He looked as perfect as he always did. To judge by his hair, he hadn’t even done anything as strenuous as play golf.
“I was outside in the hall,” the Congressman said. “They wouldn’t let me in here after the President came in. Hi, Alyssa. Good to see you again.”
She straightened up and smiled at Vincent. She didn’t really know what to say. She didn’t know what to say about anything. It was real. Matt was right. Congressman Vincent was right. There was a force for good in the world. There was a God. And she had encountered Him. Nothing seemed the same anymore.
When she didn’t speak, Vincent continued, “I can’t wait to tell my campaign manager. She didn’t believe me when I said the President was becoming a better man.”
Matt asked, “Did you know about this?”
The Congressman replied, “That the President had a daughter? No. But Wheeler here has been coming to me for advice lately. He kept asking me what Bible verses I might share with a man who regretted his past. Fortunately, the book’s full of those.”
Wheeler said, “I didn’t know about the daughter at first either. Neither did the President. He just started being a lot moodier in private and asking me if I thought there was any way he could ever redeem himself after all the messing around in his youth. I talked to Vincent about it because that’s his reputation: the official Mister Clean of Capitol Hill.”
Vincent gave him a lopsided grin. “High praise, my friend.”
Wheeler went on, “Anyway, I got an anonymous message to my personal email. It was a threat to tell the media that the President had an illegitimate daughter and that he had been a deadbeat dad her whole life. There were some blackmail demands about signing the Genetic Probable Cause Bill, and backing away from endorsing Mike in his primary. There was also a big file attachment. It was a DNA test result showing the President as the genetic father of an eighteen-year-old girl named Moira LeBlanc. They claimed to have her in captivity.
“That’s when the President and I had a big sit down. I wanted to talk about ways to cover it up, but he wouldn’t even listen to me. All he wanted was to find her and get her free if they really were holding her. We tracked her through the Federal court system to FCI Rocky, where, obviously, we found that she had just ‘escaped.’”
Wheeler chuckled. “Well, when anyone in politics says FCI Rocky, the next words out of their mouth are always, ‘Is Alyssa Chambers still there?’ So, Alyssa, pardoning you and getting your help was the President’s idea. You should thank him.”
Alyssa said, “I thought you wanted me to find her because she was one more of his affairs.”
Wheeler nodded and replied, “I tried to make it sound like that. We didn’t want anyone to learn the truth before we had her under our protection.”
He turned to Vincent and added, “Also, Mike, that’s why I missed your appointment with The Man. We had just talked about that email, and I was on the plane to get her out of jail. I was concerned about the political fallout to the President, of course. That’s my job. But he didn’t care about any of that. He just wanted to meet her. He wanted to…. Well, you heard him.”
Congressman Vincent said, “With the blackmail demands to stay out of my race and sign the Genetic Probable Cause Bill, you had to wonder about Doyle from the beginning.”
He paused, then added, “Well, maybe not Doyle, but certainly his brother.”
Wheeler said, “The Secret Service is already hauling Doyle in. One way or another, he’s about to lose the primary. We’ll know soon enough whether he was involved or just a vehicle for Luther’s scheme.
“But yeah, obviously we wondered about them from the beginning. Cobalt’s company stores people’s genetic data. It’s why he owns this server farm that we’re in. Cobalt Data Mining Systems has the federal contact for data storage. It’s not just the FBI that uses it. It’s the entire federal government. And of course, the Secret Service keeps a record of the President’s DNA.
“So when we started investigating, it seemed like a definite possibility that their computer storage systems tumbled to the match. Or more likely, they specifically looked for it.”
He concluded, “But the Genetic Probable Cause Bill is very popular in certain law enforcement, intelligence gathering, and national security circles. The Cobalt brothers left a lot of false flags to make this look like it came from within one of those agencies. We really thought that was the problem for a while. It could just as easily have been a conspiracy from some bad apples in those agencies. We didn’t know. So we sent in Chambers.”
