Born with Secrets: A Political Thriller Read online

  Moira explained, “I have a friend on the outside who does cell phone hacking. He paid one of the COs five hundred bucks to smuggle in a smartphone. So, uh, the CO duty roster is a little messed up tonight. No one’s on duty anywhere near us.”

  Alyssa raised an eyebrow and replied, “You can do all that with a smartphone?”

  “Give me a computer and an Internet connection, and I can just about burn this place down. Which, actually, is why I’m here.”

  “Go on.”

  “I want justice.”

  Alyssa shook her head. “Forget it. I’m not going to go beat up all the people who attacked you.”

  Moira shook her head. “Not all of them. Just one. The guard.”

  The younger woman paused for a moment and then added, “I know you must have seen him. He was standing a couple yards off.”

  “Yeah, I saw him,” Alyssa replied. “He didn’t lift a finger to help you until other COs were on the way.”

  “It’s worse than not helping me. He set the whole thing up.”

  “How so?” Alyssa asked.

  “He’s got a nice little racket going with those four. He smuggles meth in; they sell it to other prisoners. He wanted me to hack the duty roster to make sure he was on duty tonight so he could receive a shipment. I wouldn’t. So he brought in his friends to help ‘persuade’ me. I think he’s connected to their gang on the outside because he only started to work here recently. I think the gang had him take the job here specifically for the smuggling ring.”

  Alyssa had also noticed that the CO in question was new. The possibility of a drug smuggling ring made the whole thing easier to understand. She knew that prisoners were not supposed to have cash in FCI Rocky. She also knew there was a thriving black market and somehow cash got in anyway.

  Moira said, “The funny thing is, he’s also the one who took the money to get my smartphone in. If you want something smuggled, pay the guy who’s got a smuggling ring. Tonight, I teach him that crime never pays.”

  Alyssa said, “I don’t see how that makes your revenge scheme any more palatable from my perspective. If I’m not interested in beating up other prisoners, why would I be interested in assaulting a guard. I don’t actually enjoy life in prison. I’d rather reduce my time, not increase it.”

  The younger woman grinned. “Boy, your mind really does run to violence, doesn’t it? But that’s not what I have in mind. ‘I get pounded so he gets pounded’ doesn’t accomplish anything. I didn’t say I wanted vengeance. I want justice.”

  She continued, “He’s committing several different crimes with his little drug ring, let alone setting me up for a beating. All I want to do is see him prosecuted by the law. Of course, in here, the word of a prisoner against the word of a CO doesn’t really count, so I can’t get him busted just by telling the administration.

  “Unfortunately for him, some of his little escapade today happened in front of the security cameras. Not all of it, but enough of it to be incriminating.”

  Alyssa sighed. This was actually starting to sound appealing to her. She didn’t like the rampant level of corruption among the COs. She didn’t like meth. And she didn’t like criminals who would beat someone half to death.

  The thought of snaking through a heavily-guarded facility to steal secrets almost made her mouth water. This was what she was trained for. It was what she was best at.

  But it was also what she was trying to leave behind.

  In addition to which, even in pursuit of justice, unauthorized access to the prison’s security videos was a crime. And being out of their cells at night was a major infraction of the rules.

  “I’m sorry. My career as a professional thief is over. I don’t know why you need me anyway. If you’re good enough with a computer to send all the night shift COs somewhere else tonight, I bet you’re good enough to get that video without me.”

  Moira nodded and said, “I am. All except for one tiny little thing. There’s a physical lock on the door of the server closet, and that’s where the hard drives are, where they back up their video. I’ve already disabled every electronic obstacle between here and there. I just need you to pick the lock.”

  When Alyssa didn’t answer right away, the younger woman added, “You know why I’m inside, so it shouldn’t surprise you that I know why you’re inside. I know who you are. I know you can pick locks.”

  Alyssa nodded. “I can. It’s just that I don’t anymore. I’m clean now.”

  Moira gave her a feral grin. “You’re pretty used to being infamous, so I bet you won’t be surprised that I’ve read up on you a little.”

  A shrug was the only reply.

  “Alyssa Chambers, the political dirty tricks operative. Hired by half of the corrupt politicians in America to steal secrets or suppress them. I actually read a lot about you when your trial was going on, long before I ever thought of getting arrested and coming here.”

  “Why?” the older woman asked.

  The brown-haired girl shrugged then said, “A couple years ago I got into a really rebellious stage with my mom. Whenever she’d try to discipline me, or tell me not to do something, I’d give her, ‘If I had a father, he’d love me enough to let me do it.’”

  She sighed and went on, “I’m not the first punk kid to say things like that to a parent. I’m only now starting to figure out how hurtful it must have been for her. But I had built my father into this mythical figure who would have everything that I felt was lacking from my life.

  “And then you were all of a sudden in the news, and the story was that your father had actually been exactly the opposite and had completely ruined you. I just kind of got into wondering about it. I wished I knew my father, and you probably wished you had never known yours. You did some stuff you probably wished you hadn’t done. And… well, I did that, too. A lot of stuff actually.”

