Born with Secrets: A Political Thriller Page 7

  “I’m sorry, G,” he said. “I got caught by surprise by some personal life stuff this morning. I’ll make the time up.”

  “Those calls were scheduled, Mike. I had two guys who could write five thousand dollar checks waiting specifically for a call before ten in the morning!”

  “I’m sorry, Gina. Let me call them right now. Tell me which ones had an appointment, and I’ll call right away.”

  She took his call list and circled three different names before passing it back to him, then said, “Not right away, though. Oppo turned up something last night that I want to go over with you.”

  “Oppo” was short for “Opposition Research.” It referred to the business of finding out all the bad, embarrassing, unsavory things about their opponent so they could be turned into commercials. Vincent’s campaign had a consultant who did that for them.

  Gina was somewhat hard to take because she was almost always angry, but the Oppo consultant was something else entirely. That guy just loved knowing dirty secrets about people, and it made Mike feel unclean.

  The campaign manager said, “Doyle’s brother got fired last night.”

  “Doyle Cobalt’s?”

  “It’s not a common name, Mike. How many other Doyles are you hanging out with?”

  Mike felt the sarcasm set off his temper and had to remain silent for a few moments before his desire to retaliate was under control.

  After a second or two he asked, “What happened?”

  “His name’s Luther Cobalt. Apparently, he took a job as a Federal Correctional Officer in the prison system a couple months ago. Last night, FCI-Rocky fired him. He was still in his probationary period, so they could do that. No explanation given.”

  The Congressman asked, “Why would Doyle Cobalt’s brother be working as a prison guard? Doyle makes enough to keep his whole family in spending money, and prison guard doesn’t seem like a job you do out of love for the work.”

  Gina just shrugged. “He’s done a lot of security guard type jobs. Doyle’s brother has actually been kind of hard for our Oppo guy to track. From what we can gather, he’s got some ties to the intelligence community. His name has shown up in a court case as an informant for the Department of Homeland Security, along with some allegations of having used excessive force. The most solid record we have of him is that apparently he once worked for that corrupt contractor you made your name on. Electron Guidewire, wasn’t it?”

  The Congressman nodded. She, of course, would have no idea about what was going on, but Mike started silently putting things into place.

  Matt went to FCI-Rocky to see an imprisoned political thief.

  Mike’s political opponent’s brother was working at FCI-Rocky and got fired right after Matt left there.

  That brother had ties to his own past.

  Matt got home and someone started trying to murder him.

  It was a very thin chain of coincidence. There was nothing in there that even hinted at why someone might want to kill a political reporter. But that was twice in one day FCI-Rocky had turned up with people connected to Vincent, and it made the Congressman nervous.

  While he was trying to make the facts fit in with someone trying to kill Matt, the campaign manager added the obvious request.

  “I want to turn it into an ad and hit Cobalt with it,” she said. “It will absolutely take the wind out of his sails.”

  “No,” Mike replied immediately.

  “Why not? Mike, Cobalt’s six points ahead of us and gaining. We need to drive his negatives up if you want to be in the Senate.”

  “I told you this when you came aboard, Gina. I’ll do everything I can to win, as long as it’s the right thing to do. But I won’t do anything morally wrong to win. Telling the whole world some innuendo about some guy’s private life who’s not even our actual opponent is not the right thing to do, and I won’t do it.”

  “Mike, it’s not like it’s an extra-marital affair or something; he just got fired from his job.”

  Vincent said, “If Doyle had an affair, I might be OK with making an ad out of that. That tells you something worth knowing about the man. But the fact that his brother got fired is just an embarrassing personal story. He might have gotten fired for something completely harmless, and then we’re making a fool out of him in front of the national media just so I can shave a point or two off his brother’s lead in the polls.

  “He’s a human being, Gina, whoever’s brother he is. I won’t do it.”

  She sighed, “And yet you’re willing to gamble the whole campaign, hoping that a guy with the morals of our President will come out and endorse you. Vincent, you’ve got some weird values.”

  “He wants to change, Gina. He’s trying to. I don’t hold people’s past against them. From the President down to a prison guard, I believe in second chances.”

  His campaign manager tapped the call list with the circles on it.

  “He can change all he wants,” she said. “But you still have to make those calls.”

  ***

  Alyssa paced back and forth, talking to herself. She no longer lived in her friendly, comfortable cell. After Moira escaped, Alyssa had been moved to solitary confinement on suspicion of having had a hand in it. The obviously-picked lock to the server closet had drawn the eyes of every investigator. Their thoughts went at once to the master thief held within their walls. Boom, away she went.

  It didn’t help her mood at all that they were perfectly correct.

  Known more formally as the Secure Housing Unit, or SHU, the cells for solitary confinement lacked the window to the outside that she’d once had. They also lacked the quality of being generally open during the day so the prisoner could socialize with other prisoners or use the prison library or exercise yard.

  She was confined within a six by ten space, of which about a third was taken up by the raised concrete bed area with the cheap mattress on top.

