Life of Secrets (11 page)

Then she faded
away into the night. The fire behind her was just getting started, but the
embers of her conscience were flickering out.

"No."

It took Alyssa a
second to realize that that was the complete answer. There was nothing else
coming. Not only was she being turned down, but she was being turned down
without so much as an excuse or an acknowledgment of the openness she had shown
him first.

"What?"

Matt couldn't
meet her eyes.

"No. I
can't, Alyssa. I can't tell you who told me."

For a second
Alyssa just sat there blinking and swallowing, not quite able to process the
fact that she was being told no
and
it was coming from the one man in
the world she expected to always give her everything she wanted.

"Matt! Do
you understand that this is the difference between whether or not I go to
prison?"

"I'm
sorry,
Lyss
. I can’t tell you how sorry. But you
don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes here."

"Oh come on!
Of course I get it about reporters protecting their sources. I'm not stupid.
But this is me!"

"Alyssa… I
can’t. I can’t tell you, and I can’t tell you why."

She sat there
and stared at him, jaw hanging open. For the past day, she had had zero
friends. Every person she met was an enemy, determined to put her in prison the
moment they recognized her. The lifelong loner had finally found a degree of
separation that was too much for her.

And then, for a
few glorious hours, she had a friend again. There was a person she could trust.
One man existed, in the entire universe, with whom she could be completely
honest.

Well, not
completely
honest, she reminded herself. She was holding back from Matt, too. And the
things she was holding back…

Alyssa sighed.
She had no right to ask Matt for anything. She’d come to him expecting he’d
give her exactly what she wanted because he always had. For most of their life,
he’d wanted her affection badly enough to do anything she asked. She had
counted on that, taken it for granted, all while letting herself forget that
she’d secretly stabbed him in the back.

What if he
knew? What if he knew what she had done and that was why he said no?

But no, it
wasn’t possible. If he knew, he would never have come with her out of his
house. He would have yelled loudly enough to bring the guards while they were
still hiding in the bathroom.

If he knew how
badly she had betrayed him, he would have wanted to hurt her back. Anyone would
have long since ceased to trust her or care about her, after what she’d done.

Around them,
the patrons of the coffee shop kept mostly to themselves. They were tapping on
laptops, or reading the newspaper. A bored barista reclined behind the counter.
None of them had any idea that the most wanted woman in the world was sitting
among them, frustrated, angry, and guilty all at once.

"OK, so
can you tell me when you heard? Even if you can’t tell me who told you?"

"Alyssa,
please don’t do this. I know you’re trying to get me to say something that will
help you figure out who, and I can’t help you with that.

She sighed and
shook her head.

"Let’s
just get out of here. I’ll get us a hotel room."

Having used her
Alice
Cobler
ID at a scene where the FBI nearly
caught her, she assumed that was burned, so she switched to a driver's license
and credit card in the name of Danielle Wilson. Matt and Alyssa both fell
asleep almost at once, despite all the coffee.

When she woke
after noon, she dressed in the bathroom, then sat in one of the hotel’s chairs
and stared at Matt’s sleeping form. He held the key to clearing her name. She
was sure of it. Why wouldn’t he tell her? What secret of his own was hidden
under there? What could she do that might tease it out?

Alyssa waited
for Matt to wake up. She clicked the TV on with the volume very low, to see
what they were saying about her. One network was doing "man on the
street" interviews, where various patriotic citizens suggested creative
means of executing the hated assassin.

When they
flipped back to the anchor desk, Alyssa saw that she had been right to change
IDs. The scrolling ticker at the bottom of the screen read, "Chambers
possibly using the name Alice
Cobler
."

The next story
had to do with the ascent of Lance Reeder. Rich West's Vice Presidential
running mate, he was the natural to take his place after the assassination.
According to the news, the West/Reeder campaign had become the Lance Reeder for
President Campaign. There was a clip of Reeder.

"I don't feel
like I can just walk away. Too many people invested too much in Rich West. He
represented hope for a lot of people. I feel honor-bound to try to carry
on."

When Matt woke
up, Alyssa took a shower to give him time alone to dress. Once they were both
showered and put back together for another day, she went out for coffee and
food. Matt volunteered to go, but she was better prepared to remain undetected
in a hostile environment. By now, the feds would have added Matt’s name and
picture to all the stories about Alyssa Chambers the assassin. She didn’t trust
him to go out in public in that environment.

Once back, she
settled very deliberately into casual conversation that didn’t include any
questions for Matt.

"It’s just
surreal, when I remember last week. Had dinner with you one night,
poli
sci
department meeting,
grading papers… it’s hard for me to even believe that stuff was real. I’m sure
if I tried to come anywhere near the campus right now, I’d find more men in
black than students."

Matt nodded.

"But what
I don’t get is all that stuff was unreal to you anyway. Real life was lived at
night, breaking, entering, stealing, computer hacking, spying, etc. Faculty
meetings and grading papers were just a mask. So why do you miss them?"

It was a fair
question. She wasn’t sure exactly what would get Matt to tell her the secret,
but she suspected he had received this tip – whatever it was – last week
sometime. She wanted to keep the conversation on that time frame, and she
wanted to keep building trust, so she answered his question honestly.

