The Long Game

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  I woke up in the middle of the night, I continued, watching the rise and fall of Ivy’s chest. And you were gone. That time, Ivy had been the one who couldn’t sleep. I wondered if she’d watched me, the way I was watching her now. I went looking for you. I found you in the conference room. You couldn’t stop going back over what had happened. You couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that the Secret Service agent who’d held you captive had been in the middle of surrendering when he was shot and killed.

  Ivy had been convinced that wasn’t an accident. It was too neat, too clean, too convenient.

  Unfortunately, the shooter resisted. The words the president had spoken to me the day before echoed in my head.

  Too neat. Too clean. Too convenient.

  “Morning, Tessie.” Ivy turned over onto her side. “How did you sleep?”

  I woke up thinking. I can’t stop thinking.

  “Yeah,” Ivy said softly, taking in the expression on my face and the dark circles under my eyes. “Me too.” She pushed a strand of hair out of my face. “How about I attempt to channel Bodie and make us some pancakes?”

  Ivy was many things, but a good cook wasn’t one of them.

  “Don’t give me that look,” Ivy said. “I’m a professional. I fix problems for a living. I’m fairly certain I can handle some pancakes without causing our kitchen to explode.”

  The kitchen didn’t explode, but the pancakes did. Ivy called Bodie to undo the damage. When he walked through the front door, he wasn’t alone.

  “Look who I found lurking on the porch,” he said.

  Vivvie hovered in the doorway for four or five seconds, her big brown eyes fixed on mine. Her lips trembled, and I thought of the way we’d left things in the hallway.

  You’re supposed to be my friend. My best friend—

  Before I could finish the thought, Vivvie launched herself at me, jackrabbiting across the room and flinging her arms around me. She pressed her face into my shoulder and hugged me hard. My arms curved slowly around her.

  Bodie and Ivy exchanged a glance, then made their way into the kitchen. I barely noticed. All I could think was that the last time I’d seen Vivvie had been on the security feed. Her hands had been bound behind her back. She’d been trapped, terrified.

  “I’m sorry I got mad at you!” Vivvie blurted out, pulling back to look up at me. “When everything happened, and I didn’t know where you were, and people were getting shot, and—”

  “Hey.” I kept my voice soft but caught Vivvie’s attention before she could progress to full-on babbling mode. “You had a right to be mad, Vivvie. You had a right to be upset. I knew something—something big—about what happened with your dad, and I kept it from you.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t tell me,” Vivvie said fiercely. “I don’t want to know, Tess.” She swallowed, her thumbs worrying at the sides of her index fingers. “That’s what I realized, when I had a gun pointed at my head. I love what we do. You and Henry and Asher and me.”

  The way Vivvie said Henry’s name, wedged between mine and Asher’s, was a knife to the gut.

  “I love helping you fix things,” Vivvie continued. I could hear the tears in her voice before I saw the sheen of them in her eyes. “I like making people happy and righting wrongs. I like being us. But I’m okay with letting someone else handle conspiracies and terrorists and things that can get people killed. I don’t need answers.” Vivvie pressed her lips together and offered me a teary, apologetic smile. “I’m not like you, Tess. Or Henry. Answers don’t matter to me. People do. And if not knowing is the cost I have to pay to keep any of us safe—I don’t need to know.”

  There was so much I couldn’t tell Vivvie—about Henry and Senza Nome, what had really happened in that school, the fact that Daniela Nicolae was still out there, alive.

  “Okay,” I told Vivvie. She was giving me permission to protect her. I loved her for that.

  “I’m going to hug you again now,” Vivvie warned me. Before she could make good on the threat, the doorbell rang. Vivvie glanced out the window, then grinned. “You might want to prepare for a group hug.”

  A second later, she flung open the door, and Asher bounded in. “Did I hear someone say ‘group hug’?” he asked, throwing an arm around each of us. “What’s next on the agenda? Might I suggest either an impromptu dance party or an epic battle of pillow fight proportions?”

