

LIFE OF SECRETS

A Novel

By Bowen Greenwood

#  Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidences either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

**Copyright © May 2014 by Bowen** Greenwood **.** All Rights Reserved worldwide. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

COPYRIGHT

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

EPILOGUE

DEAR READER

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

# PROLOGUE

A beautiful woman hung by her fingertips 100 feet above the ground. Far below her was a dark alley, but she did not look down. At four in the morning, when the night is blackest and human reflexes are slowest, she gripped the side of the building, muscles on fire from continuous strain.

She wasn't falling off but climbing up. And she was nearly at the top of the building. One last reach would get her to the roof, but it was a long reach. She stretched for the edge of the roof but couldn't quite make it. Wedging her toe into a chipped-out hollow in the brick, she used that leverage to raise herself an inch or two farther.

The fingers of her left hand wrapped over the parapet. Her right hand soon followed. That done, it became a simple matter of muscle strength. She pulled herself up far enough to lean over the edge onto the roof and dropped forward onto it. Success!

Alyssa Chambers rose lightly to her feet on top of the building. Silently, she padded across the empty roof toward a maintenance door in the center. The moonless night wrapped around her like a cloak as she walked. Anyone watching would have seen little more than a shadow that may have moved. Clad in black fatigues, Chambers blended into the dark like a whisper in a crowded room.

Her raven-black hair was darker than the sky itself. She moved with a lithe grace of a dancer, and her head scanned from side to side constantly, alert for danger. She wore a bulky set of night vision goggles on her face, and a pistol – its long, fat, sound-suppressed barrel almost like a sword – strapped to her back.

She slid a card into the electronic reader on the door. Alyssa's card was special, however. Two wires ran from the card to a black box the size of a pack of cigarettes, which she held in her hand. A small digital display on the box scrolled through numbers before locking in on a set of six. Calmly, she opened the door.

Her radio earpiece came alive. "I see you're in. You have 30 seconds."

Two blocks away and ten stories down, her co-conspirator Gunter Hauptmann reclined in a white Ford Econoline van, idly watching displays. His relaxed posture was deceiving; Gunter was fully alert. His role in the operation was to monitor the target's defenses.

Gunter and Alyssa worked together from time to time on jobs like this. Both were freelancers, and their paths crossed only when there was money to be made. They weren't exactly friends, and they weren't exactly coworkers, but they had done jobs like this together before. When Chambers needed an electronics expert, she called Gunter.

She had never revealed her name and was a bit surprised when he disclosed his. However, she checked him out and, indeed, Hauptmann was his real name. His past was even more checkered than hers – an ex-con who hadn't learned his lesson.

He adjusted his long legs, resting the heels of his combat boots on the edge of the console in front of him. His gaunt frame hung totally slack, as if he were at home watching television. Not a single blond hair on his head was out of place. The only sign of tension he showed was to rub a hand over the two-day growth of stubble on his chin.

Three hours ago Gunter had run a wiretap into the phone line used by the target's alarm system. Now, he sat and watched the readout, waiting for the alarm to summon the police. It never did.

The first keycard opened the door's lock. Now it was time to turn off the alarm. Barely inside the door, Chambers wired another small electronic box into the alarm's keypad and calmly let it do its work. In moments it beeped, and she knew the alarm would not be summoning anyone any time soon.

She headed down the stairs, never for a moment relaxing her guard. The alarm was disabled, true, but someone could still show up by chance. Alyssa's particular skill set had made her a wealthy woman; she had no desire to part with any of her riches by becoming careless at this point.

Suddenly, she heard muffled voices. It was impossible to make out any words, but the implication was clear enough. The floor below her was not empty.

Her briefing had indicated it would be.

That meant one thing had already gone wrong. What else might follow?

She walked quickly but never made a sound as she made her way through the darkened maintenance space on the top floor. One floor down – on the ninth story – were the executive offices of the building. Her target was there.

Her feet padded noiselessly over the dusty floor. Apparently, no one came to the tenth floor very often; it was really more like a maintenance attic. Its purpose mattered little to Chambers – people could come here as often as they wanted, so long as they didn't do so in the next ten minutes. She descended to the ninth floor.

At the landing, she waited behind the door. She stood completely still, frozen, listening. And on the other side of the door, she heard the gentle slap of footsteps.

They were coming nearer.

Nearer. Nearer. She had three choices. Keep standing still. Head back up the stairs. Reach for the pistol strapped to her back.

She chose the first one, keeping so still she barely even breathed.

Step, step, step.

And then the footsteps began to recede.

She took her first breath in what felt like an hour and listened. When she could no longer hear the footsteps, Chambers cracked the door open the barest bit and peeked out.

At the far end of the hall, she saw a man turn a corner. Once he was out of sight, she opened the door and moved quickly down the hall.

Not only was there more activity on the ninth floor, there was more light also. Apparently, a few of the office workers had left their lights on. Alyssa slipped off her low-light goggles.

From one of those lighted offices, Chambers heard the sound of typing.

She paused for a long time just outside that door, wondering how to proceed. The building was supposed to be empty. It was three in the morning. No one was supposed to be here!

She could leave, of course. She could turn around, go back to the roof, climb back down...

No. The thought barely even passed through on its way to being rejected out of hand.

Her ears told her the sound of typing was little more than two feet from the door. Her experience told her that a person using a computer was likely to be looking at the screen, not at the floor. So she lowered herself to the floor and poked her head around the door just far enough to peek into the room

From this position she could barely see black hair above the laptop screen. Surely the man could not see her. She drew back, stood up, and ducked into the office next door to think. The only solution that presented itself was to wait. Which she did, and did some more, and kept doing, checking her watch obsessively every 20 seconds.

Finally, the typist got up and walked out of his office. Alyssa had no idea where he was going, nor did she care. This was her chance to reach her goal.

Just as she was about to sprint for it, she heard footsteps toward the far end of the hall.

Whoever had walked around the corner earlier was coming back. The hallway wasn't likely to remain safe for long. But if she kept waiting all night, eventually the staffers and consultants would be back in the office...

Taking a desperate chance, she raced past the typist's office and popped through the next doorway. She waited behind the wall, listening as the walker went by. She couldn't see him, but she could see his shadow on the ground as he peeked into the typist's office.

She waited for the walker to finish his route. She heard him open and close the stairwell door through which she'd entered. Next, she heard the typist return to his office. Once the typing resumed, Alyssa padded silently on to her destination.

Her eyes swept the hall. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound. Chambers followed the hallway carefully. She knew exactly where she was going. Reaching a corner, she found the penthouse office and delicately turned the doorknob. It was unlocked, meaning she didn't need her key-card spoofer again. The smallest of sighs escaped her lips, and she whispered a complaint she'd spent her life trying to avoid: "Too easy."

Entering the office, she scanned her surroundings to look for potential threats. Having gotten this far, she didn't expect any, but she looked anyway. The shocking thing was that the rich, royal blue carpeting showed fresh footprints. Perhaps the walker had been in here. If so, his potential return would pose a threat.

The walls were lined with contemporary paintings – originals, not prints. Each corner of the room held a bronze bust, but she didn't take the time to examine them. The room's most prominent feature was the exorbitant teak desk in the center. Chambers went to it immediately.

She moved around behind the computer and deftly unscrewed the gray metal case. Opening the machine up, she made a few very quick changes inside and then screwed the case back together.

Chambers looked at her watch again as the machine beeped and whirred. She'd been in here far too long already. While the operation didn't require a firm time limit, every added minute only increased her risk.

With a few key presses she went to work on the computer, bypassing security systems and tweaking the way it ran. Once she'd done that to her own satisfaction, any of the owner's passwords or security programs wouldn't matter anymore. She could copy files from the hard drive to her own flash drive with impunity. This she did with a practiced eye. Years of work in this business had given her excellent judgment about the kinds of computer files likely to be interesting to the people who hired her.

She made one last modification, putting in a little program of her own. It wasn't part of what she'd been hired to do, but it was standard operating procedure, something she did on every job. She left a key logger, a spy program that could tell her everything the user typed. It was insurance. Alyssa Chambers worked in a dangerous business. If she ever got caught, prison loomed large on her horizon. For that reason, she always looked for leverage over her employers, just as her father had taught her. Tracking every keystroke provided awesome leverage.

Once finished, she took her drive out of the computer. The next morning, the computer's owner would have no idea what had transpired. The computer would boot up the same as always, with no indication that it had been modified in any way.

Back in the hallway, Alyssa walked briskly toward the same stairwell through which she'd entered. On the ground floor of the building was a service door leading to an alley. That was her egress.

She strode briskly out of the alley and onto the street, ignoring passersby. In her baggy black clothes, she simply looked trendy, rather than suspicious. The two blocks to Gunter Hauptmann's van were covered in moments and less than fifteen minutes after her climb to the roof Alyssa Chambers was on her way home, two million bucks richer. Although Gunter owned the van, she drove. Her route took her right by the front door of the building she'd just broken into. Etched on the glass door was a slick, agency-designed logo of the kind so common among political campaigns.

It read, "Rich West for President."

#  CHAPTER ONE | FLASHBACK

Two teenagers walked across the grass at an expensive east coast prep school, both wearing tan slacks and blue shirts. It was their last day of class before spring break, and a touch football game had broken out in the quad among the other students. The ball got knocked out of bounds. It bounced and tumbled off the grass until it wobbled to rest at the feet of the boy and girl walking past.

The girl reached down, picked up the ball, and shot a perfect spiral right back at the quarterback, who caught it and grinned. He called, "You wanna play, Alyssa? We're losing; we could use you!"

She shook her head, waved, smiled, and went back to her conversation.

"Obviously the gossip hasn't gotten to them yet, or they wouldn't be inviting me to play," she said.

She was short, black-haired, and beautiful; she pouted as she talked. With her was a slender boy, with wavy brown hair and an angular face. His hands were stuffed in his pockets as he walked. His blue shirt was like hers – nice fabric with the school crest on the pocket. But his tan slacks fit poorly and the frayed cuffs dragged on the ground. His name was Matt Barr, and he said, "You shouldn't have done it, Alyssa."

"Of course I shouldn't have done it, but it's like I was seeing red. I got so mad I just didn't think. Don't tell me I shouldn't have done it; that's obvious."

"Is your father going to kill you?"

"My father is a minor consideration at best. He barely knows he has a daughter, let alone when she gets into trouble. My sensei, on the other hand, is going to mess up my whole life when he hears. You don't use martial arts training to beat the daylights out of someone just because they got your goat."

"You shouldn't have..." the boy cut off in mid-sentence when the girl gave him a look that suggested she might not be finished beating the daylights out of people.

"He should never have said I was your girlfriend," she muttered.

Matt said nothing, which was wise. It made him feel good when people thought he and Alyssa were together. She knew that about him. If he tried to agree with her that the boy shouldn't have said that, she would know he was lying to patronize her. But if he said what he really felt, it would just make her angry.

"They were picking on you, and I didn't like it. I don't like to see bullies pick on people."

Matt shrugged. Being defended by a girl wasn't exactly going to do him any good with the boys.

"And then he had to go and say, 'Oh look, is your girlfriend going to protect you?' It was like my head exploded. I wasn't thinking."

"It's funny how often you and I have this conversation, Alyssa. You've got to do something about your temper."

"I'll tell you what makes my temper better is touching someone's nose with my fist if they're being a jerk."

"Indulging your temper isn't the same thing as learning to get it under control."

The teen girl rolled her eyes at her friend.

"My mother wanted me to be strong. That was her dying wish for me. Her very last words."

The boy touched her shoulder lightly.

"I remember her."

She continued, "Strong is standing up for yourself. Strong is standing up for your friends. Strong isn't wimping out when a bully is picking on your friend."

Matt said, "Well, if my father hears about it, he'll chew me up one side and down the other. You know how Reverend Barr is about living by the rules. Don't be violent, don't be a trouble maker, and don't waste your time with that rebellious Chambers girl."

She shrugged. "Your father thinks the same thing about you and me that those boys thought."

"It's all he thinks about. Wanting to make sure I don't 'get into trouble' with a girl. Any girl, it's not just you."

Alyssa snorted. "You won't be getting into trouble with me."

Matt sighed. "Thanks. My dad will be glad to hear it."

She said, "At least your father knows you exist. Mine barely knows he has a daughter."

♦

Later that night, home for break, Alyssa moped in her spacious bedroom, barely even seeing the canopied four-poster bed or the original artwork that hung on her walls. She'd donned her gi and stretched, ready to work through some of the forms she'd need for her upcoming black belt test.

The punches and kicks were a good way to work through her frustration. Coming home had been very disappointing so far.

Somehow, she had hoped things would change. Every few months when she came home from school, she kept hoping things would change. They never did.

High block. Low block. Punch-punch-punch.

She had been gone since Christmas. This was her father's first chance to see her in months.

And he was in the den talking politics with a client. Alyssa felt hot tears of resentment welling up in her eyes. He won't even say anything about missing me!

Front kick. Side kick. Side kick.

The exercise was really just anger management. Punching felt good, but she didn't need the practice: she already knew the belt was hers, even after the stern lecture she'd gotten from Sensei about the evils of aggression.

The belt was already hers. Graduation was already hers. Being valedictorian was already hers. Admission to the college of her choice was already hers. What Alyssa wanted was a challenge.

She had tried gymnastics and could have gone to the Olympics if she'd stuck with it. She had tried martial arts. She had tried competitive shooting, just because it made her father nervous. But none of them had been hard for her.

Taking the easy way was not what strong people did, but Alyssa couldn't find the hard way.

She'd long ago rejected the idea of student body government as a possibility. It was too much of a popularity contest to be challenging for her and besides, it felt too much like doing exactly what her father wanted. Student council was like training for politics, after all.

Alyssa sighed. There was nothing. Nothing. Well, college would bring new opportunities. All she had to do was choose between Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or studying abroad at Oxford. The invitations from each were in her desk drawer, along with numerous others from "lesser" schools. She'd been so desperate last fall she even tried to set a world record for most acceptance letters from elite colleges, only to discover that Guinness didn't offer such a category.

Still in her workout clothes she left her bedroom, headed down the hall, down two flights of stairs, and then to the front door. Maybe some fresh air would bring fresh ideas.

On the way, she heard her father talking with someone in the living room.

She paused for a moment to listen: politics, of course. Always politics. She heard him saying, "The problem is, I don't have a lever on him yet. I want to get one, but right now I have no way to influence him."

She shook her head. As if anything ever really changes! But to her father, politics was everything. It had been more important than his wife. It was certainly more important than a daughter. Rolling her eyes, she went outside to walk around and think.

The car in the drive must be her father's visitor's, since nobody in this house would ever be caught dead in a Hyundai. She looked in the window and saw that the keys had been left in it. Just her luck: even stealing a car would be too easy.

She thought about her father inside. H. Franklin Chambers was the senior partner at the ancient law firm of Chambers and Weathering. Senators consulted them. They didn't just argue before the Supreme Court, they prepared future Justices for their confirmation hearings. Presidents sought their counsel. But Chambers and Weathering partners never left the firm to take low-paying jobs in the cabinet or any such thing. They simply advised, and they shaped history from behind the scenes.

He had wanted a son, of course. Of course! He had wanted H. Franklin Chambers VI, to carry on the name, practice law, advise some future President, etc. A girl hadn't been part of the plan. Alyssa hadn't been part of the plan.

Just as she felt the old familiar anger rising over her father's desire for a different child, the front door opened, and the visitor came out, frowning. 'Things must not have gone well with H. Franklin,' she thought. She wandered over to see what she could find out.

The visitor turned out to be George Pierce. She'd met him a few times at social functions: a client of Chambers and Weathering, who was involved in politics and used the firm's services mostly in that regard. He walked with short strides, looking down at his feet, hands in his pockets. His blue blazer looked like it came off the rack at Wal-Mart, and if his shoes had ever been shined, it had been a long time ago. His thin nose and scrawny build made him look a little taller than he truly was.

"Good evening, Mr. Pierce," she called out.

The man started, looked over at her, and started again.

"Alyssa! I didn't know you were out here. I'm sorry." He looked a bit discomfited.

"What's going on? What were you here to see Father about?"

He looked like he might try to deny her the information, so Alyssa pouted and widened her eyes to stare up at him. It worked like it always did.

"Well, it's this campaign I'm working on. You know, Lance Reeder, running for re-election to the House?"

Alyssa nodded. "Of course. He's been in Congress since I was a little girl."

"Well, until now. We're in serious trouble – like, I-need-a-new-job kind of trouble. I hoped maybe your father might be able to do something, but it looks like not."

Something H. Franklin can't help with? All of a sudden, Alyssa was interested – very interested. If there was one human being alive who had a harder time finding challenges or limits than she did, it was her father. If he couldn't do it...

"What kind of trouble?"

Pierce sighed. "Well, it's all coming out in the papers tomorrow or the next day, so I guess telling you can't really change anything. My boss... well, he's got this beautiful antique Swiss watch. It was hand-made more than a hundred years ago. It came to him from his father and to him from his father... etc. Normally, of course, it sits in a locked jewelry case in his home. It's one of a kind. There's nothing like it anywhere else in the world."

Alyssa nodded. "We have stuff like that in our family, too."

Pierce went on as if he hadn't heard her. "Well, the other day we had a fundraiser with the Speaker of the House coming in to campaign for us. It was a seriously big deal. Everyone there was writing $15,000 checks just to get in. Some of the richest people in the state were there. So of course, Lance decides to wear his one of a kind – completely unique – heirloom watch."

Alyssa whistled. "This doesn't sound like it ends well."

Pierce nodded. "Yeah exactly. He left it behind. In the bedroom. Of someone else's wife."

Alyssa grimaced and looked away. "Ugh."

"Exactly. So, naturally, his lady friend's angry husband has given the watch to the campaign of our opponent in the primary election. And even if it wasn't completely unique, we hear they've found Lance's fingerprints on it."

Alyssa raised her eyebrows. "And Dad can't do anything about that? Every politician in this state owes him enough favors to dance when he plays a tune. How come he can't fix it?"

"Every politician but this one. Ken Wells. Outsider, you know. Running against the establishment, give politics back to the people, blah blah blah. He's from outside the system; no one has a hook into him. Your father told me he knew without asking that Wells wouldn't listen to him."

Alyssa fell silent for a moment, thinking about that. She never bothered to learn too much about her father's business, but she was surprised that this Wells fellow was so independent of him. The elder Chambers had managed to do favors for almost everyone. Finding someone who didn't owe him was a rare occasion indeed.

While she was thinking, Pierce mused, almost as if to himself. "This is going to be the end of this campaign, and put Wells in office. Gonna be a rough time in politics until we can get him back out. I'd give anything to have that watch back."

Alyssa eyed him. After a pause, she repeated, "Anything?"

Pierce's head snapped over to stare at her. "Alyssa, what are you hinting at?'

"Nothing, nothing, just thinking..."

He stared harder. "Don't do anything rash. If I got you into trouble, your father would serve my butt cheeks at a soup kitchen and call it charity work. And even if Wells is going to put the establishment out of power for a while, your father will still find a way to be the kingmaker around here. Which would mean my making him mad is not going to happen while I have a say in it. So forget I said anything. I never should have in the first place."

Alyssa smiled at him. "Of course, George. I don't really care about politics anyway."

He smiled at her, said something about leaving before he got into more trouble, and waved goodbye as he got into his Hyundai.

As soon as the car rolled out of sight, she hurried back inside to her bedroom. She sat down at the computer, tapped for the Internet and soon was browsing through old newspaper articles about the Wells campaign.

Wells was a former bookshop owner... blah blah blah... not important... He hired a veteran campaign manager... blah blah blah, not important either, but a bit hypocritical for someone supposedly so beyond the system. She thought, Hmm, this is interesting... In addition to the campaign manager, this Wells fellow had one campaign staffer named Fred Harris who had been a private investigator. Hmm... private investigator, gathering fingerprints... maybe...

The internet yielded his home address and left Alyssa sitting there trying to make a decision.

She wondered, Do I really want to do this?

All her thoughts of what might pose a challenge had previously had one thing in common: they were all within the law. This, though... she was thinking about breaking and entering.

Well, she certainly knew where to find a good lawyer if she got caught.

Alyssa stood up from the computer and changed clothes. She picked out a black turtleneck and black jeans. She'd never really studied or thought about hiding and concealment, but black seemed the obvious choice at night. She found socks and gym shoes of the same color.

Dressed, she stopped and thought again. You're going to become a criminal. You're going to leave the bounds of polite society. You're...

You're going to do something even your father couldn't get done.

With that thought, she padded down the hall and back down the steps, pausing for a moment in the hallway until the butler wandered out of the way. Then she was out the front door.

It was eleven o'clock at night, and at this time of year the sun had only recently gone down. She had six hours of night to get this done.

I'll just drive over there, she thought. If there's any risk of getting caught, I don't have to do anything. If it looks too hard, I can just drive home.

She laughed to herself as she eased into her Porsche. Aloud she said, "Ha! If it looks hard, no way I'm leaving without that watch!" She put it in neutral to roll backwards out of the drive without starting the engine where her father might hear.

She parked several blocks away from the scene of her intended crime and walked the rest of the way.

Harris lived in a two-story townhouse that spoke of middle class respectability in a city that drove most of the middle class out to the suburbs. There was no such thing as a front yard, just a front step leading up to the door from the sidewalk. She strolled casually past, taking note of the light in the front window, and the silhouettes of people talking behind the curtains.

She thought, Not just breaking and entering then. I'll be breaking and entering an occupied house. I think I found my challenge.

She went around the corner, entered the alley and then counted the houses until she reached the back side of Harris's place.

The back gate was locked, but the wood fence was only six feet high. The former world-class gymnast vaulted over that in less time than it would have taken her to go through the normal way.

The back door was locked, too. However, on the second floor there was a tall French window that had curtains blowing through its open frame, and a tiny, narrow balcony outside it.

And there was a tree.

Alyssa grabbed a low branch and swung up into the tree. From there it was easy to climb a short distance and then hop onto the balcony.

That's when her heart began to race.

Now it was real. The window was open, and she was right in front of it. With two more steps, she would be in violation of the law and on her way to breaking it even further by stealing something. And not just anything, either. She was about to steal something that would change the course of an election for U.S. Congress.

For a long moment, Alyssa was frozen there on the balcony, not so much afraid as she was awed by what she was doing.

Then she stepped into the house.

Alyssa tiptoed across the floor of the bedroom she found herself in. A fast but very thorough search yielded no incriminating watch.

She listened carefully at the door and heard only distant voices. She stayed there, ear pressed to the wood, for five minutes. It stayed quiet so she opened the door.

As it turned out, the door opened onto a stairway landing. She could see down the stairs to a brightly lit open entryway to the living room, from whence the voices came.

"...you've won the campaign for me, after all. After tomorrow..."

Alyssa arched her eyebrows. That must be Mr. Wells talking. And by the sound of it, she was here none too soon.

She set her foot on the first step, as gently as possible. It didn't creak, so she gave it her full 109 pounds and tried the second one. Still no creak, but the sound of the conversation in the living room was driving her heart rate wild. All it would take would be for one of them to get the urge to go to the bathroom...

At the bottom of the stairs, she found herself trapped. To step onto the landing would put her in full view of the living room. Maybe the people in there wouldn't be looking her way, but then, maybe they would. And given what would happen to her cushy life if she got caught here, Alyssa wasn't inclined to leave that to chance.

She stood there, completely still, afraid even to breathe while she tried to think of a way out. Finally, she sneaked back up the staircase.

But she only went halfway.

