The Chosen One Read Online Free PDF

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 political combat who stored a million and one facts about the politics of the United States in a phenomenal brain atop a wheezing, morbidly obese body.
    ‘Mr President. We need to go across to the Roosevelt Room. You’re signing VAW in two minutes.’ A small turn of the head. ‘Hi Maggie.’
    Baker took his jacket off the back of a kitchen chair and swung his arms into it. ‘Walk with me.’
    The instant he began moving she could see the Secret Service agents alter their posture, one whispering into his lapel, ‘Firefly is on the move.’ Firefly, the codename allocated to Baker by the Secret Service. The bloggers had been kept busy for a week, deconstructing the hidden meaning of that one.
    ‘What kind of options are you after, Mr President?’
    ‘I want something that will get the job done. There’s an area the size of France that’s become a killing field. No one can police that on the ground.’ As they walked, a pair of agents hovered close by, three paces behind.
    ‘So you’re talking about the air?’
    He looked Maggie in the eye, fixing her in that cool, deep green. Now she understood.
    ‘Are you suggesting we equip the African Union with US helicopters, Mr President? Enough of them to monitor the entire Darfur region from the sky?’
    ‘It’s like you always said, Maggie. The bad guys get away with it because they think no one’s looking. And no one is looking.’
    She spoke slowly, thinking it through. ‘But if the AU had state-of-the-art Apaches, with full surveillance technology – night vision, infra-red, high-definition cameras – then we could see exactly who’s doing what and when. There’d be no place to hide. We could see who was torching villages and killing civilians.’
    ‘Not “we”, Maggie. The African Union.’
    ‘And if people know they’re being watched—’
    ‘They behave.’
    Maggie could feel her heart racing. This was what anyone who had seen the massacres in Darfur had been praying for for years: the ‘eye in the sky’ that might stop the killing. But the African Union had always lacked the wherewithal to make it happen: they didn’t have the helicopters to monitor the ground below, and so the killers had been free to slaughter with impunity. Now here was the American President vowing to give them the tools the dead and dying had been crying out for. The spark of excitement was turning into a flame – until she remembered that she was about to lose her job.
    ‘We only have very narrow majorities in the House and Senate, sir. Do