The Long Game

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I answered it. “Because I was told not to.”

  Until I was sure that there was no chance of word getting back to Senza Nome, I couldn’t take the risk. If the terrorists had two operatives planted at Hardwicke, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that they had someone in the FBI, too.

  “Besides,” I said out loud, looking around the table at each of them, one by one, “this part of the message was for you.”

  You’re a resourceful girl related to some very powerful people. I could still see the exact glint in Mrs. Perkins’s eyes. I have every confidence that you’ll work this out.

  “The United States government does not negotiate with terrorists,” I said. “That’s a problem. We need the vice president to agree to release Daniela Nicolae. The authorities are going to have to send her into the school to get anyone else out.”

  That statement was met with momentary silence.

  “That is a problem,” Ivy admitted. “The situation at Hardwicke has already gained national attention. The vice president can’t be seen negotiating with terrorists. Unless we want to encourage future threats, his hands are tied.”

  “Then you need to untie them,” I said. “I don’t know how. I don’t care how. But this has to happen.”

  “Why?” William Keyes asked bluntly. Now that he had eyes on me, he was not particularly inclined to give the terrorists what they wanted.

  “Because,” I said forcefully, “if we can’t get the vice president to release Daniela, people die. Kids will die.”

  “Why does this group care so much about securing Daniela Nicolae’s release?” The tone in my grandfather’s voice reminded me that he had a very personal stake in this. “Who is she to them?”

  “A soldier?” Bodie suggested. “Left behind enemy lines.”

  Adam stared straight ahead. He was a soldier.

  “They let her get caught,” Adam said slowly. “Didn’t they?” The question was rhetorical, and if any part of him had expected an answer, it was from Ivy, not me.

  I answered anyway. “They planned on Walker tipping his father off. The hospital was never a target.”

  “The Nolans were,” Ivy inferred. “It was a PR attack from the beginning.” She paused. “Her superiors had to know there was a good chance Daniela was going to be apprehended.”

  Was she expendable? Or did they always have a contingency plan for getting her back?

  “You’ve talked to this woman,” William Keyes told Ivy, folding his hands on the table and leaning forward, looming over all of us. “Do you think she knew she was going to be apprehended? Do you think she’s a good little soldier, caught behind enemy lines?”

  Ivy’s expression became a fraction more guarded. My gut said that to her ear, the kingmaker sounded a little too interested in the answer to that question, even if she didn’t know why.

  “I got a call while Tess was talking with the FBI,” Ivy stated, taking her time with the words. “Homeland was interrogating Congressman Wilcox about his connection to Senza Nome. The congressman was on the verge of breaking.”

  Was?

  “Congressman Wilcox was killed in custody shortly before the terrorists released Tess.”

  I took Ivy’s statement to mean that Senza Nome, peace-loving bunch that they were, didn’t respond well to the idea of their people talking.

  “Daniela’s not a soldier to them,” Ivy continued. “She’s a liability.”

  Ivy had told me that some of Daniela’s interrogators believed that her feelings for Walker were legitimate. They’d questioned whether her loyalties could be changed—and if they already had.

  If the people Daniela worked for were questioning them, too, she wasn’t just a liability. She was a threat.

  “If they could have gotten to her already, they would have,” Adam commented. “Just like they got to Wilcox.”

  “Captain Obvious is right.” Bodie leaned back in his chair. “If Daniela’s terrorist buddies can’t get to her where she’s being kept, it’s no wonder they want us to tie her up with a bow and send her back.”

  The kingmaker’s jaw twitched slightly. Ivy and Adam didn’t know that he was Walker’s father. They didn’t know that the terrorist was carrying his grandchild—and I could see in his eyes that he wasn’t going to tell them. They already knew the woman was pregnant. They thought her child was a Nolan. They were closer to the Nolans than they were to him. He wouldn’t tell them the truth.

  And I couldn’t shake the belief that this wasn’t my secret to tell.

