Life of Secrets (8 page)

Circulating
through the room, she heard Tilman’s name pop up in other conversations from
time to time, and even saw him floating by, whispering in Vincent’s ear. The
pinkish birthmark on his forehead stood out when the lighting was right. Maybe
Reeder was right, and this was the guy organizing Vincent’s support behind the
scenes.

It seemed like
an odd pairing, though, since when she met Mike Vincent, it was D.W. Tilman who
sicc'ed
her on him.

She turned away
from watching the two whispering and almost ran face first into the broad chest
of a very large, tall man. He wasn’t fat; he was like a tall brick. From his
thighs to his shoulders he was wider than anyone but a linebacker and looked
stronger than one, too.

Chambers
recognized him at once from all his publicity, and she didn’t need him to
introduce himself. Of course, he did anyway.

"Hi. I’m
Rich. Nice to meet you."

"Senator
West. I… I wasn’t expecting to almost run into you. Sorry."

Chambers took
note of the fact that she was actually stammering. She had stolen things from
the biggest names in politics and she was a Chambers besides. Normally, she
didn’t impress easily but here she was fumbling for words. Maybe Rich West was
as big a deal as the media said he was.

"Nothing
to be sorry for. Thanks for coming and supporting Mike."

She smiled.
"Why do you support him?"

"Well,
Mike Vincent is going to create jobs by supporting American families,"
West shot back without even a pause. "Of course, I support a candidate
like that."

Chambers
blushed. She had asked the most basic question in the book and gotten the most
scripted answer in the book thrown right back at her. It was embarrassing for
someone who called herself a professor of political science.

West smiled at
her, thanked her again for her contribution to the Vincent campaign, and
wandered off. Chambers watched him go, regretting the fit of anger with Reeder
that had thrown her far enough off her game to ask a stupid question like that.

But as he
walked away, she did see D.W. Tilman walk up beside him and lean up to whisper
something in his ear.

She sauntered
over toward the wall, eager to take a quiet moment and look at the crowd.
Tilman was playing a big role here, and she thought she had the answer to bring
back to her father, but she needed time to think and more to go on.

As she passed a
service exit, she paused to rest for a moment. She was away from the crowd and
enjoying a moment of quiet. Like most fancy parties, the lighting was dim to
create artificial intimacy. That made it easy for Alyssa to fade out of sight.

That's when
someone shoved her through the door to the service corridor.

Alyssa’s breath
escaped her with a "
whuff
!" as she fell
forward into the door, knocked it open with her weight, and crashed onto the
floor. She rolled as she hit, getting face-up just in time to see a tuxedo-clad
form rushing through the door after her, about to strike down with his foot at
her shins. From the ground, she kicked back and knocked his leg aside, then
leapt to her feet.

The door closed
behind them, cutting them off from the party.

The man in
front of her had rich, full hair as black as hers, slicked back and gelled down
until it looked painted onto his scalp. A scar decorated his cheek directly
below his left eye. He was clad in a black tux with a short coat buttoned at
the front, and he didn’t appear to have any desire to talk. He flew at her in a
flurry of punches just as Alyssa was dropping into a guard stance. Caught by
surprise, she was hard-pressed to block the assault, let alone land any blows
of her own.

The momentum of
a kick carried him past her a few steps, and Alyssa pivoted to face him without
moving. It created a few feet of space between them.

"Who are
you?" she asked between pants, trying to catch her breath.

"Fred
Harris. Do you remember me?"

She could
hardly have forgotten. The Harris Affair was still one of her fondest memories.
The challenges had grown greater, and the victories sweeter, but nothing ever
quite felt like her first time breaking the law.

"My career
took a big nose dive after Ken Wells fired me for losing that watch," he
said. "But you know, this business gets in your blood. I couldn't just
give it up. So I’ve been working my way back ever since. "

"Thing is,
after all that effort to rebuild my career, I get tired of hearing I'm only the
second-best in the field. So I figure leaving you unconscious in a service
hallway will kill two birds with one stone. Revenge and a reputation as top
dog."

Alyssa’s mind
whipped through a couple options and came to rest on a wild gamble.

"Tilman’s
working with you now? I must have charged too much for the last job."

Harris didn’t
answer, but the flash in his eyes told her she’d hit close to the mark.

Before she
could think about it any further, Harris charged at her, throwing a punch, then
a high, sweeping crescent kick that was aimed at her head, and then a knee. She
got an arm up to block and deflect the kick and stepped to the side to dodge
the knee.

But she caught
the punch right on her jaw.

Alyssa’s ears
rang and her vision was completely obscured with flashing yellow and purple
lights.

