any of this have to do with her? More importantly, what did any of this have to do with Liz and her family? Nothing, was the answer. Nothing.

  She should get in a car and drive down to Atlanta right now – drive all night and hug her sister and apologize for drawing her and her family into this nightmare. They had targeted Liz and her children as a way to get at Maggie: to hurt her, to threaten her, to scare her off whatever it was she was onto. She would have driven to Georgia this very moment, were it not for the fear that even proximity to Maggie Costello right now meant mortal peril. She had done enough damage.

  But thank God they were OK. The fire department had got there in time. Although it sounded like someone else had got there first and it was they who had made all the difference. The people on this street you contacted.

  Maggie had a shower and was about to let herself fall into a deep sleep when she picked up her phone again, hoping there might be a message from Liz. There wasn’t. Instead she saw a string of tweets under the hashtag #TwitterSav‌edALifeTonight.

  It turned out that at 9.36pm, a leading anchor on CNN, Anushka Saddiqui, had tweeted an appeal to her four hundred thousand followers asking anyone in the Cabbagetown neighbourhood of central Atlanta to head to a specific address and rescue a young family in danger. That had been retweeted by thousands of others in seconds – until it was seen by someone on Liz’s street. That man had rushed to Liz’s house and knocked the door down. The fire department came later, turning off the boiler which had somehow been set to thirty degrees Celsius.

  So that was why Maggie had recognized that woman. Come to think of it, the man she had seen in boxer shorts was a familiar TV face too, with an even greater number of Twitter followers – though a quick peek at Wikipedia told Maggie he was married to a woman who was not Anushka Saddiqui.

  Exhausted as she was, Maggie could not sleep. She was resolved: this had to end, before more innocent lives were put at risk. She had to find out who was behind all this mayhem.

  She glanced down at her phone and what she saw there told her, at last, what she had to do.

  37

  Omaheke province, Namibia, 2.21pm, four days earlier

  Ron Cain had a Hemingway in his pocket, a gesture he thought the old man would have appreciated. He felt for the book now, as they rattled along a dirt track close to the Botswana border, the Land Rover bouncing their heads close to the roof with each rut in the road.

  Ron looked again at his travelling companions. The ‘professional hunter’, or PH as he styled himself, in his shorts, thighs as big as hams, and with a defiantly pre-hipster beard. He had a map on his lap. Next to him, staring out of the window, the younger of the two guides. In the driving seat, the older man. Not for the first time, Ron wondered what these two black men – master and apprentice – made of him.

  He was black, like them. But he was American and he was rich. Did they think of him as a distant cousin? (He wouldn’t presume to be a brother.) Or was he as alien a figure to them as their usual clientele: pampered, privileged and fundamentally soft?

  The race thing was, Ron reflected, the least of the doubts he’d had to overcome to make the journey here. He hated the dynamic that existed in these situations, regardless of race. You instantly became the weakling westerner, less natural, less masculine, less worthy than your earthy, son-of-the-soil hosts. They were real men, you were an effete creature of the indoors. You became – or at least Ron became – repeatedly apologetic: sorry for not knowing how to carry a hunting tripod, sorry for whispering too loudly by the watering hole, sorry for not knowing that that constellation up there was Orion.

  He dealt with it by being deferential to the local men’s expertise, playing the character he had played since adolescence, if not childhood: the dutiful, attentive, curious pupil.

  But it was fraught, because the deference was not one-way. They might have been more macho, but they were also paid servants. The PH would have fought that designation, it was true, but the guides’ default stance was supine. Money made Ron the boss. Black, white, who cared? The colour that mattered was green.

  But still. Serving a black man was complicated for all of them, he could see that. The PH spoke with a strong Afrikaaner accent. Ron could tell that this man had not been raised for this situation.

  The vehicle bounced on, lolling from side to side. Outside, the grasses were so thick and so tall, the car seemed to be enveloped in cloud. From the way the PH was looking at the map, occasionally glancing out of the window, and from the briefly exchanged words between the driver and his assistant, Ron suspected they were close. The black rhino had eluded them for the best part of two days. But perhaps now they were on his trail.

  The driver brought the vehicle to a juddering stop, allowing the quiet to rush in. ‘On foot now,’ the PH said.

  Ron stood up and jumped to the ground, no longer even bothering to look for the foothold he had used yesterday to get in and out of the car. You see, he wanted to say, I’m getting better at this.

