CHAPTER EIGHT
As he dressed in dirty clothes from the laundry pile, Matt thought about Alyssa. There she went, the woman of his dreams: the rich girl whose family had paid the tuition for Weathering Preparatory Academy without even noticing, when he'd had to scrape and beg for every scholarship he could find, the athlete who could have gone to the Olympics, when he treasured his three minutes of actual varsity playing time on the high school basketball team, the professor of political science whose father halfway ran the country, when he struggled every day to get government sources to talk to him. The woman who had everything.
And an assassin? He had good reason to believe it wasn’t true. He prayed that it wasn’t true.
He realized twenty seconds had probably passed while he tried to come to terms with his situation. He peeked out the bathroom door to see Alyssa massaging her knuckles and an unconscious federal agent at her feet.
He tiptoed up to her and looked down at the agent. She knelt beside the man and took his gun out of his shoulder holster.
"Lyss? You said you were only going to beat them..."
"Promise," she whispered then smiled at him. His heart fluttered.
"Wait here," she said, shoving the stolen Sig Sauer pistol down the waistband of her fatigues.
Matt prayed again for her as he watched her walk away. He'd been watching her walk away most of his life. He remembered one college night in her private apartment – even during freshman year, when the school made everyone live on campus, the daughter of H. Franklin Chambers had a private apartment. He and Alyssa consumed two bottles of wine, each of which cost more than his one suit, and he'd asked her if she would go to some upcoming dance with him. It had been about the tenth invitation since they were high school sophomores.
"Look, Matt," she had said. "I don’t want that in my life. You don’t see me dating other boys, do you? I have a j… well, it just works better for me not to have anyone too close. I like my privacy."
Once again, he jumped when he realized that he was supposed to be following her. He tiptoed down the stairs to the first floor of his house to find a fight in progress. His first reaction was amazement that it could take place so silently. His second was to redouble his earlier praying for Alyssa’s safety.
Two Secret Service agents were on the floor, one completely unconscious, the other groaning thickly and holding his broken nose. But a third had Alyssa in a headlock, choking her and fumbling for his radio.
The man was standing with his legs apart slightly, bracing himself to hold her. Matt considered the situation, and figured he could run up behind the man and manage to kick him right between the legs, even from that angle. It wasn't manly, but it would have to do since he had no illusions about his ability to win a fair fight.
Before he could make up his mind, the agent went flying through the plate glass window. Matt couldn't even tell how it happened. Alyssa moved so fast she was a blur, but the agent screamed and the glass shattered.
She shouted as she threw him, then added, "That'll bring the outside guys for sure, but he didn’t leave me much choice. Come on!"
She was already running for the garage door by the time he had processed what happened. Belatedly, he ran after her. Barging through the door, he pounded the button for the automatic garage door opener even as she was climbing into the driver's seat. He grabbed the spare and ran around to the passenger side. Even as he got there, he saw a federal agent running toward the opening door.
He climbed in and handed her the keys. Alyssa gunned the engine and stomped on the gas, throwing the manual transmission into reverse. Tires squealed and the vehicle jerked backwards.
Even over the roar of the engine and tires, Matt heard the report of the agent's pistol as he fired it. He almost wet himself at the thought that a genuine, honest-to-God gun had just been fired in his direction. But then they were on the street. Alyssa slammed the car into gear and jammed the accelerator to the floor. They left a trail of rubber.
Looking over his shoulder, Matt could see the agent talking into a radio.
When he looked forward again, he caught a glimpse of the speedometer. "Um, Lyss... this speed is illegal even on the beltway."
"So is beating up four Secret Service agents and almost running over a fifth. If I slow down, we go to prison."
"Um..." she was right. He was a criminal now. "Great. Thanks for putting me in this position."
She didn't reply. She just drove like a madwoman.
♦
"Are you going to start explaining now?"
They ditched Matt's car near the Treasury building, where the Secret Service was certain to find it. Matt thought that seemed crazy, but Alyssa said giving them the car right away would mean they’d use resources and manpower to study it – manpower that couldn’t be used to chase them. Matt figured she was the expert about this stuff, so he went along.
They bounced from cab to cab until they found an all-night coffee shop not far from K Street that catered to lobbyists and other insiders working late hours.
Alyssa never told anyone about her life. No one. There was no one she could trust that much. But now, Matt could possibly be that someone.
Besides, she would need him to tell her the name of a source. For a journalist that would be a big sacrifice. It would be a big act of trust, so she would need to earn it with trust of her own.