She shuffled
back to create some distance, shouted to maybe throw a bit of confusion into
the situation, and kept her fists up in front of her upper body and face in a
guard position. She couldn’t really see yet, so blocking anything was going to
take luck.

That punch
really hurt!

Unable to see,
the next sounds confused her. In front of her, the sound of running. Behind
her, the sound of the service door, and a voice asking, "Um… excuse
me?"

As her vision
gradually returned, it became obvious that her assailant had run away. She
turned around to see Mike Vincent and Rich West crowding in behind her in the
hall, coming over to see if she was all right.

Vincent touched
her jaw lightly. "I’ll call 911," he said, fumbling in his pocket for
a phone.

"No!"
Alyssa replied, and stepped back with every intention of turning to run down
the same hallway Harris had used to escape.

Vincent held
his hands in the air, away from any place he might have had his phone.
"OK, OK, it’s your health insurance. Looks like you held a gun on the
wrong guy this time."

Rich West
turned to stare at him. "What are you talking about?"

Vincent and
Chambers stared at each other, neither of them willing to speak first.

"This is
my fundraiser," Vincent finally said to her. "I think I have a right
to know what’s going on. Are you here doing paying work like you were the last
time I saw you? Private investigator stuff?"

"I’m not a
PI," Alyssa replied. "And I don’t want to talk. Thanks for scaring
Harris off."

She walked
away, hearing West say to Vincent, "What was all that? Private
investigators? Guns?"

Alyssa had a
nasty bruise on her cheek when she arrived at the Chambers Estate. The butler
made a fuss about bringing an icepack, and Alyssa let him, but she had no
intention of holding a dripping plastic bag of melting water to her face while
trying to talk to her father.

Painkillers
were taking care of most of the problem, and she figured a wee nip from H.
Franklin’s
Talisker
would deal with whatever was left
over. She poured it into a brandy snifter with no ice, sank into a red leather
wing chair, and waited for her father to show up.

When he walked
into the room, H. Franklin Chambers’ eyes went quickly to his daughter’s
bruise, then to the drink in her hand. He went over to the bar and poured some
for himself. He drank his whisky over ice in a tumbler.

He sat down in
a chair close to her, his gray suit rustling slightly. He crossed his right leg
over his left, sipped the scotch, and waited.

"D.W.
Tilman is the man you want," she said without preamble. "He got Rich
West there, he got Lance Reeder to support him, and he had a plumber on the
scene too – for what reason I’m not sure. But you didn’t hire me for that. You
just hired me to find out who was behind the support for Vincent. It’s
Tilman."

Her father
nodded. "Good enough. I wonder if it’s just friendship, or if he has other
plans. Tilman usually has an angle on everything he does."

She shrugged,
and he inclined his head toward an alligator-skin briefcase sitting near the front
door. "For you," he said. "Feel free to count it, if you're so
inclined. Also, that looks like a nasty bruise. Why not sleep here
tonight?" He got up and walked out of the hall.

Watching him
walk away, she wondered about what Lance Reeder had said. Why had he said
something about a car crash? But she couldn’t exactly ask H. Franklin. Not when
Reeder had as much as blurted out that he and Alyssa’s mother had had an
affair.

Alyssa hid in a
copse of leafy trees, sitting on the ground, changing her clothes. Her dive
through the window had ruined the expensive business suit she’d bought earlier
in the day, but she didn’t care. It had served its purpose and now she needed a
different kind of clothing.

She needed the
kind she had stolen from the FBI agent flying the chopper.

After coercing
clothing and a very cursory flying lesson out of the helicopter pilot, she'd
ordered the woman to hover very low over a hill. Then Alyssa had shoved her out
the door – a four-foot drop or so – and taken over the controls herself, flying
away. The next hill she flew over, she repeated the procedure. She flew the
craft low over the hill, flipped on the autopilot at the last minute, and
jumped out the door.

Her own fall
was farther than the pilot's, and it hurt, but the chopper carried on without
her, heading east on autopilot. With any luck, the radars tracking it would
send FBI agents far to the east looking for her. That ought to buy her a couple
hours.

She'd limped
down off the hill, feeling pain as the rush of action faded, and cleaned her
wounds with the first aid kit from the chopper. She wrapped bandages around her
left leg and bicep. Alyssa had suffered worse cuts on other jobs and didn't
worry too much about either of them.

So, where to go
from here?

The only option
was back to town. Obviously it was the most dangerous option – that's where the
swarms of police were. But it was also where the answers were, and Chambers was
in this for the answers.

All of which
explained why she had stolen the chopper pilot’s fatigues.

