The Long Game

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Daniela walked slowly toward me.

  “Congressman Wilcox was killed in federal custody,” I told her. “He was a liability.” The terrorist drew herself to a stop directly in front of me. “Are you?” I asked her. “A liability to Senza Nome?”

  When the government hands you over, what are the terrorists going to do? To you? To your child?

  Do they have your loyalty?

  Do you have theirs?

  Those questions never made their way from my mind to my lips.

  “A liability?” Daniela repeated after an elongated moment. “To the people you have been dealing with, let us say that I am a concern.”

  She knows she’s a threat, I thought. And she knows what they do to threats.

  Once upon a time, Daniela Nicolae might have been a true believer in Senza Nome’s cause. But right now, in this cell, looking at the possibility of confronting her own people, she was also a mother.

  I knew from firsthand experience—from Ivy—what a powerful motivation that could be.

  “The message you brought me—‘The dove has always wanted to fly to Madrid.’ It was an order to kill the woman who brought you here.” Daniela Nicolae stood over me. “Priya Bharani. She’s the dove.”

  I stood up, trying to process that statement. “And Madrid?” I asked, my tongue like sandpaper in my mouth.

  “I know people,” Daniela replied, “who have been to Madrid. I know what it is they refer to.”

  “Murder,” I said.

  “Execution,” came the correction. “They don’t just want the dove dead. They want it sudden and public, and they want the blood on my hands.”

  Priya had been ordered to give herself up, to deliver Daniela, to deliver me. She’d known that, in all likelihood, she would be surrendering her life.

  “When we make it back to Hardwicke,” I said, trying to process the reality of the situation. “When we go in . . .”

  “I’m to make an example of her.”

  “With the FBI and SWAT team watching?”

  Daniela gave a slight nod.

  “Won’t they shoot you?” I asked.

  Daniela looked at me with an expression somewhere between detachment and pity.

  That was when I realized: “They won’t shoot you if you have me.”

  I could see how this would have played out, if Daniela hadn’t told me the meaning behind the message. I’d have been prepared for an attack, but I wouldn’t have expected it to come from her.

  Neither would Priya, I thought.

  The dove has always wanted to fly to Madrid.

  “Why tell me this?” I asked the woman Walker Nolan had loved, the terrorist operative he’d never really known.

  “You told me your truth,” Daniela Nicolae replied. “You wanted my trust. You claim that we are family, of sorts.” She let that sentiment hang in the air a moment longer than the ones that had come before. “My people, the organization I work for—they have been my family. I was taught, from the cradle, to protect that family.” She laid a hand on her stomach. “I would have died for our cause. But I will not allow my daughter to do the same.”

  There was a noise in the hallway—footsteps, then a shout.

  “Do you have a plan?” I asked Daniela.

  She smiled again, that same subtle, chilling smile. “Do you?”

  CHAPTER 60

  Two minutes later, the door to the cell opened.

  Priya stepped in and shut the door behind her. “We’ve got company,” she said. “Tess, you and I need to get out of here. Now.”

  “What kind of company?” I asked.

  Priya grabbed my arm, and as she pulled me out of the cell, she met Daniela’s eyes. “You stay here.”

  I’d known that it wasn’t my job, or Priya’s, to get Daniela out. But after the past fifteen minutes—and especially the last two—my gut rebelled against the idea of leaving Daniela behind and hoping things went according to plan.

  We need Daniela. Without her, we don’t stand a chance.

  “Stay behind me,” Priya said softly, as she guided me down the corridor. “And do exactly as I say.”

  The two guards who’d been there when we arrived were still just outside the door, but they’d been joined by a third—and all three were slumped on the floor. Unconscious.

  What happened? I bit back the words, suddenly sure that I didn’t want to risk making any unnecessary noise.

  Priya caught the look on my face as she glanced back over her shoulder at the men. The look on her face clearly said, Don’t ask.

