To Kill the President

by Sam Bourne

  ‘It’s so long ago,’ Maggie said quietly.

  ‘Not long enough.’

  ‘I can’t believe I told you. I’m such a fool.’

  ‘Oh, but I’m so glad you did, Maggie. My secret is safe with you, because if it’s not, then your secret is no longer safe with me.’

  45

  Two years earlier

  She got up from her desk and did a wide stretch. Maggie had been staring at the screen too long. Her eyes creaked when she rubbed them.

  She glanced down at her phone. An invitation to dinner with a group of girlfriends sent nearly two hours ago. She had stalled them, promising to join them soon, then suggesting they order without her, then offering to skip the starter and finally vowing to make it in time for dessert. The replies had dried up around then. It was too late now.

  It’s not even as if this work was especially interesting. But it was important. The President himself had asked her to take it on. He had been told that a mid-ranking official in his administration faced possible corruption charges. The suspicion was that he had been receiving direct, cash bribes from large foreign companies keen to gain preferential trading access to the US. The case was already under investigation by the relevant department but the President worried that the inquiry might not be fair, that the official might be being set up to take the fall for a wider corruption problem. He wanted Maggie to be his ‘eyes and ears’, to look over the shoulder of the investigators and make sure they were doing a proper job.

  Which had led to her being in the White House on a Saturday night, going over pages and pages of phone records, checking who the official had called and when. So many numbers, they had begun to swim before her eyes.

  It was while she was stretching, looking down at the sheets in front of her, with row after row highlighted in a rainbow of shades, that she spotted something she had not seen until that moment. One number that recurred but which had not, it seemed, been identified by the investigators.

  She checked it, then cross-checked it and saw that it appeared several times, at odd hours of the day and night, apparently from several countries around the world. She turned to her screen and, using the database established by the inquiry, typed in the phone number, hoping to put a name to it.

  Not identified.

  It was a US number and, these records confirmed, no attempt had been made to disguise it. According to the database, it was not even a secure or encrypted line. It was a regular US, domestic cellphone.

  She looked at the clock. Nine twenty pm. Saturday night. There really was no one around who she could ask. And yet she needed to get this report to the President by Monday morning, at the same time or even before the official inquiry reported.

  Maggie dialled what the older hands still called Signal, the department that handled all White House communications traffic.

  ‘Hi there. Can you help me with a number?’

  ‘Who are you looking for, ma’am?’

  ‘That’s just it. I have the number but I don’t have the person. Can you work backwards from that?’

  ‘Is this a White House number, ma’am?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It might be. Can you help?’

  Perhaps ninety seconds passed, as Maggie read over the number and was placed on hold. Eventually the operator came back on and said, ‘Please hold for the duty commander.’ A reminder that even the switchboard in this building was run by the military.

  More clicks and then a male voice. ‘Can I ask what this is in connection with?’

  Maggie explained who she was, on what authority she was making her inquiry and added that her system showed this to be a non-classified, regular phone that should, therefore, be subject to none of the usual restrictions.

  The commander then said that, according to his information, the number Maggie had supplied matched the private cellphone of – and his voice dipped as he said the name.

  Maggie might have gasped, but if she did, she moved swiftly to disguise it. She thanked the commander and put the phone down. She sat back in her chair and let the implications sink in. She had discovered that the Secretary of State had been using an unsecured, private phone line routinely and regularly, from all points of the globe, even to conduct what looked like the official business of the United States government. Any intelligence agency anywhere, including those of hostile powers, would be guilty of professional malpractice if they had not tapped that line.

  Now she had to decide what to do with this information, whether she was duty bound to report it to the relevant authorities. Ordinarily, that question would be straightforward. Of course she should.

  But there was a complicating factor. The Secretary of State, who stood to be hugely undermined by this discovery, was not just a senior figure in the current administration. The Secretary was widely – universally – expected to run for, and very probably win, the Presidency of the United States,

  If Maggie kept this finding quiet, a candidate she respected and admired would have a smoother path to the White House. But it would also mean that Maggie would, by her inaction, be saying that the law was only to be applied when it was convenient. Maggie would be declaring that no one was above the law – unless you happened to be a politician Maggie liked.

  It was tempting. She could put these phone records to one side, declare her investigation complete and no one would be any the wiser. The Secretary of State would be on course to the White House, an outcome Maggie very much wanted.

  But she knew it wouldn’t be right. If she hushed this up, it would make her no better than the hordes of partisan hacks and hustlers who filled this town. It was quaint, she rarely said it out loud – except when she was with the President she served – but she believed in something better than that: in old-fashioned things like the rule of law and doing what was right, even when it was inconvenient.

  No, she would have to pass what she had found on the Secretary of State to the relevant officials. What they did with it would be up to them. She had enough faith in the American people to believe that, even if they learned of this mistake by a soon-to-be candidate, they would not let it cloud their judgement. They would still, surely, pick the most qualified person to be their next President. As Maggie collected up her papers after a long night, she drew great comfort in that thought.

