The White House: A Flynn Carroll Thriller Read Online Free PDF Page A

there.”
    â€œYeah, and Henry the Eighth had to stay at Versailles, and look what happened to him.”
    Lorna shook her head. Cissy swallowed her guffaw. Daddy had been studying history, God help the United States of America. He was not a genius with facts. Now that he had Henry the Eighth at Versailles, heaven only knew what else he might come up with.
    On the way back, Cissy reflected that she needed to get to her room as soon as possible. She needed a private moment to call the secure number she’d been given. There was no way to be sure that the murder would interest the people on the other end of the line. But it was an “extremely unusual event,” no question there, and she’d been told to inform them of anything like that.
    A few years before, she’d witnessed some very strange things on a ranch in Texas. The people in control had made her sign a security document. Flynn Carroll of the ice-gray eyes had popped up out of nowhere in a bar and thrust the paper at her. He was the coldest, most unsmiling human being she’d ever met, and the most thrilling. Even more so than his friend Mac, with whom she’d fallen in love back in those days. Innocent days, shacked up with that wonderful crook. Mac was dangerous and delicious. He wasn’t like Flynn, though, a man so hard you could believe he had a soul of steel. He also wasn’t limitlessly wealthy like Flynn, a child of the great Permian oil boom that had transformed West Texas, starting way back at the beginning of the twentieth century. Flynn’s was the same sort of Texas story as her own: hardworking ranchers ending up sitting on millions of dollars’ worth of oil.
    He wasn’t flashy like her dad, though. He had a charitable foundation so hidden that its name wasn’t even publicly known. God only knew how much money he gave away. Or had, for that matter. Certainly, he was among the richest men in Texas, and yet he lived modestly, so much so that, when he was a cop in Menard, only his old friends even knew he had money.
    Strange guy, all the way around. And appealing as hell, damn him. Fourteen years her senior, just enough to be too old for her, at least in her crazy parents’ book. The Greenes were schlocky new money. The Carrolls were old Texas, deeply rooted. Dad and Mom just hated that.
    When they got back to the White House, Cissy went upstairs at once. She had selected the East Bedroom, the same room that Tricia Nixon, Susan Ford, Amy Carter, and Chelsea Clinton had used. It was OK. Livable. But she always wondered, every second she was in it, who might be watching or listening. Supposedly, it was private. Like, really? Since the days of her, shall we say, youthful indiscretions, Mamacita had hired hackers to invade her Internet space and detectives to bug her rooms. Lorna despised Mac and distrusted Flynn. She’d known and loathed them both in college, too, for that matter. Mom was tame, Mac was wild. Mom was greedy, Flynn was noble.
    Cissy played with her cell phone. Use it, or use the landline? No, she had to use the cell, otherwise she couldn’t get on the virtual private network Flynn’s people had installed on it.
    If you had a secure device or what you believed was a private space, long tall Lorna was liable to be in there somewhere, and now she had the Secret Service to amplify her snooping.
    She’d just have to risk being overheard. The First Daughter couldn’t exactly take a walk. Because she was pretty, she was hyped silly in the media. Everybody knew this face of hers and everybody assumed that she had time for them. “Hey, Annette, take a picture with me, sign my napkin, sign my face”—it started the moment she so much as stepped out of a car.
    As she had been taught, she logged her iPhone into the VPN. She punched in the number Flynn had made her memorize.
    The phone rang at the other end. It was picked up in the middle of the second ring. As she’d been