The Long Game

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  There was enough grit in Ivy’s voice to tell me that Daniela Nicolae wouldn’t be taking her off guard again.

  “Did she tell you anything?” I asked. “About Senza Nome?”

  About who shot the president?

  Ivy’s expression went dangerously neutral, impossible to read.

  She told you something, I thought. Something that upset you. Something you think might be dangerous for me to hear.

  “Enjoy your party, Tessie.” Ivy shut the door on that topic of conversation. “Go. Be a normal teenager for once.”

  I didn’t tell her that given what she did—and what I had every intention of doing tonight myself—normal was probably a relative term.

  CHAPTER 37

  “You have barely said a word since I picked you up, Kendrick.” Henry pulled off the highway and arched an eyebrow at me in challenge. “Meditating on the wisdom of attending a party that requires both breaking and entering?”

  I’d been quiet because I’d been thinking about Ivy. About the bruise on her wrist. About what she’d done to get it.

  I was trying to get a rise out of someone, and I succeeded.

  “Tess?” Henry used my first name rarely enough that I couldn’t keep my eyes from flickering toward his. In the instant before I looked away, I got the sense that he saw more in mine than I meant for him to.

  “What’s a little B-and-E between friends?” I said lightly.

  I waited for Henry to make some kind of comment about my fondness for felonies. “As your friend,” he said instead, lingering briefly on the word, “am I allowed to ask where you were a moment ago? What you were thinking?”

  A month ago, Henry wouldn’t have asked.

  A month ago, I wouldn’t have answered.

  “Ivy went to see the terrorist behind the hospital bombing.”

  I could see the gears in Henry’s head turning as he processed that information. My heart thudded against my rib cage. I hadn’t planned on telling him—on telling anyone—this.

  I had always been better at keeping other people’s secrets than sharing my own.

  “Ivy had a bruise on her wrist.” I kept my sentences short. “I saw it. I asked her about it.”

  Henry read between the lines. “I am going to go out on a limb and wager that Ivy was not in what one would call a sharing mood about the bruise—or the terrorist.”

  I could have snorted. I could have made a wry comment about the fact that the phrases Ivy Kendrick and sharing mood didn’t belong in the same sentence.

  Instead, I found myself saying, “Ivy told me that she was trying to get a rise out of the terrorist. I think she was hoping she could bait the woman into saying something about the attack on President Nolan.”

  There was a beat of silence.

  After the hospital bombing, I hadn’t told Henry that I suspected Walker Nolan was in some way involved. I hadn’t ever told him that Ivy thought there might be a fourth player in his grandfather’s death. In the short time we’d known each other, the things I hadn’t told Henry Marquette were legion.

  But he was there, and he was listening, and all I could think about was Henry playing my partner in crime in the front seat of Bancroft’s car, Henry washing the blood from my hands the day John Thomas was killed.

  “The group that claimed responsibility for the attack against the president?” I said, letting my eyes linger on his. “The intelligence community calls them Senza Nome. The Nameless. They specialize in government infiltration.”

  Henry pulled the car to a stop in a residential area about a mile away from the school. His hand hovered over the key for a moment before he turned it, killing the engine.

  “I don’t suppose Ivy volunteered any additional information,” Henry said, his face moonlit through the dash. “About this Senza Nome.”

  I looked out the window at the darkness enveloping the neighborhood around us. “Ivy doesn’t volunteer much.”

  There was another long silence, and in that silence, Henry’s hand made its way to the very edge of mine.

  I couldn’t make myself pull back.

  “Do you have any idea what Ivy was hoping to get out of the terrorist?” Henry asked.

  If Henry had said a word—a single word—about my relationship with Ivy, I would have decked him. Better, by far, to talk about government conspiracies than feelings.

  “Ivy said something the other day,” I told Henry. “She said that Walker Nolan didn’t have the kind of insider information that Senza Nome would have needed to pull off this attack.”

  “But someone did,” Henry filled in.

  “Someone did,” I repeated. “I think Ivy suspects they might have someone high up in the government, someone close to the president.”

  Saying the words out loud solidified the thought in my mind. Infiltration. Assassination. It made sense.

  “Does Ivy have any suspects?” Henry asked quietly.

  “I don’t know,” I said, my hand easing away from his and his from mine. “I don’t know what she suspects or what she’s planning.”

  Or if she’ll come home with worse than a bruise the next time around.

  Before Henry could reply, I opened the car door. I had two choices: sit around and think about what Ivy was doing, or get out of this car and do something myself.

  CHAPTER 38

  In the process of breaking into my exclusive private school in the dead of night, I learned three things.

  First: there were tunnels that ran underneath the school, a vestige of a train station project that had been abandoned before Hardwicke had acquired the land in the early 1900s.

  Second: the Hardwicke administration had sealed all the tunnels but one, which had been cleared by the Secret Service as an additional escape route, should the need to get presidential and vice presidential children off campus arise.

  And third: the one functional tunnel wasn’t that hard to breach after hours if you somehow discovered its existence and had a student ID, a begrudging accomplice in the Icelandic Secret Service, and a lack of basic self-preservation as reflected in a willingness to both scale security walls and risk being caught on camera.

