Unhappily Ever After Bk. 01 Ch. 04

The next item Brad placed on the desk was a folder containing as much information as he could gather in the short time he'd had on everyone who worked at Moreton City Law, from paralegals to the senior partners.

"The paralegals might not be involved in the day-to-day shenanigans," he said, "but there will certainly know about it. In fact, there's probably not a single employee in that firm who doesn't know what's going on."

"I know one paralegal who has intimate knowledge of their after-hours activities," I said. "In fact, it was she who clued me in on Friday night. Not only does she know what's happening, but she's also involved. She is one of the regular prizes and was looking forwards to helping Sam out that night. She told me she lives for those events.

"I think we might get someone we know to start conducting our own investigation," I said, turning to Charlie. "What's to stop us from ghosting the SCC's investigation?"

"La-la-la-la," I heard from Brad's side of the desk. When I looked over at him, he was sitting with his index fingers stuck in his ears, his eyes looking toward the ceiling and singing a formless tune.

"I can't be involved in any of your nefarious plans," he said when he saw we were both looking at him. "Particularly if they are plans that involve illegal acts. You do realise that impersonating a police officer or an agent of the SCC is illegal, don't you?"

"Of course it is," I acknowledged. "And heaven forbid that I would even think about doing such a thing. But, as you have seen, my PA carries bona fide credentials and could conduct her own investigation if she felt the urge to do so.

"From what I have come to learn about her, she is a strong-willed woman, and I don't believe I could stop her even if I wanted to. But as we appear to be upsetting your delicate sensibilities, I think we should take our discussion elsewhere.

"Goodbye, Mr Stokes," I said, putting on airs as Charlie and I stood. "We'll be in touch. Oh, and thank you for your help with those other matters."

As we turned to leave, Brad came out from behind his desk and gave me a strong man-hug.

"You be careful out there," he said quietly. "There be drop-bears."

He then stretched his hand out to Charlie. She took it, then reeled him in for a hug.

"Thank you for being his friend," she whispered in his ear before dropping a kiss on his cheek.

"No," he said. "Thank you for making him laugh. I haven't seen him laugh like he did this morning for a couple of years."

---oooBJSooo---

"I think he likes you," I said to Charlie as the elevator descended from his fourth-floor offices to street level.

"I like him too," she responded. "How long have you known each other?"

"All our lives. Well, all his life." I then told her about our growing up together as we walked along the street towards a nearby café.

I placed our order while Charlie found us a seat out in the shaded, plant-filled laneway that formed part of the coffee shop's appeal.

When I came out into the alfresco seating area, I discovered that she had found us a secluded table in the shadows at the back end of what had obviously once been a service alley. I had to admit that it felt a little too confining to me. I like to have open surroundings. Or, more accurately, an open field of fire.

When I got to the table, though, I relaxed. It seemed she had chosen well. Our alleyway was joined by another that ran at right angles to ours. It gave us an escape path, should it be necessary.

Relaxed was not how I read Charlie, though, as I approached the table and sat down beside her, placing our order number in the middle of the table. She seemed to be a ball of nerves.

"What's the problem, My Dear?" I asked. The words of familiarity had tumbled out before I'd even thought about them. But if I was shocked, they brought Charlie to tears.

"What is it, Charlie, my darling? I'm sorry, there I go again. I don't know what's got into me."

"It has nothing to do with your calling me 'my dear' or 'my darling'," she said. "Well, it does. But not directly.

"Before I explain," she said, "can I ask whether the Todd Manyweather you were talking to while we were driving to your office is a former military police Captain?"

"He's ex-military police," I answered. "But he retired with the rank of Major. Why do you ask?"

"It hasn't come up, mainly because it hasn't been relevant," Charlie said, "but I also served in the military police. I was a Lieutenant and served in Afghanistan with a Captain Todd Manyweather.

"During the time we served together, we had an affair. It started not long after I arrived, and as is often the way with those deployment relationships, it ended when he was posted home. I never heard from him again. But during those six months, things got pretty steamy.

