Red, White, and Blue

by Laura Hayden

  “Well . . . that’s the thing. I decided to not go home. I’m not sure how much help I would have been. I probably would have gotten in their way. Instead, I decided I’d bring someone by to see you.”

  “Who?”

  Kate smiled at the Secret Service agent who openly listened to the conversation. “You said you wanted him to visit more often.”

  “Buster?”

  “That’s the one. I just need for you to tell your agent to allow me to bring up a very important guest.”

  “Give him the phone.”

  Kate handed the agent her cell phone. “She wants to talk to you.” While she waited—a plastic smile plastered on her face—she prayed that Emily wouldn’t specify that she was expecting Kate and a dog rather than Kate and Emily’s ex-husband.

  The agent listened intently, then said, “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.” He handed Kate back the phone. “The president says for you and your guest to enter and proceed to the third floor. She’s in the sunroom.” Only the slightest gleam in his eyes suggested that he knew exactly who Nick was but was unsure why the president was so enthusiastic about his arrival.

  “Thank you.”

  Kate didn’t drop her phony smile until the door closed behind them. Then she allowed herself to sag with relief.

  “Gutsy move,” Nick said.

  “I’m not comfortable with this sort of obfuscation,” she admitted. “It could have so easily blown up in our faces.”

  “But it worked.”

  “But it worked,” she echoed. “For the moment . . . Buster.”

  “Woof.”

  Once in the private residence, she led him down the hallway and to the back staircase, where they climbed to the third floor. They wound their way past the tables and chairs that dotted the Central Hall and headed down the corridor toward the sunlit room ahead.

  Emily caught sight of Kate first since Nick was a few steps behind her and not quite in view. “Hey, where’s my little ma—”

  Her look of amused anticipation dissolved when Nick came into view. “What in the world is he doing here?”

  “An intervention?” he quipped. He stepped past Kate, surveyed the comfortable room, and dropped into an overstuffed chair. “Nice room.” He pretended to examine the fabric of the chair’s arm. “Pretty.” He bounced slightly. “Comfortable.” He shot her a grin that would disarm and charm any other woman in the world.

  Except Emily.

  Her usually expressive face remained blank. “What’s he doing here?” she repeated.

  “We’ve come here to talk to you.”

  Emily stared at her, and then something incredible happened. Something Kate had never seen before and never thought remotely possible. Emily’s left eye twitched and she turned away.

  For the first time ever in her life, Kate felt as if she had the upper hand with Emily. Emily—who could stare down angry protesters with a steely gaze. Emily—who relished arguments and ate unprepared debaters alive. Emily—who faced the toughest law professor at Georgetown with such confidence that the man began to question his own logic.

  Emily had never twitched when facing those challenges, but she had now.

  “You better sit,” Kate said with as much charity as she could muster.

  Emily sat, regaining her usual composure. “Can I get you something to drink? coffee? tea?” She smiled sweetly as she turned to Nick. “Arsenic?”

  Kate ignored the gibe. “First, what you did in terms of disaster aid was—in a word—miraculous.”

  Emily straightened, a small ripple interrupting her otherwise emotionless expression. “You’re the one who figured out the problem with the school construction. I’m just sorry it took a catastrophe of this proportion to uncover it. But I already have investigators looking into the situation. They’ll ferret out exactly how this happened and how many heads are going to roll over it.”

  Kate pointed to her. “This. This is the Emily I want to work for and work with. This is just one of the great things you’ve done and an example of the things you can do in the future. But if we’re going to continue working together, we have to straighten some things out.”

  “Like what?”

  Kate sat, an action meant to minimize the threat that her words would contain. She knew full well that the best way to play the superiority game was to do it on selected levels.

  She lowered her voice. “You should have never trusted Maia Bari.” She made it sound like a statement of quiet fact, not an accusation. “If you hadn’t foisted her on me and insisted she become part of the campaign staff, I doubt she would have ever gotten her hooks into Dozier and learned all about his financial irregularities. But you did and she did. And from there, she wouldn’t have gotten the connections she needed to blackmail half of Washington. She wanted to bring the government down—you, Talbot, everyone. And you know it. And now she’s dead.”

  Kate leaned forward, balancing her elbows on her knees. “I don’t think it was an accident.”

  Nick drew attention to himself by shifting in the chair, getting into a more comfortable position. “I found it really hard to believe that one too.”

  “True.” Kate turned back to Emily, who remained quiet. “Maybe you had her killed and Tim was simply an acceptable casualty in the line of duty. A dead Maia meant no more blackmail, no more threats to your power. No threats to Dozier and none to you in the future.”

  Emily looked shocked. “Me? I don’t have people killed. You know that.”

  “True. But what I do know is that you gave her far too much access far too quickly. Were you trying to create a protégée?”

  “A mini-me?” Nick said with a laugh.

  Emily shot him a look that made his laughter fade into uncomfortable silence.

  “No, I bet she had something on you. Something you couldn’t bear to have released.” A possible answer flashed in Kate’s head, an image she instantly wanted to erase from her imagination. “Or was she just a threat to what you wanted your whole life—this presidency?”