  She had worked through forms in three different martial arts styles, although she had to alter the steps quite a bit to fit within the allotted space. Also, the staff and stick forms were hard to make work with no staff or stick. Of course, she was not allowed anything that might be used as a weapon.

  When she tired of exercise, she spent some time with the Bible Matt gave her. It fell open to the last page she’d dog-eared — the verse about God helping the fatherless.

  Alyssa sighed. She might get away with blaming her father for the fact that she was in prison. He did frame her, after all. But the fact that she had lost her good time and been confined to solitary was no one’s fault but her own. She couldn’t blame her father for this. She was the one who’d decided to gamble two years of trying to live clean on one last chance to sneak and steal and break in.

  Eventually, she got tired of trying to read. Her mind wouldn’t focus on the words. Instead, she kept coming back to the same thought.

  You did this to yourself.

  The guards told her as they moved her in here that all of her good time was gone. It wasn’t a surprise. Bitterly, she remembered trying to work out the math of how quickly she could get out if she kept accumulating good behavior credit at the maximum possible rate every year. All that was gone now.

  Her thoughts turned to what Matt was going to think. He had this vision where eventually she got out a bit early thanks to good behavior credits and being a model prisoner, and they managed to be together for a day or two before legally becoming senior citizens and then went on cruises and bought time-shares in Arizona and all the other things old couples did.

  Alyssa didn’t want a time-share in Arizona, the thought of a cruise line made her want to vomit, and of course she had messed up the whole plan about good behavior.

  But Matt… Matt was way different from cruise lines and time shares.

  The concept of “falling in love” meant nothing to her. She’d seen it in movies and books, and it didn’t reflect anything she’d ever felt. In her old life, people were resources to be used. They were either cl
ients or victims.

  In the moment when that old life died she had discovered, after three decades of pushing him away, that it kind of made her feel better to have Matt Barr nearby. When he talked, she wanted to listen — not because she could gain useful intelligence but just because it was him talking. She didn’t feel “swept off her feet” or any of that rot. She didn’t feel like pink hearts floated out like soap bubbles every time they were together.

  She just felt happier when he was there. She looked forward to his visits, in a way that went beyond how she felt about visits from Congressman Vincent and his wife.

  At once, she sighed. Vincent.

  Congressman Mike Vincent, who came to visit her in prison regularly even though, if it became known, his approval ratings would drop ten points.

  Congressman Mike Vincent, who testified in her favor at her sentencing even though he lost dozens of donors for it.

  Vincent, whose last advice to her before she got arrested hadn’t been about how to win. It had been about letting go of her rage.

  Vincent was a good man, and the country needed someone like him in office. That was why she’d done what she’d done. It was a strange interplay between her old life and her new one.

  In her old life, she used secrecy and stealth to gain advantage for one politician over another in exchange for large quantities of cash.

  In her still-only-half-formed new life, she was fumbling toward doing the right thing. Matt Barr and Mike Vincent were her role models.

  So she used the methods of her old life to try to help a man she admired in her new life.

  And the result? She’d lost everything. A second time. Two years ago, her whole life burned down when she got arrested. She’d spent the intervening time rebuilding and now all that was gone, too.

  And when they heard about it, the men she admired were probably going to be terribly disappointed in her.

  Alyssa found it hard to imagine how she could feel much worse.

  Alright, God. Matt says you’re all about second chances. I need one. Make that, I need another one. This time, I won’t screw it up. Please give me one more chance.

  CHAPTER 9

  Matt Barr was tired of pacing, tired of swimming in the hotel pool, tired of watching the talking heads on cable news, and tired of reading the Gideon Bible in the dresser drawer.

  Vincent dropped him off at this hotel before dawn, paid for a room, and put his card on file to pay for as much room service as Matt wanted. It was all to keep the reporter from having to show up in a computer system anywhere. Matt’s credit card hadn’t been used, his phone and laptop had been destroyed in the house fire, and his car had been left at Congressman Vincent’s house. In general, there was no record of the reporter anywhere since he crawled into bed last night.

  He would have gone down to the hotel business center to check email and do a little work, except that Mike had forbidden him from going online at all.

  “If it’s got a screen, they can track it,” the Congressman had said. “If someone is really trying to kill you, and they’ve got the resources to commit both arson and a car chase, then they have the resources to track your location data. Do not touch a computer until you’re done with this, whatever it is.”

  Consequently, Matt had nothing better to do than sit in the hotel room reading, or watching TV. Mike chose the place for anonymity and it showed in the room. The bare white walls were decorated with cheap prints and the brown carpet had probably been chosen more to hide stains than to look good.

  He flipped on the TV to watch some pundits on cable news debate Mike’s campaign.

  “A week ago, insiders were saying the President might endorse Vincent in his Senate primary,” the talk show host intoned. “Now, the White House is being carefully neutral. Joe, what happened?”

