The executive jet’s private sleeping quarters included a full length mirror, and Alyssa looked at herself in it and grinned. Just for fun she whispered to herself, “Back in black.”
She strode out of the room and back to her chair. She reclined the back, then slung her boots up onto the table between her and Wheeler. She put her hands behind her head and grinned at him.
“Alright, Mr. Wheeler. Let’s talk business.”
He gave her a wry smirk, amused at the improvement in her attitude, then slid over a manila envelope.
As Alyssa opened it, Wheeler said, “That’s the FBI’s file on Moira LeBlanc. And now, I want to hear everything you know about her. Pull out that surveillance jammer I gave you and turn it on if you’re still paranoid about being overheard. But you’re holding a pardon now. Nothing you might confess matters anyway. I need to know everything you knew about Moira LeBlanc before she escaped from Federal custody.”
He finished, “Because your mission is to bring her back.”
Alyssa met his eyes, staring for a moment. Then, without replying, she opened the fat envelope.
She found a photo of a girl with long brown hair and a slender frame. She might have been a younger, lighter-haired version of Alyssa, except that the latter could not imagine herself having ever looked that bright and innocent. She must have done something with her hair since the picture was taken because when Alyssa met her, it was short and spikey.
Moira was suspected of innumerable counts of electronic theft and other computer crimes. The file included known associates, aliases, last known address in Washington D.C., and other data about the young hacker.
Finally speaking, Alyssa recounted her entire relationship with Moira, beginning with the fight and ending with her disappearance from the server closet. She included the fact that Moira tempted Alyssa into helping with her scheme with the prospect of helping Mike Vincent.
Wheeler laughed. “Help Mike Vincent? The woman is personally responsible for the fact that the President can’t sign Vincent’s privacy bill.”
Alyssa lifted an eyebrow. “That’s a story I want to hear.”
Wheeler shrugged. “You remember working for me during the campaign.”
Alyssa nodded. Her job had been two-fold. The break-in at West HQ had been only the last half of the job. The first half had been suppressing a whole slew of other secrets. Wheeler’s candidate for President had not exactly led a clean life. Keeping all that from finding its way into the media had been Alyssa’s job.
She had bribed former lovers, destroyed the official record of a marijuana arrest, and in general kept the future President’s secrets from coming to light.
“LeBlanc is… well, she’s living proof of the kind of thing you were paid to cover up for us. I didn’t know about her when we were paying you. Some people have discovered her. Now that she’s out, they’ll use her to put the President in a position where he can’t get involved in Vincent’s race.”
Alyssa asked, “Blackmailing him?”
Wheeler nodded.
She sought clarification. “Blackmailing the President of the United States?”
Wheeler fidgeted in his chair as he continued. “Obviously, this is extremely politically sensitive. The Secret Service is looking for LeBlanc, but they don’t know the whole story. I can’t afford to have them get there first.”
Wheeler paused for a long time before he said, “Chambers, I’ve got to tell you something because it’ll improve your chances if you’re fully informed. But this is absolutely black. You cannot breathe a word.”
She gave him a stare.
After waiting long enough to know she wasn’t happy about that, she said, “You know me. You’ve worked with me before. I never blab. Never.”
Wheeler nodded and said, “I know, but this is serious enough to make it worth reminding you. All the evidence we’ve found so far suggests that this might be coming from within the government itself.”
Alyssa blinked and then said, “Come again? Like a coup?”
He replied, “Or just an attempt by certain agencies to make sure their Commander in Chief chooses the path they want. The email address from which the demands came was spoofed and scrambled. They had faked the IP address that it came from as well, but they left a few electronic signatures behind. We were able to identify the hacker they hired to do that.
“He does a lot of contract work for the NSA and other agencies within the intelligence community. And agencies like that love Doyle Cobalt’s Genetic Probable Cause Bill. They love it. And since the blackmail demands would lead to passing that…”
Wheeler shrugged and finished. “Maybe we’re wrong, and it’s got nothing to do with any Federal agency. Or maybe we’re right. Either way, we absolutely must control how the facts are entered into the public record. That’s where the infamous Alyssa Chambers comes in. I need you to find Moira before anyone else does so we can keep this out of official documents. I’m hiring you so you can bring her to me first. After I talk to her, then the FBI can be as involved as they want.”
“Is Moira working with the blackmailers or are they just using her?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to know but don’t let that get in the way of the mission. Priority number one is bringing her to me.”
Alyssa was silent for a long time. She looked at Moira’s file photo – a mug shot from a previous arrest. She remembered how she looked on the ground, being beaten nearly to death by a drug gang. She remembered her last look at the girl – getting ready to upload data from a smuggled smartphone – before she had disappeared.
She wasn’t quite sure how this mission fit into her worldview. Alyssa was still unsettled by the proximity in time between her fumbling attempt at prayer and a genuine, honest-to-goodness Presidential pardon. Was saving a womanizing jerk from being blackmailed over his affairs really a good use of a…
Was it a miracle?
