Life of Secrets Page 5
The first step was to change her appearance. She went through three hair salons before she could find a stylist who would take her as a walk-in. There, she met a woman who called herself Wynd and who, like hairstylists everywhere, insisted on talking as she worked.
"My real name's Jennifer," she droned on, nodding at her license taped to the wall. "But everybody born in the seventies got that name. It's totally boring. So I call myself Wynd because I like the wind, ya know? Only with a Y, for power to the sisters everywhere."
The stylist couldn't possibly be as young as she acted and dressed. She wore a black PVC miniskirt and black tank top with a studded leather belt. Her ears were pierced about five times each. Her hair was a bright pink, and she wore far too much blush that almost matched her hair.
Alyssa nodded absent-mindedly in response to the prattle, flinching slightly as the scissors brushed her ear. Silently, she wished for her normal stylist but as of now her normal haunts were off-limits.
"You're sure you don't want to do something a little more fun?" Wynd asked, snipping a bit more. "You'd look awesome in a crew cut or maybe something spiky and a bit more punk."
Chambers was about to shake her head when she remembered the proximity of the scissors.
"Nope, just shoulder-length is fine."
Quite a sacrifice, actually, she thought, wistfully, watching locks of her flowing black hair fall to the ground, but shorter hair would help with her disguise. So would the temporary dye job she was getting.
"I understand about the blonde thing, ya know? I mean, everybody's got to try being a blonde once. But with your eyes, you would look so awesome with green hair. I mean, we could make you seriously cool."
"I think I'm a bit too old to be quite that cool," Alyssa said.
A while later, Chambers was riding the Metro to a shopping mall. First, she found a one-hour optician, where she had an exam and got a pair of contact lenses. Tinted, they made her green eyes a dark brown.
Her next stop was at a women's clothing store where she purchased new slacks, a few blouses, and one suit. She couldn't get proper fatigues, of course, but cargo pants and t-shirts were good enough.
After riding the train back to the touristy area of Washington, she found a hotel to use as a base of operations. Her fake driver license and new appearance, combined with a ready supply of cash, made booking a room easy. She checked into the kind of place in which a Chambers was supposed to stay and flopped down on the Egyptian-cotton sheets.
She sighed heavily and then asked the ceiling, "OK, now what?"
With her new looks, she'd bought herself time. With her reserve of cash and falsified credit cards, she'd probably bought an indefinite amount of time. The smart thing would be to rent a boat, sail to someplace in Latin America that didn't extradite, and start a new life.
But she had spent her whole life looking for ways to prove herself. Strong people seek out challenges, they don't run from them. There would never be a challenge bigger than this. Never. The machinery that the FBI and Secret Service would throw into this investigation would be mightier than anything ever seen before. And the plot to kill West had to have come from people with incalculable resources to draw on. To defeat both groups, and come out with the truth and her name clean... well, there could be no greater challenge in her life.
Alyssa would not walk away from that. Instead, she decided to study the situation.
She thought of calling Matt. He was an up-and-coming political reporter; he had to be in the thick of this story. He had to know something about what the federal agents were up to.
But then, depending on how fast the FBI was moving, might he already have heard she was a suspect? How would that conversation go?
If Matt hadn't already heard terrible things about her past, he soon would. And Alyssa couldn't stand the thought of trying to explain to him about that fire she'd caused – the story she'd burnt up. Just when he was finally turning into a decent guy, if he learned that...
She decided that, if she didn’t like the call, she could just hang up and throw her phone away. She should have done that already. Better to get one last use out of it. She placed the call.
Barr picked up instantly. He always did when he saw her number.
“Hey Lyss, how’s it going? You going to hit the talking head shows today? They’re all assassination all day. They’re going to need every guest they can get.”
In the guise of “Professor Chambers, Georgetown University Political Scientist,” Alyssa had made a few appearances there. But the concept of doing it today was darkly hilarious.
“Thinking about it,” she replied. “How much can you tell me about the investigation?”
“Not much. I’m pretty much exclusively covering the politics of it, not the investigation. About to finish up a story about how the guys at the West campaign are taking this. I’m praying for ‘em; they’re really broken up. Writing about the same campaigns every day, you get to know people. I have friends over there who are dealing with the death of someone they thought of as a hero and a brother. God help them.”
