Page 72 of The Night Of
She leaned back against the Resolute desk and played with the top button on her silk blouse. Silva switched to another camera feed, and suddenly we were watching from over Jonathan’s shoulder. “Too bad that didn’t work on you.” She popped open the first button. Then the second, until she’d exposed the swell of her breasts in her black satin bra. “Not much of a man, are you? But then again… you never told anyone the truth.” She ran her fingers down her chest and over her bra, taking both breasts in her hands. “Who will believe that you didn’t try to take me, ravish me, here, in this office? If I say you put your hands on me, who will defend you? Who will believe your little story?” She yanked at her shirt, exposing her shoulders. One bra strap slid down her arm. “Who will the American people believe? Their beloved, grieving First Widow, or the emotionless, heartless drone who clung to Steven’s shadows his whole life? When I tell them you snapped, that you lost your mind in the wake of Steven’s suicide, who will anyone in the whole world believe?”
“Aren’t you forgetting something? Sean knows everything I know. Take me down. Fine. But he’ll come after you. He’ll never let you go.”
“I’m not worried. I have people who can take care of him.”
“Just like they took care of Carl?”
She winked. A moment later, she raked her arm across the desk. Three of Jonathan’s framed photos—all of him and Steven—and his desk phone soared off the top of the Resolute, falling with spilled folders and a flurry of briefing papers. Everything came crashing to the floor as she ripped her hair free from her French twist. “You can’t prove anything, Jonathan. Steven killed himself. That’s all anyone will believe. That’s all anyone will ever know.”
I nodded to Keith and Nguyen. “Okay, now. Now.”
Silently, we crossed the hall next to the Oval and pulled Andrew Rees out of the president’s bathroom. Silva and Keith had left him locked in there, studying himself and all his horrible decisions in the mirror. He looked like utter shit, like his whole world was collapsing—and like he wanted to take the easy way out and not face the consequences.
Nguyen shoved Rees at me, and I spun him, aimed him toward the closed door of the Oval. “Get ready, asshole,” I whispered over his shoulder. “It’s time to meet your real girlfriend.”
We strode in together and stopped, forming a triangle: Jonathan, Yekaterina on the Resolute desk, and us. Yekaterina looked from me to Jonathan and then to Rees. She stilled, half on the desk, her shirt still unbuttoned and her breasts hanging out.
I kept one hand on Rees’s biceps and one hand on my gun.
Behind me, Nguyen and Keith were waiting in the shadows, their own weapons drawn, as Silva watched on the monitors in Jonathan’s study.
“I’m sorry,” Rees said. His voice shook, and a moment later, he started sobbing. “Felicity, I’m so sorry.”
“Her name isn’t Felicity,” Jonathan barked. “She used you and made you her fool, Andrew!” He seethed as he shook his head. “How could you betray Steven?”
Rees’s sobs grew louder, and he buried his face in his hands.
“You think we don’t have anything, Yekaterina, but we do,” I said. “We’ve got your lover, and he sang for us beautifully.”
She sent Andrew a withering glare. He couldn’t see it, too lost in his own misery and tears.
“He was extremely helpful in confirming the timeline from the night Steven was murdered. I’d worked most of it out, but it was good to have my suspicions confirmed. It holds up better in court when there’s a confession.” Sue me. I was going to gloat in front of this bitch. She’d ripped Jonathan’s heart out and would kill him if she had a half second’s chance. Would kill me, too.
“Pretending to be cagey about being caught on the pool deck was a good play,” I said. “It made it seem like the most you were worried about was a hint of scandal, the possibility of an affair. Something you gambled on everyone burying to protect the president’s legacy. But youwantedto be seen on the patio. You wanted to be noticed. You summoned Rees out there, and you used him as your alibi.”
She was doing up her shirt buttons slowly, her upper lip curling. If looks could kill and all that, I’d be bone dust fluttering in the AC ducts.
“The problem was,” I continued, “you used the wrong phone. You called Rees from the same phone you used to call the murderer. You forgot to switch back.”
I watched the blood drain out of her face. Yekaterina hadn’t made many mistakes in her long career as a deep cover spy. She’d made them, here and there, and I was sure we’d uncover more as we tore her life apart. Such a tiny thing, though, making a single phone call. It was going to end her.
Finally, for the first time, she felt the walls closing around her.
I kept going. “I didn’t understand why the Russians were willing to murder President Baker and risk starting a war. But once I understood that it wasn’t about him—it was never about him—and that it was all aboutyou, the pieces finally fell into place. It’s always been about you.”
Paul Hardacre hadn’t defected. The poor son of a bitch was due a healthy image rehab in the press. He’d been the first to uncover the First Lady’s lies, her and her sister’s fake backstories and the parents who never existed save for a handful of news reports seeded by the Russian government. From there, he’d enlisted the help of his five closest friends, colleagues he’d worked with through the years and knew he could trust with not only his life but the biggest secret in the world. They’d tried for months to piece together the truth of Felicity Baker, using every contact they had between them and Hardacre’s network in Russia, trying to pry secrets out of the Kremlin when the dark and twisted path led them into the heart of Moscow.
And then President Poletov found out about their digging
A scramble ensued. The Russians couldn’t, wouldn’t lose the best-placed spy in the history of the country. They’d do anything, sacrifice anything to keep her in place, in the heart of America. One heartbeat away from the American presidency.
I didn’t know who’d come up with the plan to blackmail Andrew Rees. It could have been Yekaterina, or it could have been Poletov. Hell, it could have been her sister, or the two of them working together. Either way, the Russians approached Rees while he was at a European conference, leaning hard on him in the middle of a crowded ballroom and explaining, in no uncertain terms, that they had inescapable proof of his affair with Felicity Baker and that they would be delivering that proof to the United States president and to the world’s media unless he did exactly as they asked. It wasn’t hard to imagine that Yekaterina had helped manufacture that proof, had set Rees up on video or captured him in photos as she fucked him. Rees was nothing but a tool to her. The poor bastard had thought they were in love, that he’d married the wrong sister, that he and Felicity were star-crossed lovers. In reality, Yekaterina had had two world leaders under her wicked thumb.
All the Russians asked for was simple: make Paul Hardacre disappear.
Rees told us, in between fits of rage and nonstop sobbing, that he’d ordered an extradition on Hardacre. With the FSB’s help, he’d manufactured intelligence for MI6 that implicated Hardacre in treason. MI6 picked Hardacre up in Rome and left him at a safe house, which was promptly raided by the FSB.
Who knew how long Paul Hardacre held out under the FSB’s torture before he gave up the names of his five best friends?