"When my deployment ended, and I eventually arrived home, he had been posted to a different unit in another part of the country. I haven't seen or spoken to him since Afghanistan."

"Do you still have feelings for him?" I asked.

"No!" she cried. "God, no. But I don't know about him. He was pretty intense and became very possessive and controlling. I just don't know how he will react to seeing me."

"But he's married with two children and another on the way," I said

"That's just the thing," Charlie said. "He was married, and they had one child while we were going at it in Afghanistan."

I tried to picture his wife. I would have met her at a few of our regular family picnic days. An image came to me of a well-proportioned pretty woman with a mousy demeanour; almost subservient.

"Was Todd an aggressive and demanding lover?" I asked Charlie.

"Almost always, after the first few weeks," she answered. "He started out as a very considerate lover. But then it became all about him."

"Did you like it when he was aggressive?"

"Sometimes," she said.

"If he was like that all the time, and you only liked it like that sometimes," I asked, "why did you keep going back to him?"

"I've often asked myself the same question," Charlie responded. "The only answer I could come up with was that we were living on the edge. Every day could have been our last. I guess it was a case of living for the moment."

"So, what did you do to satisfy yourself after he was sent home?"

"I mostly saw to my own needs," she responded. "I had one or two one-night stands and short-term relationships, but they couldn't give me what I'd become used to."

"And was that the same problem with the relationship that ended a year or so ago?" I asked. "Could he not live up to your expectations?"

"I suppose that's partly true," she said. "James was a good, well-rounded lover. But I could never get him to fuck me. Added to that, he was a procrastinator. He'd put everything off until the last minute; even our wedding. As I think I told you last night, I just couldn't get him to commit to anything. Then, as a final act of betrayal, I caught him doing to some slut what he wouldn't do for me."

"And me?" I asked. "On a scale between Todd and James, where do I fit? ...keeping in mind that we've only known each other for fourteen hours; thirteen, if you use the biblical interpretation of the word, 'know'."

"With those parameters in mind," she smiled, "I think I might have found my perfect man. Of course, one night of porridge does not a Goldilocks make. I owe it to you to give you a chance to show your true colours. Why don't you ask me again in fifty years?"

It took every ounce of strength I had in me to hold back from breaking our cover and kissing her.

"Good answer," I said. "Assuming we both make it through to the end of this tunnel alive, I'll seriously consider taking you up on your offer."

---oooBJSooo---

Before leaving the café, I texted Brad to meet us down in his underground carpark. I'd forgotten that I wanted Charlie to check his car for bugs. It proved to be clean.

We once again said our goodbyes and headed back into the street. While walking towards the edge of the footpath to hail a cab, I spotted one that was lit up and was crawling towards us, giving the appearance of prowling for a fare.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Charlie begin to raise her hand to wave it down. I quickly reached across the short distance between us to stop her. I'll give her her due. She didn't resist. I let two more cabs pass before I raised my arm and whistled the next one. It cut across two lanes of traffic to stop right in front of us.

As soon as we were seated, I leaned forward and asked the cabbie to do a u-turn as soon as he could and take us back the way he had been coming from. You can't ask an Uber driver to do that. Within less than a minute, we were heading back towards my office.

After we'd travelled about a mile, I leaned forward again and asked him to drop us off a couple of blocks from Tommy's place.

"What was that all about?" he asked as I handed him a fifty-dollar note, telling him to keep the change.

"I was just giving my young associate here a quick lesson in counter-surveillance," I answered as I stepped out of the cab. "Just in case she ever feels she's being followed."

"A good idea," he said. "I'll have to pass that information on to my daughter. I hate it when she goes out to those nightclubs with her friends."

"Tell her to avoid the first couple of cabs when she's on her own. And tell her that she should never get into a curb-crawling cab," I said as I closed the door.

"Wow!" Charlie said as I led her on a circuitous route to Tommy's headquarters. "Your spidey senses must be on full alert."

"I don't know what you just said," I responded. "But if you mean my stay-alive radar is active, you're dead right. There are eyes on us. Some of them friendly. Some not. It's the ones that are not friendly that concern me."

