Born with Secrets: A Political Thriller (10 page)

When he finally spoke, it
was only two words: “Fair enough.”

Once she got off of Wheeler’s executive jet, Alyssa
Chambers was back in Washington D.C., a place she knew better than she knew her
own name. The transition to this from prison was like having a shark stranded
on the beach and then letting it back into the ocean. She was home, she was in
her element, and she was extremely dangerous here.

Being on the outside again
had many virtues. There was the unlimited exposure to fresh air, for one thing.
Also, she no longer had to be counted at all hours of the day and night. The
smell of the real world was infinitely better than the smell of prison. She no
longer needed to constantly be alert for threats to her survival.

And then, there was money.

Alyssa Chambers had been
born rich. She also earned a great deal of money on her own from her past
criminal activities. When the Feds locked her up, they froze or seized a lot of
her assets. But not all of them. Not even close. She had too many offshore
accounts, under too many fake identities, for the FBI to get them all.

Being out of prison, she
was rich again.

One of her safe deposit
boxes had yielded a fake drivers’ license and credit cards in the name of Naomi
Black. Using that, she soon had a rental car.

That gave her options. On
the one hand, Wheeler’s electronic trace data on the blackmail email pointed at
this hacker in Arlington. She could run that location down. Maybe he’d be right
about this coming from a cabal within the intelligence community; maybe she’d
run into the CIA if she did that. She had crossed their path before, and the
reunion might be entertaining.

Based on her brief
acquaintance with Moira, Alyssa had some other ideas about how to look for her.

She sat in her rented
Mercedes, enjoying the leather seats and stereo. None of her own music was
available to her yet, but a lifetime of memory put the Washington, D.C.
classical music station easily within her reach. She dialed that in and sat
listening to Schubert while she thought about the two different pathways
forward.

Eventually, she pulled away
from the rental car business. She had decided to trust Wheeler.

***

Alyssa was in an office
building just across the Key Bridge from D.C. The cheap brown carpet and
matching walls were presentable to the public but far from expensive. The door
of her target office was made of thin laminate and had the name on a plastic
plate with a wood-grain pattern. Signs on the ground floor directed her to the
fourth floor for Samson Computer Repair and Customization, and she’d found the
office easily enough.

She hated standing in the open hallway. It felt
horribly exposed. Standing in a public hallway, wearing a night vision headset,
fiddling with their lock, would look about as incriminating as possible to
anyone who happened to enter. And although the hour was late, it was not so
late that an obsessive business owner couldn’t return to his shop.

Driven by the exposure, she hurriedly got ready to
pick the lock and get inside. The lock picking tools Wheeler provided included
a lock pick gun and several torsion wrenches.

Only long experience allowed her to see the danger
before she used them.

Near the base of the door, about a foot off the
ground, was an almost-invisible thin wire. It wouldn’t have been visible at all
except that the light amplification headset also amplified the tiny bit of
light being reflected by the wire.

Alyssa knelt to examine the wire. It went through
tiny holes in the wall on either side of the door. There was no way to tell
what was on the other side without getting in. But it would be possible to push
the door open without touching the wire. It was clearly placed for someone to
trip over, not to go off when the door opened.

Having detected the trap, it would be easy enough to
avoid. But it set Alyssa on edge. This place was dangerous. Someone set it up
expecting a search.

Grimly, she clenched her teeth and went to work. The
gun got the pins inside the lock momentarily out of place. The torsion wrench
then turned the lock as a key would.

She eased the door open a millimeter at a time,
watching the narrow gap as it was exposed, alert for any further tripwires or
other dangers. Assuming that, if there were more traps, they would be set low
to increase the odds of walking into them, she knelt down to look. She held her
face barely inches from the cut rate, dark-brown wood-grain door, her nose and
the night vision monocle almost touching it.

Opening the door so slowly, leaving so tiny an open
gap, concentrated the airflow out of the room.

Having her nose so close to that concentrated air,
Alyssa smelled something.

A faint hint of motor oil lingered on the breeze.

There was no good reason for a computer repair shop
to have enough motor oil in the office to make a smell.

On the other hand, some brands of plastic explosive
carried an aroma like motor oil.

Alyssa didn’t bother to close the door again. She
just ran. She sprinted like an Olympian back toward the staircase she’d used to
reach this floor.

It was a trap. There was a reason Wheeler’s people
had so easily discovered this place. It was designed to throw off their
counterattack on the blackmailers.

She made it almost all the way down the first flight
of stairs before the explosion knocked her off her feet. She fell the rest of
the way down to the third floor landing. She sat there for a moment shaking her
head and catching her breath as alarms began to sound.

Alyssa wobbled back to her feet. She was bruised by
the fall but nothing seemed broken. She resumed her dash out of the building.
Getting caught here when the fire department responded to the alarm didn’t seem
quite as deadly as getting caught in that trapped office, but it would pretty
much put an end to Wheeler’s orders that she hurry.

She found her way back to her rented car and sped
away as quickly as possible. Wheeler’s first clue had been worse than useless.
Time to give her own ideas a shot.

Alyssa had read Moira’s
emails. She had picked out the names of individual senders.

She knew who Moira’s
friends on the outside were.

With the smartphone
Wheeler had given her, she was soon on her way to the northern Virginia
residence of one Zack Ravenberg, the friend who had smuggled Moira’s phone into
prison.

***

Luther stood
on the loading dock at the rear of the CDMS building, impatiently waiting for
his crew to get back from snatching the reporter. His mind was locked in a
negative feedback loop. He went over and over how his simple plan to force the
President’s hand by holding Moira LeBlanc over his head had gone so wrong.

