Ingrams & Assoc 6: Downfall Ch. 01

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.

"Alright, folks," she began, "I think most of you know the brief. We have to find this guy, then the usual. He's being violent with the company's facilities, because his wife shacked up with one of their top guys. They would rather like him to stop, and the ex wants him to 'get help'." She used air quotes around that.

"Most of that is right up our street. I think that, once we find him, it's a usual stroke and fuck job. He needs to be built back up, understand it's not his fault, there's more fish in the sea blah blah blah. We've all done this a hundred times, - we know how to do that. The problem is finding him."

She clicked up the PowerPoint, which had a bullet point of ways other groups had tried to find him.

"Trouble is, he's military intelligence trained. He's quite good, took his training to heart, obviously."

Another slide came up with Chris Morgan in military dress uniform. Then another slide detailing a bunch of missions he'd been involved in, and some of the decorations he'd been awarded for them.

"Incidentally, where did we get all this background?" asked April of the room in general. "This stuff is pretty restricted, isn't it?"

Talia spoke up and said, "Well, we didn't get it. We can get a certain amount but what we have here is everything there is to get. I think it came from the FBI profile?"

"Ahh, that would make sense. I'm sure they can appropriate this kind of stuff. Anyway..."

The next slide came up, with a world map, detailing where there had been actions attributed to Captain Morgan.

"So, since his wife kicked him to the curb, he's been a busy boy, being a pain in the ass to the company that his wife's new paramour works for."

She clicked up a picture of Morgan and his wife, on their wedding day.

"Now, I'm fairly sure some traumatic event happened when she broke the news she was leaving him. He'd just returned from an engagement in the Zagros mountains area, right on the edge of Iraq and Iran. There are some details in the packet I'll be sending out after the meeting, but I don't think it's that meaningful. The only details that matter is that he was sent to stop some violence, and despite his best efforts, it happened anyway. There were several deaths, and one Iranian team was hunted down in the mountains, in conjunction with a local war lord, and when they were found, well, let's just say they were made an example of. It didn't set too well with Captain Morgan, and he returned home troubled.

"Of course when he got there, and this was laid on him, well, that wouldn't have been conducive to a good relaxing 'get it out of your system' time, but something else happened. Something he reacted to. Something... I don't know... explosive. Maybe in the manner he was told their marriage was over? I think it had something to do with the new guy his wife was seeing. There's no real reason to resort to the arson and vandalism he's been involving himself with otherwise. He's not unhinged, - the eight months remaining on his military contract indicates that. He was efficient, got his job done well and kept his eye on the missions.

"No, this was more... personal. The week he was AWOL is unheard of, - that's just not who he is, so I'm betting something heavy duty happened, and he had to cope with it. Fairly clearly, this is unfinished business on his part. And, I think, hers too. Neither one has filed for divorce, which I find puzzling. She's reset her life, why wouldn't she want that part closed entirely? I don't have answers to that yet, but the question is definitely there."

She clicked the remote again. Now a picture of the FBI HQ came up.

"Now these guys can't find him. Neither can these..."

Now it was a picture of the Pinkertons HQ.

"He's well trained, he knows how to hide, he's in Europe somewhere, - we think Madrid, - where every country has long porous borders. We aren't going to find him any more than the FBI, or Interpol is, because we don't have a tenth of their resources.

"Therefore, I propose we don't try and find him. We make him find us."

She looked around at the faces in the room, noting their quizzical expressions.

"Mr. Morgan likes a few things..."

A picture of a man playing Saxophone came up.

"This, for example, and then this..."

A man writing with a pencil and paper.

"But one thing he's absolutely rabid about is..."

She clicked again and now it was a picture of a man with big curly hair, wide smile, broad rimmed hat, a bizarre costume of red felt jacket and long multi-colored scarf, flanked by what looked like two robotic monsters, - wide thick low metal bodies, with balls around their lower parts, a dome for a head and one single eye, on a stalk, projecting from that dome. Two lower arms, one looking like a sink plunger and the other, an egg whisk, projected from the middle torso. They looked alien, vaguely menacing, and slightly silly.

