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

“I put him where he is. I can take him out, too. This is the way of the world. I have bosses who want results. If I do not produce them, I will be the one with the future in question. So I must choose between me or President Hayes. And to me, that is no choice at all. I will try to make my point one last time before decisions must be made. The president is close to his friends, is he not? I suspect he is the reason Mr. Crawford has evaded capture for so long. He hasn’t hidden the rest of them so well though. Tell him next time, it will not be the brakes that malfunction. It will be a bomb, and perhaps not in her car.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your boyfriend will know. If he forces a next time, well, I will do what I have to do. Shut down the pipeline. After that, we shall discuss strengthening relations between our countries. We don’t need all these sanctions, do we?”

Liz paled. “He’ll never do it.”

She already knew Zack would be stubborn.

“Then I will have to take care of the situation. The good news is, I have people in place to do my bidding. I hope the president can say the same. Tell him we are willing to die for our cause…or kill. Good-bye, Ms. Matthews. It was lovely to meet you. I think you will make an excellent First Lady should the president decide he wants to live.”

She stepped back, not wanting to even risk touching the man as he sauntered out of her apartment, the door closing behind him with a quiet yet ominous click.

As Liz watched him go, her hands shook. The syndicate was willing to do everything Krylov had threatened. They would kill Zack.

Suddenly, she was right back in that moment when she heard the gun shots and chaos had erupted all around her. Back in that moment she’d realized how fragile they all were.

Liz forced herself to lock the door behind him, to test it and make sure it still worked, though it was obviously flimsy protection at best.

Her phone rang, a trilling sound she’d selected because it was soothing. Now, she jumped at the sound, barely managing to pick it up and swipe across the screen. “Hello?”

“Hey,” Gus said, sounding out of breath as though she was on the move. “We might have to postpone happy hour. Holland’s car malfunctioned. Weirdly, her brakes quit working. She’s okay, but apparently it was a close call.”

If she’d needed proof that her unexpected visitor was serious, she’d just gotten it.

Liz sank to her knees and she cried.

* * * *

Zack stripped off his tie and glanced at the clock. What was taking Elizabeth so long?

Roman opened the door to the Treaty Room and stepped inside. “Dax called. Holland’s perfectly fine but she’s pissed at her mechanic. She swears she took it in for a tune-up a month ago and they said nothing at all about a problem with the brakes.”

After she and Dax had moved to DC, Holland bought a classic Mustang. They had been fighting about it ever since. He wanted her driving a car with every possible state-of-the-art safety feature, but she insisted that Mustang was her dream car. “Are they arguing about it again?”

“Dax was pretty spooked, but I bet she’ll win in the end.” Roman leaned on the desk with a sigh that portended bad news. “We need to talk about something else.”

Zack didn’t want to talk about anything right now. He wanted Elizabeth here, wanted to spend the evening pretending they were nothing more than an average couple winding down after a long day. But he didn’t get to put things off. “What?”

“Shorn caught me a few minutes ago.” Roman grimaced. “He wanted to know why he hadn’t been invited to the meeting with the energy director about the pipeline.”

Zack’s stomach took a hard turn. That nonexistent meeting had been the litmus test Roman had devised for Elizabeth. He’d told her the information in confidence, never believing she wouldn’t keep the “secret” between them. How the hell had Shorn found out?

Roman stared at him with grave eyes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to be right about this.”

“There could be another explanation.”

“Like what? You asked Liz to keep it quiet. Maybe I could understand if Gus had asked me about the meeting, but Wally Shorn? Liz doesn’t even like the man, so why would he know about a supposedly secret get-together to discuss the pipeline? Which begs the question, who else knows about it.”

There must be some other explanation besides what Roman saw as the obvious. Maybe Liz had mentioned it to Gus, thinking she knew as well… Except Gus thought everything was a secret. For all that she could be mouthy, Gus could also be very tight-lipped. She certainly wouldn’t tell the vice president anything she hadn’t run past Roman. Of course, he’d thought the same thing of Elizabeth, too.

No. Zack refused to accept that Elizabeth was working with the Russians. It wasn’t possible. There was another reason Shorn knew. Maybe she’d slipped and said something to someone in her office. Maybe Shorn was speculating. There had to be some explanation.

