Life of Secrets (16 page)

"Chambers?
Are you in here?"

It was a harsh
whisper, as if the speaker were afraid of being heard beyond the janitorial
closet.

The voice
didn’t sound like Fred Harris, but it was vaguely familiar.

"Are you
here Chambers? I’m here to help. It’s Mike Vincent."

As they drove
across the Francis Scott Key Bridge into Northern Virginia, Vincent said,
"The media are playing the story as an attempt to kill Reeder."

Alyssa fidgeted
guiltily in her seat. That actually had been in her heart. The fact that she
had lied about that to get Matt’s help and that now he was in enemy captivity
or dead, only made the fidgeting more guilty.

Vincent flipped
on his radio. There, indeed, was the report: "Federal agents attempted to
apprehend her on the scene, but the alleged assassin appears to have escaped.
Authorities still have no information on what motive might have led Chambers to
kill Rich West and then try to kill his running mate Lance Reeder as well. They
point out, however, that a professional operative, as Chambers is accused of
being, is more likely to have been hired for the work than to have her own
motive."

Alyssa reached
over and turned the radio off.

"I can’t
stand it," she said.

Vincent nodded.
He had aged since Alyssa met him as a young campaign staffer, but he’d done it
gracefully. At his temples, the blond hair was just beginning to fade slightly
into gray. He still wore the same perfect smile and still kept in good shape.
Now into his thirties, he was showing a line or two in his face, but nothing
serious. The wedding ring on his finger was new.

Alyssa allowed
herself to relax a bit and stretch in the Lincoln’s leather seat. Sitting in a
dark, luxuriant SUV, wearing a cocktail dress, with a wealthy, good looking
Congressman was like a tiny taste of her old life. For just a moment, she
wasn’t Alyssa Chambers the thief. She wasn’t Alyssa Chambers the professor. She
was Alyssa Chambers the Chambers. She was wealthy, well-connected, and entitled
to have whatever she wanted. For the tiniest moment, she regretted that
18-year-old curiosity that had led to her first conversation with George
Pierce.

Vincent spoke
and spoiled the daydream.

"How much
do you know about how I came to be involved in this?"

"Matt told
me that you were ordered by the West campaign to expose me to the press. He
said you went to him instead of any other reporter because you wanted to
fulfill your orders in the way least likely to result in trouble."

Vincent nodded.
"Kind of reminds you of how we got started, right? Trying to find a way to
do the right thing without it costing me too dearly. Well, when Reeder handed me
the folder on you, you can imagine my heart rate basically took off like a
rocket. At the time, the assassination was still in the future, so I had no
idea what exactly was going on, but that photograph on the first page of the
dossier was very obviously an older version of the first person to ever point a
gun at my face. You never forget your first."

Giving him a
thin smile, Chambers replied, "You sound like you’ve gotten used to
it."

"Well, my
life took a few strange turns since I worked for Lance, but I doubt you ever
get used to that."

"Anyway,
when the assassination hit the news Monday morning, and when 'Alleged
professional assassin Alyssa Chambers' started being featured in the news by
Monday afternoon, I knew exactly what had happened, since I’d been used to make
it happen."

Vincent turned
a corner, heading into a residential suburb.

"I’m not
going to put myself in a better light than I deserve. Deciding what to do has
taken every moment of my time between Monday afternoon and tonight. Let’s be honest
with each other. It’s not like you and I are friends. It’s more like
‘adversaries who learned to trust each other through an arrangement that’s a
lot like mutual blackmail.’ So it’s not someone I like who’s in peril. It’s
someone I wish I’d never met."

Alyssa accepted
the honesty with good grace. It was all true, and besides, earlier today she’d
been wanting to punch Vincent right in the face for betraying her. She had no
grounds to pretend their relationship was better than it was.

"Besides,"
Vincent continued, "I’m married now. It changes your value system. It’s
not like I’m some kind of paranoid weirdo, spending all day thinking about how
to protect my wife and keep her safe, obsessing about threats. But when the
prospect of genuine physical danger comes up, any possibility that it might
apply to her is unacceptable."

"Between
those two things, I’ve spent three days thinking, ‘She can obviously look after
herself, and it’s not my business, and if I barge into a situation where murder
for hire is really going on, Kathy could get hurt.’"

The Congressman
shrugged.

"Then the
situation at the fundraiser broke out. The news people were all there covering
the Reeder campaign anyway, so it became a media circus. It was live on every
channel, you couldn’t find anything else. There were breathless reporters
saying they heard gunshots, saying they heard that Chambers was in custody,
that no one could find Lance Reeder and they thought he might be dead, that you
actually weren’t in custody and had killed five Secret Service agents in the
process of escaping…. It was crazy."

"That’s
when it hit me. If you were that close to being caught – if you weren’t already
caught – then it was clear that, without help, you were going to lose. ‘If no
one helps her, she goes to prison,’ was exactly what I told myself."

He pulled the
car into a garage but made no move to get out yet. Chambers sat listening.

"And if
you did go to prison, you would be tried for murdering Rich West. And here’s
the thing: there were exactly two witnesses in the world who might provide
evidence that you hadn’t murdered him. Those were me and Matt Barr. So I tried
to call Matt and got no answer at his home or his office or his cell. Again and
again and again."

"And that
scared the daylights out of me. I thought he had already been killed. Which
really only led to one place: I’m next. Then the motivation of preventing
danger to my wife changed. Once I realized you were heading for court and I was
one of the only witnesses who could save you, the only way to keep Kathy safe
was to help you. Chambers, if you’re not alive to prove your innocence, she and
I are both likely to be killed in a day or two."