There, she stopped to slip off her sneakers. Holding them tightly, she jumped over the railing and let herself fall the few feet down to the hardwood floor below. Her stocking-clad feet made no sound when they hit, and the grace of her landing made her proud.

"It's downstairs for safe keeping."

Well, that was a convenient thing to overhear. Now all she had to do was find her way downstairs.

Just to be sure, she followed the hallway down to the kitchen. She rifled it as thoroughly as she could without making noise but, again, no watch. She stopped to put her shoes back on. Then she found the stairs to the basement on the far side of the kitchen.

The basement had two guest bedrooms. The watch was on a bookcase in one. Alyssa simply helped herself to it and headed back upstairs. In the kitchen, she unlocked the back door and casually let herself out, easing it shut behind her.

On the way back to her car, it was all she could do not to shout to the moon and dance in the street. Now that had been a challenge!

The following day was hard on her nerves. Half of her wanted to tell every single person she met, and the other half kept expecting the police to walk in on her at any minute. Even when her friend Matt asked her why she was so perky all of a sudden, she managed to keep her mouth shut.

That afternoon, she walked into the office of the Lance Reeder for Congress Committee, overcame the receptionist's resistance with an offhand mention of her father, and strode blithely into George Pierce's office. She closed the door behind her and locked it. Pierce had one phone pressed to his ear and his cell phone in his hand. He was saying something about not having the slightest idea what the caller was talking about.

In the course of switching phones, he caught sight of her.

"Alyssa! What are you doing here? Can it wait for a bit, I'm sort of in the middle of a crisis. The noon TV news reported that the Wells campaign is claiming they had a break in last night, and..."

"I know."

It was something about the way she said it. He peered at her, then said "I'll call you back" into both phones simultaneously, and hung them up.

"What are you talking about, Alyssa?"

With a Cheshire grin, she passed over the watch. Pierce set it down very slowly, staring at her the whole time. When he finally found his voice, it was only a whisper.

"What have you done?"

"I got that watch you wanted."

"But... but..." His jaw hung open.

She just grinned back.

"Alyssa, have any of your history classes covered Watergate?"

She shrugged. "Of course. The people involved in that got caught."

"And you won't?"

"Definitely not. We won't," she said pointedly.

"We? I had nothing to do..."

"Well, there are only two of us who know, Mr. Pierce, so not getting caught shouldn't be hard."

They just stared at each other for a long time. Finally Pierce said, "Why do I have a suspicion that my little slip about 'do anything for that watch' is going to come back to haunt me?"

"A hundred thousand bucks. Seems like a good idea if it's cash, completely untraceable. For that, you get to keep the watch and its fingerprints."

He temporized. "What do you want with a hundred thousand bucks? That's chump change for you, Alyssa. You've probably got a hundred times that just sitting in a trust fund your father's set up for you, let alone how much he has separately from that."

"I don't want a hundred thousand bucks of my father's money. I want a hundred thousand dollars of my money. Mine. That I earned."

It had occurred to her the night before: she was a criminal now. And it had thrilled her enough to make her consider a career in it. If she went that way, it would be a good idea to have some money that her father couldn't take away from her.

"Um, this is a heavily regulated business, Alyssa. Political campaigns can't just write secret checks without people knowing. Everything we spend has to be reported."

"Pierce, I've never paid much attention to politics, but I read the newspapers enough to know that money moves around like stink through a screen door."

"I need some time."

"To get the money?"

"And to think."

Pierce delayed, but he did pay up. Alyssa didn't really know what to do with the money, so she bought a safe and put her ill-gotten gains in her third, unused, walk-in closet.

Then, just to be safe, she took one of her father's small sailboats out on the Atlantic and, once she was far enough off shore that she couldn't see land, dumped a garbage bag weighted with a cement brick over the side. In it was every piece of clothing she had worn into Harris's house.

All of her friends and family were stunned later that month when she turned her nose up at Oxford or the Ivy League and announced her intention to go to college in Washington, D.C, but when she explained that she'd developed an interest in politics, her father gave a smug smile.

The following January, when she and some of her new school friends went down to Capitol Hill to watch the Congressional swearing in, none of the others understood why she grinned so broadly when Lance Reeder took his oath.

# CHAPTER TWO

Alyssa woke the next morning to the sound of her cell phone ringing. Unlike most of the world, she had the dumbest phone she could get her hands on. Too much of her life depended on keeping secrets, and smart phones were designed to publicize everything. She never put a contact list into the phone either. If some future investigator ever got their hands on it, why give them a list of people to interview?

So there was no caller ID but then she gave her mobile number to almost no one, so there wasn't much doubt the call was important enough to wake up for. She rubbed her eyes and then grabbed the phone from its place on her bedside table.

"Hello." She never gave her name when she picked up the phone.

"What did you get me into?"

Her eyes snapped fully open at the barely-articulate yelling. "Who is this?"

"It's your patsy! How could you do it? How could you do it and not tell me what you were doing?"

Once he stopped shouting, she recognized the voice. It was her technician, Gunter Hauptmann.

"Gunter, what are you talking about?"

"Don't play stupid with me! And don't even think you can make me take the fall. You picked the wrong guy for a patsy. I have electronic logs of every conversation we had last night - in the van and on the radio. I can prove it was you who went in there, and I can prove I never left the van, so I don't know what you were thinking," and here his voice rose to a shout again, "but I am not taking the fall for you!"

"Gunter, what are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the presidential candidate you shot last night!"

Alyssa blinked. Hard. "Say again?"

"I'm talking about Rich West, dead with a .22 caliber bullet in his head! As in, that .22 you told me you always pack when you B&E." B&E was short for breaking and entering.

"Rich West is dead?"

"What, as if you only intended to wound him with a head shot? Chambers, how many times do I have to tell you, I am not that dumb!"

Wheels began to turn in her head. If Rich West was dead... Yes, I'm a suspect. Big time. But... those other people in the office... And then her mind became fully operational. Once awake, Alyssa Chambers was professional to the core.

"Gunter, I promise you, this is not what it looks like. This line is not secure. No line is secure enough for this. Meet me at Alpha."

When she worked with someone, they always had pre-arranged meeting spots known only to them. Telling Gunter "Meet me at Washington Harbor" would have drawn a swarm of FBI agents to the scene, if she were being followed. But a code word like "Alpha" gave him the same information, without telling an eavesdropping outsider anything. She clicked off the phone, jumped out of bed and hurried to the shower. She turned on her radio with the volume up loud enough that she could hear it over the sound of running water.

She cleaned up as quickly as she could, all the while listening to the news broadcast which had pre-empted regular programming. She was lucky enough to catch it at the top of the story.

"Richard West," the announcer read, "all but assured his party's nomination for the Presidency, was found dead in his campaign headquarters this morning, apparently from a gunshot wound to the head. Federal agents are at the scene but have not announced any suspects at this time. Implications of the assassination are already being discussed by pundits. Congressman Mike Vincent, one of West's top advisors, spoke with us a few minutes ago."

They cut to an interview clip.

"Rich West was a beacon of hope in a dark time. America needed him. With him gone... I can't imagine who could take his place. This is a tragedy."

Unless the FBI and Secret Service caught the real assassin very quickly, then they would come up with her name. She lived a life of secrets, but this was no ordinary circumstance. With the death of Rich West, everything was different. The rules changed. People who would keep her name secret under other conditions would rat her right out when she was suspected of assassinating a presidential candidate. There was no doubt. She would definitely be on the run. The only question was how quickly the feds would start chasing.

Chambers climbed out of the shower and clicked the radio off. She dressed hurriedly, opting against the business suit she would normally wear in daylight. She didn't have nearly enough information to know what was going on, but one thing she did know: there was a good chance today would involve running and hiding, and those were better accomplished in pants than a skirt. On the other hand, the authorities might be more likely to look askance at someone in black combat fatigues today. She went with jeans and a t-shirt.

When her cell phone rang for the second time that morning, Alyssa stared at it for two rings, wondering whether to answer. Finally, she decided that if the FBI suspected her already, they wouldn't bother calling. Heart thumping, she clicked the phone on.

"Morning Lyss. Got time to give me a quick quote?"

She exhaled in relief. It was Matt Barr.

Of course, that brought with it a whole different reason for stress.

The sound of his voice caused her to feel the same rush of emotion that it always did. The primary feeling was guilt. She had betrayed him so many times and never told him.

Theirs was a strange friendship. Matt longed for her. For most of their lives it had been impossible to miss. Despite the disapproval of his preacher father, Matt had been chasing Alyssa since they were teens.

Alyssa, on the other hand, was desperate for Matt to never figure out how bad she'd hurt him. Between a political reporter and a thief who specialized in stealing from politicians, there were bound to be secrets. But her secrets from Matt went so much deeper than that.

For years, he had been a pest, asking her out constantly, behaving jealously if a man so much as looked at her, and in general making it really hard to be his friend.

But something changed. It had gotten easier over the past year. He had finally stopped being quite so desperate. There was a peace about him that she couldn't miss. Sometimes Alyssa suspected a girlfriend and was glad of it, but at other times she felt like that wasn't even close to the truth.

None of which changed the facts of their past. She had still set fire to his office once. She had still shut down a prime source for his stories once. She still spent every conversation with him hoping he never found out.

Matt had no idea the drama that went on in Alyssa's head when he called – every time he called. He just went on talking.

"Everyone even close to the business is going to get quoted. We need some academic analysis from the always-quotable Professor Chambers."

It had occurred to her, around her junior year of college, that she would need some visible means of making money. Of course, her real career plan was to get paid for political dirty tricks, but people would ask how she earned a living. She needed a cover story.

She'd chosen academia. It was an easy way to stay in Washington D.C., an easy way to explain being around politics, and the hours left free time for late nights breaking into campaign offices. So now she taught political science at her old alma mater. Unsurprisingly, the lure of the Chambers name to add to their faculty had been more than enough to get her the job.

However, being a professor was far from her thoughts at that moment. In response to Matt's question, at first she just blinked and kept silent. Academic analysis was the last thing on her mind, but Matt would have no idea she was worrying about being a suspect in the assassination.

Whatever she told Matt, the FBI would most likely be parsing it for clues when the story went live online – if not before - so she wracked her brain trying to come up with a quote that would sound good for Matt and throw the FBI off her track, but it wasn't working. In the end, the best she could do was say something about how the public would need to have a believable suspect quickly in order to have confidence in the election that fall, but she knew that would do her no good. Whoever the Secret Service came up with as a suspect, they would make the case believable.

"Thanks Lyss, you're a gem. I owe you a cup of coffee at some undetermined point in the future. But not any time soon. I'm not going to get any spare time at all until the assassin is being dragged out of the lethal injection chamber. My source on the West campaign was on the phone just before I called you. Sounds like chaos over there – no surprise. Anyway, I've got to go. Take care."

She muttered something boring by way of farewell, and pondered his offer of a cup of coffee. Matt quit drinking about a year ago. At the time, she asked him why; he had never seemed like he had a problem with it. He stammered through trying to explain it, then said something about his body being a temple. That was definitely out of character. Matt was about as far from being a fitness freak as anyone she knew. Matt's father used to hate alcohol. He preached about it all the time. She wondered if all the changes in Matt had to do with that relationship. But that seemed as wrong as the girlfriend explanation. The two grew up together, and Alyssa knew Matt's father. He was stern, judgmental, and holier-than-thou. Matt was none of those things.

She shrugged and finished dressing. She left home with a newspaper and a simple backpack to go with her casual clothes.

The drive to the meeting place went quickly. On the surface, her mid-sized sedan looked quite plain, but the engine under the hood had not come from the factory. The souped-up performance meant she had little trouble outpacing the other cars on the road.

Alyssa Chambers was a spy. Not one who worked for the CIA or any government agency, though. No, she worked for the people who wanted to shape the government. From the age of 18 on, Alyssa had worked in the part of politics journalists never covered. Some people called them plumbers, some called them dirty tricks men. Some simply considered them private investigators. When one candidate wanted to know what his opponent's next ad would say, he hired people like Chambers. When a party wanted proof that their opponent had cheated on his wife, Alyssa or someone like her got the call.

Obviously, it was a risky business, and the people who worked in it eventually either became paranoid or got out of the business. Or died. Sometimes two of the three. Sometimes all of the above. Alyssa had only done the first.

Quite simply, she trusted no one. Even the people she worked with were considered potential threats. In some ways, especially them. For that reason, she only hired people with a shady background. Everyone she worked with had at least one secret he didn't want the police or his family to discover, and it was always a secret Alyssa knew. That way, if any of them ever turned against her, she had something to hold over their heads.

Another part of being paranoid was always being prepared for emergencies. In a safe deposit box she had a million dollars in cash, several sets of falsified driver's licenses, passports, credit cards, and documentation of every campaign or organization that had ever hired her. The last item was for blackmail purposes, if she ever needed it.

Alyssa finagled a parking place, made her way to the harbor through the light morning crowd, and took a seat on a bench. She unfolded a newspaper she'd brought from home and to all appearances began to read. But in reality, her eyes never did more than scan the headlines; most of the time they were scanning the street, looking for Gunter or for a sign that she was being followed.

The crowd was nothing compared to what it would be at lunchtime or during the evening, but there were enough people that a tail could have hidden among them. Chambers harbored no illusions about her chances if she were followed.

Federal agents were experts at surveillance. If they set out to follow her, she would be hard pressed to lose them without help and would most likely never know they were there. Her hope was that the investigation hadn't progressed far enough to make her a suspect yet. However, even if that were true, that state of affairs wouldn't last long.

If there were any FBI agents about, she never caught sight of them, but she did see Gunter Hauptmann cautiously approaching her position. She spotted him across the courtyard, trying to watch her without being obvious. His eyes scanned across the crowd much as hers did, searching just as futilely for whoever might be watching. When he realized Chambers had noticed him, he came carefully over.

Easing his tall frame down onto the bench, Hauptmann said, barely above a whisper, "I want to know what's going on."

"So do I, Gunter, so do I."

"Explain why I should believe that. It looks for all the world like you went in there and killed West without telling me last night."

"Gunter, that's why you should believe me. You know me better than that. If I were going to assassinate someone, would you still be alive to be a witness?"

"Maybe. If you wanted someone else to set up as a suspect."

"I'd make sure he didn't know who the real killer was. You know it."

Hauptmann nodded.

"OK, for now, it's just easier to believe you but don't think I'm firmly convinced. So what did happen, then? Rich West and a third person were in there at the same time as you, and the third person killed him?"

"There were two other people in there. At least two."

Gunter asked, "Can you ID either of them?"

"No," Chambers replied. "My intel said no one else would be in there, so I didn't study any ID files."

She sat still for a long moment. Finally she said, "I need to talk to the guy who hired me."

"If he'll talk to you at all," Gunter replied. "From where I sit, either he set you up on the timing of that run, or he's convinced you did it. Either way, he's not likely to talk to you."

Gunter would never have asked and she would never have told him, but Tom Wheeler was the one who'd hired Alyssa for this job. Communications Director for the Hicks campaign – Rich West's opposition – he'd wanted research on their opponent. Chambers had never met the man before this job.

But Wheeler came with excellent references. He got her name from no less a person than George Pierce, and that was still a name Alyssa trusted.

"Hard to believe a set up," she replied.

Hauptmann shrugged.

"Even so, he's probably scared out of his mind right now, thinking that the plumber he hired went and offed West, and that he's an accessory."

Chambers nodded.

"I need to talk to him. You suppose he's in his office?"

Gunter nodded.

"He'll have to be. Every politician in America probably has two phones stuck to their heads all day today, trying to play this. It'll be driving him nuts to be in the office, with everyone wondering who did it and him being so afraid they think it's him, but he has to be there."

"OK, then. My problem is just getting into his office without being seen. You, on the other hand, are probably itching to be out of the country."

Gunter nodded. "Congratulations on the understatement of the year."

He reached across to take Alyssa's hand.

"It's been nice to know you. Good luck."

She smiled at him, and shook his hand.

"Happy running, Gunter."

He stood up.

A bullet drilled through his back and out his chest, killing him instantly.

Chambers couldn't help herself. She screamed when Gunter Hauptmann fell dead across her lap. Seconds later, the pedestrians around her were screaming, too.

However, after the initial fight or flight instinct, she found herself strangely detached. She observed the crowd, calculated where the shot that hit Gunter must have come from and plotted how to use the other people as cover from a second shot from that direction.

Most people nearby were screaming in panic but several passers-by were collected around her, trying to help her, some checking if she had been wounded, others trying to console her about the grisly mess she and her clothing had become. Alyssa tuned them all out. She got out from under Gunter and stood up, causing several people to jump back at the sudden movement. Then she took off running.

Shouts of confusion and alarm rang out behind her, but she ignored them all. In another second, she was across the open courtyard and diving into the river.

The Potomac had never been the nicest place to swim, but Alyssa didn't feel she had any choice. For one thing, it was obvious that whoever had fired the shot that killed Gunter had been aiming at her. The crowd had doubtless given her some cover, preventing a clean shot, but the killer could fire again as soon as he got the chance. Getting in the water made it much harder to shoot her.

Moreover, her clothes were covered with gore from Hauptmann's body. Running, she'd have been instantly recognizable, and stood no chance of escape, but the river cleaned her up at least a little bit.

Of course, sopping wet clothes were not much less conspicuous than bloody clothes, but at least she'd be far away from the scene.

She did most of her swimming underwater, with her eyes closed tight against the dirty river. There was a gunman out there, and if she stayed on the surface for long, she was a goner. The powerful current dragged her downstream as she swam, but that was fine with Chambers. She didn't have much of a plan yet, except to clear the area as fast as possible. And the current was moving much quicker than she could swim.

She swam for quite a while before finally working out a plan. Paddling to one of the yachts moored along the waterfront, Alyssa climbed aboard. As she expected, since it was still morning, the yacht was deserted, which suited her needs perfectly. Crossing her fingers, she hoped these people left some clothing aboard.

She got a lucky break. Not only was there clothing to be taken, but it was women's clothing. She threw the outfit she'd left home in into the Potomac – saving only the backpack – and dressed in clothes the mystery woman had left behind. The cut off shorts and tank top weren't exactly her style, but they would have to do.

She walked off the yacht as if she owned the thing – her family did own a couple yachts, after all – and disappeared into the crowd.

It wasn't much of a walk to the bank branch on the corner of Wisconsin and M where her safe deposit box was located. Walking through the elegant glass door, she felt like every security camera in the room swiveled to catch her entry. Nonsense, of course, but the feeling was still there, causing her skin to crawl.

This was her biggest risk. Chambers wasn't sure how fast the FBI would learn that she'd been in the West headquarters last night but if they already knew, then trying to access her deposit box would be the end of things. They'd have the place staked out, and she'd be arrested any moment now.

On the other hand, if she wasn't a suspect yet, and she got out of here with the contents of the box, then Alyssa was confident she could elude the FBI indefinitely. However, that was only part of the problem. There was also the small matter of someone shooting at her at the harbor.

No way was that the FBI.

An easy first guess would be that the person who fired the shot that killed Gunter was the real killer. It could easily have been aimed at her and just hit Gunter by accident; Perhaps he'd learned that Chambers had been in the building too, and was afraid she'd seen the whole thing. But if he knew she was there at the time, why didn't he kill her then? And if he only learned it after she'd gone, how did he learn?

And how could she prove it was him who shot West and not her?

In a lobby chair, waiting for a banker to help him with a loan, a man in a dark suit adjusted the newspaper he was reading. Across the room, someone standing in line brushed her fingers through her hair. Any or all of those motions could have been signals between watching federal agents.

Apparently, none of them were. As a clerk led her back to the safe deposit boxes, Alyssa began to believe she was safe for the time being. Walking out of the bank with all her cash and several fake passports and credit cards, she finally felt as if she could begin planning a few steps ahead, instead of on the spur of the moment.

# CHAPTER THREE | FLASHBACK

One evening shortly before Alyssa went off to college, her father sent the butler to knock on her bedroom door and let her know he was in the library. She had just finished thrashing Matt at tennis and knew better than to come down in her sweats. When H. Franklin Chambers sent the butler for her, he was feeling formal.

When she entered the library, it was in a pair of white summer slacks and a salmon blouse, the sweat of her tennis match thoroughly washed off. She found her father standing at the window, staring out at the late evening landscape of summer. From behind him, she could see that he held a cut-glass tumbler held in the hand hanging down at his side. Between the clinking of ice, the warm brown color of the liquid, and the open bottle of Talisker on the bar, it wasn't hard to deduce that he had decided to indulge himself.

Alyssa looked at the open bottle of scotch, looked at her father staring out the window – not turning to acknowledge her, simply waiting – and looked back at the scotch. It had been a long time since Matt's father had caught the two of them in the back yard with a stolen bottle of Glenmorangie. She decided that if her father wasn't aware that a girl about to start college knew how to drink, then it was time he learned.

She took a tumbler from the service, clinked exactly two ice cubes into it, and covered them with scotch.

Her father never moved. He just stood at the window waiting.

"Good evening, Father," she said after her first sip. He moved his head ever so slightly up and down. It passed for a nod.

"Of course everyone thinks of politics when you say you're going to Georgetown," he began, after a suitable wait. "But that's not all the school offers. They have a very good linguistics program, for example. And a quite respectable pre-med program as well."

Alyssa laughed. "We both know I'd be heading for Hopkins if I wanted to be a doctor, Father."

He gave another of his barely-noticeable nods. "Of course. But I want you to know that, until you have the degree in your hand, you can always change your mind about what to study. And even after. You can still back out of politics. You'll be able to for years yet."

Alyssa arched her eyebrows even though he wasn't looking at her and treated herself to a sip of the scotch.

"You don't want me to go into politics? Come on Father. Be real."

"Call this the last gasp of my conscience, if you want an explanation."

She simply waited. Prompting him for more would only demonstrate impatience.

"It's not a pretty profession, Alyssa. Oh, everyone's heard about money and politics, and the time that candidates spend grubbing for donations. But that's really not even the point. I'm not so foolish as to think the Chambers family attained its present wealth without a goodly number of ancestors who liked money. Chasing cash is not what makes politics corrupt."

"No, what makes politics hard on the soul is the need to abandon your ideals if you want to win. There are two kinds of politicians: the ones with clean consciences, and the ones in office. If you get into politics, come prepared to do anything to win. Anything. Lie? Cheat? Steal? Betray friends? Sell out supporters? The question isn't whether you'll have to. The question is how many of them you'll have to do in a single day."

Her father sighed, but she could tell he wasn't done. He took a sip of his scotch before continuing.

"The practice of politics is all levers," he said. "You have to find out how to make people do what you want. With some men it's money, with some it's power. Everyone has one. If you want to be involved in politics, you learn to find people's levers and use them. "

"It's the art of shaping destiny. To practice it well gives you a feeling of god-like power. There are few thrills to equal reading the newspapers and knowing that you made all that happen.

"But it has a price. The price is your conscience. Before long in politics, you'll have to decide whether there are things that are beneath you. If there are, you'll get out. If there aren't, you'll make history. I made my choice long ago. Some days I'm ashamed of it, other days I'm actually proud, if you can believe that. It's a talk for another day. When I had to choose, I chose victory and destiny over purity. The only rule is, 'Give anything for victory.' For years, I've done that. Winning will take anything you value. You have to learn not to value anything more than winning."

She thought back to her girlhood – running up onto the patio to tell her father something and being ignored while he talked to someone in politics. Or the patient tone in her mother's voice as she said, "Your father's working, Dear. Maybe he'll be here next time."