"All right Matt. Where do you want me to start?"
"Oh, I don't know, how about starting with how the girl I've known since I could walk turns out to be a master criminal?"
"Do you remember when my mother died?"
Matt’s first instinct was to reach across the table and touch her hand to comfort her, but he stopped halfway. Alyssa saw it and wondered whether it might have actually been pleasant.
"It was forever ago. It’s not like I still hurt over it. But she said something to me then that changed my life."
♦
Alyssa remembered the incident from when she was twelve. Chambers Estate was a huge home, and the 12-year-old girl had to run a long way to answer the door. The butler took Sundays off because so few people called then. She wondered who it could be. Not Matt; he would just come in.
Two policemen stood at the door. Their uniforms were brown and tan. To their right stood Reverend Barr, in his black pants and tweed jacket. His thinning hair blew slightly in the spring breeze. He stood ramrod straight and formal.
When she saw him, Alyssa backed up a step and put her hands up at her sides, as if surrendering. "I haven’t seen him all day! We didn't do anything!"
The three men looked awkwardly at each other and shifted from foot to foot.
"Is your father home, young lady?" asked one of the policemen.
She shook her head, her black tresses flopping back and forth.
"I don’t know what Matt did, but I didn’t have anything to do with it! You can’t tell my father about something I never did anyway and besides, Matt would never break the law!"
One officer squatted down, to bring himself to her level.
"We’re not here about Matt, Miss. Reverend Barr is here because…" he cut off in midsentence, and then finished, "Is your father home?"
Alyssa angled her head slightly to the side and peered at him. He was acting awfully strange.
"No, Father’s at a political meeting with the Vice President. I don’t really know what they’re talking about."
The policeman squatting in front of her looked up at his standing colleague.
"I guess that explains why his cell phone’s off. Should we go find them?"
The standing officer replied, "You want to be the one to interrupt the Vice President of the United States for this? Besides, we don’t even know where they’re meeting. I didn’t even know he was in town."
"Someone on the force has got to know," the squatting officer replied. "You don’t bring the Vice President someplace without a little on-the-ground security."
The standing one replied, "Yeah, but I don’t think t
here’s time."
The squatting one – Alyssa had come to think of him as The Nice One – turned back to face Alyssa.
"I… I should be telling your dad, honey. Oh sweet Lord, how I wish he was here…"
She felt sorry for him. He was a grown up, and he looked like he was about to cry.
"What’s wrong Mister?"
"Your name’s Alyssa, right? It’s your mother, Alyssa. She’s…"
The ride to the hospital was a long blur of The Nice One trying to get her to stop crying while she wiped her eyes over a loud, annoying siren wail that the little girl wished would just be quiet.
It was followed by a chaotic run through the hospital, smelling of chemicals. They caught up to doctors and nurses wheeling a big cart covered with a sheet down the hall, and shouting various medical terms at each other.
The Nice One said, "This is her daughter. We couldn’t find her husband."
One of the doctors said, "It doesn’t matter anyway. We have to get her into surgery. There’s no time."
And then the sheet on the cart moved. Alyssa realized for the first time that there was a person under the sheet. At the sound of "her daughter," Alyssa's mother lifted her head up.
Their eyes met, and Alyssa realized who was on the cart. She started crying again.
"Be strong, Alyssa. Be strong."
And then the head fell back down, and a loud droning sound, and one of the nurses stood in front of her and The Nice One, kneeling down to stop the little girl from going forward by hugging her so tight she couldn't move. The doctors all shouted and rushed the cart into a different room.
♦
Remembering it aloud for Matt's sake suddenly made Alyssa think. The police had been wearing tan and brown uniforms. City cops usually wore blue. Brown and tan made her think of the highway patrol....
She shook it off. She needed to focus on the matter at hand. She met Matt's eyes.
"Those were the last words she ever spoke. Something about it… maybe it was the tension of the situation, maybe it was the look in her eyes… it burned into me. The memory never fades. ‘Be strong, Alyssa.’ To me, that always meant the obvious. Be able to take care of myself. I learned martial arts, I learned to shoot. But it meant more – it probably got mixed in with a lot of ‘You’re a Chambers, don’t do anything small’ garbage from H. Franklin. If I’m ever thinking about just doing something easy, or taking the undemanding path, or walking away from a challenge, I hear my mother say, ‘Be strong.’"
Matt finally found the courage to reach all the way across the table and take her hand.
"Even when we were little, I could tell how much you two loved each other. But it was rare for you to talk about her after she died."
