CHAPTER SEVEN
Alyssa hid in a copse of leafy trees, sitting on the ground, changing her clothes. Her dive through the window had ruined the expensive business suit she’d bought earlier in the day, but she didn’t care. It had served its purpose and now she needed a different kind of clothing.
She needed the kind she had stolen from the FBI agent flying the chopper.
After coercing clothing and a very cursory flying lesson out of the helicopter pilot, she'd ordered the woman to hover very low over a hill. Then Alyssa had shoved her out the door – a four-foot drop or so – and taken over the controls herself, flying away. The next hill she flew over, she repeated the procedure. She flew the craft low over the hill, flipped on the autopilot at the last minute, and jumped out the door.
Her own fall was farther than the pilot's, and it hurt, but the chopper carried on without her, heading east on autopilot. With any luck, the radars tracking it would send FBI agents far to the east looking for her. That ought to buy her a couple hours.
She'd limped down off the hill, feeling pain as the rush of action faded, and cleaned her wounds with the first aid kit from the chopper. She wrapped bandages around her left leg and bicep. Alyssa had suffered worse cuts on other jobs and didn't worry too much about either of them.
So, where to go from here?
The only option was back to town. Obviously it was the most dangerous option – that's where the swarms of police were. But it was also where the answers were, and Chambers was in this for the answers.
All of which explained why she had stolen the chopper pilot’s fatigues.
In recent years, all the various military and law enforcement arms of the federal government had begun buying a new camouflage technology. Developed by a private company in conjunction with the German government, this new fabric enabled the wearer to defeat night vision equipment. Alyssa would need to be careful how she moved, but the light amplification technology in headsets would no longer point her out like a sore thumb.
Which was good because there was an army of federal law enforcement agents on the hunt for what they believed to be a highly-trained master assassin. Such people would certainly be wearing night vision goggles.
And they would be using them to monitor all of her known haunts. That had to include the place she needed to go tonight.
Matt Barr.
She could barely stand the thought of how he would look at her. By now, her name had to be all over the TV as a suspect. Maybe they'd dug up details of her life as a political spy, and those were out, too. He could only feel one way about the double life she'd kept from him for so many years.
Irrationally, she couldn't stop thinking that he would figure it out; he would hear about her past as a political dirty tricks operative and connect that with the huge story he'd lost in that fire. Perhaps he would even learn about the time she had ruined his inside source on the Reeder for Senate campaign.
But there was nowhere else to go. Nowhere. She had exactly one clue, and it was Wheeler's claim that Matt was working on a story about her.
Oh, he probably hadn't known it was about her at the time, but by now he did.
There was nothing for it. She had to get back to D.C. and talk to Matt.
When she'd boarded the chopper, she'd dropped her pistol in favor of the M-4. Now, she regretted her failure to switch back before she abandoned the helicopter. The carbine was impossible to conceal.
With regret, she abandoned the rifle and set out for the nearest road. Alyssa felt naked without a gun. True, she'd never actually shot at a person but having a gun was like having a get out of jail free card. If the worst happened, you had an option.
As she hiked to the road, she thought about Matt and again wondered what had changed in his life. A girlfriend? His father? His father had been the Minister in the large mainline church that the Chambers family had been patronizing for generations. Matt and Alyssa spent their youth trying to find ways to have fun without getting caught and lectured by the stern Reverend. It hadn’t always worked out…
♦
"What was Reverend Barr angry about, Alyssa?
The 14-year-old girl replied without lifting her face from her pillow, her voice muffled.
"What a jerk!"
Her father’s hair had acquired gray at the temples. He still tied his ties in a full-Windsor knot, he still preferred three-piece suits, and the smell of expensive cigars still often followed him around. He replied, "I didn’t ask whether he was a jerk. I asked why he was angry."
The girl looked up from her pillow and rose to a sitting position.
"He said Matt and I shouldn’t be alone together. He said we should never play without a parent around. He shouted a lot."
"What were you two doing?"
"Nothing! We were sitting in the back corner of the yard talking. We weren’t doing anything bad, I swear!"
"Did you steal any alcohol from the bar?"
"Dad!"
"It’s not like you never have before Alyssa. Did you this time?"
"No! I already told you we didn’t do anything bad!"
"You know how Reverend Barr feels about boys and girls never being alone together. You shouldn’t have gone off alone."
As her father had turned away to walk out of the room, he added, "That Barr boy isn’t worth your time anyway. They’re really not in the same social circles as we are Alyssa."
♦
Alyssa sighed and shook her head as she walked. She wondered how Matt and his father were getting along these days. If they talked at all, the old Reverend Barr would surely be telling his son something akin to, "See, I told you so."
