Born with Secrets: A Political Thriller Page 9

  “Now therefore, I, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a conditional pardon unto Alyssa Yvonne Chambers for all offenses against the United States which she has committed or may have committed. In witness whereover, I have hereunto set my hand this day.”

  A tear leaked out the corner of her eye, and her jaw trembled. One inescapable memory echoed and crashed like thunder across the landscape of her mind. It repeated itself over and over and would not go away.

  I prayed for this. I prayed for a second chance.

  ***

  CHAPTER 11

  It was past midnight when Congressman Vincent finally left the party headquarters for home. Late nights were the norm, but this was later than most. Repairing the damage from his missed calls in the morning had taken more time and effort than he thought. Now, he was going to have to do tomorrow on less than three hours sleep by the time he made it home.

  Which, of course, would only be his second stop after he left the HQ, not his first. First, he had to go check on Matt at the hotel.

  As he drove his Lincoln toward the Northern Virginia suburbs, Mike’s thoughts went ahead of him to his home. His wife was already asleep. He’d be gone before she woke. Vincent thought longingly of taking tomorrow off and just sitting at the table to hear her making breakfast in the kitchen. He just wanted to be near her, while they were both awake. He wanted to share space and air with her. What they talked about, or whether they even talked, didn’t matter to him nearly as much as just some time to be alone together.

  He sighed as he crossed the Key Bridge and prayed a bit.

  Just a little time with Kathy, Lord. Just a little time.

  It was a beautiful fantasy, but Gina would die of apoplexy if he skipped his calls again tomorrow. And the campaign did need money — money that only he could raise. And if the money wasn’t there, then Doyle Cobalt would be a U.S. Senator.

  Vincent only barely wanted the job for himself. Some days — like today — he didn’t care if he ever saw the Senate floor. But he cared about men like Doyle Cobalt running the country. He cared about America being in the hands of people who cared more about power than they cared about anything else. If he just gave up and walked away, he could have a wonderful life. He could have all the mornings he wanted with Kathy.

  The cost was that the power-hungry would rule the country. The cost was that American politics stayed broken.

  Mike pulled up at the hotel where he’d put Matt. He was way too tired and way too lost in his thoughts to ever notice the black SUV idling near the door. The tinted windows did not hide the fact that it was full of large men, and through the windshield, if Mike would have been looking, he would have seen at least one of them holding a pistol.

  The elevator ride was a quick one and soon the Congressman was tapping gently on Matt’s hotel room door. “You awake, Matt? I’m just checking in to make sure you’re OK.”

  The door opened just a crack, and an eye peered out. Then it closed, the deadbolt slid open, and the door swung wide to reveal his reporter friend, still wearing the sweats he’d borrowed from Vincent that morning.

  “Hey Mike. I’m fine. I actually slept most of the afternoon, so I’m wide awake still. Can’t get to sleep. Come on in.”

  The Congressman walked into the hotel room and asked, “Are you staying away from credit cards and computers like I told you?”

  Matt grunted and replied, “I am, but it’s killing me. It was a frustrating and boring day.”

  Still standing in the narrow entry way, Vincent replied, “Better to be figuratively killed by frustration and boredom than literally by anonymous men with guns.”

  That’s when three of them came through the still-open door.

  The Congressman whirled and his eyes went wide when he confronted the fat muzzle of a handgun with a sound suppressor. Without even thinking consciously, he pushed that barrel to the side.

  The other men were behind the first, their line of fire blocked by their comrade. As they tried to get into a position from which to shoot, Mike swung a big wide haymaker right at the first guy’s jaw.

  He was in no way a trained fighter. He just pumped a lot of iron. The fist connected like an avalanche, and the first man fell to the ground.

  Matt heard the commotion before Mike swung, and he grabbed a glass tumbler from where it sat by the ice bucket. He hurled it past Mike’s head at the two men near the door.

