Liz

I hadn’t meant to scream. It was a mistake that cost me.

“Enough,” Phil said, standing behind me with his hand over my mouth. “Mrs. Harris, I’m not going to hurt you.” He leaned close enough to catch my gaze and hold it. “I’m not going to let anyone hurt you.” The older man didn’t back away, not until I blinked and gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “You good?”

Another nod and Phil took his hand away from my face, holding both up as though he’d just surrendered everything he had to his name.

“I’ve got a Jeep waiting three clicks from the base of the mountain.” He nodded behind him, affecting the same sweet, sullen expression he’d worn the entire time he’d watched over me at the White House. “My job is to get you out of the country and away from...”

“You son of a...” We both heard, Phil jerking his attention away from me and to the rip of growls and screaming happening behind us.

“Come on,” he said, voice low, nearly at a whisper. “They’re getting close.”

“Who is?” I asked, trailing behind him because I knew him. Because, after six years on my detail, Phil, I’d always believed, had been trustworthy. He might be an agent, but in my bones, I didn’t feel I needed to worry about him being here.

“Ma’am?” Phil whined, pausing long enough to usher me down the mountain.

“Stop,” I said, holding onto the agent’s sleeve to get him to face me. He might be trustworthy, but I’d just been duped by the man I loved. No way was I going to trust Phil blindly. I wanted answers and I’d get them or give him the slip. 

Phil was out of his element. There was no backup, no fellow agents he could whisper a command to in his microphone. I took advantage.

“Ma’am, we’ve only got...”

“Phil, my husband is dead, and someone is trying to get me the same way.” I turned back toward the cabin when another gunshot, then a loud, surprised scream rang out.  “And Cruz...”

“Solano wants you gone.”

When I swung around, eyes wide as I watched Phil shake his head, a frown formed when I moved out of his reach. The admission shouldn’t have surprised me, but I found myself unable to speak, unable to do anything really but watch Phil.

Nostrils flaring, I recovered. “Yeah,” I said, feeling light-headed again. “That’s the problem, right?”

“Mrs. Harris...” he started, frowning when I continued to step away from him. “I don’t mean...”

“Did you know?” I asked him when the frown froze on his face.

“Know what, ma’am?”

“That Cruz killed my husband.”

It took Phil several long moments—which he filled up by watching me, mouth dropping open before he rushed to close it. “Who put that fool idea in your head,” he said, clearing his throat to adjust his tone, “uh...ma’am?”

“The pictures. I saw them on his phone. The ones from whoever hired him for the job. They were trying to remind him, I guess, of commitments he didn’t seem capable of keeping. They...” I blinked, rubbing my eyes in my lids. “They were of him standing over us as Lincoln lay dying. Cruz...he looked so guilty. He...”

Phil held up a hand, throwing a flashing glare to his right. The sound of more car doors rang out through the forest and I followed the older agent as he moved forward.

“Where is he?” a voice sounded, one that was polished, familiar.

When Phil tried getting me away from the commotion, I dug my heels in, refusing to let him move me bodily, away from the threatening sound of the voices behind us.

“Bring him here.” I heard and again that voice gave me pause.

“Ma’am...please,” Phil whispered, holding my arm steady when I slipped down a small embankment, cursing under his breath. He followed as I moved closer to the sound of voices and the thumping car doors. I was being irrational, unsafe, but needed to see who had started this. I needed to watch the person responsible for my husband’s death.

“Who are they?” I asked Phil when he caught up to me and squatted at my side in front of a small grouping of trees beyond the embankment, closer to rising voices that argued down the ridge below us.

“Where is she, Solano?” I heard and the laugh that came after a noise that had to be bone against skin reminded me of the night in Lincoln’s office, when Ben Miller discovered the truth about my husband and Miller’s daughter, Leta.

He’d clocked Lincoln. The sound hadn’t left me.

“Miller?” I asked Phil, pulling him closer as we squatted. “The Secretary of Defense?” The agent shrugged but didn’t tell me I was wrong. “What’s going on?”

Phil looked between my face and the activity below us. He nodded, eyebrows moving together when Nelson and one of his men pulled Cruz toward Miller.

Miller had retired from the Marines and took the Secretary of Defense job just two years after that. He was a darker-skinned black man with white hair and hazel eyes. I’d always thought he was handsome, and often he’d give me a smile or tell me a corny joke that reminded me of my own father and how he’d been when I was a teenager.

But time and the experience of war showed in the deep lines around Miller’s eyes and across his forehead. But he was no simple military man. Like many men his age, well past sixty, he had an old-school polish that lent weight to the confident swagger he seemed to carry with him.  I’d only seen him angry once before—the day he’d resigned from his duties because my husband had bedded Miller’s daughter and the retired military general had taken out his insult on the president’s jaw.

“Phil...” I asked when the agent didn’t answer my question. I moved my head, narrowing my eyes with the hope he’d get how serious I was. I wasn’t going to have this “national security” crap. Not now. Not when my life depended on me getting at the truth.

“Miller hated Lincoln, but he wasn’t the only one,” Phil said through a breath. “Vice president...I mean, President Gable and his wife...”

“Bella?”

“Ma’am, really, the less you know...”

I grabbed Phil’s arm. “Just tell me the truth. Did Cruz kill Lincoln?” He shook his head, pressing his lips together that he worried something I shouldn’t know would leave his mouth. “Phil,” I tried agains, moving closer to him. “Is Cruz trying to...”

