Midwest, maybe California: ‘So what kind of work do you do?’
The question brought a warm wave of relief. It meant she didn’t recognize him. He felt the muscles in his back relax. ‘I’m kind of a consultant. I advise—’
‘You know what,’ she said, her hand still on his, her eyes searching for the door. ‘It’s too stuffy in here. Let’s walk.’
He said nothing as she led him out onto Claiborne Avenue, the traffic still heavy even at this late hour. He wondered if she could feel, just through his hand, that his pulse was racing.
Finally, they turned down a side street. It was unlit. She walked a few yards, turning left into an alley. It ran along the back of a bar, one of the few around here that had survived Katrina. He could hear a party inside, the sound of a toast delivered through a muffled loudspeaker.
She stopped and turned to face him, stretching up on her tiptoes to whisper into his ear. ‘I like it outside.’
Long before he had absorbed and understood her words, the blood was surging towards his groin. The sensation of her voice, her breath in his ear, flooded him with desire.
He pressed her hard against the wall, reaching immediately for her skirt. She pushed her mouth against his, kissing him enthusiastically. Her teeth bit into his lower lip.
The skirt was up and he began working at his belt. She pulled away from his mouth, offering him her neck instead. His tongue fell on it instantly, taking in the scent of her for the first time. It was familiar – and intoxicating.
Her hands ignored his unbuckled belt and moved upward, heading for his face. She was touching him, her fingers gentle. They moved down to his neck and suddenly pressed on it hard.
‘You like it rough,’ he murmured.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, the index- and forefingers of her right hand now firmly on his windpipe.
He wanted to pull down her underwear, but she suddenly seemed to be further away from him, her crotch no longer tight against his. He heard himself rasping.
He tried to prise her fingers off his throat, but there was no budging them. She was remarkably strong.
‘Look, I can’t breathe—’ he gasped. He caught a glimpse of her eyes, two bright beads in the night. No warmth now.
‘I know,’ she said, her left hand joining her right in fully circling his throat.
There was no coughing or spluttering, just a slow wilting in her hands, as she choked the life out of him. He fell quietly, any noise drowned out by the drunken chorus of Happy Birthday coming from the bar.
She straightened her skirt, reached down to remove the BlackBerry from the man’s jacket pocket, and headed off into the night, her scent still lingering in the Louisiana air.
The previous day
Washington, DC, Monday March 20, 07.21
‘Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks. Crap and bollocks.’
First she’d been thinking it, now she was saying it out loud, the words carried off in the onrush of wind.
Maggie Costello twisted her wrist to get another look at her watch, the fifth time in three minutes. No getting away from it. 7.21am: she was going to be late. But that was OK. It was only a one-to-one meeting with the White House Chief-of-bloody-Staff.
She pedalled furiously, feeling the strain in her calves and the heaving pressure on her lungs. No one had said cycling was going to be this hard. It was the cigarettes she blamed: she was fitter when she smoked.
So much for the fresh start. New job, new regime, she had told herself. Healthy eating; more exercise; quit the fags; no more late nights. If there was a plus to finding herself suddenly single, it was surely that she could now start each morning bright and early. And not just normal-human-being early, which 7.21am certainly counted as in Maggie’s book. No, she would start her day Washington early, so that a meeting at 7.30am would not feel like bumping into someone in the middle of the night. To the new Maggie, 7.30 would feel like an ordinary moment in the heart of the working day.
That had been the plan, at any rate. Maybe it was because she had been born and raised in Dublin, only coming to America as an adult, that she didn’t fit. Whatever the explanation, Maggie was fast coming to the conclusion that she was innately out-of-sync with all these bright, shiny Washingtonians, with their polished shoes and impeccable self-discipline, because no matter how hard she tried to embrace the DC lifestyle, getting up at the crack of dawn still felt like cruel and unusual punishment.
So here she was, late again, whistling down Connecticut Avenue at a lethal speed, willing Dupont Circle to come into view but knowing that, even when it did, she would still be at least three to five minutes away from the White House and that was before she had chained up the bike, cleared security by putting her bag and BlackBerry onto the conveyor belt that fed the giant scanning machine, dashed into the ladies’ bathroom, torn off her T-shirt and cycle-clips, swabbed her armpits, used the hand-dryer to restyle her hair, wrestled her still-sweating body into her much-loathed regulation Washington uniform, a barely more feminine version of a man’s suit and shirt – and somehow altered her appearance from under-slept scarecrow to member of the National Security Council and trusted Foreign Policy Advisor to the President of the United States.
It was 7.37am by the time she stood, panting and still red-faced, before Patricia, secretary to Magnus Longley. She had been with Longley for more than forty years, they said; rumour was, he had scooped her out of the typing pool on his very first day of work at his father’s law firm. The pair of them had been around forever, he a monument in permanent Washington, she his stone base.
It had been Patricia who had summoned Maggie to this meeting, in a telephone message that had woken her blearily at 6.29am, only for her to fall back into a fatal doze that lasted another twenty-five minutes.
‘He’s waiting for you,’ Patricia said, peering above her glasses – attached by a string around her neck – just long enough to convey a sharp look of disapproval, for her lateness, of course; but for other more important reasons, too. That cold, lizard’s blink of a glance had taken in Maggie’s appearance from top to toe and found it sadly wanting. Maggie looked down and realized with some horror that her trousers, ironed so carefully last night in preparation for the next day but thrown on in haste this morning, were now unacceptably creased and marked at the ankles by a line of cycle grease. And then there was her autumn-red hair which, in a gesture of personal rebellion, she kept long and tousled in a town where women tended to keep it short and businesslike. Patricia’s expression conveyed more clearly than any words that no self-respecting young lady would have gone to work dressed like that in her day. And in the White House, too!
Maggie passed her hand through her hair one more time, in a futile bid to impose some order, and stepped inside.
Magnus Longley was a veteran Mr Fix-it who had served either in the House, Senate or the White House since the Carter era. He was the requisite greybeard appointed to balance out – and allay any anxieties over – the President’s youth and lack of Washington experience. ‘He knows where the bodies are buried,’ was what everyone said about him. ‘And he knows how to bury any new ones.’
His thin, aged head was down when she came in, poring over a neatly squared pile of papers, a pen in his hand. He scrawled a comment in the margin before looking up, revealing a face whose features remained always neat and impassive. He still had all his hair which, now white, was combed perfectly into a parting.
‘Mr Longley,’ Maggie said, extending a hand. ‘I’m sorry I’m late, I was—’
‘So you think the Secretary of Defense is an asshole, is that right, Miss Costello?’
Maggie, parched already from the breakneck cycle ride, felt her throat