Life of Secrets (3 page)

He stared
harder. “Don't do anything rash. If I got you into trouble, your father would
serve my butt cheeks at a soup kitchen and call it charity work. And even if
Wells is going to put the establishment out of power for a while, your father
will still find a way to be the kingmaker around here. Which would mean my
making him mad is not going to happen while I have a say in it. So forget I
said anything. I never should have in the first place.”

Alyssa smiled
at him. "Of course, George. I don't really care about politics
anyway."

He smiled at her,
said something about leaving before he got into more trouble, and waved goodbye
as he got into his Hyundai.

As soon as the
car rolled out of sight, she hurried back inside to her bedroom. She sat down
at the computer, tapped for the Internet and soon was browsing through old
newspaper articles about the Wells campaign.

Wells was a
former bookshop owner... blah
blah
blah
... not important... He hired a veteran campaign
manager... blah
blah
blah
,
not important either, but a bit hypocritical for someone supposedly so beyond
the system. She thought,
Hmm, this is interesting...
In addition to the
campaign manager, this Wells fellow had one campaign staffer named Fred Harris
who had been a private investigator.
Hmm… private investigator, gathering
fingerprints… maybe…

The internet
yielded his home address and left Alyssa sitting there trying to make a
decision.

She wondered,
Do
I really want to do this?

All her
thoughts of what might pose a challenge had previously had one thing in common:
they were all within the law. This, though... she was thinking about breaking
and entering.

Well, she
certainly knew where to find a good lawyer if she got caught.

Alyssa stood up
from the computer and changed clothes. She picked out a black turtleneck and
black jeans. She'd never really studied or thought about hiding and
concealment, but black seemed the obvious choice at night. She found socks and
gym shoes of the same color.

Dressed, she
stopped and thought again.
You're going to become a criminal. You're going
to leave the bounds of polite society. You're...

You're going
to do something even your father couldn't get done.

With that
thought, she padded down the hall and back down the steps, pausing for a moment
in the hallway until the butler wandered out of the way. Then she was out the
front door.

It was eleven
o'clock at night, and at this time of year the sun had only recently gone down.
She had six hours of night to get this done.

I'll just
drive over there,
she
thought.
If there's any risk of getting caught, I don't have to do anything.
If it looks too hard, I can just drive home.

She laughed to
herself as she eased into her Porsche. Aloud she said, "Ha! If it looks
hard, no way I'm leaving without that watch!" She put it in neutral to
roll backwards out of the drive without starting the engine where her father
might hear.

She parked
several blocks away from the scene of her intended crime and walked the rest of
the way.

Harris lived in
a two-story townhouse that spoke of middle class respectability in a city that
drove most of the middle class out to the suburbs. There was no such thing as a
front yard, just a front step leading up to the door from the sidewalk. She
strolled casually past, taking note of the light in the front window, and the
silhouettes of people talking behind the curtains.

She thought,
Not
just breaking and entering then. I'll be breaking and entering an occupied
house. I think I found my challenge.

She went around
the corner, entered the alley and then counted the houses until she reached the
back side of Harris’s place.

The back gate
was locked, but the wood fence was only six feet high. The former world-class
gymnast vaulted over that in less time than it would have taken her to go
through the normal way.

The back door
was locked, too. However, on the second floor there was a tall French window
that had curtains blowing through its open frame, and a tiny, narrow balcony
outside it.

And there was a
tree.

Alyssa grabbed
a low branch and swung up into the tree. From there it was easy to climb a
short distance and then hop onto the balcony.

That's when her
heart began to race.

Now it was
real. The window was open, and she was right in front of it. With two more
steps, she would be in violation of the law and on her way to breaking it even
further by stealing something. And not just anything, either. She was about to
steal something that would change the course of an election for U.S. Congress.

For a long
moment, Alyssa was frozen there on the balcony, not so much afraid as she was
awed by what she was doing.

Then she
stepped into the house.

Alyssa tiptoed
across the floor of the bedroom she found herself in. A fast but very thorough
search yielded no incriminating watch.

