Agents, Agreements and Aggravations: In Her Paranormal Majesty’s Secret Service™ Book Three

by Anderle, Michael

  Rhone took her hand and gripped it tightly. “I’m offended you even need to ask."

  Jennie sniffed the air. “You might want to clean yourself up first.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, they hit the road at full throttle.

  Jennie was glad to be leaving Washington behind. She had never been one to submit to hostility, but it was clear that things were changing at a rapid pace and she was losing her welcome. While she needed the SIA on her side as her organization grew, she wasn’t sad to be heading toward her brand-new base of operations.

  She drove faster than she should have, using Feng Mian to anticipate speed cameras and short them out before they could detect her speed. When they reached Richmond, Rhone fixed his gaze out the window and marveled at the town.

  “It’s beautiful.” He was sitting beside Feng Mian and Jiao in the back. Night had fallen, and the lights of the city twinkled like stars as they climbed the hill to King Manor. “What a view.”

  “Wait until you see it from the top of the hill.” Jennie pointed toward the manor where light spilled out the large glass windows. “That’s where we’re headed.”

  Rhone shook his head incredulously. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  Baxter turned in his seat. “Does Jennie ever kid?”

  “Poorly,” Rhone replied. “That must have cost you a fortune.”

  Jennie considered this. “Somewhat. You can’t put a price on justice, though.”

  Jennie was pleased to see that the front lawn had finally been taken care of as they entered through the wrought-iron gates that bordered the property and trod down the stone path. Rhone, now wearing a pair of SI glasses Jennie had smuggled from the SIA on his face, stared in wonder at the green blurs that sped around the house, engaged in some kind of spectral race.

  “Poltergeists,” Jennie explained. “The McFarlene brothers. Former tenants and collateral of the specters that had inhabited this house for centuries. They’re something akin to guard dogs, now. They’ve been scaring away the nosy kids, neighbors, and press as we’ve been doing up the house. Handy to have, really. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who try to spy on this house at night.”

  “I thought you said poltergeists were evil and needed to be expunged?” Rhone questioned.

  Jennie half-shrugged. “They can be. It’s on rare occasions that you can keep them somewhat under control. Usually, they need a good enough incentive to obey. The fact that they are allowed to remain mischievous on our behalf, as well as the fact that I’m promising not to exorcise them is likely enough to keep them on a tight leash.”

  A blur of green appeared around the corner of the house. It sped toward Jennie and darted through her, leaving behind a high-pitched cackle as it worked to catch up with its brothers.

  “For the most part,” Jennie added. “Come on, let me show you what we’re working with here.”

  Jennie, Baxter, Rhone, and even Feng Mian gasped as they walked into the entryway. Jiao remained silent behind them all.

  Lupe, Tanya, and the conduits had worked hard to clear the boxes and everything was now in order. The chandelier glowed like a halo above them, and as Jennie gave Feng Mian, Jiao, and Rhone the guided tour, she could not have been more overjoyed.

  The manor was a totally different place. Couches and furniture decorated the downstairs rooms and provided places to lounge in comfort. Appliances had been installed, and the electricity and water were running. She practically skipped around the place as she took her cellphone and tapped on the screen to cast the music to a set of smart speakers she had asked to be installed around the bottom floor.

  A thought suddenly occurred to her. She broke free of the group and sprinted toward the reception room with its square of white leather couches, and beelined for the bar—her bar.

  “They’re here! They’re here!” She practically squealed with excitement as she tore open the cupboard doors and found the shelves inside filled with ingredients, tools, cups, and glasses she had ordered. They were in no particular order, so she would have to sort them out later, but she was ecstatic to find that the fridge was also full, and there was even a jar of maraschino cherries on the countertop.

  She glanced up and found Lupe, Tanya, Carolyn, and the others standing in the archway. “It’s all here. You guys rock.”

  Lupe and Tanya filled her in as she busied herself making her first cocktail in King Manor—a White Russian. Classic. Rhone was taken upstairs by Carolyn and told to choose a room for himself to occupy, and at one point, Sandra wandered through the room behind the Roomba and followed it with a giggle.

