The Long Game

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “—the only way it could have been a student is if that student were a really good hacker working from the campus’s wireless network. Otherwise it would have had to be someone in security or high up in the Hardwicke administration.” Vivvie paused. “Very high up,” she emphasized.

  Before I could reply, a partygoer bopped into view, dancing between Vivvie and me. It took me a second to realize it was Asher.

  “Am I the only one who hears ‘high up in the Hardwicke administration’ and thinks that Headmaster Raleigh definitely has his shadypants moments?” he asked, still bopping around. When neither Vivvie nor I replied, he stopped dancing and lifted his hand in a solemn greeting. “Hello, friends of Asher!”

  “Asher!” I said, taking him by the elbow and pulling him toward the side of the room. “What are you doing here?”

  I hadn’t been lying when I’d told Ivy that I couldn’t imagine Asher coming tonight. Given everything that had happened—and the fact that at least one of John Thomas’s friends was probably spoiling for a fight—this could go very badly.

  “Welllllllll,” Asher hedged, dragging out the word. “I may have hitched a ride in the back of Emilia’s car. She may not know I’m here.”

  Nearby, Emilia was talking to a trio of sophomore girls. She glanced at me, then at Asher. Her eyes widened as she registered his presence, then narrowed.

  “Emilia may now know I am here,” Asher modified.

  I sensed the shift in the room the moment John Thomas’s friends noticed Asher.

  Henry made it to us before they did. “We need to get you out of here,” he told Asher.

  “I’ve gone to school with these people my entire life.” Asher glanced from Henry to me, bewildered. “If they think I might be capable of murder, I have clearly been doing this lovable-pacifist thing all wrong.”

  One second Asher was standing beside me, and the next, one of John Thomas’s friends had him by the lapels.

  “I’ve very recently sworn off fisticuffs,” Asher told him. “Quite undignified, the sign of a lesser man, gets you almost immediately accused of murder . . . which I did not commit,” he added hastily.

  “Let him go,” Henry said. Gone was the easy smile he’d used to infiltrate this group earlier. There was nothing even remotely easygoing about this Henry.

  All around us, the party fell silent. All conversation died off. The only sound was the constant beat of the bass line.

  The boy who had a hold of Asher got in his face. “You’re a dead man,” he said. “You think the powers that be in this town are going to let some dentist’s son get away with doing anything to the minority whip’s kid?”

  I stepped between them. I could see violence in the boy’s eyes as I broke his hold on Asher. This was the downside to providing an outlet for secrets and pent-up emotion to come bubbling to the surface.

  Any moment, the world could explode.

  A flash of light visible out the nearest window took the boy’s eyes off me, just for a second.

  “Security!” someone yelled.

  In the rush of madness that followed, it was every man for himself.

  CHAPTER 40

  “What could have possibly possessed you to come here?” Emilia gave her twin the single most aggrieved look I’d ever seen my life. “You’re grounded,” she reminded him. “You’re the prime suspect in a murder case. And I specifically told you not to come.”

  We’d made it out of the tunnel and taken refuge in a nearby coffee shop without getting caught by Hardwicke security—probably because security didn’t want to catch too many Hardwicke students.

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time?” Asher offered his sister an eighty-watt smile.

  “This is the very definition of a bad idea,” Henry told him.

  Asher sighed. “I always get those two confused.”

  I’d promised Ivy I wouldn’t call Asher. I’d promised her that I wouldn’t e-mail him or go see him. Technically, I hadn’t said anything about what I would do if he came to see me.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him.

  “The lapels of this shirt will never be the same,” Asher replied mournfully. “But I will persevere.”

  “No,” I said. “Are you okay? After the past few days—”

  “Lo, it is a story for the ages,” Asher intoned. “Of a boy wrongly accused and a text sent by someone who, it turned out, was not even his sister.”

  “I might actually kill you,” Emilia told him. She turned to Henry. “I might actually kill him.”

  “I would prefer you did not,” Henry told her. “Though I certainly understand the impulse.”

