True Courage, page 23
Margery gave her a soft smile, remembering her therapist’s words: calming breaths, slow movements—the kind she’d practiced in front of the mirror for times of stress.
“I’m sorry, I’m waiting for a student. Can it wait until later?”
The agent shook her head. “No, I’m afraid we need to speak to you now. It won’t take long.”
Margery nodded. “All right. I’ll just put these books away.” She gripped the books in her shaking hands and walked toward the stacks, her heart pounding. As soon as she was out of view, she set the books down and walked faster, toward the teacher’s lounge. She’d tell the agent she was going to get her handbag if she stopped her. There was another door on the outside of the lounge, and from there she could slip into the hall and disappear.
* * *
Ellie spoke quietly into her wrist mic.
“She’s heading into the teacher’s lounge. Meet her at the door, Chris. But don’t make a scene—we don’t want our protectee hearing about this.”
“On it.”
Ellie lost sight of Margery. She followed the way she had gone, through the library stacks, and into the teacher’s lounge.
She met Chris, who’d entered from the hall. No Margery.
“The bathrooms—Chris, you check the men’s, I’ll get the ladies’.”
Inside the ladies’ room, a window was open, wide enough for a small woman to slip out.
Ellie pushed her head through the window, heard a door slam in the parking lot.
She quickly climbed out the window, telling Chris through her mic what had happened.
As she dropped to the pavement, she saw a silver Mercedes reverse out of a space. She raced toward it, but before she could reach it, the car turned onto the street and accelerated.
“Call MPD for backup,” Ellie shouted into her wrist mic. “We need that car traced and stopped. We’ve got a license plate number, but if she gets out of the region it will be ten times harder to nab her.”
Any doubts about Margery’s identity fled. They’d spooked her, which told Ellie almost everything she needed to know about Margery’s intentions.
Except for the most important thing: Why had Bonnie Nash come back from the dead and contacted her daughter after eleven years?
Chapter Thirty-One
Olive’s voice came through the intercom on Adam’s desk. “Mr. President, Agent Brody just called—she’s on her way over to speak with you.”
He turned and spoke into the mic. “Is Katie all right?”
“That was the first question I asked—Katie’s fine. Agent Brody said this was urgent, though, so I’ve told John to hold off on your next meeting.”
Adam swallowed. He didn’t like the sound of the word “urgent.” He could only think of one thing that would bring Ellie here urgently, and that was to give him her resignation. He hadn’t talked to her since Saturday night, after she’d bolted out of the East Wing.
“Send her in when she gets here—is she on the grounds?”
“No, she was at agency headquarters downtown. She said it would be twenty minutes or so.”
Adam circled his desk, ignoring John’s frantic messages on his phone. Now he was convinced his suspicions were true. Why else would she be at headquarters during the day, when she’d told him she was due for training at Rowley?
He didn’t want her to lose her job, to be reassigned to some boring desk job, all because he couldn’t keep his hands off her.
He should have apologized, asked her to forget it ever happened—even though he was having a hard time forgetting it himself.
* * *
When Adam met her at the door to the Oval Office, his face was grave. For a minute Ellie wondered if he’d already heard her news. He turned toward his secretary and said, “Olive, hold my calls for a while.”
Ellie had considered bringing the director with her. This wasn’t the sort of news one delivered to the president without backup. But Director Leonard was on his way to speak to a congressional committee, and this couldn’t wait.
“Let’s go to my private study,” Adam said to her, as if he sensed that she was uncomfortable with the conversation they were about to have. “It’s more conducive to…private business.”
He led her through the Oval Office, through another small corridor and into his private office.
The room was cozier than the Oval Office, with a small desk across from a leather loveseat. A TV was airing CNN in the corner, but Adam picked up a remote and switched it off before perching on the edge of the desk. Ellie sat on the loveseat.
“I do most of my work in here. The lights in there are too bright.” He nodded toward the Oval. “They keep them on for when the photographers come in for photo sprays. So they won’t have to bring their lights.”
“I know.” She managed a stiff smile. “This is fine.”
“I think I know what this is about,” he said, crossing his arms.
“You do?” Had word leaked to his staff somehow? The director had told her it would go no further until she’d had a chance to tell the president.
His expression turned wry. “You were at headquarters handing in your resignation. All because I—got carried away the other night. I wish you’d talked to me about it first.”
She blinked. “Oh?” She shifted in her seat, wishing she’d worn a pantsuit instead of a skirt, which kept riding up her legs. Wrong time to flash the president. “What would you have said?”
“That it won’t happen again. I—” He shoved a hand through his hair, and looked toward the wall where a painting of Lady Bird Johnson was hanging. “I should have told you before—I seriously regret what happened. I should have exercised more control.”
Ellie gripped her notebook, wishing she could lob it at the president. He seriously regretted what had happened the other night? He hadn’t put up much of a fight, but now he obviously wished he had. Next time she’d send him an invitation before she grabbed his face and kissed him.
