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.”

Everyone tittered at her directing that statement at Rachael and Lee.

“It’s April’s eight year anniversary at Ingrams & Associates. Eight years of dealing with the bungle and the botched, and fixing them as best she can. I think that’s worthy of a toast?”

Everyone raised their glasses, and toasted, “To April.”

She was embarrassed and went red, and it only got worse when Lee Hicks got to his feet.

“So, yes. April. I wouldn’t be here without you. Without your dedication to your chosen career, without you caring, I’d probably be dead by now. No...” he said, seeing her shake her head in protest, “no, it’s true, and we all know it’s true. You saved my life. You saved many people’s lives. You saved my sanity, you saved my marriage, and you helped restore me to a functioning human being again.”

His voice cracked on the last sentence, - this was an emotional topic for him and Rachael put her hand up on his arm, to show support. He gathered himself together and continued.

“The fact is, you and your colleagues here have helped many people, and I can’t thank you enough. I know Rach will agree, anytime you ever need anything, if we can provide it, we will. And if we can’t, we’ll find a way.”

He was looking directly at April the whole time he spoke, and she was left in no doubt of his deep sincerity.

“To April Carlisle. Long may she reign,” he said, raising his glass to her again. Everyone else raised theirs and echoed his toast.

April just sat there, biting her lip and feeling majorly uncomfortable. She wasn’t against a bit of healthy bravado on occasion but this was too much.

She was just debating whether she should stand up and say something, - although exactly what, she had no idea, - when her phone chirruped.

She glanced down at it and saw it was a text from Jessica. While she was looking at it, she heard Desirea’s phone beep too.

The text simply said, “Be in the office tomorrow. New gig. Fun job. Details ten AM.”

She glanced at Desirea, who was looking at her phone too, then glanced around at everyone else’s expectant faces.

“New job?” she enquired of Desirea.

“Looks like it. Looks like you are back in the saddle!” exclaimed Desirea.

“I’ll drink to that,” smiled April, offering her drink for Desirea to clink hers against.

The next day, April arrived early. She was up even earlier for a morning run with Max her black Labrador, who insisted on doing his usual sniff of everything he could get his nose into, then a quick shower, dressed, rubbing the dog’s stomach, then on her way out to the office in her black Porsche 911. It wasn’t warm enough to put the top down but she was still at the office early, making good time across the city of Washington DC, where Ingrams & Associates headquarters were located.

Ingrams & Associates was a clandestine therapy group, operating on the edges of conventional counseling. They accepted assignments from large corporations, nation states and even security services to provide covert therapy to those high value individuals who would never entertain the idea themselves.

When France’s principle nuclear negotiator at the United Nations marriage disintegrates in a fiery mess, right when he’s in the middle of complex negotiations with the Russians, it’s Ingrams who comes in to try and calm him down and build him up, to get him past the emotional issues he has to face.

When a world-famous Doctor suddenly falls from grace when it’s made public he is bi-sexual, it is Ingrams who gives him a new PA, who teaches him that love for the self is not governed by judgement from external forces.

All field agents are trained in many ‘secret agent’ like techniques, they are highly trained therapists and as the work ends up having a sexual component they are highly trained seduction artists, and in the sexual arts as well. Well supplied with gadgets, they are backed up by a team of experts at research and support. And they charge fees to match.

Ingrams doesn’t advertise, everyone involved is off grid, and field agents, while leading an exciting life, also tend to lead a very lonely one, since it’s virtually impossible to maintain a normal romantic relationship when you are constantly off into the field for weeks at a time, totally out of touch, and having sexual contact with who knows who while on the mission.

Their headquarters was located in a seven-story building, with a view of the Potomac from the top two floors. April had learned they actually owned the building, taking up the top three stories, while leasing the other floors out to the headquarters of a hot-tub company, as well as a liberal think tank and a corporate law firm.

While April was early, she found others were earlier still. Despite the evening the night before not ending before eleven, Desirea was sitting in Jessica’s office, conferring with her upon April’s arrival.

Pausing only to check out the break room and grab one of the gourmet donuts delivered daily, and a cup of the good mountain blend coffee, April arrived at Jessica’s office ready and willing to work.

“Good Morning, Jessica, Desirea,” she said, sweeping into the office and trying not to spill the coffee.

Jessica was sitting at the round table in her office, papers spread out, with a set of low intensity reading glasses on her nose. She looked up and smiled, as did Desirea, sitting across from her.

“Morning April,” replied Jessica, gesturing for her to sit down with them.

“New job?” enquired April, hunting for a coaster on the table.

“Indeed,” said Jessica, leaning back and taking the glasses off her face. “An interesting one, although aren’t they all. This one is a little ... different, I think. Lot more investigative than usual.”

“Oh really?” said April, through a mouth full of crumbs.

“Yes. While there is a therapeutic job to be done here, I think that’s going to be the easy part. The hard part is finding him.”

“Oh?” April said, finishing the last of the donut and now thoroughly interested.

