Born with Secrets: A Political Thriller Read online

  Matt heard another door open and close. He zipped around the corner and hurried to catch up. As he approached the door, he saw that it said, “Exit only” in large red letters, but didn’t give it much thought.

  Following Doyle Cobalt and the mystery man, he went through the door.

  Cobalt was gone, but the mystery man was waiting for him.

  They were in the parking garage. Cars lined both bare cement walls. Pillars were spaced evenly between the parking spaces, and giant numbers adorned the walls, the better to help people find their vehicles.

  Standing about fifteen feet from the door, the man who had been with Cobalt wore a snarl on his lips and no hair on his head. He cracked his knuckles, then let his hands ball into fists as they dropped to his side.

  “I thought I noticed someone following us,” he said. “Snooping. Listening to us.”

  Matt felt his heart start hammering as the man took a step forward, toward him. He was a huge physical specimen, easily six four. His arms and chest were bulky, like an athlete, and that snarl on his face broadcast hostility.

  Matt tried to back up but, as promised by the sign, the door was closed and he couldn’t get back through it.

  Taking another step toward Matt, the man said, “The safest way to deal with a snoop is to make sure he never has a chance to tell anyone what he heard.”

  He faced the unidentified man and swallowed to try to get his tongue wet enough to speak.

  “Who are you?” Matt asked.

  The man’s only answer was to take another step toward Matt. His movement radiated menace. Every primal instinct Matt had screamed fight or flight.

  It seemed unreal. Moments ago he had been in a boring political debate among crowds of people. Now he was trapped with someone who gave every appearance of planning to assault him – maybe even murder him. Who was this guy, and why was a candidate for U.S. Senate hanging out with him?

  There was nowhere to run. In front of him, the physical presence of the stranger blocked any hope of escape. Behind him, the locked door offered nothing better.

  Matt desperately recalled a few tips about fighting that he’d picked up from Alyssa over the years.

  Run if you can.

  If you can’t, cover your face with your fists.

  Don’t shout for help; instead shout “Fire!” It brings more people.

  If you have to fight, strike for the eyes, knees, elbows, or groin. It’s not about honorable fighting; it’s about being the one who survives.

  He picked out the big man’s eyes and knees, trying to imagine ways to hit at them.

  Then everything changed. The thug in front of him reached to his waist and began to draw something out.

  The only logical conclusion was that it was a gun.

  Suddenly, things went from scary and surreal to life and death. The man was way bigger and obviously better equipped, but whatever else happened, Matt did not intend to be shot without a fight.

  He hurled his expensive laptop right at the man’s head. As the man ducked, Matt shouted as loud as he could and charged forward, swinging his fists wildly. Before he could even think about whether his punches were landing, Matt felt a big, beefy fist plow right into his gut. He doubled over and groaned.

  At that moment, a car pulled into the garage. Its bright headlights blinded Matt. He felt some movement from the man in front of him, but couldn’t see what it was.

  The blue hatchback slowed down, and Matt heard the sound of a window opening. A man’s voice said, “What’s wrong, man? Are you OK?”

  “There’s a man…” As soon as he opened his mouth, Matt threw up from the pain of being punched in the solar plexus. The people in the car got out to help him. When he could stand up straight again, Matt did so. He looked around, wanting to tell the people in the car about the mysterious thug who had been planning to shoot him.

  But the man who had been with Doyle Cobalt was gone.

  CHAPTER 2

  Federal prison. More precisely, this was the Federal Correctional Institution, Rocky Mountain. It was called FCI Rocky by those who worked and lived there, along with some other less-printable names.

  The overall look was a cross between a community college and a war zone.

  It shared a basic appearance with countless other Federal construction contracts that went to the lowest bidder. The walls were plain, the architecture was boxy, and the building materials were chosen for function, not form. Then they added twelve-foot-high concrete walls, barbed wire, and towers.

  There was also an exercise yard surrounded by one of those twelve-foot barriers, with an observation tower at every corner. If there had once been grass, it was long-since trampled to death. Now it was only an expanse of hard-packed dirt. Rather than a simple square, the yard was more like a short rectangle joined to a larger one. The corner created by the disparity in size also created a situation where one area of the yard was much less visible from the towers. Only one tower had a view of that corner, and the officers had to be specifically looking there if they hoped to see anything.

  Alyssa Chambers had been in prison for about a year and a half. In that time, she had come to know the exercise yard better than she had once known the leather seats of her Mercedes sedan.

  Before being locked away, Alyssa Chambers had been a thief. Not just any thief. She had been a thief for hire who specialized in stealing secrets from the rich and powerful and selling them to the highest bidder. All that came crashing to earth, though, when one job went horribly wrong. Paid to download the contents of a popular Presidential candidate’s hard drive, she broke into his campaign headquarters. Unfortunately, she broke in on the night he was assassinated.

  Deliberately framed for murder, Alyssa found herself running for her life, hunted and alone. The beloved candidate’s death outraged the nation, and every “man on the street” interview called for her capture and punishment, preferably by execution. Although she eventually cleared her name, it came at great personal cost.