Normally, that would have suited Alyssa just fine. She had spent years of her life persuading Matt that she didn’t want romance and if she did, it wouldn’t be him.
The funny thing was, when the entire country hated her, it made her less likely to want to push people away. She was about to go visit Matt’s house and ask for his help.
Now she was glad that dealing with Matt had gotten so much easier lately. He stopped asking her out all the time, stopped acting jealous... it made Alyssa's current plan a little easier to think about. Back in the days when he'd tried to turn every moment into romance, the idea of going to him to ask for help would have felt impossibly vulnerable. Much less so now.
Whereas before she had considered the mystery of Matt’s behavior something to be put off ‘til later, now that changed. He was her one and only clue. She had no choice but to try to talk to him. Knowing how to get the answers out of him might depend on understanding what had happened in the past year of his life. The observations she had so far were: less jealous, less insistent, and talked a lot more like his father the church leader.
None of those were exactly a good sign.
The old Matt, who always did everything Alyssa asked, would have been easier to deal with, for once. This new Matt… how might he feel about helping a suspected assassin? How might he feel about helping a woman who – he had to have learned by now – made her living breaking the law?
There was only one way to find out.
Chambers walked along the road but out of sight from it until she found a truck stop. She settled in until she watched a semi come from the east and pull in at the pumps. She broke into the sleeper compartment and hid while the driver was inside using the restroom. Not long thereafter, she was on her way back to Washington.
♦
Matt lived in a row house in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. Alyssa had been there many times for "friendly" dinners that Matt consistently let run late into the night, hoping she'd open the door to more. Now, she peered at the place from the roof of another one across the street and up a few houses.
Matt's house was quiet, but she didn't let that fool her.
The FBI would be there, of course. They had to be watching all her known haunts. Or the Secret Service. Either way – it didn't really matter. The second floor bedroom window was dark, for example. But Matt always left his be
dside light on. And the silhouette in the living room – apparently staring at the TV – was bulkier than her reporter friend. No doubt it was a federal agent, and there was probably one in the bedroom as well, with the light off to hide his shadow.
Ever so slightly, something on Matt's roof moved.
OK, so they had a man on the roof, too. She was unsurprised. She would do the same, if the circumstances were reversed. But she was the master of her craft – a black belt, a world-class athlete, and above all else, a Chambers.
Careful observation of the house across the street from her current location – three doors up from Matt's – revealed that the FBI didn't have a man on it. A mistake. Had it been her, she'd have guards on the roofs at both ends of the street as well. But even for this investigation, she supposed the feds' resources would eventually reach their limit. She clambered back down to the ground and, wrapped in shadows and darkness, she made her way to Matt's side of the street.
By means of windowsills, ledges, and a rain gutter, she pulled herself to the roof of the next building. In her normal life, she hated townhouses. Having a common wall with one's neighbors seemed to spoil the whole concept of owning a home. But tonight she was glad for it. It meant she could just walk across the roofs to Matt's place.
She'd spotted the roof guard, crouching and mostly watching the back yard. That meant she was approaching him at a right angle. She simply sat still and watched for a time, trying to get a feel for his rhythm.
The man was good. Obviously, he considered the back yard the most likely means of trying to sneak up to the house, so he spent most of his time looking that way. But every now and then he turned around to look to the front yard, and to either side. Never on a regular schedule though. In the time she watched him, he turned front after fifteen minutes one time, and then the next after only a minute. He threw in looks to the sides as well, several times looking right at Alyssa. But on a cloudy night with no moon, it was nearly impossible to spot a completely motionless person – especially one wearing dark colors.
Alyssa’s stolen combat fatigues kept her invisible to the night vision system on the man’s head. A lifetime of skill kept her invisible to ordinary vision.
Watching the guard on the roof, she waited until he was watching the back yard. She crept slowly forward, never coming out of her crouch, and never stepping fast or hard enough to make noise. The guard swiveled her way again when she was only halfway there, and she froze to wait it out.
In her head, she knew that she was effectively invisible. There was no light; she wore dark clothing; she was protected from infrared; she crouched without motion – there was nothing to draw the attention of a human eye. But still, her heart hammered like the offspring of a bass drum and a metronome. She could feel the man's eyes on her but then he kept on turning – first to look into the front yard for a minute or two, then looking directly away from Alyssa, and then to the back again.
She crept forward a bit farther, until she was barely ten feet from him. She pondered attacking the man and rendering him unconscious but decided against it. The odds were only about fifty-fifty that she could do it before he put up any struggle at all; if she lost that bet she might as well just walk up to a maximum security federal penitentiary and check in.
