The Long Game (The Fixer #2)(42)

A month ago, Henry wouldn’t have asked.

A month ago, I wouldn’t have answered.

“Ivy went to see the terrorist behind the hospital bombing.”

I could see the gears in Henry’s head turning as he processed that information. My heart thudded against my rib cage. I hadn’t planned on telling him—on telling anyone—this.

I had always been better at keeping other people’s secrets than sharing my own.

“Ivy had a bruise on her wrist.” I kept my sentences short. “I saw it. I asked her about it.”

Henry read between the lines. “I am going to go out on a limb and wager that Ivy was not in what one would call a sharing mood about the bruise—or the terrorist.”

I could have snorted. I could have made a wry comment about the fact that the phrases Ivy Kendrick and sharing mood didn’t belong in the same sentence.

Instead, I found myself saying, “Ivy told me that she was trying to get a rise out of the terrorist. I think she was hoping she could bait the woman into saying something about the attack on President Nolan.”

There was a beat of silence.

After the hospital bombing, I hadn’t told Henry that I suspected Walker Nolan was in some way involved. I hadn’t ever told him that Ivy thought there might be a fourth player in his grandfather’s death. In the short time we’d known each other, the things I hadn’t told Henry Marquette were legion.

But he was there, and he was listening, and all I could think about was Henry playing my partner in crime in the front seat of Bancroft’s car, Henry washing the blood from my hands the day John Thomas was killed.

“The group that claimed responsibility for the attack against the president?” I said, letting my eyes linger on his. “The intelligence community calls them Senza Nome. The Nameless. They specialize in government infiltration.”

Henry pulled the car to a stop in a residential area about a mile away from the school. His hand hovered over the key for a moment before he turned it, killing the engine.

“I don’t suppose Ivy volunteered any additional information,” Henry said, his face moonlit through the dash. “About this Senza Nome.”

I looked out the window at the darkness enveloping the neighborhood around us. “Ivy doesn’t volunteer much.”

There was another long silence, and in that silence, Henry’s hand made its way to the very edge of mine.

I couldn’t make myself pull back.

“Do you have any idea what Ivy was hoping to get out of the terrorist?” Henry asked.

If Henry had said a word—a single word—about my relationship with Ivy, I would have decked him. Better, by far, to talk about government conspiracies than feelings.

“Ivy said something the other day,” I told Henry. “She said that Walker Nolan didn’t have the kind of insider information that Senza Nome would have needed to pull off this attack.”

“But someone did,” Henry filled in.

“Someone did,” I repeated. “I think Ivy suspects they might have someone high up in the government, someone close to the president.”

Saying the words out loud solidified the thought in my mind. Infiltration. Assassination. It made sense.

“Does Ivy have any suspects?” Henry asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” I said, my hand easing away from his and his from mine. “I don’t know what she suspects or what she’s planning.”

Or if she’ll come home with worse than a bruise the next time around.

Before Henry could reply, I opened the car door. I had two choices: sit around and think about what Ivy was doing, or get out of this car and do something myself.





CHAPTER 38

In the process of breaking into my exclusive private school in the dead of night, I learned three things.

First: there were tunnels that ran underneath the school, a vestige of a train station project that had been abandoned before Hardwicke had acquired the land in the early 1900s.

Second: the Hardwicke administration had sealed all the tunnels but one, which had been cleared by the Secret Service as an additional escape route, should the need to get presidential and vice presidential children off campus arise.

And third: the one functional tunnel wasn’t that hard to breach after hours if you somehow discovered its existence and had a student ID, a begrudging accomplice in the Icelandic Secret Service, and a lack of basic self-preservation as reflected in a willingness to both scale security walls and risk being caught on camera.

By the time Henry and I arrived at the rendezvous point, there was a freshman directing students to the tunnel’s hidden entrance. Henry and I descended in silence. The tunnel was dark and lit only by hundreds of glow sticks that someone—presumably Di—had scattered artistically throughout.

Henry knelt down and picked up a hot-pink glow stick. He held it out to me and gave me a dry look. “There is a high level of probability that we will regret this.”

I plucked the proffered glow stick from his hands and smiled. “I don’t believe in regrets.”

When the tunnel forked, signs posted on the wall instructed us to take a right. We followed the instructions—and the sound of music in the distance.

When we finally reached the end of the line and pushed through a metal grate that had been propped open, it took me a moment to realize where the tunnel had let out.