Born with Secrets: A Political Thriller Read online

  “There was a fight this morning. Four women from one of the gangs were beating up some newbie. They had her down on the ground and were choking her; I was afraid she’d get killed, so I broke it up.”

  Matt shook his head and smiled before speaking. “I’m guessing you don’t mean that you broke it up by reciting the gospel to them and calmly advising them of the rules here?”

  Alyssa shrugged and said, “That’s not what I know how to do. Kicking people in the head is what I know how to do.”

  He nodded and replied, “I know. I also know there’s more to you than that.”

  She shrugged again and looked away. It wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have right now. When she’d turned herself in to the Feds, she had wanted to put her old life behind her. She’d been betrayed as deeply as she could imagine, and it made the whole ugly life look like something to be left behind.

  Matt was a churchgoing guy and pretty serious about wanting to share that with her. When she talked about quitting the old life, he was eager to help. And that was as far as the easy road went. From that point on, it hadn’t worked very well… yet.

  In childhood, she and Matt had been best friends. But the path she choose as she grew older took her farther and farther away from him. That path grew darker until it ended in disaster, with her own father setting her up to take the blame for a murder so he could reach the pinnacle of power politics. But what if she had chosen differently?

  Without looking back to Matt, Alyssa allowed herself to give voice to her questions.

  “I wonder how my life would have been different if my father had been different?”

  At once, Matt took her hand and squeezed it. He didn’t say anything, he just held her hand.

  Alyssa didn’t say anything either. For a long time they just sat there.

  Finally Matt whispered, “God is a father to the fatherless, Alyssa.”

  She didn’t know what to say. She was not a woman who needed emotional support. She was not someone who needed comfort. She was iron-strong, self-sufficient, hard, and invincible.

  But something about those words called to her.

  Finally, she changed the subject.

  “How’s Mike?” she asked.

  Matt took a while to reply. She could tell by looking at him that he didn’t like the subject change.

  “He’s having a hard primary,” Matt replied. “He’s running behind Cobalt, and things aren’t breaking his way. He’s been talking about trying to get the President to endorse him or at least commit to vetoing Cobalt’s bill. I’m not sure if it will really help or not.”

  Congressman Mike Vincent was a mutual friend. Matt was a political reporter and, until two years ago, Alyssa was a political operative – of sorts. That meant they knew a lot of the same people, including Vincent.

  Other than Matt, Congressman Vincent and his wife Kathy were Alyssa’s only regular visitors. It meant a lot to her. Her reputation was politically toxic. If the press ever tumbled on to how much time Vincent spent visiting the notorious accused assassin, he’d suffer for it in the polls. But he came anyway, and Alyssa loved him as a brother for it.

  Matt went on, “Your old friend Tom Wheeler’s helping Mike. He’s trying to get the President to commit to vetoing Cobalt’s bill even if he does get elected and maybe even endorse Mike in the primary. Wheeler’s a fairly decent guy.”

  Alyssa shrugged. “He probably saved my life with that call to the Attorney General when we were being arrested. But then, he got me into that fix in the first place, so he owed it to me.”

  After the last job for which Tom Wheeler hired her had gone so disastrously wrong, Congressman Vincent and Matt had worked to help Alyssa save herself from the assassination charge. Together, the two of them helped her clear her name – at least of murder. Now, they were essentially her only friends. The only other people who showed up on visiting day were reporters and conspiracy theorists looking for a story.

  Matt wanted marriage, the white picket fence, blah, blah, blah. Even if she did want the same thing — of which she was far from certain — it was physically impossible for her to give it to him. And it would remain so for another 28 years, until long after youth and beauty had faded into senior citizen discounts and wrinkle cream.

  But he never stopped coming. Every week, without fail, she could count on him for a visit. The cost in plane tickets from D.C. had to be astronomical. She’d finally gotten him to sign the power of attorney forms so he could spend some of her money on that, but she still felt guilty about it.

  Visits from the outside were too precious to give up, even when she knew how inconvenient it had to be for him.

  She never wanted to get married and now she couldn’t get married; yet, Matt still flew across the country every week to see her.

  She listened to him talk about political gossip and about the world outside. All the while, she was running through the math of how good behavior credits would affect her sentence and trying to work out the best possible case for when she might get out. All too soon, visiting time was at an end.

  ***

  The debate had been draining. The flight back to D.C. had given him no rest. The fact that Mike had another debate in a few days wasn’t helping him relax.

  The only good news was that his wife had flown home with him, and they’d gotten a tiny bit of time together. It would probably be the last for a while.

  It was ten at night, and Congressman Michael Vincent was more than ready for sleep. But it would be at least an hour before that happened. It would take him that long to get home. He sat in the Party’s national headquarters, finishing up some campaign business.

  The small office had pictures of various Presidents hanging on the walls, along with various kitschy Americana. The desk was a plywood special and the chair behind it had obviously required some assembly after it came home from the big box office supply store. A couple of guest chairs in the room were marginally more padded than the desk chair, but not much. Even this late at night, Vincent was not the only person still working here.

