Until I was sure that there was no chance of word getting back to Senza Nome, I couldn’t take the risk. If the terrorists had two operatives planted at Hardwicke, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that they had someone in the FBI, too.
“Besides,” I said out loud, looking around the table at each of them, one by one, “this part of the message was for you.”
You’re a resourceful girl related to some very powerful people. I could still see the exact glint in Mrs. Perkins’s eyes. I have every confidence that you’ll work this out.
“The United States government does not negotiate with terrorists,” I said. “That’s a problem. We need the vice president to agree to release Daniela Nicolae. The authorities are going to have to send her into the school to get anyone else out.”
That statement was met with momentary silence.
“That is a problem,” Ivy admitted. “The situation at Hardwicke has already gained national attention. The vice president can’t be seen negotiating with terrorists. Unless we want to encourage future threats, his hands are tied.”
“Then you need to untie them,” I said. “I don’t know how. I don’t care how. But this has to happen.”
“Why?” William Keyes asked bluntly. Now that he had eyes on me, he was not particularly inclined to give the terrorists what they wanted.
“Because,” I said forcefully, “if we can’t get the vice president to release Daniela, people die. Kids will die.”
“Why does this group care so much about securing Daniela Nicolae’s release?” The tone in my grandfather’s voice reminded me that he had a very personal stake in this. “Who is she to them?”
“A soldier?” Bodie suggested. “Left behind enemy lines.”
Adam stared straight ahead. He was a soldier.
“They let her get caught,” Adam said slowly. “Didn’t they?” The question was rhetorical, and if any part of him had expected an answer, it was from Ivy, not me.
I answered anyway. “They planned on Walker tipping his father off. The hospital was never a target.”
“The Nolans were,” Ivy inferred. “It was a PR attack from the beginning.” She paused. “Her superiors had to know there was a good chance Daniela was going to be apprehended.”
Was she expendable? Or did they always have a contingency plan for getting her back?
“You’ve talked to this woman,” William Keyes told Ivy, folding his hands on the table and leaning forward, looming over all of us. “Do you think she knew she was going to be apprehended? Do you think she’s a good little soldier, caught behind enemy lines?”
Ivy’s expression became a fraction more guarded. My gut said that to her ear, the kingmaker sounded a little too interested in the answer to that question, even if she didn’t know why.
“I got a call while Tess was talking with the FBI,” Ivy stated, taking her time with the words. “Homeland was interrogating Congressman Wilcox about his connection to Senza Nome. The congressman was on the verge of breaking.”
Was?
“Congressman Wilcox was killed in custody shortly before the terrorists released Tess.”
I took Ivy’s statement to mean that Senza Nome, peace-loving bunch that they were, didn’t respond well to the idea of their people talking.
“Daniela’s not a soldier to them,” Ivy continued. “She’s a liability.”
Ivy had told me that some of Daniela’s interrogators believed that her feelings for Walker were legitimate. They’d questioned whether her loyalties could be changed—and if they already had.
If the people Daniela worked for were questioning them, too, she wasn’t just a liability. She was a threat.
“If they could have gotten to her already, they would have,” Adam commented. “Just like they got to Wilcox.”
“Captain Obvious is right.” Bodie leaned back in his chair. “If Daniela’s terrorist buddies can’t get to her where she’s being kept, it’s no wonder they want us to tie her up with a bow and send her back.”
The kingmaker’s jaw twitched slightly. Ivy and Adam didn’t know that he was Walker’s father. They didn’t know that the terrorist was carrying his grandchild—and I could see in his eyes that he wasn’t going to tell them. They already knew the woman was pregnant. They thought her child was a Nolan. They were closer to the Nolans than they were to him. He wouldn’t tell them the truth.
And I couldn’t shake the belief that this wasn’t my secret to tell.
“We have less than four hours to get Daniela Nicolae released,” I said, concentrating on that. There would be time later for me to decide what, if anything, to tell Ivy and Adam about Walker Nolan. Right now, I couldn’t afford to forget that we were on a deadline here, and I couldn’t let them forget it, either. “If she doesn’t walk into Hardwicke in three hours and forty-six minutes, they start shooting. Talk to the vice president, talk to the Pentagon—blackmail, bribe, or steal, I don’t care. Find a way.”
I directed those words at all of them. The kingmaker was the first to reply.
“And you think,” William Keyes said sharply, “that if we give them Daniela Nicolae, they’ll just let everyone go?”