"By now, Kingston's people - whoever he's now using - know that I know they have me under surveillance. So there's no point in trying to hide that fact from them. By leading them on a merry chase, they will have to put more men on the board to keep up with my ducking and weaving.

"The more people they have on the board, the easier they'll be to spot. That will mean it will be easier for the friendly eyes to follow them back to their lair. Once we know who's employing them - the one who has been hired by Kingston - we can take him and his crew out of the game."

By the time I'd finished explaining the current state of play to Charlie, we had arrived at Tommy's place.

I call it a 'place', but it was more than that. It was a walled fortress. With money he'd acquired through various means - most of them legal, he'd once assured me - Tommy Jones had managed to get his hands on an old inner-city, gated, nineteenth-century mansion. He'd then restored it to its former glory. But, while that restoration kept the original façade, the work he'd done had turned it into an almost impregnable fortress. The walls that had originally surrounded the property had been retained and strengthened, and security cameras were hidden everywhere.

Was my friend a tad paranoid? Just a tad. Was his paranoia justified? From what I knew, it was. He had used his skills to destroy quite a few bad men - and women. So the answer was yes. But only if they ever found out who had destroyed them. Tommy wasn't one to leave such things to chance, however.

I had sent him a text after ensuring we weren't being followed, so the side service gate opened to my touch. He knew I wouldn't want to be left standing out on the street like a stale bottle of milk. Not with my name on a hit list. Tommy had been with me as my spotter on a few of my shooting assignments while in Afghanistan. He knew that a target standing still for more than a few seconds would probably never move again.

Charlie was aware of the same thing, so she pushed me through the gate ahead of her. I was pleased to see that she was starting to take her bodyguarding responsibilities seriously. I had been beginning to think she was becoming a little blasé about the whole thing.

As had been the case with the gate, the side portico door opened to my touch. This wasn't quite the tradesman's entrance but was the one used for walk-in visitors; friends of the family and such. The front entrance was the one used to meet and greet business clients. It and the walled driveway formed a funnel. By the time the visitor had travelled its length, they would have been fully identified and vetted.

The gates at the house end of the driveway only opened if you passed the ID tests. By that time, those at the road end had closed. Visitors were locked in that narrow laneway until that second set of gates was opened.

So paranoid was Tommy that he had even developed a new type of laser weapon that could silently blow a drone out of the sky, should it intrude into the airspace over the mansion or its grounds. It could also blow out bullet-proof tyres and glass if it became necessary to disable a vehicle trapped in the neck of the driveway funnel.

I wouldn't be exaggerating if I said that Tommy, while in no way a hermit, was a very private person. The one exception to that was when he left town on one of his adult resort trips. On those occasions, he became a party animal.

Most of the ground floor of Tommy's home was set aside as office space. At the front, it had a large private office and adjoining meeting room on one side of the wide hallway and an informal lounge area and dining room on the other. The other rooms on that floor included a security office, a kitchen and laundry and a staff dining area. He lived on the first floor (second floor to my American friends), where he had the equivalent of a fully functioning five-bedroom, five-bathroom home.

He had employed an extended Nepalese family to fulfil the positions of servants, cooks and cleaners. They lived in a couple of bungalows he'd had built in the same style as the main house. Apart from the children, all the male members of the family were Gurkha-trained.

In addition to the operatives he employed for field operations, he employed an extended twelve-man section of former commandos and SAS members to maintain security over the mansion and its grounds. They worked on a rotational basis and lived in an eight-room motel complex which, like the bungalows, was built in the same style as the mansion.

He also employed ten other computer specialists who worked on various projects. They either worked from their homes or an incubator unit he operated in a separate office space he owned in another part of the city. Oddly enough, much of Tommy's taxable income came from the games these people produced.

Possibly his most important employee was his personal assistant. Like me, he had employed an older woman in that role. Also like me, he'd brought her on board in the early days of his business. They were as close as a mother and her son. In fact, Tommy referred to her as 'Mother', and she called him 'Thomas'. For all I knew, she could have been his real mother. She was old enough.