  Vincent fiddled with a lightweight dumbbell. It was a habit. He was a free weight guy who could name every muscle group in the body and when he had nothing to do with his hands, he often started curling or at least toying with a weight. Over time, most of the spaces he regularly worked in wound up with a few dumbbells of various weights sitting there for him.

  He was running for the United States Senate. The media attention was higher than when he’d first been elected to the House of Representatives and so was the demand for fundraising. It was harder and harder to get any time with his wife.

  Instead of his wife, he was currently sitting across a desk from his campaign manager, who was kind of hard to take. She was a tightly wound Type A personality who would start yelling at the slightest provocation. Mike spent an hour every day consoling vital campaign staff who wanted to quit after Gina had lit into them.

  At the moment, though, she was yelling at the safest available target: him.

  “Mike, we need more money. Cobalt is up six points in this new poll, and nothing we’re doing is making a dent in his lead. I need more TV! I need you on the phone more.”

  The tall, overweight woman had graying hair and dark eyes. She had a pen in her mouth – constantly chewing them was her vice.

  The Congressman said, “G, I’m making seven hours of calls a day. I haven’t got any more time.”

  She shot back, “If you want to lose, it’s no big deal to me. I’ll have a job next election cycle one way or another. You’re the one who will be out of politics if you lose this.”

  “Don’t get like that,” Vincent replied.

  “Sorry. I know I get too uptight. I was actually totally lying. It’s a huge deal to me if we lose. I hate to lose.”

  “I know, G. And I’m giving you everything I’ve got. It’s getting us nowhere. Let’s come back to that plan I mentioned. I think I know a way to boost our poll numbers.”

  Gina s
aid, “I hope it’s not, ‘Come up with a better stump speech.’”

  Mike said, “Gina, I’m not a child. Stop patronizing me. I’ve been elected before, you know. I have an idea that’s better than ‘give a better speech.’”

  She replied, “I do, too. You can bring me enough money to bump our TV buy by 25 percent.”

  Vincent asked, “What if the President endorsed me?”

  Gina raised an eyebrow and asked, “In a contested primary? Against Doyle Cobalt, whom all the money men and lobbyists love?”

  “It could happen. I got to know him a bit after Rich West died. I got to know Wheeler, too. He was Communications Director on the campaign at the time. They talk to me more lately.”

  His manager said, “Yeah, but Mike, your whole brand in politics is Mister Nice Guy. The President is the polar opposite. He’s like a walking cover-up. It’s amazing to me there’s never been a front page headline about his love life. Everyone knows about him.

  “And as for Wheeler, if the President is a walking cover-up, Wheeler’s the guy who does the covering.”

  She finished, “These guys aren’t your team, Mike. They’re Doyle Cobalt’s team. They like power, they like money, and they absolutely love themselves. They might do the right thing occasionally but only if they can do it while getting more power.”

  The Congressman shrugged and replied, “This President’s changing in office. The responsibility is helping him grow up. Wheeler talks to me about it. The President doesn’t sleep around anymore.”

  Gina shot back, “Yeah, right.”

  Vincent said, “Gina, I believe in people when they’re trying to fix their lives. I believe in second chances.”

  “I know you do, Mike,” she replied. “But does he? You’re talking about betting the success or failure of your Senate campaign on hoping that he’s really changed.”

  “I’ll keep raising money, just in case,” the Congressman said.

  Vincent’s opponent was a former university professor who’d gotten a lot of government grants to develop some important genetic technology. He had then taken that same technology to the semi-private sector to make a fortune. Now he was a contractor, leasing the technology back to the same agencies that had initially funded its development.

  That made it easier for Mike. He disliked that kind of shady double dealing.

  What made it harder was that Cobalt used to support him. For many election cycles, Cobalt had been a max donor to Vincent’s campaign. Mike didn’t feel like he’d done anything to break the relationship, but the facts were the facts. His one-time ally was running against him… and was favored to win.

  The Congressman sighed and tossed the ten pound dumbbell slightly into the air, spinning, to catch it by the opposite end.

  “I’m going to try for the President’s endorsement, Gina. Maybe he’ll pledge to veto Cobalt’s Genetic Probable Cause Bill, too, and the combination of the two might change enough minds.”

  She shrugged. “Just don’t take time off from fundraising calls.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Alyssa had tried the chapel meeting in the afternoon, but it didn’t do anything for her. She tried to go because... she wasn’t sure, there were a lot of reasons.

  Her old life truly was gone. The market for professional thieves was a very small one to begin with. When you happened to be someone with a face the whole country recognized, the market became effectively zero. Besides which, she really did want to leave it behind. The experience of being framed had taught her what it felt like to have unwelcomed people messing with her future, and she didn’t want to be the one doing it to other innocent victims anymore.

  Also, there was Matt. She felt about a hundred different things about him at once and not all of them were good. But some of them were quite good – not the least of which was the memory of him saving her life. And Matt’s religion – he would never say it that way – was important to him.

