CHAPTER FOURTEEN
As they drove across the Francis Scott Key Bridge into Northern Virginia, Vincent said, "The media are playing the story as an attempt to kill Reeder."
Alyssa fidgeted guiltily in her seat. That actually had been in her heart. The fact that she had lied about that to get Matt’s help and that now he was in enemy captivity or dead, only made the fidgeting more guilty.
Vincent flipped on his radio. There, indeed, was the report: "Federal agents attempted to apprehend her on the scene, but the alleged assassin appears to have escaped. Authorities still have no information on what motive might have led Chambers to kill Rich West and then try to kill his running mate Lance Reeder as well. They point out, however, that a professional operative, as Chambers is accused of being, is more likely to have been hired for the work than to have her own motive."
Alyssa reached over and turned the radio off.
"I can’t stand it," she said.
Vincent nodded. He had aged since Alyssa met him as a young campaign staffer, but he’d done it gracefully. At his temples, the blond hair was just beginning to fade slightly into gray. He still wore the same perfect smile and still kept in good shape. Now into his thirties, he was showing a line or two in his face, but nothing serious. The wedding ring on his finger was new.
Alyssa allowed herself to relax a bit and stretch in the Lincoln’s leather seat. Sitting in a dark, luxuriant SUV, wearing a cocktail dress, with a wealthy, good looking Congressman was like a tiny taste of her old life. For just a moment, she wasn’t Alyssa Chambers the thief. She wasn’t Alyssa Chambers the professor. She was Alyssa Chambers the Chambers. She was wealthy, well-connected, and entitled to have whatever she wanted. For the tiniest moment, she regretted that 18-year-old curiosity that had led to her first conversation with George Pierce.
Vincent spoke and spoiled the daydream.
"How much do you know about how I came to be involved in this?"
"Matt told me that you were ordered by the West campaign to expose me to the press. He said you went to him instead of any other reporter because you wanted to fulfill your orders in the way least likely to result in trouble."
Vincent nodded. "Kind of reminds you of how we got started, right? Trying to find a way to do the right thing without it costing me too dearly. Well, when Reeder handed me the folder on you, you can imagine my heart rate basically took off like a rocket. At the time, the assassination was still in the future, so I had no idea what exactly was going on, but that photograph on the first page of the dossier was very obviously an older version of the first person to ever point a gun at my face. You never forget your first."
Giving him a thin smile, Chambers replied, "You sound like you’ve gotten used to it."
"Well, my life took a few strange turns since I worked for Lance, but I doubt you ever get used to that."
"Anyway, when the assassination hit the news Monday morning, and when 'Alleged professional assassin Alyssa Chambers' started being featured in the news by Monday afternoon, I knew exactly what had happened, since I’d been used to make it happen."
Vincent turned a corner, heading into a residential suburb.
"I’m not going to put myself in a better light than I deserve. Deciding what to do has taken every moment of my time between Monday afternoon and tonight. Let’s be honest with each other. It’s not like you and I are friends. It’s more like ‘adversaries who learned to trust each other through an arrangement that’s a lot like mutual blackmail.’ So it’s not someone I like who’s in peril. It’s someone I wish I’d never met."
Alyssa accepted the honesty with good grace. It was all true, and besides, earlier today she’d been wanting to punch Vincent right in the face for betraying her. She had no grounds to pretend their relationship was better than it was.
"Besides," Vincent continued, "I’m married now. It changes your value system. It’s not like I’m some kind of paranoid weirdo, spending all day thinking about how to protect my wife and keep her safe, obsessing about threats. But when the prospect of genuine physical danger comes up, any possibility that it might apply to her is unacceptable."
"Between those two things, I’ve spent three days thinking, ‘She can obviously look after herself, and it’s not my business, and if I barge into a situation where murder for hire is really going on, Kathy could get hurt.’"
The Congressman shrugged.
"Then the situation at the fundraiser broke out. The news people were all there covering the Reeder campaign anyway, so it became a media circus. It was live on every channel, you couldn’t find anything else. There were breathless reporters saying they heard gunshots, saying they heard that Chambers was in custody, that no one could find Lance Reeder and they thought he might be dead, that you actually weren’t in custody and had killed five Secret Service agents in the process of escaping…. It was crazy."
"That’s when it hit me. If you were that close to being caught – if you weren’t already caught – then it was clear that, without help, you were going to lose. ‘If no one helps her, she goes to prison,’ was exactly what I told myself."
