The Long Game

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.

Is that a swimming pool?

“The Aquatic Complex,” Henry told me.

“Yeah,” I said, glancing around. “I got that.”

Stadium seating surrounded us on all sides. An Olympic-sized training pool was set into the floor. Someone had positioned a trio of kegs along one edge. And farther down, near the diving pool, I could make out what appeared to be a bowl of punch and a veritable castle of red plastic cups.

“This is not going to end well,” Henry said, eyeing a couple of seniors climbing up to the diving platform, red cups in hand.

As if summoned by the mere thought of something being a bad idea, Di appeared beside us. She had a bottle of champagne in each hand. With an imperious smile, she set one on the ground and opened the other. Champagne fizzed to the top, and Di held it over her head in victory.

“You asked for a party,” she told me, over the sound of the music.

“You might want to turn that down,” Henry told her.

“Pshaw!” Di gestured rather liberally with the champagne bottle. “This building has walls so thick that it is practically soundproof!”

Forty yards away, one of the senior boys came barreling off the high dive, fully clothed.

Di frowned. “This is an American custom?” she asked.

“Not exactly,” I said.

Di eyed the high dive, then smiled. She took a gulp of champagne, handed the bottle to me, and made a beeline for the ladder.

An instant later, I saw a man wearing a suit and an earpiece walk by, muttering something in Icelandic under his breath.

“How do you think she talked her bodyguard into this?” I asked Henry, tracking Di’s security detail as he grimly pulled her down off the ladder.