More important than the alarm’s terrible tone was the growing audience. More and more of Zack’s neighbors poked their heads out of their doors to see what the siren was about. Instead of seeing a fire, they all stared at the life and death struggle going on the floor of the hallway.
“Someone saved your life,” Cobalt said. “You didn’t win this. You lost, but someone got you mercy.”
A second later he rose to his feet and stalked away, his boots thudding heavily on the cheap flooring.
Laying there gasping for breath, Alyssa couldn’t move yet. But she let her eyes wander as far as they could and finally she saw the source of the commotion.
Zack was standing near the exit sign, hand still pushing down on the fire alarm, as though by keeping up the pressure he could make help get here faster.
Drawing in a deep, gulping breath, Alyssa rolled over onto her back.
As soon as there was enough air in her lungs to speak, she said, “Thank you, God.”
CHAPTER 15
Alyssa and Zack made it out of his apartment building before the fire department arrived. She let him slip into the passenger seat of her rented sedan, then drove away from the curb.
Once she acquired a small degree of confidence that she wasn’t being followed, Alyssa allowed herself to chat with Zack as she took random turns to make sure no one showed up.
“So, where are we going to find Moira?” she asked.
The young man replied, “She had some kind of ongoing project that had to do with a company called Cobalt Data Mining Systems. When she got arrested, she was hacking them. I don’t know what they do – obviously, it seems like data mining must have something to do with it – but Moira had been obsessed with them for months. If we want to find Moira, we need to keep an eye on CDMS because she’ll be trying to break into their computers again. I guarantee it.”
Alyssa nodded. She took a while to collect her thoughts before she said anything more.
“You saved my life by pulling the fire alarm. Thank you.”
Zack shook his head and turned away. “I just did the only thing I could think of.”
“Regardless, that was genuine life or death back there, and if you hadn’t been there it would have been death. I’m sorry I made fun of you earlier.”
Again the young man had trouble meeting her eyes.
He said, “It’s OK. It’s true, I don’t know anything about guns and bombs and fighting.”
Alyssa had the younger man look up Cobalt Data Mining Systems on his phone. Once they had a location, she drove her rented sedan toward Middleburg, Virginia.
They drove in silence for a while. Alyssa took a long time composing her thoughts in her head before she spoke again.
“So here’s the deal, Zack,” she said. “You saved my life. I’m grateful, and I’m taking you with me. But that doesn’t change some very serious obstacles in front of us that you and I have to talk about.”
He nodded and said, “Yeah, you were right. If we run into someone like that guy you fought with back at my place, I’m not going to be a lot of good in the fight.”
Alyssa replied, “It’s more than that. I offended you earlier when I tried to talk about this, and I’m sorry, but it is a factor in what I have to do. It may be none of my business, but the fact is you throw off a huge Valentine’s Day vibe when we talk about Moira.”
The boy shrugged.
She wasn’t sure how to go on.
How? How is it even possible to tell a guy that the girl he’s obsessed with is one of like a dozen females the President had affairs with?
“The poet says that beauty is truth and truth is beauty,” Alyssa began. “But everyone else says the truth hurts. I’m looking for Moira because of some stuff in her past. If you stick with me, Zack, there’s a chance you may learn some things that aren’t easy to hear.”
She finished, “You saved my life. In return, I’ll take you to her if I can. But I’d like you to consider letting me go in alone first.”
Zack sat silently for a while as they drove west. He started to speak, then stopped, then tried again, and then went quiet.
Finally he talked. He just talked about Moira: her abilities with a computer. Her passion for giving the bad guys what they deserved. Her skills at video games.
“I want to talk to her,” he said. “I want to tell her how I feel about her. But… she can be so distant sometimes. She doesn’t really trust guys. Her father ran out on her and her mother, and I think she holds that against all of us.”
As he talked, Alyssa repeatedly checked her rear view mirrors for a tail. Feelings of safety were increasingly hard to come by.
Somehow the corrupt CO had known to look for her at Zack’s apartment. According to Moira, the corrupt CO had been involved in her smartphone-smuggling incident, so it was entirely possible that he knew the location just because of that.
But Moira had already lied to her once. She escaped from prison when she’d told Alyssa she just wanted to send a video out.
That meant it was possible that this entire thing was a setup from the beginning.
Wheeler supposedly had her out of prison to find and silence one last woman who was causing the President trouble because of his love life. But what if all that was a lie? The first place Wheeler had sent her, after all, had blown up in her face.
What would be the objective? Get her out of prison, send her off on a wild goose chase, only to kill her with a bomb or else murder her at Zack’s apartment? Why?
It couldn’t have anything to do with her personally. Alyssa had been out of the game before they bothered her. She’d been serving a 30-year sentence behind bars; she was as irrelevant as it was possible to be.
Mike Vincent, on the other hand, was highly relevant. Matt said Wheeler was helping Vincent but did he know that for certain? What if Wheeler was trying to stop Mike from getting into the Senate? After all, Mike wasn’t a natural ally for a President who needed someone to cover up the various women in his life — especially when, like Moira, they were only 18.
