Life of Secrets (18 page)

"And then
the story was gone. Destroyed. My only copy of the evidence was burned in a
deliberate fire. And the person who did it was the center of my world – the
woman I dreamed of marrying."

He said,
"All I ever wanted was for you to love me, and you betrayed me."

Alyssa winced.

He held her
hand.

"I didn’t
know what to do. I had no idea how I was ever going to feel OK again. And like
anyone would, I talked to my friends about it. I talked to my friend Mike
Vincent."

Her eyes opened
wider with surprise.

"He and I
have been friends since he started secretly giving me information, trying to
stop Lance Reeder from getting into the Senate."

At the
involuntary widening of her eyes, he said, "Yes, Alyssa, he told me about
that, too. Mike and I have been friends for years but since he got married he’s
really become a better friend."

"Mike and
his wife helped me understand that my father missed the point entirely. My
father’s religion was all about rules, and wrath, and stuff you can’t do. Mike
and Kathy talked to me about love, and forgiveness, and grace."

"They
helped me get to a place where I could understand what real forgiveness meant
and live it out."

He took both of
her hands in his. "I promise you Alyssa. I paid for this lesson the very
hard way. It’s gone. Forgiven. White as snow. Everything you feel guilty about
doing to me... believe me, you never have to feel guilty anymore."

Chambers felt
herself about to cry. In the middle of enemy territory, with armed men
patrolling only meters away, she was crying because there really was one person
in this hostile world who still trusted her.

When she
collected herself, Alyssa said, "Matt, I... I don't know what to say. I
don't know what to think. I don't know how you can... What I know is I want to
get you safe. We’ll wait here until the guards pass by again, then I’ll help
you over the back wall into the woods around the grounds. Get away. I’m going to
cause enough of a disturbance right inside the house that there won’t be anyone
left to follow you."

"Get away
and tell them the truth if I don’t come out."

"Of course
not, Alyssa. I’m coming with you if you’re going into danger."

"Don’t be
ridiculous. If we both die, no one will ever know the truth."

"If you
die, I don’t care if anyone knows the truth."

She felt the
breath go out of her. How could anyone respond? What could she possibly say?
She had fifteen years of "shut up, I don’t want to hear it" experience.
Do I want to change? How does it work?

"Matt…
I’ve never had close relationships before. I never wanted them before. I don’t
know what I want now. I learned to… to like having you around, these past days.
But I don’t know how to talk about it or what to say. I just know that I want
to keep you alive."

He smiled at
her.

"If you
like having me around let me come with you. You’ve got training that I don’t
have for dealing with physical danger, but I don’t believe physical danger is the
only thing you’ll face in that mansion tonight. I need to be with you."

It was hard. A
dozen plans passed through her brain, ideas to trick him—or push him—into
leaving. But that was more of the stuff she felt guilty for. That's how she’d
treated Matt—and everyone else—before she had to confront it all.

"I’m going
in to talk to my father, Matt," she said.

He nodded.
"I wondered. I caught a glimpse when they were tying me up and the hood
was out of place. I’ve known I was in your old caretaker cottage for a while
now, and that made me wonder. There’s obviously something political going on,
and it’s pretty big time. That means H. Franklin is going to be somewhere near
the center of it."

"Pretty
much dead center."

They waited
long enough for the guards to not only pass but also disappear around the side
of the mansion. Then Chambers opened the cottage door to head out.

Fred Harris was
standing about ten feet from the door, patiently waiting for them. A thin smile
stretched across his lips, showing enough teeth to look menacing.

She didn’t give
any sign of being startled. She slid into a guard stance, with her fists up in
front of her, as if she had come out the door explicitly for the purpose of
fighting him.

Harris stood
calmly in the middle of the perfectly-trimmed grass. His hair was dark; his
clothes were dark. His eyes and his smile were darker still. His hair might
have been glued down, it was so sleek.

Seeing Alyssa
take a fighting stance, Matt acted immediately. He threw himself forward,
charging at Harris.

Alyssa shouted
for him to stop, but it was too late. And it was never any threat to the other
man. He simply stepped to the side, let Matt’s charge carry him right past, and
dropped his fist like a hammer onto Matt’s lower back as he passed, targeted
right at the kidney. With a cry, the reporter fell forward onto his face.

At once, Alyssa
ran at Harris, trying to land a punch to his side while he was turned to follow
through on Matt. But he was too fast. He blocked that and shot back two blows
of his own, both aimed at her gut.

