Born with Secrets: A Political Thriller (5 page)

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.

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 Cobalt 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.

Sometimes, they would hire him for jobs that
required two people, or even more. He gained experience at hiring muscle.

Eventually, he built a solid living for himself as a
dark operator firmly riding the fence between law enforcement and crime. But
his connections to the Federal intelligence agencies presented an opportunity.

His brother Doyle was a university researcher
plugging away in the field of genetics. But when his research began to hint at
the existence of a “gene for criminal behavior,” Luther was in a position to
connect him with people who could use that kind of thing.

Doyle got a steady stream of grant funding.

Luther got increased prestige and status within the
inner circles of the government agencies that liked Doyle’s work.

Everyone was happy.

Until one day Luther was reading his hometown paper
and discovered that their U.S. Senator was resigning. The leading candidate to
take his place was none other than the very man who had once cost Luther his
job: Mike Vincent.

Luther Cobalt couldn’t pass up the chance. Why sit
by and let that jerk get promoted when he happened to know a successful
academic who could be every bit as good a Senator?

And of course, with Doyle in the U.S. Senate, he
could make a few choice adjustments to his deal with the national security
people. They liked what he was offering: the ability to identify criminals and
terrorists before they even knew they were criminals and terrorists. But they
hadn’t seen the real potential yet. Even Doyle didn’t see the real potential
yet. Only Luther did.

All that stood between him and victory was Mike
Vincent. It almost made him laugh. Instead it made him swear. When Luther was
first starting out, Mike Vincent ruined his first big break. Now, the guy was
trying to do it again.

Not this time, Vincent. Not this time. Once I’ve
got LeBlanc, you’re going to find every single door closed. And then we’ll see
who puts who out of a job.

***

The lights of Middleburg,
Virginia gave the rainclouds an unearthly glow as Luther Cobalt grabbed an arm
roughly and pulled the girl out of the back seat. The duct tape over her mouth
muffled her noises of protestation, but he didn’t really care how she felt. She
was the key to getting his brother into the Senate, and that was all that
mattered.

They were at the main headquarters of Cobalt Data
Mining Systems. The building was part office space but mainly a server farm.
Uncounted thousands of terabytes worth of hard drives hummed in the basement
and on the ground floor. CDMS was in the business of digitizing and storing
genetic data and that required huge volumes of storage. The building could
easily have been designed as a simple warehouse, but his brother Doyle had paid
for more expensive steel and glass architecture. After all, he had Federal
contracts to pay for the construction.

The five-story building was completely unlit. Luther
had ordered all the low-level security guards home an hour ago to avoid
witnesses and when he did, he also ordered them to leave the place dark. Luther
knew the electronically-secured back door well, though. He didn’t need lights
to get it open.

He opened the back door of the vehicle and grinned.
There sat the key to getting his brother in the Senate, passing the Genetic
Probable Cause Bill, and gaining the kind of power that could change
everything.

He had opened the HVAC duct from the server room to
the outside. He had lain in wait in the server room and as soon as Alyssa’s
back was turned and Moira LeBlanc wandered within his reach, he had dragged her
outside to some waiting hired muscle.

The fact that the entire prison believed she had
escaped, rather than been kidnapped, just meant he could hold her without fear
of discovery.

Moira’s hands were cuffed behind her back, her mouth
was taped shut, and she wore a black hood over her head, the better to keep her
from knowing where she was being kept. Restrained like that, Luther never
doubted his own ability to keep her under control.

But just in case, he was pretty rough about shoving
her in the door to his brother’s server farm. He dragged the girl down the
hall, down a staircase, through several heavy steel doors, and finally into a
large windowless room in the basement.

He shoved Moira roughly into a hard wooden chair. He
gripped her wrists hard to keep her immobilized as he transferred her
restraints from behind her back to in front of her so she could have her arms
and legs tied to the chair. He didn’t need to hear her muffled whimpers from
behind the gag to know he was gripping hard enough to hurt.

He wasn’t planning to ease up. A little pain was
part of the fun.

Once she was tied to the chair, Luther tugged the
hood off her head, holding his face only inches from hers. At first, she
squinted against the sudden bright light. As she gradually opened her eyes, her
head jerked back in surprise when she saw Luther’s crooked nose only an inch or
so from hers.

“Welcome to your new home, LeBlanc,” he growled.
“You’re going to find that Federal prison was much more comfortable. They have
rules there.”