What had been real? Whom could she trust?
Certainly not the boy beside her in the car. Zack was full of questions and talk. But Alyssa ignored most of them, letting the flow of his words go on unhindered.
She needed to think. She needed to figure out who in all this was lying.
The only answer that made sense was the same one she’d always lived by. Trust no one. People were lying – probably everyone was lying. From Moira to Wheeler to Zack, she had to question everything.
And that meant her visit to Cobalt Data Mining Systems was going to be a risky venture. If Zack was leading her there as part of some kind of conspiracy, she could easily be walking into a trap.
The re-appearance of the Cobalt name was obvious, of course. Doyle Cobalt was running against Mike Vincent for the U.S. Senate. His alleged brother, Luther Cobalt, was connected to Moira in prison – whether with her or against her was impossible to tell anymore. And now Moira was said to be trying to break into Cobalt Data Mining Systems, if Zack was to be believed.
The only prize worth anything that she could see right now was the Cobalt-Vincent Senate primary.
Eventually Zack’s talking tapered off, and the drive through Northern Virginia gave her time to think. Whether this was a conspiracy or not, it had begun with her prayer for a second chance and now she was physically out of prison.
She didn’t know anything about theology. She’d picked up a general sense of some stuff in the Bible, though. Enough to know that, if it was real, then God sometimes personally intervened to change things so people could succeed. People called those situations miracles.
Had it really been God who saved her in that fight? Or was it just luck and a coincidence that, instead of running away to save his own skin, Zack helped?
The bigger question was, was the pardon a miracle?
It was an awfully good candidate. Presidents didn’t like to pardon politically unpopular criminals. And if th
ey did, they did it in the last year of their second term. This President was barely halfway through his first term.
Alyssa was toxic, politically. Half the country still believed she had assassinated West. Even those who didn’t saw her as a symbol of everything that was wrong with politics.
Alyssa had once made a good living helping people who wanted to gain power at any price. She was personally responsible for helping hide corruption. Her work had given victory to people who valued money and status over ethics.
She couldn’t blame the public for wanting her dead or in prison.
So why would any President pardon her? The political cost would be astronomical. And no matter what Wheeler said about executive orders keeping the prison staff silent, that was a temporary stopgap at best. The public would find out that Alyssa Chambers, symbol of everything wrong with politics, was out of prison on a Presidential pardon. When they did, the President’s popularity would plummet through the floor and head straight for China.
Why? Why pardon her? Even hiding an extra-marital affair with an 18-year-old girl wasn’t a good enough reason. His poll numbers would be hurt less by that than by letting her out. So why? Why pardon her?
There was no rational reason.
And when there’s no rational reason, maybe there’s a bigger reason.
Maybe it really was a miracle.
If so, was it right to use a genuine miracle to help one more corrupt politician cover up his misdeeds? If God really got her the pardon, would He approve of what she was doing?
But the pardon had a condition to it. If she didn’t help find Moira, she’d be right back in prison.
Do what she promised and help find this woman that the President was being blackmailed over or get out of the business of helping politicians hide secrets? Which was right? Which would keep her out of prison?
Alyssa sighed.
She finally arrived at Middleburg, a small town in Northern Virginia. When she’d been younger, her father had used it as a place to get away from Washington, D.C. for a day or so at a time. She remembered coming out here with him when she was young, stopping at a place called the Coach Stop for power lunches, and wandering around town while he talked business with local money men.
All those memories were spoiled now, tainted by her father’s betrayal. She knew it wasn’t right to blame him for her life of crime; she had deliberately chosen it to rebel against him. And yet, somehow, as she struggled with the moral quandary in which she currently found herself, her anger at him still burned hot.
Driving into Middleburg, Alyssa passed streets named after James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and others of the American founding fathers. The men who had written the constitution and founded the Republic would be horrified at the idea of someone who made a living helping elected officials hide their misdeeds.
If He existed and if He was involved in this, she doubted very much whether God would approve either.
“One more job,” she muttered. “Just one more. Then I’m clean.”
***
Luther Cobalt fumed as he drove back to his brother’s facility. He had evaded the emergency responders who came when the fire alarm went off. Then he just pulled over to the side of the road and sat for a long time, recovering from the fight. When he finally felt able, he headed back to CDMS.
He repeated various profanities and curses about Alyssa. When he paid that illicit visit to her cell at FCI Rocky, he had suspected that the stories about her fighting prowess were mostly myths that came from defeating untrained hothead prisoners. He had suspected that if she came up against a trained fighter like him, she’d be a lot more human than anyone expected.
And he’d been right! He’d been winning that fight. She’d taken a few solid shots at him and even landed a couple. But nothing she dealt out was anything he couldn’t take.
The fact that she managed to slip away and escape before he could kill her made him angry beyond anything he’d known before.
It wasn’t just a personal vendetta. It wasn’t even about preventing the release of that video she had emailed out of the prison. Yes, he was angry at her for doing that, and he wanted it suppressed, but he already had the reporter to whom she’d sent it. That wasn’t a big deal anymore.