Alyssa dodged
one, blocked the other, and landed a solid kick to Harris’s hip that sent him
backward across the lawn, shuffling to regain his balance. Alyssa stepped
around Matt’s supine form – she thought she could see his back rise and fall as
he breathed – to follow Harris.

The pause as
she came forward gave both a chance to prepare themselves more for the fight.
Alyssa bent her knees a bit deeper, and planted her feet a little wider,
settling into a more formal fighting stance. Harris sneered.

"Do you
want to bow to each other and touch gloves too?"

"That
would be a sign of mutual respect," she replied. "So, no."

Then she fired
off a lightning kick right at his groin.

Harris dodged
and punched at her gut. Alyssa blocked that and kicked again, a big, swooping
high kick aimed at his temple. He dodged back and came up against a stone
bench. He allowed himself to tumble deliberately backward over it, and then he
rolled back onto his feet. He rose next to a sculpted stone flower pot and
threw it straight at her head.

She ducked
then, distracted by the sound of Matt groaning, glanced over her shoulder. She
put her eyes back forward in time to block a punch aimed at her nose, then
punched hard at Harris’s solar plexus. She hit him hard and was rewarded with
the sound of all the air in his lungs being expelled.

Harris backed
up. He was trying to recover while dodging the broken flower pot on the ground.

"Almost
got you when you wanted to run over to your friend there," Harris taunted
her. He sidestepped, feinting with his fists.

"You
should never have brought him here," she replied. "There’s nothing he
can tell you about my plans. You could never have tortured anything out of
him."

He laughed.
"Who cares what he can tell me? You think I cared? I needed Matt because
we needed a lever on you."

Alyssa saw red
at that. It was just one more reminder that her father was at work in this
nightmare. Without a second thought, she faked another high kick. When Harris
began to duck, she bent low and brought in an uppercut that hit him right below
his eye.

Harris spat a
curse at her and backpedaled but before she could drive home the second and
third punches, he kicked her swiftly in the side. Alyssa felt the pain that
told her he may have gotten one of her ribs.

They both
stepped back slightly to recover from the blows. Both were panting, staring
angrily at each other. Alyssa had enough breath to say, "You think you can
make me lie down and take the fall like a good girl? Just hold Matt over my
head?"

Harris grinned.
"Once you find someone’s lever, everything else becomes easy. You, Reeder,
whoever."

Chambers
sneered back at him.

"Reeder’s
love life probably made it easy to find blackmail material on him. You’re going
to find it doesn’t work that way with me."

Harris barked
out a laugh.

"
Find
blackmail material on Reeder? Find? The man’s going to be President of the
United States. You think we’d leave that to chance? We
create
levers when
we need them. And we needed Lance Reeder’s compliance more than most. That’s
what your father pays me for. That’s what he’s been paying me for since you
were a cute little girl running off mad because your daddy wouldn’t pay
attention to you."

It happened in
a flash. She saw again the moment when she had bragged to her mother about her
first fight. She felt again the anger as her father sent her off. And she heard
again the words.

"Sarah,
this is my friend Lance."

Her head wanted
to explode with the horror of it all. Her father had deliberately created the
situation. He had deliberately put her poor alcoholic and neglected mother into
a situation to be taken advantage of by a worthless scumbag of a man. He had
done it all to create a lever over Reeder, so he could control him. And then he
had sold out his own daughter to put that leveraged man into the White House.

A
lightning-quick step carried her to Harris as, from behind her back, she
produced Vincent’s revolver. Chambers rammed it up against Harris’s nose so
hard it almost went up his nostril.

"Lance
Reeder once said something about my mother’s death and a car crash. He was
drunk. He seemed to realize right away that he shouldn’t have said it.

"Harris,
you tell me the truth right now or you die."

The gun in his
face changed everything.

"Look, it
was never my idea! You get this; you’re in the business, too! It was a job! I
did a job! He paid me to put those pills in her drink. I didn’t know how much
she drank! I didn’t know what was going to happen!"

Holding the
pistol in her right hand, Alyssa drove her left fist into Harris’s temple as
hard as she could, and watched his head flop over unconscious.

"Fourth
time’s the bloody charm, isn’t it?" She said, and rose to her feet.

Matt stumbled
groggily to his feet, but Alyssa barely waited for him. As he called her name,
she marched up to the rear door of her home. She was beyond calls to wait or to
listen. She was beyond anything but fury. It was one thing to realize that her
father had tried to frame her; it was another thing to realize that her father
was using Reeder's affair with her mother as blackmail material.

He had
deliberately paid someone to kill her mother. He had paid Fred Harris to slip
sleeping pills into her drink, with the inevitable result that their attempt to
drive home was deadly. She died in the resulting car crash, and her father had
hired it done.