He pulled the car into a garage but made no move to get out yet. Chambers sat listening.
"And if you did go to prison, you would be tried for murdering Rich West. And here’s the thing: there were exactly two witnesses in the world who might provide evidence that you hadn’t murdered him. Those were me and Matt Barr. So I tried to call Matt and got no answer at his home or his office or his cell. Again and again and again."
"And that scared the daylights out of me. I thought he had already been killed. Which really only led to one place: I’m next. Then the motivation of preventing danger to my wife changed. Once I realized you were heading for court and I was one of the only witnesses who could save you, the only way to keep Kathy safe was to help you. Chambers, if you’re not alive to prove your innocence, she and I are both likely to be killed in a day or two."
"So we prayed, and I told her to sit in the farthest-back room in our basement with a pistol until I come home, and I went to Georgetown to see if you were still there, since the media made it sound like the search was still going on. And I remembered that when I first met you, you were pretending to be a janitor, and when I next saw you, you were in the janitor’s hallway at my first big fundraiser. Every time I see you, you’re sneaking around in custodial places. I saw a janitor's closet in the parking garage at the campus and went to check."
"Pretty thin reasoning," Chambers replied. "I got lucky."
Vincent grinned at her.
"Call it luck if you want, but I did tell you Kathy and I prayed before I went. Let’s go inside."
As they walked through the front door, Alyssa smelled coffee, despite the fact that it was about midnight. A young woman with long brown hair walked around a corner from the kitchen, wearing an oversize blue sweater and jeans. She had the graceful stride of a dancer and a broad smile. Introductions were made, and Kathy Vincent gave Alyssa’s head a curious look.
"The TV told me to expect horns," she said with a smile. "I made some coffee, or we can open a bottle of wine if you want."
"I don’t suppose you keep any good single malt scotch around the house?"
Kathy got a bottle of whisky from the bar and poured some over ice for the guest. Alyssa drank half the glass in one shot and, when Kathy stared, she said, "You wouldn’t believe my day."
Mike sat, and nodded toward the couch, inviting Chambers to sit as well. Then he said, "I can only imagine. Tell us about it?"
Alyssa sat on the couch and said, "For starters, you may be right about Matt being dead – although not how you thought. He was with me at the fundraiser, but he was taken by the assassin. By now, they may have killed him, or they may be torturing him to learn more about me. I don’t know."
Mike asked, "Tell me about the assassin?"
"His name is Fred Harris. He’s a plumber, like me. A political dirty tricks operative. I stole something from him in my first job, and we’ve h
ad it out a few times since then. If he’s hurt Matt, I will never stop hunting him until he’s dead."
Mike and Kathy exchanged looks, and Mike asked, "How do you know he’s the assassin?"
"He and I fought at the Buchanan Club," Chambers replied. "I tricked Matt into revealing that he’d been there recently, and I went there to find out who gave him the tip about me. Harris was waiting for me there. It seems obvious in retrospect. The people who hired him to kill West would also have told him where you and Matt met for the story tip that was supposed to frame me. But I didn’t think of that at the time. I was desperate to figure out the next step forward in trying to prove I didn’t do this. I wasn’t thinking clearly."
Mike nodded. "When you first said ‘the assassin,’ I was thinking of the people who hired it done, not the trigger man."
Chambers’ eyes flashed, and a small growl escaped her lips.
"Lance Reeder. Him, I am so angry at I can’t even think. I just feel like my whole head’s hot, and I want to hurt him."
Mike nodded. "I was on the receiving end once, when you got mad."
"Yeah, well you only had a taste of what Reeder’s going to get. I don’t exactly have friends, but two of the people in the world who came closest are dead because of him. Both of them killed right in front of me. I want to kill him."
Mike made eye contact with her.
"Let me tell you about Lance Reeder," he said.
Alyssa nodded, and the Congressman began to tell his story.
"When I first decided to run for Congress, I went to D.C. to meet with party officials and insiders and other House Members. It’s a pretty common early step for a candidate."
Alyssa nodded.
"I met Rich West on that trip. We were two of a kind – kindred spirits, if you will. We became friends. Over the years, I grew out of some of my old drinking buddy friendships and become closer and closer to Rich. We became such good friends that he was best man when I got married."
He paused to smile at his wife, who returned it. Then Vincent went on.
"He’s like a brother to me. I felt honored to be befriended by this man everyone was talking about as the most likely next President. He's the biggest deal in this town except for the sitting President. And he made time every day to talk to me."
