Alex stares at her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’ve called her, Zahra’s called her, Mike and her parents have all called her, she’s not answering anyone. The guard at her apartment says she hasn’t left this whole time. Apparently, she’s ‘fine but busy.’ I tried just showing up, but she’d told the doorman not to let me in.”
“That’s … concerning. And also, uh, kind of shitty.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Alex turns away, pacing over to the railing. He really could have used Nora’s nonplussed approach in this situation, or, really, just his best friend’s company. He feels somewhat betrayed she’s abandoned him when he needs her most—when he and June both need her most. She has a tendency to bury herself in complex calculations on purpose when especially bad things happen around her.
“Oh, hey,” June says. “And here’s the favor you asked for.”
She reaches into the pocket of her jeans and hands him a folded-up piece of paper.
He skims the first few lines.
“Oh my God, Bug,” he says. “I— Oh my God.”
“Do you like it?” She looks a little nervous. “I was trying to capture, like, who you are, and your place in history, and what your role means to you, and—”
She’s cut off because he’s scooped her up in another bear hug, teary-eyed. “It’s perfect, June.”
“Hey, First Offspring,” says a voice suddenly, and when Alex puts June down, Amy is waiting in the doorway connecting the balcony to the Oval Room. “Madam President wants to see you in her office.” Her attention shifts, listening to her earpiece. “She says to bring the donuts.”
“How does she always know?” June mutters, scooping up the plate.
“I have Bluebonnet and Barracuda, on the move,” Amy says, touching her earpiece.
“I still can’t believe you picked that for your stupid code name,” June says to him. Alex trips her on the way through the door.
* * *
The donuts have been gone for two hours.
One, on the couch: June, tying and untying and retying the laces on her Keds, for lack of anything else to do with her hands. Two, against a far wall: Zahra, rapidly typing out an email on her phone, then another. Three, at the Resolute Desk: Ellen, buried in probability projections. Four, on the other couch: Alex, counting.
The doors to the Oval Office fly open and Nora comes careening in.
She’s wearing a bleach-stained HOLLERAN FOR CONGRESS ’72 sweatshirt and the frenzied, sun-blinded expression of someone who has emerged from a doomsday bunker for the first time in a decade. She nearly crashes into the bust of Abraham Lincoln in her rush to Ellen’s desk.
Alex is already on his feet. “Where the fuck have you been?”
She slaps a thick folder down on the desk and turns halfway to face Alex and June, out of breath. “Okay, I know you’re pissed, and you have every right to be, but”—she braces herself against the desk with both hands, gesturing toward the folder with her chin—“I have been holed up in my apartment for two days doing this, and you are super not gonna be mad anymore when you see what it is.”
Alex’s mother blinks at her, perturbed. “Nora, honey, we’re trying to figure out—”
“Ellen,” Nora practically yells. The room goes silent, and Nora freezes, realizing. “Uh. Ma’am. Mom-in-law. Please, just. You need to read this.”
Alex watches her sigh and put down her pen before pulling the folder toward her. Nora looks like she’s about to pass out on top of the desk. He looks across to June on the opposite couch, who appears as clueless as he feels, and—
“Holy … fucking shit,” his mother says, a dawning mix of fury and bemusement. “Is this—?”
“Yup,” Nora says.
“And the—?”
“Uh-huh.”
Ellen covers her mouth with one hand. “How the hell did you get this? Wait, let me rephrase—how the hell did you get this?”
“Okay, so.” Nora withdraws herself from the desk and steps backward. Alex has no idea what the fuck is happening, but it’s something, something big. Nora is pacing now, both hands clutched to her forehead. “The day of the leaks, I get an anonymous email. Obvious sockpuppet account, but untraceable. I tried. They sent me a link to a fucking massive file dump and told me they were a hacker and had obtained the contents of the Richards campaign’s private email server in their entirety.”
Alex stares at her. “What?”
Nora looks back at him. “I know.”
Zahra, who has been standing behind Ellen’s desk with her arms folded, cuts in to ask, “And you didn’t report this to any of the proper channels because?”
“Because I wasn’t sure it was anything at first. And when it was, I didn’t trust anybody else to handle it. They said they sent it specifically to me because they knew I was personally invested in Alex’s situation and would work as fast as possible to find what they didn’t have time to.”
“Which is?” Alex can’t believe he still has to ask.
“Proof,” Nora says. And her voice is shaking now. “That Richards fucking set you up.”
He hears, distantly, the sound of June swearing under her breath and getting up from the couch, walking off to a far corner of the room. His knees give out, so he sits back down.
“We … we suspected that maybe the RNC had somehow been involved with some of what happened,” his mother says. She’s coming around the desk now, kneeling on the floor in front of him in her starched gray dress, the folder held against her chest. “I had people looking into it. I never imagined … the whole thing, straight from Richards’s campaign.”
She takes the folder and spreads it open on the coffee table in the middle of the room.
“There were—I mean, just, hundreds of thousands of emails,” Nora is saying as Alex climbs down onto the rug and starts staring at the pages, “and I swear a third of them were from dummy accounts, but I wrote a code that narrowed it down to about three thousand. I went through the rest manually. This is everything about Alex and Henry.”
Alex notices his own face first. It’s a photo: blurry, out of focus, caught on a long-range lens, only barely recognizable. It’s hard to place where he is, until he sees the elegant ivory curtains at the edge of the frame. Henry’s bedroom.
He looks above the photo and sees it’s attached to an email between two people. Negative. Nilsen says that’s not nearly clear enough. You need to tell the P we’re not paying for Bigfoot sightings. Nilsen. Nilsen, as in Richards’s campaign manager.
“Richards outed you, Alex,” Nora says. “As soon as you left the campaign, it started. He hired a firm that hired the hackers who got the surveillance tapes from the Beekman.”
His mother is next to him with a highlighter cap already between her teeth, slashing bright yellow lines across pages. There’s movement to his right: Zahra is there too, pulling a stack of papers toward her and starting in with a red pen.
“I—I don’t have any bank account numbers or anything but, if you look, there are pay stubs and invoices and requests of service,” Nora says. “Everything, guys. It’s all through back channels and go-between firms and fake names but it’s—there’s a digital paper trail for everything. Enough for a federal investigation, which could subpoena the financial stuff, I think. Basically, Richards hired a firm that hired the photographers who followed Alex and the hackers who breached your server, and then he hired another third party to buy everything and resell it to the Daily Mail. I mean, we’re talking about having private contractors surveil a member of the First Family and infiltrate White House security to try to induce a sex scandal to win a presidential race, that is some fucked-up shi—”