Rage was an
insufficient word.

She drove her
foot into the heavy oak so hard it splintered next to the knob and swung open.

Behind her,
Matt struggled to drag Harris behind them, into the house, so the guards
wouldn’t find him unconscious on the lawn.

She stomped
through the kitchen. Matt called out, "No! Alyssa, wait!" But his
words were like a spider web trying to hold back a charging bull.

She stormed
into the grand hall of the Chambers’ mansion, pistol at her side, teeth bared.

Once inside,
she saw her father.

H. Franklin
Chambers reclined in a wine-colored leather wing chair, a tumbler of scotch in
one hand. His navy suit and solid maroon power tie weren't rumpled at all. He’d
obviously sat completely undisturbed through the fight outside.

"Darling.
Come in. I’ve been expecting you."

But Alyssa was
done with games – done forever. Whatever use she might have had for her father’s
decorum had evaporated when Harris spoke those words about Reeder and her
mother.

Matt Barr came
into the room just in time to see it – or rather, not see it. Just like her
fight with the federal agents in his house, it happened so fast he couldn’t
make out any of the details. Somehow, Alyssa was suddenly across the room,
grabbing her father by the tie, whirling him feet over head to land with a thud
on his back, air escaping from his lungs in a sound like a desperate cough.

Alyssa came
down with one knee on his midriff, applying painful pressure to the nerves and
organs right below the rib cage. She leveled the pistol right between
Franklin’s eyes, not even an inch away. She knew from personal experience that
from that perspective the gaping barrel would look wide enough to park a car
in.

She screamed.
"You killed my mother!"

He couldn’t
answer. He still hadn’t recovered from having the wind knocked out of him when
landing on his back. His eyes were filled with terror.

The scream had
been an explosion of fire but now she waited, ice cold, holding the gun on him.
When his breathing returned to normal, Alyssa said, "Talk. Spill it. I
want you to confess it before I blow your head off. You sold her and me
together to buy a President you could control. I get it now. Too bloody late,
but I get it. But that’s not enough. I want to hear you confess it. Then you
die."

Behind her, she
heard Matt speak again. "Alyssa, wait–"

The .44 in her
right hand, she held up her left hand, palm facing in the direction of the
voice. The unspoken command to stop was clear, and Matt clamped his mouth shut.
He thought he had seen the worst before. He thought he had seen the white-hot
rage this woman carried around with her. But until that moment, everything he’d
seen had been only a shadow.

There was good
cause to be afraid of her.

But Matt was
afraid
for
her.

Alyssa grabbed
her father’s tie and jerked his head up off the floor, then dropped it back
down. "Talk. Don’t make me hurt you more than I have to."

"You don’t
understand–"

She slapped him
before he could continue. "I don’t? I understand you killed her!"

"She did
that to herself with rum."

She tightened
her finger on the trigger. Her memory flashed back to the scene in Wheeler’s
office, where she had done the same thing just to scare him.

Everything was
different now. She would be pulling the trigger for good this time. The only
question was when.

"You're
going back to that lie you've been telling me since childhood? That she died of
a stroke from drinking too much? Takes a lot of political muscle to keep a
cover-up like that going for a lifetime, doesn't it? But you had it. And it
gave you leverage over Reeder, too."

"You knew
Mom was alcoholic. You knew she was lonely – you bloody well ought to, since
it’s your fault. So you introduced her to a man who liked to take advantage of
situations like that, then you sat back to wait for your blackmail material.
And when it wasn’t happening fast enough, you hired my friend Harris to speed
things along. All of that, and you try to tell me she did it to herself?"

Her father
coughed again, and said, "OK, OK! Yes, I set her up to fall for Reeder.
Yes, I knew she drank too much and wasn’t stable. But she and Lance were just
supposed to get a DUI together! That would have been enough. She wasn’t
supposed to die. That wasn’t my plan."

"I don’t
care if it was your plan. It was your fault."

He shook his
head without saying a word.

"And
framing me for assassinating West? I suppose that wasn’t your fault
either?"

"You’re a
Chambers! You would have beaten the charge in court. You were never going to be
found guilty!

Alyssa scoffed.
"Even if I did beat the assassination charge in court, my whole life was
going to be ruined. You don’t go through a trial of the century like that, on
cable news 24/7, and expect to get your life back. And what about the rest of
my life? Even if the evidence was enough to be found not guilty of the
assassination, the evidence works the other way on all the charges that come
with a lifetime of being a thief. Which evidence the FBI has now, thanks to
you."