  “I’ve missed you guys!” Asher declared. “Except for Emilia. I still see Emilia all the time.”

  For fear that Emilia might actually do her brother physical harm, I intervened. “What did you find out?” I asked Emilia.

  Emilia turned her attention from Asher to me, and as she did, I saw her guard going up, saw the transition from a much aggrieved sister to a person nothing and no one could touch. “Nothing worth repeating,” she said.

  I recognized, in her voice, that Emilia had heard something tonight. I wondered how much of what she’d heard had sounded familiar to her. I wondered how she was holding up with that, but knew she wouldn’t tell me, just like she wouldn’t betray anyone else’s confidences about John Thomas.

  “Anyone who might have had a motive?” I asked.

  Emilia shrugged. “Motive? Yes. Opportunity? Ability? Not so much.”

  “On the subject of ability,” Vivvie cut in, “we should add hacking to the list. If the hedgehog was a student, he or she would have had to figure out how to hack the security feeds via the campus wireless network.”

  “The hedgehog?” Emilia asked, wrinkling her brow.

  “I approve!” Asher declared. “Though I am somewhat hurt that the lot of you have been hedgehog hunting in my absence. Just because a person is suspected of premeditated murder doesn’t mean they don’t have feelings.”

  “What would it take to hack the security feeds?” Henry asked Emilia, ignoring Asher with the expertise of someone who had been strategically ignoring him for a very long time.

  “I don’t know,” Emilia told Henry. “But I can find out.”

  To say that Emilia was good with computers would have been an understatement. I had very little doubt that given the time and motivation, she could figure out how to hack the security feeds herself.

  “Did you get anything out of John Thomas’s friends?” Vivvie asked Henry.

  “I discovered how John Thomas found out about my family’s personal issues, how he got ahold of Hardwicke medical records.”

  I’d guessed, the day John Thomas died, that he had obtained the information about Henry’s father from his own. I’d overheard enough of Ivy’s conversations to recognize just how easily a person could pick up on things they weren’t supposed to know.

  “Congressman Wilcox kept files,” Henry said. “On major and minor players in Washington. Not that uncommon, among a certain set.”

  My thoughts went to Ivy’s files. Her program. Ivy’s clients could count on her absolute discretion—until and unless something happened to her. If she went off the grid, the program started releasing secrets.

  “What is uncommon,” Henry commented, “is that John Thomas had somehow managed to get access to his father’s files. I suspect his father had no idea.”

  No wonder John Thomas had paled when I’d threatened to tell the congressman what he was up to. It would have been bad enough if John Thomas’s father had simply let the information slip in front of his son, but if John Thomas had acquired the information without the congressman knowing . . .

  That wouldn’t have gone well for John Thomas.

  “What other information do you think was in those files?” Vivvie asked, wide-eyed. “I mean . . . are we talking about blackmail material, or BLACKMAIL MATERIAL, all caps?” She punctuated those words with an elaborate gesture.

&nbs
p; “If I had to venture a guess,” Henry said, “I would go with the latter.”

  BLACKMAIL MATERIAL, all caps. Silence fell over the table. Emilia was the one to break it. “If John Thomas had access to his father’s files,” she said, “then we’re not just talking about him having dirt on Hardwicke students.”

  We were talking about Hardwicke parents, about politicians and lobbyists and power players of all stripes. If John Thomas had opened his mouth . . .

  We’re looking for someone with access to Hardwicke, I reminded myself. But I couldn’t help thinking that Ivy had said more than once that Hardwicke was Washington.

  And I knew better than most how dangerous this town could be.

  CHAPTER 41

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

  John Thomas Wilcox was laid to rest on Saturday morning—less than twelve hours after the party had been busted up. Nearly the entire student body attended the funeral, with their parents in tow. It was a Who’s Who of Washington’s elite, and all I could think was that if John Thomas had read his father’s files, he probably had blackmail material on half the people here.

  I wondered if he’d tried to use it.