Phil cut me off with a shake of his head. “Solano is the best man I’ve ever known, ma’am, and he’d slit his own throat before he intentionally hurt you.”

The older agent had been on my husband’s detail longer than even Cruz. He’d served many other presidents and their families, and he’d become close to both me and Lincoln. If I trusted anyone in this world, it was Phil.

Phil and Cruz.

“You should have done the job,” Miller said, down on that embankment, and I leaned forward, Phil at my back to get a better look at the former Secretary of Defense taunting Cruz. “We could have avoided this mess if you’d just done your job.”

“My job,” Cruz said, spitting on the ground next to Miller’s feet. “Isn’t to murder innocent people...”

“Innocent...” Miller said, sounding astonished. “My grandson looks just like that whoring bastard. He had to go.”

“That had nothing to do with Lia. Or me.”

“You were the closest. We needed you to take him out.”

Son? I thought, disappointment and guilt running through my veins like poison. Most fathers wouldn’t want their daughters sleeping with liars. They certainly wouldn’t want them having children that were daily reminders of the disappointment they’d caused. If I knew my husband and how he’d covered up indiscretions in the past, I imagined how the news of Leta’s pregnancy had been handled. Likely, not well.

There were no real Olivia Popes in D.C. Not for the Harris administration.

“Mrs. Gable had the intel about you and your activities with the First Lady and how you’d both been discovered.” He looked away, smiling to himself. “I would have liked to see that bastard’s reaction when he found you with his pretty wife.” He scratched his chin. “She’s a beautiful woman; I could see why you’d be tempted. Never understood how Harris managed to convince her to marry him.”

“Get to your point...” Cruz said, sounding angry, looking fierce with his mouth curled up as he pushed against Nelson’s death grip and the gun he held at Cruz’s rib.

“My point, Solano, is that you should have never grown a conscience. You should have...”

“Done nothing when Gable’s donations to the Russian white nationalists came to my attention?”

Miller looked uncomfortable then, shooting his gaze to Nelson, then at the agent behind him. From what I could tell, two other men were on the ground, either dead or out cold, one of which looking every bit a pincushion with what I recognized as Cruz’s large, blade knife sticking out of his thigh.

“No...no one will ever believe you,” Miller tried, as though he was fine with what Gable had been up to. If Cruz was to be believed, then the current President of the United States was a white nationalist asshole happily funding terrorist cells in Russia. Of course, Miller wouldn’t be happy about that shit. What sane person would? Still, he seemed compelled to ignore the subtle accusation in Cruz’s tone and continued with his threats. “Besides, you’ll be dead before you can leak that intel.”

“You willing to risk your freedom and his on that?” Cruz stared back at Miller with a slow, sinister grin sliding across his mouth. He had something on them and from the way Miller frowned, how Nelson jerked Cruz again, they all knew what that something was.

“What’s he got?” I asked Phil, leaning toward him, but unable to move my gaze from Cruz’s smug smile.

“Ma’am...” Phil started, going quiet for long enough that I glanced at him. “I shouldn’t.”

“You said he was a good man.” I motioned to Cruz, watching Phil’s expression for an agreement. When he nodded once, I continued, “So tell me why he’d risk his life, and his freedom, to expose these assholes.”

“You.”

I blinked, my face tightening as I frowned. “I don’t...”

“You were their leverage. It’s why I took extra precaution after the assassination. We all did. We’d been lazy about security that night. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. That and...” He swallowed, head down like he couldn’t stand thinking of the night Lincoln died. When I touched his hand, Phil looked up again.

“How many times do I have to tell you, it wasn’t your fault?”

He inhaled, lips pressed together before he looked away. “Me and Johnson, we were the only ones Cruz trusted. Gable came to him with the assignment to take President Harris out. Naturally, he refused, but then...they threatened you. That’s when he approached me.” Phil rubbed the back of his neck, as though the tension had grown too tight in his muscles there. “Cruz would’ve exposed them himself, but they threatened you. You...were...you are his weak point.”

Below us, Miller muttered something to Nelson as he and his men searched Cruz, holding his hands over his head, periodically yelling “find it!” or “find her” as they moved. At my side. Phil sighed, making a noise that sounded exhausted.

“Get on your knees,” Nelson told Cruz, bringing both our attention to the men below us. I gripped Phil’s arm again, my heart beating so hard I thought it might rattle against my lungs. He pulled out a phone from his coat pocket and moved his thumb along the screen.

“Don’t worry, ma’am,” he said, waving the phone at me. I made out the page loaded and the draft of an email. The message was blind carbon copied to hundreds of people, a few news outlets among them. “He’d do anything to keep you safe and wanted you out of the country before any of this got out.”

“What are you...”

“You stay here.” Phil stood then, offering me a sweet half-smile he’d given me a hundred times over the years. I’d only seen that expression from one other man—my father and the look worried me. “When I told you he was a good man, ma’am, I wasn’t lying.” Phil moved his hand, the phone screen blinking before he adjusted his jacket and shrugged. “Solano’s gonna be pissed you’re not out of the country, but, hell, sometimes we have to break protocol to get the job done.” Then Phil nodded to me and turned, hands over his head in surrender as he marched straight down the embankment and into the small gathering of murderers.