She wanted to say something. She wanted to ask why it was more important to shape destiny than to spend time with his wife and daughter. She wanted to ask if maybe Mom's drinking would've been more under control if he hadn't made the decision to value politics above his family. But in the end, she couldn't bring herself to ask any of that.

"You can still turn back, Alyssa," he said, then turned away from the window and walked out without ever meeting her eyes.

♦

By her second year of college, Chambers had taken every political science class she could and spent her spare time with a reading list that would have shocked her father: The most presentable items on that list were true crime books. The worst was a manual she'd found on bomb making. The middle ground covered everything from espionage and surveillance techniques to guides about what constituted admissible evidence in criminal trials.

Occasional unexplained explosions in campus parking lots in the dark of night were written off as student pranks, and she simply threw away the video footage she'd gotten from the dean's bathroom; there was no good use for that.

Over the years, George Pierce had hooked her up with various opportunities to do what she loved. Each time, she grew more comfortable in her clandestine career. Learning people's secrets and giving them to political opponents became first comfortable for her and then an art form.

She tailed a candidate home from the bar and called in a DUI to derail his campaign. She could walk right behind two people and have them never know someone was listening. Breaking into an office to plant spy software on computers was often her preferred way to get the job done, but it was only one of many.

George put her in touch with others who needed skills like hers, who then put her in touch with still others. Her name was never known. Yet, for those who knew the right people, contact with Alyssa was something that could make or break a political career.

Her friendship with Matt became a professional asset. Even though they were both still only halfway through school, he was trying to get an early start on his career. He took freelance writing work whenever he could and was building a good relationship with a number of different editors. It helped Alyssa to be able to slip documents under his dorm door now and then when a client wanted some facts to make their way into the media.

Of course, as always, friendship with Matt was a double-edged sword. He was useful sometimes, but he still wanted more from her than she wanted to give. It was becoming something of an annoyance.

One night, Alyssa found herself in the middle of an argument with him – the same argument they had been having since high school.

"Look, Matt, I don't want a husband. I don't want a boyfriend. I don't even want friends. How many times are you going to keep coming back to this? It's not going to change."

"But Alyssa, we're such a good fit. We both..."

"Stop, OK? I've heard it. I've heard it and heard it. We grew up together, we both like politics, we both have trouble with our fathers... you keep pointing all that out without listening to me! I like to be alone. I need to be alone. You don't even have the first foggy clue of why I can't have someone in my life who gets too clear a picture of me. The first requirement of a good fit is that both parties feel like they need someone or something. I don't."

Her cell phone picked that moment to ring. Matt looked like he wanted and expected her to ignore it. Both to vent some of her anger and to communicate something to him, she picked up the phone, stomped down the hall, and slammed the door to her bedroom before answering it.

It was George Pierce.

"I've got someone I want you to meet," he said. "I'm moving up in the world. I'm a consultant for a few different campaigns now. Lance is running for Senate, and he's got a new campaign manager. I figured you'd want to meet him since he's got some work that needs doing that's kind of up your alley."

"Of course. It's hard to make money without clients. Just make sure he understands my rules."

Pierce gave her a chuckle. "You get more paranoid every time we talk."

"Wouldn't you, if you did what I do?"

"Probably, but I doubt I'd be as skilled at it."

"Can we meet tonight?" she asked. She named a parking garage that she knew to be poorly lit.

Walking back out of her bedroom, she found Matt still waiting for her.

"Are you still here? We've had our argument – again. For like the tenth time. Go home. I answered you. Please stop asking every time the season changes."

The agreed-upon meeting-time was closer to dawn than to dusk. Chambers went to the darkened parking garage and broke a couple of lights to make sure the visibility was next to nothing.

She hid outside the garage, waiting for the two of them to walk in. Pierce, as usual, was looking at his feet as he walked, with his hands in his pockets. The man next to him had a portly build and appeared to be going bald. In the moonlight, it was possible to make out what looked like a birthmark on his forehead.

Chambers emerged from behind a parked car and followed them into the garage. She padded silently, listening to them mutter back and forth about paranoia, until they were in the darkest area of the garage.

"Don't turn around please. It's probably too dark to make out my face even if you did, but I still don't like people being able to identify me."

Both of them jumped a little bit like they were about to whirl and look behind them but controlled the instinct in time. The newcomer spoke softly, facing away from her.

"Pretty melodramatic. A dark parking garage in the middle of the night? It's just like Watergate."

"Most of my jobs could end in a courtroom if I'm not careful about my identity."

"Not this one," the newcomer replied. "I just want to hire someone to work in an office I already own. Perfectly legal."

Chambers said, "Safer that way. So what's the problem?"

The new man said, "The press has a mole in our campaign. I don't know who it is, but I know they're getting intel. They know our ads before we run them. They're rebutting our spin before it's even out. I want to pay someone to find the leaker and make them stop. Nothing illegal about that, right? It's just that we don't want the candidate to know about this, so we're keeping it off the books. Our candidate... well, he has a problem with addictive behaviors. If he knew we knew, he'd probably fire all of us rather than admit there's a problem. He's already fired two guys for trying to talk to him about it. That's how I have a job. So he can't know. If he finds out we hired you to deal with the problem, he'll fire me and then you don't get paid."

She made a noncommittal noise, and the new guy continued.

"But if we don't do something to stop this leaker, then the whole world's going to know about Lance Reeder and women. So we need you."

"I already know about Lance Reeder and his... love life," she shrugged. "None of that is really my problem, right? You don't want me to get him into a 12-step program; you just want me to stop the leaker, right?"

"Right."

Chambers nodded.

"Tell me who you are, so I know who to call when I find out."

"My name's Tilman. You're not going to tell me yours?"

There was no answer. When the two men looked around, no one was there.

Alyssa waited a day before starting on the job.

Dressed in the gray coveralls of a janitorial worker, Alyssa pushed a cart laden with cleaning supplies and an oversized trash can. The elevator dinged, she pushed her cart in, and rode to the twentieth floor. Once there, she went down the darkened hallway until she reached the office of the Lance Reeder for Congress Committee. The real cleaning company wasn't scheduled to come until tomorrow.

Inside, she quickly located the offices of the communications director and finance director. Together with the campaign manager – this Tilman person, who hired her – those two were usually the top staffers on a campaign. If one of Gibson's people was leaking crucial intelligence to the press, it was likely to be one of them.

Unfortunately, the communications director was in his office.

Alyssa glanced at her watch. It was eleven at night. This guy was a real workaholic.

She busied herself with pretending to be a custodial worker: emptying trash, dusting, etc. The employee gave her a friendly wave. Alyssa waved back and made her way into the finance office instead. She rifled through the trash and found nothing incriminating, so she emptied the garbage into her cart, working slowly to allow for a lucky break.

She got it. The man working in the communications office left. He waved once more and walked out the door of the headquarters.

At once, Alyssa sat down at the finance director's computer. She popped in a thumb drive. Soon, she was copying the entire contents of the computer to sort it out at leisure later on and figure out if one of these two was the mole.

When the file transfer finished, she shut the computer down and popped out her thumb drive. Then she went to the office next door.

The sign on the door read, "Communications Director Michael Vincent."

Alyssa eased into his chair. It was still warm from his recent departure. She plugged her thumb drive in, started the computer, and again began copying files.

"What's going on here?"

The communications director was back. He was tall, with wavy blond hair that was blow-dried perfectly into place. Alyssa's head whipped up to meet his eyes, and her brain began searching for an answer that might alleviate the situation.

"What are you doing with my computer?"

When Alyssa still didn't answer, the man backed up, and pulled a cell phone out of his pocket. This was unacceptable. Alyssa saw all her careful secrecy going up in smoke with one phone call. She saw her budding career destroyed. The possibility made her angry. It made her angry enough to do something stupid.

She vaulted over the desk and tackled the man, quickly knocking his phone out of his hand. She was better trained, but there was a substantial difference in physical size that made it hard to keep him pinned down. He got an arm free and tried to throw a punch at her. Alyssa blocked it easily with a forearm block, then grabbed his wrist and pinned his arm back down, sitting on his stomach. He kept trying to break his arms free.

Caught up in the moment, mad at the man for turning a simple job into a potential disaster, Alyssa made a fateful decision. She reached inside her baggy coveralls and pulled out her silenced Ruger .22 to aim it at the man's face. That pretty much put an end to his struggling, but it created a new problem.

"Never point a gun at someone you don't want to shoot," was the first rule of firearms safety classes. Likewise, "Never make a threat you can't follow through on," was the first rule of negotiation. Since she was emphatically not going to shoot him, she was breaking both rules. It made her path forward rather awkward.

"Just let me do my job..." she muttered, unsure how to solve the problem. She had no desire to hurt the man, she just wanted to do what she'd been paid for and get out but how was she supposed to get out when this guy was here?

"What job?" he asked.

Alyssa growled under her breath. She hadn't really meant to say that aloud. Instead of a direct reply, she asked, "What will it take for you to just leave?"

"What job?" he asked again.

When she didn't answer, he said, "Is this job about me?"

Alyssa didn't know what to say. It might be about him, if he was the guy leaking campaign secrets. He took her silence as agreement.

"Did Tilman figure out I've been telling the press about him? He hired a private detective to get evidence to fire me?"

Alyssa blinked. She hadn't expected the man to just come out and admit that he was the one she was looking for.

Her facial expression must have told him he'd hit a nerve. He'd given up struggling now and simply lay there with his head on the carpet, watching her eyes.

"Look, Lance Reeder cheats on his wife," the guy said. "And not in some kind of one-time slip either. He goes through mistresses like an alcoholic through bourbon. He likes them young and naive and easily impressed by a Congressman. He uses his position of power..."

The young man shook his head and looked away.

"I can't just sit idly by and do nothing about that. I don't believe a man like that should represent me in the Senate."

Alyssa couldn't really disagree. She didn't like helping a man like that stay in office much more than this guy did, but opportunities to get paid for work like this were rare, and she didn't want to blow one.

"I can see it in your eyes. You agree with me. So why are you trying to rat me out?"

"It's a job," Alyssa replied, surprised to find herself talking to him.

"Yeah, me too. I want to be in politics, and I can't just quit this job. I need the income, and I don't need to get blackballed from the biz, so I sneak info to the press in hopes of getting this dirt bag out of office without losing my career. Not exactly brave or noble, is it? I just want to try to do the right thing without going broke over it."

Alyssa remembered her father's advice and repeated it back to Vincent. "Trying to do the right thing is a good sign you don't belong in this business."

"I don't believe that," the man replied. "I get that it's what most people think. Just do what you have to do to win and stop caring about the details. But that's not how I am. And I don't think it's how the business should be."

Alyssa shrugged, still holding him down.

"Doesn't really affect our little problem, does it? I let you go, and you can pick me out of a lineup easy. But what are the alternatives? I could shoot you, but that's not a line I want to cross if I don't have to."

"Sounds like I'm not the only one who still believes in doing the right thing."

"That's different."

He only smiled at her.

"Give me an option – other than you dying – that keeps my secrets."

The young man said, "Look, I told you the truth. If you've been hired to find out who's leaking to the press, I'm him. Doesn't that show you can trust me?"

Alyssa replied, "Trust doesn't mix well with the ethic of doing anything to win."

Both of them were silent for a time, in their awkward position on the floor, until Alyssa asked, "You say you're leaking to the press instead of just quitting because you value your career, right?

He nodded.

"Politics feels like I'm making a difference – like I'm changing the world."

"So here's the deal: if we both just walk away from here, you could identify me if you chose. That's not too big a deal – I'm here legally; Tilman hired me to do this, but it's a career setback for me. Anonymity is a valuable professional asset."

She went on, "On the other hand, if we both just walk away, I can ruin your political career if I choose. No one's ever going to want to hire a staffer with a reputation for giving confidential information to the press. It won't kill you, but it's a career setback."

"Yeah," he agreed. "And embarrassing. I've started building a good relationship with Tilman. He's really helping me get my career started. If he knew I was giving away his secrets, it would ruin that."

"OK. I was hired to stop the leak, not necessarily to turn anyone in, so let's say both of us walk away and keep our mouths shut. You keep your career; I get to stay anonymous. All you have to do is stop leaking and keep my secret for life. The minute you ruin me, I ruin you. So we both keep the secret, right?"

He sighed. "Yeah. Stop leaking. And let a womanizing, walking wanted-for-sexual-harassment poster get into the Senate."

"Let me give you some advice my f... my mentor gave me."

Vincent looked at her and raised an eyebrow.

"Before long in politics, you'll have to decide whether there are things that are beneath you. If there are, you'll get out. If there aren't, you'll make history."

"I don't think I'd like your mentor very much."

"Like him? I don't like him either. But that's not relevant. Do we have a deal?"

Vincent sighed.

"Yeah. I don't like it, but I don't want to get fired. I hate this. I know I'm going to regret it. The reporter I've been talking to is kind of a nice guy, too. Probably going to mess with his life when his editor discovers he can't keep delivering juicy insider stories about the Reeder campaign. It's a shame. He's just getting started on his career. Young kid working freelance. Probably this'll mess up his whole career."

Alyssa didn't ask. She wavered somewhere between not wanting to know and being certain she already knew. She knew only one reporter who had just started with freelance journalism. Matt was way too persistent, but that didn't mean Alyssa liked the idea of hurting his career. With bitter irony, she heard the echo of the words she had just spoken.

"You'll have to decide whether there are things that are beneath you."

# CHAPTER FOUR

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 Chambers' 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.

# CHAPTER FIVE

Getting into places where you don't belong isn't really that hard. More than half the battle is simply looking like you're supposed to be there. In the business suit she bought earlier, Alyssa looked more than professional enough for a Presidential campaign headquarters.

At the Hicks office, she rode an elevator up to the ninth floor. There, she was told by the receptionist that Tom Wheeler was unavailable at the moment.

Of course he is, she thought. He's on three different conference calls at once, trying to make sure none of what's coming splatters on him.

"Well, my name is Alice Cobler. I'm a research assistant for Ben Richards," was what she said aloud.

Richards wrote one of the high-profile political opinion columns in the Post. Alyssa had met him once, courtesy of an invitation from Matt to an office party. Someone like Wheeler – who was a spin doctor at heart, whatever actual title he might use – always found time for reporters, especially well-known types like Richards. Alyssa knew she'd get in.

She took a chair in the lobby, waiting for Wheeler. Remaining calm was the hardest thing she had ever done.

Part of her agitation came from being in a public place while law enforcement was hunting for her. But a bigger part was having her face all over the TV screen.

Most campaign offices keep a TV set running constantly to monitor the latest news. Since this was a presidential campaign, there were four sets—one on each wall—all tuned to 24-hour cable news networks. And they were all taking advantage of closed captioning to avoid the cacophony of four TVs blaring at once.

Every screen had Alyssa's face on it. Each photo or video clip came with a tag line like "Person of interest" or "Suspect?" or her favorite, "Professor by day, assassin by night?" The closed captioning showed the anchors saying things like, "Chambers is known to hold a black belt in two martial arts and to be a competitive shooter."

They showed her driver's license photo, the photo from her personnel file at the university, and publicity shots of her that the university had taken at various events. And of course, there were the clips from interview shows on these very networks.

Really the whole thing was ironic. She had never intended to wind up in the spotlight at all. Far from it. But after she'd supplied little bits of analysis for Matt's stories here and there, she started getting calls from the rest of the media. Such exposure had made her life awkward and only increased the level of paranoia she felt when meeting new people, though she hid it well.

She chuckled to herself as she realized the dilemma each news host was probably wrestling with. Just a short time ago they had called upon her, even fawned over her, as a respected political analyst. Now they were showing sound bites from some of those same interviews – obviously with a different goal in mind – but the end result was still embarrassment for them. No wonder they appeared to be a bit flustered!

The receptionist saw her looking at the TV and said, "Pretty wild, huh? She was just on that show last week giving some analysis about how we're the only campaign that has any chance of derailing Rich West. 'Had,' I should say. Now they're saying she killed him."

It took every ounce of Alyssa's willpower to calmly make eye contact with the young woman, smile broadly, and reply, "I know. Mr. Richards does shows with her sometimes. Pretty crazy."

As soon as she possibly could without looking evasive, she turned her face away to look back at the TV screen. Her heart hammered so hard in her chest that she feared for her health.

One screen shifted to another interview with Congressman Vincent. The host explained that Vincent was a senior advisor to the West campaign and asked him again about Lance Reeder.

Vincent gave his best smile.

"People keep asking me that. I don't know the answer. I was in this for Rich. He was a great man – maybe the first truly great man we've had in politics in decades."

Finally, the receptionist's intercom buzzed, and Chambers was told to go down the hall to the last door on the left. That, she knew, would be a penthouse office. Pausing in the hall to collect herself after the nerve-wracking conversation in the lobby, she was struck by the eerie similarity to the location where she'd been the previous night. In fact, the West headquarters was only a few blocks up K Street.

She walked down the hall. Wheeler was going to answer some questions for her, but they wouldn't be the kind of questions he'd expect from a supposed reporter.

She opened the door to see Wheeler hanging up his cell phone. When they originally met, Alyssa had taken the same precautions she always did with clients. They met at night, and she approached him from behind. Although he had hired her as a thief, Tom Wheeler had never seen her. Of course, he had seen plenty of pictures of her on the news since then. She took a moment to congratulate herself on her disguise – neither the receptionist nor this man had any idea who she was.

"Miss... Cobler, was it? Come on in. You must be new with Ben; he didn't tell me he had a new assistant. Heck of a time to start work, huh? Biggest news story of the new century."

While he was talking, Chambers opened the backpack that was all that remained of her previous life. She drew out her handgun. Its six-inch long barrel was fatter than most pistol barrels because sound suppression – a silencer, to most people – was built directly in. The angular handle held a removable magazine loaded with ten rounds of subsonic .22 caliber ammunition. An eleventh round was already in the chamber.

She pointed it straight at Wheeler's forehead so that the fat barrel almost touched him right between the eyebrows.

"Who did you tell that I would be in West's headquarters last night, Wheeler?"

His eyes went wide, and for a moment Alyssa thought the man might actually pee his pants. Staring at the gun barrel, his eyes were almost crossed. Then he came to his senses a bit, and focused on her face.

"Chambers? Alyssa Chambers?" His voice rose, building to a shout. "Secur..."

"Shut up or die."

"...ity," he finished in a hoarse whisper.

They spent a moment in silence, staring at each other. Finally Wheeler said, "You killed Rich West!"

"Wrong. I didn't kill him, but whoever you told that I would be going in there did kill him. So tell me who, and I'll go deal with them myself."

"You're the woman I hired to..." he stopped, suddenly unwilling to say it aloud.

"That's right. But I am not the woman who killed Rich West. I suspect you told someone that I was going in there, and I suspect that someone killed him."

"Can it, Chambers! You can try convincing the jury you didn't kill him, but you can't convince me. I know for a fact that you were there. At least talk to me honestly."

"I am. Try thinking about it for a moment. What possible reason could I have for coming here if I killed him? The FBI already knows about me, so it's not like I could stop you from giving them any information about me by coming here to kill you. No, if I were the assassin, I would already be sitting on a Caribbean beach sipping something with a plastic sword in it. We both know that. So tell me who you told, so I can go beat the truth out of them."

"You're crazy."

"You keep saying words, but not the ones I want to hear. That's an unwise position to take with someone pointing a gun at your head. Who did you tell?"

"I didn't tell anyone, OK? No one!"

"One more chance, then you die."

Chambers made a show of tightening her grip on the trigger. It was enough.

"A reporter! This reporter called! He said he'd heard we hired a private investigator and was asking about it for a story! I didn't tell him anything! I hung up on him! But he knew somehow. It wasn't me. Please, it wasn't me who told him!"

"Now we're getting somewhere. What was his name?"

"Matt Barr."

The bottom dropped out of Alyssa's stomach. The emotional shock was so great that her gun-hand wavered.

Wheeler's intercom picked that moment to go off.

"Tom, some men from the FBI are here to see you. I tried to tell them you were with someone at the moment, but they're on their way back."

Alyssa and Wheeler stared at each other in horror. She recovered first and immediately began seeking a way out.

Tom tried to put his poker face back on and said, "OK, now you're caught, right? So no sense adding a second murder to make your case worse. You can't kill me now."

She paid no attention. Instead, she quickly ran through her options. Yes, whoever could tell the FBI her name could also point them at Wheeler as someone likely involved with her. Any of her previous clients could identify the senior staff of an opposing campaign as likely to be involved if Chambers was involved.

All of which meant the FBI would treat Wheeler as a possible suspect. Which would mean they'd be here with a full team of agents for an arrest of this magnitude.

In other words, think what she might of her own abilities, even she could not hope to fight her way out through the front door.

But she didn't even know if the Hicks campaign headquarters had a back door. And if it did, the FBI was probably guarding it anyway.

So the only way out was...

She said a quick word of thanks for the pretentiousness of politics - it meant Wheeler had a corner penthouse office.

Out the front windows there was nothing but a nearly-hundred-foot drop to the pavement below.

But out the side window she could see the roof of the next building over. It appeared to be not far below where she was currently standing.

She shoved Tom out of the way and began firing her pistol at the window.

Wheeler shouted when she pushed him. The metallic racking back and forth of the slide on her silenced semi-auto was the only sound from the gun. But as the repeated impacts of small-caliber rounds cracked the glass, the room became very noisy. When he realized she was firing an actual real-life handgun in his office, Wheeler's eyes went wide, and he gave out a high-pitched scream.

Alyssa didn't care. She kicked off her high heels and ran toward the cracked glass.

She heard someone throw open the door behind her - heard the doorknob hit the wall too hard.

"Mr. Whee... what the... Freeze!"

Whoever was speaking was too late. Alyssa leapt out the window.

She felt shards of broken glass as she flew but she barely cared. So much adrenaline coursed through her body, she didn't even feel the pain.

The fall was a bit farther than she had expected—she'd been deceived by perspective—and she landed harder than she planned.

The part of Alyssa that still remembered her days as a gymnast winced at the ugly landing.

She was off-balance when she hit but made up for it by pitching forward and letting herself roll through a somersault. The gravel on the roof hurt her back, but she came up running for the far side.

Behind her she heard someone yell, "Federal agents! Freeze!" She ignored the order and kept running. On her left she heard a "zing" and saw a small cloud of dust rise.

They were shooting at her.

Frantically, she began random, zigzagging turns as she ran, hoping to make it harder for the shooter to get a clean shot at her. Little fountains of gravel and dust rose in front of her, behind her, and to both sides, but each time she swerved just right to avoid getting hit.

Alyssa caught sight of the service entrance to the roof and turned that way, only to see the little puffs of debris that indicated gunfire drawing ever closer. It was too obvious - they'd been waiting for her to turn that way.

She turned back and dashed for the far side of the roof.

The problem was, she couldn't see anything past the edge of the roof.

There was nothing for it but to run and hope.

Just as she heard the thud of someone else jumping down from Wheeler's office to join her on the roof, she reached the parapet.

The next building was one story down.

She was more prepared for the distance of the jump this time. She landed on her feet and took off immediately, glad to be at least temporarily out of the line of fire. Besides, the distance between her and Wheeler's office was growing too great for accurate pistol shots. And to make matters even better, she could see that she had three buildings of roughly equal height in a row here. That gave her some time to figure out what she was going to do when she reached the end of the block.

That was the positive side of her current personal ledger.

On the negative side, a helicopter flew into view off to her left.

The sound of gunfire was much more audible this time, even over the roar of the chopper's rotors. There was a man in the open passenger compartment of the chopper, firing warning shots in front of her with an assault rifle. The vehicle was obviously equipped with a microphone and loudspeaker because she heard, "This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Throw down your weapon and put your hands in the air!"