  Beside the open grave, the reverend continued talking, the low hum of his voice assuring us that the Lord worked in unfathomable ways. John Thomas’s family stood a few feet away. His mother was shaking, her shoulders rounded, her body on the verge of crumbling in on itself. Beside her, there were two younger boys: one in his early teens and another who couldn’t have been older than seven or eight.

  The congressman stood on the opposite side of the boys, his hands balled into fists at his side. He looked grief-stricken—there was no other word for the lines of sorrow etched into the corners of his eyes and mouth. His whole face looked heavy, like the only thing keeping his skin on his face was the tense set of his jaw.

  The congressman is very good at paying attention. John Thomas’s statement—his threat—came back to me, and I thought of the way father and son had interacted in the ballroom that night, the look on John Thomas’s face when Henry had said the word disappointment. Congressman Wilcox might have had a gift for ferreting out the skeletons in other people’s closets, but my gut said that he hadn’t paid attention to his son.

  As the service ended, my gaze slid to my left—to Bodie. Adam had told me once that Bodie didn’t do funerals, and yet here he was. With me.

  And here Ivy wasn’t.

  I hadn’t told her I was planning on coming today. I hadn’t told her that I needed her here. I hadn’t asked her to stay, because she would have. And she would have taken one look at me—the way I was watching the congressman, the way I surveyed the presence of each and every mourner—and she would have known that I had more than one reason for coming.

  “You ready?” Bodie asked me.

  “Not yet,” I said, making my way toward the aisle. A few feet away, I caught a glimpse of a familiar head of strawberry-blond hair. Emilia Rhodes. She peeled away from the crowd and made her way to the far side of the grave. She stood, looking down at the casket. Without thinking, I started walking toward her. When I came up behind her, her head was bowed, and her eyes were closed. At first glance, she looked like she was praying, but when I got closer, I could hear the words her lips formed. They were barely more than a whisper, but her body shook with them.

  “I hope it hurt.”

  That was her prayer. That was her good-bye to John Thomas Wilcox.

  After a moment, she looked up from the grave, her face a mask of grief, looking like any other mourner. She saw me standing beside her. “How many times do I have to tell you that I don’t need your help?” she asked me quietly.

  “At least twice more,” I told her.

  “I should go,” she said. “And so should you.”

  I didn’t take Emilia’s advice. Instead, I slipped into the receiving line behind the other mourners. When I reached the front of the line, Congressman Wilcox took my hand. “Theresa,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”

  Did you know that John Thomas was using your files? I curled my fingers around the congressman’s. Did you know that he knew about your affair?

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.

  “You’re the one who found him.” Mrs. Wilcox’s voice was wispy and rough. “You were with him when he . . .” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “I was with him,” I said. I didn’t tell her that I’d tried to help. I didn’t tell her that I’d pressed my blazer to his chest to staunch the flow of blood. “I’m sorry,” I said again, and my eyes went back to the congressman. I’m sorry that your husband is cheating on you. I’m sorry something in his files might have gotten your son killed.

  I turned to leave, but the congressman reached out to stop me. His hand was heavy on my shoulder. My stomach twisted.

  “Did John Thomas say anything to you?” the congressman asked. “At the end, did he . . .” John Thomas’s father choked on the words.

  Tell. Didn’t. Tell.

  An hour before John Thomas’s death, I’d threatened to tell his father that he was spilling secrets. I’d threatened to tell the congressman that John Thomas had told me about his affair.

  Tell him I didn’t tell.

  “I have to go,” I said, pulling away from the congressman’s grasp. As I turned to leave, the next mourner in line stepped forward. She was in her early forties, with girl-next-door looks and red hair. She was wearing a black dress and matching heels.

  I recognized her immediately.

  “Congressman, Mrs. Wilcox,” the woman said, her manner professional, more colleague than family friend. “My deepest condolences.”

  I’d seen the congressman with this woman. I’d seen him burying his hands in her red hair. But as I forced myself to walk past her, it took everything in me not to turn around, because the woman the congressman was having an affair with—the fund-raiser wasn’t the only place I recognized her from.