She listened
carefully at the door and heard only distant voices.  She stayed there,
ear pressed to the wood, for five minutes.  It stayed quiet so she opened
the door.

As it turned
out, the door opened onto a stairway landing. She could see down the stairs to
a brightly lit open entryway to the living room, from whence the voices came.

"...you've
won the campaign for me, after all. After tomorrow..."

Alyssa arched
her eyebrows. That must be Mr. Wells talking. And by the sound of it, she was
here none too soon.

She set her
foot on the first step, as gently as possible. It didn't creak, so she gave it
her full 109 pounds and tried the second one. Still no creak, but the sound of
the conversation in the living room was driving her heart rate wild. All it
would take would be for one of them to get the urge to go to the bathroom...

At the bottom
of the stairs, she found herself trapped. To step onto the landing would put
her in full view of the living room. Maybe the people in there wouldn't be
looking her way, but then, maybe they would. And given what would happen to her
cushy life if she got caught here, Alyssa wasn't inclined to leave that to
chance.

She stood
there, completely still, afraid even to breathe while she tried to think of a
way out. Finally, she sneaked back up the staircase.

But she only
went halfway.

There, she
stopped to slip off her sneakers. Holding them tightly, she jumped over the
railing and let herself fall the few feet down to the hardwood floor below. Her
stocking-clad feet made no sound when they hit, and the grace of her landing
made her proud.

"It’s
downstairs for safe keeping."

Well, that was
a convenient thing to overhear. Now all she had to do was find her way
downstairs.

Just to be
sure, she followed the hallway down to the kitchen. She rifled it as thoroughly
as she could without making noise but, again, no watch. She stopped to put her
shoes back on. Then she found the stairs to the basement on the far side of the
kitchen.

The basement
had two guest bedrooms. The watch was on a bookcase in one. Alyssa simply helped
herself to it and headed back upstairs. In the kitchen, she unlocked the back
door and casually let herself out, easing it shut behind her.

On the way back
to her car, it was all she could do not to shout to the moon and dance in the
street. Now
that
had been a challenge!

The following
day was hard on her nerves. Half of her wanted to tell every single person she
met, and the other half kept expecting the police to walk in on her at any
minute. Even when her friend Matt asked her why she was so perky all of a
sudden, she managed to keep her mouth shut.

That afternoon,
she walked into the office of the Lance Reeder for Congress Committee, overcame
the receptionist's resistance with an offhand mention of her father, and strode
blithely into George Pierce's office. She closed the door behind her and locked
it. Pierce had one phone pressed to his ear and his cell phone in his hand. He
was saying something about not having the slightest idea what the caller was
talking about.

In the course
of switching phones, he caught sight of her.

"Alyssa!
What are you doing here? Can it wait for a bit, I'm sort of in the middle of a
crisis. The noon TV news reported that the Wells campaign is claiming they had
a break in last night, and..."

"I
know."

It was
something about the way she said it. He peered at her, then said "I'll
call you back" into both phones simultaneously, and hung them up.

"What are
you talking about, Alyssa?"

With a Cheshire
grin, she passed over the watch. Pierce set it down very slowly, staring at her
the whole time. When he finally found his voice, it was only a whisper.

"What have
you done?"

"I got
that watch you wanted."

"But...
but..." His jaw hung open.

She just
grinned back.

"Alyssa,
have any of your history classes covered Watergate?"

She shrugged.
"Of course. The people involved in that got caught."

"And you
won't?"

"Definitely
not.
We
won't," she said pointedly.

"We? I had
nothing to do..."

"Well,
there are only two of us who know, Mr. Pierce, so not getting caught shouldn't
be hard."

They just
stared at each other for a long time. Finally Pierce said, "Why do I have
a suspicion that my little slip about 'do anything for that watch’ is going to
come back to haunt me?"

"A hundred
thousand bucks. Seems like a good idea if it's cash, completely untraceable.
For that, you get to keep the watch and its fingerprints."

He temporized.
"What do you want with a hundred thousand bucks? That's chump change for
you, Alyssa. You've probably got a hundred times that just sitting in a trust
fund your father's set up for you, let alone how much he has separately from
that."

