“Who lives here?” she asked, not because she expected an answer—she didn’t. It was to break the increasingly oppressive atmosphere, to give Maddie, who was looking increasingly wild-eyed and terrified, a bit of heart.
“Shut up” was the growled response. The second thug, who was walking behind her sister, who was leading the way, gave Maddie a shove.
Maddie stumbled, regained her balance, and seemed to shrink. Feeling the welcome heat of building anger—welcome because it was an antidote to fear—Jess shut up.
As they were herded along a hall, Jess got the impression that they were still underground. The floor was stone, the walls seemed to be the real old-fashioned kind of plaster, and the air was quiet and cool. At the end of the hall was an elevator. They rode it up three floors in silence. The tension in that elevator was so thick it could have been cut with a knife.
When the door opened, Jess was pushed out first with a rough hand in the middle of her back. She found herself stumbling into what seemed to be an extremely large office, maybe thirty by forty feet, with a slate floor and bookshelves fashioned from some fine dark wood lining three of the four walls. The fourth wall, the one to the right of the elevator, had deep blue floor-to-ceiling curtains drawn over a pair of windows that flanked a white marble fireplace with a portrait of a woman over it. Scattered about were a number of gold-upholstered wing chairs positioned in pairs with a table between them. Jess could smell, just faintly, a mix of cigar smoke and lemon-tinged furniture polish in the air. A quartet of black-suited men, two on either side of the room, stood with their legs apart and their hands clasped behind their backs in the classic military at-ease position, their expressions impassive as they stared straight ahead, clearly on guard duty. Jess’s heart pounded as she spotted them.
They
,
them—
those were the names she knew them by, and just the sight of them made her go all light-headed. A huge mahogany desk sat catty-corner across the far corner of the room. Two men were behind it, one standing, the other sitting. The sitting man rose as Jess stopped just beyond the elevator, looking at them.
Her breathing suspended as she recognized him: Wayne Cooper, the First Father.
“You’ve got yourself into a bad situation, I’m afraid, Ms. Ford.” He sounded perfectly normal, if a little severe. He looked just like he did on TV, which was the only place Jess had ever seen him. But there was something about him, about the expression on his face, about the way his fingers tapped impatiently on the desktop, about the aura of power he exuded, that sent a chill racing down Jess’s spine. “I need you to come over here, give me that phone of my son’s, and tell me exactly what you’ve done.”
He turned and pointed a bony forefinger accusingly at a computer monitor. The man behind him was absolutely ashen-faced as he looked at it, too. The reason was obvious: It was running one of the videos she had so recently uploaded.
“Free her hands,” Cooper ordered over his shoulder. One of the goons must have had a knife, because he sliced through the plastic tie. Jess shook her hands, chafed her wrists, and glanced at Maddie, who had just been pushed down into one of the wing chairs.
Maddie’s eyes clung to hers. Jess could see tears swimming in them. Her chest went tight.
“My sister?”
Cooper snorted. “Get the hell over here and give me that phone.”
A goon pushed her forward. With her peripheral vision, Jess saw Maddie let her head drop against the back of the chair and close her eyes. She could feel her sister’s terror, reaching out like icy fingers to clutch at her own heart. As she moved toward the desk, Jess swallowed, the taste of fear sour in her mouth.
She was horribly afraid they were just about out of time; even if she wanted to, even if they ordered her to at gunpoint, or with a gun to Maddie’s head, what was done could not be undone.
Once they figured that out, would they kill them both?
Bubbling anger trumped the sick fear that threatened to turn her bones to water and her muscles to mush. These people were terrorizing and threatening her sister. They had ripped her own life completely apart. They had killed so many people. They had shot Mark.
She was caught, with no way to escape them that she could see. And thanks to her, poor, innocent Maddie was caught along with her. But she refused to cower. No way would she give them the satisfaction of seeing how very frightened she was, of how helpless she felt.
Her head came up. Squaring her shoulders, she walked to the desk.
“Hand over that phone.” He held out his hand. Jess pulled the President ’s phone from her pocket and put it in his palm. She had no further use for it, anyway. She’d taken what she needed from it.
“Now I want you to tell me just exactly what you did.”