  Emily broke her silence, an indicator that Kate might have accidentally stumbled onto the truth. “Kate, she’d have destroyed this country. She had to be stopped—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Kate said, interrupting Emily. “Not anymore. She’s dead, right? But what about me? When Dozier confessed to me, did that make you start worrying about me too? Were you concerned that I might not believe that you knew nothing about Dozier’s problems?”

  Kate rose to her feet, unable to keep her cool, professional demeanor any longer. “The funny thing is I did believe you. What I didn’t believe was that Jack would give up his fortune so quickly, but you two were convincing.”

  Emily bristled visibly at the mention of Jack. She stood and straightened to her full presidential height. “Now, wait just a minute. I’ll have you know that Jack Marsh is an honorable man who—”

  “Sit down and shut up,” Kate ordered, surprising herself with the strength of her command.

  Emily didn’t sit, but her posture and expression changed, sagging visibly.

  “Jack Marsh was your lackey who flew to Panama and had the audacity to change the foundation records so that Nick is listed as the investment manager of one fund and my father for the other. My father!” she said, her voice reverberating around the room.

  The look of utter shock on Emily’s face appeared genuine, but Kate couldn’t be sure. Not anymore. The president sagged back into her chair as if her knees had given out, making her look decidedly unpresidential. “He did what?”

  “You heard me. Jack’s trying to make it look as if both Nick and my dad are involved in financial improprieties, and that I’m planning to funnel the Pembrooke stock profits into an offshore account in my father’s name. And Jack’s doing it on your command, right?”

  “Absolutely not.” Emily regained her strength and proved it by rising from the chair and crossing over to the nearest window. She leaned her head against the glass and slapped the frame with her open hand.
“That blithering idiot. I told him expressly not to do that. All we had to do was remove any connection between Dozier’s foundation and Green World.”

  “Well, evidently he didn’t listen.”

  She shrugged. “He’s too protective.”

  Kate gawked at the description. “Protective?”

  Emily turned away from the window and faced Kate. A cold gleam in her eyes signified that Kate had probably just lost the advantage of surprise and might be on the receiving end of some new and unsavory revelations.

  “You better sit down, Kate.” She glanced at Nick, who was beginning to rise from his seat. “And don’t you get up. I’ll have the Secret Service here in five seconds flat, and we’ll see just how fast they take you down.”

  Nick settled reluctantly back into the chair, matching her cold stare with his heated one.

  Kate refused to sit. There was no way she would give Emily the height advantage. No matter what.

  Emily cocked her head at Kate’s position. “Hmmm . . . toe to toe. Okay. I admire that.” She drew a deep breath. “You’ve seemed to lose sight of the bigger picture and are concentrating too much on the smaller pieces. Jack described you as a liability, and I’m afraid I have to agree with him.”

  “Since when have you turned to him for advice? Last thing I heard, you hadn’t seen him in years.”

  Emily offered her a sad smile. “Here I am worrying about how much you do know about me, and then I realize there’s so much you don’t know. Jack and I have been close for years. Since we were kids. I just never let you into that part of my life. But despite that, you still know too much, Kate. Pure and simple. You know my strengths but you also know too much about my weaknesses. I’ve come to realize that I can’t really trust someone who knows that much about me.”

  “You trust Jack Marsh. Sounds like he knows you better than I do.”

  “We’re . . . a lot alike.” Something crept into her expression that softened it, and Kate wondered if Emily and Jack had a far deeper relationship than she was willing to admit.

  Emily kept her voice low and soft. “Don’t make me go public with what I know.”

  “You mean with what you’ve trumped up,” Kate said.

  “I really regret that. The last thing I wanted to do was hurt you. I didn’t need Jack to go rogue and create stupid lies. We’ll have a talk about that the next time I see him. No, the beauty of my plan is that everything I have on you is true.”

  Emily offered her deadliest shark smile. “Your dad. How long has he been retired from Glaswell? Six years? I bet you didn’t know his retirement included a deferred stock option deal. Or that Pembrooke bought out Glaswell’s parent organization four years ago. Your father is due to make a nice bit of change when Pembrooke gets the drilling contract. That’s real, Kate. Not trumped up. You’ll be hard pressed to convince federal investigators, plus the press, that you knew nothing about it.”

  Kate opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

  “And Charles Talbot might even be pursuaded to unburden himself and admit that it was you, not me, who called him and threatened him with dirt you’d dug up on him. Isn’t that the very definition of blackmail? If you think about it, you helped a murderer avoid criminal prosecution. Bad girl . . .”

  The blood rushed so furiously in Kate’s ears that she could barely hear Emily when she turned and spoke to Nick.

  “And you, scum of the earth, I haven’t forgotten about you. How’s the job going? Getting your feet wet? That’s why I engineered that exact position for you. I figured you’d enjoy being a lobbyist. You schmooze well, Mr. Charm.”