  “No.”

  The answer to Asher’s question came from behind him. I looked up and saw Emilia standing in the doorway. For a second, as our eyes met, I saw her in the library. I saw her stepping out into the aisle. I saw her thrusting her chin out and facing Dr. Clark head-on.

  “Asher’s been banned from pillow fighting.” Emilia’s voice gave no hint to whether or not her thoughts in any way mirrored mine. “Trust me,” she continued dryly, “when I say it’s a kindness to all involved.”

  You gave yourself up for me. You risked your life for me.

  “What?” Emilia shot back, staring me down. “Do I have something in my teeth?”

  She didn’t want a thank-you any more than she’d given me one for taking on John Thomas for her.

  “I could be wrong about this,” I told Emilia, “but I’m pretty sure they call it a group hug for a reason.”

  I saw a flicker of raw surprise cross Emilia’s features before she hid it. Asher latched a hand onto his twin and pulled Emilia to the rest of us. Vivvie wasn’t one to question a hug, so within seconds, she had one arm wrapped around Emilia and one around me. Asher kept hold of his twin and pulled me tight.

  A little too tight.

  We started to topple. Asher threw his whole body into it and brought all four of us to the floor. Vivvie started giggling.

  “The bat is in the belfry!” Asher told her, falling back into code.

  Emilia tried to pry herself out from underneath her brother. “We are not related,” she told him.

  Asher was unperturbed. “All we need is Henry,” he declared, “and some borderline illegal fireworks, and all will be right with the world.”

  This was what it would be like, I realized, as I weathered the sound of Henry’s name. This was what I’d signed up for, when I’d decided to keep Henry’s secret—to make him keep it.

  “Have you been to see him yet?” Asher asked me, propping himself up on his elbows. “The nurses didn’t want to let me in, but I can be very persuasive.” He wiggled his eyebrows.

  “I saw him,” I said, my throat tightening around the words.

  Asher sighed. “I still can’t believe Henry got himself shot. Even I can’t one-up that.” He sighed. “Now I will never win the heart of Tess Kendrick through acts of derring-do!” The teasing undertone in his voice—the one that said that he wasn’t interested in my heart, but he thought that Henry was—cut into me with almost physical force.

  Emilia rolled her eyes at her brother’s dramatics. “And I,” she added, “will never win the student council election.” She sighed and leaned back on the heels of her hands. “My campaign is dead in the water. Do you know what heroically surviving a terrorist’s bullet does to someone’s approval rating?”

  I stared at her.

  “Kidding,” Emilia clarified. “Mostly.”

  Emilia’s taste in humor wasn’t the reason I was staring at her.

  Do you know what heroically surviving a terrorist’s bullet does to someone’s approval rating? My mouth went dry, my heart pounding deafeningly in my chest. Too perfect. Too neat. Too clean.

  Suddenly, I was back in my World Issues class. Dr. Clark was at the front, lecturing about flashbulb memories. She was asking what people would remember about the day that President Nolan was shot. She’d asked if they would remember Georgia Nolan’s rousing speech about her husband, the fighter. She’d asked if we would remember the record number of voters who turned out at the polls.

  Going into midterm elections, the president’s approval rating had been at an all-time low.

  I hadn’t paid much attent
ion to the outcome of the elections. But I knew, in my gut, what I would find when I pulled the information up on my phone.

  Before the president had been shot, the outlook for his administration had been dire. His party almost certainly would have lost its majority in Congress. The chances that the president would get a second term in office were next to nothing. That was why Congressman Wilcox had been working with Senza Nome. The revelation that Walker Nolan had impregnated a terrorist had been meant to devastate the Nolan administration at the worst possible time.

  And then, the day before midterm elections, the president had been shot—and suddenly, President Nolan wasn’t seen as complicit in Walker’s ordeal. He was a victim, a soldier on the front lines of the war on terror.

  Senza Nome had already gotten what they wanted. The thought solidified in my mind. They had no reason to shoot him. None.