  It hit one of them in the face and blood splattered from the man’s nose, but it didn’t take him down. He aimed his pistol at Mike’s head. The other intruder took aim at Matt.

  “One more move and we shoot,” one of the men said.

  With a sigh, Vincent put his hands in the air.

  ***

  The unshielded, unblinking light bulb overhead made it hard to have her eyes open. Yet, at the same time, that bright light combined with her position made it impossible to sleep except for fitful, cramped dozing.

  Moira LeBlanc sat tied to her chair. The spikes in her new hairdo were rapidly flattening down. Her cheeks were streaked with dried tears. Her wrists and ankles were rubbed raw from her initial attempts to struggle against the ropes holding her in place.

  She was left with nothing for stimulation but thought and memory, and those were not friendly allies.

  Over and over, she cursed herself for her decision to hack into Cobalt Data Mining Systems. At the time, she felt like a warrior striking a blow for justice. CDMS had plans that called for gathering genetic data on as many innocent American citizens as possible. It was more than just in the case of people arrested, replacing the process of fingerprinting with a DNA swab. It went far beyond that. Everyone who applied for a government job would have to provide a DNA swab. Everyone who applied for Federal welfare benefits would have to provide a DNA swab. Everyone who got a background check for a concealed weapons permit would have to provide a DNA swab.

  They’d have everyone’s DNA and then they’d pick and choose who had the “dangerous” genes. It was too much power to give anyone, corporation or government, and resisting them once felt to Moira like she was doing the most noteworthy thing she’d ever done.

  She and Zack and the others who helped with the hack had laughed and laughed as they put Doyle Cobalt’s cell phone number onto the bulletin boards that made up the dark underbelly of the web, where hackers and criminals exchanged messages.

  But in retrospect, the escapade hadn’t accomplished anything at all. Moira went to prison along with one of the other co-conspirators, and Doyle Cobalt just got a new cell phone.

  Now, Doyle’s brother was holding her prisoner and planning revenge. It wasn’t fair! Her so-called crime was nothing more than a prank, and she’d already gone to prison for it. Why had he kidnapped her out of prison just to get revenge on her?

  She didn’t want to think about what that revenge might be. Her encounters with him so far had been sadistic enough to make anything seem possible. She had terrible visions of being tortured or killed, and she couldn’t make her mind stop going there.

  She’d made a lot of stupid choices in her life. It seemed like they got more frequent the older she got. Tied up in a basement room by a man who had already had her beaten once before, Moira’s mind pulled up everything she wished she could take back, every bad decision, every mistake. She pictured each one of them as a fork in the road that, if her life had only been different, might not have led here.

  Growing up, Moira’s mother had explained, in the gentlest way possible, that her father didn’t stick around. Mom stressed over and over again that it wasn’t because of her. But that wasn’t the problem for Moira. Knowing that she had a father out there, somewhere, had changed her interaction with every bad situation she encountered.

  Whether she got grounded, or picked on by bullies, or failed a class, she always found herself imagining that, if he was only there, her father co
uld fix it. She grew up hoping over and over again that somewhere out there was this hero who would save her from all the trouble she got into.

  But it never happened. Never. There was no father. There was no hero out there to save her.

  This time would be just like all the other times.

  No one would help.

  No one was coming.

  ***

  The three armed men led the reporter and the Congressman out the hotel’s back door. There they met a fourth who was sitting in the driver’s seat of the black sport utility, keeping the engine idling.

  “Get in the car,” one of the armed men said, as the others held the SUVs doors open. “If you try to fight, you can make things a bit awkward for us, but you’ll still have 7 rounds of .380 hollow point in your chest.”

  For a second, Matt could only stare. Before he could even think any further about whether he wanted to comply or not, the attacker shoved him toward the SUV, and from inside it a man reached out to grab Matt’s arm. He let himself be dragged in, still too surprised to even resist.

  The last thing he saw before the door closed was Vincent being shoved into a second car.

