Cost of Honor

by Radclyffe

  “Unfortunately, we don’t have weeks. The convention is six weeks away.”

  “And you expect me—or any new campaign manager, for that matter—to step in and coordinate a national organization, let alone all the details of the event itself, in that amount of time?”

  “We don’t have a choice,” Blair said. “The convention planning, at least, is already underway.”

  Ari snorted. “If it is, I would be very surprised. I know what kind of chaos exists up until the last minute.” She shook her head. “You’re asking the impossible.”

  “Agent Weaver is the lead advance agent for the president’s trip to Philadelphia. Other than Esmeralda Alaqua, the campaign press secretary, she probably knows more about the status of the event than anyone.”

  Ari swiveled to face the agent, who on the surface now looked as remote as the agent standing by the doorway across the room. Beneath the surface, though, in the depths of her dark gaze, turmoil swirled. Pain perhaps, or anger. “How far along are you with the itinerary?”

  Oakes said, “Coordination is underway with local law enforcement, airports, fire-rescue, medical, hotels—all going as planned.”

  “Of course it is,” Ari said dryly. Really, what else could Weaver say? It’s a rat’s nest of loose ends surrounding a snarl of chaos? Did any of them really expect her to buy that? “And the convention organizers? Media and publicity? TV coverage? Ads?”

  “That’s Adam’s…” Oakley flushed. “I don’t presently have a status report on those issues.”

  Ari lifted a brow. Oakley held her gaze. If she was to consider this job—and that was a big if—she’d have to work day in and day out with this agent or others like her. She blew out a breath. “That might very well mean Adam’s assistant has all those details or, worst case scenario, they were all in Adam’s head. What’s your take on that, Agent?”

  “I can’t answer that question, Ms. Rostof, because I don’t deal in speculation. But,” Oakley said, “my goal is to ensure that every step of the president’s convention trip is secured before he ever steps out of the White House. To that end, we’ll be on the same team.”

  Ari appreciated just how carefully Weaver had phrased that reply, as carefully as she had schooled her expression. Weaver had slipped around the obvious difference in their goals. The campaign manager worked for the president to get him reelected. The Secret Service worked for Homeland Security to protect the life of the president. Whoever that might be.

  “Give me a moment.” Ari rose and walked to the far windows to look at the sea. She’d never undertaken anything of this magnitude before, but the challenge excited her in a way nothing else could. More than just the challenge, the goal. Andrew Powell was a president who stood for many of the things she believed in. She would have to make the decision herself, but she was deciding for more than just herself. If she put herself in the national eye, as would be unavoidable, her father would be in the spotlight with her.

  She forced herself to consider what she’d neatly managed to avoid thinking about her whole life. She couldn’t be certain, had never been truly certain, that all the speculation she’d heard about her father’s business associations wasn’t true. Her moving into the sphere of the President of the United States would reawaken all of those old stories, and with them, suspicions of her. The president and his advisors must know what the media would do with that. Blair and Cameron Roberts knew it too, but they were here. They believed in her.

  Ari turned around. “I’ll need to make a call.” She laughed. “Several of them. But I’ll be ready to go with you at five p.m.”

  “Good,” Blair said, smiling for the first time. “I’ll call ahead. My father will want to meet with you.”

  “There’s quite a few people I’ll need to see…yesterday,” Ari muttered. “I’ll have Martha show you to the study where you can make your calls.”

  As everyone stood, Ari stopped Weaver with a hand on her arm.

  “Ms. Rostof?” Oakes asked.

  “Call me Ari,” Ari said. “I’ll need to see everything you have so far from Adam on the convention.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Ari sighed. “Ari.”

  “All right…Ari. When?”

  “Tonight. I’m sorry, I’m afraid it might be late by the time I can get free.”

  “Not a problem.” Oakes hesitated. “And it’s Oakes.”

  Ari smiled. “Thank you.” Aware that Blair and the others had moved past them down the hall, and aware too that she still had her fingers curled around Oakes’s forearm, Ari reluctantly let go. The night ahead was likely to be the first of many nights spent working, but right at that moment, she didn’t mind a bit.

  Chapter Eight

  “You won’t be disturbed in here,” Ari said, opening the paneled mahogany door into a library. The long room faced a flower-bedecked terrace beyond a pair of ornate french doors. The other three walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books.

  “Thanks,” Blair said. “We won’t be long.”

  “Just text me,” Ari said as she stepped back into the hall. “I’ll be ready when you are.”

  When Ari closed the door behind her, Blair waited a moment before saying, “How secure do you think this is?”

  Cam scanned the room and lifted a shoulder. “With those windows alone, someone could probably get a sight line into here with an audio receiver. But…my best guess? It’s probably safe. If we are to trust Ari, then we need to trust that she put us in a secure space.” Cam shrugged. “And I don’t get the sense that this is a location where her father does business. I’m sure wherever that is, there are recordings.”

  Blair dropped into one of a pair of captain’s chairs, with broad arms sheathed in supple black leather, arrayed in front of a huge stone fireplace stacked with logs, ready to be fired. She pulled out her phone. “I guess we trust Ari on this.”