"I don't
want a hundred thousand bucks of my father's money. I want a hundred thousand
dollars of
my
money.
Mine
. That
I
earned."

It had occurred
to her the night before: she was a criminal now. And it had thrilled her enough
to make her consider a career in it. If she went that way, it would be a good
idea to have some money that her father couldn't take away from her.

"Um, this
is a heavily regulated business, Alyssa. Political campaigns can't just write
secret checks without people knowing. Everything we spend has to be
reported."

"Pierce,
I've never paid much attention to politics, but I read the newspapers enough to
know that money moves around like stink through a screen door."

"I need
some time."

"To get
the money?"

"And to
think."

Pierce delayed,
but he did pay up. Alyssa didn’t really know what to do with the money, so she
bought a safe and put her ill-gotten gains in her third, unused, walk-in
closet.

Then, just to
be safe, she took one of her father's small sailboats out on the Atlantic and,
once she was far enough off shore that she couldn't see land, dumped a garbage
bag weighted with a cement brick over the side. In it was every piece of clothing
she had worn into Harris's house.

All of her
friends and family were stunned later that month when she turned her nose up at
Oxford or the Ivy League and announced her intention to go to college in
Washington, D.C, but when she explained that she'd developed an interest in
politics, her father gave a smug smile.

The following
January, when she and some of her new school friends went down to Capitol Hill
to watch the Congressional swearing in, none of the others understood why she
grinned so broadly when Lance Reeder took his oath.

Alyssa woke the
next morning to the sound of her cell phone ringing. Unlike most of the world,
she had the dumbest phone she could get her hands on. Too much of her life
depended on keeping secrets, and smart phones were designed to publicize
everything. She never put a contact list into the phone either. If some future
investigator ever got their hands on it, why give them a list of people to
interview?

So there was no
caller ID but then she gave her mobile number to almost no one, so there wasn't
much doubt the call was important enough to wake up for. She rubbed her eyes
and then grabbed the phone from its place on her bedside table.

"Hello."
She never gave her name when she picked up the phone.

"
What
did you get me into?
"

Her eyes
snapped fully open at the barely-articulate yelling. "Who is this?"

"It's your
patsy! How could you do it? How could you do it and not tell me what you were
doing?"

Once he stopped
shouting, she recognized the voice. It was her technician, Gunter Hauptmann.

"Gunter,
what are you talking about?"

"Don't
play stupid with me! And don't even
think
you can make me take the fall.
You picked the
wrong
guy for a patsy. I have electronic logs of every
conversation we had last night - in the van and on the radio. I can prove it
was you who went in there, and I can prove I never left the van, so I don't
know what you were thinking," and here his voice rose to a shout again,
"
but I am not taking the fall for you!
"

"Gunter,
what are you talking about?"

"
I'm
talking about the presidential candidate you shot last night!
"

Alyssa blinked.
Hard. "Say again?"

"I'm
talking about Rich West, dead with a .22 caliber bullet in his head! As in,
that .22 you told me you always pack when you B&E." B&E was short
for breaking and entering.

"Rich West
is dead?"

"What, as
if you only intended to wound him with a head shot? Chambers, how many times do
I have to tell you, I am not that dumb!"

Wheels began to
turn in her head. If Rich West was dead…
Yes, I'm a suspect. Big time. But…
those other people in the office…
And then her mind became fully
operational. Once awake, Alyssa Chambers was professional to the core.

"Gunter, I
promise you, this is not what it looks like. This line is not secure. No line
is secure enough for this. Meet me at Alpha."

When she worked
with someone, they always had pre-arranged meeting spots known only to them.
Telling Gunter "Meet me at Washington Harbor" would have drawn a
swarm of FBI agents to the scene, if she were being followed. But a code word
like "Alpha" gave him the same information, without telling an
eavesdropping outsider anything. She clicked off the phone, jumped out of bed
and hurried to the shower. She turned on her radio with the volume up loud
enough that she could hear it over the sound of running water.