  Inside the vehicle, Matt sat wedged between two big, beefy guys. Both had pistols held away from Matt so he’d have trouble trying to grab it, but they were aimed right at him.

  In the passenger side front seat was a man with curly black hair and the bulging muscles of someone who lived in the gym. He had no obvious firearm. His clothing was nondescript, except for the T-shirt bought a size too small to make his biceps more obvious.

  There was also a guy in the driver’s seat. His head scanned left and right for trouble as he sped away from the hotel.

  “Give me your phone, Mr. Barr,” one of the attackers said.

  Without thinking, Matt went to pat the pocket of his sweats, forgetting that he had a gun pointed at him. But in the end, it made no difference.

  “I don’t have it,” he said. The moment he touched his pocket he remembered that his phone had been destroyed in the fire.

  “Then tell me your email password,” the gunman replied, wiggling the barrel of his weapon ever so slightly.”

  Matt said a prayer and replied, “Why? What do you want?”

  “Do you want to get shot?”

  Matt never thought of himself as very brave. He just knew that inside a moving car was a terrible place to discharge a firearm. The noise alone would incapacitate everyone else – including the driver – almost as bad as the gunshot victim.

  “Of course I don’t,” he replied. “I just want to know what’s going on. Why’d you guys burn down my house?”

  The fist to his jaw definitely hurt. But the space was so confined there was no room to build up any momentum. The angle was off, too. Matt saw stars and little else for a few seconds, but he knew it wasn’t a crippling blow.

  “Tell me your email password,” the man repeated.

  Although his words were slurred because of his rapidly swelling lip, Matt replied, “It’ll be easier to get me to cooperate if you tell me what the heck is going on.”

  The second punch felt harder than the first. Rationally, Matt thought that was probably just because he was already bruised from the first, and the skin of his lower lip was split, not because the actual punch was any stronger than the first. But that didn’t matter much. It still hurt like blazes. The thought was in his head that if he just said his email password he might not have to be punched again, and that seemed really attractive.

  The man said, “When you tell me your password, we’re going to get into your email, delete a couple files, and then change the password so you can’t get back in for a little while. Then we’ll drop you off somewhere and we’ll be done. This doesn’t have to be painful for you.”

  Matt sat silently, not replying, until the knuckles once again compressed the skin of his cheek and nose, and he felt blood run down the front of his face.

  He felt woozy and wondered how many blows to the head it took to knock a person unconscious. Was he unconscious already? It seemed like he wouldn’t hurt so bad if he were but, on the other hand, he couldn’t seem to make any of his muscles respond.

  Perhaps he looked unconscious because his captors talked about him. Although he was squeezing his eyes shut from the pain, Matt could still hear. The one who’d been hitting him asked, “Is there any chance she could have warned him what he was getting?”

  “None,” the voice to his left replied. “We checked the logs. There hasn’t been a single call out of there yet from any phone a prisoner could get to.”

  “Yeah, but we know better than most how easy it is to smuggle a phone in there. She must have told him.”

  She… prisoners… those words had a specific meaning in Matt’s world. Once he heard them, he no longer wanted to be knocked unconscious. He didn’t want to miss a single thing. Whatever was happening, if it involved Alyssa, he wanted to know every single detail.

  CHAPTER 12

  Not many airplanes had hardwood floors.

  The Gulfstream 550 rocketed through takeoff and headed east. The wine-colored leather chair in which Alyssa sat could swivel or recline and a footrest stood ready to pop out in front of her. Out of the large round window beside her, the black night acquired illumination in sudden, impressive fashion when the private jet burst through the clouds. Moon and stars glowed brightly.

  Her – Liberator? Employer? – sat in the seat facing hers across the table. The jet’s furniture was laid out more like a living room than a flying bus. Once the aircraft leveled off, Wheeler said, “The owner of this jet is one of the President’s biggest campaign donors. He likes to ski in Aspen so when I told him I needed to get out west, he offered to take a special ski trip and bring me along. We dropped him off, and he loaned me the plane to make an extra stop at FCI Rocky before it returning to Washington. No one’s ever going to know I was out of town. This is a nice way to fly.”

