Ingrams & Assoc 6: Downfall Ch. 04

"April, please, think about this..." said Jessica, also rising. The large man in the suit at the other table also rose, looking inquiringly at Jessica, who ignored him.

"Goodbye, Jessica. Thank you for the years of employment," murmured April, walking away without a backward glance. She grabbed her travel case, her large bag and walked out of the coffee shop, and out of the hotel, leaving Jessica standing alone, a shocked look on her face.

* * * * *

April managed to find the building where, as she thought of it, Chris has his 'lair'. She'd taken note of where she'd left, the street names, and after a trying a few of the taxis outside the hotel, she'd found one who spoke English, and made him understand where she needed to go.

She was grateful she still had money, money she'd left in her room. It wasn't much, but it was enough to get her to where she needed to go.

She felt empowered, but also very sad at end of her Ingrams career. Not how she imagined it, for sure.

When the taxi dropped her off, down the street, she spent some time circling the block, looking for people following her. Even April knew that four right turns made in quick succession will indicate if someone is still behind you. Thankfully, it looked like she wasn't being followed.

When she opened the door to the rooms Chris had been using, it was empty, except for one last plastic pelican casing, which Chris was sitting on, drinking one solitary glass of red wine. A half empty bottle was at his feet, and one other empty glass sat next to it.

"Ah, there you are. Wasn't sure you were coming," he smiled at her.

"I told you to wait," she pouted back, wheeling her suitcase in and closing the door.

"Here to see us off?" he inquired, swilling the wine around in his glass.

"No," she replied, simply.

"No?"

"No. I'm coming with you."

There was a pause, before he said, "You sure about that?"

"Completely."

"This will almost certainly put you on lists. I mean, you'll be a fugitive. Hunted. Like us," he said, putting the glass down.

"Hey, it took me to find you in the first place. Think anyone else will have the same luck?"

"I need you to be really sure, April. I'm not sure myself. The thing is... I... um... I... Look, I care about you, okay? I... wouldn't feel right putting you in this situation. Putting you under this microscope. Putting you in harm's way." Chris groped the words out, not looking at her when he told her he cared.

"I'm a big girl, Chris. I can make my own decisions. I'm hardly imagining this is us riding off into the sunset. I know the risks. Probably better than you do, having been on the receiving end of what they do. I still have the scars in my cerebellum where they ran around in their spikey boots. I need this. I need to hand it back. Ingrams isn't going to help, so I am."

She made her speech, and strode forward, end up nose to nose with him. "Now, are you going to argue, or are you going to fill up that other glass and give it to me?"

He regarded April for a moment, the grabbed her, kissed her hard, and then dropped down to pick up the glass and pour some wine.

April went completely gooey when he kissed her, knees almost buckling. For all her bombast, this man had the ability to bypass all her reasoning centers and go directly to nerve endings and raw emotion. And she was mildly worried about that; this man was dangerous to her, because she couldn't always trust her reactions around him. But, she was here, he was here, and she'd made her choice. Better make the best of it.

"Here," he said, thrusting the glass out to her. "Welcome to the gang."

* * * * *

The next few months were hectic for April. The first things she did was to call her next-door neighbor, Kim, to ensure that Max was cared for, for the foreseeable future. Then she made arrangements for her mortgage to be paid automatically from her accounts. She had enough in her savings to cover at least the next ten years of payments, so that wasn't a worry.

She organized a new phone, bought some new clothes, and had a complete makeover. Her hair was cut short and bleached, she bought contact lenses to turn her brown eyes blue, she changed her color scheme with makeup, and affected a new stride when walking.

