Born with Secrets: A Political Thriller Read online

  CHAPTER 6

  About three minutes after Alyssa made it back to her cell, the alarm went off. The public address system announced an unscheduled count. All around her, the groaning voices and profanity of women roused in the middle of the night made a kind of obscene chorus.

  Alyssa stood near the door of her cell to be counted.

  Of course, the count came up one short. Moira LeBlanc was well and truly gone.

  The hubbub that followed didn’t really affect Alyssa. She was far too keyed up to sleep, so the din of Correctional Officers searching the facility for the missing prisoner didn’t deprive her of any rest. Obviously, the search of her own room did not yield Moira hiding under the bed and once that much had been ascertained, the officers moved away from her.

  As the increasingly frantic search went on, gossip passed between cells by women too annoyed or excited to sleep that told Alyssa the COs had found an HVAC duct in the server room with the grate forcibly removed. It had an outlet to the outside.

  That meant the entire case was closed in Alyssa’s book. She now knew how Moira had gotten out and why she had tricked Alyssa into breaking into the server room. The incriminating video file they had sent to Matt probably never mattered to her at all. Game over.

  Except for one thing.

  Before dawn, just as relative quiet was returning to the cells, Alyssa’s door opened yet again. She half expected Moira to re-appear and this time she was determined not to trust her. She came out of bed at once, rising to her feet and dropping into a guard stance, ready to fight.

  The man who entered her cell had no hair on his head. In the moonlight, she could make out the slightly-bent nose of someone who had had it broken once. His large chest and upper arms made it feel very threatening when he stepped forward right into her space, until that broken nose was only an inch from the fist she held up in her guard stance.

  This close, she could see that one of his eyes was green and the other black. His breath smelled of cheap, sour coffee.

  Belatedly, Alyssa recognized him. He was the Correctional Officer who had just stood there and watched while Moira was getting beaten.

  “You shouldn’t have sent that video,” he said, his voice halfway between a whisper and a growl.

  That caught Alyssa by surprise. If a CO knew what she had done in that room, something didn’t compute. Why hadn’t he stopped her then? Or was Moira wrong or lying, and the security cameras were still on?

  She barely held onto her poker face and didn’t bother to reply. This conversation was way off the books. No CO should ever be in her cell alone. What was happening was obviously outside the law.

  The guard growled, “I’ve waited too long for my revenge. I’ve worked too hard to get here. I will not let you steal from me.

  “I’m going to make you pay,” he said. “Not tonight. Not while the whole place is up in arms looking for your little friend. But you’re going to pay. I like hurting people. I know ways to do it that you can’t imagine.”

  He continued, “I know everyone else is afraid of you, but I’m not. I’ve killed people — better fighters than you. Someday soon, when you’re not expecting it, you’re going to learn a new definition of pain.”

  He turned and walked back out of her cell with a growl and a parting shot Alyssa could barely hear.

  “You’re going to pay.”

  Alyssa took a few moments to let her heart rate get back into the normal range. She had never been afraid of a fight but then she’d never dealt with someone who just wanted to hurt her for hurting’s sake. Most of the fights she’d ever had before – in and out of prison – had been about some larger goal.

  Staring at the door where the corrupt guard had walked away, Alyssa could not stop one thought from rattling around in her head.

  Be careful, Matt!

  ***

  Matt Barr’s flight back to D.C. from his visit with Alyssa was, as usual, long and punctuated by layovers. He spent the hours praying about her.

  What am I gonna do, God? I want to give her everything she wants, but I don’t think she knows what she wants. I want to protect her, but she doesn’t need anyone to help her with that. I want to help her with her pain about her father, but everything I can think of to say sounds so cheesy. How do you love a woman who has everything but her freedom and her family? I need your help, God.

  He wondered if he should have told her about the encounter with the mystery man after the debate. She had noticed right away that he was off kilter. He could have talked to her about it. But chances to talk to Alyssa were so rare, he hadn’t wanted to waste it on that.

  Tomorrow, he had stories to file about the various top-tier Senate races going on in the mid-term elections. His friend Mike Vincent would be near the front of the line, although it wasn’t a happy story for Matt. He wanted Mike to win, and that didn’t look likely.

  If he’d been more dedicated, he could have started writing them on the plane, but he was never any good when he came back from visiting Alyssa. The look on her face when she saw him felt too good. The fact that it had taken Federal prison before he saw that look felt too frustrating.

  Like many people, he couldn’t sleep in the cramped quarters of coach-class airline seats so when the plane finally landed at Reagan and he made it back to his townhouse in Adams Morgan, he fell almost instantly to sleep.

  He woke up when he smelled smoke.

  The acrid stench of burning plastic and petroleum byproducts dragged him out of a dream. His mind rapidly went through, “What stinks?” to “Make it go away, I’m trying to sleep!” to “what’s up here, I’m having real trouble breathing…” and landed on “Fire? Here? Now? For real? FIRE!”

  His eyes shot open, and he saw the door to his bedroom with black smoke pouring in through the edges. He stumbled out of bed and went over to perform the classic test of seeing whether the door knob was warm to the touch, but it was so hot he couldn’t even get close enough to lay a finger on it.