  We rounded the corner, walking at a brisk pace. We continue at that pace until a group of men turned the corner at the end of the hall, walking toward us.

  Not good.

  There were four men. At least three of them were armed.

  So not good.

  “Head down and keep walking,” Priya murmured. She slowed her pace slightly, and I matched mine to hers.

  “You!” I heard a voice say to my left.

  Priya tensed, ready to launch herself into action.

  “Tess.”

  The sound of my name drew Priya up short, and for the first time, I looked past the guns to the men’s faces. Three of them appeared to be guards of some type. The fourth was the vice president of the United States.

  Where’s his Secret Service detail?

  “It is Tess, isn’t it?” the vice president said. Beside him, one of the men’s hands hovered over his weapon.

  “Yes,” I told the vice president, turning to face him full-on. “It is.”

  “They say you saw my daughter. They say you saw Anna.” The vice president didn’t say a word about my presence here. He didn’t seem capable of registering surprise or suspicion or anything other than a haunting mixture of sorrow and fear. “She’s okay?”

  “She was screaming,” I said, unable to keep the memory from coming to life on my tongue. “I saw them knock her unconscious, but they weren’t trying to hurt her. They needed her intact.”

  They need her to get to you.

  “They won’t need her much longer,” the vice president said, the words getting caught in his throat.

  I realized, then, why he was here.

  He turned to Priya. “I never saw you,” he said gruffly.

  “Nor we you,” Priya returned. She started walking again at that same brisk pace. After a moment, I followed.

  He’s here for Daniela, I thought. The same as us.

  The difference was, the vice president—the acting president—had the authority to let her go.

  Priya and I made it to the surface. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to see Ivy waiting outside. Adam stood slightly behind her.

  They were very surprised to see me.

  “What—” Ivy started to say, but then she changed her mind. Instead of asking me what I was doing here, she turned on Priya, the look on her face promising dire consequences.

  “She had a message,” Priya told Ivy. “For the prisoner. I assure you—”

  “I assure you,” Adam countered, stepping forward, “that you do not want to finish that sentence.”

  Adam and Ivy hadn’t been happy when Priya had used me to send a message to them. And now that she’d brought me to see a known terrorist? Put me in a room with that terrorist?

  This wasn’t going to be pretty.

  “She didn’t have a choice about bringing me,” I said, trying to get Adam and Ivy to focus on me. “Just like I didn’t have a choice about coming.”

  They have Vivvie.

  I willed Ivy to remember that, willed Adam to ask himself what lengths he and Ivy would have gone to if the terrorists had still held me.

  “Get Tess out of here,” Ivy told Adam, clipping the words.

  “Is it done?” I asked, stepping back and away from them before Adam could reach for me. “Daniela? The files? The foreign prisoners?”

  Everything else Senza Nome asked for—is it done?

  Ivy held up a USB drive. “My files,” she said.
>
  Or at least, the version she was giving Senza Nome.

  Ivy inclined her head slightly. “It’s done.”

  The door opened behind us. All four of us whirled in the direction of the sound. Daniela Nicolae stepped out into the evening air, her hands cuffed in front of her body, an armed guard on either side.

  “President Nolan will be sworn back in within the hour,” one of the guards told Ivy. “You need to move.”

  Priya was the one who heeded that instruction, stepping forward to take the USB drive from Ivy. “I’ve received an ultimatum of my own,” she said, her voice steady. “I have to be the one to deliver their demands. I go in.”

  “You won’t come out,” Ivy told Priya. The resulting silence indicated Priya’s acceptance of Ivy’s words, both as truth and as inevitable.

  Stone-faced, Ivy nodded to the guards. They transferred Daniela Nicolae to Priya’s custody. Seconds later, the guards were gone.

  They were never here. Vice President Hayden was never here. This exchange never happened.

  “Come on, Tess,” Adam said, stepping up beside me.

  I swallowed. “I can’t.”