In recent
years, all the various military and law enforcement arms of the federal
government had begun buying a new camouflage technology. Developed by a private
company in conjunction with the German government, this new fabric enabled the
wearer to defeat night vision equipment. Alyssa would need to be careful how
she moved, but the light amplification technology in headsets would no longer
point her out like a sore thumb.

Which was good
because there was an army of federal law enforcement agents on the hunt for
what they believed to be a highly-trained master assassin. Such people would
certainly be wearing night vision goggles.

And they would
be using them to monitor all of her known haunts. That had to include the place
she needed to go tonight.

Matt Barr.

She could
barely stand the thought of how he would look at her. By now, her name had to
be all over the TV as a suspect. Maybe they'd dug up details of her life as a
political spy, and those were out, too. He could only feel one way about the
double life she'd kept from him for so many years.

Irrationally,
she couldn't stop thinking that he would figure it out; he would hear about her
past as a political dirty tricks operative and connect that with the huge story
he'd lost in that fire. Perhaps he would even learn about the time she had
ruined his inside source on the Reeder for Senate campaign.

But there was
nowhere else to go. Nowhere. She had exactly one clue, and it was Wheeler's
claim that Matt was working on a story about her.

Oh, he probably
hadn't known it was about her at the time, but by now he did.

There was
nothing for it. She had to get back to D.C. and talk to Matt.

When she'd
boarded the chopper, she'd dropped her pistol in favor of the M-4. Now, she
regretted her failure to switch back before she abandoned the helicopter. The
carbine was impossible to conceal.

With regret,
she abandoned the rifle and set out for the nearest road. Alyssa felt naked
without a gun. True, she'd never actually shot at a person but having a gun was
like having a get out of jail free card. If the worst happened, you had an
option.

As she hiked to
the road, she thought about Matt. The two of them had known each other their
whole lives. His father had been the minister in the large mainline church that
the Chambers family had been patronizing for generations. Matt and Alyssa spent
their youth trying to find ways to have fun without getting caught and lectured
by the stern Reverend. It hadn’t always worked out…

♦

"What was Reverend
Barr angry about, Alyssa?

The 14-year-old
girl replied without lifting her face from her pillow, her voice muffled.

"What a
jerk!"

Her father’s
hair had acquired gray at the temples. He still tied his ties in a full-Windsor
knot, he still preferred three-piece suits, and the smell of expensive cigars
still often followed him around. He replied, "I didn’t ask whether he was
a jerk. I asked why he was angry."

The girl looked
up from her pillow and rose to a sitting position.

"He said
Matt and I shouldn’t be alone together. He said we should never play without a
parent around. He shouted a lot."

"What were
you two doing?"

"Nothing!
We were sitting in the back corner of the yard talking. We weren’t doing
anything bad, I swear!"

"Did you
steal any alcohol from the bar?"

"Dad!"

"It’s not
like you never have before Alyssa. Did you this time?"

"No! I
already told you we didn’t do anything bad!"

"You know
how Reverend Barr feels about boys and girls never being alone together. You
shouldn’t have gone off alone."

As her father
had turned away to walk out of the room, he added, "That Barr boy isn’t
worth your time anyway. They’re really not in the same social circles as we are
Alyssa."

♦

Alyssa sighed
and shook her head as she walked. She wondered how Matt and his father were
getting along these days. If they talked at all, the old Reverend Barr would
surely be telling his son something akin to, "See, I told you so."

Normally, that
would have suited Alyssa just fine. She had spent years of her life persuading
Matt that she didn’t want romance and if she did, it wouldn’t be him.

The funny thing
was, when the entire country hated her, it made her less likely to want to push
people away. She was about to go visit Matt’s house and ask for his help.

Dealing with
Matt had gotten so much easier lately. He stopped asking her out all the time,
stopped acting jealous... it made Alyssa's current plan a little easier to
think about. Back in the days when he'd tried to turn every moment into
romance, the idea of going to him to ask for help would have felt impossibly
vulnerable. Much less so now.

She suspected
the change in his behavior was explained by a woman. Nothing cured a crush on
one person like a relationship with another. Briefly, she wondered how that
would affect her plans. She was about to go ask him to help her evade law
enforcement. A man with commitments might be more hesitant to do that.

Chambers
finished her hike to the road, then kept walking west until she found an
overpass. She walked up onto that and settled in to wait.

Finally, a semi
roared up the road beneath her, heading west, back toward the District. Timing
it just right, she waited until the truck was racing under the bridge then
dropped over the side. She landed on top of the trailer and pressed herself
flat on top of it, fingers gripping the sides.

Matt lived in a
row house in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. Alyssa had been there many times
for "friendly" dinners that Matt consistently let run late into the
night, hoping she'd open the door to more. Now, she peered at the place from
the roof of another one across the street and up a few houses.