Based on Matt’s casual conversation, he hadn’t heard anything about the FBI suspecting her yet, which was good. She said goodbye, hung up, and powered her phone completely down. She threw it in the hotel room trash can.
He did talk about praying more and more lately. The call gave her one more reason to suspect that the change in Matt had to do with his father the minister. But she couldn’t get around the fact that she couldn’t stand Matt’s dad, whereas Matt himself had become more likeable.
One more time, she filed her questions about her friend away. She could sort all that out after she was out of danger. She flipped on the TV to a news program.
On the screen, she saw her old pal Mike Vincent being interviewed on one of the head talk shows.
"Rich could have changed things," he said. "Right now, we've got this situation in American politics where far too many politicians promise whatever is popular when they're running and then do whatever the establishment says when they get to Washington. Rich West was different. He could have made our politics great again. That's why I put my own life on hold to help his campaign. I believed in him. He was a leader to me. More than that, he was a friend."
The anchor asked, "Senator Lance Reeder was Senator West's choice for Vice President on his ticket. Do you think Senator Reeder will become the top of the ticket now?"
On the screen, Vincent replied with a shrug.
"It's too early for me to think about that. I lost my best friend. I just don't know."
Chambers flipped through other channels, looking for news about the investigation. Political speculation about the race didn't help her much. She wanted to know what the Secret Service and the FBI were up to but none of the channels had that. She could find lots of biography of Rich West and Lance Reeder and lots of speculation about what would happen at the party convention that was only a couple weeks away, but none of that gave her a tactical advantage.
She clicked the TV off, wishing she had learned more than the fact that Mike Vincent and Rich West were good friends. She knew they were allies but never imagined they were as close as he indicated on that interview show.
Chambers worried her lower lip between her teeth. If Mike Vincent felt like that about Rich West, what was he going to do when the FBI started blaming her for West's death? Their old deal about keeping each other's secrets would go right out the window.
All of her anonymity was going to evaporate very fast. She knew it, and she knew that the only way out was to attack the problem.
She saw three different options. First, perhaps someone had killed Rich West just to frame her. It was highly unlikely, but it had to be considered. Second, it might have been simple coincidence that the assassin had done his work on the very night she was stealing the files of the West campaign. Chambers was too paranoid to believe that. Finally, and most likely, the assassin had planned his murder to coincide with Chamber
s' B&E, with the explicit intent of leaving an obvious suspect to take the heat off him.
It was the last option Chambers liked best. It was how she would do it, if she were planning an assassination. Always find a patsy if you can. She had done it before, though not for a murder.
For this theory to work, though, the assassin would have to either know when she was going in or know someone who knew. So who knew she was going in? Well, Gunter for one. But he had proven in the most dramatic way possible that he was not the one who was trying to frame her.
The other person who knew was Thomas Wheeler.
Several months ago George Pierce, her old comrade in skullduggery, had brought along a third person to one of their occasional meetings. He had promised a chance at the biggest paycheck she'd ever had from a single job. And, knowing Alyssa, he'd also promised that the task would be next-to-impossible.
That third party was Wheeler, the Communications Director for the presidential campaign of John Hicks. Advertising, media relations, and opposition research all fell under his bailiwick. For the opposition research part, he hired Alyssa Chambers.
Over the course of the primary campaign, Alyssa had learned the secrets of many of Hicks's opponents. One had once been in debt to a mob boss. One had had an affair. One liked his mind-altering substances way too much. None of those candidates ever got traction, so none of the information had ever seen the light of day. That wasn't her concern. Alyssa Chambers got paid to learn secrets, not to use them. Secretly, she was glad they hadn't. That was the part of her job she preferred to keep at arm's length.
The last person Wheeler had wanted her to find the goods on was the hardest. Hicks was running second for the nomination – a distant second. The overwhelming favorite was Rich West.
Bringing him down would have taken a work of art. Trying to do it had been Alyssa’s last job before the frame up. Perhaps her last job ever, by the looks of things. However, if she wanted to find out who framed her, the people who sent her into the office of the Rich West for President campaign would be a good place to start.
So, her first line of suspects included the people she'd worked with: Tom Wheeler and maybe George Pierce. The latter would have to be crazy to do it, since Alyssa knew enough of his secrets to destroy him. But paranoid was paranoid: Pierce had to be a suspect, too.
