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– the one after that will. Make no mistake: I mean to destroy him.

SIX

       Washington, DC, Tuesday March 21, 05.59

      Maggie got the call before 6am: Goldstein, sounding caffeinated. ‘Put on MSNBC. Now.’

      She fumbled for the remote, down at the side of the bed. It wasn’t there. She reached across to the blank, empty space that made up the other half of the bed and found it marooned there, stabbed at the buttons until finally the screen fired up into a too-bright light.

      ‘It’s an ad for car insurance, Stu.’

      ‘Wait. We got a heads-up.’

      There was the portentous sound of a station ident, a whizzy graphic and then the morning anchor, all glossy lips and improbably static hair. The image over her shoulder showed the President, the words strapped across the bottom of the screen: Breaking News.

      ‘Papers seen by MSNBC suggest Stephen Baker received campaign contributions that came, indirectly, from the government of Iran. Details are still sketchy but such a donation would constitute a serious violation of federal law, which prohibits candidates from receiving contributions from any foreign source, still less a government hostile to the United States. Live now to . . .’

      Iran? What on earth did Stephen Baker have to do with Iran? They could not be serious. Something truly bizarre was going on here. Bizarre and sinister. Two bombshells in twenty-four hours. She knew every one of her White House colleagues would be asking the same question: ‘What the hell is going on?’

      She could hear Goldstein barking an instruction to someone outside his office.

      ‘What the hell is this, Stu?’

      ‘You’ve probably got some Irish word for it, Maggie.’

      ‘For what?’

      ‘For when someone sets out to fuck you in the ass and stab you in the heart, all at the same time. What’s that in Gaelic?’

      ‘You think this is part of some plan?’

      ‘Two stories, two days running, on the same network. That doesn’t happen by accident, sweetheart. That means they have a leaker. A source.’ Goldstein paused just long enough to let out a wheeze. ‘Someone, in other words, who’s out to destroy this presidency.’

      ‘But these stories have got nothing to do with each other. They’re twenty-five years apart.’

      ‘Which proves it’s organized. Some well-resourced outfit, with enough money to do serious oppo.’

      ‘Stuart,’ Maggie said, now out of the bed and walking towards the shower. ‘I’m glad you called but why me? Shouldn’t you be speaking to Tara and—’

      ‘Did that thirty minutes ago. Iran. You’re our Middle East gal, remember. Need you to think about the angles. If this does not turn out to be bullshit, then who might have done this at that end? Government or rogue? And why now? What game are they— Shit.’

      Goldstein’s cellphone rang, the first notes of the theme from The Godfather, the movie loved by all political obsessives. ‘This is how power works, Maggie,’ he had said when the film was screened on a return flight from California. ‘Watch and learn.’

      He must have put the call on speaker because she could hear a voice, high-strung and rattled, at the other end. She couldn’t make out all the words but she could hear the urgency.

      ‘. . . a doorstep at the Capitol, demanding a special prosecutor.’

      Stuart’s response was instant and ferocious. ‘That prick. Was he on his own or with colleagues?’

      The voice: ‘One other. Vincenzi. You know, bipartisan bullshit: one Republican, one Democrat.’

      ‘Assholes.’

      Maggie tried to say goodbye, but it was clear Stuart was not listening. He was absorbed in this new conversation, apparently unaware that he was still holding the receiver. All she could do was hang up. Or stay on the line and eavesdrop . . .

      Stuart spoke again, a sound like a faulty air conditioner coming from his chest. ‘What did he say he wants? An independent counsel or a special prosecutor? What were his exact words?’

      Maggie could hear a muffled sound, which she took to be the luckless official, whoever it was, squirming under the fire of Goldstein’s interrogation.

      Stuart was off again. ‘I’ll tell you what difference it makes. Special prosecutors no longer exist. They were abolished. The only reason a person would start talking about special prosecutors is if they were either a moron – which the senator from Connecticut is not – or if they wanted to make a point.’

      More muffled sound.

      ‘The point being that the words special prosecutor have a very particular sound in this town. The sound of Archibald Cox. Don’t tell me – sheesh. Am I the oldest freaking person in this White House? Archibald Cox? Watergate?’

      Maggie tried to catch his attention. ‘Stuart? Stuart!’ But it was too late. She hung up.

      They had now, she understood, entered a new realm of seriousness. If a Democrat was calling for an independent counsel to investigate a Democratic president, there was no way he could fight it. It was no longer ‘partisan’: now it was above party politics. Baker would have to agree. In the space of a few weeks he had gone from St Stephen – the coverline on a British magazine story about the new president – to Richard Nixon, under investigation.

      Maggie felt as if she were standing on the deck of a ship taking on water. They had all been so euphoric that unseasonably warm evening in November when Baker had won. She’d been caught up in it, accepting the ribbing from Stu and Doug Sanchez, as they mocked her earlier pessimism. ‘Oh ye of little faith, Costello, who said it would never happen,’ Sanchez had said as he embraced her, maintaining the hug a moment or two longer than necessary, his hands brushing her bottom in a way that was not quite accidental. More than ten years her junior, he had a nerve, that boy. But it was that kind of night.

      She had tranquillized her doubts, allowed herself to believe that this time it would be different. Her own experience told her that politics was bound to end in failure. She had seen it when she worked for the United Nations, where even the most elementary, obvious truths – ‘These people are dying and need help!’ – could get tangled up in turf wars, rivalries, bureaucratic indecision, vanity and, that most decisive of categories, ‘interests’. So often she had felt – she stopped saying the words, knowing that to utter them out loud made you a hippy, a naïf who could be ignored – that something must be done. And so often it had not been.

      For years she had come to believe that the last truly worthwhile work she had done was back when she started out, as an aid worker in Sudan. Handing out sacks of grain from the back of the truck: that had value. The minute she had stepped back from the frontline, lured by the promise of helping more than one person at a time, she had been less use. The titles were grander – first she had been involved in policy, then strategy, finally, at the UN and the State Department, she had been at the highest levels of diplomacy – but she remained stubbornly unimpressed. Help was what she was interested in, and she’d begun to lose faith that she, or anyone in these grand jobs, could ever deliver it.

      Then Stephen Baker had appeared. Reluctantly and despite herself, she had allowed the hide she had grown over her once-tender idealism to be pierced. He had done it to her, breaking through layer after layer of scepticism, until he had found the person underneath – the person she had not been since she was twenty-five.

      Now, though, the ship was listing. She had got it wrong. Again. Politics would always rise up and strangle hope, like a weed choking a flower. She had been stupid to think it would be any different this time.

      But

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