  Matt backed away as he tried to get his mind around the fact that this was real. His house was really on fire.

  He slept in black sweats. His bare chest showed the sweat that came from a very warm room. His hair stuck up in all directions from sleep.

  He went to his bedroom window and popped the screen out. He had to get out of the house and the door wasn’t going to work. The window was the only way.

  He worked the latch to unlock it, then pushed to slide the window open. To his surprise, it wouldn’t move.

  He tried again to slide the window and got nowhere. He knelt down a little bit to get his leg muscles into it, then tried with all his strength to shove it open. It wouldn’t budge, and the exertion left him panting for breath, which hurt from the smoke.

  Out on the frontiers of his consciousness, clouds of panic began to gather.

  Matt took a pillow from his bed and placed it against the window. He took a deep breath and punched it as hard as he could. The glass cracked. A few more hits and he had a genuine hole to work with. Gratefully, he pressed his face to it and took several deep breaths from the cleaner outside air. But the smoke was out there, too, and his nose and throat felt raw from breathing it in.

  Using the pillow and, when that was completely shredded, some blankets from his bed, he cleared the frame completely of glass. Awkwardly, he braced himself on the floor in a push up-like position, then backed his legs out first. He would have to drop ten feet or so to the ground from his second story window; he wanted to do that feet first.

  Finally, he was almost out. Just as he was finally getting his second hand into a good grip on the window ledge, it caught on a remaining fragment of glass. Shouting in pain, Matt missed his grip and plunged to the ground below.

  He landed hard but not hard enough to break bones. It hurt. He lay there gripping his shins for a second, ignoring the cold rain that poured down and soaked his sweats immediately. Finally, he happened to look up at the wall of his house. About an inch below the window, where his
head would have been if he’d gotten the grip he planned for, was a tiny round hole around which shattered wood stuck up in splinters.

  It was a bullet hole.

  At the same time, he noticed the rain.

  Hard, cold, pouring rain. Washington got such storms often in the spring. What was unusual was the fact that it was having no effect at all on his burning house.

  That, he though, probably meant some kind of fuel or accelerant was keeping it burning. And that, he realized…

  Matt shot up from the ground the moment he put two and two together. A fire that wouldn’t go out and a bullet hole in his house? As he sprinted away, another bullet impacted the wall. He couldn’t even see who was shooting at him. Fighting wasn’t an option until he knew more. Retreat was the only option likely to produce results.

  Without wasting another second, he raced to the tiny walkway between his house and the neighbor. He sped through it, hearing a ricochet behind him. He ran to the side door to his garage and hurriedly placed his hand against the wood. Not warm. The fire hadn’t spread here yet.

  He went inside and scooped up the spare key to his Camaro from the front driver-side wheel well. He slammed on the button to raise the garage door then dropped into the seat. With an eerie sense of déjà vu from the last time he and Alyssa sped away from his house in a sports car, he slammed on the gas and burned rubber backing out onto the street.

  ***

  Racing away from his home, Matt let himself take a breath or two. The crisis had erupted without warning. His system had been swimming in adrenaline since he’d first realized he was in a real house fire. Now, driving out into the night, he felt like he had escaped.

  Matt bought the red Camaro with black trim because he loved to drive. He loved the feel of acceleration. He loved timing the shift just right to get the maximum possible speed. He loved the way the seatbelt barely held him in place in tight turns. Put him in his car, and Matt Barr felt like he could conquer the world.

  That confidence was put to the test when the first bullet screeched through the body of his car.

  Matt let a profanity slip out, and his foot was already holding the pedal to the metal before he could even decide what to do.

  Behind him, a black SUV loomed large in his rear view mirror. In the dark of night it wasn’t possible to see the gun hanging out the window until it fired. Then a painfully bright muzzle flash stabbed through the rainy night. It was bright enough that Matt had to blink to clear his eyes, even though he was only looking at it in the mirror.

  The sound of glass breaking followed closely behind as the back window of his sports car became an opaque web of shatterproof pieces.

  Matt began a series of turns trying to get away from the vehicle behind him. Gunshots echoed through the night; sometimes they hit his vehicle and sometimes they missed. Matt just kept driving. If one was going to hit him, that was out of his control. The only thing he could control was the wheel of the car.

  He had forgotten about the mystery thug with Doyle Cobalt, but the fact of being shot at brought it freshly to mind. The whole series of events seemed unreal. He was a reporter who covered politics. The violence in his life was all sublimated — politicians “attacked” each other with press releases and commercials, not guns and bullets. It was hard to make his mind accept this as real.

  Matt worked through the factors of the situation. He didn’t have a gun and the people behind him obviously did. On the other hand, there was no way that big bulky sport utility could hang with his baby. Matt had the faster car, and he also had a weapon the other side didn’t: Exposure. Whoever they were and whatever they wanted, they weren’t likely to appreciate police attention. And Matt knew how to get that.

  He whipped out of the side streets and onto Connecticut Avenue, for exactly that reason. The bigger the street, the more the cops would patrol it. Besides, Connecticut Avenue led through Dupont Circle and toward the White House. If there was anywhere to find police assistance, that was it.