She cleaned up
as quickly as she could, all the while listening to the news broadcast which
had pre-empted regular programming. She was lucky enough to catch it at the top
of the story.

"Richard
West," the announcer read, "all but assured his party's nomination
for the Presidency, was found dead in his campaign headquarters this morning,
apparently from a gunshot wound to the head. Federal agents are at the scene
but have not announced any suspects at this time. Implications of the
assassination are already being discussed by pundits. Congressman Mike Vincent,
one of West's top advisors, spoke with us a few minutes ago."

They cut to an
interview clip.

"Rich West
was a beacon of hope in a dark time. America needed him. With him gone... I
can't imagine who could take his place. This is a tragedy."

Unless the FBI
and Secret Service caught the real assassin very quickly, then they would come
up with her name. She lived a life of secrets, but this was no ordinary
circumstance. With the death of Rich West, everything was different. The rules
changed. People who would keep her name secret under other conditions would rat
her right out when she was suspected of assassinating a presidential candidate.
There was no doubt. She would definitely be on the run. The only question was
how quickly the feds would start chasing.

Chambers
climbed out of the shower and clicked the radio off. She dressed hurriedly,
opting against the business suit she would normally wear in daylight. She
didn't have nearly enough information to know what was going on, but one thing
she did know: there was a good chance today would involve running and hiding,
and those were better accomplished in pants than a skirt. On the other hand,
the authorities might be more likely to look askance at someone in black combat
fatigues today. She went with jeans and a t-shirt.

When her cell
phone rang for the second time that morning, Alyssa stared at it for two rings,
wondering whether to answer. Finally, she decided that if the FBI suspected her
already, they wouldn't bother calling. Heart thumping, she clicked the phone
on.

"Morning
Lyss
. Got time to give me a quick quote?"

She exhaled in
relief. It was Matt Barr.

Of course, that
brought with it a whole different reason for stress.

The sound of
his voice caused her to feel the same rush of emotion that it always did. The
primary feeling was guilt. She had betrayed him so many times and never told
him.

Theirs was a
strange friendship. Matt longed for her. For most of their lives it had been
impossible to miss. Alyssa, on the other hand, was desperate for Matt to never
figure out how bad she’d hurt him.

It had gotten
easier over the past year. For years, he had been a pest, asking her out
constantly, behaving jealously if a man so much as looked at her, and in
general making it really hard to be his friend.

But something
changed. He had finally stopped being quite so desperate. Alyssa suspected a
girlfriend and was glad of it.

None of which
changed the facts of their past. She had still set fire to his office once. She
had still shut down a prime source for his stories once. She still spent every
conversation with him hoping he never found out.

Matt had no
idea the drama that went on in Alyssa’s head when he called – every time he
called. He just went on talking.

"Everyone
even close to the business is going to get quoted. We need some academic
analysis from the always-quotable Professor Chambers."

It had occurred
to her, around her junior year of college, that she would need some visible
means of making money. Of course, her real career plan was to get paid for
political dirty tricks, but people would ask how she earned a living. She
needed a cover story.

She'd chosen
academia. It was an easy way to stay in Washington D.C., an easy way to explain
being around politics, and the hours left free time for late nights breaking
into campaign offices so now she taught political science at her old alma
mater. Unsurprisingly, the lure of the Chambers name to add to their faculty
had been more than enough to get her the job.

However, being
a professor was far from her mind at that moment. In response to Matt's
question, at first she just blinked and kept silent. Academic analysis was the
last thing on her mind, but Matt would have no idea she was worrying about
being a suspect in the assassination.

Whatever she
told Matt, the FBI would most likely be parsing it for clues when the story
went live online – if not before - so she wracked her brain trying to come up
with a quote that would sound good for Matt and throw the FBI off her track,
but it wasn't working. In the end, the best she could do was say something
about how the public would need to have a believable suspect quickly in order
to have confidence in the election that fall, but she knew that would do her no
good. Whoever the Secret Service came up with as a suspect, they would make the
case believable.