  By the time Henry and I arrived at the rendezvous point, there was a freshman directing students to the tunnel’s hidden entrance. Henry and I descended in silence. The tunnel was dark and lit only by hundreds of glow sticks that someone—presumably Di—had scattered artistically throughout.

  Henry knelt down and picked up a hot-pink glow stick. He held it out to me and gave me a dry look. “There is a high level of probability that we will regret this.”

  I plucked the proffered glow stick from his hands and smiled. “I don’t believe in regrets.”

  When the tunnel forked, signs posted on the wall instructed us to take a right. We followed the instructions—and the sound of music in the distance.

  When we finally reached the end of the line and pushed through a metal grate that had been propped open, it took me a moment to realize where the tunnel had let out.

  Is that a swimming pool?

  “The Aquatic Complex,” Henry told me.

  “Yeah,” I said, glancing around. “I got that.”

  Stadium seating surrounded us on all sides. An Olympic-sized training pool was set into the floor. Someone had positioned a trio of kegs along one edge. And farther down, near the diving pool, I could make out what appeared to be a bowl of punch and a veritable castle of red plastic cups.

  “This is not going to end well,” Henry said, eyeing a couple of seniors climbing up to the diving platform, red cups in hand.

  As if summoned by the mere thought of something being a bad idea, Di appeared beside us. She had a bottle of champagne in each hand. With an imperious smile, she set one on the ground and opened the other. Champagne fizzed to the top, and Di held it over her head in victory.

  “You asked for a party,” she told me, over the sound of the music.

  “You might want to turn that down,” Henry told her.

&nb
sp; “Pshaw!” Di gestured rather liberally with the champagne bottle. “This building has walls so thick that it is practically soundproof!”

  Forty yards away, one of the senior boys came barreling off the high dive, fully clothed.

  Di frowned. “This is an American custom?” she asked.

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  Di eyed the high dive, then smiled. She took a gulp of champagne, handed the bottle to me, and made a beeline for the ladder.

  An instant later, I saw a man wearing a suit and an earpiece walk by, muttering something in Icelandic under his breath.

  “How do you think she talked her bodyguard into this?” I asked Henry, tracking Di’s security detail as he grimly pulled her down off the ladder.

  “By threatening to do something worse?” Vivvie popped up beside us. She was wearing a half-dozen rainbow-colored leis. In contrast, her expression was almost comically serious. “I think you were right, Tess. People are really letting loose. Pretty soon, our classmates are going to be feeling very chatty.”

  Another fully clothed senior came barreling off the diving board.

  “Where do we start?” Vivvie asked.

  “With anyone John Thomas might have threatened.” I paused. “And with the girls from ISWE. All we need is for one person to open up and admit that John Thomas wasn’t the guy people want to remember. If we can get one, others will follow.”

  If the killer was here, I doubted he or she would volunteer their own motive—but someone else might.

  “You talk to the girls,” Henry said. “I have another target in mind.” I followed his gaze to a group of John Thomas’s friends standing near the keg.

  “You think they might know who else John Thomas had dirt on and what he was planning to do with it?” I asked.

  “I think,” Henry replied, “that John Thomas liked an audience. Whatever plans he had, he would have shared them with someone.”

  With that, Henry made his way across the room. I watched as an easy smile crossed his face. My first impression of Henry Marquette had been that he was a little formal, a little stiff. It had taken me longer to realize that he was a master at putting other people at ease—when he wanted to.

  As I watched Henry disappear into the crowd of John Thomas’s friends, I noticed two of those friends staring at something—or someone.

  Emilia Rhodes had arrived at the party.

  “Did we know that Emilia was coming?” Vivvie asked me.

  “No,” I said. “We did not. Come on.” By the time I arrived at Emilia’s side, there was no doubt in my mind that she’d noticed the whispers and stares. From my place beside Emilia, I stared back at John Thomas’s friends, my eyes narrowed. One of them flinched.

  “Are they scared of you?” Vivvie asked me over the pounding of the music.

  “It is possible,” I said, “that I threatened to castrate a couple of John Thomas’s friends my first week at Hardwicke.”

  “Of course you did.” Emilia looked from me to Vivvie, then back again. “I don’t suppose it will do any good whatsoever to tell you that I don’t need you glaring at anyone on my behalf?”

  I shrugged.

  “Or,” Emilia continued, “to suggest that the two of you go on your merry way, and I go on mine?”

  “Tess is the patron saint of misfits,” Vivvie said brightly. “And I’m a barnacle. Pretty sure you’re stuck with us.”

  “Pretty sure you’re here to find a way to help my brother,” Emilia countered. “So go. Fix. I don’t need a babysitter, let alone two.”

  Something about the way that Emilia had said that we were here to help Asher told me that she was as well. As she strolled into the fray, I tracked her gaze to a boy sitting up on the bleachers. Unlike most of the guys around him, he didn’t look particularly inebriated. Or particularly inclined to chat.

  “Who’s that?” I asked Vivvie, nodding toward the boy.