  But the minister at the chapel said a bunch of boring junk that sounded more like Matt’s uptight preacher father than Matt. She walked out at the end of the service as unmoved as she had ever been.

  Now she lay on her side in bed with the Bible Matt had given her. She couldn’t sleep, and the moonlight through her barred window gave her enough light to see the ink on the pages. Her previous good behavior had earned her a cell with no roommate. Although she expected that to be taken away after the fight earlier today, it hadn’t happened yet.

  She looked up that verse Matt had told her about in his visit. She found it in the psalms: “A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows is God in his holy dwelling.”

  Her father had been neck deep in the darkest kind of politics. He traded influence and connections and money to get politicians under his thumb. He loved the control; he loved the power.

  He loved the power so much that he’d been willing to betray his own daughter to get more.

  Alyssa sighed and closed the Bible. She would rather be fatherless than have the father she had.

  She let her thoughts wander back to the fight in the exercise yard.

  The shocking thing was how good it felt.

  Before being arrested, Alyssa had a great deal of power over her own life. She was a strong, competent, intelligent woman at the pinnacle of her – however illicit – career. She was wealthy and well-connected. She was very skilled at dictating everything that was a part of her world. In prison, she lost that. Her whole life was at the whim of the Correctional Officers and the system. The fight gave her a taste of her old power back.

  She had thought she was past those feelings. Matt certainly wanted her to be past those feelings. But strength and control still felt good, and she couldn’t tear her thoughts away from the exhilaration of imposing her will on a situation.

  Given that she was pondering her desire for control over the world around her, it shocked her to the core when her cell door opened completely unexpectedly.

  The cell door randomly opening in the middle of the night was unheard-of. It simply never happened. And when the impossible happened in Federal prison, it was often accompanied by danger.

  At once, Alyssa rolled out of her bed and landed on her feet. She set her right leg slightly behind her left and brought her fists up to cover her face in case she had to fight.

  “Relax, I’m not here to hurt you,” whispered a voice. It wasn’t a voice Alyssa knew.

  “Who are you? Step into the light from the window,” she whispered back.

  The spiky brown hair and pajamas didn’t reveal much. Alyssa took a few moments to recognize the woman who stepped into her cell. But perhaps that was understandable – the last time she had seen her, the intruder was curled up in a ball on the ground. Once she was in the moonlight, it was possible to see the ugly black eyes and fat lip she was wearing as a result of some feet to her face.

  “I’m Moira,” she said. “Moira LeBlanc. You saved my life earlier today.”

  Alyssa nodded in recognition but didn’t let down her guard.

  “Possibly,” she replied. “They might have just hurt you really bad and called it good.”

  “Regardless, thank you. I don’t know if I can ever describe how it felt when they were all kicking me. It was horrible. Thank you. I wish I could fight like you.”

  Alyssa replied, “You’re welcome. Remember this if you’re ever in a fight again. It’s your only fighting lesson from me: If you let a fight go to the ground, the heavier fighter almost always wins. But, on the other hand, if a fight goes to the ground, whoever happens to be nearby can kick you in the head.”

  Moira gave a feeble grin. “I hope I never have occasion to need it.”

  Alyssa nodded and asked, “I do hate being unfriendly but are you planning to say ‘thank you’ by getting me busted for having my cell door open after hours?”

  In the moonlight, she could barely make out the grin that spread across the girl’s face.

  Moira said, “Oh, that won’t be a problem.”

 
“Why not?”

  The younger woman asked, “You know what I’m in for?”

  Alyssa shrugged and answered, “I believe computer hacking was mentioned. I don’t make a point of putting my nose in other people’s business.”

  “Computer hacking seems like such a trite term,” Moira replied. “When it comes to computers, I’m an artist. You won’t have any trouble with COs tonight.”

  ***

  Moira LeBlanc was an activist hacker. Like many in the computer underground, she considered it a point of honor to mess with people and businesses that did things she considered evil. In her early and mid-teen years, she had flouted the law on multiple occasions, usually to the detriment of whoever looked like a villain in the popular media at the time.

  When the National Security Agency was drawing negative press for its surveillance programs, Moira and her peers defaced the agency’s web site. When a University was accused of ripping off their students by hiking tuition while giving the administrators big bonuses, Moira and others who shared her hobby staged a mass electronic break-in to change the grade of every single student there to an A.

  Some people called it hacktivism. A combination of hacking and activism, the word meant to use computer crime as a means of social protest.

  So when Cobalt Data Mining Systems was formed for the express purpose of helping the Federal government gather DNA on as many citizens as possible, Moira and her online friends freaked out. At once, CDMS vaulted to the top of the enemies list of the hacktivism community.

  There were Distributed Denial of Service Attacks, there were attempts to vandalize their web site, there were “spear phishing” attacks attempting to gather CDMS employees’ passwords… the full arsenal of Internet dirty tricks was deployed.

  And Moira LeBlanc got through their defenses far enough to attract attention. For the first time in her life, she wound up on the radar scope of Federal law enforcement agencies.

  Not long after that, she was in prison, meeting Alyssa Chambers.

  ***