Born with Secrets: A Political Thriller (6 page)

Matt finally replied,
saying, “I understand why you’re asking. I’m not offended. It seems insane to
me, too. But it happened. I’m sure about that.”

Vincent sipped coffee,
leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes. Matt assumed he was praying.

Finally, the Congressman
asked, “Well, what should we do about it?”

“That’s why I came here,”
Matt said. “You told me you had an experience like this once where someone
tried to kill you. Other than Alyssa, you’re the only person I know who might
have some advice to give. And she’s two thousand miles away. As much as I want
to see her right now, she’s not the easiest person to get to.”

Vincent nodded and said,
“When Kathy and I met, she had made the wrong people angry. We spent some time
hiding and running. There was a company that made electronic surveillance
gadgets for the FBI and NSA and pretty much most of the Federal government.
Kathy had stumbled on some evidence that they were planning to massively
defraud not just the government, but everyone they could lay their hands on. I
helped get them shut down. You covered it, remember? The Electron Guidewire
scandal?”

Matt replied, “Yeah, I
remember writing a few stories about it. So did the experience teach you any
lessons that I should know? I mean, I’m assuming the police and fire department
have shown up at my house by now. I want to be a good citizen and talk to them,
but someone was shooting at me with real live bullets. The last time I went
through that it was with Alyssa, so I want some guidance before I trust the
authorities.”

“The cops themselves are
probably trustworthy,” Vincent replied. “But the problem is before and after
you’re with them. Sitting in an interrogation room, you’d be safe. If this
really is happening the way you describe it, then I wouldn’t place any bets
about how safe you’d be walking back to your car afterward.”

Matt said, “That doesn’t
make me feel very good about talking to them.”

“Go off the grid,” Mike
advised. “No phones and no credit cards. No going home. No going to work. No
place you’ve ever been.”

Matt sighed and said, “I
don’t feel like I can just run away without telling the police something about
the attack. Wouldn’t that place me under suspicion?”

The Congressman shrugged.
“Maybe. But if someone genuinely pulled the trigger on a firearm aimed at you,
then you’re in the middle of something big time. They’ll look for you to go to
the police. It’s what any ordinary citizen would do. If someone wants to kill
you, that’s the place they’ll look.

“Here’s what I’d
recommend,” Vincent continued. “They’re looking for you, not for me. So let’s
use my plastic. I’ll check you into a hotel and get you a bunch of cash from an
ATM. That way you don’t show up in any electronic way. Once you get there, stay
off of anything electronic.”

Matt said, “I don’t like
missing work, and I don’t like borrowing money from you.”

Vincent clapped him on the
shoulder. “Don’t worry about the money, brother. I know you’re good for it. And
as for missing work, you’d just be writing about how I’m going to lose. No one
wants to read that.”

With his hand still on his
friend’s shoulder, Vincent said a quick prayer for safety and guidance. Then
the two of them went out to find a suitable hotel.

Luther and Doyle stood
in the basement storage room, staring down at Moira. They’d taken her hood off
when they let her go to the bathroom and now her eyes nervously went back and
forth between them. She had tried asking what they wanted — at least, they
assumed that had been what she asked; it was hard to tell through the gag, but
their refusal to answer any of her questions eventually wore her down and now
she didn’t ask any more.

“Here’s the deal,” Luther said. “As the race stands
right now, you win. You’re ahead in the polls and pretty boy Vincent has less
money to spend on changing that than you have to spend on keeping it that way.
If nothing else happens, you’re in the Senate in a little less than a year.”

Doyle nodded. “Thanks to you, brother.”

Luther nodded in answer and then went on, “The wild
card is the President. He could endorse Vincent in the primary. He could
announce that he won’t sign the Genetic Probable Cause Bill. The effects are
pretty much the same. Either way, Vincent will get a big boost in the polls and
in his fundraising. If that happens, the race becomes a complete wild card.
Anything can happen.”

Doyle just nodded.

“So LeBlanc here wipes out all that risk. Now we’ve
got living proof of exactly how big a dirt bag the President really is. When
the public learns about her, his popularity is going to dive like Jacques
Cousteau. Then, he can endorse Vincent all day and I won’t care. That’ll make
us more popular and him less.”

Luther continued, “I already sent the email to his
guy. Right now, the entire administration is probably changing their
underwear.”

His brother asked, “So that’s it then? We just sit
back and wait for me to be elected?”

Luther shook his head and said, “Probably not.
They’re going to respond somehow. They have to.”

“Like what?”

Luther shrugged and replied, “No telling. The most
obvious choice is a Secret Service investigation to find the blackmailers.”

Doyle said, “They’ll come right to us. I mean, who
else is going to want him to sign the Genetic Probable Cause Bill? If they
investigate, aren’t we ruined before we start?”

Luther’s lips stretched into an aggressive grin. He
wrapped an arm around his brother’s shoulder and guided him out of the locked
storage room so there was no risk of Moira overhearing.

“That’s the fun part,” he said. “We’re not the only
people who care about that bill. The NSA wants it. It’ll strengthen their
surveillance efforts in unbelievable ways. The CIA wants it. They think they
can use the genetic behavior prediction technology to figure out who’s a
potential terrorist. The entire intelligence community is salivating over that
bill.”

The two stood in a bare concrete corridor with an
unshielded bulb providing the only illumination. Dusty boxes were stacked along
one wall.

Luther added, “So I hired a specialist to fake the
IP address and other tracing information on my email. To the White House, this
should look like it’s coming from a conspiracy inside the government. Unless
something goes wrong, the Secret Service will start by investigating the CIA.”

Doyle gave his brother a wide-eyed look.

“That can’t possibly go over well with your pals in
the intelligence community,” he said.

“They can be as mad as they want,” Luther replied.
“Once we have this system in place, they’ll need us. They’ll have to do
business with us, even if we do tick them off.

“Doyle, once we get you in the Senate and get that
bill passed, no one’s going to have a choice. We’ll be indispensable.”

***

After dropping
Matt off at the hotel, Congressman Vincent hurried to the party national committee
headquarters. He had a ton of fundraising phone calls to make, and he was
behind schedule because of the business with Matt.

When he entered, he pressed his finger to his lips
as he passed the receptionist, giving her a wink. Then he whispered, “Don’t
tell Gina.”

He was arriving really late, and he wanted to avoid
the yelling from the campaign manager that always came with reduced production
in fundraising calls.

The receptionist grinned and didn’t say a word as
Mike walked down the hall to the office they let him use. The party kept space
where members of Congress could come and conduct political business since they
couldn’t do that in their official, taxpayer-funded offices. However, the space
was barely large enough for Mike and for his campaign manager when she was in
town.

Alas, today she was in town. Mike was barely
finishing his fourth call when Gina came in, sat in the guest chair across the
desk from him, and calmly waited until Vincent hung up the phone. The moment he
clicked off the line, the yelling started.

“Mike, two hours of no calls being made costs us
twenty thousand dollars in lost donations!”

She had a spot of ink on her lower lip. She’d been
chewing on a pen and had it explode again. It happened to her frequently.
Gina’s gray hair looked like she hadn’t had time to wash it in a couple of
days. That was well within the realm of possibility, Mike knew.

“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
clients 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.