“Yeah, this is an interesting one, April,” stated Desirea, throwing a single piece of paper across at her.

“Ex-Military, one Captain Chris Morgan. Dumped by his wife for some high-powered exec of ... seems like some kind of resort company? He came home from an extended posting, she sprang it on him that she had fallen for some corporate lothario and was moving out, and he lost it. Now he’s basically running around the world being a thorn in the company’s side, doing damage to their facilities wherever he can find them. It’s all there.”

April picked up the first sheet and started to look it over.

“Isn’t this a bit out of our wheel house? I mean, I get the therapy angle, but finding him? He doesn’t want to be found? If he’s doing damage to their facilities, isn’t this more a police matter?”

“Well, he’s a clever one, this guy. According to the reports, he only does enough damage to be a pain in the ass to the corporate interests, but not enough to get named top of the most wanted list for the FBI or Interpol. Sure, they’d like to find him and have a word with him, but he’s not done enough to make them actually spend any effort on him. At least, not enough to really do their best to find him.”

Still, reading distractedly, April said, “What about Pinkertons or one of the private agencies?”

“Apparently they have been asked to find him, and can’t. This guy is ex-military. He’s ex-military intelligence in fact. He’s been around. He’s been trained. He’s very good at keeping off the grid. The FBI has done a basic search for him, Pinkertons, Interpol, the UK special Branch, some of the French police departments, even the cops in Germany, Italy and Spain. All of them have tried to a greater or lesser degree over the past few years. All came up short. I don’t think any of them necessarily put their A game on it, but still, the guy is slippery.”

April lowered the sheet and stared at Jessica.

“And so we get this? Pardon my frankness, Jessica, but our band of sex therapists is expected to find this guy when the police forces of most of the major European countries, and our own FBI can’t? That doesn’t sound like our MO at all? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love what we are able to do, but this seems like very outside our area of expertise?”

Desirea coughed and turned away, and April could see her doing her best to suppress a smile.

Jessica threw her glasses on the table and leaned back and stretched.

“Yes, I’m aware of that,” she said, a little acidly. “Here’s the thing, April. If we can pull this off, we will have managed to achieve something none of the other agencies have. And the company funding this has given us a very large budget. I suspect that this is the doing of the ex-wife. It’s embarrassing that this guy is running around, doing damage and making them look bad, and she feels like she needs to help. To do something, both to protect the business of her new guy, and also to help out the destructive behaviors of the ex. At least that’s how I read it.”

“Yeah, well, all that may be true Jessica, but how are we actually going to do this?” One thing that Jessica Ingrams did encourage was questioning of all behaviors. She didn’t shirk behind language or direct conflict, as long as it wasn’t disrespectful.

“I mean, how are we, - good though we are, - going to find this guy, where the police forces of major countries, with all their camera feeds and tracking abilities, failed? I mean, seriously?” April was exasperated. A new job was one thing. A new job which was way outside their capabilities was quite another, no matter what the kudos would be if they pulled it off. They were being set up to fail, from her perspective.

Jessica leaned forward and said quietly, with a small smirk on her face, “You are asking the wrong question April. It’s not ‘how are WE going to do this?’ - it’s ‘how am I going to do this.’ You are the one with the investigative credentials. You figure it out. Remember, lots of budget on this one. Don’t be afraid to spend.”

“Seriously? You know we aren’t going to succeed at this one?” replied April, testily. She glanced at Desirea, who wasn’t hiding the smile any more. She was grinning like a madwoman, enjoying the show.

“Well, we need to try. If we fail, we are among good company. But if we succeed ... well, we could use the feather in our cap right now,” said Jessica, leaning back again, with a gleam in her eye.

April sighed, and started to gather up the documents on the table to take back to her office. Balancing them on one arm, with the coffee cup in the other, she rose from the table and said, disgustedly, “Twenty-three operations, and no failures, and now this. Happy Anniversary, April.”

For three days, April was sequestered in her office, going over everything in the dossier they’d been provided with. It was heavy with the details of other attempts to run Captain Chris Morgan down, along with details of his life, and that of his ex-wife, Trisha Kennedy. Although it turned out that she wasn’t his ex-wife. Neither had actually filed for divorce. Which was surprising. Why would the ex not file, given she had clearly moved on? There was more to this than met the eye, April decided, although exactly what she couldn’t guess. Just not enough details. Only hints.

There were some details of his attacks on the corporate facilities, - apparently the corporation concerned was a holding company that owned many smaller companies, but the one he was concerned with was some resort group, that owned executive retreats all over the world. There was one in most major cities of the world currently. Most of the damage was arson, which made sense, since that was one of the easiest things to do. In all cases, the damage was contained, and services resumed quickly.

This had been going on for the past two years, ever since Chris Morgan returned from a five-month posting in the green belt of Iraq. Captain Morgan’s tours were not the military norm of six months and above, - his postings tended to be more mission based, and therefore more of an as-and-when situation, allowing him to be home more often than most in the military.