  The expression that crossed Nick’s face contained none of his legendary charm. “You know what my father always said: ‘Flattery always comes before the flat iron.’ Quit trying to get back into my good graces, Emily. Just spill it.”

  “Here you go. Better Energy Alliance, a division of Stern, White, and Hodge, whose parent company is . . . the Pembrooke Group.”

  “Coincidence.”

  “On its own, yes. But not combined with pictures of you and Madam Chief of Staff over there having intimate late night assignations. I have some rather lovely shots of you two, looking like you’d just come out of the bedroom, all rumpled and such. There’s even one of you kissing. When those photos show up in the gossip columns, it’ll look bad—the White House chief of staff fooling around with the president’s ex.”

  Kate reached blindly behind herself and found a chair that she dropped into, her knees no longer willing to support her weight. After a moment, she managed to say, “I thought you said the last thing you wanted to do was hurt me.”

  “A good strategist works several moves ahead and covers all her bases.” Emily came closer. “And I had to do it. This country couldn’t stand the shock of what you know, what Maia knew, becoming public. That’s right. You know too much, Kate. That’s the bottom line. I really don’t want to have to expose your sins to the public—showing them how you’ve disgraced me by taking advantage of your position for financial gain. Not only you, but your loved ones too. Your quest for personal pleasure has resulted in a romantic relationship with my ex-husband. A relationship that I’m afraid might have originated during my marriage to Nick, which would, of course, make you the other woman.”

  She could have stood next to Kate’s chair, towering over her. But instead, Emily dropped to the couch, putting them on the same level. Instead of shouting, she spoke barely over a whisper.

  “Don’t make me say those things about you. Especially not about your dad. I actually like him.”

  Our Father, who art in heaven . . .

  Kate said nothing.

  “It doesn’t have to be this difficult, Kate.”

  . . . hallowed be thy name.

  “Don’t throw this friendship away, not after all this time.”

  Thy kingdom come . . .

  “Tell me you’ll play it my way. Tell me you’re still with me for the long haul.”

  . . . thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

  “Think of all the good things we can do. All the people we can help. Look at O:EI; it’s the first real step to saving this world from our mistakes.”

  Give us this day our daily bread.

  “Say the word and I can make all the bad stuff disappear.” She snapped her fingers as if to demonstrate the strength and swiftness of her power.

  And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

  Kate finally spoke, forcing all emotion from her words, leaving them flat but factual. “You can’t make the truth disappear. But remember, I know everything. All about the toll road program, the dirty tricks you played during the campaign, evidence showing that you and Jack stood to profit, just like Dozier. We even have proof that someone added my father’s name and Nick’s after the fact in an effort to discredit both of us. And despite all of your efforts to destroy the evidence, you failed. I still have all the documents in safekeeping.” Most of the documents, she said to herself.

  And lead us not into temptation . . .

  “I have faith that my truth will not only offset your lies, it will destroy them.”

  Emily betrayed no reaction except for her white-knuckle grip on the edge of the couch’s cushion.

  “Stalemate,” Nick muttered, almost to himself. He turned to Emily. “It’s a stalemate,” he repeated louder. “If you fire the first shot, we’ve got enough ammunition to hit back. Hard. You try to take Kate down, you’ll go down with her.”

  Emily released a string of terse expletives, a clear sign that she realized her predicament. And didn’t like it one bit.

  . . . but deliver us from evil.

  Kate knew there was only one thing she could do. The prospect should have felt frightening, but a sudden peace filled her, the sort of serenity that could only come from God. It was that sign she’d been looking for.

  Pure and simple.

  For thine is the kingdom . . .

  “Emily?” Sh
e stood and faced the person who had been her best friend for over twenty years.

  . . . the power . . .

  The person with whom she shared laughter and tears, a woman who she had hoped could be America’s greatest president.

  . . . and the glory, for ever and ever.

  “I quit.”

  Amen.

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  Welcome back to the world of Kate Rosen and Emily Benton. As you’ve learned, the road of their relationship isn’t particularly smooth, especially not after Kate has done some soul-searching. Is there any chance for recovery? That’s up to them.

  I know it sounds odd for me to talk about them as if they are real, but to me, they are. As a writer, you work very hard to create characters who become three-dimensional and realistic. If everything goes right, they almost gain lives of their own. I may plan scenes, set up plot points, but often, things simply . . . happen. The characters say something or do something I haven’t planned, and suddenly the story takes a slight detour from what I expected. That’s when you sit back and realize that you’ve been writing for four or five hours without a break, and it seems as if you’ve been sitting there for only minutes. We call that being in the zone—and it’s a marvelous feeling.

  This leads me to the admission that when asked “What’s next for Kate and Emily?” all I can say is—it’s up to them. I know what I think will happen, but you never know what surprises are around the bend when you’re working with two other headstrong women who may have ideas of their own.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Laura Hayden began her reading career at the age of four. By the time she was ten, she’d exhausted the children’s section in the local library and switched to adult mysteries. Although she always loved to write, she became sidetracked in college, where the lure of differential equations outweighed the draw of dangling participles.