Ignoring her pounding heart, Jess looked Cooper in the eye.
“I uploaded those videos to every media outlet I could think of. I put them on YouTube. iReport. iWatch. Everywhere. They’re all over the Web. And those goons of yours who broke into my mother’s house and kidnapped my sister and me? That was captured on my webcam, too. It ’s all out there now. Millions of people are probably watching it as we speak.”
His eyes bulged. His face slowly purpled with anger.
“God in heaven, young woman, you’ve done a bad day’s work. A bad thing for your country. You—”
The phone on his desk rang, interrupting. Breaking off, fixing her with a fulminating stare, he snatched up the receiver.
“Yes,” he said into it. Then, “It’s about time. Send them on up.”
Then he hung up.
“There’s no fixing this, Mr. Cooper,” the man at his side said. He looked absolutely ill as he glanced at the screen then away again. Jess thought there was something familiar about his round face and blond hair, but she couldn’t quite place him and wasn’t inclined to try. Instead, she was busy trying to think of anything, any sliver of a plan, that might save them. “Once it ’s out there on the Internet like this, there’s no calling it back.”
“There has to be.”
A barely audible click and the whisper of the doors opening announced the arrival of the elevator.
Automatically, Jess glanced over her shoulder. Her eyes widened. Her heart wobbled. Her breath stopped. She turned, leaning back against the desk for support.
Mark walked into the room, a new, barely congealed gash in the left side of his forehead, his face tight with stress, tension apparent in the controlled way he moved, but very much alive. Their eyes met. Her soul sang hosannas. The icy grief that she’d been keeping so carefully isolated suddenly melted and turned into a rush of thanksgiving that surged through her veins.
It was only then, as her world righted itself on its axis and she drew a deep, cleansing breath, that she registered the identity of the man right behind Mark: Fielding. He was pointing a gun at Mark’s back.
33
M
r. Cooper. Lowell.” Mark nodded grimly at the two men behind the desk. Only then did Jess realize who the second man was: Harris Lowell, the President’s Chief of Staff. With Fielding still behind him, Mark walked toward them. Guards and goons alike watched him carefully, but with Fielding’s gun on him and outnumbered seven to one, he apparently wasn’t considered a threat, because they let him come. Jess saw the sideways glance with which he took in Maddie ’s presence, as well as the subsequent narrowing of his eyes and thinning of his mouth. Maddie was sitting up now, tear stains on her face, looking at Mark with renewed hope.
Hoping was foolish, Jess told herself sternly as she caught herself hoping, too. The odds were so high—too high. Mark was still alive, yes, but he was in no better case than Maddie and herself: He was a captive, almost certainly slated to die.
“Mark.” Cooper’s eyes pinned him. His expression was unfriendly, to say the least. “If you’d kept a lid on Annette like I asked, none of this would have happened. How the hell are we gonna fix this?”
“Ms. Ford posted videos of the President all over the Web,” Lowell said, gesturing unhappily at the monitor, where one of the films was playing. “It ’s bad. As bad as can be.”
Mark reached the desk. He was so close his sleeve brushed hers, so close she could see how very raw and painful-looking the gash in his forehead was. It looked like the kind of thing that could have been gouged out of his flesh by a bullet. Had he been shot, as she’d thought, and that was the result? Even with Fielding and his gun behind him, Jess was so glad to see him that a warm little glow filled her. It must have shown in her eyes, because his eyes warmed in turn and he gave her a quick, intimate smile.
“It was the President’s phone that I picked up right before the car wrecked,” she told him. “Mrs. Cooper must have found it that night before she ran away from the White House. There were videos on it. . . .” She gestured at the monitor. The graphic images spoke for themselves.
“My question is, how did you know Annette had it?” Mark asked Cooper. He was very calm, but she could feel his stress. He was wound tight, his edginess apparent in the hardness of his eyes and jaw, the tautness of his shoulders. Behind him, Fielding’s face could have been carved out of stone.
“David called me and told me. He realized his phone was missing as soon as he got up to the residence from that damned dinner for whoever it was. He was panicking, because he knew what was on it and that she must have took it. She’d been threatening him with divorce, you know. He guessed she was going to use those damned pictures against him. That boy always was a fool when it came to women.”