  46

  Washington, DC, Saturday, 9.43am

  He had hit her in her most vulnerable spot. It was her fault: she had revealed it to him, a matter of weeks after they had become lovers.

  They were in bed, having the perennial conversation, she in earnest, he – she now understood – with complete fraudulence. What on earth were they doing here, working as servants of this appalling monster of a President?

  She had offered her reasons only partially at first. A job in the White House was a privilege; if you had the chance to do even a little bit of good, you were obliged to take it; maybe she could, in her own small way, mitigate the impact of the new regime – all that bullshit. But eventually, and under Richard’s sustained questioning, the two of them facing each other, warm under the covers on a bitterly cold February morning, she had begun to tell him.

  Maggie first explained that she felt a terrible responsibility, which meant she felt obliged to serve. ‘You mean duty?’ he had asked. No, she explained. She felt a sense of responsibility in the sense of being responsible for what had happened.

  ‘Is this a Catholic guilt thing?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s an actual guilt thing. I did something terrible.’

  He had furrowed his brow into a question mark, encouraging her to say more.

  ‘You know the whole “unsecured line” scandal?’

  ‘You mean the issue which destroyed the candidacy of our President’s main opponent—’

  ‘Yes, thank you very much. That was me.’

  ‘What do you mean, it was you?’

  ‘I discovered it. I was the one who saw that the Secretary of State had been using a private phone line. Wh
ich turned into an “unauthorized” phone line, a “secret” phone line, a “compromised” phone line. That was me. I discovered it – and I reported it.’

  ‘You went to the FBI?’

  ‘Department of Justice, actually. But yes.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘That was you. Christ, Maggie, you changed the course of history.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ‘I mean, there’s no way he’d be President now if it wasn’t for—’

  ‘Yes, thank you, I’m quite aware of all that.’

  He smiled and said, ‘I’m sorry, Maggie. I take it back. Seriously, that whole campaign was so badly flawed. Even without the phone line saga, there’s a good chance it just wasn’t going to happen. And it was a change election. You can’t beat yourself up over—’

  ‘Are you kidding? Beating myself up is the least I can do. Can you imagine what this feels like? This complete sociopath is in the Oval Office, this nightmare for the entire world is unfolding, and all because I had to open my big mouth.’

  ‘Maggie, really—’

  ‘I mean it, Richard. This is on my conscience every hour of every day. I can’t stop thinking about it. Every time he insults someone, every time he trashes something good or makes one of his wild threats – all the time – I’m thinking, “This is my fault. We wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t destroyed the one person who could have beaten him.”’

  ‘I’m not so sure.’

  ‘Every day during the campaign, I was checking every poll, gobbling up every tiny point of data I could, just to reassure myself. “Don’t worry. He won’t win. And then it will all be over. What you did won’t have mattered. You can get this millstone off your neck.”’

  ‘Oh, Maggie.’

  ‘And then all those scandals and revelations came and I thought, “Thank God. There’s no way he can win now.” But somehow he kept in there, soldiering on. And these voters would be interviewed on TV and they’d say, “Yeah, sure, he’s done some bad stuff. But, you know, what about that secret phone line?” And I wanted to shout at the top of my voice, “Who gives a fuck about one fucking phone line?” But I couldn’t say a word. Because it was my fault.’

  ‘And then he won.’

  ‘And then he won.’ Maggie let out a long sigh. ‘My first instinct was to run away. I wanted to go back home, to Ireland. Start again. Be a teacher or something. Do something useful.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But I talked about it with the boss and he was adamant. “You owe this to the country, Maggie. If you leave, there’s one less good person in the White House. And we need all the good people we can get.”’

  ‘Sounds like him. And McNamara kept you on?’

  ‘To my amazement, yes. Or at least he didn’t block me. Kassian was the main backer though.’

  ‘“Professionals”.’

  ‘Exactly. He wanted as many as he could get past McNamara. But, seriously, God knows what I’m doing it for. The old boss said, “Some day – I don’t know when, don’t know how – there’ll be a way for you to make a difference.” Well, I can’t see that day ever coming, I really can’t.’

  That had been more than three months ago. She had stuck to it, clinging to those words of the former president. In the last few days, she had seen a way to make amends: if she could halt an assassination and the mayhem that would follow, perhaps then she would have made her contribution. But even in the best-case scenario, it would have been a strange kind of atonement: she’d have saved the life of a President she despised and preserved a presidency she believed was truly malevolent.

  But this was not the best case. The President had survived and now McNamara and his henchmen had pulled off a putsch in which – according to Richard and backed up by the early rumblings on Twitter – McNamara had crushed the last remnant of internal resistance, sweeping aside Bob Kassian and Jim Bruton. Now he and his circle would be able to do their worst. And if the latest news was any guide, they were moving swiftly.

  She glanced down at a news alert on her phone.

