THE LONG GAME (25 page)

“Don’t fight this,” Henry told me. His voice
was quiet. I wished he didn’t sound like the boy I’d known. I wish I couldn’t see
my
Henry in his eyes as he continued. “Don’t fight me.”

Armed men bound my hands behind my back. They bound me to a chair, and Henry watched.

He knew that when I’d been kidnapped, I’d been bound. He knew that I couldn’t even see a roll of duct tape without flashing back,
and he watched
.

“Leave us,” Henry told
the guards.

I thought of the armed man in the hallway, the way he’d looked at Henry as he said:
You.

Not
you
as in
now
you
get on the ground. You
as in
I know
you.
You
as in
what are
you
doing with this girl?

At Henry’s request, the guards left us. I stared at the boy I’d kissed less than an hour earlier. I forced myself to look at him, to take in every line of his face, features I’d memorized,
features I
knew
—

“Kendrick.”

Full lips, wide jaw, piercingly clear eyes.

“Don’t call me that,” I told Henry. “Don’t call me anything.”

He lowered his voice. “I tried to get you out.”

Anger bubbled up inside me and came out as a strange, dry laugh. “You tried to get
me
out,” I repeated. “What about Vivvie? And Emilia?” I didn’t give him time to reply. “What about all those freshmen who think
you hung the moon?”

Henry’s jaw clenched. “I never meant for any of this to happen. If you understood—”

Understood?

“These people killed John Thomas!” The words ripped their way out of my mouth. I hurt, just saying them. “Emilia accused Dr. Clark, and do you know what she said? She said that it wasn’t
her
idea. That
she’s
not the one who pulled the trigger. But she didn’t deny that Senza Nome
was behind it.”

“I didn’t know.” Henry’s reply was guttural. I barely heard it. “About John Thomas, about his father. Until this weekend, I never even suspected—”

“I had John Thomas’s blood on my hands,” I choked out. “And you . . .”

He’d washed it off. He’d given me his shirt. He’d taken care of me.

“I didn’t know,” Henry repeated. “I swear it. No one was supposed to get hurt.”

I heard what
Henry wasn’t saying.
No one was supposed to get hurt
here.

Henry had told me that his grandfather’s death had taught him that the people in power couldn’t always be trusted. I’d kept the truth about the conspiracy from him for fear of what he might do if he knew. And when he’d heard me mention the possibility of a fourth conspirator, he’d been devastated. He’d told me that he
wished
I’d told
him.

Not because he didn’t know
, I realized, unable to keep from trying to make sense of how a boy who believed in honor—who believed in protecting people who couldn’t protect themselves—could have let himself be recruited into a group like this.

He already knew the conspiracy wasn’t over. They told him first.

If Senza Nome was trying to manipulate Henry, they might not have told him there
were suspects, plural, for the remaining conspirator. They might have led him to believe there was only one.

“The president.” I forced myself to say it out loud. “They told you that the president is the one who had your grandfather killed.”

Henry stood, staring down at me with the same sick masochism that kept me from looking away from him. He didn’t speak—didn’t confirm what I’d implied, but
didn’t deny it, either.

They told you the president killed your grandfather. They made you believe they could make it right.

“They just asked for money at first,” Henry said. “Then information.”

Information.
I thought of all the times Henry had asked me what Ivy was up to. I thought of the two of us, sitting in the dark on the front porch. I thought of Henry asking me about Ivy’s files.

He’d
used me.

The door to the room opened. Headmaster Raleigh, bound and beaten, was shoved in. Henry tore his gaze away from me, turned, and went to secure the headmaster.

“You don’t have to do this, Mr. Marquette,” Headmaster Raleigh told him.

“If I want to stay in a position to keep the people in this school safe,” Henry told him—told
me
, “yes, I do.”

I turned my head down and to the side. I
refused to look at him. I refused to even acknowledge that I’d heard the words.

I didn’t look back when I heard Henry walking toward the door.

I didn’t lift my head until it closed behind him.