What was a big deal was that Chambers was helping Moira LeBlanc in prison and now that Chambers was out of prison, she was still talking to friends of LeBlanc. That was not a good combination. Luther couldn’t have anyone getting to LeBlanc — not until either his brother was in the Senate and the Genetic Probable Cause Bill was signed or else until Luther was ready to drop her like a bombshell on the world and expose the truth about the President’s philandering.
And how had Alyssa escaped from FCI Rocky anyway? Had his abduction of LeBlanc left her some clue about how to get out? What was between those two women? From breaking up the fight through helping her get the video to tracking her down outside of prison, Alyssa Chambers was following LeBlanc like a loyal guard dog. Why?
The situation had too many unanswered questions for Luther. Of one thing he was sure: Chambers had played her last ace by sneaking out of that fight. If he met her again, she would die.
CHAPTER 16
Cobalt Data Mining Systems owned a huge campus several miles outside Middleburg. A long drive led off the main road to a five-story office building. Surrounding that building, the company kept elaborate grounds with hills and grassy yards on which employees could take breaks. It was thickly wooded for shade and completely unlit.
In the pitch black that came after the moon had gone down but before the sun had come up, Alyssa planned her attack. In prison, Moira had told her that Cobalt Data Mining Systems was the hacking victim that finally got her arrested.
Zack confirmed it; identifying this company as the one Moira would surely go after again now that she had escaped from prison.
So Alyssa was here to look for information. Whatever Moira hacked this place for, Alyssa intended to find it. Hopefully, finding out what the girl wanted here would yield a hint as to how to track her down. Then she could hand her over to Wheeler and put the whole mess behind her.
Driving right up to the front door didn’t seem wise. Besides, it was impossible. A gate blocked the private drive. Thus, Alyssa parked her rented car by the side of the road a mile or so from the approach to the campus. The giant suitcase Wheeler had given her was still stored in the back seat, and Alyssa opened it up and took out a set of lock picking tools. Wheeler had also given her a black box with a small alphanumeric display and a set of protruding wires — that was for defeating electronic locks. She imagined that, for a man who worked directly for the President, the CIA could provide this kind of thing.
Once geared up, she took a moment to talk to Zack.
“Here’s the thing,” she said. “I’m going in here to look for clues about what Moira was up to. I hope I’ll find something that will help us find her, but I don’t expect to find the girl herself. And anyway, I’m not knocking on the front door. I’m going to break in.”
Alyssa made eye contact with the boy and held it.
“It’s time for that decision, Zack. I’ve treated you honorably so far, and I’m telling you that if I find Moira I’ll send her to talk to you. But I want you to wait here with the car.”
When Zack didn’t reply right away, Alyssa added a bit more assurance.
“You’ll be sitting in my car, which has all my gear in the back seat. I’m not going to abandon you here.”
She threw him the keys and then went on, “I’m a trained professional at getting into places like this. You’re very very good at what you do, but what you do is not covert approaches to a heavily guarded targets. If you come, we’ll be caught and both of us will be in prison before we’ve gone five hundred feet.”
She concluded, “Wait here. I promise you, I’ll be back. Hopefully when I am, I’ll know where we go next to look for Moira.”
Zack reluctantly nodded.
Strapping the light
-amplifying monocle over her head, she set off through the wooded grounds of the CDMS campus, heading toward their main building.
The hemlocks, red cedars, and pine trees enfolded her like a blanket. Alyssa placed each step with the care of an artist. She never even picked a foot up until she had already picked out a small patch of ground without twigs or leaves, so she could put her boot there without making noise. The practice of silent movement was all about care and attention to detail. But because one often had to stay in a crouching position for long periods of time, it also required endurance. Under the tight straps of her night vision headset, sweat soon glued her hair to her forehead.
The walk gave her time to think. If the pardon really was a miracle, what then? Was Matt right about everything? The Bible, God, Jesus, the whole nine yards? She had a hard time picturing herself at church bake sales. She had been shot at, she had parachuted into foreign countries, she had fought for her life, and she had survived in the jungle for a week with nothing but a knife. Alyssa Chambers could blend in at a cocktail party for billionaires or backstage before a Mixed Martial Arts match. She didn’t feel cut out for a church choir.
But she couldn’t escape the fact of what happened. Unasked for, unsought, impossible: A Presidential Pardon out of the blue, right after she asked God for one more chance.
And here she was using that second chance to break and enter, to fight, and to help a politician cover up a past affair. She couldn’t understand how it all fit together.
The first laser perimeter alarm came as a relief to her when she found it. To begin with, it took her mind off her moral dilemma. Besides which, if she hadn’t seen one sooner or later, the most likely thing would have been that she’d missed it and thus been discovered.
She avoided tripping the alarm by using tree branches to pull herself up over the laser, then swinging forward until she could come down on the other side.
She assumed there were also infrared surveillance cameras in the trees somewhere, but her government-issue fatigues had infrared signature management technology, and she trusted that to keep her safe.
Born with Secrets: A Political Thriller Page 12