Vincent sighed.
"There are a whole lot of people in this business who follow the philosophy of ‘Do anything to win.’"
Alyssa nodded.
"Don’t I know it."
"That’s what I loved about Rich. He wasn’t one of those. Rich believed that winning was a tool, if it helped you do good things, but it was only a tool, never the end. I admire that about him.
"I love him. Loved, I guess. It's still hard for me to make it real in my head that he's gone. Rich West was the real deal. He was a genuinely nice man in a profession full of mean people. He meant what he said, and he was sincere about his beliefs. He knew how to make the political system work without letting the political system change him. America needed a President like him. We still do, maybe more than ever now."
"So when he began to tell a few of us – his closest confidants – that he was getting ready to make it official and start floating rumors and leaks about a run for President, of course I volunteered to help however I could. His friends from Congress never had official titles on the campaign. We all just pitched in, in whatever way we could. But we were the heart of the campaign. We were the real leaders. It always made the consultants mad."
The Congressman shook his head and sighed.
"The first time I ever questioned Rich’s judgment was when he announced that Lance Reeder would be his candidate for Vice President. I knew him from before…" Vincent paused, and looked at Alyssa. "...but I forget you already know that. Well, then, we both know what kind of man Lance Reeder really is. Everything Rich West is, Lance Reeder is the opposite."
"But with Reeder on the ticket, we had a really, serious, honest to goodness chance to win my home state, which our side hasn’t done in a while. It would have given Rich a nice boost in the electoral vote count in the fall. And Rich, of course, was only 48. So he had no reason to believe Reeder would ever get a sniff of the Presidency. It was safe to bring him on as VP, knowing that he would never get near power. I guess you can’t blame the man for not expecting to be murdered."
Vincent’s voice broke a little bit, surprising Alyssa. She hadn’t been looking right in his eyes; she didn’t know he was near tears.
"I would have done anything to help Rich win, which is how I got sucked into this.
"The Friday before Rich died, I was given a distinctive red ostrich leather folder with gold on the corners, and told that it must be in the media’s hands before Monday. Inside it was a whole ton of research about you. Various candidates you were suspected of working for, various things you were suspected of having stolen… tons of incriminating evidence about crimes you’re accused of. And the front page was a note asserting that you had recently been contacted by Tom Wheeler of the Hicks campaign. I was supposed to give it to the press."
He turned to face Alyssa.
"It was Reeder, of course, who gave me that."
She nodded grimly and said, "West gets killed, I get the blame, and Lance Reeder becomes the last man standing on a Presidential ticket that represented hope for so many people. I’ve heard the rhetoric already: Don’t let Rich West’s death be for nothing. Elect the man he chose to replace him."
Vincent nodded. "The man my country needed is gone. In his place is…"
He paused. He made eye contact with Alyssa.
"You and I don’t really know each other all that well, Chambers."
She nodded. He’d already emphasized that point earlier tonight.
Mike said, "I have to do something now that I’m afraid of. I don’t know how it’s going to come out. I don’t know how it’s going to affect you, or me, or my friend Matt’s chances for survival. I’m afraid to say it and I don’t know how.
"But you’re Matt’s only hope, and I can’t let you go in there unprepared for the truth."
Chambers looked at the Congressman. Two friends were dead, Matt might also be dead, and her whole life destroyed. What was he about to tell her that could be worse? What merited this much buildup?
"Lance Reeder isn’t the one who ordered Rich West killed."
"What? But you told me…"
Vincent said, "I told you he gave me the folder. But I haven’t told you who he got it from."
Chambers couldn’t decide if she should be angry or afraid. Just tell me! But the rational part of her brain wondered, if he’s this afraid, what am I going to feel?
"For his entire political career, Lance Reeder was never particularly competent on his own," Vincent began. "He didn’t win because he was the better candidate or the smarter man."
She stared impatiently.
"He won because, for all his career there has always been one backer who pulled the strings behind the scenes to make sure Lance Reeder kept winning and winning. One man who knew how to make the system work… how to make it dance…"
Before he even finished she was on her feet, spilling the ice out of her empty drink. Alyssa’s mouth hung open, and she took small, involuntary steps backward. "No. No no no…"
"I saw him walk into Lance’s office at the campaign headquarters on Friday morning. He was carrying a red ostrich leather binder."
"No. You’re wrong. It can’t be."
"It was your father."