I blinked away the tears that blurred my vision. The headmaster came into focus, bound opposite me in this tiny office.

“Whatever they tell you to do,” the headmaster told me, blood crusted to his lip,
his face swollen, “you do it, Ms. Kendrick.”

I was surprised by the fierceness in his tone.

“This is my fault,” Raleigh said, as much to himself as to me. “I brought them here. It’s my fault.”

I thought of Dr. Clark, watching, infiltrating, influencing,
recruiting
. I thought of the headmaster’s secretary, with her finger on the pulse of the school. “They were already here.”

When Henry’s grandfather
died, Dr. Clark had tasked the class with choosing a replacement. Because she wanted to challenge us to think critically about the process? Or because
she wanted to know what our parents thought? What they knew?

We see everything. We know all of your secrets. And we wait.

I forced my mind away from the memory of Daniela Nicolae’s words and back to the man across from me. “Why did you take the
picture down?” That question surprised me almost as much as it surprised the headmaster. “The photo of you with the president at Camp David,” I continued.
The photo of you with Vivvie’s father and one of the other men who conspired to kill Justice Marquette.
“Why did you take it down?”

I’d thought the headmaster was in bed with the terrorists. When he’d read out the words they had written, I’d
believed they were his. If it hadn’t been for that photograph, for a lingering sense of suspicion cast upon all the men there, would I have questioned that? Would I have realized that the person in the best position to
influence
the headmaster, to
silently observe
everything that went on in these halls, was someone non-threatening?

Someone who goes largely unnoticed.

“What interest could you
possibly have in that photograph?” the headmaster asked, sounding more like the aggrieved man who’d sat opposite me in his office more times than I could count. “Really, Ms. Kendrick—”

“Please,” I said. “I just want to know.”

The headmaster sniffed but deigned to oblige. “I was told displaying that photograph so prominently was a bit gauche.”

I heard the doorknob turn a second before the door
opened. My wrists tensed against the ties that bound them to no avail. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t fight back. I was helpless.

Henry had left me helpless.

Dr. Clark shut the door gingerly behind her. She knelt down in front of me. “Look at you, Tess.” Her voice was gentle. She murmured the words, like it grieved her to see me like this.

Like she
hadn’t
shot a Secret Service agent dead while
I watched.

“This isn’t how I wanted this meeting to happen,” Dr. Clark told me.

“Moira, get away from that young lady or I will—” The headmaster’s threat cut off abruptly as he realized there was nothing he could do. Nothing he could say.

Dr. Clark gave no sign that she had heard him. Her warm brown eyes were solely focused on me. “I know how this must look to you, Tess. I know that you cannot
begin to fathom what I’ve done here today, or why. I know that you cannot understand why a boy like Henry would listen to what I have to say—”

“What did you tell him?” I asked, my body tensing against the ties again, causing the chair to jar slightly.

She didn’t jump. She didn’t blink. “I told him what I am trying to tell you. What’s happening here today isn’t who we are. This”—she gestured
at me, at the headmaster—“is not what we do.”

Mine is a glorious calling.
The tone I’d heard in Daniela Nicolae’s voice in that video was present to the nth degree in my teacher’s. This was what zealotry looked like.

This was a true believer.

“I came to this life when I wasn’t much older than you,” Dr. Clark said softly.

“After 9/11,” I said, cutting her off before she could say more.
There’s
nothing you can say that will make you anything less than a monster to me.
I hoped she could hear that in my voice.

Whether she could or not, she continued, “After the attacks, I wanted to do something. The world wasn’t safe. Everything had changed.”

“So you became a terrorist,” I supplied, my voice razor sharp. “If you can’t beat them, join them?”

“No,” Dr. Clark said vehemently. “No, Tess.
I would never—”

I tuned out whatever it was she would
never
do. She’d killed a man as I’d watched.

“While I was abroad, I was approached by someone. A mentor. He thought that I might be interested in a life of service.” Dr. Clark paused. “He was right.”

“Service,” I repeated dully. “You call this
service
?”

