The Fixer (33 page)

Keyes was staring at me now, as if he could see into my cells and disassemble my DNA, piece by piece.

“How long have Ivy and Adam known each other?” I asked him. I didn’t wait for an answer as I pelted him with question after question. “Did you know he’s teaching me how to drive? Or that the first time he ever saw me, he looked at me like the bottom had dropped out of his stomach?”

The old man came to stand behind the chair he’d been sitting in moments before. His hands closed over the back of it, his grip turning his knuckles white.

“Did you know,” I said slowly, “that I heard Adam tell Ivy that bringing me to DC was a mistake because she’d made an enemy of you? I heard you say that Ivy had gotten under Adam’s skin, that you had no idea how she’d done it. I have a theory.”

Keyes took a step forward. “You think Adam is your father.”

There was a ferocity in his voice when he’d said those words, like it took every ounce of determination and power he had just to choke out that one statement.

“I asked him,” I said. “He didn’t deny it. We’d need a DNA test to know for sure, but a DNA test might raise some questions.”
I paused. “You’re still hoping that someday, Adam might retire from the military and go into politics.”

William Keyes had barely interacted with me, but I’d watched him. I’d heard him talking. I knew, instinctively, how to go straight for his heart.

“You have a plan for Adam,” I said, “and I doubt that I am part of that plan.”

“Are you attempting to blackmail me?” Keyes said. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought he sounded pleased.

“I prefer to think of it as a negotiation,” I said. “You want to see your son in the Oval Office someday, and I want the governor of Arizona to issue either a pardon or a permanent stay of execution for Damien Kostas’s son.”

Now that the cards were on the table, I saw how easily this could go either way. William Keyes might not give me what I wanted. Adam might not even
be
my father.

I needed this to work.

Ivy
needed for this to work.

“When were you born?” Keyes issued the question like a demand. Those four words—and the laser-sharp focus with which he assessed my features—told me that he wasn’t dismissing my claims outright.

I can do this. I have to do this.

I told him when I was born, and then where. I told him, again, what Ivy had told me: my father was young and recently enlisted.

“Adam joined the military after college.” William’s grip on the back of the chair relaxed slightly. “He met your sister when he was home on leave. She’d just turned twenty.”

I felt like a balloon that had been scratched with a knife. There was one moment of tightness in my chest, like I might explode, and then I felt the fight drain out of me. This was supposed to be my Hail Mary pass.

This was supposed to be me saving Ivy.

Adam met Ivy after I was born.
As I forced myself to process that fact, I realized that I hadn’t just thought Adam was my father, I hadn’t just believed it—I’d wanted it to be true.

If Keyes was telling me the truth, Adam couldn’t be my father. I wasn’t anything to him but Ivy’s daughter.

I stood up and turned sharply to the door.

“I suggest you sit back down.”

I stopped in my tracks but didn’t sit.

“Tess, isn’t it?” the older man said, coming around to stand in front of me. “Is that short for Tessa?”

I wondered what game he was playing.

“Theresa,” I said finally.

Keyes studied me, eyes sharp. “My late wife’s name was Theresa.”

The game had changed—but I wasn’t sure how.

“I never quite figured out how Adam and Ivy met,” William Keyes continued. “She was at Georgetown. He went to see her. I’ve wondered, over the years, if there was something romantic between them.” He paused. “I see now that there’s not. That there couldn’t be.”

He walked over to a shelf on the opposite side of the room and returned with a picture. In it were two young boys. The older one had a serious expression on his face.
Adam
. The younger boy—he had dark hair, a shade too light to be black. He was laughing, smiling.

His eyes were hazel, a familiar mix of brown and green.

“You look like him,” William Keyes said. I had no idea what he was feeling. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the picture—away from the boy.

“Adam said he had a brother,” I said slowly. The memory washed over me. “The first time we met, Adam said he had a brother.”

He’d said that his brother had never cared for school, that he had preferred to spend his time outside.

Like me.