Even so, she planned to start with Wheeler. She changed into her new suit, left the hotel, and again rode the Metro, this time to K Street.
What Wall Street is to the world of High Finance, K Street in Washington, D.C., is to politics. Lobbying firms, special interest groups, polling firms, consultants - all of them make their home on K Street.
Alyssa went there because the insiders played their game there.
At the Metro station Alyssa decided it was time for an elementary bit of intelligence gathering.
For a woman who stole some of the most closely guarded secrets in Washington, slipping a cell phone out of someone’s pocket was no trouble at all. She had left hers at the hotel. Even dumb phones like hers were far too easy for the government to trace. For the same reason, even if she had her own, she would still have stolen someone else’s for this call.
Alyssa walked away from the teenage girl who would soon be missing her smartphone and dialed the front desk of her department at the University.
The phone picked up on the first ring. Even though she had made the call for the specific purpose of learning this, Alyssa's blood suddenly ran cold. "Office of Professor Chambers, who's calling please?"
The voice was male.
Her normal receptionist was female.
She had never heard that voice before. Chambers hung up, threw the stolen phone in the trash, and leapt onto the first train that went by. She hopped off at the next station and grabbed a different train. She repeated the procedure six times.
She did it to clear the location where she’d used the phone, as quickly and randomly as possible. That was necessary for one simple reason: A strange voice answering her phone could only mean someone was investigating her office.
The FBI already suspected her. Alyssa was now a fugitive.
She led a life guaranteed to harden her. Her work permitted few friends and even fewer confidants. As a professional breaker of the law, she lived with the constant threat of incarceration if she ever messed up badly enough. But as cold as she'd trained herself to be, it still took several minutes of train-hopping before she brought herself under control.
It was one thing to be suspected of breaking and entering or electronic theft – her normal crimes. But to be wanted by the FBI for a murder that would change history was above and beyond even her daily routine. Alyssa got off the subway, found an empty bench, and sat down to catch her breath.
She cataloged her steps since Gunter's death. New appearance, ready cash, hidden location - she couldn't think of anything she'd missed. But the FBI could build a case from even the tiniest detail. If she'd forgotten anything - anything at all - she'd be in prison in less than a week.
Again, she weighed her options. The FBI, or secret service, or whichever agency would take the lead on this would be watching the airports. Trying to fly out of the country would be chancy at best. Renting a sailboat would be easier. Chambers was a competent enough sailor to make her way to the Caribbean and, once there, she'd be effectively out of the FBI's reach.
Yet, the same fascination that drove her this morning still held. Surviving an investigation into an assassination would be the hardest thing she had ever done. If she could do this, no one would ever say she hadn’t lived up to her mother’s desire for her to be strong.
She was going to clear her name because her whole life was about living up to that last wish. Be strong. Well, surviving this and proving that she hadn’t killed West would prove just how strong she really was.
Alyssa got back on the Metro and rode back to K Street. The doors slid open, she stepped off, and almost fell flat on her face.
A man in a dark suit with a flesh-colored microphone hanging off his ear was interviewing the girl from whom she’d stolen the phone.
Backup agents surrounded the pair. They tried to blend into the surroundings, but the "men in black" image of federal agents made it almost impossible.
Their leader was showing the cell-phone’s owner a picture of Alyssa.
Fortunately, it was a picture of a woman with beautiful long black hair, not a dirty blonde jaw-length bob.
Chambers stared straight ahead with the practiced disinterest of a city-dweller. She walked right past the agents without so much as a second glance.
Her peripheral vision caught one of the agents watching her walk by.
Her heart skipped a beat. Was this it? Her grand effort to clear her name was over after less than eight hours? Could she fight three federal agents in a crowded Metro station and get away?
His gaze slipped down, and kept sliding down, until his eyes had slid far enough down that she could be certain he was not concerned about duty at the moment. Alyssa rolled her eyes. Pervert! She kept walking.
Even when she was safely out of range, she didn’t breathe the sigh of relief that wanted to come out.
There might be more of them watching.
The only way out was forward. Resolutely, she strode away from the Metro station and down K Street, on the way to the headquarters of the Hicks for President campaign.