  “When exactly did you decide on her to replace Adam?”

  “In the limo on the way to the White House this morning. I didn’t have a chance to talk to you about it before we met with my father and the others. Sorry.”

  Cam sat across from her. “What if I’d disagreed?”

  “Do you?”

  Cam shook her head. “No. I don’t have a history with her, and you do. Besides, I trust your judgment.”

  Blair laughed. “And I know you well enough that if you’d had an issue, you would’ve brought it up at the meeting. I wasn’t worried about that.”

  Cam reached across the space between them and Blair took her hand. “About that history.”

  Blair snorted. “No. And no.”

  “No, as in…?”

  Blair laughed. “No, I wasn’t and no, she wasn’t.”

  “Hmm. Maybe her judgment is suspect.”

  “Her judgment is razor sharp,” Blair said. “I hope there’s enough time. I hope…she’s enough.”

  “All we can do is make the best decisions in the moment,” Cam said, “and this is a good one.”

  “Well,” Blair said, punching in the code to the White House, “what’s done is done.”

  “Yes,” Cam murmured, her fingers entwined with Blair’s.

  “This is Blair Powell,” Blair said when the operator in the communications center answered the secure line. “I’d like to speak with the president, please.”

  “Just one moment, Ms. Powell,” the operator said in a calm, steady tone.

  The faint background static from the electronic scrambler was the only sound for a moment, so subtle that anyone else probably would’ve missed it, but Blair had been listening to it all her life and knew just what it was.

  Then her father said, “Blair. Do we have an answer?”

  “Yes. Ari will be accompanying us back to Andrews.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Has Adam’s family been advised yet?”

  “Lucinda called them this morning, explained that there would be no media announcement until later today or possib
ly tomorrow morning, but”—he sighed—“there’s been a leak.”

  Blair closed her eyes for a second and let out a long breath. “Of course there has. From where?”

  “Metro Police.”

  “Now, that’s not surprising. The media has it?”

  “The media knows that someone from the White House was involved in the hit-and-run this morning. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “We can’t be back until nine tonight at least.”

  “Hold a moment, I’m going to bring Lucinda and the communications deputy in on this.”

  Again the very faint static.

  “Blair,” Lucinda said briskly a few seconds later. “Do we have her?”

  “Yes,” Blair said.

  “Good. We’re going to need to get out in front of this leak,” Lucinda said.

  “I agree,” Blair said.

  The communications director added, “We need to make some kind of statement within the hour. We’ll be lucky if we can keep a cap on it until then.”

  “We don’t have a choice,” Blair said. “It’s best that we appear to be on top of the situation, even if we can’t put Ari on the air.”

  “I may have a solution for that,” Lucinda said.

  Blair smiled. “Of course you do.”

  After Ari left Cam and Blair in the east wing, she asked Martha to show Agent Weaver to a comfortable place to wait and continued on through the house to the west wing. Her father’s office door was still closed, and she knocked.

  “Come,” he said, his voice muffled by the thick, heavy door. She closed it carefully behind her after she entered. Her father still sat behind his desk, but with his chair swiveled toward the windows. From there he could look down on the main entrance, where the vehicles and Secret Service agents from Blair’s detail were clearly visible.

  “I’ll be leaving for Washington in an hour,” she said, wondering how he felt about this unexpected intrusion.

  He turned back to her and regarded her impassively for a moment. “Does this have something to do with the death of a White House staffer this morning?”

  Ari had had years of practice schooling her expression, and she doubted he could see her surprise. She took care not to stiffen or signal her feelings. “I know your networks are remarkably efficient, but you must have mobilized them the moment I left the room.”

  “You could hardly expect me not to investigate when the First Daughter makes a surprise visit to mine.” He smiled, a little wryly. “Some would consider that a meeting of equals, and definitely newsworthy.”

  Ari scoffed. “If you’re trying to boost my ego, I don’t need it. And yours certainly doesn’t.”

  He smiled, the way he often did when she met him on level ground, answering his challenge with an equally challenging riposte. “I can see you haven’t lost your edge, even though you’ve immersed yourself in a culture where power is not always desirable.”

  “Power is always desirable,” she mused. “It’s the cost that’s in question.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Is there a price you wouldn’t pay?”

  He probably would think any answer other than no would be a sign of weakness, but Ari wasn’t so sure. “I should go—we’ll be leaving soon.”

  “Are you planning to tell me the details?” he asked.

  “Are you willing to go off the record?”

  He sighed. “If you’ll agree to give our reporters in Washington an exclusive when you arrive.”

  Ari thought it over. Her job was to publicize the president’s campaign, and taking over as his new campaign manager was news. Her father’s network was one of the largest, and if she could get on the air with her statement before the media had much of a chance to react to the news of Adam’s death and her succession, she could get out in front of the uproar she expected her name to generate.

  “I can promise you an exclusive interview,” Ari said, “but I can’t guarantee you’ll be the first to break the news. That’s entirely up to the White House, and you know there’s going to be a press release.”

  “A generic press release is not nearly as significant as an exclusive. Exactly what will you be doing for the president?”

  “I’ll be the new campaign manager.”