  Ivy understood before Adam did. She always thought three steps ahead. “No,” she said fiercely. “Tessie. Theresa. No—”

  There was a blur of movement, and Ivy crumpled. Adam caught her just before she hit the pavement. Priya stood over them. She’d knocked Ivy out, and now she had a gun in her hand.

  “I am sorry,” she told Adam. “Truly. But Tess comes with me.”

  Adam lowered Ivy’s prone form to the ground. He stood. Priya fired a warning shot to one side.

  “Tess.” Adam addressed me, ignoring Priya, ignoring her gun. “Come to me.”

  My throat tightened. “I can’t.”

  Adam saw now what Ivy had seen instantly: Priya wasn’t taking me against my will. He saw in my face that I’d known all along that it would come to this.

  “I’m sorry,” I told Adam. “If there was a way . . .” My words came at an uneven pace, my breathing ragged. “I wish there were a way, Adam, but I can’t just step back and let people die. Tell Ivy—”

  “Tess—”

  I spoke over his objection. “Tell Ivy that I forgive her. For leaving me in Montana, for lying to me—for everything. Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her that I had to do this, okay? Tell her . . .”

  I love her.

  He could hear it in my voice. They all could. I stared at Ivy, lying prone on the pavement, her face peaceful.

  “Tell her,” I said, “that I am my mother’s daughter.”

  I nodded at Priya, and she stepped forward, placing herself between Adam and me, her gun still pointed directly at him. I turned to go. I heard Adam step forward. “You won’t shoot me,” he told Priya.

  A second later, I heard his body hit the ground.

  I whipped back around. There was no gunshot, I told myself frantically. Priya didn’t shoot him.

  Daniela stood over Adam’s body, her hands still cuffed. “He was right,” she told Priya. “You would not have shot him.”

  How did she—

  Priya trained her gun on Daniela, and I remembered Vivvie’s aunt telling me that pregnant or not, Daniela Nicolae could take me.

  “He will be fine,” Daniela said, stepping over Adam’s body. “Now, are we doing this, or aren’t we?”

  I tried not to think, in that moment, that Priya didn’t know—not really, not fully—what this entailed.

  The dove. Madrid.

  I couldn’t let myself go there. I couldn’t think about the plan—my plan.

  Priya lowered her weapon, but never took her eyes off Daniela. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 61

  “There’s no way I’m letting a minor put herself back on the chopping block.” The FBI agent who’d greeted me when I was released was the same one we needed to let us back through the gate now.

  It had taken us twenty-three minutes to get to Hardwicke and another twelve to arrange this meeting. Feeling suffocated by that tally, I laid my phone on the table in front of us. “You don’t have a choice.”

  I’d received another text on the way here. Another video. As I watched, the FBI agent hit play. I’d seen the video, but I made myself watch it again. A girl this time. A senior. I couldn’t place her name, but I knew she’d applied early to Princeton.

  She wouldn’t be going to college now.

  “Give them what they want,” I told the agent, “and we can end this.”

  She had to avert her gaze—from me and from my phone.

  “Homeland’s cleared it,” one of her colleagues told her. It, in this case, was surrendering Daniela to the terrorists’ hands, not me. “Word is that the order on this one came down from the top.”

  The clock was ticking on that order, just like the clock was counting down to the terrorists’ next kill. Once the president resumes his office, once he figures out what the vice president has done . . .

  We had a window, and we were wasting it.

  “This is my choice,” I told the hostage negotiator. “If nothing else, it will buy you time, and they won’t hurt me, not right away.”

  We can’t stand around debating this. We need to move.

  “We’ve got the girl’s guardian on the line.” Someone held out a phone to the FBI woman. At the mere mention of Ivy, I snapped into motion. The FBI hadn’t patted me down for weapons this time.

  That was a mistake.

  Priya had refused to give me a gun, but she hadn’t left me defenseless. We’d had time to talk about how this would go down on the drive here. Before we’d left the car, she’d given me a knife.

