So here it is, the final entry in the Ingrams & Associates saga. It took a while, but I finally got my ass into gear enough to get it done.
Yes, it's a long one. Came out at 88k words, which is a lot. I'll break it up into episodes, as I always do, to make it easier to read. More than usual, but like I said, it's long.
It's a not a stroke story, this is a full-on thriller and, I hope, a fitting conclusion.
I want to thank my editor, 29WordsForNow, for all this work on this, and the other manuscripts he's looked over. In fact, I want to thank all the editors who've been involved with this series. NoneTheWiser, JonB1969 and the inestimable PennLady, who made me a far better writer than I could otherwise be. She is something special, that lady.
Todd172 very kindly extended me permission to use one of his characters.
Chapter 1
In the darkest hours of the summer night, the mansion house was lit up from discrete ground embedded lighting, making the building look like an English Gothic Mansion from yesteryear. There was smoke wisping from some of the faux Tudor-like ornate high chimneys, and also starting to emanate from a couple of the ground floor windows. Flames were occasionally shooting out the side of the large building, making the shadows of the foliage dance.
The front of the building, complete with winding stone chipped drive way, held a couple of sports cars, two Rolls Royces and a Bentley, plus a smattering of SUVs and two more ordinary town cars. There were three motorcycles neatly lined up by the entrance to an eight-car garage, - two Harley Davidsons and one Japanese crotch rocket.
The left door of the large two door front entrance banged open heavily, like it had been kicked open, and a man staggered out almost collapsing on the gravel of the drive way as he did.
He was bruised, his dress shirt torn in several places, blood was splashed across his chest and face, and he had a cut right above the hair line over his left ear that was dripping down his face and onto the ripped collar of his shirt.
Behind the rips, it was clear this was a man who worked out, - no flab, - but not a body builder either. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, clean-shaven, although a large purplish bruise was starting to appear along his jawline, and also on the other side of his head from where the cut was.
He stumbled forward, and fell, falling on his outstretched hands, the gravel cutting into them, and adding more blood dripping on to the ground. He groaned, and pushed himself back up, turning and looking back at the building he had just escaped from.
Smoke was starting to escape through the open door, and suddenly there was a klaxon of a fire alarm. And, dimly, behind that, human voices were starting to be heard, increasing in volume.
The man looked around with controlled intent taking in the situation, the cars in the driveway, judging what he might hotwire and take. All were recent models, and as such, required wireless dongles to even open the doors, much less start. He dismissed them, looking at the motorbikes instead. The crotch rocket wasn't his style, and also looked computerized, but the Harleys... they had promise. He knew how to hotwire those, and one of them was an older model Dyna Low. It required two set of cross wires, one to make the lights work and another to activate the ignition, plus access to those wires wasn't hard to get at.
After spending a minute using a knife he pulled out from being tucked into the flat of his back flattening the tires of the cars he was ignoring, he headed directly to the bikes, and got to work, ignoring the increasing screaming and raised human voices from within the house. Two minutes later, and the bike roared into life, with him sitting astride it. It was painful, he had a large bruise on the outside of his left thigh, and his wrists hurt from being confined, but he was free.
Gravel spurted from the rear tire as he maneuvered the bike around and rolled to the top of the drive, where he stopped and looked back.
The smoke was starting to get a lot thicker, and the flames along the side of the building were starting to lick upwards and burn from the bottom story up to the second. Several people in various stages of evening dress, - and also various degrees of clothed at all, - had staggered out, and were coughing or pulling each other away from the burning building, as the flames and ferocity of the blaze increased.
People started coming around the side of the building, evidently having exited through another door, - several people in uniforms, a few younger women and men, all coughing and doing their best to move as fast as they could.
Someone saw him, sitting astride the motorbike, looking at them and a cry went up, with fingers being pointed.
The man sighed heavily, and then gunned the throttle, spraying yet more gravel chips, as he roared away into the night.
* * * * *
Two years later.
April Carlisle, a tall red-haired woman, reminiscent of a mix of Kate Middleton and Juliana Moore, walked back to the table at the upscale 1789 Restaurant in Georgetown, in Washington DC.
She was wearing her long hair in a single woven strand that lay around her neck, in the Grecian style. A matching dark pearl necklace and long pearl earrings offset the red lipstick, and the simple white toga style dress she wore completed the outfit.