She kept zigzagging harder and faster, now left, now right, dodging shots from the chopper.

Then, the helicopter moved. As its rotors kicked up a spray of small stones, the aircraft swept around and ended up directly in front of her, less than fifty feet away.

With the chopper broadside ahead of her, she could see the FBI agent in full raid gear kneeling in the open door, pointing an M-4 carbine at her. The loudspeaker blared again.

"There's no escape. We have you surrounded. Put your hands in the air. This is your last chance to surrender."

The chopper's move had happened so fast she hadn't had time to react; she was still sprinting forward – right at the helicopter. Her run carried her closer as the loudspeaker ordered her to freeze.

Instead of freezing, she dove and rolled, a manoeuver that carried her right under the copter. Alyssa experienced the surreal sight of seeing the "FBI" logo painted on the bottom, right in front of her face. Then she rolled out the other side.

She jumped, grabbed the skid, and hauled herself up. Just as the shooter made the switch over to her side, she climbed into the open cabin. Long experience with helicopters had prepared her for the tiny quarters. They were always very small vehicles, even the luxury ones. And in this case, very close to the target was exactly where she wanted to be.

Before he could bring his weapon to bear, she delivered a right cross to the jaw. She followed that up with a kick that sent him tumbling out the open door.

At the last minute, she grabbed the M-4 out of his hands, then watched him fall with a thud to the rooftop only a few feet below them.

She swung the rifle forward and sized up the two people flying the craft. The pilot, to Alyssa's delight, was female. So she pointed the M-4 at the co-pilot's head.

"Out! Now!" She screamed at the top of her lungs to be heard over the engine noises.

The man turned around to stare at her in shock, eyes crossing over the barrel of the weapon. He wasn't moving, so Alyssa put a bullet through the windscreen to drive her point home.

Without further ado, the co-pilot undid his straps, threw open his door and jumped down to the roof.

The pilot was in the process of doing likewise when Alyssa shouted, "Not you! Sit down and get this thing out of here if you want to live."

The pilot looked at her, stared at the carbine, and then pulled back on the cyclic stick to gain altitude.

"Your helmet! Take it off!" She yelled. Then, holding the rifle in her right hand and cupping it under her elbow, she mimed taking the helmet off with her left to make sure she got the point.

"It's got a mic in it. I need it to talk to air traffic control!" she shouted back.

"Exactly! Take it off now or I blow you away!"

It was a bluff. She really didn't want to shoot an FBI agent. From Alyssa's perspective, that would be the worst possible scenario. Committing murder on the way to proving herself innocent of murder would not exactly work out. But from the pilot's perspective, her own demise was eminently believable. First of all, there was the matter of the barrel pointed at her head. Second, she thought that this person invading her aircraft had already murdered the man who most likely would have been the next President; for someone who had done that, killing a lowly FBI agent would not be a big deal.

She took the helmet off and, getting the drift when Chambers did no more than wave the barrel of the M-4 at the co-pilot's still-open door, she threw it out of the chopper.

"Head east," she shouted. "Straight and level, nothing fancy, put the autopilot on and talk to me."

She watched very carefully as the pilot complied, noting the location of the autopilot switch when she activated it.

"Oh, and one more thing," Alyssa added as the pilot turned back to look at her.

"I need you to strip. Down to your skivvies."

# CHAPTER SIX | FLASHBACK

Chambers eased the Mercedes into the garage and let it idle for a moment, sitting and enjoying the concerto on the stereo, letting it finish. The kids had been tough in her lectures and seminars, Matt had been his usual self at dinner, and she was in no hurry to move, except for the fact that there might be a drink in it for her if she did.

Finally, she went inside. From the garage, she entered the kitchen of her long, narrow townhouse. Normally she would have kicked off her pumps and headed for the wet bar after a day like this.

Chambers, however, violated other people's private space for a living. It had given her a sixth sense for knowing when a space was not empty.

Her home was not empty.

Silently, she reached inside her blazer back and drew a subcompact 9mm from its holster, amused at what the university administration would think if they knew. Rather than kicking her shoes into the closet as usual, she eased them off to make less noise. She stepped over to the door that led from the kitchen to the dining area and living room and slipped her head around for a peek, without even a little rustle.

Standing in front of her picture window, staring out at the college kids walking by on O Street, was a person whose silhouette she couldn't fail to recognize. Rail thin, straight as a flag pole, wearing a suit. Although she was seeing him from the back, she knew it would be a three piece.

"Father. What a pleasant surprise. Do you mind if I turn on a light?"

The elder Chambers didn't turn to greet her. He simply said, "As you wish," and lifted the tumbler at his side. Noticing it, Alyssa's eyes flicked over to her bar. He'd gotten into her Macallan 25, which she'd been saving for a special occasion. Biting her lower lip in annoyance, she poured some over ice in a tumbler, put her pistol behind the bar, and walked over to stand beside and half a step back from H. Franklin.

She thought of him as H. Franklin just then but didn't dare say it out loud, as he hated being called that. In fact, she'd never used it aloud with anyone but Matt and her mother. He preferred "Chambers" as a form of address, or "Frank" from people who had earned the right to feel close to him.

With her he wouldn't answer to anything but Father.

She was his daughter; she knew him well. He had come here for some purpose of his own, and he would divulge it in his own time. Asking would only cause him to look down on her for impatience.

Instead of speaking, Alyssa held her glass to her nose and breathed in. Mac 25 was very good scotch, and she didn't intend to let the company spoil her enjoyment of it.

"I want to hire you."

She blinked. She was instantly on guard. One did not speak of "hiring" a professor. His words implied he knew about her other job, but he wasn't supposed to know. Alyssa was fanatical about who knew. She passed on many clients who wouldn't do business with her without seeing her face. She could count on the fingers of one hand the people who knew her face and name and also knew that she was a thief.

He didn't say anything more for quite some time. Alyssa's mind raced through the conversational strategies. Normally, if he left something unsaid, he would say it later. Asking just made you look weak. But in this case, remaining silent for too long might be taken as an admission.

"Really, father? Some white paper you need for a client?"

"It was never going to be kept secret from me, of course. Not for long. A Chambers expects to succeed at what he does. I admire you for that attitude – for believing you could keep it a secret. But I have more experience at being a Chambers than you. You wanted to keep it secret, and I wanted to find it out. I won."

There was no point in denying. He had made it clear that he knew. The facts were on his side. Lying would invite disdain.

So, she simply kept silent and waited.

"There's a new young fellow running for Congress this year. Naive. Unrealistic. Thinks he can succeed by doing right rather than doing what's necessary to win. Not unlike that Ken Wells fellow you kept out of Congress in your first job. Nice work that."

The younger Chambers absorbed the information without comment. Her father was communicating the fact that he knew exactly how she'd gotten her start in business. He intended to put to rest any lingering doubts about whether he really knew. He was also trying to intimidate her by demonstrating his ability to find out what she tried to keep hidden.

That might mean he expected her to balk at the work he wanted done, and he felt he needed extra leverage. Or, it might just be H. Franklin being his usual self.

The only safe response was to keep silent. She sipped her scotch.

"His name is Mike Vincent. He's an upstart staffer who used to work for Lance. Now that Lance is off to the Senate, this Vincent fellow wants the House seat. Normally, of course, a man like that wouldn't be able to get anywhere in real politics. The consultants would eat him alive for a 20 percent commission, and the donors would snicker at him as soon as his back was turned. But somehow he's raising enough to be competitive. Somehow, he might actually win. He's got Rich West coming in for a fundraiser, for goodness sake. West could be the next President, and he's raising money for some guy no one's heard of."

This time, Alyssa felt like she had the edge. Her father mentioned Vincent's work for Reeder in passing, without any kind of comment. He did not know that she already knew Mike.

Of course, no one but Mike knew that she already knew Mike.

"If Vincent is going to go places, I need to get a lever on him. I need to know how he can be controlled. I don't like people running around in politics on whom I can't get any leverage. Senator West is like that. No leverage. Drives a man half mad. I want to find out who's helping Mr. Vincent," her father finished. "Someone is keeping our young idealist afloat in very dangerous waters. I want to know who and why. From that, I hope to deduce how to keep the young fellow in line. How you find out is up to you. "

"One hates to be so crass as to quote a fee to one's own daughter. Nevertheless, you may safely expect to be paid whatever you think reasonable."

Alyssa nodded and said nothing. No Chambers ever mentioned a dollar figure aloud unless wagering, and then only on horses, yachtsmen, or golf.

H. Franklin Chambers tipped back his tumbler and polished off the scotch. He walked out her front door and never did give any indication of how he'd gotten in.

Alyssa caught the next flight back home so she could get to the fundraiser with Rich West. It was like most such affairs. Outside a big hotel, the valet parking staff drove cars back and forth while wealthy donors went in. Alyssa wore a red suit to fit in. She allowed some untrained teenager to have charge of her Mercedes, nervously watching as he drove it away. Walking through the front door of the hotel toward the ballroom, she was flagged down by Matt Barr. He lurked outside the party with a voice recorder at hand.

"Hey Lyss, how's it going?" He stood a little too close. "Can I talk to you for a few?"

"Of course, Matt, what's up?"

"It's a pretty big deal, having someone like Rich West come in to campaign for an unknown like Vincent, right? Can you say that in a way that makes it sound academic, for the analysis quote?"

She laughed. "Tonight I'm actually just another Chambers giving money to a politician, Matt, not really on the job."

"Really? Why? Are you as gaga over Rich West as everyone else?"

She shrugged. "Not to speak of. It's just Chambers life. H. Franklin wants a family presence here."

"What do you mean by 'not to speak of?'"

She patted his arm. "Don't quote me tonight, Matt. Have a good time."

The party itself was a little glitzier than usual because of the presence of the celebrity Senator. Rich West was a big deal in politics. Everyone was talking about him for the next Presidential election. Some were saying there was no one else to talk about.

What no one knew is why he picked an unknown House candidate from a small state to support. Not that long ago, Vincent had been a newbie communications director on someone else's Senate campaign.

Remembering that meeting with Vincent, Alyssa was mostly amazed that it had worked out. The two of them really had kept each other's secrets. It made her vaguely curious about meeting him tonight. But not curious enough to bet her life on it.

"Are you really Alyssa Chambers? You have to be. The resemblance is too strong."

She turned around to see Senator Lance Reeder beaming her a thousand-watt smile that stopped at his eyes. His eyes looked more like a wolf sizing up a meal. There was really nothing special about him other than his smile and his eyes. He was an ordinary man in late middle age collecting some extra weight in his midriff. His brown hair was thinning and graying. His suit was expensive, his posture was good, and of course there was that smile... and those eyes. His breath smelled strongly of alcohol.

Also, there was what Alyssa knew about him. She remembered her first job; she remembered her last conversation with Mike Vincent. As a consequence the man's smile had no effect on her.

"Have we met?"

"No, but I knew your mother. You look so much like her you could be her. Well, you could be her from 20 years ago anyway."

She felt her temper rise at once at the very thought of this man's eyes on her mother. "Goes through women like an alcoholic through bourbon," was what Vincent had said.

She reminded herself, Dignity... grace... you're a Chambers... You're here to do a job...

She held out her hand.

"Yes, I'm Alyssa Chambers. A pleasure to meet you."

He took her hand. Whatever followed was not a handshake. It took all her willpower not to jerk her hand back. She looked around for Matt – he would embarrass her if he saw someone caressing her hand that way.

"Lance Reeder."

"How did you know my mother, Senator?"

He accepted wine from a passing waiter, drank from the glass in a way that was more guzzling than sipping, and said, "Please, call me Lance."

Alyssa forced herself to smile but couldn't manage any pleasant words. She waited for him to say more and pondered the concept of a hard straight punch right to his solar plexus.

A womanizing drunk telling me about how he knew my mother...

Her hands balled into fists, and she had to consciously uncurl them.

"We were... friends," he slurred. "Well, you know, your whole family. I've known your father for a long time. You can't help it if you want to go anywhere in politics. You have to know Chambers."

The attempt to recover made obvious what the first words might only have hinted at, and Alyssa quickly switched from reminding herself about dignity and grace to planning how to get the man out of everyone's sight so she could assault him.

"I'll never forget that car crash," he mumbled.

Alyssa wasn't sure if he meant to say it aloud or if the wine was causing his thoughts to come out of his mouth.

And what did he mean about a car crash mentioned in conjunction with her mother? Her mother died of a stroke from drinking too much...

Gritting her teeth, she forced her mind back to the task at hand. Why was money and support lining up behind an unknown, untested candidate?

"So why are you here, Senator?"

He shrugged, slurring his speech as he replied.

"Besh party goin' on in the state tonigh'. Wesh is a big deal. Vincen' usha work for me. Pick ya' reason."

"Yeah, but you're a serious player. None of those are reasons for you to throw your weight behind someone in the primary."

His reply took the form of a question.

"D'you know D.W. Tilman?"

Chambers wasn't keen to admit how she knew of Tilman – especially since the acquaintance was not mutual. Tilman had never seen her face. She settled on, "I seem to remember he worked for your campaign once."

"Yeah, but he'sh off to bigger'n better things now. Went ta work at the National Committee headquarters in D.C., and now he's pullin' strings on a Presidential campaign. He's linin' guys up behind Vincent. Not sure why. They both worked for my campaign once."

Chambers nodded, pleasantly reminded of the advantages of talking to drunk people. It was a lot easier to get information. She made as graceful an exit as she could from her conversation with Reeder and went off to gather more information.

Circulating through the room, she heard Tilman's name pop up in other conversations from time to time, and even saw him floating by, whispering in Vincent's ear. The pinkish birthmark on his forehead stood out when the lighting was right. Maybe Reeder was right, and this was the guy organizing Vincent's support behind the scenes.

It seemed like an odd pairing, though, since when she met Mike Vincent, it was D.W. Tilman who sicc'ed her on him.

She turned away from watching the two whispering and almost ran face first into the broad chest of a very large, tall man. He wasn't fat; he was like a tall brick. From his thighs to his shoulders he was wider than anyone but a linebacker and looked stronger than one, too.

Chambers recognized him at once from all his publicity, and she didn't need him to introduce himself. Of course, he did anyway.

"Hi. I'm Rich. Nice to meet you."

"Senator West. I... I wasn't expecting to almost run into you. Sorry."

Chambers took note of the fact that she was actually stammering. She had stolen things from the biggest names in politics and she was a Chambers besides. Normally, she didn't impress easily but here she was fumbling for words. Maybe Rich West was as big a deal as the media said he was.

"Nothing to be sorry for. Thanks for coming and supporting Mike."

She smiled. "Why do you support him?"

"Well, Mike Vincent is going to create jobs by supporting American families," West shot back without even a pause. "Of course, I support a candidate like that."

Chambers blushed. She had asked the most basic question in the book and gotten the most scripted answer in the book thrown right back at her. It was embarrassing for someone who called herself a professor of political science.

West smiled at her, thanked her again for her contribution to the Vincent campaign, and wandered off. Chambers watched him go, regretting the fit of anger with Reeder that had thrown her far enough off her game to ask a stupid question like that.

But as he walked away, she did see D.W. Tilman walk up beside him and lean up to whisper something in his ear.

She sauntered over toward the wall, eager to take a quiet moment and look at the crowd. Tilman was playing a big role here, and she thought she had the answer to bring back to her father, but she needed time to think and more to go on.

As she passed a service exit, she paused to rest for a moment. She was away from the crowd and enjoying a moment of quiet. Like most fancy parties, the lighting was dim to create artificial intimacy. That made it easy for Alyssa to fade out of sight.

That's when someone shoved her through the door to the service corridor.

Alyssa's breath escaped her with a "whuff!" as she fell forward into the door, knocked it open with her weight, and crashed onto the floor. She rolled as she hit, getting face-up just in time to see a tuxedo-clad form rushing through the door after her, about to strike down with his foot at her shins. From the ground, she kicked back and knocked his leg aside, then leapt to her feet.

The door closed behind them, cutting them off from the party.

The man in front of her had rich, full hair as black as hers, slicked back and gelled down until it looked painted onto his scalp. A scar decorated his cheek directly below his left eye. He was clad in a black tux with a short coat buttoned at the front, and he didn't appear to have any desire to talk. He flew at her in a flurry of punches just as Alyssa was dropping into a guard stance. Caught by surprise, she was hard-pressed to block the assault, let alone land any blows of her own.

The momentum of a kick carried him past her a few steps, and Alyssa pivoted to face him without moving. It created a few feet of space between them.

"Who are you?" she asked between pants, trying to catch her breath.

"Fred Harris. Do you remember me?"

She could hardly have forgotten. The Harris Affair was still one of her fondest memories. The challenges had grown greater, and the victories sweeter, but nothing ever quite felt like her first time breaking the law.

"My career took a big nose dive after Ken Wells fired me for losing that watch," he said. "But you know, this business gets in your blood. I couldn't just give it up. So I've been working my way back ever since. "

"Thing is, after all that effort to rebuild my career, I get tired of hearing I'm only the second-best in the field. So I figure leaving you unconscious in a service hallway will kill two birds with one stone. Revenge and a reputation as top dog."

Alyssa's mind whipped through a couple options and came to rest on a wild gamble.

"Tilman's working with you now? I must have charged too much for the last job."

Harris didn't answer, but the flash in his eyes told her she'd hit close to the mark.

Before she could think about it any further, Harris charged at her, throwing a punch, then a high, sweeping crescent kick that was aimed at her head, and then a knee. She got an arm up to block and deflect the kick and stepped to the side to dodge the knee.

But she caught the punch right on her jaw.

Alyssa's ears rang and her vision was completely obscured with flashing yellow and purple lights.

She shuffled back to create some distance, shouted to maybe throw a bit of confusion into the situation, and kept her fists up in front of her upper body and face in a guard position. She couldn't really see yet, so blocking anything was going to take luck.

That punch really hurt!

Unable to see, the next sounds confused her. In front of her, the sound of running. Behind her, the sound of the service door, and a voice asking, "Um... excuse me?"

As her vision gradually returned, it became obvious that her assailant had run away. She turned around to see Mike Vincent and Rich West crowding in behind her in the hall, coming over to see if she was all right.

Vincent touched her jaw lightly. "I'll call 911," he said, fumbling in his pocket for a phone.

"No!" Alyssa replied, and stepped back with every intention of turning to run down the same hallway Harris had used to escape.

Vincent held his hands in the air, away from any place he might have had his phone. "OK, OK, it's your health insurance. Looks like you held a gun on the wrong guy this time."

Rich West turned to stare at him. "What are you talking about?"

Vincent and Chambers stared at each other, neither of them willing to speak first.

"This is my fundraiser," Vincent finally said to her. "I think I have a right to know what's going on. Are you here doing paying work like you were the last time I saw you? Private investigator stuff?"

"I'm not a PI," Alyssa replied. "And I don't want to talk. Thanks for scaring Harris off."

She walked away, hearing West say to Vincent, "What was all that? Private investigators? Guns?"

♦

Alyssa had a nasty bruise on her cheek when she arrived at the Chambers Estate. The butler made a fuss about bringing an icepack, and Alyssa let him, but she had no intention of holding a dripping plastic bag of melting water to her face while trying to talk to her father.

Painkillers were taking care of most of the problem, and she figured a wee nip from H. Franklin's Talisker would deal with whatever was left over. She poured it into a brandy snifter with no ice, sank into a red leather wing chair, and waited for her father to show up.

When he walked into the room, H. Franklin Chambers' eyes went quickly to his daughter's bruise, then to the drink in her hand. He went over to the bar and poured some for himself. He drank his whisky over ice in a tumbler.

He sat down in a chair close to her, his gray suit rustling slightly. He crossed his right leg over his left, sipped the scotch, and waited.

"D.W. Tilman is the man you want," she said without preamble. "He got Rich West there, he got Lance Reeder to support him, and he had a plumber on the scene too – for what reason I'm not sure. But you didn't hire me for that. You just hired me to find out who was behind the support for Vincent. It's Tilman."

Her father nodded. "Good enough. I wonder if it's just friendship, or if he has other plans. Tilman usually has an angle on everything he does."

She shrugged, and he inclined his head toward an alligator-skin briefcase sitting near the front door. "For you," he said. "Feel free to count it, if you're so inclined. Also, that looks like a nasty bruise. Why not sleep here tonight?" He got up and walked out of the hall.

Watching him walk away, she wondered about what Lance Reeder had said. Why had he said something about a car crash? But she couldn't exactly ask H. Franklin. Not when Reeder had as much as blurted out that he and Alyssa's mother had had an affair.

# 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 bedside 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.

# 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 there'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."

# CHAPTER NINE | FLASHBACK

Once George Pierce had been her only connection to her work in politics. Those days were long over. The woman in front of her now had been referred by Lance Reeder's one-time campaign manager. She had her back turned and didn't know Alyssa was behind her.

The street was pitch dark, and the woman was on her way home from a hard night of partying. Politics was often like that, Alyssa had learned – at least, the campaign part. Her politics were never like that. But campaign staff worked hard and then played hard, as the saying went. This particular woman had just spent a couple hours drinking with fellow staffers but was now on her way home to get what little sleep she could before a new spin cycle started with a new day.

Two cat-like steps brought Alyssa within striking distance of the woman. Deftly, her hand shot forward and covered the subject's mouth and the barrel of her .22 went to the back of the woman's neck.

"Don't scream and don't move. You might be carrying mace, but I'm carrying a gun, so I win." Her voice was a harsh whisper, too low to be identified.

There was a brief moment of panicked struggling – typical at moments like this, Alyssa had long since learned – and then the other woman went stock still, rigidly frozen like a recruit on a parade ground. When she lifted her hand slightly, the subject whispered, "Please! Take anything you want in my purse. Just take the whole purse, and let me go. Please."

"I'm not here to rob you. I'm here to rob someone else, as I understand it. D.W. Tilman said you wanted a plumber."

"What?"

The woman tried to turn, and Alyssa tightened her grip again to keep her in place.

"Don't turn around. I steal campaign secrets for a living. I've been told you wanted to hire someone of that particular profession. It's not a legal business – I don't like strangers being able to identify me. So keep still, eyes front, and tell me what you want."

"Y... you're the woman Tilman told me about? The one who... who gets things?"

"For a fee."

Alyssa dragged the woman into an alley to the right. Once they were safely away from casual observers, she went on. "Now, if Tilman was properly informed – usually that's one of his few virtues – you're having issues with the press having their hands on some troublesome information, is that right?"

"Financial records. They've gotten enough bank records together to trace a lot more labor union money into our account than the campaign finance laws allow."

"How'd they get those? Your FEC reports are public, but your actual bank records should be almost impossible for another campaign to get." Alyssa knew campaign laws better than most lawyers.

"Our finance director sold us out. He had the statements, and the other guys blackmailed him into giving them to a young reporter hungry for a story that can make his career. He didn't give the press everything, but he gave them enough to write a story. Please, I won't turn around. Could you at least let go of me? This is uncomfortable."

Alyssa took her hand off the woman's jaw and stepped back. "So what good will it do us to get those records back if your finance director can just rat you out again?"

"He's fired now, obviously. He can't get any more bank statements. Without those, it's just the word of a disgruntled former employee."

"That's still a bad story."

"But more survivable than one with proof." The young campaign manager twitched as though she wanted to turn around but caught herself.

"Just so you understand that I take no responsibility for how that story plays out. You hire me to remove those records from your opponent's possession, not to spin. If I deliver my part and you still lose, don't blame me."