“You know what I think, Tess?” Keyes said, putting the picture down. “I think that my youngest met Ivy during basic training. I think they were young and stupid and, if we want to be generous, maybe even in love. Tommy was like that. If he fell, he fell hard.”

Was
, I thought dully.
Tommy
was
like that.
The past tense hit me with an almost physical force.

“I told him not to enlist. I told him to go to college. He could have been an officer—but he didn’t listen.” Keyes ran a hand roughly through his hair. “Adam thinks I pushed Tommy away, pushed him into joining up by forbidding him to go. Tommy died. I lost both sons.” The kingmaker’s sentences got shorter and curter. “And then there was Ivy.”

Adam’s father—
Tommy’s
father—began to pace. I watched him, hyperaware in that moment that it was almost like watching myself. I’d looked at Adam, wondering if there was any of him in me, and now I knew.

It wasn’t Adam.

It was never Adam.

“Adam must have known Tommy was seeing someone,” Keyes continued, his voice raising a decibel or two as he paced. “And somehow, he found out about you.”

Me.
The pieces fell into place in my mind. All of those times I’d felt like Adam was looking at me like I reminded him of someone—I’d assumed I reminded him of Ivy.

But what if I was wrong?

What if, when he yelled at me, when he told me that family didn’t bolt just because things were hard—what if those had been the times when I’d reminded him of his brother?

His dead brother.
I’d lost so much in the past few weeks:
Gramps, my home, my identity, who I thought my parents were, Ivy
. I’d read a poem once in English class, about what it meant to master the art of losing.

I was an artist.

And now—now I would never know my father. I would never get to meet him, never know if he would have looked at me and seen pieces of himself, if he would have
wanted
me.

If I could have been a daughter he would have loved.

I couldn’t stay here. I started for the door with no plans of what I would do when I walked out. I’d gambled and I’d failed, and now I really was going to be an orphan. Tommy was dead, and Ivy—

Kostas is going to kill her.

I tried.

“Hold it right there, young lady.” Keyes barked out as my hand closed around the doorknob.

“Why?” I asked, whirling around, caught between sorrow and a smoldering anger I wasn’t sure would ever go away. “If it was
Adam, I had something to offer. But my father is dead. Dead men don’t win elections.”

Dead men fathering illegitimate children was barely even news.

My father is dead.
It hurt. All I’d ever seen of him was a picture, and it hurt.
Ivy might die.
I hadn’t saved her.

Just this once, I wanted to save someone.

“No matter what Ivy and my son might have told you”—Keyes crossed the room to stand in front of me—“I’m not so heartless as to send my only grandchild away.”

His
grandchild
. There was something in the way he said that word that was almost manic, as if my importance were larger than life.

My heart clenched.

“You’ll do it?” I asked, terrified to hope for even a second that the answer might be yes. “You’ll get the pardon?”

You’ll save Ivy?

William Keyes—my paternal grandfather—put a hand under my chin. He tilted my face toward his. “That depends,” he said, “on whether or not you’ll do something for me.”

CHAPTER 63

Back at Vivvie’s place, I told the others about the deal I’d struck, and I waited. Eventually, Asher got a text from his sister. Without a word, he flipped on the news.

On the television, a pretty Asian American reporter stared directly into the camera, her hair whipping in the wind. “Again, I am standing outside the Washington Monument, where a SWAT team is closing in on what we are told is a hostage situation.” The camera panned to show a blockade—and beyond that, two dozen men, armed to the teeth.

“Ivy,” I whispered. She had to be okay. She
had
to be.
You have to get through this
, I thought fiercely.
You have to, Ivy. I’ll never forgive you if you don’t.

I couldn’t look away from the screen, the armed men.

Henry sat down beside me. “I would venture to guess that Kostas decided to make it harder for the president to ignore his demands,” he said.

Ivy had promised Kostas that she would tell him exactly how to handle this situation. I wondered if she’d been the one to suggest taking the situation public.

I will hate you forever if you leave me now
,
Ivy
, I thought, wishing she could hear me. My eyes were dry. So was my throat. I had nothing left but the words repeating themselves over and over again in my head. I’d done everything right. I’d
fixed
this. Help was coming.