Vincent slipped back into the role of a Member of Congress. Speaking to Wheeler in his capacity as a top aid to the President, he said, “That bill. It’s way worse than I thought. I didn’t like it when it was just about giving everyone and their dog a DNA test, then placing everyone with suspicious genes under surveillance. But Luther had way bigger plans than that. He was figuring on all kinds of genes, not just ones for criminal activity. He was planning to sell the data: who’s an alcoholic, who’s a risk-taker, who’s a risk to cheat on their wife… everything. You guys can’t sign it.”
Wheeler sniffed. “Don’t worry. I’ve just been through a miserable couple of days dealing with the consequences of genetic information being too well-known. The President will never sign it after this. But it’s not just about the President. We all, every one of us, have the right to deal with our flaws in our own way. No one wants the government knowing all of our faults from birth. No one wants the government predicting our sins before we commit them. There’s not a person in America who wouldn’t be hurt by this bill.
“Everybody’s born with secrets.”
EPILOGUE
The great hall of Chambers Estate stretched longer than it was wide. A vast floor-to-ceiling plate glass window looked out over the landscaped front lawn. There, a setting sun cast long shadows from hedges and fountains.
Behind that window, Alyssa Chambers stood staring into the evening. She wore an expensive charcoal skirt suit and tugged at it incessantly. Not nearly as comfortable as fatigues, but necessary.
The hardwood floor gleamed in the dim light of sunset, and the burgundy leather furniture eagerly awaited guests. They would begin to arrive in half an hour or so.
She looked over her shoulder in time to see Matt Barr limp into the room, walking with a cane. His leg was healing but not fast enough for him. Tonight, he wore a navy double-breasted suit. Alyssa had made it known that his preference for ink-stained shirts and frayed cuffs was going to have to change.
He came up beside her. Together they stood there, watching the sun set.
The President’s announcement had begun the slow work of detoxifying her reputation. Matt’s series of articles on Alyssa had helped, too. They covered her role in helping the President meet his daughter, her life in prison, and more.
Slowly, the Chambers name was re-acquiring some of the luster that once made it a beacon of influence in American politics.
As the holder of a pardon from the President of the United States, Alyssa was an innocent woman. Every consequence of her crimes was legally wiped out. All the assets that had been frozen while she was on trial and in prison were now free and clear again.
What’s more, she was pardoned while her father was still a felon. That made Alyssa the only legal Director of the Chambers Family Trust, which was the legal owner of the Estate, both yachts, three jets, and a vast ocean of cash.
Tonight was her coming out party, of sorts. It was her return to the world of politics. She was holding a fundraiser for the Mike Vincent for Senate campaign. With both Cobalts in prison – one minimum security, the other maximum – the primary had turned into a walk. Vincent was the party nominee now. Mike was riding a wave of popularity after the President exaggerated his role in helping rescue Moira, and no one expected him to lose his race for Senate.
Of course, that just made people who played politics even more eager to donate money, the better to be on the winning side. All of which made
it a perfect opportunity for Alyssa’s first try at a new role.
For generations, people who cared about politics had been coming to fundraisers at Chambers Estate. But this would be the first time they had come when it was the youngest Chambers throwing the party.
To Matt, she said, “It’s going to be different. Not like I used to be. Not like my father was.”
He replied, “You were never like your father.”
Together, they watched the sun sink behind the mountains as the first limousine pulled into the front drive of Chambers Estate. An elderly man in a tuxedo got out and was escorted toward the front door as the valet parked his car.
“I am not a criminal anymore,” she said. “I don’t know what I am yet, but I know what I’m not. I don’t believe Cobalt — either of them. I don’t believe in their Genetic Probable Cause Bill.
“It’s more than DNA that makes us who we are. Maybe people are born with secrets, but no one has to live with them.”
Finis
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Also by Bowen Greenwood
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Acknowledgements
Thank you God, thank you Stephanie, thank you Mom. Thank you Sherrie Dolby-Arnoldy, you are an amazing editor. If anyone reading this is also a writer, I recommend her work very highly. Thanks also to President Ford, whose language pardoning President Nixon I used for Alyssa’s pardon.
Born with Secrets: A Political Thriller Page 16