‘But that’s one of your great strengths. You’re the American Dream.’
‘Yeah, yeah. The folks like that. But I’m running against Doctor Anthony Adams, PhD of New York. I’m the boy from the sticks. I’ve got to convince Georgetown and the New York Times and the Council on Foreign Relations – all that crowd – that I’m not too provincial to be President.’
‘I thought you wanted to be the outsider: Mr Smith goes to Washington and all that.’
‘No, Maggie. I want to win.’
Soon he was telling her how, once he’d got a scholarship to Harvard, he’d met people who spent the vacations in Paris or London or jetted off for weekends in the Caribbean. He, meanwhile, had to go back to Aberdeen and work shifts in the lumber yard or at the frozen fish processing plant: his father had emphysema and there was no other way to pay the bills.
‘Eventually I got away. My first trip out of the country. And I went to Africa. Just like you.’
He looked away from the road long enough for them to smile at each other.
‘I was in Congo, Zaire as it was then. Jeez, I saw some terrible things. Just terrible. And it’s still going on, if not there, then somewhere else. It’s like they’re taking turns: Rwanda, then Sierra Leone, then Darfur. The burning villages, the rapes, the children orphaned. Or worse.’ He glanced at her again. ‘I know you’ve seen some real horror yourself, Maggie.’
She nodded.
‘Well, it’s a long time ago now.’ He paused for a long minute until she wondered if she was meant to say something. Then he spoke. ‘I believe I can win this thing, Maggie. And if I do, I want to do something that only an American president can do. I want to dedicate some of the enormous resources of this country to stopping all this killing.’
She frowned.
‘I’m not talking about sending our army to invade places. We tried that already. It didn’t work out so well.’ Now it was her turn to smile. ‘We need to think of other ways to do it. That’s why I need you.’ He let that sentence hang in the air while she stared at him in disbelief.
‘Something tells me that you never forgot what you saw when you were twenty-one, Maggie. You never forgot it. It’s what makes you work so hard, even now, all these years later. Am I right?’
Maggie looked out of the car window, picturing the position papers, conferences and endless meetings of which her life now consisted. Each day she felt she got further away from that angry twenty-one-year-old woman she had once been. But he was right. What fuelled her still was the fury she had felt then about all the violence and injustice – all the sorrow – in the world and the determination to do something about it. These days, her ideals seemed to have slipped so far into the distance, it was a struggle to glimpse them. But Stephen Baker had just reminded her that they were still there. She turned back to him and nodded.
‘And that’s how I am, too. I never forgot what I saw out there. And about eighteen months from now, I’m going to have a chance to do something about it. Something big.’ He shifted the car down a gear. ‘Will you be with me, Maggie Costello?’
Now, nearly two years later, the President was reaching for a red plastic lunch box with one hand and opening the fridge with the other. ‘So what’s it to be, junior? Apple or pear?’
‘Can’t I have candy?’
‘No, young man, you cannot. Apple or pear?’
‘Apple.’
Stephen Baker wheeled around, an expression of deep seriousness on his face. ‘That’s not so you can use it to play baseball, is it?’
The boy smiled. ‘No, Dad.’
‘Josh.’
‘I promise.’
The President put the fruit into the box, clipped the top shut then placed it in his boy’s hand. Then he bent to kiss his son on the top of his head. Maggie noticed that he shut his eyes as he did it, as if in a moment of grateful prayer. Or just to savour the smell of Josh’s hair.
‘OK, young man, scram.’
Just then, Kimberley Baker came in, clutching a bag bulging with gym gear. Blonde and pretty as a peach in her college days, she was now usually described as ‘rounded’ or, by the less kind, ‘plump’. Magazines had obsessed about her weight when her husband first announced, the celebrity press zooming in on cellulite patches or a close-up of her rear-end in an ill-advised trouser-suit. She had gone on daytime TV, told how she had gained weight when Katie was born and how she had tried multiple diets – ‘including all the nutty ones!’ – to take the pounds off, but failed each time. Now, she said, she was comfortable with who she was and had decided to devote her energies to something more worthwhile than her waist size. The women in the audience had stood and cheered their approval, the host had hugged her and, within a day or two, she was declared a role model for female empowerment.
No less important, the political cognoscenti had decided that Kimberley Baker was an enormous asset to her husband. Female voters, in particular, had long been sceptical of Barbie doll, Stepford political wives; they liked what it said about Stephen Baker that his wife was a real, rather than artificially flawless, woman. That she was from Georgia, thereby connecting him with the vote-rich South, was an added bonus.
The Bakers could not say they were used to life in the White House, even if Tara MacDonald had already briefed People magazine that they were loving it. But Kimberley was certainly making an effort, chiefly for the children’s sake. She had been worried about it from the start, anxious about an eight-year-old boy and a thirteen-year-old girl entering the most vulnerable time in their young lives in front of the gaze of the entire world. She remembered her own adolescence as one long stretch of blushing embarrassment: the notion of enduring that with a battery of cameras permanently in your face, scrutinizing your clothes and your hair and relaying those images around the globe, seemed truly unbearable. During the campaign, Stephen Baker always got a laugh when he joked that the only two people who truly wanted him to lose the election were his opponent and his wife.
Now Kimberley was fussing over both Josh and her shy, gauche, pretty teenage daughter, bundling them out of the door and into the hands of a casually-dressed, twenty-something woman who looked like an au pair. In fact, she was Zoe Galfano, one of a Secret Service detail whose sole duty was the protection of the Baker children.
‘Maggie, something to drink? Coffee, hot tea, juice?’
‘No thanks, Mr President. I’m fine.’ The phrase still snagged in her throat on its way out, but there was no getting around it. Everyone addressed him the same way, including his closest advisors and oldest friends, at least inside the White House. He had realized early on in the job that if he asked some people to call him by his first name, then those to whom he had not made the same offer would feel offended. He’d end up telling everyone, ‘Call me Stephen,’ and that was too casual. Better to keep it formal – and consistent.
He checked his watch. ‘I want to talk about Africa. I saw your paper. The killing’s starting up again in Sudan; there’s hundreds of thousands at risk in Darfur. I want you to work up an option.’
Maggie’s mind started revving hard. Magnus Longley was all but certain to take her job away, and yet here was the President offering the opportunity she had always dreamed of. The timing was perverse – and painful. But she felt a rush of the same optimism that had always got her into trouble – and also got things done. She took a deep breath. Perhaps, somehow, the whole Asshole Adams debacle would melt away.
‘An option, for action?’ she asked.
Baker was about to reply when a head popped around the doorframe. Stu Goldstein, Chief Counselor to the President: the man who had masterminded the election campaign, the man who occupied the most coveted real estate in the White House, the room next door to the Oval Office. The veteran of New York City