But it was the learning she did over the next few months that really made the most difference. Chris made a point of educating her in some of the other areas of intelligence work she'd never been trained in. Her training at Ingrams was designed and targeted very much at the kind of work they did, - integration into a life, and then the ability to fashion therapy, and implement that therapy. They didn't really go into detecting when someone was following you, or memory techniques to be able to remember who was in a room by just glancing through an open door, or the more esoteric and personal self-defense. She'd had some training from Talia, but that was mostly about being able to fend off an attacker and run away. What Chris taught was more about killing people very quickly and effectively, because there was liable to be more of them coming. There was usually no time for long, drawn out battles as you see in movies. In those, it's one heavy piling on after another. Real fights are four people all coming at you at once. The bad guys have seen the same movies.

She learned how to tail someone on foot. How to be inconspicuous. How to disguise herself by using glasses, hats and hoodies. She learned how to tail someone in car, and how to detect when she was being tailed.

Chris' crew and her played tailing games in Bangkok, where they ended up after Spain.

She learned martial arts via Chris, partnering with everyone in the crew, because as Chris put it, "In the real world, you don't get to pick the opponent." She learned some Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, although as was pointed out, the whole point of this approach to Jiu-Jitsu was to take the fight to the floor as quickly as possible, since that's where it's likely to end up anyway, and then control the action once on the ground. Which is fine when it's one on one in a metal ring, in Mixed Martial Arts, where there are rules, but doesn't work that well when it's more there are more opponents than one. Usually going to the ground too early just resulted in getting a brick behind the ear from another bad guy, while wrestling with the first. Plus, while the rules of MMA stated no eye gouging, when your life is on the line, that's the first thing you do.

She learned about cutting punches, from Shaolin Kung-fu, where the aim is to disable muscle by twisting the fist on impact. She learned about all the dirty art of fighting for your life, - elbows in the face, scratching the forehead, so the opponent bleeds into his own eyes. She learned about using whatever objects comes to hand. To break strength holds by pulling on the little finger rather than trying to oppose strength with strength.

She learned about distances, when covering someone with a weapon. She learned to shoot, and discovered that while she was adequate, Lindsey was something of an auteur, - she could put the rounds from a .45 in a tight pack of around 10 inches, even at fifty feet. April could just about hit the target at the point. April turned out to be far better with the ASP baton weapon, that Chris favored. A small metal stick that extended out to twenty-one inches with a flick of the wrist. It was hard, unyielding and absolutely devastating when used by someone trained in its application. April learned quickly that even just extending the ASP, in the right situation, was enough to take down an attacker.

But April was also able to give back. She discovered, for example, that Chris' training didn't extend very far with lock picking. She'd covered it in far greater detail at Ingrams, and was able to instruct the rest of the team on much more finesse and finer details. Chris grunted and stated that with the people he usually hung out with, doors were opened with a boot rather than a pick.

She also was able to teach the crew how to canvass a target. What to look for when someone is lying to them. How to work out what the target wanted, and then construct ways to give it to them. Chris had some experience in this area, but her ability far outweighed his.

One other thing April did, without really informing Chris of her deep intentions, was to approach Lyndsey, and ask her if she could create a small cloud-based storage account, that only April could access. Something encrypted, with a dead man's switch, so if April didn't connect to it, weekly, it would automatically send the keys and link to a predetermined contact.

As she explained to Lyndsey, "Look, no one knows we are here. That these guys exist. What we are doing, or why. If those bastards get to us, that's it. They carry on doing whatever they are doing. We need a record of what we are doing. What we've discovered. What our actions are, why and we need that to be sent to someone if anything happens to us. Just so someone knows what we did."

Lyndsey looked at her, doubtfully.

"Well, yes, wouldn't be hard to set up. But, you sure? We had a journalist working with us before, and you heard what happened to her. You sure you want to dump this on someone else? I mean, I'm sure they've already got themselves tapped into people you worked with. Who would you send this to? Who would you trust in the event that something happened to us?"

April thought for a moment. "Can you do it for a couple of people?"

"Sure. Just give me emails for the dead man's switch. Better you don't tell them it's coming though. Just in case they are being monitored."

"Okay, so the first is my next-door neighbor. Kim McGhee. Amazonian woman. She does drag shows around the country. She's amazing. She'd be one. I know I can depend on her. She has my dog, right now."

