Life of Secrets Read Online Free PDF Page A

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. Alyssa, on the other hand, was desperate for Matt to never
figure out how bad she’d hurt him.
    It had gotten
easier over the past year. 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. He had finally stopped being quite so desperate. Alyssa suspected a
girlfriend and was glad of it.
    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 mind 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 drink 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 then 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.