  The lack of conversation as they walked suited him. His job in Texas, as the founder and chairman of what had grown into a large electronics company, the maker of specialist TV satellite and broadcast equipment – the dishes, the transmitters, the set-top boxes – involved so much talking. Meetings, meetings, meetings, all day. The chance to be on the other side of the world, in the bush – away from spreadsheets, swivel chairs and annual reports – was why he had come here.

  Not that he had planned it. He had bid for this ridiculous, morally questionable prize on a whim. ‘Lot Number Seventeen is a licence to kill – literally!’ That’s what the compere had said at the fundraising dinner, announcing the offer of a rare permit to hunt and kill a member of the world’s most endangered species: a black rhino. The idea was that selling a permit for astronomical sums would bring in money for conservation but also incentivize the Namibians to keep the rhinos alive and to fend off poachers: now these animals would have a value measurable in hard cash. As trophies for rich, bored Americans whose heads were filled with Hemingway fantasies, these animals certainly commanded a steep price. The bidding had reached $350,000.

  Ron’s wife had looked on aghast. Her husband had never even hunted for ducks, let alone rhino. He was about to tell her how he planned to use this licence, but her attitude annoyed him: ‘Are you serious? Hunting in Africa: you?’ Yes, me. Why the hell not me? For a reason he could not quite fathom, his wife had never seemed so white to him as she did that night.

  They were walking now in single file, the older guide marching at the head of the column, followed by the PH, then Ron, with the youngest man at the rear. Ron carried a rifle on a strap over his shoulder, but he couldn’t escape the feeling it was a glorified prop. Sure, he knew it was loaded. But he would only fire it when he’d been told to. He would not be relying on his own, predator’s instincts. He was not sure he had any.

  At least not here, in the bush. Back home, different story. Those instincts had made his fortune. In business he could be rapacious – and strong. That’s why he had not given up the lawsuit, despite all the advice. He couldn’t care less how high a position that man had won for himself: he was guilty of theft, plain and simple. Five years ago, long before any talk of politics, he and Ron had signed a contract for services running into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Ron had fulfilled his side of the bargain, providing equipment and personnel over a period of eighteen months. It had cost him a fortune in salaries alone. But his company’s bill had never been paid.

  He had played nice and patient, but it became clear that he was being stiffed. This man, now on TV every minute of every day, had in effect stolen from him. He had got what he wanted – setting up an infrastructure in several cities, as he had demanded – b
ut he had not paid for it. He’d been confronted over it, but refused to apologize or seem even vaguely embarrassed by what he had done. To have ‘got so much stuff for free’, as he put it, made him ‘smart’. What he had done for himself, he would now do for America. The crowds loved it, imagining their new President stiffing the Chinese or the Europeans or whoever. But Ron had been appalled.

  Which was why he was taking this to the courts. Not that he was confident of winning. The judges seemed as scared as everyone else of this man’s power. His supporters called him ‘the King’ and had taken to talking of him being in power for the next eight years at least. Ron had noticed that ‘at least’ and it had chilled him. What exactly did this man have in mind?

  The PH stopped, wheeled around – twisting his torso, while keeping his feet rooted to the spot – and placed a finger over his lips. They all halted and hushed.

  After a moment, the older guide nodded, as if agreeing. Only then did Ron hear what the other man had heard, the faintest crunch of a twig underfoot. Could he hear a whisper through the grass, as if it was being thrashed aside? He listened as closely as he could. The sound seemed to be coming from behind them. He felt his pulse quicken. Could the rhino be pursuing them? He liked the irony of it; he imagined it as a Hemingway short story, with a neat little twist: the predator becoming the prey.

  The men paused a while, read each other’s expressions – ignoring Ron, he noticed – and eventually decided to move on. More than thirty minutes passed, the heat beginning to bear down, when the guide held up his hand to signal another stop. Once they had, he pointed at the ground. At a pile of shit.

  ‘Rhino faeces,’ the PH said quietly. He bent down and sunk his hands into the soft, brown mess. ‘Still warm,’ he said. ‘Still moist. Look.’ He pointed at the dung beetles, already at work. ‘He was here an hour ago, tops.’

  They kept walking, but now with new vigour. The PH was excited, Ron could see that. They were getting close. They would surely see the beast today, maybe even this afternoon.

  He thought back to yesterday when they had come to a small clearing, marked by a lone tree and no grass, where a set of bleached-white bones were scattered against blood-red sand. The PH had beckoned Ron to come forward and pick up one of these giant bones, to imagine the body it had once supported. Ron felt its weight in his hands.