"You were
going to win, Alyssa. You were always going to win. You’re a Chambers. You’re
my daughter. Don’t you understand? I only took the risk because I believe in
you!"

Her eyes went
wide.

"Did you
just seriously try to turn my torture into flattery? Gunter Hauptmann’s corpse
in my lap was flattery? Because you believe in me?"

"I never
wanted Harris to do that! He was acting on his own when he realized you had
been in the office at the same time. He didn’t know you were there to be the
patsy, so he tried to kill you. That wasn’t my fault!"

"And
Pierce?"

Her father
froze, silent. The terror was back in his eyes.

"Are you
going to try to tell me that wasn’t your fault?"

"He knew I
had worked with Harris in the past! He could have given evidence tying me to
the shooter if Harris ever got caught. I had to give the order, I didn't have a
choice! He could have blown the whole thing wide open."

He tried to
shake his head – whether in denial or just fear of what she might do – but
could only move it slightly.

"Please…."

"You
ruined my life. You killed my friends. And you killed my mother with your
scheming for power. You die."

She cocked the
hammer back on Vincent’s revolver.

Her father
gasped and stammered.

"Alyssa…
no…."

"When I
was a girl, all I ever wanted was for you to love me, and you betrayed
me."

She adjusted
her finger on the trigger one last time, and then it hit her.

The moment
froze like a photograph.

"All I
ever wanted was for you to love me, and you betrayed me."

Her jaw dropped
open.

For the first
time, her eyes left her father and flashed to Matt.

And her
thoughts shattered into pieces and left the present, drawn like iron filings by
a magnet toward that moment when she had freed Matt from captivity.

♦

"I knew,
Alyssa. I’ve always known."

"What?"

"I saw you
there. I came out of the restroom and saw you fighting that other guy. I
recognized you clear as day. I saw you throw my laptop into the fire."

Chambers had
stopped untying to simply stare at him.

"I told
you once, Alyssa. I told you about it when you tricked me into telling you
about the Buchanan Club. It’s forgiven. Gone. White as snow."

She shook her
head slowly from side to side.

"I don’t
understand."

"It’s the
only way to ever get any peace when you’ve been wronged, Alyssa. It’s
forgiven."

She finished
untying him as she said, "Matt, I ruined your whole career. You could be
big time by now. You could be one of the celebrity reporters if I hadn’t done
what I did."

He nodded.

"It was a
terrible time for me. When I had that documentation in my hand, proving illegal
union contributions to a Senate campaign, I knew it was hot. It was the biggest
story I’d ever had. I was daydreaming of my own show on a cable news network…
bestselling political books… I wanted to be the new Bob Woodward, and I knew
that story could get me there."

"And then
the story was gone. Destroyed. My only copy of the evidence was burned in a
deliberate fire. And the person who did it was the center of my world – the
woman I dreamed of marrying."

Matt's words
echoed in her memory.

He said,
"All I ever wanted was for you to love me, and you betrayed me..."

They rang like
bells on Sunday, over and over.

"All I
ever wanted was for you to love me, and you betrayed me...

"I promise
you Alyssa. I paid for this lesson the very hard way. It’s gone. Forgiven.
White as snow. Everything you feel guilty about doing to me, you never have to
feel guilty anymore."

"It’s the
only way to ever get any peace when you’ve been wronged…."

♦

She stared at
Matt, to see tears streaming down his face.

She looked back
at her father, and the magnum revolver she was aiming at his face, and the
terrified eyes of a man who knew his murder would be justified.

She looked to
Matt, and Matt spoke.

"I love
you Alyssa. You’re a strong, principled woman with ironclad self-control, and I
love that about you."

She rose to her
feet, and as she did she could hear her mother’s voice. It whispered across the
years from their conversation about her first fight.

"Be
strong…. Don’t let anger rule you."

Matt was right.
She’d spent her whole life chasing the wrong idea of her mother’s last words.
In that moment, she understood something she had never known before about that
scene in the hospital. Dying, her mother had tried to repeat the same advice
she had given Alyssa at the age of ten. It wasn't supposed to have ended with
just, "Be strong." It was supposed to be, "Be strong, don't let
anger rule you."

Strong wasn't
winning fights with other people. Strong was winning the fight with herself.

Alyssa flipped
a switch on the side of the revolver, and its chamber dropped open. She tipped
it up, scattered the cartridges on the floor, and threw the gun aside.

She nodded at
Matt, then at the phone on the end table beside a chair.

"Call the
feds. Tell them we have the assassins."