She swallowed a big lump of emotion and faced him squarely. “That’s not why I’m here, but that’s very interesting. Maybe we can discuss it in more detail later.”
“You mean you’re not here to tell me you’ve resigned?” His face registered surprise.
“No, I haven’t resigned.” Yet.
“What’s happened, then? Katie’s okay…?”
“She’s fine. She’s at the residence right now, probably working on the algebra problems her teacher assigned.”
“Good, then she’s probably having more fun than I am.” He smiled crookedly, and her heart thudded against her chest. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, feeling like she had the time she was about to jump out of an airplane, facing that open door and knowing there was no easy way to get it over with except to jump.
She swallowed, then leaped: “We believe we’ve located your wife.”
His smile froze. “What did you say?”
“We’ve found your wife—your ex-wife. Bonnie Nash.”
A muscle in his jaw twitched. “Where is she?”
“She’s right here in D.C. She’s been here for five months.”
“What the hell is she doing here?”
“She was volunteering at Katie’s school.”
“And no one knew this?” He scraped a hand over his face. “Her mother—Jesus.”
“It took us a while to identify her. She’s had plastic surgery, dyed her hair, wears brown contacts now. She looks nothing like Bonnie anymore.”
Adam narrowed his gaze. “Then what made you think it’s her?”
“I had the facial recognition expert fool around with her passport image, and it matched. We also got fingerprints—they match biometric records from Switzerland for your wife.”
“Would you stop calling her that? She’s my ex-wife. We were legally divorced a year after she left. I divorced her in absentia—for desertion.”
Ellie looked away. She didn’t want to see the look of pain in his eyes when he talked about his ex-wife.
Remembering what she had to do, what she had to learn, she took a deep breath and began, “Do you have any idea why she’d come here in disguise? Why she wouldn’t tell anyone of her relationship to you and Katie?”
“I have no clue. But I don’t want her anywhere close to Katie. Is that clear?”
“Absolutely. I’ve already alerted the team.”
“Have they had any contact—oh, God, does Katie suspect…?”
“No,” Ellie said firmly. “I don’t believe Katie suspects anything. There’s very little resemblance, plus Katie was three the last time she saw her mother. Right?”
He nodded. “But she’s seen photos—that’s all she remembers. I didn’t get rid of them—even though I wanted to burn every one of them.” His voice was bitter—the sound of a man who’d had his heart broken.
“Margery—that’s what she calls herself now—has approached Katie several times.” Ellie looked down at her notes. “She came along on a school field trip to the Smithsonian, and she’s running the after-school club that Katie’s been involved in.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I suspect she started the club to get close to Katie.”
He shook his head. “Twelve years of ignoring her daughter, and then she starts a club to get close to her? Just imagine, if Katie had suspected who she was…” He stood up, staring out the window where the press corps were waiting in their tents for their five o’clock news hit.
He turned. “How soon before the press finds out about this?”
“They won’t hear it from us. I can guarantee that.”
“Someone will talk. Someone from the school.”
“No one at the school knows. We told them we couldn’t allow her to continue volunteering because of immigration issues.”
“I’ve got a boatload of refugees setting a course for Guam and an ex-wife who’s here illegally. What the hell else can go wrong?” He shook his head. “At least you didn’t resign. I was worried that I’d ruined your career.”
Ellie swallowed. Somehow, the fact he was worried about her career ending over a random kiss made her realize he didn’t particularly want their relationship—if that’s what it was—to advance any further. He valued her in her professional capacity more than as a lover. A potential lover, she reminded herself. Neither of them would have let that happen.
At least she was pretty sure she’d have put the brakes on it.
She was there to see that his daughter was safe, and that’s what she’d continue to do.
And she’d forget about this attraction she felt every time she was in a room with him.
She’d passed the intense training to be a protective agent by maintaining single-minded focus and determination. She’d get over this—infatuation—the same way.
By focusing on her job.
She lifted her chin. “I need to find out why she’s here. And in order to piece that together, I need to know why she left. Do you mind if I ask you some questions?”
“I don’t suppose I have any choice now, do I? Now that she’s been unearthed…” He shook his head and muttered, “I wish she’d stayed underground, if you want to know the truth.”
Ellie ignored that. Smoothing her skirt over her thighs, she began, “She left twelve years ago—that was the year the film about you came out, One Way Out.”
“Yeah, but that wasn’t why she left.”
“Why did she leave?”
He shrugged. “She never told me. She just moved out one day, leaving Katie with the housekeeper.”
“How does a mother do that?”
“You’re the psychologist. You tell me.”
“It was your marriage. What was wrong? Were you seeing someone else?”
“No.”
“No? Did she think you were?”
“No! I never fooled around on her. I wasn’t home much, but I wasn’t fooling around.”
“You were working?”