The campaign manager whispered, "I'm not an idiot, of course I know that. Sure, you can beat me in a fistfight, but in my own area I'm very good. Let me deal with the spin. Can you do your part?"

"Of course," Alyssa replied.

"How much?"

"Half a mil."

It had become her usual fee. She'd found that it was about all the market would bear.

The client coughed and asked, "How much?"

Apparently this young woman wasn't as experienced with the market rate for law-breaking.

"Don't even think of haggling. Just say yes or no."

"I need time to work out that kind of money, especially without our finance guy. We'll pay you when we have the goods."

"Half up front. That's my rule."

"We can't. The money isn't there, not right now. Surely you know it takes time for a campaign to come up with money that can be hidden. You probably deal with that every day. But we can't afford to wait – the kid from the Post is probably writing it right now."

About an hour later, some laxatives in coffee left a short, black-haired pizza delivery driver too ill to work. She called in sick, never realizing that her cell phone had been hacked, and the call rerouted. Wearing padded clothes to make herself look pudgier – they were also good for hiding her pistol – Alyssa drove the other woman's rusty old Civic to Don Vito's Genuine Italian Pies, where they never realized that their regular driver was hanging on to a toilet for dear life. Alyssa picked up a few pizzas for delivery.

The receptionist at the Post sent her back to the newsroom with the pies. The Don Vito's driver was a regular, and the receptionist never quite realized that the reporters hadn't sent out for dinner yet.

Once inside, Alyssa dodged into the women's room. In her padded thermal carrying case was one pizza for a realistic smell. The rest of it was occupied by black jeans and a turtleneck – good for sneaking, but normal enough to pass for an ordinary visitor if she were spotted. Rapidly she changed clothes and stuffed the delivery uniform into the case.

As always, more than half of her disguise came simply from attitude. As long as she acted like she had every reason to be there, no one paid her much attention. She walked among the scattered desks and cubicles of the Post's newsroom, stealing glances at computer screens when no one was looking. She listened carefully too, eavesdropping on the reporters' conversations as they worked. From what she heard and saw, she rejected the first few desks she passed. They were occupied by people working on other stories – stories they would actually get to file.

But then she passed a desk where a reporter worked alone, away from his chattering colleagues. He wasn't talking. He simply hunched over his keyboard, typing furiously. Approaching the man from behind, Alyssa could read a bit of his computer screen.

"...records reveal that the United Brotherhood of Commercial Transport Workers illegally spent two million..."

This was the man. And she knew him.

It was Matt Barr.

Her jaw hit the floor and goose bumps broke out all over Alyssa's skin. She stared at him – her oldest friend, the man who'd been breaking his heart over her time and again. For too long, she was simply frozen in place, staring at the friend she had come to rob. Belatedly, she realized she would stand out if she just stood there, so she ducked behind a desk where none of the other reporters could see her. Hiding there, she peeked under the bottom of the workstation and stared some more, completely at a loss as to how to proceed. And as she watched, she heard her father's voice, so clearly she thought he must be in the room with her.

Before long in politics, you'll have to decide whether there are things that are beneath you.

The noise of Matt's typing finally stopped, and he pushed back from the desk and stretched. Yawning, he stood up and walked away, heading for the restroom.

There couldn't possibly be a better time. He'd be gone for a minute, maybe two. In that time she could grab the documents, sabotage the computer, and be heading for the door before he zipped up.

She remembered the other half of her father's advice: if there are things that are beneath you, you'll get out of politics. If there aren't, you'll make history.

Swallowing thickly, she pulled on a pair of gloves and rose from behind the desk.

"Alyssa Chambers. We just keep running into each other."

The words dumped a gallon of adrenaline straight into her bloodstream, but somehow Alyssa fought off her instincts and froze. She stopped mid-stride, looking almost like a photograph.

She recognized the voice immediately. After a long pause she said, "I wish I could say I was happy about that."

From behind her, a man stepped out of the shadows and walked into her field of vision. He was wearing a double-breasted navy suit and a red tie, as if he'd just come from a cocktail party. Except for the silenced pistol in his hand, he could have fit right in at any charity fundraiser. His slicked back hair and scar confirmed what she knew from his voice. Fred Harris.

"I'd offer to shake hands, but..." he hefted his pistol slightly, never taking its barrel away from Alyssa. He held it low at his side to keep it out of sight to most of the reporters in the room. The newsroom around her seemed frozen, its bustle gone as if that had been the illusion. How could they not be noticing this? How could they not see? Rationally, Alyssa knew that while the two of them stood casually talking, no one would pay them the slightest mind. After all, she'd relied on the same technique herself many times over. But with her fight or flight instincts raging, she could not bring her body to accept what her brain was telling her.

"Does Matt know you're here?"

After wasting so much time hesitating to betray him, it would hurt to discover he'd already betrayed her.

"Of course not. Prissy little reporter deal directly with a blackmailer? Never! He thinks his source handed those bank statements over of his own free will. It's just that I knew the opposition would have to respond, and if they did, there was only one person who might be able to get this far. So I figured I better wait here and protect my investment in case you showed up."

A scream ripped through the scene.

Alyssa's head whirled to the right without conscious thought, where she saw one of the reporters staring at her and Harris, mouth open, and shrieking. Someone had finally noticed the gun. A distant part of Alyssa's mind realized that her opportunity was gone forever. The scream would surely bring Matt out of the bathroom.

Harris had the same reaction. He turned to stare at the interloper. The difference was, Alyssa recovered faster.

Without even turning back to face Harris, she pivoted on one foot and sent a high kick flying into his temple. He went down like a chopped tree, but he also had his finger on the trigger of his weapon. It went off as he fell.

The bullet went far wide of Alyssa. Instead, the unconscious man's last act had been to shoot a nearby computer monitor, which exploded in a shower of sparks.

When the pistol went off, and then the monitor exploded, the rest of the newsroom staff joined in the panic. They all dove for the floor just as, across the room, Alyssa saw Matt come running out of the bathroom.

More afraid of him seeing her than she'd been of the gun, she threw herself on the floor just like the reporters.

Someone pulled a fire alarm, or a burglar alarm, or something, because a screeching siren began to pierce the chaos, so loud Alyssa's hands went to her ears without thinking.

Then flames began to lick out of the bin of a nearby paper shredder, where a spark from the blasted monitor had fallen. They caught a computer cord hanging above the shredder, bringing more sparks that landed on a stack of paper.

Chambers crawled to Matt's desk on her belly, praying that he would do the rational thing and duck for cover. She peeked up over his desk until she saw the bank statements sitting on top of the pile of papers. With one furtive motion of her hand, she grabbed them.

Behind her, a room full of newsprint was starting to burn, and acrid smoke made her nose scrunch up. Alyssa squirmed around and put the bank statements into the growing flames, watching as her last scrap of morality twisted into ash in the heat.

The flames were too close for comfort now, and they were spreading in other directions, too. The other reporters fled from the growing blaze – she could see them running out the front door she'd entered a lifetime and ten minutes ago.

Alyssa grabbed the laptop off Matt's desk, the story about illegal union financing still on the screen. She threw it into the blaze as well, and then she hefted Harris over her shoulder.

She didn't want to let the man die. Maybe she still had some scruples left.

Deception was part of her job, after all. Deceiving herself came easy.

She ran for the nearest window and threw another computer monitor through it to break the glass. Then she vaulted out with her unconscious nemesis on her shoulder. Alyssa left him behind – safely away from the blaze, with his gun in his hand and his fingerprints all over it, waiting for the police who would surely show up.

Then she faded away into the night. The fire behind her was just getting started, but the embers of her conscience were flickering out.

# CHAPTER TEN

"No."

It took Alyssa a second to realize that that was the complete answer. There was nothing else coming. Not only was she being turned down, but she was being turned down without so much as an excuse or an acknowledgment of the openness she had shown him first.

"What?"

Matt couldn't meet her eyes.

"No. I can't, Alyssa. I can't tell you who told me."

For a second Alyssa just sat there blinking and swallowing, not quite able to process the fact that she was being told no and it was coming from the one man in the world she expected to always give her everything she wanted.

"Matt! Do you understand that this is the difference between whether or not I go to prison?"

"I'm sorry, Lyss. I can't tell you how sorry. But you don't know what's going on behind the scenes here."

"Oh come on! Of course I get it about reporters protecting their sources. I'm not stupid. But this is me!"

"Alyssa... I can't. I can't tell you, and I can't tell you why."

She sat there and stared at him, jaw hanging open. For the past day, she had had zero friends. Every person she met was an enemy, determined to put her in prison the moment they recognized her. The lifelong loner had finally found a degree of separation that was too much for her.

And then, for a few glorious hours, she had a friend again. There was a person she could trust. One man existed, in the entire universe, with whom she could be completely honest.

Well, not completely honest, she reminded herself. She was holding back from Matt, too. And the things she was holding back...

Alyssa sighed. She had no right to ask Matt for anything. She'd come to him expecting he'd give her exactly what she wanted because he always had. For most of their life, he'd wanted her affection badly enough to do anything she asked. She had counted on that, taken it for granted, all while letting herself forget that she'd secretly stabbed him in the back.

What if he knew? What if he knew what she had done and that was why he said no?

But no, it wasn't possible. If he knew, he would never have come with her out of his house. He would have yelled loudly enough to bring the guards while they were still hiding in the bathroom.

If he knew how badly she had betrayed him, he would have wanted to hurt her back. Anyone would have long since ceased to trust her or care about her, after what she'd done.

Around them, the patrons of the coffee shop kept mostly to themselves. They were tapping on laptops, or reading the newspaper. A bored barista reclined behind the counter. None of them had any idea that the most wanted woman in the world was sitting among them, frustrated, angry, and guilty all at once.

"OK, so can you tell me when you heard? Even if you can't tell me who told you?"

"Alyssa, please don't do this. I know you're trying to get me to say something that will help you figure out who, and I can't help you with that.

She sighed and shook her head.

"Let's just get out of here. I'll get us a hotel room."

Having used her Alice Cobler ID at a scene where the FBI nearly caught her, she assumed that was burned, so she switched to a driver's license and credit card in the name of Danielle Wilson. Matt and Alyssa both fell asleep almost at once, despite all the coffee.

When she woke after noon, she dressed in the bathroom, then sat in one of the hotel's chairs and stared at Matt's sleeping form. He held the key to clearing her name. She was sure of it. Why wouldn't he tell her? What secret of his own was hidden under there? What could she do that might tease it out?

Alyssa waited for Matt to wake up. She clicked the TV on with the volume very low, to see what they were saying about her. One network was doing "man on the street" interviews, where various patriotic citizens suggested creative means of executing the hated assassin.

When they flipped back to the anchor desk, Alyssa saw that she had been right to change IDs. The scrolling ticker at the bottom of the screen read, "Chambers possibly using the name Alice Cobler."

The next story had to do with the ascent of Lance Reeder. Rich West's Vice Presidential running mate, he was the natural to take his place after the assassination. According to the news, the West/Reeder campaign had become the Lance Reeder for President Campaign. There was a clip of Reeder.

"I don't feel like I can just walk away. Too many people invested too much in Rich West. He represented hope for a lot of people. I feel honor-bound to try to carry on."

When Matt woke up, Alyssa took a shower to give him time alone to dress. Once they were both showered and put back together for another day, she went out for coffee and food. Matt volunteered to go, but she was better prepared to remain undetected in a hostile environment. By now, the feds would have added Matt's name and picture to all the stories about Alyssa Chambers the assassin. She didn't trust him to go out in public in that environment.

Once back, she settled very deliberately into casual conversation that didn't include any questions for Matt.

"It's just surreal, when I remember last week. Had dinner with you one night, poli sci department meeting, grading papers... it's hard for me to even believe that stuff was real. I'm sure if I tried to come anywhere near the campus right now, I'd find more men in black than students."

Matt nodded.

"But what I don't get is all that stuff was unreal to you anyway. Real life was lived at night, breaking, entering, stealing, computer hacking, spying, etc. Faculty meetings and grading papers were just a mask. So why do you miss them?"

It was a fair question. She wasn't sure exactly what would get Matt to tell her the secret, but she suspected he had received this tip – whatever it was – last week sometime. She wanted to keep the conversation on that time frame, and she wanted to keep building trust, so she answered his question honestly.

"I got into... well, I got into what I do because I wanted to test myself. I wanted to prove my strength. But it was always like two separate worlds. I could go about my ordinary life – safe, easy, boring, and comfortable – and sneak out to do something dangerous and fun one or two nights a week. I always had my safe place to come back to. I guess is what I'm trying to say. But that was last week. This week, I'm a hundred percent, full-time, professional thief and plumber. No retreat, no safety, no comfort. It's radically different."

Matt nodded.

"I can understand that."

He paused for a long time before speaking again.

"Alyssa, I feel like I have to ask. Do you really think this is what your mother meant when she wanted you to be strong?"

Alyssa didn't answer. What could she answer? Her mother would never even have conceived of this life.

Matt went on.

"I knew her too, you know. Obviously not like you did, but I was around your house all the time when we were kids. She hated H. Franklin's 'victory above everything' approach to politics. She was always struggling with words, trying to find a way not to say disrespectful things about your father in front of you, while at the same time teaching you that some things mattered more than winning."

"Are you saying I came out like my father and not like her?" There was a dangerous edge to Alyssa's voice, and she locked her eyes on Matt's.

He backed up in his chair and held his hands to the side.

"Alyssa, I know how you feel about him. I know he never cared about you growing up, I know he never gave you any time, and I know he was wrong about that. But ask yourself: wouldn't what you do now fit in just fine with how he practices politics?"

She looked away. She remembered taking a job for her father once. Yes, having a good operative on call fit very well into her father's vocation.

"He brought you up telling you that his was the only way to do politics. He tried to teach you that 'do anything to win' was the only possible philosophy. But he's wrong about that Alyssa. There are people in politics who live and thrive on a value system that's more like 'give anything to do what's right.'"

Alyssa looked out the window. Trying to earn Matt's trust was not going at all the way she planned. She was supposed to be manipulating the conversation. She was supposed to be guiding him into revealing things. Instead, he was leading her.

"H. Franklin never really made much effort to teach me," she replied.

She felt she needed to disagree with him, just to avoid where he was taking her.

"We had one conversation about politics before I went to school, and that was it."

Alyssa smiled at the memory.

"I just walked right in on him and poured myself a glass of his scotch without asking. I was hoping for more of a reaction from him than I got."

Matt smiled at her indulgently.

"He had no idea you'd been teaching me about single malts?"

"Oh, he knew darn well. You remember that time your dad got mad at us for being alone and out of sight?"

Matt laughed.

"How could I forget. Dad was so hyper about keeping me moral and pure. He seemed to think you were just waiting to turn me into a bad boy at the first opportunity, which really got my goat in high school, since you had no interest at all. It really stinks to be constantly found guilty of a crime that's never going to happen."

Alyssa arched an eyebrow.

"Irony."

Matt laughed.

"Yeah, I guess so."

"Anyway," she said, "My father came up and talked to me about it. I guess your dad must have yelled at him. He asked me if we'd been stealing alcohol again."

Matt gave her a warm smile.

"Well, if it hadn't been for you, I never would have learned about single malt scotch. Dad wouldn't have anything to do with alcohol at all, and all the other kids I knew in high school were into Bud Light."

"Your teaching stuck with me though," Matt added. "I had a chance to drink some Laphroaig 15 last week. I don't drink much anymore, but I had to have some when I saw it, because it reminded me of you. It was very, very nice."

"Ah, well, all that was in the past," Alyssa said, sighing. "I doubt I'm going to sit in father's leather chairs having a drink with him for a long time."

But inside, every alarm in her psyche went off. Matt had just given her a clue.

Matt liked scotch only because Alyssa did. But Alyssa liked it for itself. She had been brought up in a household that treated liquor like everything else – if you're going to do it, do it right. She studied fine whisky, and knew where to find it.

Take Laphroaig 15, for example, which Matt had mentioned. The distillery no longer made it. It had become almost impossible to get. In fact, there was only one supper club in D.C. that still had it: The Buchanan Club.

A reporter couldn't afford the cost of a membership at the Buchanan, which meant Matt had been there with someone else. And the Buchanan wasn't a place you went for a casual hangout. It was very high end. It was the kind of place a source would take a reporter to stress the importance of the tip.

Without realizing it, Matt had just told Alyssa where he met the source that gave him the information about her.

Although Matt Barr could never afford the price of a membership at the Buchanan club, the Chambers family had had one all her life. Alyssa knew the club quite well, from every time H. Franklin had brought the family with him to D.C. She knew, for instance, that the Buchanan required reservations, and that the list of reservations was in a binder on the Maître D's podium. It would go back several weeks.

Now all she had to do was kill the rest of the day, so she could break in at night.

♦

The sun sank into the horizon as a spring afternoon faded to evening. A perfectly manicured lawn stretched unreasonably far from the house to the stone wall at the property line. A ten-year-old girl came running up the front step of the house, dirt and mud all over her dress, black hair tangled and flying everywhere.

"Daddy! I had a fight, and I won!"

On the patio, two men reclined in wicker chairs, puffing on cigars. Both were in their thirties, clad in suits and ties. The little girl heard words like "Speaker" and "Majority" as she leapt up the steps. She had learned that those words meant boring things.

The only one of the two men that she cared about wore a three-piece suit of gray with a black tie sloping up from the vest to the collar where it was held by a full-Windsor knot.

"I punched him right in the face, Father!"

"That's nice, Alyssa. Go tell your mother."

His hand came down over the child's shoulder. He pushed her gently but firmly away.

The girl walked back off the front porch and stood still for a second. She knew better than to go inside while she was covered with mud, but that's where her mother was.

She went around the side of the house, passing the neatly trimmed hedge and the fountain in the shape of a porpoise. She found the kitchen window and waved both hands frantically as high as she could above her head, trying to get them into view from the window.

"I had a fight, Mommy!" she shouted.

Before long the side door opened. A slender, waif-like black-haired woman came out, holding a tumbler of amber liquid with ice cubes. Alyssa smelled it right away. It was an odor she learned was rum, and that it was only for grown-ups.

She held her closed fist up to her mother's face for her to look at the scrapes.

"I punched him and I won!"

The older woman drew back instinctively, and then eased down to sit on the steps at her daughter's level. She took a long sip from her glass. "You have to learn to control that temper, Alyssa. You let anger rule you. You need to be strong. You need to rule your anger. Don't let anger rule you. You're a slave to whatever rules you.

"But still, if you're going to have a fight, it's good you won. Tell me about it."

Pouting, the young Alyssa Chambers sat down beside her mother.

"I saw that one boy picking on Matt so I went up and told him to stop and he told me a little girl couldn't do anything about it, so I pushed him and he pushed me back and said to go away, so I got really mad and I just punched him right in the nose and he cried and ran away."

Mrs. Chambers smiled at her daughter, drank deeply from her glass, and listened.

"Matt said his father says girls shouldn't hit, but I think Matt should be glad I did."

Sarah Chambers sighed.

"Matt's father just has some very firm beliefs, that's all. It's not really good for anyone to hit people but if it has to be done, you can do it just as well as anyone else."

As the older woman drank more rum, draining it down to the ice cubes, the two men from the front patio walked around to the side. Her father's gray suit was unbuttoned, and his tie fluttered a bit in the light breeze. He knocked ash off his cigar, and then said, "Give us a moment with your mother please, Alyssa."

"But you said I could come and tell her about my fight!"

"Run along inside, child. Your mother will be in soon."

The man patted her on the head and gave her a gentle push toward the door. Alyssa's mother knelt down to look her daughter in the eye.

"I'll come soon, dear," she said.

Alyssa stomped inside, angry, and wanting to cry. Winning your first fight was a big deal, and she couldn't get anyone to listen to her about it.

As she went through the door she heard, "Sarah, I'd like you to meet a friend and colleague. Lance, this is my wife Sarah."

# CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Buchanan Club was in the capitol area of Washington, a couple blocks off Pennsylvania Avenue, not far from the National Mall. The buildings here were more modern, rather than the brick townhouses in her neighborhood. But they were like all D.C. architecture: pressed together on the sides.

The Buchanan Club sat on a corner. In the shadows across the street from their front door, Alyssa lurked and pondered her strategy.

In the pre-dawn gloom, the club wasn't open yet, of course, which meant the front doors were locked – with a keycard. Not a problem for her when she had all her toys available but at the moment, getting past it was a challenge.

Matt was asleep back in the hotel. It had taken all of her will power to waste time until she could go raid the Buchanan Club without him knowing, but she didn't want him to realize she had talked his secret out of him.

Alyssa casually walked across the street, as if she had nothing in the world to hide. She sauntered down the walk, past the front door of the club, and turned into a narrow service alley. She walked down the alley toward the back of the club.

As a lifelong member and a frequent guest, she knew some details about the club that an ordinary thief wouldn't know. For example, in the ladies room was a small privacy window about six feet off the floor. Years of poor maintenance combined with Washington D.C. humidity had swollen the wood frame of the window until it would no longer shut fully. As entrances went, it wasn't super. But for a very small woman in prime physical condition, it would do.

She stood on the ground beneath the window, ready to leap up and grab the sill, when she heard the sound of a vehicle on the street. She froze and smashed herself flat against the wall, grateful she still had her black stolen FBI fatigues. A black and white patrol car rolled by on the street.

Chambers held her breath until it passed. Then she leapt up to grab the sill, pushed the window up, and began to worm her way in. It was a tight fit, even for her, but after a few scrapes she made it.

Inside, she tiptoed down the hall from the back where the restrooms were located to the front where visitors were received. A podium stood in front of the main entrance, and Alyssa knew it was where the wait staff would stand to greet members and their guests and walk them in.

On the angled face of the podium sat a black leather binder. In it, Alyssa knew, would be the names of everyone who had reserved a table here for the past few weeks.

She started on Friday, the day that Wheeler said he'd gotten the call from the reporter. And she didn't have to look far. There on the line for an 11:30 lunch was a name she recognized from her past. It was the name of the only person she had ever voluntarily trusted, other than Matt.

Representative Michael Vincent.

Alyssa was about to casually walk out the front door, as if she had every right in the world to be here, when she barely heard the sound of a footstep.

At once she whirled, dropping into a guard stance, just barely in time to see someone's leg kicking the air in the exact spot where her temple had been less than a second ago. She threw up a block and dodged to the side, sending her own kick straight at the groin of the man who had sneaked up on her.

He blocked, dodged, and shuffled back, and they faced each other at guard. When she saw him full on, everything fell into place.

"Harris! You shot Gunter! You killed Rich West!"

His slicked-back hair was only the tiniest bit out of place from the exertion of their first blows. His scar was hard to see in the nearly complete darkness, but his grin was readily apparent.

"In my defense, your friend Mr. Hauptmann was only an accident. I was aiming for you."

"How would that help you? The whole plan was for me to be blamed as the assassin. If I'm dead, there's no one to take the blame."

He smirked. "That's the danger of need-to-know planning. No one ever told me they had a plan for a patsy. I just discovered the signature little spy software you left behind on West's computer. Oh yes, Chambers. I know you always leave that little key logger behind on a victim's computer. When I found it on West's I realized you must have been in there, too. I figured there was a risk you had seen me and acted out of self-protection. I trailed you from your home down to the waterfront and took the shot. Just Hauptmann's bad luck he died instead of you. Boy, was the client ever angry when he found out, too."

Chambers used her back foot to push the podium to the side, giving her a little more space if she had to fight. Then she replied, "The client?"

Harris just laughed at her.

"Yeah, right."

She tried again.

