The Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Set One
Books 1 - 7
Michael Anderle
The Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Set One (this book) is a work of fiction.
All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2018 Michael T. Anderle
Cover by Andrew Dobell, www.creativeedgestudios.co.uk
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First US edition, October, 2018
Version 1.01, November 2018
The Kurtherian Gambit (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are copyright © 2015-2018 by Michael T. Anderle.
Contents
Death Becomes Her
Queen Bitch
Love Lost
Bite This
Never Forsaken
Under My Heel
Kneel or Die
Death Becomes Her
The Kurtherian Gambit Book 1
1
“May those who fight have honor, else we are doomed in the end.”
Unknown politician’s stump speech.
"You know the problem with honor? Honor can be a restraining bitch on you. I’ve decided honor was for the last generation.”
Bethany Anne Reynolds, Queen of the UnknownWorld
Virginia, USA
Cautiously, the large agent entered the dilapidated wooden warehouse in old-town Virginia. Taking up most of a city block and surrounded by old weather-beaten and rusting pipes it was an eyesore to everyone walking or driving by it.
He spoke into his mic, “Carl, three heartbeats, smells are incredibly pungent with a slightly sick smell. Kind of like they’re going through severe body issues, or eating lots of yellow curry. I'm not sure which.”
He listened as Carl retorted over the earpiece, “Bill, for the record, Indian food is magnificent, and your culinary bigotry is showing.”
“Easy for you to say, I’m the one who has to smell it when you go overboard eating it.” Stopping the conversation and moving silently, the agent squeezed his entirely too-big body through holes which certainly were too small.
“OK, inside perimeter and will be making contact inside thirty, that is three–zero seconds. Smells include heavy bleach, with a subtle aroma of aforementioned nastiness. Still three tangos, no heartbeat warnings, no talking.”
Carl was viewing the video take coming from the needle camera attached to Bill’s heavy helmet and mask. While there was no way Carl could ever make it on a takedown, he certainly enjoyed sitting in on the real-time action.
“OK big guy, I have all the info coming in from the sensors outside. We have no movement and nothing out of the ordinary. We don’t seem to have any issues with flanking, so you are a go from this side. Your call, Billy Boy.”
Bill swore to himself. If there was any one thing that got under his skin more in the last fifteen years working with Carl other than being called ‘Billy Boy' he didn’t know what it was. One of these days he was going to give Carl the monumental wedgie he kept asking for. Except he never said it when Bill was around, and Bill never thought about it except times like this.
One of these days, though... God help him, and the big guy would be upset, but he was going to make it so Carl had to be surgically removed from his shorts.
Time to get back to business.
“OK, approaching and have visual. Three contacts all dressed in jeans and shirts, nothing different except two have hunting vests on, one has his off and is messing with it. Can’t see what he’s doing as his back is to me.”
At that moment, one of the men cocked his head and gestured at the other two who suddenly looked in Bill’s direction.
“You’ve been made, loudmouth.” Carl couldn’t keep the concern out of his playful jibe.
“Shit. OK, apparently this might get bloody. Talk to Primary and let him know we might need cleanup.”
“Primary is already in listen-only mode. I’m sure he’s setting up dispatches already.”
Bill heard the three guys around the card table stand up and fan out, ready to face him.
He sighed, it wasn’t as if he was worried. He had taken down so many people in fights like this or gunfights, it wasn’t even funny. While he looked about thirty-eight, he was closer to seventy-six years old. Pretty young for a vampire, actually.
While bullets hurt, he would mend, and the pain would remind him not to get sloppy next time.
Bill stood up, all 6’4”, and confidently strode right over to the three guys, stopping about ten feet away.
Damn if that smell bothering him wasn’t peculiar. The bleach was causing his nose severe issues, but he could still smell something over that nasty stuff.
Carl watched through the video link as Bill started asking the guys if they would like to come quietly or...
He never got out the next word as all three rushed Bill and the signal from his headgear suddenly stopped.
The incoming video from a couple of the cameras outside that weren’t damaged showed the whole wooden warehouse go up in flames while smoking embers rained down from the sky in streaks onto nearby buildings. Carl was pretty sure that in seconds there wouldn’t be a piece of the engulfed warehouse left.
His best friend, his partner, had just vanished in a big ball of heated urgency and consumption. Carl just stared at the screens, willing Bill to come running back out through the flames.
Someone knew they were coming, and they knew how to take a Vamp down. Three of them were willing to take their own lives to make it happen.
The color, what little was left, drained from Carl’s face. The shock of losing his friend, the shock of being so mistaken about Bill’s safety left Carl staring at the screen.