  I pictured the president in his hospital bed, telling me that the shooter had been connected to the terrorists. I pictured him telling me that he was ready to heal and to lead this country as it did the same.

  There were good guys, and there were bad guys, and everything was tied up with a neat little bow.

  The shoulder, I thought. He was shot in the shoulder.

  I could hear Dr. Clark, tending to Henry: Shoulder wounds are rarely lethal.

  I could hear the First Lady: The bullet did less damage than the fall.

  If the president hadn’t fallen, if he hadn’t hit his head just right, there wouldn’t have been a coma. He would have been rushed to the hospital, rushed into surgery.

  Do you know what heroically surviving a terrorist’s bullet does to someone’s approval rating?

  “Tess?” Asher’s voice pulled me back to the present.

  As I covered and picked up the conversation with the three of them, all I could think, over and over again, was that if it wasn’t for the head injury, President Nolan would have been fine.

  CHAPTER 69

  Two days later, I got an invitation to dine at the White House. I hadn’t said a word to Ivy about my suspicions. The president was a friend. I couldn’t ask her to investigate the possibility that he’d arranged his own shooting until I was sure.

  Sure that there was something to investigate.

  Sure that it was worth it.

  So I accepted Georgia Nolan’s invitation to brunch, and I went to the White House, uncertain what I expected to find there.

  Something to tell me I’m not crazy. Or, better yet—something that would tell me I was wrong.

  I’d had forty-eight hours to think about Dr. Clark telling me that the Nolan administration was corrupt. She’d convinced Henry that the president was the fourth player in the conspiracy to kill Justice Marquette. The one who’d brought the other men together. The one who’d walked away scot-free.

  Over the past two days, I’d found myself wondering if that was true.

  The president’s doctor, Dr. Clark’s voice whispered in my memory as I took my seat opposite Georgia Nolan. A Secret Service agent on the president’s detail. That doesn’t strike me as a coincidence.

  It shouldn’t strike you as one, either.

  If President Nolan was the kind of man who could arrange to have himself shot for approval ratings, what else was he capable of? Could he have been involved with the assassination of Justice Marquette?

  Brunch was served in the family dining room. The residence was different from the public face of the White House, but I couldn’t forget—even for a second—where I was.

  President Nolan was out of the hospital and back to work. Ivy was off doing damage control for a famous philanthropist who had apparently gotten caught up in some not-so-philanthropic things.

  It was just the First Lady and me.

  How well do you know your husband? I thought, as Georgia dished out the food. If I told you what I suspect, would it shock you? Would you turn around and tell him what I’d told you?

  Georgia speared a piece of fresh fruit with her fork and assessed me across the table.

  “How are you doing, Tess?” she asked. “Truly?”

  I considered my answer. “I’ll survive.”

  “I have no doubt of it,” the First Lady replied. “Ivy is one of the strongest women I have ever met, and you, my dear, are very much your mother’s daughter.”

  I am.

  That was why I was here. That was why I would watch and wait and look for patterns, hints that no one else would think to see.

  “I’m so glad we were able to sit down like this,” Georgia said. “I must confess, I did have an ulterior motive for asking you here today.”

  I’d told the First Lady—told the president—that the terrorists had said, again and again, that they weren’t responsible for the attack on the president. Did you ask me here to figure out what I know? What I suspect?

  Georgia gave me a considering look. “I understand that your grandfather may have told you certain . . . truths, shall we say?”

  My heartbeat evened out. “Truths,” I repeated. “About Walker.”

  That’s what this is about. That’s why you called me here.

  “My Walker,” Georgia told me, “is very much like you, very much like his father.”

  Had we been overheard, an observer would have assumed she was talking about the president. I knew better.

  “I know my son must be struggling,” the First Lady continued. “I know that his heart is broken. But he doesn’t say much. Not to me. Not to his father.”

  This time, she was referencing the president. He was the man who’d raised Walker. In the ways that counted, he was Walker’s father.

