He attempted a smile. ‘Some of you work in the White House. Some of you don’t.’
Maggie stared at her feet.
‘I need your advice,’ he went on. ‘This presidency is under sustained assault. We knew it would happen one day. But not as soon as this.’ He paused. ‘Stuart, remind us what we know.’
‘Thank you, Mr President.’ Stuart Goldstein cleared his throat and moved to the edge of the sofa he was on so that he could have a line of eye contact with everyone in the room.
He looked horribly uncomfortable. Maggie always felt for Stuart in casual situations. His body was not designed for it. He needed a suit and a hard chair, preferably on the other side of a desk. In casual clothes, or on a couch, he was lost.
‘Vic Forbes, from New Orleans, Louisiana, supplied MSNBC with two stories in the course of little more than a single news cycle. Both of these stories were calculated to cause maximum damage and both required deep investigative skills. Or inside knowledge.’
Maggie saw Tara MacDonald shift in her seat.
‘At the same time, he has made an indirect, but personal contact with the White House.’
Now both MacDonald and Sanchez sat to attention.
‘Last night someone posing as a friend of Katie Baker’s sent her a message via Facebook.’
There was a gasp.
Stuart went on. ‘This message effectively claimed responsibility for both the first MSNBC story and, in advance, the second. He said it would come in the morning and it did. He also made a very direct and personal threat against the President.’
There was a pause. All eyes were on Baker, who eventually spoke. ‘Tell them what he said, Stuart. His exact words.’
Goldstein cleared his throat. Maggie noticed that he looked nervous. Was that because he was not used to addressing a large group, like this one? No. As Maggie watched, a hint of colour appeared at the top of Goldstein’s cheeks, and she realized the source of his awkwardness. He was straying, however indirectly, into a wholly alien realm. Talking about Katie Baker and her friend Alexis, discussing live chat on Facebook, forced Stuart Goldstein – married to a fellow political consultant but without children – to enter the world of family life, of fathers and daughters, of vulnerable teenage girls, a world, in short, utterly remote from his own.
He began to read. ‘I have more stories to tell. The next one comes tomorrow morning. And if that doesn’t smash his pretty little head into a thousand pieces, I promise you this – the one after that will. Make no mistake: I mean to destroy him.‘
Tara MacDonald gasped, suddenly looking like the mother of four that she was, an angry and protective matriarch, as she shook her head and muttered, ‘That poor child.’ In an instant the fury that had been brewing inside the White House ever since the psychiatrist story first broke had a focus: loathing for this man who had not only sought to derail the Baker presidency in its infancy but had dared to prey on a child.
Stuart continued. ‘Secret Service traced the communication to a house in Bethesda, Maryland. They raided the property. The computer was there, but not the person. Turns out the machine was a dumb terminal. Guy was operating it remotely. Eventually he was traced to New Orleans.’
‘So he’s the same guy? Forbes?’ Sanchez, his voice urgent, as if that was all he needed to get his coat on, head out and find the man himself.
‘Yep.’
There was a subtle movement in seats, as people braced themselves for the meat of the discussion: what do we do now?
Stuart held up a fleshy finger. ‘There’s one more thing. Agent Galfano did some extra probing, based on the computer IP address in New Orleans. She examined the data records of the so-called liberal blogger who so ingeniously hacked into MSNBC’s emails, thereby revealing their source.’
One step ahead as always, Tara MacDonald shook her head. ‘Don’t tell me. New Orleans.’
‘Yep. Forbes.’
Sanchez whistled in apparent admiration. ‘The guy outed himself.’
A noise like a door opening out on a snowstorm came through the room. Anyone hearing it for the first time would have been puzzled. But these veterans of eighteen months on the road together were used to the sound of Stuart Goldstein sighing. ‘Seems so,’ he said.
Sanchez crinkled his forehead, in a way that recalled the precociously bright teenager he had obviously been all of seven or eight years ago. ‘Why the fuck would he do that?’
Now Maggie spoke. ‘So that we’d listen to him.’ All heads turned to her, including, she noticed, the President’s. ‘He knew what we’d do. He knew we’d trace his message to Katie. He wanted to be certain that once we’d found him, we’d know he was for real. He wanted us to match him up to the MSNBC source.’
Stuart came in behind her. ‘First rule of blackmail. It’s not enough to have the goods. Your target has to know you’ve got the goods.’
Baker decided he had heard enough. ‘Thank you, Stuart. Everyone, that is the background to the decision we need to make this evening. Who wants to go first?’
Tara MacDonald didn’t wait for the customary polite silence. ‘I wanna be clear what exactly it is we’re talking about here? Are we discussing negotiating with a blackmailer?’
Neither Baker nor Goldstein said anything.
‘Because that’s a whole world of pain we’re entering if we go there. I mean, do we really think something like this could ever stay secret? I don’t mean whatever shit this guy’s holding, I mean the fact that we talked to him. Do we really think that’s going to stay underground? Uh-uh.’
Sanchez fiddled with his watch. ‘Doesn’t it depend a little on what we think the guy might have?’
Maggie felt the air suck out of the room. You had to admire the balls of the guy, the fearlessness of youth and all that. But there was only one person who could answer that question and you didn’t want to be the one to ask him.
There was, to everyone’s relief, a knock on the door. A butler, probably seventy years old. ‘Sir, I have an urgent note from the Press Office. For Mrs MacDonald.’
Baker beckoned the man forward; he walked in stiffly and presented the piece of paper to her. She pulled on the glasses that hung around her neck on a chain and read rapidly. Then she cleared her throat. ‘Forbes has just released a statement. Most networks are only quoting it in part, but apparently there’s a full version on Drudge. It reads as follows. “I want to make clear that the further information I hold on Stephen Baker does not relate to the way his campaign was funded nor to the state of his health.”’
Maggie realized she was holding her breath. So was everyone else. MacDonald kept reading.
‘“It’s about his past. An aspect of his past that I think will shock many Americans. An aspect of his past that the President has not shared with the nation. An aspect of his past he may not even have shared with his own family.”’
Maggie felt a new mood enter the room. It was a sensation she dimly recalled from her teenage years at home in Dublin. She could picture her younger self, sitting on the couch beside her sister Liz, cringing as a vaguely sexual scene appeared on the TV; her father getting up out of his chair, fumbling to change the channel. That was the sensation she could feel spreading over her and, surely, everyone else in this room: embarrassment. Sheer, hot-faced, look-away embarrassment.
What mortifying secret might the President have kept from his own wife? No one could bring themselves to look at him.
Maggie stole a glance at Stuart: he too was avoiding Baker’s gaze. But she could see that Stuart Goldstein’s embarrassment was already compounded by something that shook him much more: political panic.
How much more