Page 56 of Lessons in Power (The Fixer #2)

It was four hours before the FBI let Ivy and Adam take me home—half of the eight I’d been given gone answering questions and describing the situation on the inside.

The hostage negotiator and profilers had asked me to provide a description of each of the players involved.

Homeland Security had then begun running background checks on Mrs. Perkins and Dr. Clark.

I’d been able to describe one of the guards—the one who’d knocked Anna unconscious, the one Henry had incapacitated in his quest to get me out—in enough detail for an artist to make a computer rendering.

I told them everything I knew about the terrorists’ numbers, the brief dissension I’d sensed in their ranks, the game of good terrorist/bad terrorist Dr. Clark and Mrs. Perkins had played with me. I told them about the tunnel and the security feed and the men I’d seen shot dead.

I told them they had eight hours. I told them what would happen if they didn’t give Mrs. Perkins what she’d asked for.

I told them everything except the truth about Henry—and a subset of the demands that Mrs. Perkins had made of me.

“Can I get you anything?” Ivy asked as she opened the door to our house. I stepped into the foyer, and for the first time, it felt like home. This was where I belonged. I would have given anything to stay here.

With Ivy.

“Could you make me some hot chocolate?” I asked, my voice hoarse.

The request took Ivy by surprise. I wasn’t good at letting her take care of me. I’d never asked her, even in a little way, even silently, to be my mom.

“I’ll make us each a cup.”

I did us both the favor of ignoring the raw emotion in Ivy’s voice. She went to make the hot chocolate.

“Don’t do that again,” Adam said quietly. He’d joined us on the ride home, but like Bodie, he’d remained mostly silent, fading into the background under the roar of the connection between Ivy and me.

“Don’t do what?” I said. “Ask for hot chocolate?”

“Don’t let bad things happen,” Adam said, pulling me suddenly into a hug, his words sounding more like a prayer than an order directed to me. “Not ever. Not to you.”

“I’ll get right on that,” I replied into his chest.

He held on to me for a few seconds longer, and then the front door opened. William Keyes hovered in the doorway, his gaze frozen on Adam and me.

“Make yourself at home,” Bodie told the old man dryly. “No need to knock.”

Bodie’s words snapped all three of us out of our reveries. The kingmaker stepped over the threshold and shut the door behind him, and Adam turned, one arm still wrapped protectively around me, to face his father.

“I was told my presence was required,” Keyes informed Adam. There was a note of challenge in his voice, but he was the one who broke eye contact first, transferring his gaze from Adam to me.

“You are unharmed?”

Keyes had been updated on my condition, but this was the first chance he’d gotten to ask me for himself. I could only imagine how frustrating he’d found waiting—and the fact that the FBI had let Ivy in to see me but not him.

“I’m uninjured,” I said. “But I’m not okay.”

Ivy picked that moment to return. She handed me a mug of hot chocolate and kept the other for herself, positioning herself directly to my left. With Adam on one side and Ivy on the other, I should have felt safe.

I should have felt protected.

Three hours and fifty-four minutes.

I didn’t have time for dread or guilt or fear.

“I’m not going to be okay until this is over,” I said, looking from one face to the next. “And this isn’t going to be over until we give them what they want.”

“I didn’t tell the FBI everything.”

The five of us were settled around Ivy’s conference table now—Ivy, Adam, Bodie, the kingmaker, and me.

“Why not?” Adam was the one who issued the question.

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.