Born with Secrets: A Political Thriller (3 page)

The Congressman sighed and
tossed the ten pound dumbbell slightly into the air, spinning, to catch it by
the opposite end.

“I’m going to try for the
President’s endorsement, Gina. Maybe he’ll pledge to veto Cobalt’s Genetic
Probable Cause Bill, too, and the combination of the two might change enough
minds.”

She shrugged. “Just don’t
take time off from fundraising calls.”

Alyssa
had tried the chapel meeting in the afternoon, but it didn’t do anything for
her. She tried to go because... she wasn’t sure, there were a lot of reasons.

Her old life truly was
gone. The market for professional thieves was a very small one to begin with.
When you happened to be someone with a face the whole country recognized, the
market became effectively zero. Besides which, she really did want to leave it
behind. The experience of being framed had taught her what it felt like to have
unwelcomed people messing with her future, and she didn’t want to be the one
doing it to other innocent victims anymore.

Also, there was Matt. She
felt about a hundred different things about him at once and not all of them
were good. But some of them were quite good – not the least of which was the memory
of him saving her life. And Matt’s religion – he would never say it that way –
was important to him.

But the minister at the
chapel said a bunch of boring junk that sounded more like Matt’s uptight
preacher father than Matt. She walked out at the end of the service as unmoved
as she had ever been.

Now she lay on her side in
bed with the Bible Matt had given her. She couldn’t sleep, and the moonlight
through her barred window gave her enough light to see the ink on the pages.
Her previous good behavior had earned her a cell with no roommate. Although she
expected that to be taken away after the fight earlier today, it hadn’t
happened yet.

She looked up that verse
Matt had told her about in his visit. She found it in the psalms: “A father to
the fatherless, a defender of widows is God in his holy dwelling.”

Her father had been neck
deep in the darkest kind of politics. He traded influence and connections and
money to get politicians under his thumb. He loved the control; he loved the
power.

He loved the power so much
that he’d been willing to betray his own daughter to get more.

Alyssa sighed and closed
the Bible. She would rather be fatherless than have the father she had.

She let her thoughts
wander back to the fight in the exercise yard.

The shocking thing was how
good it felt.

Before being arrested,
Alyssa had a great deal of power over her own life. She was a strong,
competent, intelligent woman at the pinnacle of her – however illicit – career.
She was wealthy and well-connected. She was very skilled at dictating
everything that was a part of her world. In prison, she lost that. Her whole
life was at the whim of the Correctional Officers and the system. The fight
gave her a taste of her old power back.

She had thought she was
past those feelings. Matt certainly wanted her to be past those feelings. But
strength and control still felt good, and she couldn’t tear her thoughts away
from the exhilaration of imposing her will on a situation.

Given that she was
pondering her desire for control over the world around her, it shocked her to
the core when her cell door opened completely unexpectedly.

The cell door randomly
opening in the middle of the night was unheard-of. It simply never happened.
And when the impossible happened in Federal prison, it was often accompanied by
danger.

At once, Alyssa rolled out
of her bed and landed on her feet. She set her right leg slightly behind her
left and brought her fists up to cover her face in case she had to fight.

“Relax, I’m not here to
hurt you,” whispered a voice. It wasn’t a voice Alyssa knew.

“Who are you? Step into
the light from the window,” she whispered back.

The spiky brown hair and
pajamas didn’t reveal much. Alyssa took a few moments to recognize the woman
who stepped into her cell. But perhaps that was understandable – the last time
she had seen her, the intruder was curled up in a ball on the ground. Once she
was in the moonlight, it was possible to see the ugly black eyes and fat lip
she was wearing as a result of some feet to her face.

“I’m Moira,” she said.
“Moira LeBlanc. You saved my life earlier today.”

Alyssa nodded in
recognition but didn’t let down her guard.

“Possibly,” she replied.
“They might have just hurt you really bad and called it good.”

“Regardless, thank you. I
don’t know if I can ever describe how it felt when they were all kicking me. It
was horrible. Thank you. I wish I could fight like you.”

Alyssa replied, “You’re
welcome. Remember this if you’re ever in a fight again. It’s your only fighting
lesson from me: If you let a fight go to the ground, the heavier fighter almost
always wins. But, on the other hand, if a fight goes to the ground, whoever
happens to be nearby can kick you in the head.”

Moira gave a feeble grin.
“I hope I never have occasion to need it.”

Alyssa nodded and asked,
“I do hate being unfriendly but are you planning to say ‘thank you’ by getting
me busted for having my cell door open after hours?”

In the moonlight, she
could barely make out the grin that spread across the girl’s face.

Moira said, “Oh, that
won’t be a problem.”

“Why not?”

The younger woman asked,
“You know what I’m in for?”

Alyssa shrugged and
answered, “I believe computer hacking was mentioned. I don’t make a point of
putting my nose in other people’s business.”

“Computer hacking seems
like such a trite term,” Moira replied. “When it comes to computers, I’m an
artist. You won’t have any trouble with COs tonight.”

***

Moira LeBlanc was an activist
hacker. Like many in the computer underground, she considered it a point of
honor to mess with people and businesses that did things she considered evil.
In her early and mid-teen years, she had flouted the law on multiple occasions,
usually to the detriment of whoever looked like a villain in the popular media
at the time.

When the National Security Agency was drawing
negative press for its surveillance programs, Moira and her peers defaced the
agency’s web site. When a University was accused of ripping off their students
by hiking tuition while giving the administrators big bonuses, Moira and others
who shared her hobby staged a mass electronic break-in to change the grade of
every single student there to an A.

Some people called it hacktivism. A combination of
hacking and activism, the word meant to use computer crime as a means of social
protest.

So when Cobalt Data Mining Systems was formed for
the express purpose of helping the Federal government gather DNA on as many
citizens as possible, Moira and her online friends freaked out. At once, CDMS
vaulted to the top of the enemies list of the hacktivism community.

There were Distributed Denial of Service Attacks,
there were attempts to vandalize their web site, there were “spear phishing”
attacks attempting to gather CDMS employees’ passwords… the full arsenal of
Internet dirty tricks was deployed.

And Moira LeBlanc got through their defenses far
enough to attract attention. For the first time in her life, she wound up on
the radar scope of Federal law enforcement agencies.

Not long after that, she was in prison, meeting Alyssa
Chambers.

***

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.”