"I tried to tell you once. Do you remember our last spring at Weathering Prep? We were walking outside. Some kids were playing touch football. I'd beat some punk up, and was trying to tell you that I wanted to live up to what my mother said, that strong people stood up for their friends."
He stared at her.
"I do remember that! Wow. All this goes back to that?"
"Well, really it stems from the feelings I was trying to express, not from the conversation itself. Anyway, it was that very night that I learned from some family connections that a congressional campaign would give anything to get their hands on certain evidence. I got it. It's the first time I can ever remember something that was hard – that I didn't think I could do, but I did it."
"Lance Reeder! Everyone said Ken Wells had the goods to prove he cheated on his wife but then nothing ever happened."
"Yeah, well, I made connections from that job... blah blah, it's a long story. Point is, I built a career as a ... I dunno. A plumber, they call me sometimes."
"I suppose it sounds better than thief, but why call it a plumber?"
"The term goes back to the Watergate days. The original plumbers were Nixon's men who tried to stop leaks of confidential information. Stopping leaks – plumbers."
"And all this time you're Miss Respectable to the world – daughter of H. Franklin Chambers, distinguished professor..."
"Well, you can't just put 'political thief' on your tax returns, can you? But let's fast forward to the present day." She looked very deliberately down at his hands. "No notebook, I see."
"Yeah, yeah, I know the rules. None of this is for publication. Lyss, right now I'm not thinking of my job, I'm thinking about you. I'm thinking about how the woman I... well, how my best friend went so far wrong."
"I don't think of it as having gone wrong. But let's not argue about it. Anyway, I was hired to find out some information about the West campaign. Now..." She looked away and sighed. "This is hard for me. I've never given away a client's name before. Not once. It's an even stronger rule for me than giving away sources is for you." That last part, she added very deliberately.
"You know I'm not going to publish this. I already told you that."
"You don't understand. It's not about keeping the names out of the papers or the police report. It's just that I never tell. That's pretty integral to being a reliable person in this profession. Not to other clients, not to other insiders, not to my father... never."
Alyssa paused. "There's no one else I could tell, Matt. No one else I would ever trust this much."
He seemed to glow. Normally, she would have cringed at it. In the past, she had always been embarrassed by how much he liked her. But after the past day, human companionship felt really good. Knowing that someone liked her and wanted her around felt like sinking into a hot bath.
She went on. "So Tom Wheeler hired me to hack the West campaign. Not ordinary computer hacking, that you do over the wires. I had to get physical access to West's hard drive and get Tom all the data on it. I don't know exactly what they wanted. I never asked. If I don't need to know, then everyone's happier if I don't ask."
Matt nodded. "That makes sense – as much as any of this makes any sense, anyway."
"Well, I broke into the West headquarters, cracked the hard drive, and got out with the data. No muss, no fuss. Two million bucks."
Her friend gave a low whistle.
"That's a ton of money. Well, for me. Not for you, though. You’re a Chambers. Two million bucks comes out every time H. Franklin sneezes. Makes me wonder why you bother."
"I told you, it's for the challenge. But of course, the story doesn't end there. The next morning I woke up to a phone call from a subcontractor, screaming at me about how he wasn't going to be my patsy. At first I had no idea what he was talking about. By the time I figured it out, my world had narrowed down to running and hiding."
"So you didn't do it?"
"There were two other people in there. One I never got a look at, the other I barely saw the top of his head. An easy first guess is that the one I never saw was West and the one I barely saw was the assassin."
Matt didn't say anything for a while. The two of them sipped espresso until Alyssa asked, "Well?"
Matt shrugged. "I'm not sure what to say. It's good to know you're innocent."
"Matt, I need your help."
"Why? You've dodged the Secret Service, the FBI, and everyone else for a full day now, and from what I saw earlier you won't have any trouble keeping it up. You don't need a simple reporter who used to think that dirty politics meant TV ads. I can't fight, I can't sneak, I can't shoot, and you already used up my car. So why not get on a plane, get out of the country, and disappear?" He sighed and looked away.
"Probably better for me."
"I can't Matt. I'm not out to run. I'm out to clear my name."
"You need me to publish a story describing how you're innocent? Except for all that breaking and entering and industrial espionage, that is. I don't think that's going to get off the ground, Alyssa. It’s going to take a lot more than your word to undo everything they’ve put in the media about you."
She shook her head.
"No. You called Wheeler just before I went into the West HQ. You were asking
about him hiring a private investigator. Who gave you that lead, Matt? I need to know."