“Well, you know,” Rita said, “when you’re leader of the free world, you have a lot to worry about. Wars going on everywhere, fingers on the button, Yuri’s dad cutting off natural gas supplies to Europe.”

Yuri was an idiotic fourteen-year-old boy from Moscow who went to school here, and who delighted in telling anyone who would listen that his father controlled the natural gas pipeline running from Russia to Germany. Yuri hadn’t gotten his growth spurt yet. He wasn’t even five feet tall.

Elizabeth handed the pencil back.

“That’s all Yuri has, natural gas,” she said.

Clock’s ticking, Rita wrote. School year’s over. Friday night?

“And he blows it up everybody’s ass,” Rita said.

Elizabeth took the pencil and circled the original Yes.

Sure? Rita wrote.

Elizabeth circled the word again. Now it was Yes in two big black circles.

They both laughed at poor little Yuri. Silly boy.

Good, Rita wrote. It’ll be fun.

Elizabeth nodded. “Fun,” she said. It was a weird thing to say, since it didn’t quite follow what Rita had said, but it was all Elizabeth could think of.

Fun.

And that was all it was to Rita, who took her vast freedom for granted. Her nights in Geneva, her occasional side trips to London and Paris and Milan. But to Elizabeth, it was something else again. It was huge, it was energizing, it was terrifying. Her entire body tingled when she thought about it. Her breath caught in her throat.

Would she be able to go through with it?

Would she be able to make herself climb through the window and shimmy down the rain gutter? Then what? A drive through the countryside to the city. A crowded club with lights flaring, music pumping, bodies pressed together. Drinks? Sure, she would have a drink, even though she was technically too young. Just a long hoped for night of adventure. The chance to be anonymous, among anonymous people, and maybe have some real fun for once.

Well, her dad told her to do something exciting, didn’t he?

Who was she kidding? Her parents would kill her if they found out, and they were definitely going to find out. Escape Mode only went in one direction. There was no plan for coming back in. There was no way to shimmy back up the rain gutter. She would just have to reenter the campus, and the building, the old-fashioned way.

By then, the Secret Service man outside her door would have probably grown suspicious of the TV playing all night and let himself in. The alarm would be raised. There might even be an international incident.

Elizabeth felt herself ramping up with anxiety. She took a deep breath to try to calm herself down. After this, she was going to be grounded until she was forty.

Rita wrote something new. She turned it around so Elizabeth could see.

Ahmet will be there.

CHAPTER TEN