  “Put the phone down,” I said. It took a single beat for the agents to process the fact that I was holding a blade. That was all the time it took for me to angle it at my own throat.

  “Put the phone down,” I repeated.

  “Tess.” Hostage negotiators specialized in sounding reasonable.

  I dug the tip of the blade into my own neck. I felt a sharp pain. Blood tricked down and over my collarbone.

  They put the phone down.

  “You have two choices,” I said, stepping back. “You either send me in with Priya and Daniela and you risk that something might happen to me in there, or I swear to all that is holy that something will happen to me, right here.”

  They might be able to take the knife from me, but not before I did some serious damage to myself.

  “Am I bluffing?” I asked the female agent.

  She took in my posture, the expression on my face. “No.”

  My gut said that they wanted to send me in. They wanted to buy themselves time.

  I just had to give them an excuse.

  When Priya, Daniela Nicolae, and I walked through the gates of Hardwicke, I could just barely make out the silhouettes of the snipers on the roof. Behind us, the SWAT team and the FBI stood in a formidable line.

  One wrong move, and it was all over.

  Step after step after step, we walked away from the safety of the outside world and toward the main campus—toward the armed men and Mrs. Perkins and the bodies already littering the Hardwicke halls.

  We’d made it two-thirds of the way there when Daniela spoke. “You can lower the knife.”

  My arm had held the blade in position long enough that for a second, it didn’t want to move.

  Closer to the front doors of Hardwicke. Closer.

  My hand shaking, I managed to lower the blade to my side.

  “Drop it,” Priya told me, her voice guttural and low, as we approached the main building. I followed her gaze and saw the red dot on my chest.

  The snipers.

  I dropped the knife. It clattered to the pavement. For an elongated moment, the sound echoed all around us. The world was still. Calm.

  And then Daniela Nicolae bent to pick up the knife.

  Dove. Madrid—

  Within a heartbeat, Daniela was holding Priya from behind, the knife at her throat. Daniela turne
d to face the SWAT team, to face the world.

  “My name is Daniela Nicolae,” she shouted, her voice high and clear. “And the time for waiting is over.”

  The blade slid over Priya’s throat. One second, Vivvie’s aunt was standing beside me, and the next, Daniela pushed her body aside and made a grab for me. She held the blade to my throat.

  “Breathe,” Daniela murmured into the back of my head, using my body as a shield as she backed away from the SWAT team’s raised weapons, away from Priya, sprawled out on the ground.

  The dove has always wanted to fly to Madrid.

  I did as Daniela Nicolae instructed. I forced air into my lungs and I forced it out. But all I could see, in the world in front of me and in my mind, was blood.

  CHAPTER 62

  I’d known the plan. That was what I told myself as Daniela jerked me through the front doors of Hardwicke. I’d known that for us to do what needed to be done, the terrorists had to watch Daniela do as she’d been told.

  They had to watch her kill Vivvie’s aunt.

  “Ms. Kendrick,” Mrs. Perkins greeted me as we stepped inside the building. “So nice to see you again.”

  An armed man slammed me against the wall. My face pressed flat, my heart thudding in my chest, I tried to ignore the hands on my body, checking me for weapons, lingering a second too long.

  “She’s clear,” the man said, stepping back. I turned slowly to face them. Opposite me, Mrs. Perkins plucked the knife from Daniela’s hand. “I’ll take this,” she said.

  The blade was still smeared with red, still dripping.

  Mrs. Perkins let the knife dangle from her fingertips as she led us down the hallway and up the stairs. One of the guards pressed the tip of his automatic weapon against the small of my back.

  When we stepped out into the third-floor hallway, I saw a trio of bodies lined up against the wall. The headmaster, two students.

  “This isn’t who we are,” Daniela said, her voice low, her eyes on the bodies.

  Mrs. Perkins opened the door to the third-floor computer lab. “It’s who you are,” she told Daniela lightly. “It’s all you’ll ever be in the eyes of the world, thanks to your wonderful little performance out front.”