  “We have less than four hours to get Daniela Nicolae released,” I said, concentrating on that. There would be time later for me to decide what, if anything, to tell Ivy and Adam about Walker Nolan. Right now, I couldn’t afford to forget that we were on a deadline here, and I couldn’t let them forget it, either. “If she doesn’t walk into Hardwicke in three hours and forty-six minutes, they start shooting. Talk to the vice president, talk to the Pentagon—blackmail, bribe, or steal, I don’t care. Find a way.”

  I directed those words at all of them. The kingmaker was the first to reply.

  “And you think,” William Keyes said sharply, “that if we give them Daniela Nicolae, they’ll just let everyone go?”

  Clearly, he didn’t see that as a likely scenario.

  “No,” I replied tautly. “I think that if we give them Daniela Nicolae, and someone leans on the secretary of state to start calling in favors with foreign governments about the overseas prisoners on their list, and twenty million dollars is transferred into their account, and we arrange an exit strategy for them, then they will let everyone go.”

  That wasn’t all. That wasn’t even half of it. But it was all I could say in this room, in front of all four of them.

  “I don’t mean to be insensitive to what you’ve been through,” William Keyes said, “but given that my granddaughter has already been released, I do not feel particularly inclined to pay a ransom of any kind.”

  “So don’t pay,” I told him, my voice low. “Persuade the other parents to do it. Their children are still in danger. Some of them have deep pockets.” I let that sink in. “You’re always talking about the art of influence,” I told Keyes, “about strategy and manipulation—so make it happen. Coordinate the transfer of the money, and make sure the police can’t trace it.”

  For some reason, Senza Nome had believed the kingmaker might have some level of expertise in the kind of money transfers that couldn’t be traced.

  “That would be a risk,” Keyes said. “It might mean opening myself up to scrutiny I would rather avoid.”

  I didn’t ask him to do this for me. I didn’t say please. The kingmaker would have been the first one to tell me: A Keyes doesn’t beg.

  “Does it bother you at all,” Adam asked his father, his voice carefully, dangerously neutral, “to think of someone else’s child in danger?”

  I studied the old man’s face in response to that question. It bothers him more than he wants to admit.

  “You’ll do it?” I asked quietly.

  He stood. “I will.” He looked at Ivy. “When it comes to getting the vice president to release a known terrorist, however,” he continued, “you’re on your own.”

  Keyes let himself out of the conference room, and twenty seconds later, I heard him let himself out the front door.

  “What aren’t you telling us, Tess?” Ivy’s question took me off guard, just as she’d meant it to.

  Ivy Kendrick had a sixth sense for when she was only getting half of the story.

  “They had another request,” I said. “For you.”

  Still not the whole story. As much as I can give you. As much as you can know.

  I kept those thoughts from my face as best I could, pushing back against the black hole of emotion rising up inside me—the desolation, the knife twist of guilt, the white-hot fear at the thing I couldn’t and wouldn’t tell her.

  The thing they had asked—demanded—of me.

  “They want your files,” I said, sticking to
what I could tell Ivy. “The program that releases your client’s secrets if you go offline. They want it, they want your client list—they want everything.”

  “How do they even know about the program?” Bodie asked.

  My insides twisted as I tried not to think about the fact that Henry had known about the program.

  They just asked for money at first. Then information.

  Henry had asked me to access Ivy’s files.

  Before that, on the day that someone had broken into Ivy’s office, Henry had volunteered to drop me off.

  “Senza Nome has eyes and ears everywhere,” I said.

  “You can’t give them the program,” Adam told Ivy softly. “If that information got out, it would be devastating. Dangerous. For this country and for you.”

  Ivy wasn’t looking at Adam. She was looking at me.

  “They have Vivvie,” I told her.

  Ivy didn’t flinch, but I saw the moment my words landed.

  “They have Henry.”

  She didn’t know what Henry had done, what he was. She knew the Henry I’d known—and that boy was worth fighting for.