When Moira LeBlanc hacked Cobalt Data Mining Systems,
her great act of rebellion was to steal Doyle Cobalt’s personal cell phone
number and post it online. It obviously wasn’t the severity of her crime that
got her caught. It was the fact that CDMS made a product that the Federal law
enforcement community loved.

The ability to look at genetic data and develop
probabilities on how likely someone was to be a criminal was hugely valuable to
them. Combined with the NSA’s email and phone surveillance program, CDMS gave
them the ability to pick and choose what citizens they needed to spy on.

Analysis might indicate that a person with one
particular gene was 30% more likely to break the law. Then, everyone the
government could find who had that gene could be added to the watch list. Their
emails would all be read. Their phone calls would all be recorded.

The FBI, the NSA, and the rest of the Federal law
enforcement community salivated over the chance to put the system into
practice. They predicted that successful prosecutions would skyrocket.

So when the young hacker came snooping around their
pet project, they were not amused. Moira was swiftly caught and sent to prison.

There, the government took a DNA swab and stored the
data in case the young hacker was ever accused of a new crime.

Because Cobalt Data Mining Systems had the Federal
government contract to store the electronic version of all genetic data they
acquired, Moira’s genome was stored at the CDMS facility in Northern Virginia.

Because CDMS was owned and operated by people with
questionable ethics, Luther Cobalt decided to have a look at the data of the
person who had stolen his brother’s old cell phone number.

That changed everything.

Shortly after studying Moira’s DNA, Luther Cobalt
took a job as a Correctional Officer at FCI Rocky. He blazed through the
three-week CO course at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, where he
shattered the stereotype that BOP stood not for Bureau of Prisons, but Belly
Over Pants.

It should have been easy. Moira gets a couple bones
broken in a prison gang fight, she goes to the hospital where the security’s
lighter, and then boom: Luther and his brother could show the world evidence of
the President’s immorality. That would make it worthless if he endorsed
Vincent; the man would be toxic.

From there, pass the Genetic Probable Cause Bill,
start gathering up DNA data about people, start testing for the “criminal
gene,” and everything’s good. Crime goes down, his brother’s popularity goes
up, and Luther Cobalt is much more than just a CIA Front Corporation that gets
the call for the really dirty jobs. Luther Cobalt goes inside — deep inside.

Instead, he’d had to hire a ton of muscle to chase
after this idiot reporter. And to make matters worse, the White House was now
reacting to the blackmail. He had known it would happen, but it did increase
the difficulty of the situation.

He had used that hacker to mask his email address
very deliberately. The guy often took consulting work for the NSA. It would
plant a false flag for the White House to make them believe the blackmail
demand was coming from intelligence agencies, rather than from Doyle Cobalt.

But of course, since he picked the hacker, he knew
exactly where they would look first. And he left them a nice little surprise.
He’d gotten a little electronic notice when someone set the bomb off. Some
Secret Service agents were probably dead now.

Normally, that would have amused Luther, but he
didn’t like having to fight a two front war. Now he had to deal with the White
House’s response to his blackmail threat and the reporter at the same time.

Just when Vincent thought his mood couldn’t get any
worse, a small icon on his tablet lit up, and expanded to fill the entire
screen with video. His eyes went wide. He swore.

He was just about to whirl and run to his own car
when the SUVs pulled up. But instead of one, it looked like they had
two
prisoners…

***

The two vehicles pulled
up to the Cobalt Data Mining Systems server farm and came to a stop. Men flooded
out of each, securing the two gagged and blindfolded prisoners as they were
brought forward.

They were surprised to find their employer
impatiently waiting for them. Luther Cobalt stood outside the back door. He
seemed to be watching something on a tablet. He looked up from the screen as
the hired thugs dragged the two prisoners through the door.

As the second prisoner went past him, Cobalt arched
his eyebrows and stared at the men dragging him. One started to speak, but
Cobalt shook his head and pointed to the prisoner. He didn’t want to have the
conversation in front of him.

Inside the building, the men went toward the same
stairway that led down to the room he was holding Moira. But before they could
open the door, Cobalt stopped them. Silently, he pointed up.

One of the men asked, “Upstairs? But—”

Again, Cobalt touched his lips for silence.
Shrugging, the thug continued forward as his colleagues dragged the two
prisoners behind them. They came to an elevator and rode it up in two groups

Luther trotted up the stairs and met the group as
they arrived at Doyle’s office. As a group they walked in, and Doyle stood up
from behind his desk. He’d been looking at something on his computer screen but
immediately looked away from it and at the surprise arrivals.

He got out, “What the—” before Luther silenced him
with a gesture.

Doyle stared as Luther supervised the two men being
tied to conference table chairs — much more comfortable than LeBlanc’s accommodations
in the basement. One of the hired men stayed behind to guard the prisoners. The
rest, including Doyle, followed Luther out through the secretary’s office and
then into the hallway.

Once there, Luther grabbed the first one he could
reach by the throat and shoved him against the wall.

He shouted, “Idiots!”

The man he was assaulting struggled against the grip
on his throat while all the others stared with wide eyes.

“Luther, what—”

Luther released his choke hold. The man fell to his
knees, rasping and gulping in air. Cobalt brought his shouting down to a harsh
whisper so the prisoners wouldn’t hear.

He asked, “Do you buffoons have any idea who your
second guy is?”

They all shrugged, except for the one who was still
recovering from being choked.

One said, “He showed up at the target’s room just as
we were moving in to snatch him.”

“So you brought him here?”

“What were we supposed to do? Kill him?”

Cobalt punched the man who gave that response. He,
in turn, fell down to his knees holding his jaw.

“That is my brother’s opponent in his election, you
idiots! And we’re holding him against his will at our office! If he ever
figures out where he’s being held, or who’s holding him, or sees me, or sees my
brother, it will ruin everything.”