If it was, it was a miracle with a string attached. She had to do this, or the pardon went poof, like Cinderella’s carriage.
For a few moments in prison – before she discovered that it had all been part of an escape attempt – Alyssa almost liked Moira. Now, she was being sent to capture her.
“I’m not a bounty hunter,” she said aloud. “I’m a thief. I was a thief. I know how to capture data, not people.”
“LeBlanc’s no fighter,” Wheeler replied. “She sits behind computer screens and does basically what you did: steal data. If you get into her physical presence and hold a gun on her, it’ll be game over.”
Alyssa challenged him: “What do you know about holding guns on people?”
Wheeler gave her a hard stare and said, “I know you know how to do it. I’ve never forgotten it.”
She nodded. Once again, guilty as charged. It was a tiresome feeling.
She didn’t want to feel guilty anymore.
“I’ll do this, Wheeler. I’ll do it because that’s what the pardon lists as a condition, and the pardon is my only way out of prison. You have no idea how bad prison feels. But then I’m gone. I’m going to do what I should have done when I was first framed for killing West. I’ll disappear so hard people will have a hard time proving I ever existed, and I’ll spend the rest of my life on a beach in the South Pacific.”
She finished, “This one last time. Then I’m done. I’m out. No more saving corrupt jerks from their own perversions. No more helping one power-grubbing politician blackmail another. Done.”
She watched Wheeler’s face go through a number of expressions. He was obviously offended by her diatribe, but then there came a visage that could have won the World Series of Poker: no expression at all.
When he finally spoke, it was only two words: “Fair enough.”
CHAPTER 13
Once she got off of Wheeler’s executive jet, Alyssa Chambers was back in Washington D.C., a place she knew better than she knew her own name. The transition to this from prison was like having a shark stranded on the beach and then lettin
g it back into the ocean. She was home, she was in her element, and she was extremely dangerous here.
Being on the outside again had many virtues. There was the unlimited exposure to fresh air, for one thing. Also, she no longer had to be counted at all hours of the day and night. The smell of the real world was infinitely better than the smell of prison. She no longer needed to constantly be alert for threats to her survival.
And then, there was money.
Alyssa Chambers had been born rich. She also earned a great deal of money on her own from her past criminal activities. When the Feds locked her up, they froze or seized a lot of her assets. But not all of them. Not even close. She had too many offshore accounts, under too many fake identities, for the FBI to get them all.
Being out of prison, she was rich again.
One of her safe deposit boxes had yielded a fake drivers’ license and credit cards in the name of Naomi Black. Using that, she soon had a rental car.
That gave her options. On the one hand, Wheeler’s electronic trace data on the blackmail email pointed at this hacker in Arlington. She could run that location down. Maybe he’d be right about this coming from a cabal within the intelligence community; maybe she’d run into the CIA if she did that. She had crossed their path before, and the reunion might be entertaining.
Based on her brief acquaintance with Moira, Alyssa had some other ideas about how to look for her.
She sat in her rented Mercedes, enjoying the leather seats and stereo. None of her own music was available to her yet, but a lifetime of memory put the Washington, D.C. classical music station easily within her reach. She dialed that in and sat listening to Schubert while she thought about the two different pathways forward.
Eventually, she pulled away from the rental car business. She had decided to trust Wheeler.
***
Alyssa was in an office building just across the Key Bridge from D.C. The cheap brown carpet and matching walls were presentable to the public but far from expensive. The door of her target office was made of thin laminate and had the name on a plastic plate with a wood-grain pattern. Signs on the ground floor directed her to the fourth floor for Samson Computer Repair and Customization, and she’d found the office easily enough.
She hated standing in the open hallway. It felt horribly exposed. Standing in a public hallway, wearing a night vision headset, fiddling with their lock, would look about as incriminating as possible to anyone who happened to enter. And although the hour was late, it was not so late that an obsessive business owner couldn’t return to his shop.
Driven by the exposure, she hurriedly got ready to pick the lock and get inside. The lock picking tools Wheeler provided included a lock pick gun and several torsion wrenches.
Only long experience allowed her to see the danger before she used them.
Near the base of the door, about a foot off the ground, was an almost-invisible thin wire. It wouldn’t have been visible at all except that the light amplification headset also amplified the tiny bit of light being reflected by the wire.
Alyssa knelt to examine the wire. It went through tiny holes in the wall on either side of the door. There was no way to tell what was on the other side without getting in. But it would be possible to push the door open without touching the wire. It was clearly placed for someone to trip over, not to go off when the door opened.
Having detected the trap, it would be easy enough to avoid. But it set Alyssa on edge. This place was dangerous. Someone set it up expecting a search.
Grimly, she clenched her teeth and went to work. The gun got the pins inside the lock momentarily out of place. The torsion wrench then turned the lock as a key would.
She eased the door open a millimeter at a time, watching the narrow gap as it was exposed, alert for any further tripwires or other dangers. Assuming that, if there were more traps, they would be set low to increase the odds of walking into them, she knelt down to look. She held her face barely inches from the cut rate, dark-brown wood-grain door, her nose and the night vision monocle almost touching it.