"Mike Vincent?"

Harris laughed even harder.

"That guy? He was always a Dudley Do-Right, and he's only gotten worse since he got married. Him hire a plumber? He'd sooner shoot West himself, and he loved West like a father."

"Lance Reeder?"

The only reply was a sudden lightning charge and a hail of fists.

Block, dodge, block, block. She tried to fight back with a hook aimed at the jaw, only to have it blocked and to meet a kick in reply. Alyssa barely blocked that, shuffling backward to buy space and time.

Harris wouldn't give her any. A flying front kick launched as she was moving, and Alyssa had to dodge to the left to avoid it.

But as he passed her, Harris threw an elbow strike. It connected squarely and solidly with her temple. She fell to the floor, groggy and moaning. She tried but couldn't make her limbs work to push herself up.

"I've been trying to leave you unconscious for the police for four years," Harris said. "Third time's the bloody charm, isn't it?"

As he casually exited the building via the front door, he pulled the fire alarm. That was the last thing Alyssa remembered before she passed out.

♦

The next thing she saw was the small of someone's back. She tried to ask, "What's going on," but all that came out was a moan.

"Shh," was the reply.

She faded into unconsciousness again, and when she once again woke her first sensation was a terrible smell. Her eyes didn't want to come open and when they did, the light made matters worse. A bright rising sun hurt painfully, and she squeezed them shut again. Alyssa tried to rise to her feet, but her body wasn't quite ready to cooperate yet. Legs and arms would move, but they had almost no strength.

"Just rest for a second, but not for too long. We don't have much time."

A sip of water. A cool, wet sensation on her forehead. The voice was Matt Barr's.

"What are you doing here?"

"Later. We've got to get you ready to walk again and then clear out. We're only about six blocks from where the police are swarming all over the Buchanan Club."

That acted like a shot of espresso to Alyssa. She rose to her feet and said, "Let's go."

"We've got a seven-block walk from here to the nearest Metro station," Matt replied. "That seems like the fastest way to get far away from the scene of the crime."

She shook her head. "Too obvious. Agents will be all over the subway right now. If they realize they're close to catching me, they'll probably stop the trains and buses running, so I can't use them to get away."

"Then what?" Matt asked.

"The Mall. We're not far. And it's a lot harder to pull one guy and girl out for special questioning when the entire place is crawling with tourists who want to see the Washington Monument at dawn."

The walk to the mall itself was hair-raising. Eight different patrol cars drove by, plus several unmarked sedans of the kind used by federal agents. Somehow or other, Harris had clearly made it known that the alarm at the Buchanan was connected to the assassin.

Each time a car went by, Alyssa reached out to grab Matt's hand and pull him close, walking like any other man and a woman enjoying their nation's Capitol in the summer. She held him close, keeping an arm around his waist, turning to walk into shops every time a law enforcement presence came too close.

As they walked, Alyssa could not keep herself from thinking about her relationship with this man. He had just saved her life, but it was more than that. In the silence of self-reflection, she could be honest. She had spent her life looking down on Matt. He wasn't as strong as she was, he wasn't as rich as she was, and he wasn't as sophisticated as she was. He didn't come from a family with connections to presidents and senators. He came from a family that consisted mainly of a bible-thumping minister with an attitude. She had always thought of him as a charity case.

But today, her strength wasn't enough. It was Matt Barr who got the job done. She failed. She lost the fight. But Matt had known enough to be where she needed him. Matt had been strong enough to carry her out of danger.

She looked sidelong at him and wondered, What if I've been wrong? What if I've been wrong my whole life?

They stopped at the first tourist-oriented kiosk they saw, and bought replacement clothing. Ball caps and sunglasses for each, Shorts with "Capitol" written on the butt, and t-shirts aplenty. Matt gave Alyssa a weird look as she bought small, medium, and large versions of "It's Monumental" t-shirts, so she explained after they paid and walked away.

"Makes me look bulkier," she said. "If the feds are putting out a description of a very fit woman, three shirts make me look less skinny."

Then they found public restrooms to change in, and then proceeded with the plan of losing themselves in the crowd of summer tourists.

At last, they reached the relative safety of the mall. They found a few square feet of grass among all the other tourists laying out picnic blankets there and settled down to sit for a while. Matt tried to ask her how her head was and got a shake of the head in reply. This close to other people, even a whispered conversation was too great a risk.

Gradually, the law enforcement presence died down. The two of them felt safe to move around again and went looking for as much privacy as they could get. Eventually, they found a poorly-lit bar and grill with deep booths where Alyssa could feel like she was out of sight. The wood-paneled walls and brass railings gave the place a clubby air.

Chambers ordered a beer as a poor man's painkiller for her headache, and they began to talk.

"So where do we start?" Matt asked.

She hung her head. Matt had saved her life. She wanted to hear the whole story, but she knew enough before the conversation even started. Harris had left her unconscious for the police to find and then pulled the alarm. He had also done something to make sure they knew the burglar alarm was connected to the assassination, though she didn't know how. He probably just called in an anonymous tip.

If nothing had intervened, the cops would have picked her up, there would have been a very swift, very public trial, and eventually she would have had a lethal injection.

But instead, the next thing she saw was Matt's butt – a viewpoint made possible only if he was carrying her over his shoulder. And then he had given her water, revived her, and helped her escape the dragnet.

Matt Barr saved my life.

The conclusion was inescapable, as was the overwhelming guilt over how little she deserved it.

She had ruined his first confidential source.

She had set fire to his office and his biggest story.

She had tricked him into revealing something that he said he had serious reasons not to reveal.

She gave him nothing but pain. And in return, he saved her life.

"I should start by saying I'm sorry."

He had asked her just to drop it. He had told her there was more going on than she understood. And yet, she had gotten a hint out of him anyway, and then gone after the full story. He had to be angry.

"It's past Alyssa. Forget about it. It's gone. Forgiven."

Alyssa did a double take. She stared at him.

"Gone? Matt, it can't be gone. I deliberately sniffed out what you asked me to leave alone."

He smiled at her.

"Alyssa, please. You're feeling guilty because you didn't do as I asked and let it be. Well, here's your chance to make up for it; here's what I'm asking now: forget it. Don't feel guilty. It's gone. I forgive you."

She sat silently. Matt has been in love with me since he was old enough to know what it meant to want a girl to like you. All my life, he's followed me around like a puppy. So I guess I should have expected this.

But if he knew everything else I've done to him...

She bit her lip and tried to fight back tears. She looked away and wiped her eyes with a bar napkin.

I hurt him all my life, and he tells me it's all forgiven. But he only knows about one thing, one moment. If he knew the rest...

# CHAPTER TWELVE

"So tell me how you saved my life," she said after a long pause.

"I felt stupid as soon as I let that slip about Laphroaig 15. Obviously you know scotch better than I do. I knew there was a risk that you would know where I'd gotten it. It was out of my mouth and that very second I started beating myself up. Stupid, stupid, stupid."

He shrugged, and then continued.

"I held out some hope when you didn't react and didn't say anything more about it, and the conversation turned to other things. As the day went on, my hope got bigger and bigger."

"And then I nodded off for a while as it got to be pretty late at night. And when I woke up, you weren't in the room, and you weren't in the bathroom, and you didn't come back after I waited and waited."

Matt shrugged again.

"I knew where you had to be. I had effectively told you. I figured I'd go and try to explain. Maybe if you heard it from me before you formed your own conclusion..."

He concluded.

"So I was walking up to the Buchanan Club when some dude barges out the front door and runs away down the street. He left the door swinging in the breeze, so I was walking up to see what's up when I heard sirens in the distance. I ran inside, grabbed you... you know the rest."

Alyssa reached across the bar table to place her hand over his, and said, "The rest is that I'm not in prison waiting for a death penalty trial because of you."

He smiled at her for a second or two before he couldn't take it anymore and looked away.

"I couldn't have done anything else."

"Matt, you saved my life. And you're saying it's no big deal that I tricked you into telling me how to find the Buchanan Club. So I already feel bad about how I treated something that's obviously serious to you, but I can't help it. I have to know. Why couldn't you tell me about Mike Vincent?"

He sighed.

"Somehow I was hoping you hadn't learned before that guy attacked you."

She shook her head.

"'That guy' is Fred Harris. He and I have been crossing paths for as long as I've been in this business. And I looked in the RSVP book at the Buchanan before he got there. Vincent was the only name there who means anything to me. It has to be him, but I don't understand why you wouldn't tell me."

Matt looked away from her, and then back to her, and then away.

"I really don't know what to do. I made a promise to him. I don't know how I can keep it and discuss this honestly with you."

Chambers gritted her teeth.

"Yeah, well, once upon a time Vincent and I made promises to each other. He broke his, so I'm no longer feeling very bound by mine."

Matt tilted his head to one side.

"Tell me more."

Her anger at being betrayed got the better of her, tempting her into speaking about a subject she wasn't really eager for Matt to discover.

"Pretty simple, really. We met a long time ago. I caught him at something, he caught me at something. Neither of us was exactly eager for our indiscretion, so to speak, to become public knowledge. I agreed to keep his secret, if he agreed to keep mine – it was one of my early jobs as a plumber, and he saw my face."

"So I've been protecting him from Tilman and Reeder and all the rest of them all these years, so they never knew how untrustworthy he was. And now he betrays me. Right when it matters most, his promise goes out the window, and he rats me out. Yeah, maybe you still feel like Mike Vincent's word is worth something, but I don't."

Matt stared at her. "Wow," was the only word out of his mouth.

"What?"

"Where to even start? Alyssa, you still get so angry, after all these years."

"You wouldn't? I've been hunted for days, turned into a national devil on TV, all because he picked this moment to break his word. Yeah I'm mad. He sold me out. He betrayed me. If I had him in front of me I'd..." she shook her fist.

"Mike Vincent didn't betray you, Alyssa."

She gave him a condescending stare.

"He was protecting you."

"Say again? How does telling the press I'm a criminal protect me?"

Matt closed his eyes and sat silent for a moment. Then he spoke.

"When Mike and I had our meeting last Friday, his one concern was that he had made a promise to you all those years ago – a promise to keep your secret if you kept his. He wouldn't tell me very much about the bargain. He said he didn't want to break faith with you, so he wouldn't give me any details. But he said once upon a time you caught him in something and he caught you. The two of you agreed to keep each other's secret."

Alyssa caught herself almost crying. Oh Matt, if you knew what he didn't tell you...

"He came to me because we've been friends a long time. He trusts me, and I trust him. He was in a place where helping the man he loved and admired and wanted as a leader conflicted with a promise he'd made years ago, and he could trust me."

"So, Mike tells me he was ordered by someone high up on the West campaign to give the press a dossier full of facts and evidence about your record. He was told he must make sure it's in the hands of the media by Monday. Is this timeline ringing a bell with you?"

Indeed it was. The meeting happened Friday, she broke into the West HQ on Sunday, West was murdered on Sunday, and Vincent was told to make sure the press had information about her before Monday.

It was pretty clear that this was it. This was the frame up. This was the plan to set her up as the patsy for the assassination. Mike Vincent had been given explicit instructions to be sure she was exposed at the moment the crime was discovered.

"Who gave him the..."

"Reeder," Matt replied before she could finish her question. "Senator Lance Reeder."

Her jaw open, Alyssa simply stared at Matt for a second or two. Then she whispered, "Of course. I just saw the TV news talking about it. As West's Vice-Presidential pick, he's a natural as the replacement candidate for President when West was killed. Reeder could never have been a Presidential contender on his own. Now, he rides into office on the message of 'Rich West gave his life for the cause. Don't let his death be for nothing. Elect the man Rich West wanted to succeed him.'"

"Lance Reeder ordered Mike to give the media information that would make you look suspicious as a possible assassin. Two days later, Rich West is assassinated, and the biggest profit from his death goes to Lance Reeder."

Chambers just sat there quietly for a moment. She wasn't sure what to say. She'd been wanting to know who killed West and who framed her for what seemed like years, even if it was only a couple days. Now she knew. Fred Harris pulled the trigger on West, and Lance Reeder hired it done and arranged to frame her.

"I want Reeder," were the words that finally came out of her mouth.

Matt shook his head, "Now Alyssa, be sensible."

"I want to kill him."

As deep as her criminal life went, she had never killed anyone before. It was the one line she never crossed. Beat people senseless, steal from them, provide intelligence that would be used to blackmail them... she had never committed murder. She never wanted to until now.

"No, Alyssa, you don't want that."

"Yes, I do. You have no idea what he did to me."

"Obviously I haven't suffered like you have, but I have been on the run with you for the past 24 hours, Alyssa. I have some idea.

"What's more, I've known you since you and I were both too young to talk. You are not a murderer."

"Not yet."

"Alyssa, stop. I get you're mad. Obviously you're mad. And I get that you have a problem dealing with anger constructively."

She gave him an icy stare, and Matt held his hands in front of him protectively.

"If we can't be honest at a moment like this, when are we ever going to be honest? You know I'm not wrong about that."

"So what? You just want me to find him, beat the daylights out of him, and stop short of killing him? Is that what you want, Matt?"

"Of course not."

"Then what?"

He reached across the table to take her hand.

"I want you to forgive him, Alyssa."

There was a second of stunned silence before she laughed.

"Get real! The man made me into a national hate-figure. Have you seen what the 'man on the street' interviews have people saying about me? If I went to the center of this bar and shouted, 'I'm Alyssa Chambers,' there'd be ten guys beating me to death with table legs before you had time to call a photographer. Lance Reeder has the whole country believing that I killed the most popular politician in recent memory – the guy who was finally going to restore honesty and integrity to Washington, and as far as the press and the people know, I murdered him. I'll never be able to go out in public again! Even if I clear my name, I'll live out my life with most of the country believing it was a CIA conspiracy that got me off, and that I should have sat in the electric chair."

She paused to stare at him and asked, "Forgive him?"

"Exactly like I just did for you, about tricking me into giving Mike away."

Her eyes almost popped out of her head.

"Are you kidding me? You're going to compare a little..."

But it wasn't just that one thing, was it? It was his best source shut down. It was his office burned to the ground. It was his career-making story up in smoke. Those were all the things she had done to Matt. And even if he didn't know about the rest of the things she'd done wrong to him, he was still being her friend when she deserved it less than anyone.

But... Running for her life with the FBI literally shooting at her. Days with no friends and no comfort and no safety. Gunter Hauptmann's bloody wreck of a corpse falling into her lap.

"I can't Matt. I can't just let it go, what he did to me."

"There is no peace without it, Alyssa. If you kill him for revenge, it's not going to satisfy."

"Oh yeah? How do you know?"

"Trust me on this, Alyssa. Forgiveness is the only way to peace."

"I don't know if I can. It's like I'm seeing red. I'm so mad I can't think."

"Then trust me to think. Let it go, Alyssa."

She sat silent. Alyssa felt a debt to Matt. She had been betraying him six ways from Sunday for years and yet when everything was on the line, he saved her life and risked his own freedom and reputation to do it. But her guts boiled at the thought of Reeder getting away with what he had done without paying. When she thought about him getting off scot-free, maybe ascending to the Presidency...

Chambers ground her teeth.

She tried to distract herself. She looked around the darkened bar, watching the ordinary people living ordinary lives, laughing and chatting and eating their burgers. She had lived like that once, and Lance Reeder had taken it all away from her.

That wasn't working to take her mind off the anger. Her eyes fell on the television.

"By default, Lance Reeder has risen to the top of the West/Reeder campaign since the death of Rich West," the anchor said in the closed captioning running beneath the screen.

"I never wanted to be President," Reeder said in a quick cutaway clip. "I just wanted to serve in the best way I could and help a great man do great things. I'm not the quality Rich West was. No one is. He was one of a kind. All I am is the man he named to take his place if the worst happened. Well, the worst happened. I don't feel I have any choice but to rise to the challenge as best I'm able."

The screen cut back to the news anchor. "The West/Reeder campaign – already in the process of changing their name to Lance Reeder for President – is holding a major donor fundraiser tonight on the campus of Georgetown University. There, Reeder expects to make his pitch to the elite of the elite of West's supporters."

Alyssa turned back to look at Matt just as Matt turned to look at her.

"No," he said.

"We're going," she said.

"Alyssa, this is not the way to solve your problem."

"We're going," she repeated stubbornly.

"No, we're not."

"Matt, look. I know you want me to let go of my anger. And yes, obviously you're right. It's not like I could deny it. We've been having this conversation since high school about how I get so enraged I just can't see straight. But Reeder arranged for the murder of the man who might have finally changed American politics into something more like what it's supposed to be. Then he framed an innocent person for the murder. He deserves to be punished."

"No one is arguing that he doesn't deserve to be punished, Alyssa. What he did was wrong – what he did to the country, and what he did to you. He deserves to be punished.

"All I'm arguing about is whether it's in any way healthy for you to be the one who does the punishing."

"That's not your call to make. We're going."

"Maybe it's not my call about whether or not vengeance is healthy for you, but it is my call whether or not 'we' are going because I will not help you become a murderer, Alyssa. I love you too much. If I can't stop you, I certainly can refuse to help you. And I do. I will not help you murder Lance Reeder."

Alyssa felt something ripping her up inside. She had done so much wrong to Matt over so many years. He saved her life, and he forgave her for what he knew about. He would never forgive the stuff he didn't know, but then, he didn't know... She didn't want to keep hurting him. She didn't want to keep betraying him.

But Lance Reeder was not going to get away with murder. She didn't want lying to Matt to be the price of justice. She never wanted to hurt Matt again. But...

"Will you come with me if I promise not to kill him?"

# CHAPTER THIRTEEN

They were in a formal-wear shop. Matt was being fitted for a tux. Alyssa didn't need fitting. She knew her sizes, and the red cocktail dress fit perfectly. She tried it on once and was still wearing it.

Matt came out of the changing room wearing a black tux with long tails and a pink bowtie and cummerbund. His pink with her red dress was a debatable color match, but Alyssa didn't care. She wanted to be able to keep track of Matt at the fundraiser. Every man there would be in a black tux but few men wore pink. Giving him those accents would make him easier to spot.

What she wasn't prepared for was how good he looked. Matt was a scrawny beanpole of a guy, but it meant the tux hung on his frame well and gave him an air of sophistication that might not have worked for a bulkier man.

She smiled at him and enjoyed the sight. Matt practically glowed at the idea that Alyssa was looking at him and liking it.

Alyssa paid with cash – still the one asset she had in abundance – and they walked out of the formalwear shop onto M Street.

"This is crazy, you know," Matt said as Alyssa strode boldly up to the curb and stuck her arm out for a cab. "This is the successor to a Presidential candidate who was just assassinated. The security on him is going to be like a vise. You're the most wanted woman in America. You changed your hair color, changed your eye color, and stuffed your bra. You think that's going to get past the greatest dragnet in American history?"

"I don't think my costume will get me past," she replied. "I think my attitude will get me past. Matt, if you learn nothing else from me, learn this. Project confidence. If you do it, no one ever suspects you of anything."

A taxi pulled to the curb, and they climbed in. The conversation died. Neither of them wanted to say anything worth saying where it might be overheard.

Arriving at the fundraiser, Alyssa simply shook her head at the spectacle. In mere days, the West-Reeder campaign had become Lance Reeder for President. Banners decorated the front of the building; red, white, and blue bunting lined the walkways; and well-dressed donors streamed in. Somewhere in the distance, a band pumped out John Philip Sousa music.

The main entrance to the Leavey Center at Georgetown was across a short bridge that carried pedestrians over the narrow road underneath. Alyssa and Matt joined the throng heading over to hear the future President speak.

Inside the building, the route to the ballroom was lined with staff in formal attire to guide people in. Giant video screens had been erected, playing new versions of the old West campaign commercials, now with Lance Reeder in the starring role. Obvious Secret Service agents in their dark suits and their earpiece-microphones stood along the path. Alyssa knew what she had always known about getting into places you're not allowed: just look like you're supposed to be there. She'd done her job right at the store – both she and Matt looked the part of people who would spend $35,000 to go to a political event. She knew what worked for situations like this.

Matt, on the other hand, had no such experience or confidence. He leaned over to put his lips right next to Alyssa's ear and whispered, "I think I might wet my pants the next time a Secret Service guy looks at me."

She put her arm around his waist – mainly to give the federal agents an explanation for why they were whispering together, but also to comfort him. She was surprised at how good it felt. It seemed silly, even stupid, that it meant so much to her. Other people formed relationships and bonds every day, but Alyssa's whole life had been spent making sure no one knew too much about her; making sure no one got too close. A couple of days of being on the run changed everything. All of a sudden, this one person who still trusted her mattered. He mattered a lot.

Before, Alyssa merely tolerated Matt. Now she liked him. She wanted him to like her. She wished she had never done some of the things she'd done – the things that had hurt him. She wished she didn't have to worry about him realizing what she had done to him. If he ever found out that she was the one who burned his computer and his whole office to the ground...

Her arm would probably never be welcomed around his back again.

Never mind if he ever found out what she was thinking now. She had promised him that she wouldn't kill Lance Reeder here. But Alyssa had no idea whether she would keep that promise. She had a visual fantasy that she couldn't stop dwelling on. She would knock down a Secret Service agent, take his gun, and kill the man who had ordered West killed, ordered her friend killed, and ordered her framed.

She could sense that her arm around Matt's back didn't give him perfect peace, but he did at least try to smile and look around at people, just as she was doing. That was what people at political fundraisers did. Checking out the crowd to see who else was there was as much a part of the event as seeing the candidate.

They made it inside the ballroom, passing easily through the metal detector since Alyssa had not brought a gun. Once there, the din became almost overwhelming, as hundreds of people chattered in an enclosed space. Alyssa guided Matt toward the bar to keep them looking normal.

"All we need to do now is get me close enough to talk to Lance Reeder," she said. "Which might not be that easy. You'd be shocked to learn how many people give $35K and never even get to shake his hand."

Matt shrugged. "I'll feel better about it if we never get close to him. You're taking a huge risk to be here, Alyssa, and not just the risk of getting caught."

"We'll get close," she replied. "Trust me: I'm confident about getting close enough to eavesdrop on a politician. It's what I do for a living."

Barr shook his head. He didn't respond. He simply let the silence grow until it was easier to change the subject.

"I still can't believe Lance Reeder's going to be President. The guy's a total nothing. He's never accomplished anything in his life but to survive a car wreck."

Alyssa shrugged.

"I never cared much about who got elected. I just took their money to go thrill-seeking, but it's not relevant right now. Keep your eyes peeled for a chance to get close to Reeder."

They made it to the front of the line at the bar. Before Matt could speak, Alyssa ordered two blue dolphins. He asked, "Blue Dolphin?"

Then he tasted it. Water.

"Keeps you hydrated, helps you look normal at a booze-fest, and neither of us needs our faculties impaired right now," Alyssa said.

They circulated around the party. To Alyssa, the scene was boring. In the course of her career, she'd been to dozens of high-dollar fundraisers. The dresses could have fit right in at a Hollywood movie premier. Most of the women had clearly spent hours with a stylist that afternoon. Discreet wait staff floated among them, always seeming to offer a tray of hors d'oeuvres just as the conversation ended.

Matt's bright pink bowtie worked exactly as she planned, making it easy for her to keep an eye on him in the crowd. She was just making eye contact with him to ensure he had nothing to report, when she felt a hand on her bare shoulder.

She was a professional. She was used to tension, so she didn't jump out of her skin, but she did feel the tingles that come from adrenaline flooding the body, and her fists did clench instinctively, ready to fight for her life.

"Thank God. I've been so desperate to find you. This was my last hope."