“I was just out of law school, working around eighty hours a week. Bonnie was drinking a lot. I’d come home and she’d have tried to clean herself up. Her breath smelled like mouthwash, but she was wasted. Every single day. If it hadn’t been for the housekeeper, Katie—hell, she probably would’ve starved.”
“The housekeeper lived there?”
“No, not until after Bonnie left, then I asked her to move in.”
“I want to talk to her—Mrs. Torres. See what she remembers about Bonnie.”
“Why? It was a long time ago.”
“We need to know if Bonnie intends to harm Katie in any way. If she was a bad mother simply due to neglect, or if she harbors resentment toward her daughter.” She paused. “We need to know if she’s capable of harming her now.”
Adam was quiet. Then he said, “I don’t think she’d harm her. Not intentionally.”
“You were surprised when she left. How well do you really know her?”
He looked away. “I didn’t. Not as well as I thought, apparently. Or maybe she didn’t know me.”
“She didn’t know you were a workaholic?”
“I’m not a workaholic.”
“You just said you were working eighty hours a week.”
“That’s typical for lawyers right out of law school. And I had more to prove…”
“You had more to prove…to whom?”
He didn’t speak. Then, “Me. I had to prove to myself that…that goddamned film…”
“What about it?”
He came off the edge of the desk, started pacing the small office. “They made me out to be a hero. It had died down after the book was released, and then the film started it all up again.” He stopped, looked at her. “You know what it’s like to be the object of hero worship? A whole nation that thinks you’re somehow special because you did what anyone else would have done.”
“I don’t think too many people would have done what you did.”
He stuffed his fists in his pockets. “Not true. Any one of those men in that unit would’ve gone up that mountain if they’d still had working legs. I was the only one who could do it. So I did. End of story.”
“But it wasn’t the end of the story.”
He shrugged. “Close enough.”
“Adam! You risked your life, repeatedly, distracting the enemy soldiers so the helicopters could land and get those men out. It’s a miracle you even survived.”
“I got lucky.”
She snorted. “Luck, yeah. You wouldn’t have needed it if you’d just jumped on the first helicopter and gotten the hell out of there.”
“Someone had to do it. Someone had to and I was there, and I had another M67 in my vest and an M16 magazine clip I was saving for just such an occasion.” He gave her a smirk, as if they were talking about a nice bottle of wine instead of a plan to protect two dozen soldiers in a mountain jungle.
She blinked. “A lot of men owe their lives to you.”
He settled against the desk again, his gaze warning her she was on dangerous ground. “What’s this got to do with my wife—my ex-wife?”
“I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out why Bonnie left, and why she’s back now.”
“I can think of any number of reasons why she left.”
Ellie was having a hard time imagining any woman leaving Adam Dybik, so she asked, “Why? Let’s hear them. Why do you think she left her three-year-old child and husband, without a trace, and decided to come back twelve years later?”
“Maybe she finally gave up the bottle, got clean, and wants to make amends.”
“Let’s hope that’s it, and she doesn’t have some other reason for not telling anyone she was here and stalking Katie.”
“Stalking?”
“Yeah, I’d use that word. She was a little too interested in Katie. I thought it might be a case of celebrity worship—some people think it’s really cool to be near the first family. But it went beyond that. Volunteering every day at her school, despite not having a kid there? I should have figured it out months ago, but her story checked out. The passport she gave us is foolproof—I’ve got the State Department looking at that now, to figure out if she had any help coming up with the new identity.”
“She probably didn’t. She’s wicked smart—she specialized in international criminal law at Harvard. Chances are she hasn’t even broken any laws. Even the name, Margery—it’s short for Margaret, her real name. Last name could’ve been legally changed. Maybe she remarried. Who the hell knows?”
“We’ll check on it. That doesn’t explain why she changed her appearance. That alone is suspicious enough that we’ll have to arrest her—if we can find her.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s my fault,” Ellie admitted. “I spooked her. I went to the school library today and told her I wanted to talk to her. She went into the teachers’ lounge and escaped out the window. We have local law enforcement searching for her tags right now. Hopefully they’ll bring her in before she gets out of the country.”
“The police are looking for my ex-wife? The media will have a shit storm over this.”
“No one knows she’s your ex-wife. Not yet—I haven’t even told all the members of the team, only Chris and the director. But you need to tell Katie.”
“You want me to tell her her mother’s been stalking her all this time? No. I’m not going to tell her that. It will—it’s not something she needs to hear.”
“If she learns it from someone else—”
“She won’t.”
Ellie shook her head. “Adam—Mr. President. I’m telling you, as your daughter’s protective agent, you need to tell her what’s going on.”
Adam closed his eyes. “I can’t. To dredge all that back up again…”
Ellie swallowed. Dredging it back up would be painful—for Katie, and for him. “You really don’t know why she left?”
He looked at her, as if he were gauging how much to tell her about the intimate aspects of his life with Bonnie. Ellie wished she didn’t need to know. Finally, with a sigh, he said, “I married her because she was pregnant. With Katie.”
“I knew that—I’ve done the math.”
