To Kill the President: The most explosive thriller of the year. Sam Bourne

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СКАЧАТЬ when, guess what, she trips over a pair of legs. Turns out it’s a corpse.’

      ‘Right.’

      ‘She calls the park police, because she’s a good citizen, and they identify the body and you’ll never believe who it is.’

      Maggie waited for the reveal, then realized McNamara was waiting for her. She briefly closed her eyes. ‘You seriously want me to guess?’

      ‘I thought it might be fun. Never mind.’ Now he sat himself on her side of the desk, so that his knees, exposed and hairy in his cargo shorts, were just a few inches away from Maggie’s face. He was wearing cologne, a fairly expensive one.

      ‘The dead man is none other than Dr Jeffrey Frankel, of these parts.’

      ‘The White House doctor? Jesus.’

      ‘The very same. Seems he blew his brains out early this morning.’

      ‘Christ. Why would he do that?’

      ‘I don’t know. And nor do you. And nor does anyone else. Not yet anyway. But I tell you what I do know.’

      ‘What’s that?’

      ‘That as soon as this death is announced, and I mean within ten seconds, maybe five, there will be two hundred different crackheads saying it was murder. Within ten minutes, there’ll be fully fleshed-out theories assigning guilt, motive and culprit. And by tonight, maybe tomorrow morning at the latest, every asshole in America will be linking to some five-thousand-word blog titled, “The Unanswered Questions about the Death of Dr Jeffrey Frankel”.’

      ‘And you know this because you—’

      ‘—because I am the king of this world. That’s right, Costello.’ He stood again. ‘I was once the master and lord supremo of this dominion. These people are my people. The lonely virgins living in their moms’ basements who never read a conspiracy theory they didn’t believe, and who never saw a corpse within twenty-five miles of the Beltway that died of natural causes – they are,’ and here McNamara raised his arms aloft, in the manner of a TV evangelist, to mimic a Southern preacher’s accent, ‘my people.’

      ‘They’ll be all over this.’

      ‘They will love it. This is gonna give Bill O’Reilly orgasms for the next six months. I know because it’d have done the same for me and my old comrades back in the day.’

      ‘Not that long ago.’

      ‘Yep.’ He adopted a baritone, as if doing a movie voiceover. ‘“The road from the wilder shores of the patriotic right to the White House proved shorter than any of them ever expected.” But I know you don’t hold that against me. I know you’re going to do your solemn duty.’

      ‘Which is what?’

      ‘You’re going to conduct the independent investigation by the White House Counsel’s office set up by the President to look into this tragic occurrence.’

      ‘Me?’

      ‘Yes, you. Your reputation travels before you, Miss Costello. That’s why I asked you to deal with those bimbo eruptions.’ He saw Maggie wince, but ignored it. ‘Which, incidentally, you can drop now. I’ll give that particular hospital pass to someone else. Look, I know you dug the previous folks out of some serious shit. Bottom line is, you’re a troubleshooter and we have here some major league trouble that needs shooting. Besides.’

      ‘Besides, what?’

      ‘People inside and outside know that you’re not one of us. In fact, I know you hate us. But that’s just a bonus. The thing is, you’re obviously not a loyalist. You’re not a partisan hack, everyone knows that.’ He gave her a knowing wink, which made her queasy. ‘Starting assumption of the wingnuts – I’m sorry, the concerned citizens – will be that this is a cover-up. But why would the respected Maggie Costello – loyal servant of the other team – engage in a cover-up to help this President?’

      Maggie felt the old guilt rising, accompanied by its ever-present companion: a biliousness as complete as if she were on the deck of a heaving boat. ‘She wouldn’t. Because I wouldn’t. And I won’t.’

      ‘Exactly.’ McNamara did a kind of vertical clap, letting his hands slap against each other in a chopping motion. ‘That’s my girl! You be as independent and rigorous as you want. Do whatever it takes. Those conspiracy theories will get started in the next hour or two. Your job is to—’

      ‘To get to the truth.’

      ‘I was going to say, your job is to shut them down. To deny them the oxygen on which they feed. How you do it is up to you. But I know this phenomenon. I’ve seen it a million times. Your mission is to strangle it at birth. Don’t let me down.’

       9

       The White House, Tuesday, 9.15am

      ‘Jim, a moment of your time?’

      They were filing out of the Oval Office, after yet another meeting of principals to discuss the stand-off with North Korea. The President had been subdued, Bob Kassian thought. He’d watched him idly twisting a pen between his fingers and turning at intervals to glance at the TV set, now permanently turned to a hostile cable TV network (‘It gets his juices flowing,’ McNamara had explained, before adding a leering reference to the First Lady.) The TV was muted, but subtitles gave a rough, if delayed, sense of the on-air conversation. Kassian was at the wrong angle but what he could see displeased him.

       … painted himself into a corner. I agree with Mark and John. At this point, anything short of a military response will look as if the President’s wimped out. You can’t issue red lines and not enforce them …

      Not for the first time, Kassian found himself cursing the media. Perhaps they didn’t realize how closely the President paid attention to them, to television especially. For them it might be no more than time-filling hot air, but it had an effect. The President took each of their remarks as a challenge. No, it was more basic than that. As a dare. When they said he was being weak, he’d lash out just to show that he was strong. Fine, when it was only the campaign. Fine, when lashing out merely meant bad-mouthing some senator or congressman who had bruised his ego. But the stakes were higher now.

      Indeed, Kassian had made some discreet inquiries of the senior butler in the Residence. It turned out that shortly after one am yesterday, the President had asked to see playbacks of the Sunday talkshows that had aired the previous day. Several pundits had demanded a show of US ‘resoluteness’ in the face of Pyongyang’s provocations. It struck Kassian as highly plausible that it was these goads to action from a few talking heads on NBC and CBS, rather than the specific wording of a statement from the DPRK Workers’ Party, that had pushed the Commander in Chief to the threshold of all-out nuclear war.

      The meeting in the Oval Office had been devoted entirely to the North Korea question, pitting hawks against doves. As so often, those who had seen armed combat with their own eyes were most cautious. Those whose familiarity with war extended to owning the director’s cut of Saving Private Ryan were more gung-ho. It was yet another fact of DC life that Kassian СКАЧАТЬ