"I got
into… well, I got into what I do because I wanted to test myself. I wanted to
prove my strength. But it was always like two separate worlds. I could go about
my ordinary life – safe, easy, boring, and comfortable – and sneak out to do
something dangerous and fun one or two nights a week. I always had my safe
place to come back to. I guess is what I’m trying to say. But that was last
week. This week, I’m a hundred percent, full-time, professional thief and
plumber. No retreat, no safety, no comfort. It’s radically different."

Matt nodded.

"I can
understand that."

He paused for a
long time before speaking again.

"Alyssa, I
feel like I have to ask. Do you really think this is what your mother meant
when she wanted you to be strong?"

Alyssa didn’t
answer. What could she answer? Her mother would never even have conceived of
this life.

Matt went on.

"I knew
her too, you know. Obviously not like you did, but I was around your house all
the time when we were kids. She hated H. Franklin’s ‘victory above everything’
approach to politics. She was always struggling with words, trying to find a
way not to say disrespectful things about your father in front of you, while at
the same time teaching you that some things mattered more than winning."

"Are you
saying I came out like my father and not like her?" There was a dangerous
edge to Alyssa’s voice, and she locked her eyes on Matt’s.

He backed up in
his chair and held his hands to the side.

"Alyssa, I
know how you feel about him. I know he never cared about you growing up, I know
he never gave you any time, and I know he was wrong about that. But ask
yourself: wouldn’t what you do now fit in just fine with how he practices
politics?"

She looked
away. She remembered taking a job for her father once. Yes, having a good
operative on call fit very well into her father’s vocation.

"He
brought you up telling you that his was the only way to do politics. He tried
to teach you that ‘do anything to win’ was the only possible philosophy. But
he’s wrong about that Alyssa. There are people in politics who live and thrive
on a value system that’s more like ‘give anything to do what’s right.’"

Alyssa looked
out the window. Trying to earn Matt’s trust was not going at all the way she
planned. She was supposed to be manipulating the conversation. She was supposed
to be guiding him into revealing things. Instead, he was leading her.

"H.
Franklin never really made much effort to teach me," she replied.

She felt she
needed to disagree with him, just to avoid where he was taking her.

"We had
one conversation about politics before I went to school, and that was it."

Alyssa smiled
at the memory.

"I just
walked right in on him and poured myself a glass of his scotch without asking.
I was hoping for more of a reaction from him than I got."

Matt smiled at
her indulgently.

"He had no
idea you’d been teaching me about single malts?"

"Oh, he
knew darn well. You remember that time your dad got mad at us for being alone
and out of sight?"

Matt laughed.

"How could
I forget. Dad was so hyper about keeping me moral and pure. He seemed to think
you were just waiting to turn me into a bad boy at the first opportunity, which
really got my goat in high school, since you had no interest at all. It really
stinks to be constantly found guilty of a crime that’s never going to
happen."

Alyssa arched
an eyebrow.

"Irony."

Matt laughed.

"Yeah, I
guess so."

"Anyway,"
she said, "My father came up and talked to me about it. I guess your dad
must have yelled at him. He asked me if we’d been stealing alcohol again."

Matt gave her a
warm smile.

"Well, if
it hadn’t been for you, I never would have learned about single malt scotch.
Dad wouldn’t have anything to do with alcohol at all, and all the other kids I
knew in high school were into Bud Light."

"Your
teaching stuck with me though," Matt added. "I had a chance to drink
some
Laphroaig
15 last week. Very, very nice."

"Ah, well,
all that was in the past," Alyssa said, sighing. "I doubt I’m going
to sit in father’s leather chairs having a drink with him for a long
time."

But inside,
every alarm in her psyche went off. Matt had just given her a clue.

Matt liked
scotch only because Alyssa did. But Alyssa liked it for itself. She had been
brought up in a household that treated liquor like everything else – if you’re
going to do it, do it right. She studied fine whisky, and knew where to find
it.

Take
Laphroaig
15, for example, which Matt had mentioned. The
distillery no longer made it. It had become almost impossible to get. In fact,
there was only one supper club in D.C. that still had it: The Buchanan Club.

A reporter
couldn’t afford the cost of a membership at the Buchanan, which meant Matt had
been there with someone else. And the Buchanan wasn’t a place you went for a
casual hangout. It was very high end. It was the kind of place a source would
take a reporter to stress the importance of the tip.

Without
realizing it, Matt had just told Alyssa where he met the source that gave him
the information about her.

Although Matt
Barr could never afford the price of a membership at the Buchanan club, the
Chambers family had had one all her life. Alyssa knew the club quite well, from
every time H. Franklin had brought the family with him to D.C. She knew, for
instance, that the Buchanan required reservations, and that the list of
reservations was in a binder on the Maître D's podium. It would go back several
weeks.

Now all she had
to do was kill the rest of the day, so she could break in at night.

♦

The sun sank
into the horizon as a spring afternoon faded to evening. A perfectly manicured
lawn stretched unreasonably far from the house to the stone wall at the
property line. A ten-year-old girl came running up the front step of the house,
dirt and mud all over her dress, black hair tangled and flying everywhere.

"Daddy! I
had a fight, and I won!"

On the patio,
two men reclined in wicker chairs, puffing on cigars. Both were in their
thirties, clad in suits and ties. The little girl heard words like
"Speaker" and "Majority" as she leapt up the steps. She had
learned that those words meant boring things.

The only one of
the two men that she cared about wore a three-piece suit of gray with a black
tie sloping up from the vest to the collar where it was held by a full-Windsor
knot.