"So we
prayed, and I told her to sit in the farthest-back room in our basement with a
pistol until I come home, and I went to Georgetown to see if you were still
there, since the media made it sound like the search was still going on. And I
remembered that when I first met you, you were pretending to be a janitor, and
when I next saw you, you were in the janitor’s hallway at my first big
fundraiser. Every time I see you, you’re sneaking around in custodial places. I
saw a janitor's closet in the parking garage at the campus and went to
check."

"Pretty
thin reasoning," Chambers replied. "I got lucky."

Vincent grinned
at her.

"Call it
luck if you want, but I did tell you Kathy and I prayed before I went. Let’s go
inside."

As they walked
through the front door, Alyssa smelled coffee, despite the fact that it was
about midnight. A young woman with long brown hair walked around a corner from
the kitchen, wearing an oversize blue sweater and jeans. She had the graceful
stride of a dancer and a broad smile. Introductions were made, and Kathy
Vincent gave Alyssa’s head a curious look.

"The TV
told me to expect horns," she said with a smile. "I made some coffee,
or we can open a bottle of wine if you want."

"I don’t
suppose you keep any good single malt scotch around the house?"

Kathy got a
bottle of whisky from the bar and poured some over ice for the guest. Alyssa drank
half the glass in one shot and, when Kathy stared, she said, "You wouldn’t
believe my day."

Mike sat, and
nodded toward the couch, inviting Chambers to sit as well. Then he said,
"I can only imagine. Tell us about it?"

Alyssa sat on
the couch and said, "For starters, you may be right about Matt being dead
– although not how you thought. He was with me at the fundraiser, but he was
taken by the assassin. By now, they may have killed him, or they may be
torturing him to learn more about me. I don’t know."

Mike asked,
"Tell me about the assassin?"

"His name
is Fred Harris. He’s a plumber, like me. A political dirty tricks operative. I
stole something from him in my first job, and we’ve had it out a few times
since then. If he’s hurt Matt, I will never stop hunting him until he’s
dead."

Mike and Kathy
exchanged looks, and Mike asked, "How do you know he’s the assassin?"

"He and I
fought at the Buchanan Club," Chambers replied. "I tricked Matt into
revealing that he’d been there recently, and I went there to find out who gave
him the tip about me. Harris was waiting for me there. It seems obvious in
retrospect. The people who hired him to kill West would also have told him
where you and Matt met for the story tip that was supposed to frame me. But I
didn’t think of that at the time. I was desperate to figure out the next step
forward in trying to prove I didn’t do this. I wasn’t thinking clearly."

Mike nodded.
"When you first said ‘the assassin,’ I was thinking of the people who
hired it done, not the trigger man."

Chambers’ eyes
flashed, and a small growl escaped her lips.

"Lance
Reeder. Him, I am so angry at I can’t even think. I just feel like my whole
head’s hot, and I want to hurt him."

Mike nodded.
"I was on the receiving end once, when you got mad."

"Yeah,
well you only had a taste of what Reeder’s going to get. I don’t exactly have
friends, but two of the people in the world who came closest are dead because
of him. Both of them killed right in front of me. I want to kill him."

Mike made eye contact
with her.

"Let me
tell you about Lance Reeder," he said.

Alyssa nodded,
and the Congressman began to tell his story.

"When I
first decided to run for Congress, I went to D.C. to meet with party officials
and insiders and other House Members. It’s a pretty common early step for a
candidate."

Alyssa nodded.

"I met
Rich West on that trip. We were two of a kind – kindred spirits, if you will.
We became friends. Over the years, I grew out of some of my old drinking buddy
friendships and become closer and closer to Rich. We became such good friends
that he was best man when I got married."

He paused to
smile at his wife, who returned it. Then Vincent went on.

"He’s like
a brother to me. I felt honored to be befriended by this man everyone was
talking about as the most likely next President. He's the biggest deal in this
town except for the sitting President. And he made time every day to talk to
me."

Vincent sighed.

"There are
a whole lot of people in this business who follow the philosophy of ‘Do anything
to win.’"

Alyssa nodded.

"Don’t I
know it."

"That’s
what I loved about Rich. He wasn’t one of those. Rich believed that winning was
a tool, if it helped you do good things, but it was only a tool, never the end.
I admire that about him.

"I love
him. Loved, I guess. It's still hard for me to make it real in my head that
he's gone. Rich West was the real deal. He was a genuinely nice man in a
profession full of mean people. He meant what he said, and he was sincere about
his beliefs. He knew how to make the political system work without letting the
political system change him. America needed a President like him. We still do,
maybe more than ever now."

"So when
he began to tell a few of us – his closest confidants – that he was getting
ready to make it official and start floating rumors and leaks about a run for
President, of course I volunteered to help however I could. His friends from
Congress never had official titles on the campaign. We all just pitched in, in
whatever way we could. But we were the heart of the campaign. We were the real
leaders. It always made the consultants mad."

The Congressman
shook his head and sighed.

"The first
time I ever questioned Rich’s judgment was when he announced that Lance Reeder
would be his candidate for Vice President. I knew him from before…"
Vincent paused, and looked at Alyssa. "...but I forget you already know
that. Well, then, we both know what kind of man Lance Reeder really is.
Everything Rich West is, Lance Reeder is the opposite."

"But with
Reeder on the ticket, we had a really, serious, honest to goodness chance to
win my home state, which our side hasn’t done in a while. It would have given
Rich a nice boost in the electoral vote count in the fall. And Rich, of course,
was only 48. So he had no reason to believe Reeder would ever get a sniff of
the Presidency. It was safe to bring him on as VP, knowing that he would never
get near power. I guess you can’t blame the man for not expecting to be
murdered."

Vincent’s voice
broke a little bit, surprising Alyssa. She hadn’t been looking right in his
eyes; she didn’t know he was near tears.

"I would
have done anything to help Rich win, which is how I got sucked into this.