  The President has accepted the resignation of the head of the Federal Communications Commission, CNN has learned. White House sources tell CNN the new FCC head is likely to be a close presidential ally, with speculation focusing on the President’s eldest daughter. According to a senior administration official, ‘Her job will be implementing a new licensing system for the broadcasters: only those networks she deems “fair and balanced” will have their license to broadcast renewed.’ The official adds that plans are well-advanced and that from his bed at the George Washington University Hospital the President has signed an executive order instructing that this be done “not in months or weeks, but days – for the sake of public safety”.’

  The country was on the verge of a coup that would trample all over the Constitution and the only two men who might have stopped it were now powerless. And she had let it happen. She had given the President’s henchmen what they needed to make a move they’d never have risked otherwise. She had handed them the shock event of a genuine assassination attempt, but with enough advance warning that they could guarantee its failure. She had let herself be betrayed by a lover and, in the process, she had betrayed the country she had come to love. Her despair was total.

  It was raining heavily outside; the apartment was dark, but she couldn’t find the strength to turn on the lights. She sat there in the gloom and prepared to go deep, to plunge into the abyss, to aim for the bottom of the pit, a place whose contours and rough edges would at least have the comfort of familiarity. She deserved no better.

  But a voice nagged at her. She knew she could not resist it. In moments like this, the one person who might speak sense, who might somehow help her make amends, was her old mentor Stuart Goldstein.

  ‘Whaddya got, Costello?’

  ‘I’m not in the mood, Stuart.’

  ‘Bupkis. That’s what you got. Bupkis.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘A big fat nothing.’

  ‘Stuart, seriously. I know that.’

  ‘So Mr Crawford McNamara knew what you knew: that somebody was about to whack our so-called President.’

  ‘Because Richard told him.’

  ‘Yes. Silly girl. I told you that one was trouble. Not for you. Too pretty.’

  ‘Too pretty?’

  ‘You can’t trust a man who dresses better than you do. We need to find you a big, balding schlub.’

  ‘Like you, you mean.’

  ‘You could do worse, Costello, believe me.’

  Maggie found herself laughing, and it felt good. It’d been a long time. ‘Stuart, can we go back to what—’

  ‘Sure, sure. Don’t distract me with the personal stuff. Not my strongest suit, as Mrs Goldstein will testify.’

  ‘You’re not helping, Stuart. I need something.’

  ‘All right. We’re looking for a way to make this right. So: what do you know about Eisenhower?’

  ‘Stuart, please. Now is not the time.’

  ‘Now is exactly the time.’

  ‘Not for a history lesson. I’ve got to—’

  ‘Do you want my help or not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right. Eisenhower. Three things. Go.’

  ‘Jesus, Stuart. I don’t know: Supreme Allied Commander during World War Two. Called Ike. Won two terms.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Warned of the power of the “military-industrial complex”.’

  ‘What else? Something he said.’

  ‘I think I’m all out of Eisenhower trivia, Stuart. Can we move on to the Film and TV round?’

  ‘“Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger.” That’s what he said. “I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.” That was Eisenhower.’

  ‘And that helps me how exactly?’

  ‘Stand back, Maggie. See the big picture.’ />
  ‘I am seeing the big picture, Stu. A President using a national emergency to impose martial fucking law, shutting down the press and rounding up minorities seems pretty fucking big picture to me.’

  ‘What else is going on here? While you’ve been so obsessed with Kassian, Bruton and Friedman—‘

  ‘Frankel.’

  ‘Whatever, what else has been happening?’

  ‘The nuclear thing? The President nearly losing his mind and blowing up the planet?’

  ‘OK. That’s more like it.’

  ‘But Kassian and Bruton knew all about that. They were so worried about it, they thought their only option was to kill the President. They didn’t think they had any other options.’

  ‘OK. So let’s think of something else. Something else that’s been going on, kind of offstage. To the margins. Remember what I always say?’

  ‘“Check your peripheral vision.”’

  ‘Exactly. Still my star pupil, Costello. So look off to the sides. Think about what you’ve only half-heard or what you’ve fully heard but only half-remembered.’

  ‘That’s hard, Stuart.’

  ‘I know it is. That’s why so few people do it. But there’s something there, Maggie, I’m sure of it. With bona fide assholes like McNamara and his boss, there always is.’

  ‘Thanks, Stuart.’

  ‘Don’t thank me. Get digging.’

  Maggie stared into the gloom of her apartment for a moment or two longer and then reached for a light switch. It was time to begin looking – and she knew exactly where to start.

  47

  Washington, DC, Saturday, 10.23am

  Three nights ago, when she had opened up Richard’s phone, she had been shaken, distressed and disgusted – but she had not completely lost her mind. She had maintained just enough equilibrium to do a quick copy and paste of her then-boyfriend’s Signal exchange with Crawford McNamara, dump the text into an email to herself – from Richard’s account – before deleting the message from his Sent folder.