  Chambers shrugged and replied, “My father always preferred the Dassault Falcon, so that’s what I’ve flown on before. The Gulf doesn’t seem much different so far. I would think you’d be used to executive air travel by now. Your guy’s been in office for a year.”

  Wheeler said, “On the rare occasions when I get out of Washington anymore, I fly on an Air Force version of an executive jet. It’s not quite as luxurious, but the President isn’t risking his re-election and legacy just so you and I can chat about the lifestyles of the super-rich.”

  Alyssa nodded and said, “I’ve been wondering about that. The cable news shows treat me like I’m slightly more dangerous than the 9-11 hijackers. Pardoning me isn’t going to be popular.”

  Wheeler answered the implied question. “That’s why one of the conditions of your pardon is that you not reveal it to anyone. Executive Order 15342 directs the employees at FCI Rocky to say nothing more than, ‘She was in a fight. She was confined to the Secure Housing Unit and isn’t allowed visitors.’ We’d prefer not to have to deal with the PR backlash right away.”

  Chambers shrugged. “That’s only going to work for so long. I’ve been there more than a year, and I have never seen anyone in SHU for longer than a month. Sooner or later someone’s going to smell a rat.”

  She thought of a certain political reporter who has more than enough reason to keep track of where she was.

  Wheeler shrugged and said, “It doesn’t have to work for long. We actually want the scandal to break soon, just not right away. The sooner the media tumbles to this, the more time we have to recover before the election. All we need is to keep it quiet until you accomplish your mission.”

  Chambers nodded. “Ah yes. The mission. Condition number two of the pardon. Care to enlighten me?”

  Tom Wheeler stood up from his seat, stretching. He walked back to a closed door. He opened it, turned around, waved Alyssa forward, and walked in.

  She unbuckled and walked to the rear of the aircraft. Inside the private cabin was a bed. Given that it was now past on
e in the morning, the bed looked quite attractive to Alyssa but before she could sleep, she’d have to clean off the giant suitcase on it.

  Wheeler nodded at it and said, “For you.”

  Alyssa popped the clasps and opened the bag on the bed. Inside was everything a professional thief could want.

  There was a set of locksmith’s tools and a more complicated gizmo designed to defeat electronic locks. There was a smartphone and an electronic static jammer to interfere with microphones and other eavesdropping devices. There were several complete sets of Army Combat Uniform fatigues in black, dark gray, and a digital urban camo pattern. Having the genuine government issue ones was important because they included Near Infrared Signature Management Technology, which made it much harder to spot the wearer with a night-vision device.

  The suitcase also contained a night vision monocle attached to a headset that soldiers referred to as a skull crusher because of how tight it clung to the head. There was a modern, fitted, lightweight bulletproof vest. There were boots to go with her fatigues and a holster. Matching that, just in case she needed it, there was a brand new Ruger .22 with a sound suppressor built right into the barrel, the way Alyssa preferred them. It had a laser site slung under the barrel. To judge by the brand name, it was one of those that could be switched between a green laser and an infrared one that would only be visible to those wearing night vision devices. Four magazines for the pistol and a couple bricks of subsonic .22 caliber ammunition rounded out the care package.

  She turned to Wheeler and smiled. “You read the records of my trial. How sweet.”

  “Not to mention having your pistol pointed at my forehead once. Feel free to change if you want to get out of your prison khakis.”

  With that, he walked out of the room and shut the door.

  She put on a black undershirt and black, baggy fatigue pants, with the night vision device stuffed into a baggy cargo pocket. Next came the ballistic vest, which included Velcro fasteners where she could attach badges if, for some bizarre reason, she ever wanted to advertise her name. Wheeler even got her a black leather motorcycle jacket, which she put on. She tucked the pistol under her jacket.