Mother met us at the door when we arrived. She shook my hand in welcome but gave Charlie a big hug.

"Please come in, Mr Bourke," she said. "I'm so pleased to see you again. Thomas will be happy you have arrived safely.

"You're looking radiant, my dear," she said, turning to Charlie. I'd swear she had a twinkle in her eye. "You must tell me what you do to stay so vibrant and alive."

"I'm afraid it's the old story, Mother," Charlie responded, smiling. "Liberal slatherings of moisturiser, enough makeup to hide the blemishes and plenty of exercise."

They both laughed.

I don't know why, but the way they both looked at me, I felt that I was the subject of a deep, knowing secret between them.

Mother led us to the dining room, where Tommy joined us a few minutes later. After giving the two of us a hug, we sat in the three seats around the top of the table, where we were served a magnificent meal of slow-cooked brisket in barbecue sauce with baked potatoes, green peas and beans and honeyed carrots. Mother joined us when the meal had been served.

The conversation over lunch was fairly general. The only case-related subject was Tommy congratulating me on how I had led my watchers - good and bad - on a lovely scenic tour through the city.

"You lost the bad guys right at the start with the old cab u-turn trick," he said, imitating Maxwell Smart from the old television series, 'Get Smart'.

"They missed you by 'that much'," he said, raising his right hand and holding his index finger and thumb about twelve millimetres (half-an-inch) apart.

"It's good to see you haven't forgotten your tradecraft.

"Did you learn something today, Charlie?" he asked, turning his attention to her.

"I did," she answered. "I learned that he is more like the Roadrunner than Wile E. Coyote. I'm developing a strong suspicion he will avoid the traps they set for him and that he'll eventually turn the tables on them."

We laughed at both her assessment of the situation and at her analogy.

"Now I've got a question for you, Tommy," she said.

"Shoot," he responded.

"What was your nickname when you were a commando? And how did you get it?"

Tommy looked over at me with a single enquiring eyebrow raised.

"She met a few of the lads last night and learned that we all had nicknames. She asked me what yours was. I told her to ask you."

"Well, my dear Charlie," Tommy said. "I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours."

"I didn't have one," she said. "It seems that the issue of nicknames, handles, or callsigns was the sole preserve of the other ranks. Officers didn't seem to have the same closeness as the ORs.

"I have no doubt that the ORs had a nickname for me - as they would have had for the other officers. I just hope that mine was a little more flattering than some of those I heard when they referred to my fellow officers."

"Did you ever hear one of your fellow officers referred to in a positive or flattering way?" Tommy asked.

"No."

"Then I think you have your answer. Mind you, some of the unkindest nicknames can quite often be flattering in their own way."

The table was silent for a moment.

"But back to your question. My nickname was Prancer. I earned it because whenever there was the first sign of trouble, I'd be off with the speed of a thousand startled gazelles."

"Springboks, more like," I said, interrupting him.

"Hmmm, well, whatever," Tommy said while frowning. "Anyway, I was never much good as an athlete at school, but I was pretty good in a rugby game. I played Rugby League rather than the other one. We couldn't afford to have fifteen players on a side where I grew up, so we had to settle for a game requiring only thirteen.

"Anyway, when you're racing down the sideline with a ball tucked under your arm, you learn to high-step so the bastards can't take your legs out from under you. And that's exactly what I did the day some raghead bastard tried to take my legs out from under me with his AK.

"I almost got away with it, too," he said, dropping his head in feigned sorrow.

I looked over at Charlie to see a tear sliding down each cheek.

"You bastard!" I shouted at Tommy. "See what you've done. You got the poor girl in tears."

"Maybe so," Tommy came back at me. "But if I told that story up in one of the resorts I visit from time to time, she'd be mine for the night."

"Don't listen to him, Charlie," I said, handing her my spare handkerchief. "He's full of shit. He's right about the raghead wanting to take his legs out, but he was the last man to respond to the contact call and was the furthest from cover.

"The raghead was shooting low, and Tommy was high-stepping it like a thoroughbred at a dressage meet. That's how he earned the nickname, Prancer.