“Zack…” Roman began.

Anything Roman would have said was cut off by the door crashing open and Elizabeth rushing in, looking pale and shaken.

Zack stood, worry flaring through him. She did not look like a woman who’d had a casual trip to her old apartment. She looked like she’d seen a ghost. “What happened?”

Gus, who had followed her in, reached out to give Elizabeth a steadying hand. Roman frowned beside him.

“H-he was waiting for me,” Elizabeth managed. “Inside my apartment.”

Zack’s heart threatened to stop. He should never have allowed Elizabeth to leave the safety of the White House without an escort. Hell, he should never have let her go at all. He should have sent someone to gather her things. “Who?”

“Ivan Krylov. A-at least I think so. He was sitting on my couch. I don’t know how he got in. The door was locked. I used my key. I...” Her words were spilling out fast, just like her tears.

“Did he touch you? Did he hurt you?”

“No. But the things he said…” She pressed a hand to her chest. “The things he threatened… He told me he would make an example of one of us. This time, he said, it was the brakes, but next time would be a bomb. Is Holland okay? Gus said that her brakes suddenly failed?”

“Her brakes went out because the car is old,” Roman said, reaching for his fiancée in spite of his reassurances. “That’s what Dax said.”

Elizabeth shook her head as she reached for him. “It was Krylov. He told me it was a message for you.”

Zack bit back his own panic. He needed to get her calm or he might lose it, too.

He hauled her close, grateful when her arms encircled his neck and she began to relax.

“I’m going to get us some wine,” Gus said, holding her fiancé’s hand. “Why don’t you come and help me?”

Roman frowned. “If there’s one thing you don’t need help doing, it’s finding the liquor. I need to stay and hear everything that happened.”

Gus groaned. “You’re lucky you’re so pretty. Liz already told me what happened, and I’ll tell you while we let them have a moment alone.”

“I would appreciate it.” Zack pressed Elizabeth even closer, feeling a fine tremble wind through her body.

Roman let Gus lead him out.

He tilted Elizabeth’s head up and smoothed back her hair. “Tell me everything that happened.”

She nodded and seemed to calm. “I went to my apartment like I told you.”

“Like you texted me,” he corrected. If she’d faced him and said she’d planned to go home alone, he would never have allowed that. And he worried she was well aware of that. He would have sent a Secret Service agent with h

er, one of Thomas’s trusted men. Was that the reason she’d texted him in the first place?

She ignored him and continued. “I went to my apartment and used the key to unlock the door and he was sitting there on my couch.”

“Ivan Krylov, the head of the Krylov syndicate, was just hanging out?”

“I think it was him. He wouldn’t say his name. I guessed, but he neither confirmed nor denied.”

It didn’t matter. She could ID him from a picture. They had a good-sized file on the head of the syndicate.

God, she’d walked into someplace she should have been safe and found herself alone with a killer. “Did he hurt you?”

She shook her head. “No. He just talked to me. Zack, he said a lot of nasty things, but the most important thing he said was that if you don’t stop the pipeline, he’s going to assassinate you, just like Freddy and Mad suspected.”

She clung to him as she started to tell him everything.

And Zack held her, trying not to think about the fact that this was the second time she’d been the one to bring him the syndicate’s message.

Chapter Thirteen

Zack’s head was still reeling three hours later when all the guys, with the exception of Dax and Mad, crowded into the Treaty Room. Gus had taken the ladies out to visit Holland, though Dax’s wife swore she was perfectly fine. Captain Awesome—a nickname that still got a grin out of Zack—had Holland on bedrest and was watching over her like a hawk.

“Have we heard anything from the mechanic?” Roman paced like a frustrated tiger.

“Yes.” Connor sat at the desk, making notes. He’d either been on the phone or focused on his laptop for hours. “Someone fucked with her brakes. The guy spoke in technical terms I won’t bore everyone with, but it definitely wasn’t an accident.”

Zack bit back nausea. They could have lost Holland. The danger had been real for quite some time, but it hit him again that someone was truly trying to hurt him—and they were willing to use his friends to do it.

Would one of them die because of him?