  “She’s been doing that for hours.” There was fondness on Tanya’s face, an expression that only a mother could wear. “She loves it. Fascinates her. At one point, I saw her standing on it and swirling around the kitchen, laughing as though there was nothing better in the world.”

  When Rhone returned with Carolyn, Jennie finished making drinks for everyone. They laughed and talked and listened to music. Baxter started dancing as a song that he hadn’t heard since his childhood played over the speakers.

  Jennie’s eyes were watery with tears. “This all looks fantastic, guys. There’s still some work to do, but we’re almost at the point where we’ll be able to operate. The phones and computers should all be here tomorrow, as well as Hendrick’s gear, and then we can really get this show on the road.” She looked around the room, confused. “Where is Hendrick, anyway?"

  Carolyn laughed. “He’s upstairs, playing with his gear.”

  Jennie gave her a look.

  Carolyn beamed. “It came a day early, Jennie. It all did. Come on, let me show you.”

  Jennie, Baxter, Feng Mian, Jiao, and Rhone followed Carolyn upstairs. She opened the door to what had once been the music room, and in its place were long rows of desks with more computers than Jennie could count at a glance. Phones were on each desk, and cables were neatly bundled in rows.

  “Imagine this space filled with agents,” Jennie marveled. “All working together to detect spectral issues and relaying them to our field agents.” Her cheeks hurt from smiling.

  Carolyn laughed. “But wait, there’s more!”

  She showed them Hendrick’s lab, a space triple the size of his old room in which the old mole looked lost. He hardly raised his head as he busied himself with organizing stacks of flasks, beakers, and burners, along with the rest of his equipment. Carolyn also showed them meeting rooms, an on-site training facility, a storage room for weapons and other spectrally-imbued equipment, and an interrogation room, as well as several holding cells.

  Jennie placed her hands on her hips, imagining the situation with the Dragon, but in a house of her own. “It’s all coming together. The walls are going to be spectrally-imbued, aren’t they?”

  Carolyn nodded. “That’s Hendrick’s first priority.”

  Jennie looked impressed. “There might be a position for you as the project manager. Or maybe we can change the title to something more modern.”

  “People pointer!” Carolyn exclaimed.

  Baxter scoffed. “Maybe not.”

  “Let’s keep working on it.” Jennie scanned the room one more time. “It’s perfect.”

  Carolyn shook her head. “There’s still more!”

  Jennie raised an eyebrow.

  “Just follow me,” she instructed.

  Carolyn took Jennie back down the wide staircase and toward a room at the back of the manor that she had sped past on her first tour of the lower floor. She opened the door, and Jennie’s mouth fell open.

  It wasn’t finished yet, but the pieces were all in construction. Timber beams mapped out the shape of the stage, and velvet curtains lay on the floor, ready to be attached to a proscenium arch. There were boxes stacked on either side of the room with illustrations of rowed seating on the brown packaging.

  “We weren’t going to show it to you until it was finished,” Carolyn explained. “But I just couldn’t wait. What do you th
ink?”

  Jennie searched through over a hundred years of memory and experience for the right words to say at that moment. Yet, even then, nothing sprang to mind.

  So this is what true happiness feels like...

  Jennie hugged Carolyn so tightly that she almost choked, then, aided by the others, got to work in piecing the makeshift theatre together.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Washington DC, USA

  The Dragon sat in the quiet of his cell and meditated.

  It was something that had always kept him calm. Even in his dying days, when the pain in his chest and throat had become all too painful, he had meditated.

  There was something almost magical in the art, a sense of being able to bend and warp your own reality as you tricked your mind into believing that all was well. True masters could slow their heartbeats to a third of their original pace with nothing more than thought. Stress could be alleviated, and pain could be numbed. Meditation was a superpower, and it was to this art that the Dragon attributed a lot of his success.

  The voices floated around in his head. They were faint and muddled, as though he were driving through a loud tunnel and the radio was too low in volume. He could hear how many there were, he just couldn’t hone in on their frequencies.

  He steadied his breathing. Somewhere inside him, he still felt the ghostly beating of a heart. It wasn’t truly there, he knew. However, decades of living in a biological body were enough to trick him into feeling the heart’s phantom beats.