  “It would hurt them,” Georgia said, “both my husband and my son, if certain truths were to come to light.”

  “I know how to keep a secret,” I told Georgia.

  She smiled slightly. “I suspect that you do.”

  Not long ago, I’d put my life in Daniela Nicolae’s hands. I’d chosen to trust a known terrorist because Walker Nolan was her child’s father. Because family mattered. Because we were connected by blood.

  Sitting there, opposite Georgia Nolan, I thought about the connections between us. She’d had an affair with my grandfather, the result of a relationship that went back decades. Georgia treated Ivy like a daughter. I was a Kendrick, and I was a Keyes, and in some twisted way, that made me hers.

  “What would you say,” I asked the First Lady, my heart thudding in my chest, “if I told you that I thought there was a chance that your husband had himself shot?”

  To mitigate the damage done by the Daniela Nicolae scandal. To protect himself from the fallout. To play on people’s emotions on the eve of midterm elections.

  “Tess, darling,” Georgia said, “don’t be ridiculous.” She wasn’t looking at me like a threat. She wasn’t looking at me like a target. She was looking at me like a child. “The president simply is not capable of something like that.” Georgia’s tone was as polished as ever, but beneath the gentle Southern accent, I could hear a thread of sincerity.

  A thread of steel.

  “I’ve been married to the man for nearly forty years, Tess. I know him as well as it is possible to know anyone in this world, and I am telling you, he could no more arrange for his own shooting than he could kill our children in their sleep.”

  Everything in me wanted to believe what Georgia was saying. But I couldn’t help thinking: Do you know what heroically surviving a terrorist’s bullet does to someone’s approval rating?

  I couldn’t help thinking about the Supreme Court justice, murdered by the president’s doctor and an agent on the president’s detail. They could have been working for him.

  “You’ve been through a very traumatic event,” Georgia told me. “It’s understandable that there would be some lingering aftereffects.” Georgia softened her voice. “Have you talked to Ivy about any of this? To Adam, or your grandfather?”

  She said the words like they were a suggestion, but part of me couldn’t help wondering if
they were a probe.

  “Ivy knows Peter,” Georgia continued. “Almost as well as I do. She knows he is not capable of something like this.”

  This time, when the First Lady said the word capable, I heard it in a different way. What if capable wasn’t a value judgment, a comment on the president’s moral compass? What if it was a statement of fact?

  The First Lady was the one who held the press conference after the president was shot. She was the one who made it a call to action.

  From things I’d overhead here and there, I knew that Georgia Nolan took an active hand in her husband’s administration. I knew that Ivy and Adam and Bodie considered her a force to be reckoned with.

  I knew she was a woman with whom the kingmaker had fallen in love.

  When I asked the headmaster why he took down the photo of the Camp David retreat, I thought suddenly, he said that someone had told him it was a bit gauche.

  That photo connected the three men who’d conspired to kill Justice Marquette. There was a chance—a good one—that the fourth conspirator had been there, too.

  I was told displaying that photograph so prominently was a bit gauche. That didn’t sound like something the president would say. The word gauche sounded polished. Female.

  I was told displaying that photograph so prominently was a bit gauche.

  I was sure, suddenly, irrevocably sure that someone was Georgia Nolan.

  Why would Georgia tell the headmaster to take that photo down?

  She held a press conference after her husband was shot, rallying support for him, for the party.

  “You really should talk to someone,” Georgia told me, “about everything you’ve been through.”

  Even now that I’d put my initial suspicions on the table, Georgia wasn’t treating me like I was a threat. She wasn’t telling me to keep my suspicions to myself.

  “Everything,” Georgia repeated softly. “Including the truth about Henry Marquette.”

  Slowly, I registered the meaning behind those words. Georgia knew. Somehow, she knew that Henry had betrayed me. She knew that he’d been working with the terrorists.

  Just like I knew that she was the one who’d had her husband shot.