  Moira shrugged. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to go all Sigmund Freud on you. What I’m trying to say is, I read a lot of the news about your trial. So I know you know Mike Vincent. In fact, some of the Internet rumors say he personally saved your life before the trial.”

  Alyssa shrugged. “It’s kind of weird being a semi-celebrity. I’m always running into people who know stuff about me. I lived my whole life trying to be completely unknown and now I’m the opposite.”

  Moira said, “Well, tonight, I’m offering you the chance to help Congressman Vincent.”

  Alyssa held her tongue for a moment. She tried to think. She tried to pray. She was clean now. She wasn’t a criminal anymore. But Moira was right, she owed Mike Vincent big time.

  “You have my attention,” she said.

  The thrill of revealing a secret was practically glowing from Moira’s face.

  She said, “This corrupt Correctional Officer? The one who’s got a drug smuggling ring going with the prisoners he’s supposed to be supervising? The one who set an innocent young girl…” – here she traced a small circle over her head like a halo – “up to be beaten?”

  She finished, “His name is Luther Cobalt. He’s Doyle Cobalt’s brother. The news says your friend Vincent is in danger of losing his election to the very same Doyle Cobalt. If you don’t care about bringing a corrupt CO to justice, do you care about helping your friend?”

  CHAPTER 5

  Gliding down the hall in stocking feet, the better to avoid making noise, Alyssa divided her attention fore and aft. Ahead of her, there was danger. If anything went wrong with Moira’s hacking of the duty roster, the Correctional Officers would come from in front. Behind her, on the other hand, came Moira. The danger there was entirely different. The girl knew next to nothing about real world, in-person crime. Every step carried with it a danger of a sneeze, a misstep, or some other source of noise or light.

  In between cells, faint lights illuminated the bare concrete corridor. The floor and walls would echo like canyon if they made even the tiniest noise.

  Some of the cells contained women who snored. From others, there was no noise at
all. Some probably even held women who were awake, which was why Alyssa was so concerned about noise.

  Every footfall rasped like a file in her ears. Every breath echoed down the hall. Her mind magnified every noise. Worse, it magnified every thought.

  Mike Vincent was a friend. Without him, she might never have survived being framed for assassinating a Presidential candidate. Tom Wheeler was helping him, and Wheeler, too, had helped her come out of the assassination incident alive. She had come with Moira because of them.

  But she would be lying if she tried to tell herself that was the only reason.

  This was what she had spent her adult life doing. The job tonight was to steal information from a heavily secured facility and use that information to affect a political race. This was Alyssa’s life. This was all she knew or had ever known. This was home.

  She was the best at this, the very top of her class. The thrill of defying the law to steal information that could affect an election coursed through Alyssa’s veins. Her brain buzzed with acute sensitivity to the danger, while her heart thrilled to the knowledge that there was no one on earth better equipped to handle it.

  And yet…

  This was the life that had landed her in prison. This was the life that had earned her betrayal by her own father. This was…

  Not going as planned. The sound of footsteps reached her ears very clearly from ahead.

  The two women were approaching an intersection of hallways when she heard the noise. It was the heavy clomp of tactical boots, but that didn’t surprise Alyssa. If anyone else was out besides them, it had to be a correctional officer.

  She jabbed her finger in the direction of the sound, pointing very aggressively. Then she peered at Moira, made her eyes wide, and shrugged expectantly. Everything about her body language silently communicated the message, “You told me no one would be here!”

  Moira shrugged back, but the look on her face was one of fear.

  The choice was between pressing on and retreating to her cell. Alyssa clenched her teeth and inched forward.

  The sound of the footsteps was receding down the hallway they were about to intersect. She edged her way up to the corner, then peeked around it. In the faint light, she could see a guard rounding another corner about a hundred feet away.

  The room they needed to be in was past that corner.

  Alyssa ground her teeth and moved as quickly as she could. Her socks slid silently on the cement. Without even looking over her shoulder to check on Moira, she approached the corridor the Correctional Officer had just turned down. Once again, Alyssa poked her head out barely far enough to see.. Once again, she saw the man walking away from them.

  Moira pressed against her from the back. Alyssa understood that she wanted to see what was going on. Instead of letting her, she held up three fingers. Then she pulled one back to make it two. Then just one and then a flat palm waving forward.

  Alyssa darted across the hall. Moira tried to stop in the middle to look at the guard, but Alyssa grabbed her arm and pulled her all the way across.

  “Do not risk being seen,” Alyssa whispered. Then she walked across the hall and into their destination.

  The first room had only the normal security. It was supposed to be secured by an electronic lock, but Moira had already done away with that. On the far side of the room, though, Alyssa saw a second door. That one had both a thumbprint scanner and a traditional pin and tumbler lock.

  “The biometrics are already disarmed,” Moira said when she saw Alyssa looking at it. “I just need your help for that deadbolt.”

  Moira had supplied most of the elements for success in this mission. She had hacked the duty roster. She had manipulated all the electronic security.

  In addition, she had also brought two paperclips.

  Famously helpful to lock pickers, the thin paper clips could be bent into shapes that would fit inside the keyhole. From there, it could be manipulated to cause the spring-loaded pins inside the lock to release. It required physical access to the lock to make those bends, though. Alyssa set about doing it as fast as she knew how.