Chambers blinked and turned around. Before her was a man with the top of his head shaved completely bald, but wearing about a week's worth of beard over his full face. He wore glasses with the thick black plastic frames that formed the basis of every stereotype image of nerds. His rumpled business suit was definitely a step below the formal attire of most men at the party.

It took her a moment or two to recognize him, and when she did, she had to give a smile and slight nod in admiration.

"George Pierce. Nice work on the disguise."

"I ought to have learned at least a little bit. I've been working with you for ten years. Which, I might add, is why I need a disguise. You've got to help me, Alyssa. The FBI thinks I'm a suspect! I have a friend who owns a boat, and I know where he hides the keys. I've been living there since the day we heard that West died. At lunch, I heard the radio report that you were a suspect. I'd been wondering what I should do about it. Then I walk back to my office, and there are a bunch of cops hanging around it. I turned around and went the other way."

Matt Barr elbowed a few people out of the way in his race to get back to Alyssa.

"What's going on?" he asked breathlessly. "Who are you?"

"Quietly," Alyssa growled. "Matt, this is George Pierce, an old... business associate of mine. George, Matt Barr. An old friend. Pretty much the last friend I have left, as you might imagine if you watch the news at all."

"Not quite the last friend," Pierce replied. "There's Mike Vincent."

"What do you mean?" Matt asked, eyes going wide.

"Matt, please let me do the talking. But yes, George. Since that's given away, how did you know that I know Mike Vincent?"

Alyssa's face could have won the World Series of Poker. She gave no clue at all that she was really here for Reeder, and Pierce was off the mark.

"It's the only reason I thought to look for you here. He's one of West's best friends, and one of the leading figures in the West campaign. I figured he had to be here."

"But why would that lead you to look for me here?"

"A few years ago, I was brought in to help on a project," Pierce recalled. "A frequent client of mine was running against Mike Vincent in the primary, and he wanted to sandbag that Rich West fundraiser that helped him get started."

Chambers kept her facial expression carefully under control. She had worked the same project, of course, but with no involvement from Pierce, so she had never wondered whether Pierce might have been involved with the Vincent race.

"My client tasked me with hiring a plumber to go in there. You turned me down when I called."

She remembered the call quite well. She didn't like turning George down, but she already had a project. Little did either of them know it had been the same project.

"Do you remember that guy Reeder's opponent was using when you and I first met? Fred Harris? Well, I hired him."

At this, it took all of Alyssa's willpower for her to keep her jaw from dropping open. She remembered every detail of meeting Harris at West's fundraiser for Vincent. She could still recall what it felt like to have her ears ring and see stars from the first time she'd lost a fight. Now, with Rich West dead, the memory was especially poignant.

"When I made contact with him about the job, he told me, 'I nearly caught Vincent leaking to the press when he was a campaign staffer a couple years ago. Someone shut him up before I could get the actual evidence though.'"

This time, Alyssa couldn't stop herself.

"Wait, Harris was working the first Reeder for Senate campaign at the same time I was?"

"Exactly. That's how I knew about you and Vincent being friends. I knew you'd be trying to get in touch with him for help. He's a big deal at the West campaign, and this is their big re-launch. He'd have to be here. You let him off the hook once, he owes you. I knew you'd come here. I risked everything to be here at the same time you were, so I could get your help."

Chambers just shook her head. Pierce found her by exactly the wrong chain of reasoning. The problem with that was, if Pierce expected her to be here because of the old Vincent connection, who else might be waiting for her here?

Pierce continued, "You would never tell Tilman and me who the mole was. You just got him to quit leaking and kept his name secret. So we knew the two of you had to be friends. We just didn't know who it was. Wow, was Tilman ever angry at you. He didn't want to pay you, but I insisted. You're a valuable ally; I didn't want to make you mad."

Chambers whistled softly. This put everything into a different light. She had always wondered who sent Harris after her at the West-Vincent event. And George knew.

"Who were you working for when you hired Harris to sandbag that fundraiser?" she asked.

Pierce looked away from her.

"Come on, Alyssa. You know how it is in this business. We don't rat people out. We have to keep secrets, or we lose our value."

"George, you don't get how wrapped up this stuff is in what's going on right now. I need to know...."

"Look, I didn't come here to rehash the past. I want you to tell the FBI I had nothing to do with the assassination! I can't have them rooting through my entire past—who knows how many clients are going to get embarrassed by what they find?"

She arched an eyebrow and fixed Pierce with a skeptical eye.

"Are you serious? You're here begging for my help and you won't help me in return? You can't actually believe that's going to work out."

He replied with a rising voice, on the edges of panic.

"You have to help me, Alyssa. I've been hunting for you since the news broke about the assassination. They'll believe you. Tell them I wasn't involved!"

"Tell you what, George," she replied. "If you tell me who sent Harris to that fundraiser, I'll..."

That's when Alyssa heard the sound of a helicopter flying very low over the building. Even amid the din of the party, the roar of its rotors shook the floor, which meant it had to be very low indeed. And that could not mean anything but trouble.

Even as she thought it, she noticed a team of federal agents in raid gear coming in through the main door of the ballroom. They wore body armor, black fatigues, and helmets. Each was carrying very serious weaponry, and they were headed straight for her.

"Someone must have recognized us!" Matt said in a harsh whisper.

"I can't get caught here!" Pierce shouted. "I've been hiding for a week; if they find me with you, they'll be sure I did it!"

He bolted off toward the nearest gray service door.

"Wait! George, let me!"

Alyssa darted after him. She was in far better shape. She reached the door before Pierce.

She threw it open and ran headlong into a Secret Service agent who was dashing down the hall – clearly bent on securing the door from the other side.

They both tumbled to the ground. Since the agent was male and in good physical shape, his weight gave him much greater momentum. That meant Alyssa fell backwards, and the agent came down pinning her to the cement floor.

She grabbed his left bicep and shoved up, rolling him over and off her. She got to her knees and delivered a very swift punch to the solar plexus and a chop to the neck. Then she plucked the pistol from his shoulder holster, rose to her feet, and kicked him in the head to make sure he stayed down for a while.

"It's in the fan now, guys. Let's get out."

The three of them raced through service corridors. They turned left, right, right, left, through anonymous, windowless concrete halls meant only for staff, not for guests. The pounding footsteps of pursuers echoed off the walls, spurring the three of them on. Alyssa was easily in the best shape, but before long even she found herself winded.

She could see evening light beaming in from outside on their right. That had to be an exit. But before she could even wonder about it, the sound of a gunshot hurt her eardrums. In the tight confines of the hall, with its cement walls echoing the sound, the noise was painfully loud. Ahead of her, she saw the sparks of a metal-jacketed bullet ricocheting off the wall.

She whirled and was confronted with making a choice. Thoughts blazed through her head faster than lightning. Her perception seemed to speed up.

Racing up behind them, shouting at them to halt, were three of the agents she had seen come into the fundraiser. One of them had his weapon out; he had clearly fired the shot that missed Alyssa. In her hand was a pistol stolen from the Secret Service agent she'd run into. She could pull the trigger and return fire. She could solve their problem quickly and easily. They were running; she was standing still. She had every reason to expect better aim. The agents were wearing body armor, but there was no such thing as body armor for the head.

She could kill them.

But the choice was the same as it had been with the FBI agents in the helicopter. Alyssa's end goal was to come out of this with her name cleared. Killing a bunch of federal agents was counterproductive.

Not even a second had passed before she worked the decocking lever on the pistol, tossed it to the side, and threw herself at the approaching agents.

She collided with the first one, taking the impact on her shoulder. He fell over and she rolled to her feet, coming up face-to-face with a second man, the shooter. She punched him in the temple, and he went straight down.

The third man tried to grab the hand she'd just punched with. She broke his grip and elbowed him in the side of the head. He went down almost as quickly as the second one did.

She stood there panting, nursing the knuckles of her punching hand, when she heard another gunshot. Behind her.

She turned, saw the place where she'd thought there was a door, and heard screaming beyond it. Alyssa scooped up the Sig she had dropped and dashed out that door.

George Pierce lay bleeding to death on the ground. Standing a few feet away from him, the smoking barrel of his pistol still pointed at George's fallen body, was Fred Harris. His black hair glistened in the setting sun.

Alyssa never hesitated. She brought the pistol up and fired at Harris. It was one of the more satisfying moments of her life. She activated an instrument of death aimed at the man who killed Rich West.

It was satisfying even though she missed.

Harris dove, rolled, and came up right next to Matt Barr, who was still staring at George Pierce's corpse. He grabbed the reporter and held the gun to his head.

In his other hand – the one not holding the gun – Harris clutched Matt Barr by the head, holding his hand over his mouth, which was trying to scream. Harris rubbed his weapon against Matt's temple.

A black van screeched to a halt right behind him, and Harris smiled at Alyssa as the door opened.

"Drop the pistol and kick it over here," he said. "Or I blow Mr. Barr's head off."

Alyssa sighed and dropped the pistol a second time. She sent it skittering across the pavement with her toe.

Harris laughed, still clamping his hand over Matt's mouth.

"Here she is, surrendering rather than risk any harm to you, Mr. Barr. It's almost like she likes you. But I don't know how you two can stand each other. Barr, don't you get that this is the woman who...."

"NO!"

Alyssa knew what he was going to say. She knew the secret from her past that Harris was going to throw open for Matt to look at. Her scream was so loud as to make Harris's words unhearable, but he simply waited until she ran out of breath.

"...who set fire to your big union corruption story?"

Matt shook his head violently, as if trying to communicate something, trying to break free of Harris's grip, trying to shout or scream. Muffled sounds came out, but nothing recognizable.

Alyssa felt the strength go out of her legs. She collapsed to the ground. Humiliatingly, mortifyingly, she felt tears in her eyes, right in front of people. All that would come out was a whisper.

"I tried to find a way to tell you..."

Harris just laughed.

"True love. Who knew?"

With that, he threw Matt into the back of the van and piled in after him. The sliding door slammed shut. The vehicle squealed away.

Alyssa tried to get back to her feet to run after it, but as she did the door opened behind her and another of the pursuing federal agents ran out. He looked almost as surprised to see her as she was to see him, but he recovered. He reached out with both hands to grab the front of her dress.

Alyssa was too distraught to care, but her training was so ingrained it worked anyway. She threw him to the ground and kicked him in the head.

She ran away as fast as she could, still crying, looking for a place to hide.

♦

Alyssa crouched, curled up, behind a stack of five-gallon drums in a janitorial closet. Federal agents had already looked in the closet once, but they had assumed the drums to be stacked directly against the wall, instead of harboring a fugitive behind them.

She didn't know what to do. There was nowhere left to go. George had been her oldest ally, and he was dead. Matt had been... well, finding Matt had helped her remember what it was like to want another person around. Now he was in the hands of a killer. He would probably soon be as dead as Pierce.

If he wasn't already dead, he was probably being tortured right now with Harris trying to find out how much Chambers knew. And there was nothing she could do about it. She had no idea where Harris would be hiding. And she certainly couldn't dial 911.

For years Matt had been an awkward annoyance with his constant efforts to woo her. Then he had matured into a distant, comfortable business colleague – one with whom she might swap stories and mutually beneficial information over drinks.

Then her whole life burned up. Then Matt gave Alyssa the one gift no one else in America was willing to give: a few simple hours in the company of another human being who trusted her. That had made Matt into something more than he had ever been before. She wasn't sure yet what to call it.

She wasn't used to this. It was a strange emotion, to want someone to be near, to want them to like her, to want them to pay attention to her. She'd built a whole life in which people were risks and assets, not...

Friends.

Wondering whether he was being tortured drove her crazy.

When she was worn out from imagining Harris and Matt, her thoughts went to memories of George Pierce. Pictures flashed before her eyes: his shocked face when she had dropped the watch onto his desk in her first-ever political theft; his bloody body lying on the street as his lips opened and closed, trying to get one last breath; the way he looked when he tried to say something to her before he died.

Gunter's death had been unpleasant. George's hit her much differently, though. They weren't friends. Alyssa didn't have friends – depending on what she was calling Matt. But George had been... well, he was Alyssa's only relationship that lasted, besides her father and Matt.

Now he was gone. Gone when he had come to her hoping to be saved. She couldn't shake his words – very nearly his last words: "You've got to help me, Alyssa!"

Even knowing that it was wrong, she kept holding that against herself. He came to me begging for help, and I let him get killed.

It wasn't rational. She had tried to take the lead, but the thought wouldn't go away.

The tears started again. She used to be mortified about crying. At the moment, though, she was past caring about anything. She wasn't even sure she wanted to avoid prison.

She tried to motivate herself with memories of her father's stern code: Do anything to win. You're a Chambers. But they fell flat. Lance Reeder paid Harris to kill Rich West; he was the kind of person who'd do anything to win. Maybe it was Matt's influence, but she no longer wanted to be that kind of person.

She had never felt this lost, never felt this alone, never felt this hurt. She hadn't known pain like this since her mother died.

In the end, that was the memory that helped her pull herself together.

It was only a 12-year-old girl's recollection, but it was still clear as day to her: scuttling down the antiseptic-scented hallway, trying to keep up with the medical professionals wheeling the gurney to emergency surgery. In the memory, her mother used every last ounce of strength she could find – the last of her strength, it turned out – to lift her head and look at her daughter, and say two words.

"Be strong."

The gurney went through two swinging doors and an experienced, kindly old nurse stopped her with a hug, and Alyssa's childhood ended early. But it ended with those two words being her most formative memory.

"Be strong."

She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and set her jaw.

Just in time. She heard the sound of a vehicle pulling up outside her closet, and a door opening.

Alyssa froze. She held her breath.

The door to the closet opened.

She tried to will her heart to beat more quietly.

There were no brisk whispered commands that might be expected of a team of federal agents. There was none of the rustling of clothing that might indicate professional operators giving each other hand signals. By the sound of the footsteps, it might be just one man.

Harris?

Alyssa had wedged herself into a very small space. There was really no room to move at all, but she clenched her fists, gritted her teeth, and prepared to fight.

"Chambers? Are you in here?"

It was a harsh whisper, as if the speaker were afraid of being heard beyond the janitorial closet.

The voice didn't sound like Fred Harris, but it was vaguely familiar.

"Are you here Chambers? I'm here to help. It's Mike Vincent."

# 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 had 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."

# CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Alyssa fell backward onto the floor, coming down hard on her rump, pulling her legs up to her chest protectively. Her jaw came to rest on her knees, and she stared vacantly ahead.

Her protestations had been empty. As soon as Vincent mentioned Reeder's backer, she had known it made sense. Her father had kept Lance Reeder in power since she was ten years old. Her father had won Reeder's every campaign for him.

And now, her father had made Lance Reeder the next President.

Kathy was on the floor next to Alyssa, kneeling, with an arm around her shoulder. She didn't say anything; she just sat beside her and held her. Alyssa didn't care. She barely even noticed.

"You can't let this stop you, Alyssa. You're the only one who can get Matt out."

"Give her some time, Mike!" the female voice next to her whispered harshly. Alyssa had forgotten her name.

He had always valued power above everything else. He had always valued controlling people. Now he had Lance Reeder under control. She remembered Reeder's accidental almost-admission. He had had an affair. What a perfect lever for H. Franklin Chambers. What a perfect chance for him to practice the kind of politics he was famous for.

He's not going to get away with it.

The thought was cold. Always before, Alyssa experienced rage as a red filter over her vision and a fierce heat all over her face. Tonight, it was different. Tonight was a simple, steel-hard resolve to exact revenge on the man who had chosen power over his daughter's love.

"He's right," she said, barely able to muster the will to make her lips move. "He's right. I'm the only one who can get Matt out."

Kathy tried to say something, but Alyssa cut her off.

"And my father owes me justice."

They decided to take a break. Alyssa went to the restroom to splash cold water on her face. She came out, and Mrs. Vincent was outside the door, holding some black jeans and a black long-sleeve t-shirt.

"My old college roommate left these here the last time she came to visit," Kathy said. "She's pretty close to your height."

Gratefully, Chambers changed out of her ripped and dirty dress and into the clothes that fit her plans for the night better. Mike had a black baseball cap that she took.

Kathy offered her the final accessory. She reached behind her back and handed over an angular black object. It was a pistol. She held it with the barrel facing down.

"Mike insisted I carry this tonight when he went out looking for you. You'll need it more than I will now."

Alyssa took the pistol. It was a revolver. Just a quick glance at the barrel and the chambers told her it was a .44 magnum. She dropped the chamber open to see that it was loaded. Then she tried to hand it back to its owner.

"I can't. It's probably traceable to you, right?"

But Kathy was already unclipping the holster from her waistband and passing it over.

"Take it. If you succeed tonight it won't matter that it's traceable to us. If you don't... well, evidence will be the least of our worries. I'm giving it to you because I believe in you, Alyssa. I trust you."

That made Chambers uncomfortable. "You don't know anything about me. Even your husband barely knows anything about me, and at least I've met him before tonight. You and I just met."

Kathy smiled. "Trust me. I know what I'm doing."

Alyssa nodded, managed half a smile, and clipped the holster to the back of her jeans and let the oversize shirt hang loose to cover the holster.

As she did, Kathy said, "Whatever you have to do tonight, remember that we care about you, and what happens to you, and how you end up."

"Your husband said he wished he'd never met me."

"We all say things we later grow out of. Mike grows fast. Trust me, we care about you and want you to come out of this stronger."

The echo of her mother's voice in "stronger" almost undid Alyssa. She just nodded and smiled.

Then the two women rejoined Mike in the living room.

Vincent said, "They can't possibly be holding Matt at the West headquarters. The risk is too great. Can you imagine someone finding out that a Presidential campaign had a reporter tied up in the closet?"

Alyssa nodded.

"There's a very secure guesthouse on the estate. Brick walls, tiny windows, only one heavy door. It started life as a home for the people who looked after the lawn and vegetation. That's where I would put him if I needed a place."

"It's a long drive to get back home from D.C., and it's hard for me to see them carrying a hostage into first class on an airliner."

"You're right," she replied. "H. Franklin would have sent a private plane. You don't have to go through TSA to fly on those."

Vincent nodded. "Well, whether Matt's there or not, I really see only one way forward for you. Back home. Even if they're not holding Matt at Chambers Estate, your father will be there, and he has answers. Try to find something that will back up my own testimony about Reeder and your father. I'll be happy to be a witness in the trial but not if it's just me. If you don't have anything to back me up, they'll say I'm crazy. We need hard evidence."

Chambers said, "It's just a matter of getting me there. I don't think H. Franklin is likely to send any of the family planes for me right now, and I'm not eager to submit to the facial recognition software that TSA is using these days."

Mike replied, "I know a Senator who was part of the West inner circle with me. She flies her own Cessna. But you had better succeed. If you fail, she'll have to deal with headlines about aiding and abetting the assassin, and I don't want to do that to her."

She nodded. "I won't fail."

As they drove to meet his friend at her hangar, Vincent recounted one last tale.

"I had my encounter with Frank Chambers of course. Everyone does in politics eventually. He tried to use my relationship with a guy named D.W. Tilman to get at me. It didn't work out, and Tilman and I aren't friends anymore, but it taught me how Chambers works." He paused, looked at her, and then added, "The elder Chambers, I mean."

"He likes to get a lever on people. That's how he talks about leverage. He likes to figure out what it is that makes a person susceptible to manipulation. And then he uses it to get you to do what he wants. The way your father operates, Alyssa, is that he likes politicians he can control. I know of governors he's blackmailed, but it's not always blackmail. If Chambers can make himself the only connection between you and the donor establishment, then he can control you through that. If he can be the man who gets the news media to take you seriously, that's a lever he can use to control people. He's always trying to control people. He would say he's always trying to get a lever on people. I lost a good friend over it."

Alyssa let the silence grow for quite a while before replying.

"I know it better than most."

"That's what I wanted to say to you, before you do this. You've shown me a lot of anger tonight – at Fred Harris, at Lance Reeder..."

"And at my father," she finished the list for him.

"Exactly, Alyssa. Don't let your anger be a lever."

♦

The hour was somewhere near three in the morning. The rural ancestral home of the Chambers' family was distant from Washington, D.C., and the flight had been long, especially in a cramped, tiny plane. Chambers was glad to be out of the Cessna. The Senator kept giving her terrified looks the whole flight. They landed, Alyssa jumped out, and the plane left the area again without even shutting the engine off. The Senator had obviously stretched her trust of Mike Vincent all the way to its limit.

Now Chambers stood looking down from a small hill at the yard of the estate. The urge was strong to not let Matt go even another second in captivity. But even stronger was her training, so she took the time to survey the terrain.

The grounds stretched much farther than the walled-in, well-manicured green expanse around the home. She had hiked cross country for quite some distance to come up on the place from the back. She stood in a copse of pines on a low rise.

Before her was her childhood home. There was the hidden corner where she had given Matt his first taste of alcohol from a bottle stolen from her father's bar. There was the dolphin fountain she had passed on her way to brag to her mother about her first fight.

And, most important of all, near the back corner of the yard was the tiny stone cottage that had once been a groundskeeper's quarters. It had sat mostly empty since Alyssa's teenage years, when they started hiring a local company.

What was different about her home was the pair of armed guards patrolling the stone wall that marked the edge of the mansion grounds. She watched them walking away from her. About ten minutes later a second pair walked past, and about fifteen minutes later a third pair. Half an hour later, the cycle repeated itself.

To her knowledge, there had never been guards at Chambers Estate before. Either Matt was being held here, or her father knew that she was coming for him. Either way, she was at the right place.

When the third pair of guards passed for the second time, and the pattern suggested she'd have about half an hour to work, Alyssa hurried off her the toward the stone wall. She knew how to move silently in the night, placing each step carefully to avoid twigs, leaves, and dead foliage. She knew how to find the shadows and stay out of the moonlight. She came up against the wall; getting over it was no problem for the former gymnast.

The cottage windows were boarded up, which confirmed her suspicion/hope that someone was being held prisoner inside. The front door was locked, but that was only a defense against a stranger. Alyssa had had the key since childhood. She went in and shut the door behind her.

A wooden chair sat in the middle of the dusty, poorly lit floor. A space had been cleared around it. Tied to that chair was a man with a hood over his head. In one corner was a cold, empty woodstove. In another was a small bed, unslept-in for years. There was a chair with an ottoman near the stove. Once upon a time, it had served the Chambers family as a guest house after it stopped being servants' quarters. No one had stayed here for years though.

Alyssa was whispering, "Oh Matt!" before she even ran to him and gently removed the hood.

He was dozing lightly in a position that had to cramp his neck, but he woke instantly when Alyssa removed the hood.

"Just leave me alone," he mumbled. Then his eyes opened and he saw the short woman kneeling beside him, working on the ropes that held him to the chair.

"Lyss!"

She nodded.

"Shhh, I'll get you out."

But she couldn't keep her own advice. Her observations of the guards had not indicated that they ever looked in the cabin, and it should be 20 minutes before the next set came along. As she worked on untying the knots she said, "I'm so sorry, Matt. I knew I should tell you about what I did. You shouldn't have had to hear it from Harris. I meant to tell you, but I've been so afraid. Ever since this assassination happened, I've been so alone. And when I finally had you with me again, it felt too good to risk losing. I liked having a friend. I needed a friend. I didn't want to admit what I did, and have you turn your back on me. I know it's way too big for you to forgive, but ..."

"Of course it's not, Alyssa."

"But..."

She had loosened enough rope for him to move one hand. He took her chin in it and held her gaze.

"I knew, Alyssa. I've always known."

"What?"