  Not only did she learn that she’d been betrayed by her own father, her entire criminal career came to light in the investigation.

  Innocent of the assassination, a Federal Court still found her guilty of multiple counts of assaulting Federal Agents, among other crimes. When they thought she was an assassin, the public had been howling for her death. When she turned out not to be, the passions inspired by the 24-hour trial of the century news coverage proved hard to undo. The mob wanted justice, and the court did its best to appease them. She went away for 30 years for all her previous crimes. Meanwhile, her name lived on among conspiracy theorists as the real assassin who had gotten off by legal trickery.

  Her hair had grown back and regained its natural black. If anything, prison had made her physique stronger and harder. Her strength and skill manifested themselves in a stride that was always on the verge of becoming a spinning kick, and in a face that could share space with murderers and drug dealers without a hint of fear. Many who met her for the first time experienced the unnerving sensation of her eyes picking out target points where she would aim her strikes if a fight broke out.

  She wore gray sweat pants that she’d purchased from the prison commissary and a gray T-shirt as well. It had “FCI Rocky” in blue letters on the chest.

  She walked out into the exercise yard like she owned it. Her experiences here so far had given her reason for confidence. Although fights were much rarer in a women’s prison than in one for men, on the rare occasion that physical violence did happen, it usually had to do with drugs and gangs.

  In her early days, Alyssa got tangled up in a few of those. For a woman who had earned black belts in several different martial arts schools, winning fights had not been a problem. No one picked fights with her anymore.

  However, they might pick them with others.

  In the corner that was hardest for the Correctional Officers to see, four of her fellow prisoners were beating a fifth one. They had the victim down on the ground, curled into the fetal
position. The attackers were kicking her repeatedly.

  Although she didn’t know the attackers, Alyssa recognized the woman on the ground. She was a teenage punk who got locked up a few days ago for computer crimes. But all Alyssa really needed to know was that repeated kicks to the face, temples, throat, and spine could kill. Even if she didn’t die, the newbie’s injuries could be severe.

  Alyssa bit her lower lip. This wasn’t her affair. She had learned early on that her key to survival in prison was to keep her nose out of other people’s business.

  She had invested a lot of effort in cleaning up her life. She’d become a model prisoner. The Correctional Officers, or COs, liked her, the chaplains who came in to do chapel services liked her, even most of the other prisoners liked her. She was earning good behavior credits. And most important of all, she was clean. She wasn’t a bad guy anymore.

  All of that investment in a changed life teetered on the edge of a cliff as she watched the fight.

  As she stood there watching, one of the women rolled the victim over onto her belly, climbed onto her back, and wrapped an arm around her neck in a chokehold.

  That did it. She couldn’t just stand by and watch another human being be murdered.

  It took only a second before she was racing over there, shouting “Stop!”

  One of the women turned, crossed her arms over her chest, and said, “This ain’t your business. We don’t want any trouble with you Chambers.”

  She was bulky, and it was hard to tell how much of that was fat and how much was muscle. Her pixie cut didn’t look much like a pixie on that large frame. Her hair was fading from brown to gray.

  Behind her, the other three were still kicking and choking the woman on the ground.

  Alyssa took a step to the side to go around the woman, who reached out to try to grab Alyssa’s shirt as she passed.

  That was a mistake.

  Slip to the side. Spinning side kick right to the ribs.

  Alyssa’s heel connected very hard with the area right under the woman’s arm. A cry of pain came out as she tumbled over sideways.

  While one of the remaining three women continued choking the victim, the other two rose, turned, and faced Alyssa. They ran at her simultaneously.

  A double punch aimed at nose level stopped both of them in their tracks. One blocked it, the other bent over with a broken nose.

  Alyssa turned back to the woman who had blocked her first punch and threw her a light front hand jab so she would block again. The attacker obliged and did exactly that. Before her block had even moved very far, Alyssa took advantage of the fact that her hand was now out of position. She threw a straight front kick to her gut so hard the woman went flying backward and ended up on the ground retching.

  The last two women were still on the ground, one choking the other. Alyssa knew what it was like to be lost in adrenaline, so she wasn’t surprised that the last aggressor was too focused on the victim to notice the fight.

  Alyssa calmly walked up and kicked her in the head.

  The attacker fell off to the side, unconscious. The victim gasped desperately for breath, retching as the pressure on her windpipe finally subsided.

  Just as she was about to offer the woman on the ground a hand up, Alyssa noticed one of the Correctional Officers.

  He must have been new because she didn’t recognize him.

  The thing was, he wasn’t trying to stop the fight.

  He had been standing there the whole time. Watching.

  He stood there with his arms crossed over his chest. The scowl on his face wouldn’t need much downward pressure to become a feral snarl. He was bald, and it looked like his nose had been broken in the past.

  As other Correctional Officers poured out of the prison in response to the fight, he jerked into motion to pretend like he, too, was responding to the violence. But Alyssa had seen the truth. She had seen him just watching the fight – almost as if he had a stake in the outcome.