“Our organization was designed to infiltrate terrorist groups. We influence their decisions.
We stop them from the inside out. We play their game better than they do.”

I was on the verge of asking her how, precisely, the Hardwicke School qualified as a
terrorist group
. But I decided it wasn’t worth the words.

“To do what we do,” Dr. Clark said, leaning forward and trying to take my hand, “we need eyes and ears everywhere.”

“Eyes and ears?” I jerked my hand back. “I’m bound to a chair,
I saw you shoot a man dead, and you want me to believe that you just observe?” She believed what she was telling me. She expected me to believe it, too. “You people bombed a hospital!”

“And no one was hurt in that bombing,” Dr. Clark said fiercely. “You think that was an accident? A mistake? We don’t
make
mistakes.”

“Then why—” I cut myself off. “You knew Walker Nolan would tip someone off.
That was the point.”

“Sometimes the biggest threats come from the inside. Sometimes the system is broken, Tess. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Dr. Clark glanced at the headmaster, then turned back to me. “You know what it’s like to stand up to people in positions of power, Tess. I’ve always admired the way you defend people who are not in a position to defend themselves.” She paused. “Is
it so hard to believe that someone like me might want to do the same?”

I knew, just listening to her say the words, that she’d said a variation of them to Henry. She’d told him that the system was broken, corrupt. She’d led him to believe he could fix it.

“You know what President Nolan is capable of,” Dr. Clark said. “You know what happened to Justice Marquette, and you know that the Nolan administration
covered it up.”

“You told Henry that it wasn’t over.” I forced myself to look Dr. Clark directly in the eyes. “You told him that the president was responsible for his grandfather’s death.”

“I believe someone in that administration was,” Dr. Clark countered. “Marquette was killed by the
president’s
doctor and a Secret Service agent on the
president’s
detail. That doesn’t strike me as a coincidence.”
She paused. “It shouldn’t strike you as one, either.”

I imagined Henry, listening to these words. “You told Henry—”

“I told him that we could help him fight back, that we could help him get justice, that
no one
should be above reproach. Four men died. Were we not supposed to notice? Justice Marquette. His doctor. The front-runner to replace him. And a Secret Service agent, shot down by a SWAT
team?” She lowered her voice. “The
White House kept a lid on the agent’s identity, but we found out. We always find out. There was a reason the Nolan administration wanted this buried, Tess. Who do you think ordered the SWAT team to shoot Damien Kostas? Who do you think ordered that a man be executed, with no due process, no law?”

The fourth conspirator.

“So why not expose the truth?” I asked
Dr. Clark. “If you really care about corruption and cover-ups, why not—”

“When someone takes office, we develop a contingency plan. If they’re worthy of the office, it need not be activated. If they are not . . .” Dr. Clark executed an elegant shrug.

A contingency plan
, I thought.
Like Walker Nolan.
That had to be a plan years in the making. They’d already infiltrated Walker’s life before President
Nolan was elected. They’d already sent Daniela to him. So when they developed suspicions about the Nolan administration, they didn’t have to try to dig up incriminating information.

They already had damaging information of their own.

They’d staged the bombing, revealed the relationship between Walker and the bomber, for the sole purpose of taking the president down.

My brain spun. “So shooting
the president, that was what? Another contingency plan?”

“That shooting,” a voice said from the doorway, “was the one contingency we hadn’t planned for.”

I whipped my head in the direction of the voice.

“I need a minute,” Dr. Clark told Mrs. Perkins.

“You’ve had a minute,” Mrs. Perkins responded. “And you’re wasting your time. This one won’t flip.”

Dr. Clark stood up. Her lips were pressed
into a thin line, the muscles in her face taut. “These things take time.”

“Unfortunately, Moira, time is one thing we do not have in any abundance.” Mrs. Perkins turned her attention from Dr. Clark to me. The gleam in her eyes was darker and harder than anything I’d seen in Dr. Clark’s.

Some people do horrible things because of their beliefs
, I thought, a chill settling over my body.
And some
people choose beliefs that let them do horrible things.