The ringing of the phone broke through his pain, his stupor. It was the primary contact.
He hit the talk button, “Yeah,” his voice barely a whisper.
A gruff voice from the other end of the line, “Tell me he has enough parts left that he can make it back to us, Carl,” said Frank, their primary contact with the Government. He had been working his solo career deep in the bowels of the darkest areas of security so long he predated Carl by decades. “I have Spec-Ops ready to extract in five minutes.”
“No, Frank. We just lost him. All of him. I just lost my fucking best friend.” Carl wanted to slam the button down as anger and anguish directed both at those who killed Bill and himself, rose up. “We can’t get noticed right now. We’re obviously being watched, and something is so rotten in Denmark I can’t even think straight.”
“I’m so sorry, Carl.” Frank knew that there wasn’t much he could say. Carl was his third contact on the othe
r side of the ‘redline,’ and he was aware that it was Carl’s first loss. Frank had been through two others before this, and while he interacted with the agents, he was uncomfortable around them.
Frank knew that no matter what the protocol said, it was never ‘his program.'
“What’s our next step, kid?” Frank had to get Carl thinking again. While Carl wasn’t young, compared to Frank’s near-century mark he was a drop in the bucket.
“Step?” Carl sounded like his mind was just idling, nothing going on as the take from the outside cameras showed the burning warehouse and registered the sirens in the distance.
Probably Frank’s work.
As much as Carl wanted to yell and scream, cry and drink himself into oblivion, there was only one response.
With a voice only starting to come back, Carl replied, “Do? Frank. There is only one choice. I have to wake Him up.” Any color left in Carl’s face totally faded away. Oh my, God, he thought. What’s going to happen now?
Frank, on the line hundreds of miles away, had much the same thought. Except his thought was even more concise.
It was simply, “Oh shit.”
Washington, D.C.
Bethany Anne Reynolds was a sight to behold. Coming down the inside of ‘spook central’ in Washington, she received surreptitious glances from a couple of the guys.
Although her hair was jet black, her personality could be straight from a redhead at the best of times.
The ones who were smart forced their gazes away instead of watching her walk down the hall, the view was not worth the scathing look should Bethany Anne notice.
Or the ass-kicking during martial arts workouts later. She was only 5’3” and for most of the guys, that gave them a significant height and reach advantage. She had a long upper torso and her legs were a little short for her height. She tended to wear higher heels to compensate.
It was obvious she was angry, and when Bethany Anne was ANGRY, her better nature took a sabbatical, and while she might apologize later, it was always better not to risk the twins in the first place.
Some guys never understood the danger, or decided just to chance it and watch the agent go down the hall. No matter how many HR training classes on appropriate behavior some guys take, it never overcomes their natural predilection to be an ass.
Today, however, was their lucky day. She never glanced in anyone’s direction. She strode through the hallway in a carefully tailored expensive dark suit, with a piece of paper in her hand and her blue eyes flashing a warning to ‘keep the hell away.’
It worked.
Martin Brennan, her boss (or at least her advisor, no matter what the org chart said) for the last five years, heard her coming from thirty feet away. There was no mistaking those very loud, very determined steps.
He sighed. It wasn’t like this was his plan. He loved her like a daughter and just like fathering a teenager, he was about to get ripped for something he had nothing to do with.
This discussion, he decided, was so going to suck.
Military Base, Colorado Mountains
The klaxon was sounding somewhere way in the back past all of the pipes and Matthew Wainright was getting very annoyed that apparently it had become his shit duty to go and see about it.
He had been relegated to this out of the way floor deep underground on the base some three days ago to deal with some of the timeworn, really antique, really useless scientific equipment from the war... Not even from recent decades. This equipment was the serious relic-style 1940s stuff.
He felt like he was doing research on the Philadelphia Experiment and somehow pulled the shortest straw.
To top off his growing frustration with dust, grease, faded pencil forms and boxes full of useless crap, he had to be around when some fuse must have finally shorted, and the stupid klaxon started up.
God hated him, He really did.
With disgust, he dropped the handfuls of old paperwork he was digging through in the box on the old, gray metal makeshift workbench that had seen better centuries.
Time to go through junkyard city and beat some sense into something that really shouldn’t have been built this dependable, he thought.
Matthew grabbed a huge flashlight and a heavy wrench and started walking down the lanes created by the pipes everywhere. Sometimes it felt like he was in the oversized engine room of a battleship rather than underneath hundreds of feet of rock in the Colorado mountains.
