Read Born with Secrets: A Political Thriller Online
Authors: Bowen Greenwood
Born with Secrets: A Political Thriller (12 page)
A painful, high-pitched siren began to sound,
accompanied by a flashing light. Other apartment doors began to open onto the
hallway.
Cobalt swore. The siren kept screaming, hurting
Alyssa’s ears. For a moment the man kept choking her but eventually he released
her neck.
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.”
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 they 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.”
***
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.