"This is a British TV show, called Doctor Who. Captain Morgan is, apparently, a major officiado of this show. It's been running for over fifty years now, like a soap opera. They have this clever conceit where the lead in the show, - the Doctor, - is an alien from another planet, and when the lead actor wants to quit, the character 'regenerates', and transforms from one person to another. It's really quite clever. I came across this when I was in the UK, - they love it there. It's like a national treasure to the Brits."

There was a faked cough from Talia, and everyone turned their attention to the smaller, pixie haired woman, with the nose ring.

"Um. That's actually the fourth guy they had to play the Doctor," she ventured, hesitantly, gesturing at the screen. "They've had thirteen guys, - well, fourteen, if you count the War Doctor, - and one woman play the character so far."

There was a stunned silence as everyone came the realization that Talia was, in fact, a fan.

"That blue box thing on my desk? That makes all the groaning noises? That's his Time and Space Vehicle. It's a police box, from the UK in the nineteen-sixties. It's actually bigger on the inside than the outside," she said, warming to her theme.

April nodded and then clicked again, and now a shot came up from what looked like a convention, with lots of people in costumes, and one of the Robots from the first picture was present.

"Those are called Daleks by the way. The main enemy for the hero. I did a little research and found that there are expos and conventions for this all over the world."

"Yes. The largest one in that's done is in LA in fact, yearly," broke in Talia. "I... ah... actually went. One year. It was fun..." she ended, lamely, beginning to realize the looks she was getting from Megan and Jessica weren't encouraging ones. Megan was obviously biting her tongue from saying something. April smiled, understanding they now had a built-in expert in their midst. That would take the load off her a little.

"Is this a kid's show or what?" asked Jessica, in a somewhat incredulous tone, that April was spending this amount of time in a serious briefing on some ridiculous UK TV Show.

April shrugged. "Sort of. They consider it a family show. One of the few the whole family can sit down to. Something for everyone. It's like a big tradition on Saturday nights. It usually beats everything else in the ratings."

Jessica sat back and rubbed her forehead.

"Dear god. Please tell me this is relevant, April. Please," she pleaded.

April grinned. Making Jessica uncomfortable was almost impossible, and now she'd found a button, she was going to press it.

"So, here's what we are going to do. We are going to host a convention, in Madrid, for the Doctor Who nerds in Spain. We are going to get a couple of the actors from the show, and basically organize an entire convention, and I'll bet a thousand dollars, he'll show up. And when he does, we'll have him."

There was silence to this pronouncement. Then Jessica just said, simply, "What?"

April turned to her and said, "Well, you did say it was a big budget. I think this is it. We aren't going to find him by looking for him. The other groups proved that, and they are better equipped and have more resources that we do, obviously. We have to be smart. We have to make him come to us. We do this, I'm very sure he'll show up."

"How sure?" asked Desirea.

"Very," replied April, firmly.

Desirea and Jessica glanced at each other.

"Why does he have this fascination?" inquired Megan, curious.

"Good question," replied April. "He's the second child in the family, - he has one older sibling. His father had a work-related injury just after Chris Morgan was born, and was invalided home. He basically became a barely functioning drunk. His mother went to work and kept the family. His father died when Chris was in his last year of high school, - pancreatic cancer, - and his mother died the following year of pneumonia. His elder brother is eight years older than he is. I'd judge Chris was an 'oops' child. His brother was long out of the house when Chris came of age, - according to the dossier, he was traveling as a roadie for a band in California. But the bottom line is, Chris didn't get much in the way of parental guidance. His father was drunk most of the time, and his mother worked two jobs to keep a roof over their heads.

"Chris pretty much brought himself up. And if I judge him correctly, he did by watching TV shows like this Doctor Who thing, on PBS. Shows like Star Trek, The A Team, shows with a strong moral message. He worked hard, took the lessons these shows had to heart and ended up managing to get to college on scholarships based on his grades. Whatever messaging he was getting from this show, it worked. And he's been a devotee ever since. Least, that's how I read it."