She didn’t get to leave me again.

On-screen, the reporter kept throwing information at us. The Washington Monument had been closed for construction. No one was sure how many people were inside, but there was a bomb.

The bomb strapped to Ivy’s chest.

I looked at the clock on the wall, like it could tell me when the deal I’d struck with Keyes would come through. Even for a man known for making things happen, conjuring a governor’s pardon out of nowhere took time.

Time Ivy might not have.

“We don’t have to watch.” Vivvie reached for the remote. I pulled it back.

“Yes,” I said simply, “we do.”

The four of us sat, one next to the other, our eyes locked on the screen. Vivvie’s hand worked its way into mine. On my other side, Henry surprised me by doing the same.

I held on—like a person dangling from the edge of a skyscraper, like a drowning man reaching for a hand to pull him to shore.

The press couldn’t get close. The Capitol loomed in the background. The SWAT team, the FBI . . . I didn’t know who else was there, trying to talk Ivy’s captor into releasing her, into not setting off the bomb.

If it had been just her, if it hadn’t been public, would they have just let her die? Would they have swept it under the rug, covered it up?
It hurt to ask myself the question. It hurt even more to know that the answer was almost certainly yes.

“John!” the woman on the screen addressed the station’s news anchor excitedly. “Something is happening. Something is definitely happening.”

Far away, behind the blockade, there was movement. Guns were raised. A door was opening. I couldn’t make out the features on anyone’s face.

My phone buzzed, alerting me to arrival of a new text.
It’s done. WK.
William Keyes.

I stopped breathing. I stopped blinking. I stopped thinking. I stopped hoping.

All I could do was sit there as the reporter continued yelling at the camera, telling us that someone was coming out.

“We have confirmation that the hostage is female,” the reporter was saying. “I’m hearing unconfirmed reports that there’s a bomb strapped to her chest.”

I couldn’t see. I couldn’t tell what was happening. There was a flurry of movement on-screen.

“I don’t see her,” I said, wheezing the words out. “I don’t see her.”

If the others responded, I didn’t hear them. My ears rang. Suddenly, I was on my feet, but I didn’t remember standing.

“The hostage is safe,” the reporter said suddenly. “I repeat, John, we are hearing reports that the bomb has been disarmed and the hostage is safe.”

My body didn’t relax. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t risk
believing what she was telling me—then the camera panned. It zoomed in, and just for a moment, I saw her.
Ivy.

The shot was grainy. All I could make out was her hair, a hint of her features, but the way she moved, the way she stood—it was Ivy.

I sank back into the sofa.
It’s done
, the text had said. Kostas had gotten what he wanted. He’d let Ivy go. Not because of the president, or the hostage negotiators, or the SWAT team, or the FBI.

Because somehow he’d gotten word that his son had been pardoned.

Because of William Keyes.

Because of me.

“They’ve got her.” Vivvie said the words slowly, as if she didn’t quite believe them. “She’s okay.”

Part of me still didn’t believe it. Part of me wouldn’t believe it was really over until Ivy was here, with me.

“The hostage-taker is coming out,” the reporter said suddenly. “I repeat, the hostage-taker is coming out.”

I never saw Kostas take that first step out into the open, his hands up. The view was blocked from the cameras. I never saw him give himself up.

But I did hear the shot that rang out a second later.

I heard the screams, the chaos.

I heard confirmation that the hostage-taker was dead.

CHAPTER 64

The FBI—or the Secret Service or Homeland Security or the White House, I wasn’t really sure on the details—kept Ivy in seclusion for nearly twenty-four hours. They must have allowed her access to a computer, because her insurance policy didn’t rear its head, but they didn’t let her near a phone.

I knew this because I knew, in the pit of my stomach, that if she’d had a phone, she would have called me.

I got a call from Bodie instead. Ivy really was okay. Kostas really was dead—shot with an exploding round before anyone had a chance to see his face. The number of people who knew his real identity could be counted on two hands—and that was why they hadn’t released Ivy right away.