Matt's house
was quiet, but she didn't let that fool her.

The FBI would
be there, of course. They had to be watching all her known haunts. Or the
Secret Service. Either way – it didn't really matter. The second floor bedroom
window was dark, for example. But Matt always left his bedside light on. And
the silhouette in the living room – apparently staring at the TV – was bulkier
than her reporter friend. No doubt it was a federal agent, and there was
probably one in the bedroom as well, with the light off to hide his shadow.

Ever so
slightly, something on Matt's roof moved.

OK, so they had
a man on the roof, too. She was unsurprised. She would do the same, if the
circumstances were reversed. But she was the master of her craft – a black
belt, a world-class athlete, and above all else, a Chambers.

Careful
observation of the house across the street from her current location – three
doors up from Matt's – revealed that the FBI didn't have a man on it. A
mistake. Had it been her, she'd have guards on the roofs at both ends of the
street as well. But even for this investigation, she supposed the feds'
resources would eventually reach their limit. She clambered back down to the
ground and, wrapped in shadows and darkness, she made her way to Matt's side of
the street.

By means of
windowsills, ledges, and a rain gutter, she pulled herself to the roof of the
next building. In her normal life, she hated townhouses. Having a common wall
with one's neighbors seemed to spoil the whole concept of owning a home. But
tonight she was glad for it. It meant she could just walk across the roofs to
Matt's place.

She'd spotted
the roof guard, crouching and mostly watching the back yard. That meant she was
approaching him at a right angle. She simply sat still and watched for a time,
trying to get a feel for his rhythm.

The man was
good. Obviously, he considered the back yard the most likely means of trying to
sneak up to the house, so he spent most of his time looking that way. But every
now and then he turned around to look to the front yard, and to either side.
Never on a regular schedule though. In the time she watched him, he turned
front after fifteen minutes one time, and then the next after only a minute. He
threw in looks to the sides as well, several times looking right at Alyssa. But
on a cloudy night with no moon, it was nearly impossible to spot a completely
motionless person – especially one wearing dark colors.

Alyssa’s stolen
combat fatigues kept her invisible to the night vision system on the man’s
head. A lifetime of skill kept her invisible to ordinary vision.

Watching the
guard on the roof, she waited until he was watching the back yard. She crept
slowly forward, never coming out of her crouch, and never stepping fast or hard
enough to make noise. The guard swiveled her way again when she was only
halfway there, and she froze to wait it out.

In her head,
she knew that she was effectively invisible. There was no light; she wore dark
clothing; she was protected from infrared; she crouched without motion – there
was nothing to draw the attention of a human eye. But still, her heart hammered
like the offspring of a bass drum and a metronome. She could feel the man's
eyes on her but then he kept on turning – first to look into the front yard for
a minute or two, then looking directly away from Alyssa, and then to the back
again.

She crept
forward a bit farther, until she was barely ten feet from him. She pondered
attacking the man and rendering him unconscious but decided against it. The
odds were only about fifty-fifty that she could do it before he put up any
struggle at all; if she lost that bet she might as well just walk up to a
maximum security federal penitentiary and check in.

The guard
turned again, and Alyssa worried seriously about a heart attack as his gaze
fell on her. He looked directly at her – so directly that she squinted her eyes
nearly shut to hide the whites.

Then he rotated
to the front.

She breathed
again and moved forward while he wasn't looking – as quickly as she could
without making a sound. He turned away from the front yard, looking the other
way. While he did, Alyssa dropped herself over the edge of the roof toward the
back yard, hanging on by her fingertips. From there, she dropped catlike onto
the ledge of the bathroom window.

Chambers never
knew how soon the guard turned his gaze to the back yard again. She was below
the roof by then, safely concealed.

Perched
precariously on the ledge of the bathroom window, clinging to the windowsill
with just the fingertips of her left hand, she reached down to place the palm
of her right hand flat against the window pane. Slowly, relying on friction
between her skin and the glass, she worked the window open.

That was the
advantage of knowing the terrain. Matt never latched this window; he opened it
in the morning to let the steam out when he took a shower.

Once the window
was open she squirmed in. Furtively, she opened the shower door, got inside,
and slid the door almost closed, leaving just a crack to peek through. Then she
waited.

It seemed like
hours. It may actually have been hours. She had no way of keeping track of the
time – her watch had been destroyed in her swim through the Potomac that
morning. Sometimes she stood; sometimes she leaned against the back wall of the
shower. At one point, she had to fight back the giggles when she considered the
notion of actually taking a shower – it seemed like forever since she'd had
one, and it would be nice to feel clean.