  In the real world, Alyssa owned many sets of torsion wrenches, hook picks, snake rakes, and other arcanely-named locksmith tools. She also had a few bump keys, which half the time could make all the other tools unnecessary. Here, she had to make do. She bent one clip into an “L” shape for a makeshift torsion wrench and the other into a twisty “S-rake” shape. It wasn’t the most artistic method of picking a lock – anyone who looked at this in the future would have no doubt it had been picked – but it was fast.

  When Alyssa pushed the door open, Moira rushed past her, pulling her contraband smartphone out of her pocket. Alyssa watched as the younger woman found a cable and plugged the phone into one of the racks and racks of servers that lined all four walls. Blinking LEDs made the room seem like a convention of cherry fireflies.

  “Boot up one of those PCs behind you,” Moira whispered. “Once I find the right file, we’ll pop it onto a computer and attach it to an email. I’m just assuming you know the right people in the media to send it to?”

  Thinking of Matt, Alyssa smiled as she picked out a computer and pushed the power button.

  “I know just the one,” she replied.

  Soon Moira came out waving her smartphone. She plugged it into the machine at which Alyssa sat, then just leaned back and smiled.

  “I’ve got like a zillion fake webmail accounts,” the younger woman said giving Alyssa the web address and username and password to one of them. “From what I read about you, you’re good enough with computers to get a file off a memory card, right?”

  Alyssa sniffed. “Want to compare the dollar value of the data I’ve stolen and the data you’ve stolen?”

  Moira replied with a very quiet laugh. “It would all be subjective. How are we going to place a dollar value on the contents of a Presidential candidate’s hard drive?”

  “You say that like there was only one,” the older women replied. Then she turned her attention exclusively to the job at hand. As she pulled the video file off the phone and put it on the computer’s desktop for eventual attachment to an email, Moira said, “Check out the video. If you didn’t already feel good about sending this guy to prison, this will do it for you. You can fast forward to about the 4:42 mark.”

  Alyssa wanted to say no. This wasn’t exactly a safe place to sit around and watch web videos, but something led her to click.

  After scrolling to the indicated time marker on the video, she watched as the corrupt CO and two of the women from the fight strolled through the camera’s field of view. They were in the exercise yard, probably only minutes before they attacked Moira. They were heading toward the corner that was out of view.

  “I don’t care if she lives or dies,” the man said. “Either way works for my purposes.”

  “It’s a lot harder to kill someone without a shank than people think,” one of the prisoners replied.

  She was the one who had been choking Moira. A shank was the prison term for an improvised weapon. It was usually a piece of metal sharpened on the concrete floor.

  “Last time I offed a guy, a chokehold did it,” the guard replied on the video.

  Alyssa felt her skin prickle at the casual way he talked about murder.

  “Pretty bad way to go, too,” he continued. “Even if she lives, she’ll never forget the lesson.”

  Sickened, Alyssa clicked the video closed. Moira was right. Seeing that made her want to get the video to Matt more than ever.

  She worked quickly, logging into the webmail account Moira had given her. She noticed a lot of emails from a guy named Zack Ravenberg, including one with the subject line “Did you get the phone?” Alyssa quickly memorized that email address, figuring it was the phone hacker Moira had mentioned and that she could find a use for information like that. Then she composed a new email addressed to Matt. Just as the younger girl had promised, finding the file on her smartphone was easy. Alyssa attache
d it and sent the message winging its way to Matt.

  That was when she heard footsteps coming toward their room.

  She whispered, “That’s it, Moira. Time to go.”

  There was no reply.

  Step. Step. Step. Whoever was out there was coming their way.

  Alyssa’s head whipped back and forth, looking for her co-conspirator. She was nowhere to be found.

  She risked a tiny bit more volume and called, “Moira?”

  Again, no answer, unless it was the footsteps growing louder.

  Alyssa raced from her chair to the server room she had unlocked. She put her head through the door and called, “Moira?”

  Nothing.

  Moira LeBlanc was gone.

  The sound of combat boots on a concrete floor grew louder and louder. Alyssa knew she was out of time. The noise was too close for her to leave the room she was in.

  Franticly, she ran to the door and shut it. Just in case Matt was right, she said a prayer. She wedged herself into the corner such that, if the door opened, she would be behind it.

  Then she stopped breathing to avoid being heard. If she could have, she would have stopped her heartbeat, too.

  The door opened.

  Alyssa felt squeezed as it pressed against her. Watching out the corner of her eye, she saw the Correctional Officer walk into the middle of the room.

  He looked around.

  But he never looked directly behind him. Instead, he went over to the door of the server closet. He worked the thumbprint scanner.

  Then he reached down for the keys at his belt.

  Alyssa had scratched that lock up pretty bad in the course of picking it. There was no way for him to avoid seeing what had happened.

  The Correctional Officer fumbled with his key ring.

  Silently, Alyssa slipped out from behind the door, staring at his back the whole time. She took one silent step to the right, never taking her eyes off the guard. Then she slowly backed out the door. She took it one step at a time, silently retreating from the room and into the hallway.

  She turned and ran back to her cell.