  “There might be a version of my files that I could give them,” Ivy said. “Enough secrets for them to think it was the real thing, not enough to do more damage than I can fix.”

  Adam clamped his jaw down in a way that told me he wasn’t happy with the idea of giving the terrorists anything. My stomach twisted for a different reason.

  “Whatever you give them,” I told Ivy, “make sure they think it’s real. Pretend it’s my life that depends on it.”

  Ivy stood and came to stand behind me. She ran a hand lightly over my head, assuring herself that I was still here, that I was fine.

  She’d do what I’d asked of her. I had to trust that—because ultimately, my life did depend on it.

  That was what had made this homecoming so impossible. That was why it hurt to be here with Ivy, why I couldn’t bring myself to drink the last of my hot chocolate.

  Of all of Mrs. Perkins’s demands, the last one was the only one I couldn’t tell Ivy.

  After I’d done what they’d sent me out here to do, if I wanted my friends and classmates to live, I had to do one last thing.

  I had to go back.

  CHAPTER 56

  Two hours and twenty-two minutes.

  Ivy had gone to talk to the vice president. Adam had gotten an appointment with the secretary of state to see what wheels she could grease with respect to the release of foreign prisoners. Bodie was working on Ivy’s files. And I was waiting—for the kingmaker to make good on his word, for the next stage of the plan to go into effect.

  The doorbell rang. Bodie answered it with a gun.

  “I come in peace!” Asher announced on the front porch. “Your friendly neighborhood rogue, recently suspected of murder!”

  Bodie lowered the gun.

  “Tess,” he yelled, “you have company.”

  As I came to stand face-to-face with Asher, I didn’t question the fact that in the midst of a terrorist attack, he was making jokes. Humor was Asher’s first, best, and last line of defense against the world.

  I met his eyes, and that defense crumbled. Even Asher couldn’t manage a smile now.

  “Emilia saved me,” I told him. I was aware, on some level, that my face was wet, but it took me longer to realize that I was crying. I told Emilia’s twin about the way she’d walked out into the line of fire, her head held high.

  “It would take more than mere terrorists,” Asher said, “to keep my sister down.” He choked slightly on the words but kept talking. “I think we both know she’s probably composing a college essay about the whole experience in her head as we speak.”

  I nodded, the edges of my lips pulling up. Nodding hurt. Smiling hurt. Thinking about Emilia hurt.

  “Henry is probably lecturing someone,” Asher continued. “And Vivvie is winning them all over with her best sad-puppy-dog eyes.”

  Vivvie is facedown on a floor somewhere. Henry might be the one holding the gun.

  “I’m sorry,” Asher blurted out. “I know it wasn’t . . . I know you’re not . . .” I’d never heard Asher at a loss for words. “I should have been there,” he said finally.

  If he hadn’t been suspended . . .

  If he’d been in school today . . .

  If, if, if . . . It was a thought pattern I knew all too well.

  If I’d told Henry the truth about his grandfather’s death, if he’d heard it from me, instead of from Dr. Clark . . .

  If I hadn’t upset Vivvie, if she hadn’t run, if I’d had her with me . . .

  If I’d been the one to turn myself in, instead of Emilia . . .

  “I have to go back,” I told Asher, my voice as lifeless as I felt inside. “Either I go back in with everything they asked for, or they start shooting students.”

  His face pale, Asher turned his back on me. He bowed his head. I waited for him to say something, but instead, when he did turn around, it was to launch himself at me. He hugged me, as fiercely as Ivy had.

  “If you get yourself killed,” he whispered, “you’ll never get to see the interpretive dance I plan to create based on this experience.”

  Asher was crying. He was crying and joking and dying inside—and I knew, in that moment, that I couldn’t tell him the full truth of what had happened back at the school.

  I couldn’t tell him about Henry.

  I hadn’t told the FBI. I hadn’t told Ivy. I wouldn’t tell Asher. If I spoke the words out loud, that would make them true. If I said Henry was with the terrorists, there was no going back.

  His hands on mine. His lips on mine. That subtle half smile.