She made her way to the table, where her friend and work colleague Megan was sitting, alongside her husband Thomas, a tall willowy man. Another couple sat at the table, - Rachael and Major Lee Hicks, recently arrived from the UK, and beside them sat her friend and often counselor, Marianne Dubowski and her date, Dermot. Dermot used to be the Chief Operations Officer at Ingrams and Associates, and had retired sometime before, and begun a quiet relationship with April's therapist, a fact April had only just discovered. He was also an aspiring novelist, it transpired. Next to them was Kim McGee, her friend and next-door neighbor, a tall and statuesque transgendered lady. Filling out the table was her friend and, she joked, 'date for the night', Desirea McGhee. Desirea was now the second in command at Ingrams & Associates, right hand person to Jessica Ingrams herself, now that her trusty compatriot, Dermot, had retired.
All were attired similarly, decked out in their best gowns, and there was more than a little money present in the jewelry some of the women sported.
"Ahh, there she is. Toilets up to spec, April?" asked Rachael, as April took her seat, Lee standing to pull the chair out for her.
Looking up gratefully to Lee, April said, "Oh yes. Cold water not
too
cold..."
It was a running joke for April and Rachael. When April had been in the UK months previously, she had noticed and remarked on how cold the water often was in the bathrooms of various pubs and hotels she'd stayed at. She'd mentioned this to Rachael, and it had become a 'thing', where April would rush off to the bathrooms of a new place they had entered, to check the temperature of the cold-water faucet. No, Tap. She was in the UK, after all.
Sitting down, she beamed at everyone around her, - some of her closest friends and colleagues, without whom she would never have made it through the trying times of the past six months.
April had been involved in a particularly hard mission in the UK, where she'd been taken by a group of brainwashing experts, and put through multiple rapes, mind altering drugs, heavy duty hypnosis until she had almost broken. Only a last-minute reprieve, from previously implanted instructions, had saved her. She had spent almost three months just trying to wrap her head around what had happened, dealing with the emotions it evoked, trying to cap the anger at what had happened to her, and to others, and to deal with the guilt of having to take a life in order to preserve her own.
She picked up her champagne flute and glanced at Lee Hicks, who had also gone through the same process. He'd had an even harder time coming back to reality, even with the help of his wife, Rachael, who clearly loved him, body and soul. She looked at Rachael, who was in the process of telling a story, all glistening eyes directed at her husband, and laugh lines around her eyes.
Inwardly she idly wished she had someone to look at like that. But she was a field agent for Ingrams & Associates, and she'd been there and tried that, and failed miserably. Not for her, the life of a soccer mom or devoted housewife. The only people who'd made that work was Megan and her husband Thomas, and even she'd had to quit first, before rejoining Ingrams in a non-field agent position. Thomas and Megan were currently sitting enrapt in the amusing story Rachael was telling, - April was extremely glad they had accepted her friend as their own.
And then there was Desirea. She'd had a nasty situation too, where a mission she'd been on had gone wrong, and she and the target had been held hostage for ransom, and when the abduction had gone wrong, they were lucky and had both been dumped in Alabama, unconscious and without much memory of the event. Both had been raped at least once, but while Desirea had returned to Ingrams a whole person, - field agents for Ingrams & Associates were tough, physically and mentally, - her nerve had been broken. No more field assignments for her. She'd taken the previous chief-of-operations position when he'd retired, having earned that honor by being the longest serving field agent Ingrams had ever had.
Desirea was currently engaging in some quiet conversation with Marianne Dubowski, who April had encountered some years before, on a personal mission to find out more about a man who had died saving her life. Marianne had turned out to be far more than a simple source of information, instead becoming a close confident and therapist to April, guiding her through her own emotions with her unique brand of Sherlockian emotional observation and shrewd questioning of April's motives.
Marianne was listening carefully to Desirea, but caught April looking at her, over her champagne flute, and slowly winked at her, poking the tip of her tongue out. Megan and Kim were deep in conversation, Kim telling Dermot about her past life as a male nurse, before she'd finally accepted who she was inside, and gone for it, even down to having injections to give herself hips and breast implants of the newer, gummy bear type silicon variety. Dermot was listening with rapt attention, feeding her questions.
As April reflected on her years working for Jessica Ingrams, internally cataloging her cases, - twenty-three of them, almost all successfully concluded, - she was idly wondering how long she would last. She'd managed to return to active duty and she had two new cases under her belt since the events of six months earlier but it was getting harder and harder to muster the enthusiasm for the job.
She wondered how long it would be before her own internal biological clock would start ticking ever louder, noticing Megan adjust her position in her chair to make herself more comfortable with her ever increasing waist line, now that she was four months pregnant.
Megan also caught her looking at her and just smiled, rubbing her stomach. She knew what April was thinking.
"Actually, could I have your attention for a moment everyone?" asked Megan suddenly, raising her voice across the two conversations going on.
"Come on folks, you know why we are here. This is April's night. A night to dress up, be pompous and impress the royalty from across the pond."