His wife, Trisha, - Trish to almost everyone, - had been an admin for a small local newspaper, in the suburb of San Antonio where they’d lived. Morgan had been based out of Fort Houston, located in the same city.

They’d been married for nine years, - college sweethearts, marrying right out of college, as he’d gone straight into the military. When he’d returned home from that posting, and found her all but moved out, and with a Dear John conversation for him, there had been some event that occurred, - something fairly traumatic, because he ended up AWOL for almost a week.

When he resurfaced, he informed his superiors that he was done in the Army, and was honorably discharged eight months later, at the end of his current enlistment.

At that point, he sold his home and effectively vanished. Then various facilities that the corporation that Trish’s new man worked for, in a high executive capacity, were attacked and damaged, and they caught Chris Morgan on camera masterminding the operation.

This had happened three times in the US alone, and eventually the FBI got interested since each facility was in a different state, and then it became clear that Chris Morgan had gone international, when the same thing happened to a Parisian resort.

So far he’d struck at eight locations, in four different countries. Almost every country had tried to locate Chris Morgan, and it was now apparent he had help of some sort, and failed each time. He’d obviously moved on and just started again.

The holding corporation, - one Key Imperium Inc., - was embarrassed, annoyed, and just wanted this resolved since it was starting to affect business a little. And Trish, now domestic partners with the COO of Key Imperium, - Michael Turnbull, - just wanted to help Chris out, since she felt responsible for him flipping out.

Those were the surface details, although there was a lot more depth on Chris Morgan himself, and even a sketchy profile on him, which April found very interesting, since that was her original dream job, writing profiles for the FBI.

The only piece of current relevant information was a supposition, based on overheard comments from audio at the last break in, in Berlin, about looking forward to Paella; some grainy video footage from the central station of what looked like Chris Morgan getting on the night train from Moscow to Paris, and then other footage that may, or may not be Captain Morgan, getting off a train at Madrid Nord railway station. The footage was dark, grainy and very inconclusive, but the figure certainly met his dimensions, and there was the added fact that no attacks had yet happened in Spain, but there was a Key Imperium retreat resort located there.

It was all they had to go, and April did feel at a gut level that there was some degree of truth to the supposition. Either way, she had to figure something out, and if he wasn’t in Madrid then they were entirely screwed anyway.

April was so engrossed, she even ordered lunch in to her office, an only went home to sleep, shower, give her dog a walk, and then return to Ingrams. Her office looked like a demented private investigator lived there, - papers all over the walls, threads leading from one document to another, pictures all over the place, maps ... Jessica, on sticking her head around the door to see how things were going, was somewhat alarmed, but chalked it down to April’s dedication.

April spent one day building her own profile of Chris Morgan from all the documentation she already had. She’d set the R&D group to see what else they could find, and they found some things regarding his past school life, and a few scraps of mentions of him from other people on social media, but it didn’t add too much to what she’d already been provided with.

Her profile was more in depth than the one provided by the FBI, and she disagreed with some of their conclusions, - they felt he was unhinged, but her analysis of his military record, and all the testing he’d undergone before being moved to Military Intelligence suggested a far more calculating man. Someone who used humor to defuse tense situations, and someone who gave the impression of someone who flew by the seat of his pants, but in fact was very deliberate in what he did. He just cultivated that appearance in order to get others to underestimate him. Either that, or he was an enormous show off, - she wasn’t entirely sure which he was.

He was well trained in close combat, he was proficient with projectile weapons, but not excellent, - he was no marksman, although he could still do well. Better than your average grunt. The army tended to ensure that everyone in it could do more than one thing, and he had been trained as a bomb analyst. He went in after an explosion and examined the crater and resulting debris, and could work backwards to determine where the bomb was, what its likely composition was, how it was set off and other details. Normally the FBI did this kind of thing, but most of their experts were thinly spread, so the army trained some of their people too.

Given that, it would make sense that the style of attack that he was making on Key Imperium’s facilities would be fire based. You can’t analyze bombs and fires without knowing how to set them off as well.

There were a number of interesting facts about Chris Morgan that April noted, - he was a keen genealogist, tracking his family back five generations. He had, in the past, played saxophone, being part of a college band. He’d tried his hand at writing fiction. There were some samples in his dossier, and they weren’t half bad. But there was one thing he was fairly fanatical about, that when she thought about it, April decided it might be the key to the whole situation.

She spent half a day on research, sending out emails, and testing out the waters, and she felt she might actually have something no one else had come up with.

The fourth day, she called a meeting.

Desirea, Megan, Talia Cronkite, the head of research and also Ingrams’ hand-to-hand combat coach, Jessica and Jessica’s PA, were present, sitting in the conference room, as April swept in, looking unkempt, with rings around her eyes.

They all looked up expectantly at her, as she arranged some papers, and activated the ceiling mounted projector and plugged in her laptop, with its PowerPoint presentation she’d built.