  Who is this Daniela Nicolae? I could see the red-haired woman asking the camera. How did she get into the country? And why is an anonymous tip the only thing standing between us and a terrorist attack on American soil?

  Congressman Wilcox was having an affair with the female pundit I’d seen flaming the Nolan administration on the news.

  CHAPTER 42

  An internet search told me that the pundit’s name was Stephanie Royal.

  “Pancakes.” Bodie set them in front of me.

  I gave him a look. We’d gotten home from the funeral ten minutes earlier. He hadn’t asked why I’d been so quiet on the drive.

  “I can make two things, kid: pancakes and my hangover cure.” Bodie arched an eyebrow at me. “Are you telling me you’d rather I haul out the blender?”

  I picked up a fork and stabbed it into the pancake in answer.

  John Thomas accessed his father’s files. I couldn’t keep from going back over everything I’d discovered as I chewed. The congressman has a very personal relationship with the Nolan administration’s most vocal critic. I thought about the media leaks. Before Daniela Nicolae had sent Walker—and every major news outlet—that video, there had already been leaks.

  The terrorist’s name.

  The fact that the attack had been averted because of a tip from an anonymous source.

  The picture of Daniela Nicolae’s very pregnant stomach.

  Did Congressman Wilcox have access to information like that? My stomach clenched. Did John Thomas?

  The front door opened and closed. Bodie’s hand went to his side. To his gun, I realized a moment later.

  “Tess?”

  I relaxed the second I heard Adam’s voice. Bodie rolled his eyes heavenward but let his hand fall away from the weapon.

  “In here, Boy Wonder,” Bodie called out.

  When Adam came into the kitchen, he and Bodie looked at each other for a few seconds, and then Bodie took a step back from the kitchen island. “I’d offer you a pancake,” Bodie told my uncle, “but I figure
you’re probably watching your girlish figure.”

  With a wink at me, Bodie strolled out the door.

  Adam took a seat next to me at the counter. “For the record, I would have gone with you to the funeral,” he said, picking up a fork and stealing a bite of my pancake. “So would Ivy, if she’d known.”

  I looked down at my plate. I hadn’t told them about the funeral, because I hadn’t wanted either of them asking questions about why I’d decided to go. I hadn’t wanted to tip them off to the fact that while Ivy was off investigating the attack on the president, I was running an investigation of my own.

  But if there was even a chance that my case was connected to hers, I couldn’t keep that quiet. “Congressman Wilcox is having an affair with a woman named Stephanie Royal.”

  It was clear from the expression on Adam’s face that he knew exactly who Stephanie Royal was.

  “Does Congressman Wilcox have high-level security clearance?” I asked. “Could he have been the source of the media leaks about the bombing?”

  Adam didn’t answer. I took that to mean that a man as powerful and resourceful as John Thomas’s father might have all kinds of access.

  “John Thomas broke into his father’s files,” I told my uncle. “There’s a good chance that something John Thomas saw in those files got him killed.”

  “Have you mentioned any of this to Ivy?” Adam asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?” Adam’s expression was deadly serious. He expected an answer, and he wouldn’t back down until I gave him one.

  Because Ivy told me to stay away from Asher. She promised that she would take care of it, but she’s done nothing. If she knew I was looking into John Thomas’s murder, she would have told me to stay away from that, too.

  Instead of putting any of that into words, I took out my cell, called Ivy, and set the phone to speaker.

  It went to voice mail.

  Considering my point made, I hit end and turned back to Adam.

  Adam was quiet for several seconds. “The vice president is attempting to move Daniela Nicolae to a classified facility.” Adam’s words—the fact that he was telling me this—took me completely off guard. “Ivy thinks Nicolae knows something she’s not sharing about the attempt on the president’s life, and no one trusts the vice president enough to let him remove a piece from the board. That’s where Ivy is right now. She’s working with Georgia to try to block the transfer.”