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

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       12

       Chevy Chase, Maryland, Tuesday, 6.45pm

      Maggie had witnessed this ritual more than once, but the intensity of it struck her with as much power now as if it were the first time.

      The front door was open, a crowd of people spilling out onto the stoop. Maggie had to force her way through, just as she’d done once in Jerusalem and – she recalled with melancholy – not so many years ago, here in Washington, DC. No one stopped her, no one asked who she was. This was a house of mourning and anyone who turned up was assumed to be grieving the dead.

      She pushed her way into the main living room, which was even more packed than the hallway. She could have been on a commuter train; she could barely move her arms. She counted at least a dozen White House colleagues, including several men whose faces were rendered unfamiliar by the addition of skull-caps.

      A man she took to be a rabbi stood at the front, leading the room in Hebrew prayers. Some spiritedly joined in the ancient tunes, some mumbled along, others stood in respectful silence. All stood as if under a heavy cloak of grief. Several wore expressions that were desperate.

      She scanned the room. The full range of ages. Plenty who were obviously Dr Frankel’s contemporaries: men she guessed were fellow medics, as well as some she’d have marked down as lawyers or accountants. But there were also scores of people her own age too: friends of the Frankel children, no doubt.

      On two of the walls, there were mirrors covered by sheets. It came back to her. That too was a Jewish custom. She remembered it being explained to her in Jerusalem: no scope for vanity or attention to the self when all focus must be on the dead.

      But on every other available inch of wall-space, and on the shelves jostling with books and ornaments – including an eight-branched candelabrum, a silver goblet and a pair of antique candlesticks – were family photographs. Dozens of them. Pictures of kids on beaches, now and thirty years ago; graduation photos; black-and-white portraits of turn-of-the-century Americans, their heads held high in that immigrant pose of aspiring formality.

      On the shelf nearest her, something caught Maggie’s eye. Printed on white card, in a stylish typeface, was an invitation.

       Jeffrey and Helen Frankel along with Philip and Miriam Stern invite you to the wedding of their children, Sheryl and Mark …

      No name was printed in the space just below. Maggie squinted to make out the date. A summer wedding, just six weeks from now.

      It was only circumstantial, nothing you’d present in a court of law. But it felt obvious that Jeffrey Frankel was a committed family man, surrounded by people he loved and who loved him, with plans for the immediate future. Maggie had known a couple of people with suicidal depression. But that’s not what she was seeing here.

      Now the rabbi was speaking in English. ‘As for man, his days are as grass. As a flower of the field, so he flourishes …’

      There was more Hebrew, a eulogy from one of the dead man’s teenage grandchildren, a precociously well-spoken girl whose lower lip began to wobble as she reached the final paragraph of her written speech, and finally an instruction from the rabbi for guests to form a line so that they could give their good wishes to the bereaved. This was the ritual Maggie remembered. Indeed, it was what she was here for.

      She was about to take her place in the queue, when a former White House colleague appeared at her side, bending down to kiss her on the cheek, simultaneously squeezing her shoulder: a gesture of mourners’ solidarity. It was Ben Jackson, formerly of the NSC; he’d been pretty junior when she was on the foreign policy team, even though they were around the same age, but he’d worked his way up in the last administration, leaving weeks after the new President was elected.

      ‘I didn’t see you at the funeral,’ he began but before she’d had a chance to reply, he said, ‘What an awful business. How’s it been there?’ He didn’t need to say what he meant by ‘there’.

      ‘Actually, I’ve barely been in the office today. But people will be taking this pretty badly, I’m sure.’

      ‘And what about you, Maggie? How’s it been for you these last few months?’

      She did her best not to bristle, though she suspected her shoulders had tightened. Had she heard smugness in that inquiry? Or at the very least an implied judgement? I cannot believe you work for that evil man.

      ‘Well,’ she smiled. ‘It’s different. You can certainly say that.’

      ‘Heroic of you to stay on, I gotta say. A few of us were together the other night and we were saying, “OK, could not do that myself, but hey: relieved one of the good guys is there, fighting the good fight.”’

      Maggie smiled weakly, unsettled by the notion of a ‘few of us’, out in Washington, talking about her. ‘Well, I do what I can.’

      ‘Though what the hell is he playing at with the North Koreans? It’s like every time he sees a hornets’ nest, he just has to jab it with a stick.’ He illustrated his point, by helpfully jabbing the air with an imaginary stick. ‘And that stuff he said about black people not being the same as “real Americans” ’cause they never chose to come here, I mean, does he even listen to the words that come out of his mouth?’

      Maggie’s head began to dip. It wasn’t his fault. Her friends talked the same way to her whenever they had the chance. So did Liz, obviously. And the woman who cut her hair. Pretty well everyone but Richard. She couldn’t disagree with them on the specifics. They were right. What the President said at his rallies, or on TV or online was – eight times out of ten – either appalling or a lie. Or both. She could not defend it.

      It was obvious to anyone looking in from the outside. She could not possibly stay. But what none of them understood was why she could not possibly leave.

      She stopped listening. But while her head was down, she was struck by Ben Jackson’s shoes. Absolutely nothing interesting about them at all: standard-issue, Washington-man black brogues. Except what set them apart in a town where high-achieving men always wore ironed shirts and polished footwear was that they were splattered with mud.

      Jackson was still talking, making a point about the President’s business interests, but she interrupted. ‘You were at the funeral, right?’

      ‘What? Yes.’

      ‘Just now? You came here from there?’

      ‘Yes.’