"Oh, you have a dog?" squealed Lyndsey. "I love Dogs. Love love love them. What breed is it?"

April stared at her. "Let's get back to that in a bit?"

"Oh yes. Sorry."

"Next one is a client I used to have. Rachael Hicks. She turned into a friend. She's got money backing her up. She knows what these fuckers are capable of, since her husband fell into their clutches."

"You sure? They are probably monitoring her."

"Let them," said April, firmly. "She can more than take care of herself. And so can her husband."

"Well, okay then. If you are sure. Give me the emails?"

Once she'd done that, the conversation, once again, went to discussing Max, her dog, and then the story of how Max had come to be her dog came out, and Lyndsey sat, hands over her mouth, as April described how a man she had never know had died for her, and what she'd done about it.

Within a day, spurred on by April's story, Lyndsey had the cloud storage account set up. April logged on and started documenting what they were doing, what they'd discovered. She put copies of what little Chris could remember of the original USB information he had found up, and made video diaries of what they were up to, along with some interviews with other members of the team. Something some of them were not altogether comfortable with, until April explained what it was for.

When Chris became aware, he cornered April and asked her what she was doing. She smiled sweetly, and informed it was 'something he should have thought of doing himself.' Once she explained, he relaxed, and then asked to be interviewed himself.

She also learned how they traveled from city to city undetected. While waiting to be picked up in Spain, she asked Chris how they would get to Thailand, and he explained that they had a courier.

"Her name is Wendy. She's the best there is. Expensive, but we get a discount. Her other half is some loud Australian. I was on an op in Bali; we were watching this house, - a yakuza safe house, - for a particular drop off. We had parabolic mikes on the windows, and we caught wind that they were going to off this guy, and we thought that this was the contact we'd been waiting for. So we went in, all loaded for bear. Got the guy out and then found he was absolutely not who we thought he was, grateful as he ended up being. If we hadn't gone in, well, it would have gotten pretty sticky for him. As we were leaving, his own group showed up. It was a few tense moments between us and them, since we had no idea who they were, and we were more than a little trigger happy at that point.

"It was him who recognized the other guys and pointed out that he should probably mediate. So we let him, I mean, he wasn't anything to us, and the op was already blown anyway. We got some good intel out of it, but totally missed the contact we were waiting for.

"Anyway, a week later, we are all, - the entire team, - invited out for dinner. I mean, no one should have had a clue who we were, or who the members of the team were, but there it was. So, armed up the wazzo, we went. Turned out to be a really nice night. Wendy was there, to say thank you for rescuing her guy.

"And that's how we got on her good side, and now she'll run us around without asking too many questions and for 'mate's rates', as her other half puts it. Almost free, in fact."

They ended up separating the team, and having them travel in small two-man groups, to avoid detection. Chris and April were placed in a decked-out travel container, with a bed, a small kitchen, its own power source and a hell of a small wine stock. They spent ten days in it, doors opened to the world, on a container ship, slowly winding from Spain to Thailand. They did wonder who might have ridden in this particular conveyance; it seemed like a strange thing for a smuggler to use. But it was oh, so comfortable. And they found things to do.

But, by far, her biggest contribution to the team was realizing, very quickly, that everyone on it was suffering from some degree of PTSD. The things they'd partaken in, and what they'd seen, it had left indelible effects on each one of them. The reasons that they were part of the team in the first place was bad enough, but activities since then had done nothing to lessen the harm of the initial emotional trauma each had gone through. And nowhere was that more obvious, than with Chris Morgan himself. He was, April mused, remarkably composed for someone who had undergone the emotional earthquakes he had. That, coupled with some of the actions he'd undertaken when part of the military, had left him with a large unconscious death wish. While he was fiercely protective of his team, and all about making sure they were safe, when it came to his own person, he was foolhardy and threw himself into situations without thinking of the consequences.