“So you had Annette killed to stop her from using the videos against David in a divorce?”
Cooper grimaced. “Hell, no. I had her killed to save his Presidency. If they’d got out it would ’ve been over. Now that I’ve seen ’em, I know he wasn’t exaggerating one bit about that.”
“They are out,” Jess pointed out. “They’re everywhere. It’s over, Mr. Cooper.”
“Nothing’s ever over, Ms. Ford.” Cooper’s eyes met hers. “If you’d died in that wreck like everybody else, none of the rest of this would ’ve been necessary. But you didn’t, you lived and you remembered and you talked and you put these damned pictures on the Internet, so that’s where we are.”
“You’ll be charged with murder, Mr. Cooper.” Lowell sounded like a man in shock. “Hell, they’ll charge me as an accessory after the fact, even though I had nothing to do with killing the First Lady and just got on board later to try to clean up the mess. The President . . .”
“He was out of the loop,” Cooper said. “He suspects some, but he doesn’t know.”
“He ’ll have to resign just on account of these videos, if nothing else,” Lowell said.
“No.” Cooper shook his head. “I’ve been thinking. We can claim the pictures are fakes—claim it ’s a look-alike and not David at all. There’ll be some talk, maybe some things printed in rags like the
National Enquirer,
but they can’t prove it ’s David, and we can face it down. There ’s no proof of anybody murdering anybody. Annette died in a car accident, pure and simple. Davenport committed suicide without anybody threatening to reveal that he’d been embezzling from his firm for ten years or more if he didn’t kill himself and take this young lady with him—which the damned drunk failed to do. His secretary—hit and run. That reporter—car accident. It’s all nothing. It can all be explained away. The only people who know otherwise are right here in this room.” Jess knew what was coming. A thrill of fear shot down her spine even as Cooper looked around at his guards. “I want you—all of you—to take these three people here away and shoot ’em, then hide their bodies where they won’t ever be found. Hennessey, I’m putting you in charge of that. We can’t afford any screwups on this, you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Hennessey—the second goon—nodded and drew his gun.
“Oh, please, I’m having a baby! I don’t want to die!” Maddie cried, bolting up from the chair and darting toward Jess. Jess’s gaze shot to her. Her heart clutched. Her stomach turned over. Her arms reached out for her sister. . . .
Horror grabbed Jess by the throat as she realized Hennessey’s gun was tracking Maddie.
“Maddie!” she screamed, lunging toward her.
“Please, please . . .”
“Get down!”
Mark dived on top of both of them. Even as she hit the stone floor hard, Jess realized Mark had a gun. He was rolling, coming to his feet, aiming . . .
And screaming into his sleeve, “Where the hell are you guys?”
A split second later a dozen armed men burst from the elevator, yelling, “Freeze, Federal agents!”
AN HOUR LATER,
it was all over. Having taken Mr. Cooper and Lowell away first, the FBI was now loading the last of Cooper’s private security personnel into vans. Put together from former federal agents, Cooper’s team had all the skills of the real thing with none of the legal restrictions. Mark had been glad to learn that the men who had been trying to kill Jess and, later, both of them, had been Cooper’s employees rather than Feds. The thought that he had killed two fellow agents had bothered him. Knowing that they were basically thugs for hire eased his conscience. It also saved him from the scrutiny, hearings, etc., associated with the killing, no matter how justified, of another operative.
“I’m so glad you came.” Wrapped in a blanket, her hands freed, Maddie was in the backseat of Fielding’s car, which Mark had “borrowed,” if one wanted to use the term loosely, which he did. He was driving them—her and Maddie—back to D.C. Maddie to be dropped off at her sister’s, and Jess—well, he had other plans for Jess. “I was
so
scared.”
“So was I.” Jess sat in the passenger seat beside him, smiling at him. She ’d been smiling at him basically ever since he’d hauled her up off the stone floor in Cooper’s house, with the occasional hug thrown in, and as soon as they got somewhere private he was going to demonstrate in a big way just how much he appreciated that. She shivered, looking at him. “I thought you were dead.”