At the Pleasure of the President (The Perfect Gentlemen 5)

That realization terrified him. The wolves could be anywhere, everywhere.

“Thomas, please go inform Mr. Calder that my late wife was working with the enemy.”

“Sir—”

“I know you’re not supposed to leave me, but Mr. Harding is an old man handcuffed to a table. I’ve survived one bullet today. I doubt there’s much else he can do to me.” When the agent still hesitated, Zack got stubborn. “I’m ordering you to. And I’ve got Freddy here to help me.”

Thomas sighed as if he didn’t like it at all, but he complied. “I’ll be back shortly.”

As he left, Zack sat back and tried to process everything Paul had hurled his way.

Joy had been a traitor. The woman he’d sought to make First Lady had been a Russian asset. Wow. Just…wow. Even as so many pieces of the puzzle began to snap into place, Zack thought of a thousand other questions. Why the emotional affair with Roman? What purpose would that have served to the Russians? To compromise his best friend? Possibly, but Roman was the one person he’d ever seen Joy be passionate about. Was it possible that she’d followed her heart that once? Had she changed her mind and shifted her loyalties, never knowing her end was near?

How much of her life had been dictated since the moment she was born? And what kind of relief had she felt when she’d thought she might escape? Zack could still remember the peace on her face when they’d realized he wasn’t going to win the election. At first he’d thought Joy was merely being a supportive wife. Now he wondered if she’d seen losing as her one-way ticket out of a life she’d no longer wanted.

What would it be like to have spent a lifetime in service of those others whose sole intention was to use you?

“I suppose I never found the ‘right people’ in your eyes. My father sent me to Creighton because you thought a school with such a rigorous reputation would make me easier to mold. You didn’t count on me finding a group of friends, did you?” Creighton had been isolating in the beginning. He’d spent the first half of a semester talking to no one until the mouthiest bad boy in the class sat down next to him and started talking. Maddox. He’d been the one to bring them all together. He hadn’t had any idea how his need to form a family would change their lives forever. “It might have worked if I hadn’t found my friends.”

“We expected all of you to drift apart as you got older. Most people do. We waited for you to get involved in your lives and careers, find other interests and people. Mr. Calder, we knew would stay around, but we thought he would be easy to deal with, especially when it seemed clear that Joy would have more success manipulating him than you. A physical affair between the two of them would have made him vulnerable.”

But Roman had never crossed that line.

Zack saw their plans now. They’d put him in the presidency, then waited until they’d been ready to use him. He was supposed to have been their frog in a pot. If they’d dropped him into scalding water, he would have leapt out. But by slowly turning up the heat, they had been hoping to boil him before he realized it was too late to escape.

“Instead, none of us drifted apart,” Zack pointed out.

One person had held them together. He’d done it by showing up at the most inopportune times and slyly convincing them to party. But now, Zack saw clearly that had been Mad’s way of holding his family together. He feared he would have done exactly what the Russians had expected without Mad Crawford to save the day. Even his death, sharing their grief, had held his band of brothers together. Everyone had underestimated Mad at every turn, even him.

“You did not. I didn’t see this as a problem, though. I believed your friends would be excellent tools to wield against you,” Paul explained.

“Hence the blackmail letter. Who delivered that to Ms. Matthews’s suite in London?”

Paul shrugged. “I am not privy to trivial details. I merely know the matter was handled poorly.”

A dead end, damn it. Zack raked a hand through his hair. No clue if or how involved Elizabeth might be.

That moment, Thomas stepped back into the room with a somber nod. It was done. Roman now knew that the woman he’d once thought he loved had been a traitor. Zack hated that he’d had to break it to Roman this way, but if it helped him at all in questioning Elizabeth…

Freddy jumped in with a narrow-eyed stare at Paul. “Why did you single out Maddox Crawford? I know he was getting close to discovering that Tavia Gordon’s foundation was a front for trafficking, but if you were willing to give up your own daughter, why not give up Tavia?”

“That was out of my hands. Some of us believed we should have killed Mr. Crawford. I took the man seriously, if only because I knew Zachary would. My partners disagreed. They believed that, if properly motivated, he could be persuaded to see our side.”

“I honestly thought I was going to find a corpse when I got to Mad’s apartment that night,” Freddy admitted.

Thank god Freddy hadn’t. “I assure you, you would never have been able to turn Maddox Crawford into a Russian asset.”

“Which is precisely why I wanted him dead. They thought he would break because he was a ridiculous, entitled playboy. I thought that his death would prove to you that our demands could not be ignored. The main handler chose a softer touch, but I knew you needed a hammer. And it is coming for you,” Paul promised.

“Who is Sergei?” Zack asked the question he’d been desperate to know the answer to for months. Sergei must be the hammer Paul meant.

A nasty smile lit Paul’s face. “You think it’s you, don’t you? Perhaps it is. Perhaps you are not who you believe yourself to be. It’s what children forget. You are who your father made you to be. You cannot change that, and you must pay because he sinned.”

“I know he did, but I will not make reparations for that. I am Zack Hayes. I don’t give a damn who gave birth to me. That was nothing more than a trick of biology. If I was born to Natalia Kuilikov, it doesn’t matter.”

That truth finally hit him. The man sitting across the table had no power over him unless Zack gave it to him. He’d spent so much time panicking at the need to save his friends and his reputation while ensuring the Russians didn’t have a backup plan that he hadn’t fully considered that simple fact.

“I assure you the voting public will care very much.”

“Then I’ll step down, but as I do I’ll drag every one of you traitorous bastards down with me.” Maybe that’s what he should have done the moment he’d received that blackmail letter. He’d hesitated because of Elizabeth. He hadn’t wanted to bring anyone else into the investigation in case she was involved. He’d been trying to protect her. Same with Gabe, who’d also looked potentially guilty because of the FAA investigation into Mad’s death.

Paul scoffed. “You cannot escape your past. Or your destiny. I am hardly the only one involved in this plan. I assure you, there are more of us. Many more. We’re right here in your White House. We’re waiting. You will do what we want or we will destroy everything and everyone you care about. If you need proof of our power over you, you will soon have it. And the price for your rebellion thus far will be steeper than you ever imagined. You cannot be rid of us. Not ever.”

Zack’s heart stopped. “What price?”

Paul merely curled his lips into the smile of a satisfied snake.

“What price?” he growled.

“You are easy, Zachary. You think those friends of yours make you strong, but every one of them is merely another weak link. I’m here to make you understand. And now I have done so. Call it the final act of a patriot. Cancel the pipeline or you’ll mourn more of your friends.”

Suddenly, Paul’s face went pale and his hand began to shake.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Zack replied, studying his unexpected nemesis. Paul seemed to be in physical distress. Or maybe it was an act, like everything else about the man. The important thing was, Connor and the guys from Justice could hold him, question him more. But Zack refused for a second to let Paul think

they’d won a thing. “Mad is alive. I don’t have to mourn anything but my idiocy where you’re concerned.”

Paul staggered and paled further. Zack watched as the older man bucked, then a drop of blood dripped from his mouth. “I don’t mean Maddox. I suspected he survived his ‘crash.’ There was a reason the FAA investigation was halted. But you have other friends. You see, the agents who picked me up were kind enough to allow an old man his coffee. My people have perfected some excellent new poisons. They work over the course of a few hours. My time is almost up. How will you handle that, Mr. President? I assure you no one has seen this poison yet. They won’t be able to save either of us.”