Born with Secrets: A Political Thriller (8 page)

She shrugged and took
another sip from her glass. It felt good. The sensation started as a bite on
her tongue and spread out like the warmth of a campfire over her whole upper
body. It wasn't just the alcohol. It was this particular alcohol and all the
reminders it carried of her old life. Sitting here sipping two-hundred-dollar
whisky and talking about politics and money made her miss it worse than ever.

Her name was the same here
in FCI Rocky. Her body was the same. Her skills were the same. But on the
outside, she was an empress. She was the only child and last heir of one of
America's oldest and richest families. She was powerful and connected to the
mightiest leaders of the land.

In here, she had to turn
around and meekly wait for the cuffs whenever she was told.

She paused, then waved
around her to indicate the prison. “I'm not exactly in a work release program.”

Wheeler went back to his
briefcase and finally did what she had expected ever since she saw him open it.
He drew out a piece of paper. With a grin like an all-in poker player turning
over the fourth ace, he slid it down the table.

Taking it, Alyssa felt
that it was not plain paper. It was a rich, bonded vellum, a watermark in the
middle.

The watermark was the
Great Seal of the United States.

Turning it over, she saw
it was letterhead.

“Office of the President
of the United States of America.”

Alyssa's heart raced. The
paper trembled in her hands as she skimmed through some legalese at the top, a
summary of the charges to which she had plead guilty. At the bottom of the page
were the words she had never until that moment even dared to imagine.

“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.

***

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 could 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.