The Price of Grace (Black Ops Confidential 2)

“A week before you were shot at. Think you can use your cyber skills to track it down?”

Probably. “Yeah. Send me what you have.”

“Will do. How’d you do with your list?”

“One dead. One in jail. One happily married and on a reality TV show. That leaves your two.” It can’t be either of them. It can’t. “I need to go back and see who I’m missing.”

There was a weighted silence. “About that. What do you know of your biological father?”

“My father? Not a thing.” The import of that question hit her. “What do you know about him?”

He sucked in a breath through obviously gritted teeth. A snake made less of a hiss. “Well, that’s the interesting part. When Sandesh was trying to discover who the family traitor was, he asked me to look into Justice’s closest siblings. You were on the list.”

She was probably top of that list. She’d been pretty mean to Sandesh. But it hadn’t been her. It had been Tony. “And you found out about my dad?”

“Yeah.”

She felt a twinge of expectation. Growing up in a dynamic household full of adopted kids, many of whom didn’t know or didn’t want to remember their families, it seemed almost wrong to ask where she’d come from. And when her bio-mom had come back into the picture, it seemed twice as bad to ask. She’d had an embarrassment of riches, after all. Two mothers who loved her. And though she had wondered over the years, she’d instinctively known that if that information hadn’t been painful for her bio-mom, she would have shared it. So she’d told herself she had way too many family members to go looking for more. But now? “Tell me about him.”

“First go to CNN. They have a live feed, click on it.”

Her fingers flew over the keys. At the site, she clicked on the live feed button. The screen burst into action.

The scroll below the video said, “From the Hyatt Bellevue in Philadelphia, Senator Andrew Lincoln Rush to announce his bid for president.”

A man with a lean physique walked onto a stage filled with a group of people as backdrop. He wore a classic blue Armani suit. Music played. His supporters clapped and cheered.

She leaned close to her monitor. Her stomach squeezed. He had red hair and green eyes. Fudge. “Is that him?”

“Yes. That’s your father.”

She wet her suddenly dry lips. The clapping, cheering, clicking of cameras, and talking slowly died down. Rush welcomed everyone. His microphone squawked. He adjusted it with a smile.

“Are those his kids behind him?”

“Yeah. Five boys. One girl. And his grandkids. There’s ten.”

“So many.”

He snorted. “You can’t be serious.”

“They’re so clean-cut. Kids and grandkids.”

“Yeah, it’s like a Fashion Week photo shoot back there. The blond woman, the older one, nipped and tucked, she’s his wife. The boys range from your age, thirty-two, to the oldest, forty-two. They all have some presidential name, either middle or first name.”

“And the girl?”

“The youngest. Layla Eleanor Rush, twenty-seven. Mom kept trying until she had that girl. Parenting magazine did a cover story on it, years ago. The article’s over-the-top, acting like the mom was Sarah from the Bible and the kid was sent from heaven.”

Layla was beautiful. Dressed in an iridescent green silk baroque-style dress. The kind of dress that took confidence and money.

Gracie ran her hand over the monitor. Would they have been friends? Would the boys have teased her? Like Tony?

Unexpected emotion tightened her throat, moistened her eyes. The senator began to talk about one of his sons, Porter Jefferson Rush, who was also his campaign manager. The camera zoomed in on the tall man in the back, who looked exactly like his father. Honestly, it was like they were twins.

Unlike his father, Porter did not appear to like the spotlight. Sweat ran down his face. He wiped at it, leaned back, waved off the praise. But as his father encouraged the crowd to clap louder, Porter left the stage.

Whoa.

Looked like some family strife. How tight-knit was the family? Could they be one bad news day from falling apart? “Do you think an illegitimate kid, an illicit affair over thirty years old could…” She stopped. “How old is Andrew Rush?”

It was hard to tell. He looked very young.

“Sixty-eight.”

Sour saliva flooded her mouth. “My mom was barely nineteen when she had me. Rush would’ve been thirty-five.”

“Okay. So she was a lot younger than him, but still of age. And an affair isn’t the reputation killer it used to be. You add in three decades and the fact that you landed in a good place…it’s weak motivation.”

True. She’d been adopted into a wealthy and respected family. “He’s conservative. Maybe he wouldn’t want ties to the Parish family.”

“Could be. Your lot does have a reputation. But he’s dipped a toe into the feminist waters a bit over the years. It hasn’t really stopped his career.”

If it wasn’t fear over the political fallout, assuming Rush was the one who sent the hitman, maybe… “Maybe he’s worried about his wife, his family. Maybe they’d turn against him if they found out. That would make running for president a lot harder.”

Victor made a noise of agreement. “Good point. That’s a big family. Lots of personalities. I’ll investigate the lower half.”

“I’ll take the upper half. Thanks, Victor.”

She hung up. A lot of ifs and buts, but enough possibility to send her gut churning. Her list had just grown by eight. She’d have to enter their faces into the club’s facial recognition software. If any one of them ever came through her front doors, she wanted to know.

What a crazy morning. First the money transferred from John’s account. And now it turned out she might be someone’s dirty little secret.

Chapter 16

Porter knelt and cleaned up the vomit from the floor of the hotel bathroom. Great. A thousand-dollar gray plaid suit absorbing gruel from his stomach.

His father knocked on the door again. “Porter? Porter? Are you okay?”

Porter stood. “Go away, Dad.”

God, he sounded like a teenager, not a man of forty-two. He tossed the soaked washcloth into the wastebasket and went to the sink to wash his hands. Wetting a hand towel, he bent and wiped the knees of his suit pants.

“Porter?”

“A minute.”

God in heaven. The problem with running his father’s campaign was that he had to deal with the man whether he wanted to or not. And right now that meant dealing with his father’s dirty laundry.

Things had gone from bad to worse to worst. Bad. After Porter had intercepted the phone call with Mukta, his father had admitted that he had an illegitimate child. Worse. Mukta Parish had a video recording of the woman, girl—now dead—detailing how the senator had drugged and raped her. Worst. Mukta had been using the existence of this recording to blackmail his father, influencing how he wrote policy for thirty years.

His father had confessed to the content of the tape this morning, moments before the press conference. Porter’s stomach still rocked.

The handle to the bathroom door jiggled. Porter rinsed with the hotel-brand mouthwash, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

He pushed past his father and went straight to the suite minibar. He grabbed a bottle, twisted the cap. He drank without looking. Scotch. He exhaled the heat of the drink. Grabbed another.

Even if people could forgive the “affair,” there was no way his father’s supporters would ever forgive the fact that Mukta Parish had been initiating policy, directing research and funding for her causes for decades.

A man who was supposed to be strong and principled had been the puppet of a rich, outspoken woman. Porter shuddered.

And Mukta had be

en devious in the way she’d blackmailed his father. She’d cherry-picked—on votes, personnel decisions, even the focus of the many committees he’d chaired, including Senate Appropriations. Nothing overt enough to cause someone to raise an eyebrow. But if someone went looking for it, knew what they were looking for, they’d see the pattern.

His father grabbed his arm. “Porter, what were you thinking, leaving like that? You have the entire family worried. Layla wanted to come up here. I convinced her and Mother to stay downstairs and entertain at the luncheon.”

Porter jerked out of his grasp. He would’ve preferred Layla. “Go downstairs, Dad. A five-thousand-dollar-a-plate lunch. You need to be there.”

“Your sister will handle things. Half the people there are her hipster Twitter followers anyway. Let the campaign go for now. I want to talk to my son, not my campaign manager.”