The guard turned again, and Alyssa worried seriously about a heart attack as his gaze fell on her. He looked directly at her – so directly that she squinted her eyes nearly shut to hide the whites.
Then he rotated to the front.
She breathed again and moved forward while he wasn't looking – as quickly as she could without making a sound. He turned away from the front yard, looking the other way. While he did, Alyssa dropped herself over the edge of the roof toward the back yard, hanging on by her fingertips. From there, she dropped catlike onto the ledge of the bathroom window.
Chambers never knew how soon the guard turned his gaze to the back yard again. She was below the roof by then, safely concealed.
Perched precariously on the ledge of the bathroom window, clinging to the windowsill with just the fingertips of her left hand, she reached down to place the palm of her right hand flat against the window pane. Slowly, relying on friction between her skin and the glass, she worked the window open.
That was the advantage of knowing the terrain. Matt never latched this window; he opened it in the morning to let the steam out when he took a shower.
Once the window was open she squirmed in. Furtively, she opened the shower door, got inside, and slid the door almost closed, leaving just a crack to peek through. Then she waited.
It seemed like hours. It may actually have been hours. She had no way of keeping track of the time – her watch had been destroyed in her swim through the Potomac that morning. Sometimes she stood; sometimes she leaned against the back wall of the shower. At one point, she had to fight back the giggles when she considered the notion of actually taking a shower – it seemed like forever since she'd had one, and it would be nice to feel clean.
‘And how did you catch the assassin, Special Agent? We found her taking a shower in the midst of ten FBI guards.’
Someone came into the bathroom. Peeking through the door, Alyssa saw that it was a federal agent. At least it wasn't Matt. The agent was wearing a suit and a flesh-colored microphone. She remained on guard the entire time he did his business, in case he turned around.
Another agent came in and peed. Then a third. The fourth man, finally, was Matt. He was wearing just his boxers, his brown hair was askew, and he'd obviously been asleep.
Alyssa let him finish going, averting her eyes. But when he finished, she slid the opaque shower door open silently. She stepped out, wrapped her hand over his mouth, then leaned in and stood on her tiptoes to whisper in his ear.
"Please don't fight me Matt. Don't make this harder than it already is."
As usual, the first reaction was panicked jerking about. Then he froze. She lifted her hand a millimeter away from his mouth, and Matt whispered, "Lyss?"
No one else ever called her Lyss. It made him feel more intimate to have his own nickname for her.
"Yes. We need to talk."
"Holy... You're... I mean you... did you...? Jeez, the FBI..."
"Shhh. We need to get out of here."
"But Alyssa... did you do it?"
She whispered, "Of course not, don't be stupid. We can talk once we get out!"
"Yeah, well, you managed to sneak into my bathroom past half a dozen Secret Service agents. That makes you seem a lot like this crazy ninja assassin they say you are."
"I'm not a ninja, I'm not an assassin, but I am very good at sneaking – a skill which will be wasted, I might add, if the feds start to wonder what's taking you so long in here. "
"The only question, Matt, is whether you're going to come with me or turn me in."
There had been a time when that would have settled it. There had been a time when Matt Barr would have answered every single question with "I’m on Alyssa’s side." And she would have been equally likely to tell him, "Please go find some other side to be on."
That time had been before Matt knew she’d been living a double life almost as long as they’d known each other. It had been before he had seen the stories about her involvement in numerous nefarious political deeds. Again she wondered, Did he figure out what I did to him? Does he know?
"I don't want to be an accessory to a crime," Matt replied.
The answer made Alyssa wince. It sounded like he did know. It sounded like he had figured out the lost union financing story and the lost source inside the Reeder campaign. It sounded like he knew her past and despised her for it.
She found her voice and did her best to make it work without wavering. "You're not, I haven't committed a crime."
"Well, how do you plan to get out?"
"I'm going to beat down every agent between us and the door then you and I will tear out of here in that Camaro you bought."
She smiled, remembering. Matt had bought
that car and driven up to her place in it, just assuming he’d have better luck asking her out. The fact that he no longer behaved like that was what made the past two years so much easier.
Matt spoke, reminding Alyssa that she was not in a good place for reminiscences.
"Um... that's kind of... well, normally I would say it's pretty unbelievable. But right now I believe you could do it. The ‘beating down agents’ part is assault, though, which kind of goes against my idea of not being an accessory."
"Assault, maybe, but not murder. I never committed murder."
He took a moment to respond but when he did she knew she'd won.
"I'm not much good in a fight."
"You don’t have to be; I am. Poke your head out the bathroom door and watch," she whispered. "Get some clothes out of your laundry hamper, then follow about twenty seconds behind me."
He stammered out a protest, but she was already out the bathroom door.