Opening the door so slowly, leaving so tiny an open gap, concentrated the airflow out of the room.
Having her nose so close to that concentrated air, Alyssa smelled something.
A faint hint of motor oil lingered on the breeze.
There was no good reason for a computer repair shop to have enough motor oil in the office to make a smell.
On the other hand, some brands of plastic explosive carried an aroma like motor oil.
Alyssa didn’t bother to close the door again. She just ran. She sprinted like an Olympian back toward the staircase she’d used to reach this floor.
It was a trap. There was a reason Wheeler’s people had so easily discovered this place. It was designed to throw off their counterattack on the blackmailers.
She made it almost all the way down the first flight of stairs before the explosion knocked her off her feet. She fell the rest of the way down to the third floor landing. She sat there for a moment shaking her head and catching her breath as alarms began to sound.
Alyssa wobbled back to her feet. She was bruised by the fall but nothing seemed broken. She resumed her dash out of the building. Getting caught here when the fire department responded to the alarm didn’t seem quite as deadly as getting caught in that trapped office, but it would pretty much put an end to Wheeler’s orders that she hurry.
She found her way back to her rented car and sped away as quickly as possible. Wheeler’s first clue had been worse than useless. Time to give her own ideas a shot.
Alyssa had read Moira’s emails. She had picked out the names of individual senders.
She knew who Moira’s friends on the outside were.
With the smartphone Wheeler had given her, she was soon on her way to the northern Virginia residence of one Zack Ravenberg, the friend who had smuggled Moira’s phone into prison.
***
Luther stood on the loading dock at the rear of the CDMS building, impatiently waiting for his crew to get back from snatching the reporter. His mind was locked in a negative feedback loop. He went over and over how his simple plan to force the President’s hand by holding Moira LeBlanc over his head had gone so wrong.
When Moira LeBlanc hacked Cobalt Data Mining Systems, her great act of rebellion was to steal Doyle Cobalt’s personal cell phone number and post it online. It obviously wasn’t the severity of her crime that got her caught. It was the fact that CDMS made a product that the Federal law enforcement community loved.
The ability to look at genetic data and develop probabilities on how likely someone was to be a criminal was hugely valuable to them. Combined with the NSA’s email and phone surveillance program, CDMS gave them the ability to pick and choose what citizens they needed to spy on.
Analysis might indicate that a person with one particular gene was 30% more likely to break the law. Then, everyone the government could find who had that gene could be added to the watch list. Their emails would all be read. Their phone calls would all be recorded.
The FBI, the NSA, and the rest of the Federal law enforcement community salivated over the chance to put the system into practice. They predicted that successful prosecutions would skyrocket.
So when the young hacker came snooping around their pet project, they were not amused. Moira was swiftly caught and sent to prison.
There, the government took a DNA swab and stored the data in case the young hacker was ever accused of a new crime.
Because Cobalt Data Mining Systems had the Federal government contract to store the electronic version of all genetic data they acquired, Moira’s genome was stored at the CDMS facility in Northern Virginia.
Because CDMS was owned and operated by people with questionable ethics, Luther Cobalt decided to have a look at the data of the person who had stolen his brother’s old cell phone number.
That changed everything.
Shortly after studying Moira’s DNA, Luther Cobalt took a job as a Correcti
onal Officer at FCI Rocky. He blazed through the three-week CO course at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, where he shattered the stereotype that BOP stood not for Bureau of Prisons, but Belly Over Pants.
It should have been easy. Moira gets a couple bones broken in a prison gang fight, she goes to the hospital where the security’s lighter, and then boom: Luther and his brother could show the world evidence of the President’s immorality. That would make it worthless if he endorsed Vincent; the man would be toxic.
From there, pass the Genetic Probable Cause Bill, start gathering up DNA data about people, start testing for the “criminal gene,” and everything’s good. Crime goes down, his brother’s popularity goes up, and Luther Cobalt is much more than just a CIA Front Corporation that gets the call for the really dirty jobs. Luther Cobalt goes inside — deep inside.
Instead, he’d had to hire a ton of muscle to chase after this idiot reporter. And to make matters worse, the White House was now reacting to the blackmail. He had known it would happen, but it did increase the difficulty of the situation.
He had used that hacker to mask his email address very deliberately. The guy often took consulting work for the NSA. It would plant a false flag for the White House to make them believe the blackmail demand was coming from intelligence agencies, rather than from Doyle Cobalt.
But of course, since he picked the hacker, he knew exactly where they would look first. And he left them a nice little surprise. He’d gotten a little electronic notice when someone set the bomb off. Some Secret Service agents were probably dead now.
Normally, that would have amused Luther, but he didn’t like having to fight a two front war. Now he had to deal with the White House’s response to his blackmail threat and the reporter at the same time.
Born with Secrets: A Political Thriller Page 10