  For an instant, his usual impenetrable façade broke and his shock showed through. “Adam Eisley was killed? What happened?”

  So his sources in DC hadn’t gotten all the information yet. “Off the record, still?”

  He grimaced. “Only until the rumor mill identifies him. Once that happens, we will run with the story, quote confirmation from an unnamed source.”

  She nodded. At that point, none of what transpired would be a secret any longer. “I don’t have any details beyond a hit-and-run this morning.”

  He frowned. “Accident or intentional?”

  Ari’s heart pounded. That was the question, wasn’t it? Could someone actually have targeted Adam? Why? Yes, his role was pivotal in securing the nomination for President Powell, but Adam wasn’t a critical power player. He didn’t hold a high-level cabinet position or sit on any significant congressional committees. He wasn’t a politician in that sense. So why? “I don’t know, but I can’t figure it’s anything other than an accident.”

  Her father leaned back and folded his hands in his lap. His appraisal carried an air of disbelief. “Can’t you?”

  Things had always been this way between them. A gauntlet thrown down with a simple question that intimated she had missed some critical point, and she had never been able to avoid being caught up in the verbal jousting. Her mother was the peacekeeper, the one who refused to play the game of power, which was probably why she spent a good part of her time in Italy at the family villa in Tuscany, rather than here where Ari and Nikolai made their home.

  “Granted, it’s close to the deadline,” Ari thought out loud, trying to see what others might have anticipated from Adam’s death, “and the public is fickle. Any sign of weakness and, like any other pack, even the staunchest allies will abandon the weak. So I suppose, if Powell’s infrastructure weakened—financially or politically—he could lose points in the polls.”

  “Exactly. And these things tend to escalate. And don’t forget, Adam would have been an easy target if the goal was to create chaos. He’s not surrounded by Secret Service agents twenty-four hours a day as is the president and those close to him.”

  A shiver ran down Ari’s spine. “Do we really think someone in the opposition would resort to murder? This isn’t Nicaragua, you know.”

  “Why consider it came from the opposition? There could be another group who expects to benefit.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Ari said, not quite ready to embrace a conspiracy theory. “But no matter the circumstances, Powell needs a new campaign manager immediately.”

  “And you would be a good choice.”

  Ari laughed shortly. “I certainly hope so.”

  “You’ll need a bodyguard.”

  “I’m sorry? Why?”

  He waved a hand. “Don’t be disingenuous. You’re an important person and always have been. As a child, you were a target for kidnapping. As an adult, the same is true, and now, in a pivotal public position, where another accident could prove disastrous, you are at risk.”

  “I don’t think…” Ari shook her head. “Really, a bodyguard would be impossible.”

  “Why? Do you have a lover?”

  Ari couldn’t prevent heat from rising to her cheeks. “That is beside the point.”

  “That’s the only reason a bodyguard would be inconvenient, and that’s not an insurmountable obstacle. Otherwise, you’ll have a driver, and you’ll have protection.”

  “Security clearance for a bodyguard is going to be an issue.” Ari snorted. “Hell, my clearance could be one.”

  “Those kinds of things can be taken care of with a few phone calls,” he said dismissively. “I’ll arrange for it.”

  She knew the tone. There was no changing his mind. She woul
d simply have to make things clear to whoever was assigned to guard her that her private life was private, and she didn’t intend to share her living space.

  “I’ll try it,” she said. “I’ll leave a message once I know my schedule. It’s going to be hectic for a while.”

  “Very well.” As she turned to go, he added, “Be prepared for anything.”

  “I am,” she murmured. At this point it really didn’t matter. She’d made her choice.

  “If you’ll follow me, Agent,” Martha said, “you can wait somewhere it’s a little more comfortable. If anyone asks, I’ll tell them where you are.”

  “Thank you,” Oakes told the housekeeper as she followed her out onto the sweeping veranda at the rear of the house. Before going off to prepare for DC, Ari had taken Blair and Cam somewhere private where Blair could brief the White House on developments. Oakes could have rejoined the rest of Blair’s detail outside with the vehicles, but she wasn’t really needed out there. On the off chance that Blair—or possibly Ari—might want to speak with her again, she decided to remain available. That was pretty much her assignment, after all.

  The housekeeper was right—the view of the sailboats and pleasure craft coursing in the harbor was even more captivating under a clear blue sky dotted with impossibly white powder-puff clouds than it had been from inside. The slanting afternoon sun had just begun to gild the edges of the horizon in swaths of red and gold.

  “Would you like something to drink?” Martha asked.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” Oakes said.

  “I just made some lemonade.”

  Oakes smiled. “Well then, I’ll reconsider.”

  Martha beamed and disappeared inside. Oakes settled into one of the white wicker chairs arranged around a round, glass-topped table beneath a broad, sun-bleached canvas umbrella. A few moments later, the sliding glass doors behind her opened, and footsteps sounded on the flagstones. Oakes turned to thank Martha and rose automatically when she saw Ari approaching with a tray in her hands.

  “Ms. Rostof,” Oakes said. “Sorry, I…uh…thought you were occupied, or I wouldn’t have disappeared.”