Next time he talked with his parents, he was going to let them know that the recruiter’s comments about ‘seeing the world’ should conjure up thoughts of seeing the Earth’s sphincter hole, rather than being in Europe.
While the buzzing from the old fluorescent lamps couldn’t be heard over the klaxon around the corner, the crappy light they produced let him see well enough. He had gone down two lanes only to have to backtrack because they were dead ends.
He was able to snake down between two pipes and get onto a path with yellow stripes on the edges and a red line down the middle.
Huh, he thought, I’ve never seen any lanes with red lines.
Since the lane seemed to be going in the direction of the noise, he decided it would be easiest to take the path of least resistance.
General Lance Reynolds, Base Commander, was talking with his secretary Patricia when his phone lit up on a landline from inside the base.
She reached across the desk and picked it up before he could so much as bat an eye, or appreciate the view.
Damn, but he was getting slow in his old age.
“General’s office, state your case.” She was ever so not by-the-book. But if efficiency had a middle name, it was Patricia, so he didn’t push the issue.
“Klaxon, uh-huh, Level Five, right. Won’t shut off. Yes, I can hear it. I’m surprised that you have a working phone down there. Wait, say that again? The door was opening when you arrived? Yes, it’s right outside the door. I get that. It’s hurting my ears right now.”
“There’s an envelope attached? Mmm hmmm. I’ll let him know—right, you won’t touch anything.”
She hung up. Lance raised an eyebrow.
“Seems like we have a little shakeup down on Five. We have an old time war vault that suddenly activated, with an envelope attached to the inside of the door. It’s addressed ‘To the Base Commander.’”
Lance continued the single raised eyebrow. She said nothing. Damn, it used to work.
He sighed. “OK, what else?”
She seemed confused. “It says ‘On your honor,' sir.”
Washington, D.C.
Bethany Anne rapped on the door and waited half a second before barging into Martin’s office, face red and eyes furious.
He put up a hand to forestall the bitching. “Close the door without breaking it, and I’m not at fault.” He chose this particular order for the two phrases because he didn’t want to replace the glass… again.
The last time wasn’t Bethany Anne’s fault, but he was sure her previous efforts to reduce his glass to shards had helped.
After a significant effort to restrain her desire to slam the door, Bethany Anne turned back around and didn’t give Martin a chance to get a word in edgewise. “What is the meaning of this? I have a few months, A FEW MONTHS, Martin, to finish my case, and dammit I can! There is NO proof that I’ve only got six months left to live. That’s only the doc’s best guess. Otherwise, I am FINE. Nothing even comes back on any of the physicals. I’m doing better, if anything! Who pulled this bullshit request and took my case and shipped me out?”
Martin waited for a second to see if she was done.
“Well?”
Apparently, she was.
Martin squared his jaw and said three words that were sure to fuel the flames of her ire.
“I don’t know.”
He stared at her, and she glared back at him. He could see the logic synapses firing in her brain.
If anything, she was the brightest he had. Hell, the brightest he’d ever known. If he coul
d have just a few more years with her out in the field, there was no telling how many cases she would close.
As it was, Mother Nature was being a real black-hearted bitch. Bethany Anne had a very rare blood disease. One they never even had the ability to check for until recently. The doctors, although not 100% sure, pretty much agreed she had less than six months to live.
With her only twenty-eight years old, it was a crying shame. Martin admitted doing a little of the crying himself when no one was looking.
Besides the physicians, he was the only other soul who knew.
She wouldn’t even tell her father. He had raised her on all of that male testosterone bullshit he was indoctrinated with in the military. Figures, Martin thought. Treat her like a boy and see what you get. Never easy to get close to, and since her mom died at almost exactly the same age of, unexplained causes, it was most likely genetic and passed down, and she was the first and only child.
Getting to the end of her logic chain she narrowed her eyes. “If my father so much as mentions my condition before I can tell him I will personally fly back to Washington and kick your boys so hard you will sing falsetto until Christmas!”
Martin put up his hands. “Duly noted, Bethany Anne, and for the record I’m innocent. I wouldn’t abuse your trust like that.” Martin didn’t even bother with the insubordination. Bethany Anne never meant to hurt friends, but her temper was also apparently genetic, considering the rumors about her father’s famous rages.
Cooling down, Bethany Anne strode over to the two chairs in front of Martin’s desk and sat in one, tapping the paper against one of the Christian Louboutins she really enjoyed wearing when working in the office.
Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Set One: Books 1-7, Death Becomes Her, Queen Bitch, Love Lost, Bite This, Never Forsaken, Under My Heel, Kneel or Die (Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Sets) Page 1