She made some noises under the duct tape, but Luther
just laughed.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to kill you.
I may hurt you a little bit, but that’s just entertainment, nothing serious.
Nothing that will leave a mark. You’re here so I can make you famous. We can’t
have you all bruised up if you have to go on TV.”

She made some more noises under the tape. She was
trying to shout. Even muffled as she was, Luther had no trouble figuring out
what she was trying to ask.

“What do I want with you? Oh that’s easy. It’s about
making money, Moira, but it’s also about revenge. I’m not satisfied with just
putting my brother’s technology to work. I’m not even satisfied with getting
more out of it than anyone has even imagined so far. But revenge? That’s
satisfying. I’m going to get some payback, Moira.”

***

Congressman Michael Vincent was an early riser; he had to
be. Contrary to popular belief, the job of being a Member of the U.S. House of
Representatives actually took much more than 40 hours a week. Of course, a very
large portion of those hours were spent raising money for the campaign. But the
difference in duties didn’t make it any easier to sleep in.

His normal morning routine
called for getting up at four, being in his home gym by four thirty, and being
out the door for the Longworth House Office Building by five thirty. Usually,
his wife was awake enough for a kiss before he left. Usually.

All of which made it
extraordinarily annoying that someone was pounding on his door at 3a.m.

As the rain hammered his
window, the Congressman whispered to his wife to stay put and wrapped himself
in a bathrobe. Then he took a small pistol from the nightstand and dropped it
into his pocket. Only then did he go investigate the disturbance.

It turned out the
precautions weren’t necessary. Pounding on his door in the middle of the night
was a bedraggled, soaking-wet version of his friend Matt Barr.

“Matt? What’s going on?
It’s three in the morning!”

“My house just burned
down, Mike.”

“What the—”

“And it was deliberate. It
was arson. And whoever did it chased me in a car and tried to shoot me.”

The Congressman simply
stared at his friend for a moment, open-mouthed. Then he said, “Well, get
inside. You’re soaked. Let’s get you dried off and in some fresh clothes. Then
I want to hear everything.”

Mike brought him in, sent
Matt to the bathroom to use the towels, and laid out some of his clean sweats
for his friend to wear. He started the morning’s coffee, grabbed a pair of
thirty-pound dumbbells, and worked through some sets of concentration curls
while he waited for Matt to come tell him what the heck was going on.

Since he got married,
Kathy had improved the bachelor-pad-efficiency in which Mike used to live. Now
the furniture matched, he had a real couch rather than a futon, and decorations
adorned the walls.

When his friend changed
clothes, Congressman Vincent gave Matt a cup of coffee. Then the two of them
went to sit in the living room.

Matt said, “You know I
went to visit Alyssa yesterday.”

“Of course. How is she?”

“She said she got into a
fight again. I’ve got a lot to say about that but now’s not the time. The point
is, I got home and tried to get some sleep. I woke up sweating buckets, which I
guess was pretty logical since the doorway of my bedroom was catching fire.”

“Are you OK?”

“Well, I’m pretty messed
up emotionally right now but physically I’m OK. I got out through the window
and two things happened at about the same time. One, I noticed that the fire
was completely unaffected by the pouring rain, which made me think someone had
put some chemical accelerants on it. Two, I also noticed someone was shooting
at me. I…”

Vincent interrupted and
said, “Wait, what?”

“Yeah. Shooting at me. I know,
right? It seemed like a strategic retreat was the only maneuver that made
sense. I got in the Camaro and tore up the road to get here. They chased me,
too, but I lost them as I started to get anywhere near the White House.”

The Congressman leaned forward
in his seat. He said, “Matt, I love you and you’re my friend. I do trust you.
But are you sure? Shooting at you?”

Matt found it hard to
believe, too. Why? Why would someone want to kill him? Yes, he had just been to
talk to a famous criminal, but she hadn’t told him any information worth
killing over. She only said she interrupted a prison fight. Not that Matt ever
considered using his relationship with her for news but even if he did there
was nothing even close to newsworthy in that.

He could not imagine any
reason to shoot at him, other than that conversation he’d overheard with Doyle
Cobalt. If there was something about the Genetic Probable Cause Bill, was that
worth killing him over? The trouble was, he hadn’t really heard anything. He
didn’t have enough to know why someone would kill over it.