  The analyst, a frequent guest on the show, replied, “I can’t say for sure, Rick, but Cobalt has some pretty powerful backers. He’s the party establishment’s favorite, and a lot of the guys with money and power are behind him. They might have leaned on the President. It’s also true that Cobalt’s Genetic Probable Cause Bill offers a lot of tools that the intelligence community would like to have. It’s possible they were the ones who persuaded the President.”

  Matt knew both the host and the analyst/guest. He’d been on this show more than a few times to talk politics. He hated being stuck watching other people commit journalism when he should be doing it himself. But, although he’d never tried it, he suspected that he’d probably hate getting shot worse. So here he sat, watching his professional rivals dig into his friend.

  The host said, “Vincent’s been critical of that bill. How did a bill that hasn’t even been introduced yet become the focus of a race for U.S. Senate?”

  The analyst replied, “Cobalt built his whole campaign on it. Every speech is about protecting people from violent crime.”

  The first analyst said, “It’s hard for me to believe the bill can really do what Cobalt says. Can they really know who’s going to be a criminal before they commit a crime, just based on whether they have one gene? What about free will?”

  The analyst explained, “Genetics aren’t that simple. It’s not, ‘You have this gene, so you’re a criminal.’ What happens is having that particular genetic makeup creates a tendency toward a certain kind of behavior. If you have a thousand ordinary people, maybe only two percent would ever commit a violent act. If you have a thousand people with this marker, maybe ten percent would. What Cobalt wants to do is let the NSA and the FBI bug everyone who has the gene. They want to read their social media, check their email, tap their phone calls, all of it. Then, the police will know enough to stop someone before they become violent.”

  The host asked, “Bug everyone?”

  “Just people with the wrong genes. What if it can save lives?”

  Matt clicked the TV off. It was too annoying. He’d overheard that conversation at the debate between Doyle Cobalt and one of his men about the Genetic Probable Cause Bill. Now, he didn’t trust what anyone said about it. What if there was more? What if the plan as Doyle Cobalt talked about it on the stump wasn’t fully honest with the people?

  And what could he do about it sitting in a hotel room without Internet access?

  He went back to the Gideon Bible. At least he could be reasonably sure it wouldn’t mention his friend’s race for Congress.

  ***

  Mike Vincent rounded a corner in the West Wing of the White House. He had been there before but still found himself surprised every visit. The hallways seemed so much narrower than they should be for the center of American power. The original artwork on the walls and busts on pedestals couldn’t erase the feeling of being in cramped quarters.

  He was walking away from the Oval Office, more than a little bit shaken. Only days ago, the President seemed to be coming around to Mike’s way of thinking. The President’s right hand man, Tom Wheeler, had become a friend since the campaign, and Vincent had hoped that would matter.

  Now, everything seemed to have flipped upside down. He was leaving a meeting in the Oval Office where the President had completely refused to respond to any of Mike’s attempts to get him to commit. It had been as though the man were a cardboard cutout of himself. He was almost completely without expression or emotion. And Wheeler hadn’t even shown up. Instead, it had been some lower level deputy assistant to the assistant.

  Was the President still on his side? Was Wheeler? The news media were reporting that the administration was no longer sure about Cobalt’s Genetic Probable Cause Bill, let alone an endorsement.

  Not that he trusted the media, but he’d just seen the proof with his own eyes. It was a complete reversal. In recent weeks, Tom Wheeler had been coming to him more and more for advice. He even started asking him for Bible verses that he could share with the President. That was why Vincent had hope that the man was finally changing from his past. It was also why he thought he had hope for the endorsement.

  Was that all go
ne now? What had happened?

  Even though he might be in the Senate next year at the moment, Mike was just a rank and file Congressman. That meant he got zero special consideration from the security personnel. Getting in and out of the President’s bubble required procedures not that different from boarding an airplane. Mike used the time to think. And all those thoughts kept coming back to one inescapable conclusion.

  Without the President’s endorsement, his campaign was probably sunk.

  Since forming his company to sell DNA-based surveillance to the government, Doyle Cobalt had the kind of wealth Mike had never had or wanted. He had connections to the people who could fund a first-class campaign. And he was favored by a lot of the inside beltway crowd.

  Vincent, on the other hand, was famous for being a naive idealist.

  He didn’t think of himself as naive, but he was unashamed about hoping for the best.

  That was an outlook it was getting increasingly hard to maintain. If the President wasn’t going to endorse him, Vincent wasn’t sure whether there was any other route to victory. No matter how many calls he made, the money wasn’t coming in fast enough. And without money, it was impossible to buy enough TV or direct mail to change the poll numbers.

  “Need a little help, boss,” he prayed aloud as he left the White House.

  ***

  Doyle Cobalt had an office on the top floor of Cobalt Data Mining Systems. It was easily accessible from the rooftop helipad. And since the company chopper almost never flew except when Doyle wanted it to, he never had cause to mind the noise of being right under it.

  As the rotors spun down and the whine of the engine gradually reduced, Doyle walked away from the landing pad and toward that office. It was a simple matter of going in the door, walking down one flight of stairs, walking down about twenty feet of hallway, and passing through his secretary’s antechamber.