April felt she was purpose made for combating these deep-rooted emotional impacts to the team, and for her, it was a first. The kind of therapy that Ingrams tended to practice was, by necessity, short term. More band-aid and super glue than deep surgery with prolonged recovery time. For the first time, she actually had time to spend with people who, even if they didn't know it, desperately needed her help and abilities. No short-term band-aids; she actually had the time to delve into deeper emotional issues and try and actually stem the bleeding from them, rather than just trying to find a situation where the bleeding didn't matter. And what's more, she didn't have to sleep with anyone to do it, - most of their issues weren't sexual in any case.

It was a revelation, for her as a therapist, and she got to know her team mates far more intimately. She was careful that they were didn't really grok what she was doing; that part of her training she was careful to keep active. They would almost certainly not have responded well to knowing that they were being analyzed. She did marvel that no one seemed to question her having almost bi weekly chats with everyone, always alone, and always with suggestions on how they might combat some of the deeper feelings they were experiencing. None of them realized the more intimate information they were giving up to April, such was her ability to direct chat and get to the root of what might be bothering someone.

The only person who even began to suspect was Chris. He mentioned a few times how much calmer and more possessed the team had been since April came along. He did, at one point, give her a very penetrating gaze and mentioned, "Having a head fucker along was paying dividends," but there were no more comments after that. April had the decided feeling that he knew exactly what she was doing, and he was fine with it, as long as it wasn't made public.

He, of course, was the hardest case to crack. And in doing so, using all her training, both in the bedroom and outside of it, to get him to open up to her. And slowly, begrudgingly, he did. And what she discovered, what his life had consisted of, - the things demanded of him when in the Army, and since then, - both terrified her and broke her heart. She redoubled her efforts to get him to confront his own emotional trauma and in doing so, feel even more in love with this man than she already was. Her feelings for Chris Morgan, over the next few months didn't settle down, they just became more and more intense, the more she knew of this man and what made him tick.

For herself, she was self-aware enough to understand what was going on in her own emotional mind, but for all her self-control and understanding of what she was going through, from a detached therapist point of view, she was, to her own chagrin, utterly incapable of actually stopping it or doing anything about it. While April was a fully trained therapist, she found that applying some of those lessons to her own love life was way harder than it seemed. She constantly second guessed herself in terms of Chris' reactions, she found herself going out of her way to try and make him happy, and she was afraid she was losing herself in his, frankly, intoxicating persona.

And worse still, she was pretty sure she didn't want to stop it.

She knew that she was somewhat out of control of her own feelings, and to a control freak like April, that was more than a little scary. She was very regretful she couldn't get an hour with her shrink, Marianne Dubowski, to talk more about what she was feeling, and what she should be afraid of, if anything. She'd more or less given up on the idea of romantic love being for her, not until she was completely done with the Ingrams Life, and she had had no plans for that to happen any time soon. It was peculiar to her to be on the receiving end rather than the advice-giving end, regarding this one new aspect of her life.

But, she knew reaching out was a no-no. She was off the grid and intended to stay that way.

Except, unexpectedly, Ingrams reached out to her. Or, one member of it, at least. Lindsey had set up a cut-out email set, where she'd set up a forwarding system of various machines, daisy chaining and spoofing IP addresses, all of which reset themselves, wiping their hard drives and re-building their installs every hour from a physical CD in the rack, - if anyone got into the machine and installed any watching malware, it was wiped every hour. Lyndsey had spent almost an hour describing how clever her cutouts were to April, who needed a large gin and tonic afterwards to decompress from all the nerd language.

Since her Ingrams email was obviously now non-functional, and she didn't want to go near her own personal one, Lyndsey had set her up with one she could use. She didn't intend to use it more than once, simply to mail blast a few friends to let them know she was okay, but wouldn't be around for some time, and not to believe anything they heard.

And then, a month later, idly checking her email, she got a reply. From not someone she ever expected get one. She got a 'Hey there' email from, of all people, Desirea McGhee, second in command at Ingrams and Associates.