"Thanks
Lyss
, you're a gem. I owe you a drink at some undetermined
point in the future. But not any time soon. I'm not going to get any spare time
at all until the assassin is being dragged out of the lethal injection chamber.
My source on the West campaign was on the phone just before I called you.
Sounds like chaos over there – no surprise. Anyway, I've got to go. Take care."

She muttered
something boring by way of farewell then finished dressing. She left home with
a newspaper and a simple backpack to go with her casual clothes.

The drive to
the meeting place went quickly. On the surface, her mid-sized sedan looked quite
plain, but the engine under the hood had not come from the factory. The
souped
-up performance meant she had little trouble
outpacing the other cars on the road.

Alyssa Chambers
was a spy. Not one who worked for the CIA or any government agency, though. No,
she worked for the people who wanted to shape the government. From the age of
18 on, Alyssa had worked in the part of politics journalists never covered.
Some people called them plumbers, some called them dirty tricks men. Some
simply considered them private investigators. When one candidate wanted to know
what his opponent's next ad would say, he hired people like Chambers. When a
party wanted proof that their opponent had cheated on his wife, Alyssa or
someone like her got the call.

Obviously, it was
a risky business, and the people who worked in it eventually either became
paranoid or got out of the business. Or died. Sometimes two of the three.
Sometimes all of the above. Alyssa had only done the first.

Quite simply,
she trusted no one. Even the people she worked with were considered potential
threats. In some ways, especially them. For that reason, she only hired people
with a shady background. Everyone she worked with had at least one secret he
didn't want the police or his family to discover, and it was always a secret
Alyssa knew. That way, if any of them ever turned against her, she had
something to hold over their heads.

Another part of
being paranoid was always being prepared for emergencies. In a safe deposit box
she had a million dollars in cash, several sets of falsified driver's licenses,
passports, credit cards, and documentation of every campaign or organization
that had ever hired her. The last item was for blackmail purposes, if she ever
needed it.

Alyssa finagled
a parking place, made her way to the harbor through the light morning crowd,
and took a seat on a bench. She unfolded a newspaper she'd brought from home
and to all appearances began to read. But in reality, her eyes never did more
than scan the headlines; most of the time they were scanning the street,
looking for Gunter or for a sign that she was being followed.

The crowd was
nothing compared to what it would be at lunchtime or during the evening, but
there were enough people that a tail could have hidden among them. Chambers
harbored no illusions about her chances if she were followed.

Federal agents
were experts at surveillance. If they set out to follow her, she would be hard
pressed to lose them without help and would most likely never know they were
there. Her hope was that the investigation hadn't progressed far enough to make
her a suspect yet. However, even if that were true, that state of affairs
wouldn't last long.

If there were
any FBI agents about, she never caught sight of them, but she did see Gunter
Hauptmann cautiously approaching her position. She spotted him across the
courtyard, trying to watch her without being obvious. His eyes scanned across
the crowd much as hers did, searching just as futilely for whoever might be
watching. When he realized Chambers had noticed him, he came carefully over.

Easing his tall
frame down onto the bench, Hauptmann said, barely above a whisper, "I want
to know what’s going on."

"So do I,
Gunter, so do I."

"Explain
why I should believe that. It looks for all the world like you went in there
and killed West without telling me last night."

"Gunter,
that's why you should believe me. You know me better than that. If I were going
to assassinate someone, would you still be alive to be a witness?"

"Maybe. If
you wanted someone else to set up as a suspect."

"I'd make
sure he didn't know who the real killer was. You know it."

Hauptmann
nodded.

"OK, for
now, it's just easier to believe you but don't think I'm firmly convinced. So
what did happen, then? Rich West and a third person were in there at the same
time as you, and the third person killed him?"

"There
were two other people in there. At least two."

Gunter asked,
"Can you ID either of them?"

"No,"
Chambers replied. "My Intel said no one else would be in there, so I
didn’t study any ID files."

She sat still
for a long moment. Finally she said, "I need to talk to the guy who hired
me."

"If he'll
talk to you at all," Gunter replied. "From where I sit, either he set
you up on the timing of that run, or he's convinced you did it. Either way, he's
not likely to talk to you."