  Another burst of gunfire came from behind him. Matt yanked the steering wheel first left then right, trying to present a harder target to hit, but coming dangerously close to the other lane of traffic.

  Matt leaned on his horn as he entered the traffic circle. Merging into the things was a tricky exercise at best but slowing down was not an option tonight. Not with random strangers trying to murder him.

  He drew a chorus of angry honking as he blazed through the circle and heard the squeal of tires somewhere as a car or two had to slam on their brakes. Then he pulled out of the circle on a direct course for the White House.

  Why? Why are they trying to kill me? I didn’t do anything! I don’t know any secrets. Everything I write about comes out in a press release for the whole world to read.

  As if answering his own question, he kept coming back to his encounter with Doyle Cobalt and the mystery man and the conversation he had overheard. Was there more to that? Had something he heard been dangerous? It had only been snippets — there was nothing there he could turn into a reason to murder him. But then, they wouldn’t know that. For all they knew, he might have heard every word.

  Now that he was out of Dupont Circle, the black SUV didn’t re-appear behind him. He was probably getting too close to the White House for the pursuers to keep chasing him.

  With the gunfire over, he could hear the rain pattering on the roof of his car. His wipers thumped rhythmically.

  Having reached a moment when he could think forward a few steps, instead of focusing on surviving long enough to get away, Matt never had any doubt where he would go. Mike Vincent. It had to be Vincent.

  Congressman Vincent had hinted to Matt that he’d survived something like this once, where someone had wanted to murder him. He was pretty cautious about sharing the full story but from hints and whispers, Matt got the idea it might be pretty good.

  Other than Alyssa, there was no one but Mike that he could trust at a time like this.

  He and Vincent had known each other half their lives now, when Matt was a college kid trying to land freelance gigs and the Congressman was an entry-level staffer working on someone else’s campaign. At a moment like this, Vincent was his third thought, right after God and Alyssa. Matt was trying to process the fact that people were trying to literally kill him — to leave him a charred corpse in his rented row house or in his smashed-up ten-year-old Camaro.

  It didn’t seem real. It didn’t seem possible. He kept expecting to go back to real life.

  But that wasn’t happening. The bullet holes in his car were still there. If he went back to his neighborhood, his house would still be burned down.

  CHAPTER 7

  Luther Cobalt never liked discipline. In high school, he could never stick with football because the coaches demanded teamwork, not just hitting people. He liked the hitting people part.

  After high school, he hadn’t lasted very long in the army for the same reason. He earned himself many a dressing down from drill instructors and never handled them constructively. When he broke a sergeant’s nose, the big green machine spit him back out.

  He drifted around various jobs working as a bouncer or a security guard. He studied fighting. He got good at fighting. He got to enjoy it.

  Eventually, he landed a fairly steady gig at a company called Electron Guidewire that manufactured surveillance devices and other electronics for the government. It had been a good job. The security and law enforcement agencies that bought their products paid a ton of money. That meant the company could afford to pay its people well. He worked his way up, eventually becoming the lead security guard, reporting directly to the director of security. His boss actually had a fairly similar personality to Luther, so they got along.

  That all came crashing down, though, when Congress voted not to allow the NSA to buy the latest gizmo that company manufactured. And it wasn’t just the vote not to buy it. There was a big scandal about its performance. That scandal brought the company down.

  Luther Coba
lt was out of a job.

  And the Congressman who led the charge to abandon that product and that company? The Congressman who used that scandal to catapult his career forward?

  Mike Vincent.

  Luther grew more and more bitter as he read the fawning newspaper stories about how Vincent defended the taxpayers from corrupt purchasing and contracting. Usually, he was reading them on his way to the Classified Ads to look for work. But his time at Electron Guidewire ended up serving him well.

  Many of their clients worked for government agencies like the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, or others in the alphabet soup. They were all in the national security business somehow or another.

  One of those people recognized Luther as a fairly tough guy who didn’t ask questions.

  He began to occasionally hire Luther for black, secret, completely deniable work. The jobs were rarely pretty or legal, but sometimes in the murky world of protecting the homeland, they needed doing. And when they did, Luther got them done.

  Eventually, Luther acquired a reputation as a person who would and could apply violence successfully. He was a lethally effective fighter, although he managed to keep the “lethal” part of it out of any official record. That brought him to the attention of other people who had need of his skills. He began to take money from drug dealers and others in organized crime to keep himself afloat between government jobs. Luther began to drift in and out of the criminal underworld.

  It didn’t take long before he ran afoul of the law, but his connections there won him a deal: Go back to work for the drug dealer he’d been working for but this time wear a wire.

  The Feds liked his results. The criminals never knew how little he could be trusted. Luther Cobalt lived in the murky gray world between the darker elements of America’s national security establishment and people who got rich by breaking the law.

  The combination proved to be a lucrative one. Spies oftentimes needed a bridge to organized crime. When Intelligence agencies wanted a “private contractor” who could do very dirty jobs and give them plausible deniability, Luther Cobalt took the job.