  “Matt Benning,” Vivvie supplied promptly. She had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of everyone at Hardwicke, from the students down to the janitor. “He has a little sister. Lizzie. She’s a freshman. Their dad works in Hardwicke security.”

  Apparently, while I’d been thinking about who had motive to kill John Thomas Wilcox, Emilia had been coming up with some questions of her own.

  I caught up to her just as she reached the bottom of the bleachers. “What do you want with Matt Benning?” I asked her.

  “What do you think?” Emilia said, her eyes still on her target. “I want to know why anyone suspects my brother of murder when the whole thing—including the real killer—should have been captured on video.”

  Vivvie popped around to stand directly in front of Emilia. “I know you’re not going to want to hear this,” she said, “but you should let Tess talk to Matt.”

  “Why?” Emilia returned. “Because my twin is the one the police are desperate to pin this on, or because people don’t like me the way they like Tess?”

  “Neither,” Vivvie said softly. “Because if John Thomas was threatening someone, if he hurt someone or blackmailed them or made them do something they didn’t want to do, they’ll talk to you. Not Tess, Emilia. You.”

  Emilia took a single step back from Vivvie. I could see her wanting to tell Vivvie that wasn’t true.

  The words dried up on her lips.

  “I’ll talk to Matt,” I told Emilia. You can do this, I continued silently. I knew better than to say those words to her out loud.

  “Fine.” Emilia turned her back on me. She didn’t want to do this, but she would—for Asher.

  Matt Benning didn’t so much as glance my way when I took a seat behind him on the bleachers. He was sitting on the edge of a group of guys, close enough to give the appearance that he was part of their conversation, but making no move to actually join it. He gave off an air of being present but not really a part of things.

  I’d been that person, back in Montana.

  “Not in the mood for a drink?” I asked him.

  He didn’t turn around. “Not much of a drinker.”

  I managed a small smile. “Me neither.”

  I settled into silence then. I rested my forearms on my legs and waited. Before moving to DC, I’d spent my entire life on my grandpa’s ranch. I had a sixth sense for knowing when to approach and when to let a tetchy horse approach me.

  Minutes crept by as Matt and I sat on the edge of the crowd, neither one of us saying a word.

  “They’re going to catch us, you know.” Matt’s voice was naturally deep and even-keeled. My gut said that he would have been good with horses, too. “There are cameras everywhere on this campus.”

  I slid down to sit beside him but kept my gaze focused straight ahead. “Not everywhere, apparently,” I said.

  If there were footage of John Thomas’s murder, the police would have already made an arrest. I didn’t bother putting that into words. “Were you and John Thomas friends?” I asked Matt instead.

  For several seconds, Matt said nothing. “I have a little sister,” he said finally. “Freshman. She asked me to take her picture the other day.”

  It took me a moment to catch the implication—his little sister had been one of the girls to join the ISWE project.

  “Did you take the picture?” I asked. If he’d agreed to help his sister with our protest, that told me something about the kind of guy he was.

  “I did.”

  I turned that over in my head for a second or two before I took a risk. “Do you know Asher Rhodes?” I asked. “Because if you know Asher at all, that means that you know he didn’t kill John Thomas.”

  Matt neither agreed nor disagreed with that statement.

  “If I asked you who on this campus could get around the security feeds,” I ventured, “would you tell me?”

  Matt turned from me to direct his stare back out at the makeshift pool party going on below us. He picked a stray lei up off the bleachers and held it taut between his hands. “You’re assuming I know the answer to that
question.”

  Yes. I am. I let my silence speak for me.

  “You’re also assuming,” Matt continued quietly, “that I’m the kind of guy who likes to talk.”

  “You’re not?” I said.

  He rubbed his thumb over one of the flowers on his lei. “I’m the kind of guy who likes to keep his head down.”

  That was why he was here, sitting on the edge of things, just close enough to blend.

  “If you were really the kind of guy who kept his head down,” I pointed out, “you wouldn’t be here.”

  At a completely illegal party, where you know we’re going to get caught.

  Matt responded to my comment by turning to look at a cluster of girls by the punch. It took me a moment to realize that one of them was his little sister, that he was probably here for the sole purpose of keeping an eye on her.

  My gut said that Matt was a good guy. But it also said that he wasn’t going to make waves. There was a good chance he and his sister attended Hardwicke on scholarship—scholarships they received because their father worked for the school.

  He wasn’t going to tell me anything his father had said.

  He was going to keep his head down and keep watch.

  Luckily, I had other options. I leaned back against the row of seats behind me, watching the group of freshman girls Matt had been keeping watch over. They were young—excited to be here and playing it cool.

  Something tells me Matt’s little sister isn’t so into keeping her head down.

  I texted Vivvie. And then I waited.

  CHAPTER 39

  “Here’s the deal,” Vivvie told me as we walked along the edge of the pool, dodging partygoers as we went. “Lizzie’s father is really stressed out right now because there are some major questions about how, exactly, someone managed to black out the library security cameras the day John Thomas was murdered. The police have been all over it. The headmaster has brought in a dozen new security specialists, and long story short—”

  Vivvie’s version of short was somewhat different from mine.