  I knew, deep down, that there was already no going back. Not ever. Not for me.

  “What can I do?” Asher asked. I recognized the helpless tone in his voice. Telling him that I had to hand myself back over to the terrorists hadn’t been fair of me. Expecting him to sit here and do nothing—that wasn’t fair either.

  “Actually,” I said, “there is one thing.”

  “Anything.” Asher spoke without emphasis, without frills.

  I glanced down at my watch.

  Two hours and fourteen minutes.

  “I need you to deliver a message for me,” I said, “to Vivvie’s aunt.”

  CHAPTER 57

  “I take it Ivy doesn’t know what you’re playing at here.” That was how Priya Bharani greeted me an hour later when I picked up her call. She’d placed it from a blocked number, most likely a burner phone.

  “You got my message,” I replied, lowering my voice and shutting the door to my room. If Bodie knew what I was planning—if he told Adam or Ivy what I was planning—they’d never let me go through with it.

  And if they didn’t let me go through with it, someone would die, and then another and another, until the terrorists got what they wanted or the FBI decided to risk a high rate of casualties and take Hardwicke back by force.

  “I also received another message.”

  That statement brought me back to the present. I didn’t know what the terrorists had asked Vivvie’s aunt to do, or how they had passed along their instructions. All I knew was that I’d been told to wait until Ivy had been gone for two hours to get in touch.

  “It seems I am to help you make contact with Daniela Nicolae prior to her release,” Priya continued. “That is assuming, of course, that her release is somehow secured.”

  “Ivy’s working on it,” I said.

  One hour and twenty-one minutes.

  “Is that all they asked you to do?” I asked Priya, trying to focus on Vivvie’s aunt and not the ticking clock. “Getting me in to see Daniela?”

  “No,” Priya said shortly. “I am to ensure that both you and Daniela are delivered to them.” She paused. “And I am, of course, to hand myself over as well.”

  I paused. “What do they want with you?”

  “I made many enemies before I came here.”

  She’d c
ome here for Vivvie, left her old life—whatever that entailed—behind for Vivvie. I didn’t have to ask whether she would hand herself over to these people for Vivvie, too.

  “What will they do to you?” I asked Priya, leaning my back against the door to my room, my heart battering my rib cage as I remembered Dr. Clark killing Anna’s Secret Service agent and the offhanded way Mrs. Perkins had put a bullet between Headmaster Raleigh’s eyes.

  On the other end of the phone line, Priya answered my question with silence.

  I slid slowly down the door until I was sitting on the floor, my legs pulled to my chest. “What will they do to me?”

  I’d tried not to ask myself that question. I’d tried not thinking about Ivy’s relief that I was home safe, or Adam’s request that nothing bad happen to me ever again.

  “If they get what they want?” Priya said, taking her time replying to my question. “They will do nothing to you. They will let you go.”

  And if they only get part of what they want? If they realize the program Ivy plans to give them is a fake? If the kingmaker can’t arrange for the $20 million transfer? If the secretary of state isn’t inclined to pull any strings to secure the release of Senza Nome operatives abroad?

  “You do not have to do this, Tess.”

  I got the feeling that saying those words had cost Priya more than I could fathom.

  “They asked you to bring me,” I said.

  If Priya didn’t do what they asked of her, Vivvie would be the one to pay the price. I couldn’t let that happen, no matter the icy chill that seeped into my skin at the thought of going back in.

  “Women like this Clarissa Perkins,” Priya said softly, “they excel at knowing where the tiniest pressure can create the most pain.”

  Vivvie was Priya’s weak spot—and one of mine.

  “I take it that Ivy is not aware—”

  “She wouldn’t let me out of her sight if she was,” I said. I was Ivy’s weak spot. I always had been. “I’d find myself knocked unconscious and on a plane to Aruba before I got within five miles of the school.”

  Ivy had thought, when she’d agreed to let her parents raise me, that lying to me was necessary. She’d thought it was the right thing to do.