"I saw you there. I came out of the restroom and saw you fighting that other guy. I recognized you clear as day. I saw you throw my laptop into the fire."

Chambers had stopped untying to simply stare at him.

"I told you once, Alyssa. I told you about it when you tricked me into telling you about the Buchanan Club. It's forgiven. Gone. White as snow."

She shook her head slowly from side to side.

"I don't understand."

"It's the only way to ever get any peace when you've been wronged, Alyssa. It's forgiven."

She finished untying him as she said, "Matt, I ruined your whole career. You could be big time by now. You could be one of the celebrity reporters if I hadn't done what I did."

He nodded.

"It was a terrible time for me. When I had that documentation in my hand, proving illegal union contributions to a Senate campaign, I knew it was hot. It was the biggest story I'd ever had. I was daydreaming of my own show on a cable news network... bestselling political books... I wanted to be the new Bob Woodward, and I knew that story could get me there."

"And then the story was gone. Destroyed. My only copy of the evidence was burned in a deliberate fire. And the person who did it was the center of my world – the woman I dreamed of marrying."

He said, "All I ever wanted was for you to love me, and you betrayed me."

Alyssa winced.

He held her hand.

"I didn't know what to do. I had no idea how I was ever going to feel OK again. And like anyone would, I talked to my friends about it. I talked to my friend Mike Vincent."

Her eyes opened wider with surprise.

"He and I have been friends since he started secretly giving me information, trying to stop Lance Reeder from getting into the Senate."

At the involuntary widening of her eyes, he said, "Yes, Alyssa, I've figured out that was you too. I knew there had to be a reason Mike made me give my word not to tell you that my tip came from him. Mike and I have been friends for years but since he got married he's really become a better friend."

"Mike and his wife helped me understand that my father missed the point entirely. My father's religion was all about rules, and wrath, and stuff you can't do. Mike and Kathy talked to me about love, and forgiveness, and grace."

"They helped me get to a place where I could understand what real forgiveness meant and live it out."

He took both of her hands in his. "I promise you Alyssa. I paid for this lesson the very hard way. It's gone. Forgiven. White as snow. Everything you feel guilty about doing to me... believe me, you never have to feel guilty anymore."

Chambers felt herself about to cry. In the middle of enemy territory, with armed men patrolling only meters away, she was crying because there really was one person in this hostile world who still trusted her.

When she collected herself, Alyssa said, "Matt, I... I don't know what to say. I don't know what to think. I don't know how you can... What I know is I want to get you safe. We'll wait here until the guards pass by again, then I'll help you over the back wall into the woods around the grounds. Get away. I'm going to cause enough of a disturbance right inside the house that there won't be anyone left to follow you."

"Get away and tell them the truth if I don't come out."

"Of course not, Alyssa. I'm coming with you if you're going into danger."

"Don't be ridiculous. If we both die, no one will ever know the truth."

"If you die, I don't care if anyone knows the truth."

She felt the breath go out of her. How could anyone respond? What could she possibly say? She had fifteen years of "shut up, I don't want to hear it" experience. Do I want to change? How does it work?

"Matt... I've never had close relationships before. I never wanted them before. I don't know what I want now. I learned to... to like having you around, these past days. But I don't know how to talk about it or what to say. I just know that I want to keep you alive."

He smiled at her.

"If you like having me around let me come with you. You've got training that I don't have for dealing with physical danger, but I don't believe physical danger is the only thing you'll face in that mansion tonight. I need to be with you."

It was hard. A dozen plans passed through her brain, ideas to trick him—or push him—into leaving. But that was more of the stuff she felt guilty for. That's how she'd treated Matt—and everyone else—before she had to confront it all.

"I'm going in to talk to my father, Matt," she said.

He nodded. "I wondered. I caught a glimpse when they were tying me up and the hood was out of place. I've known I was in your old caretaker cottage for a while now, and that made me wonder. There's obviously something political going on, and it's pretty big time. That means H. Franklin is going to be somewhere near the center of it."

"Pretty much dead center."

They waited long enough for the guards to not only pass but also disappear around the side of the mansion. Then Chambers opened the cottage door to head out.

Fred Harris was standing about ten feet from the door, patiently waiting for them. A thin smile stretched across his lips, showing enough teeth to look menacing.

She didn't give any sign of being startled. She slid into a guard stance, with her fists up in front of her, as if she had come out the door explicitly for the purpose of fighting him.

Harris stood calmly in the middle of the perfectly-trimmed grass. His hair was dark; his clothes were dark. His eyes and his smile were darker still. His hair might have been glued down, it was so sleek.

Seeing Alyssa take a fighting stance, Matt acted immediately. He threw himself forward, charging at Harris.

Alyssa shouted for him to stop, but it was too late. And it was never any threat to the other man. He simply stepped to the side, let Matt's charge carry him right past, and dropped his fist like a hammer onto Matt's lower back as he passed, targeted right at the kidney. With a cry, the reporter fell forward onto his face.

At once, Alyssa ran at Harris, trying to land a punch to his side while he was turned to follow through on Matt. But he was too fast. He blocked that and shot back two blows of his own, both aimed at her gut.

Alyssa dodged one, blocked the other, and landed a solid kick to Harris's hip that sent him backward across the lawn, shuffling to regain his balance. Alyssa stepped around Matt's supine form – she thought she could see his back rise and fall as he breathed – to follow Harris.

The pause as she came forward gave both a chance to prepare themselves more for the fight. Alyssa bent her knees a bit deeper, and planted her feet a little wider, settling into a more formal fighting stance. Harris sneered.

"Do you want to bow to each other and touch gloves too?"

"That would be a sign of mutual respect," she replied. "So, no."

Then she fired off a lightning kick right at his groin.

Harris dodged and punched at her gut. Alyssa blocked that and kicked again, a big, swooping high kick aimed at his temple. He dodged back and came up against a stone bench. He allowed himself to tumble deliberately backward over it, and then he rolled back onto his feet. He rose next to a sculpted stone flower pot and threw it straight at her head.

She ducked then, distracted by the sound of Matt groaning, glanced over her shoulder. She put her eyes back forward in time to block a punch aimed at her nose, then punched hard at Harris's solar plexus. She hit him hard and was rewarded with the sound of all the air in his lungs being expelled.

Harris backed up. He was trying to recover while dodging the broken flower pot on the ground.

"Almost got you when you wanted to run over to your friend there," Harris taunted her. He sidestepped, feinting with his fists.

"You should never have brought him here," she replied. "There's nothing he can tell you about my plans. You could never have tortured anything out of him."

He laughed. "Who cares what he can tell me? You think I cared? I needed Matt because we needed a lever on you."

Alyssa saw red at that. It was just one more reminder that her father was at work in this nightmare. Without a second thought, she faked another high kick. When Harris began to duck, she bent low and brought in an uppercut that hit him right below his eye.

Harris spat a curse at her and backpedaled but before she could drive home the second and third punches, he kicked her swiftly in the side. Alyssa felt the pain that told her he may have gotten one of her ribs.

They both stepped back slightly to recover from the blows. Both were panting, staring angrily at each other. Alyssa had enough breath to say, "You think you can make me lie down and take the fall like a good girl? Just hold Matt over my head?"

Harris grinned. "Once you find someone's lever, everything else becomes easy. You, Reeder, whoever."

Chambers sneered back at him.

"Reeder's love life probably made it easy to find blackmail material on him. You're going to find it doesn't work that way with me."

Harris barked out a laugh.

"Find blackmail material on Reeder? Find? The man's going to be President of the United States. You think we'd leave that to chance? We create levers when we need them. And we needed Lance Reeder's compliance more than most. That's what your father pays me for. That's what he's been paying me for since you were a cute little girl running off mad because your daddy wouldn't pay attention to you."

It happened in a flash. She saw again the moment when she had bragged to her mother about her first fight. She felt again the anger as her father sent her off. And she heard again the words.

"Sarah, this is my friend Lance."

Her head wanted to explode with the horror of it all. Her father had deliberately created the situation. He had deliberately put her poor alcoholic and neglected mother into a situation to be taken advantage of by a worthless scumbag of a man. He had done it all to create a lever over Reeder, so he could control him. And then he had sold out his own daughter to put that leveraged man into the White House.

A lightning-quick step carried her to Harris as, from behind her back, she produced Vincent's revolver. Chambers rammed it up against Harris's nose so hard it almost went up his nostril.

"Lance Reeder once said something about my mother's death and a car crash. He was drunk. He seemed to realize right away that he shouldn't have said it.

"Harris, you tell me the truth right now or you die."

The gun in his face changed everything.

"Look, it was never my idea! You get this; you're in the business, too! It was a job! I did a job! He paid me to put those pills in her drink. I didn't know how much she drank! I didn't know what was going to happen!"

Holding the pistol in her right hand, Alyssa drove her left fist into Harris's temple as hard as she could, and watched his head flop over unconscious.

"Fourth time's the bloody charm, isn't it?" She said, and rose to her feet.

# CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Matt stumbled groggily to his feet, but Alyssa barely waited for him. As he called her name, she marched up to the rear door of her home. She was beyond calls to wait or to listen. She was beyond anything but fury. It was one thing to realize that her father had tried to frame her; it was another thing to realize that her father was using Reeder's affair with her mother as blackmail material.

He had deliberately paid someone to kill her mother. He had paid Fred Harris to slip sleeping pills into her drink, with the inevitable result that their attempt to drive home was deadly. She died in the resulting car crash, and her father had hired it done.

Rage was an insufficient word.

She drove her foot into the heavy oak so hard it splintered next to the knob and swung open.

Behind her, Matt struggled to drag Harris behind them, into the house, so the guards wouldn't find him unconscious on the lawn.

She stomped through the kitchen. Matt called out, "No! Alyssa, wait!" But his words were like a spider web trying to hold back a charging bull.

She stormed into the grand hall of the Chambers' mansion, pistol at her side, teeth bared.

Once inside, she saw her father.

H. Franklin Chambers reclined in a wine-colored leather wing chair, a tumbler of scotch in one hand. His navy suit and solid maroon power tie weren't rumpled at all. He'd obviously sat completely undisturbed through the fight outside.

"Darling. Come in. I've been expecting you."

But Alyssa was done with games – done forever. Whatever use she might have had for her father's decorum had evaporated when Harris spoke those words about Reeder and her mother.

Matt Barr came into the room just in time to see it – or rather, not see it. Just like her fight with the federal agents in his house, it happened so fast he couldn't make out any of the details. Somehow, Alyssa was suddenly across the room, grabbing her father by the tie, whirling him feet over head to land with a thud on his back, air escaping from his lungs in a sound like a desperate cough.

Alyssa came down with one knee on his midriff, applying painful pressure to the nerves and organs right below the rib cage. She leveled the pistol right between Franklin's eyes, not even an inch away. She knew from personal experience that from that perspective the gaping barrel would look wide enough to park a car in.

She screamed. "You killed my mother!"

He couldn't answer. He still hadn't recovered from having the wind knocked out of him when landing on his back. His eyes were filled with terror.

The scream had been an explosion of fire but now she waited, ice cold, holding the gun on him. When his breathing returned to normal, Alyssa said, "Talk. Spill it. I want you to confess it before I blow your head off. You sold her and me together to buy a President you could control. I get it now. Too bloody late, but I get it. But that's not enough. I want to hear you confess it. Then you die."

Behind her, she heard Matt speak again. "Alyssa, wait–"

The .44 in her right hand, she held up her left hand, palm facing in the direction of the voice. The unspoken command to stop was clear, and Matt clamped his mouth shut. He thought he had seen the worst before. He thought he had seen the white-hot rage this woman carried around with her. But until that moment, everything he'd seen had been only a shadow.

There was good cause to be afraid of her.

But Matt was afraid for her.

Alyssa grabbed her father's tie and jerked his head up off the floor, then dropped it back down. "Talk. Don't make me hurt you more than I have to."

"You don't understand–"

She slapped him before he could continue. "I don't? I understand you killed her!"

"She did that to herself with rum."

She tightened her finger on the trigger. Her memory flashed back to the scene in Wheeler's office, where she had done the same thing just to scare him.

Everything was different now. She would be pulling the trigger for good this time. The only question was when.

"You're going back to that lie you've been telling me since childhood? That she died of a stroke from drinking too much? Takes a lot of political muscle to keep a cover-up like that going for a lifetime, doesn't it? But you had it. And it gave you leverage over Reeder, too."

"You knew Mom was alcoholic. You knew she was lonely – you bloody well ought to, since it's your fault. So you introduced her to a man who liked to take advantage of situations like that, then you sat back to wait for your blackmail material. And when it wasn't happening fast enough, you hired my friend Harris to speed things along. All of that, and you try to tell me she did it to herself?"

Her father coughed again, and said, "OK, OK! Yes, I set her up to fall for Reeder. Yes, I knew she drank too much and wasn't stable. But she and Lance were just supposed to get a DUI together! That would have been enough. She wasn't supposed to die. That wasn't my plan."

"I don't care if it was your plan. It was your fault."

He shook his head without saying a word.

"And framing me for assassinating West? I suppose that wasn't your fault either?"

"You're a Chambers! You would have beaten the charge in court. You were never going to be found guilty!

Alyssa scoffed. "Even if I did beat the assassination charge in court, my whole life was going to be ruined. You don't go through a trial of the century like that, on cable news 24/7, and expect to get your life back. And what about the rest of my life? Even if the evidence was enough to be found not guilty of the assassination, the evidence works the other way on all the charges that come with a lifetime of being a thief. Which evidence the FBI has now, thanks to you."

"You were going to win, Alyssa. You were always going to win. You're a Chambers. You're my daughter. Don't you understand? I only took the risk because I believe in you!"

Her eyes went wide.

"Did you just seriously try to turn my torture into flattery? Gunter Hauptmann's corpse in my lap was flattery? Because you believe in me?"

"I never wanted Harris to do that! He was acting on his own when he realized you had been in the office at the same time. He didn't know you were there to be the patsy, so he tried to kill you. That wasn't my fault!"

"And Pierce?"

Her father froze, silent. The terror was back in his eyes.

"Are you going to try to tell me that wasn't your fault?"

"He knew I had worked with Harris in the past! He could have given evidence tying me to the shooter if Harris ever got caught. I had to give the order, I didn't have a choice! He could have blown the whole thing wide open."

He tried to shake his head – whether in denial or just fear of what she might do – but could only move it slightly.

"Please...."

"You ruined my life. You killed my friends. And you killed my mother with your scheming for power. You die."

She cocked the hammer back on Vincent's revolver.

Her father gasped and stammered.

"Alyssa... no...."

"When I was a girl, all I ever wanted was for you to love me, and you betrayed me."

She adjusted her finger on the trigger one last time, and then it hit her.

The moment froze like a photograph.

"All I ever wanted was for you to love me, and you betrayed me."

Her jaw dropped open.

For the first time, her eyes left her father and flashed to Matt.

And her thoughts shattered into pieces and left the present, drawn like iron filings by a magnet toward that moment when she had freed Matt from captivity.

♦

"I knew, Alyssa. I've always known."

"What?"

"I saw you there. I came out of the restroom and saw you fighting that other guy. I recognized you clear as day. I saw you throw my laptop into the fire."

Chambers had stopped untying to simply stare at him.

"I told you once, Alyssa. I told you about it when you tricked me into telling you about the Buchanan Club. It's forgiven. Gone. White as snow."

She shook her head slowly from side to side.

"I don't understand."

"It's the only way to ever get any peace when you've been wronged, Alyssa. It's forgiven."

She finished untying him as she said, "Matt, I ruined your whole career. You could be big time by now. You could be one of the celebrity reporters if I hadn't done what I did."

He nodded.

"It was a terrible time for me. When I had that documentation in my hand, proving illegal union contributions to a Senate campaign, I knew it was hot. It was the biggest story I'd ever had. I was daydreaming of my own show on a cable news network... bestselling political books... I wanted to be the new Bob Woodward, and I knew that story could get me there."

"And then the story was gone. Destroyed. My only copy of the evidence was burned in a deliberate fire. And the person who did it was the center of my world – the woman I dreamed of marrying."

Matt's words echoed in her memory.

He said, "All I ever wanted was for you to love me, and you betrayed me..."

They rang like bells on Sunday, over and over.

"All I ever wanted was for you to love me, and you betrayed me...

"I promise you Alyssa. I paid for this lesson the very hard way. It's gone. Forgiven. White as snow. Everything you feel guilty about doing to me, you never have to feel guilty anymore."

"It's the only way to ever get any peace when you've been wronged...."

♦

She stared at Matt, to see tears streaming down his face.

She looked back at her father, and the magnum revolver she was aiming at his face, and the terrified eyes of a man who knew his murder would be justified.

She looked to Matt, and Matt spoke.

"I love you Alyssa. You're a strong, principled woman with ironclad self-control, and I love that about you."

She rose to her feet, and as she did she could hear her mother's voice. It whispered across the years from their conversation about her first fight.

"Be strong.... Don't let anger rule you."

Matt was right. She'd spent her whole life chasing the wrong idea of her mother's last words. In that moment, she understood something she had never known before abut that scene in the hospital. Dying, her mother had tried to repeat the same advice she had given Alyssa at the age of ten. It wasn't just, "Be strong." It was "Be strong, don't let anger rule you."

Strong wasn't winning fights with other people. Strong was winning the fight with herself.

Alyssa flipped a switch on the side of the revolver, and its chamber dropped open. She tipped it up, scattered the cartridges on the floor, and threw the gun aside.

She nodded at Matt, then at the phone on the end table beside a chair.

"Call the feds. Tell them we have the assassins."

# EPILOGUE

Matt Barr stood in the millimeter-wave scanner holding his hands above his head. He stepped out and smiled at the guard.

"You're clean," the guard said.

Moments later, another guard passed him back his package, with a similar statement.

"Clean."

Matt smiled and wished him a nice day. He felt lucky to get the package back. Most of the time, visitors to federal prisons weren't allowed to bring in gifts. They were supposed to be mailed, eventually reaching the prisoner after a long series of checks. It helped to have a Congressman pull some strings.

He stepped into the visitors' area, with its cheap furniture and federal utilitarian decor. On one wall hung a portrait of the Attorney General. On another, a portrait of the President. Perhaps it would soon be replaced by a picture of John Hicks or Lance Reeder. Mike's hopes for a leader who could really change the country would have to wait.

One wall was all windows, looking out over the exercise yard. Matt found himself drawn to it as he waited.

Women in orange jumpsuits busied themselves with weights or other activities. But they all gave a wide berth to one in particular.

She moved, quickly and precisely, through a series of choreographed turns and motions. Although Matt knew almost nothing about such things, he had heard them described often enough. It was clearly a martial arts form – a series of techniques strung together in such a way that it looked half like a dance and half like a fight against invisible opponents.

Her hair was jet black again and growing quickly—it was already shoulder length. Her small frame spun with every turn, punching and kicking in an order Matt wished he understood. It was beautiful. Her hair flew with every turn, blowing over her eyes, masking the deadly serious look she wore.

She finished the form, bowing and standing at attention before an instructor or audience that only she could see. Matt imagined the black belt that belonged around her waist.

One of the guards walked up to her. The glass and the distance ensured Matt couldn't hear, but he saw lips move as the guard spoke. Words were exchanged. Alyssa looked up toward his window. Matt waved, unsure if she could see him.

A few minutes later a buzzer sounded, and the guard in the visiting area went over to the rear door. There was a metallic clank, and the door swung open. Alyssa Chambers entered, walking with the same poise and composure she would have had in a business suit, lecturing students, or in a set of black combat fatigues, scaling the wall of a building.

She smiled at Matt and eased into one of the cheap plastic chairs in a small conversation square. Matt walked over and took the seat next to her. She patted his hand and said, "Thanks for stopping by."

"How could I not. How are you?"

"It's not that bad really. I had a few fights in my first couple days, but none of them were a real challenge. Once you show you can beat anyone in here, there's no problem being left alone."

"For all the years I've known you – even after I knew about your secret career – I never imagined you describing prison as 'not that bad.'"

Alyssa smiled back at him.

"I don't have secrets to keep anymore. Everyone knows everything about me. It's amazing how that solves your stress problems."

"It's still hard for me to take," he replied. "You proved them wrong. You proved you didn't do it. You even handed them not only the trigger man but the man who paid to have the assassination committed, and instead of getting a medal, you're in prison."

She shrugged.

"You saw the trial as well as I did. I can't say they got anything wrong. I am indeed guilty of ten counts of breaking and entering, nearly as many counts of theft, a few random counts of assaulting a law enforcement officer... I pled guilty for a reason. It was a good deal. They only charged me with half of what I did."

"Besides, the media invested a lot of time and effort into getting people to hate me. The public wasn't ready to buy 'oops, we were wrong, she's innocent.' They had been told I deserved punishment, and they wanted to see punishment. I'm probably going to be the subject of conspiracy books for decades. My name'll wind up synonymous with the grassy knoll.

"I don't blame them for charging me."

Matt, bemused, shook his head. "I doubt your father is handling prison as well as you."

Alyssa shrugged.

"I'm not ready to talk about him yet."

An awkward silence followed, until the reporter asked, "What are you going to do now?"

She shrugged.

"Theoretically sit here for the next thirty years. I don't know. I don't know what I want. Being a professor was never more than a cover. Being an operative is over now. No one's going to want to hire the one plumber everyone in America recognizes. I don't know if I want to get out. I don't know if I care. There's nothing I want out there."

Matt gave her a lopsided grin and, with one hand, pointed vaguely in his own direction.

"I'd like it if you were out."

She smiled.

"I'm glad you came to visit, Matt. That's a change, right? I look forward to seeing you. I don't know what happens from here. I like you and want you to come around again. Can you be comfortable with that and leave the rest for later?"

Matt nodded, smiling. It was the most she'd ever said about liking him.

"I brought you a present," he said, pulling the heavy book out from under his arm.

She raised her eyebrows. "Usually those have to come through the administration."

He gave her a wink. "We have a Congressman pulling strings. That makes it easier to get the Bureau of Prisons to allow an exception."

"How is Mike?"

"Good. Talking about maybe running for Senate."

"Following in Rich's footsteps?"

"He won't say it that way, but yeah. America needs a leader who puts principles over politics. We need a President who cares more about what's right than about what will win. We can't have Rich West, but I think Mike could be a good substitute. This gift is actually from Mike and his wife and me."

He passed over the thick, heavy book with a black, pebbled leather binding and title in gold.

"I think I have some idea how you feel, Alyssa. There was a time when I thought there was nothing out there I wanted. When I had reached rock bottom and felt like everything I cared about was gone, what helped me come back was learning to forgive, and learning the truth about loving someone."

The guard was trying to get Matt's attention. His time was up. He stood and smiled at Alyssa one more time.

"Give that a read. It's written for people who need a second chance."

♦

Dear Reader,

Thank you so much for reading my book. I'm honored and humbled. I'm already in your debt, but if you don't mind one more favor, would you please review it? Your honest review helps other readers make up their mind about whether this is a good book for them to buy.

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You can also learn more about my previous novel, Death of Secrets, and other forthcoming novels at my website:  www.bowengreenwood.com

Acknowledgements

Thanks God! Thank you Stephanie, again and always. Mom. Vicki: absolutely amazing editing. Sherrie Dolby-Arnoldy: more great editing. My sister Jane. Kris. EJ, for being one of the first beta-readers when Alyssa was half-finished and completely different. I have one friend who helps tremendously with my writing but likes to remain anonymous, so to him I'll just say, "Thank you, House Buck." For everyone I should have thanked and didn't, thank you and I'm sorry.