  ***

  Doyle Cobalt’s hair had gone completely gray but to judge by appearances, he would go to his grave with all of it. He sat in his richly-appointed office at the Cobalt Data Mining Systems building, looking out of the floor to ceiling window at the rolling hills of Northern Virginia. He took his circular glasses off his thin nose and polished them on the end of his tie.

  Yesterday’s debate had been so awkward. He and Vincent weren’t friends, of course. But they were warm acquaintances or at least they used to be. Regular as a metronome, every two years Doyle had written a $5,000 check to the Mike Vincent for Congress Committee. The Congressman had come in person to pick it up — usually right to this office. They had always shared a few minutes of small talk, and Doyle always told him he was glad to have Vincent representing him in D.C.

  All that changed when his brother Luther pointed out to him the real value of his discovery. His sibling was a bit of a family black sheep. He hadn’t gone into academia like Doyle, like his father, and like his mother. But when Doyle told him about his academic project, he did see the utility of it right away — far quicker than Doyle had.

  In his university research, Doyle Cobalt discovered a key gene that powerfully affected the growth of criminal tendencies. Variations in this gene could be linked to the risk that a person either was or would become antisocial or violent.

  The gene regulated a signaling pathway in the brain that was tied to violent and rebellious behavior. It affected the creation of a specific neurotransmitter.

  He tested 900 people with nonstandard levels of that particular genetic marker against a control group of about the same number. The nonstandard subjects were 10 times more likely to have a criminal record seven years after the study began.

  Doyle conceived of it as a way to help people know when they should seek therapy. But his brother suggested a different idea.

  What if the police knew in advance every person who had that gene? Couldn’t they use it to reduce crime? Couldn’t they use it to make the world a more peaceful and less violent place?

  Together, Doyle and his brother conceived the Genetic Probable Cause Bill. If it became law, Federal law enforcement agencies would completely and totally switch from fingerprinting to taking a DNA swab. The bill said that all the DNA gathered that way had to be tested. And when those tests revealed a person with the “criminal gene,” so to speak, it let Federal law enforcement agencies place people under surveillance.

  And, of course, some company would have to get the Federal contract to store and test all that DNA. For that purpose, they formed Cobalt Data Mining Systems.

  Unfortunately, the Congressman to whom Doyle had been giving money for so many years didn’t see the wisdom of the project. So, once again, his brother Luther supplied the next step of the plan. If Doyle were in Congress instead of Mike Vincent…

  And so, it had come to this. He had to stand across stages from a man he once considered an ally and call him soft on crime. He and Vincent didn’t speak much anymore but every time they both had to appear at the same event, Doyle felt vaguely dirty.

  Which didn’t seem fair because he was the one trying to do something good. If the Genetic Probable Cause Bill passed, the government could accumulate genetic data on more and more people. It could know who was likely to commit a crime. They could know who was a potential terrorist or who might be a threat to National Security. The government could give that list to the FBI or the NSA. The suspects could be watched.

  How many mass murderers made social media posts before they killed? With the NSA’s tracking of social media and Cobalt’s ability to predict who had the tendency to become a killer, how many of those shootings could be prevented?

  Cobalt knew the Genetic Probable Cause Bill was a good thing. It was too bad Mike Vincent didn’t.

  CHAPTER 3

  Normally when she fought, Alyssa spent some time in the SHU as a consequence. An acronym for Secure Housing Unit, it was what most people called “solitary.”

  The victim mu
st have testified on her behalf because, for once, that didn’t happen.

  Which was a good thing because today was visiting day.

  When she first pled guilty to breaking and entering and assaulting Federal Agents, Alyssa thought she wouldn’t mind prison. She thought her whole life had been destroyed, and she wouldn’t care about being locked up in a dangerous place with no friends.

  FCI-Rocky quickly disabused her of that notion.

  Although she had made a friend or two here, she missed her world. She missed her life. She missed people who knew the things she knew and cared about the things she cared about.

  Somewhat to her surprise, she missed Matt Barr.

  As she entered the visiting lounge, she saw him from across the room. Without conscious thought, a big smile spread across her face. She felt her feet quicken a little bit to get to where he was standing.

  Embracing still felt a little strange. Her family had not been one to show physical affection, and Alyssa didn’t have a lot of experience with it. But prison had helped her change that behavior, and she hugged Matt.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said.

  “Of course. You know I’m never going to stop.”

  Matt Barr was a man of average height. His wavy brown hair framed a square, clean-shaven face. He wore jeans and a white shirt with a button-down collar. Somehow, for once, the cuffs of his pants weren’t frayed. Alyssa figured they must be new.

  As they sat down in the cheap plastic chairs, among the din of all the other prisoners and their visitors, she looked him up and down.

  “Are you OK, Matt? You look a little off-kilter.”

  He paused for a long time, not meeting her eyes. He opened his mouth once or twice as if to speak. Then he shrugged.

  Matt said, “It’s nothing. How’ve you been?”

  “I was doing fine until this morning,” she replied.

  Matt raised an eyebrow and waited for her to explain.