“Tess, darling,” Georgia said, “don’t be ridiculous.” She wasn’t looking at me like a threat. She wasn’t looking at me like a target. She was looking at me like a child. “The president simply is not capable of something like that.” Georgia’s tone was as polished as ever, but beneath the gentle Southern accent, I could hear a thread of sincerity.
A thread of steel.
“I’ve been married to the man for nearly forty years, Tess. I know him as well as it is possible to know anyone in this world, and I am telling you, he could no more arrange for his own shooting than he could kill our children in their sleep.”
Everything in me wanted to believe what Georgia was saying. But I couldn’t help thinking: Do you know what heroically surviving a terrorist’s bullet does to someone’s approval rating?
I couldn’t help thinking about the Supreme Court justice, murdered by the president’s doctor and an agent on the president’s detail. They could have been working for him.
“You’ve been through a very traumatic event,” Georgia told me. “It’s understandable that there would be some lingering aftereffects.” Georgia softened her voice. “Have you talked to Ivy about any of this? To Adam, or your grandfather?”
She said the words like they were a suggestion, but part of me couldn’t help wondering if they were a probe.
“Ivy knows Peter,” Georgia continued. “Almost as well as I do. She knows he is not capable of something like this.”
This time, when the First Lady said the word capable, I heard it in a different way. What if capable wasn’t a value judgment, a comment on the president’s moral compass? What if it was a statement of fact?
The First Lady was the one who held the press conference after the president was shot. She was the one who made it a call to action.
From things I’d overhead here and there, I knew that Georgia Nolan took an active hand in her husband’s administration. I knew that Ivy and Adam and Bodie considered her a force to be reckoned with.
I knew she was a woman with whom the kingmaker had fallen in love.
When I asked the headmaster why he took down the photo of the Camp David retreat, I thought suddenly, he said that someone had told him it was a bit gauche.
That photo connected the three men who’d conspired to kill Justice Marquette. There was a chance—a good one—that the fourth conspirator had been there, too.
I was told displaying that photograph so prominently was a bit gauche. That didn’t sound like something the president would say. The word gauche sounded polished. Female.
I was told displaying that photograph so prominently was a bit gauche.
I was sure, suddenly, irrevocably sure that someone was Georgia Nolan.
Why would Georgia tell the headmaster to take that photo down?
She held a press conference after her husband was shot, rallying support for him, for the party.
“You really should talk to someone,” Georgia told me, “about everything you’ve been through.”
Even now that I’d put my initial suspicions on the table, Georgia wasn’t treating me like I was a threat. She wasn’t telling me to keep my suspicions to myself.
“Everything,” Georgia repeated softly. “Including the truth about Henry Marquette.”
Slowly, I registered the meaning behind those words. Georgia knew. Somehow, she knew that Henry had betrayed me. She knew that he’d been working with the terrorists.
Just like I knew that she was the one who’d had her husband shot.
“I care about you, Tess,” Georgia told me. “You’re very dear to people who are very dear to me.”
People who would scorch the earth to find the person responsible if anything ever happened to me.
The First Lady wouldn’t attack me. But she knew about Henry—and whether I was family or not, whether she cared about me or not, she’d come at him to get at me.
You really should talk to someone about everything you’ve been through.
I could tell Ivy what I suspected. I could tell the kingmaker. I could start them down the path of tying the First Lady to the attack on the president, maybe even the assassination of Justice Marquette.
Everything. Including the truth about Henry Marquette.
This was what it looked like to play five moves ahead. This was strategy. This was power.
I stood. Georgia came over and pressed a kiss to my cheek. All I could think, as I made my way out of the residence and was escorted onto the White House lawn, was that William Keyes had been right.
The queen is the most dangerous piece on the board.
CHAPTER 70
In the weeks that followed, I found myself going back over the conversation I’d had with Georgia Nolan: every word, every nuance, the expression on her face. There were days when I found myself wondering if I’d imagined the subtext to our exchange, the underlying threat. Georgia had admitted nothing. She’d said nothing incriminating. She’d told me I should talk to Ivy, to Adam, to the kingmaker. She’d done nothing but express concern.