  The voices grew in volume. They had been there since he had taken his final breath and fallen still on the apartment floor, laying in a pool of his own blood. The moment he had resurrected as a specter they had gnawed at him, talking in a whisper, but finally they were growing more vocal.

  Who are you? He wondered after the voices. They hadn’t been there in life, so what were they in death? Sometimes he fancied he could pick out a selection of voices that he knew, specters who had accompanied his devilish schemes as he ruled the roost as the feared Dragon.

  That had been who he once was, although he knew that that was no longer his title. In truth, he had forgotten who he was long ago, and in passing over the mantle to his next in line, he had foregone any identity he’d once had. Did that make him a ghost?

  Maybe.

  Did that make him an enigma?

  Possibly.

  Did that make him invincible?

  Definitely not.

  He was the Dragon, but he wasn’t the only dragon. A family can only survive by breeding, and he had been very selective in that process.

  He opened his eyes and for a half-moment saw the ghost of the woman who had visited his cell. She still played on his mind, as much as he tried to clear it. She was powerful and had bound him in bonds that he couldn’t understand. Putting her Hollywood face and those killer breasts aside, beneath it all was a killer. He had surrounded himself in enough of the like to know one when he saw one, and this woman was exactly that.

  In fact, part of the Dragon’s anxiety had been because of this woman and the threat that she posed. He hadn’t come across her before, but he was glad she had made herself known. Imagine if he had gone ahead with his plan without knowing about the powerful enemy who waited beyond these prison walls.

  He shook away the thoughts from his mind and concentrated on the voices. Somewhere inside the jumble of individual voices, he would find what he was looking for eventually. It was all he had left to do as he waited for the first stage of his plan to kick into action.

  Soon they would come. Soon he would be free. Soon the reign of the dragons would come to the world, and all who stood in his way would be burned in the process.

  * * *

  It was late, not that Daggro could tell in her windowless office. Her vision had gone blurry, and she knew that she needed a good night’s sleep.

  But who has the time? With things around here moving one hundred miles per hour, eight hours of sleep was the equivalent of three working days.

  Still, her hands trembled, and there was only so much caffeine her body could take. She had found Hendrick’s store of energizers in the laboratory last week and had made her way through the entire supply. When she had run out, she had ordered Proctor to make some more.

  Proctor had been less than helpful, informing Daggro that the formula was something that Hendrick had refused to share, and the best he could do was try to replicate it.

  Try?

  TRY?

  Daggro had instructed him to get to work, but so far, nothing had come to fruition.

  An hour later and she finally gave in. If she didn’t find her quarters now, she’d likely fall asleep on her desk, and that was no way for a leader to go. This was her shot. With Rogers absent and Hopkins removed from his post, this was her chance to shine, and that was something she wasn’t going to waste.

  The hallways were nearly all empty, which was a strange contrast to the last few weeks. Agents were all either in their quarters catching up on sleep, or out in the field and bringing justice to the world. She grunted at the brave specters and agents who acknowledged her in the halls, then turned a final bend toward her quarters.

  An agent walked past her and gave a sly nod. Daggro nodded back. She didn’t recognize the agent, but then they had been growing so quickly, how was she ever going to know every member of staff employed by the SIA?

  Her bed felt like a cloud, the room deftly silent. She drank a glass of water and didn’t even bother kicking off her SIA fatigues. Within minutes, she was asleep.

  It was in the land of dreams that the realization of what she had seen came to her, not that it would wake her up. Nothing could wake her up from her slumber, not even an agent in her hallways with a dragon tattoo creeping out from under his collar and painting his neck.

  * * *

  Darius Chu placed a finger to the receiver in his ear. “I’m in.”

  It had been trickier than he had anticipated, but he had finally done it. The SIA HQ hadn’t been hard to find, but gaining entry had been a colossal pain in the ass. Almost a week of tailing the movements of the unsuspecting agent who chose not to sleep at the HQ and instead retire to his home with his wife outside of work hours had paid off.

  He’d return the uniform to him eventually. He’d unbind them both and give them back their freedom once he was done with his uniform and keycards. For now, he had a job to do.

  “Go ahead. Keep low.” The voice in his ear was encouraging, feminine—a soft voice that reminded him of his mother. “Take it easy.”

  Darius knew that the key to conquering any break-in was confidence. People won’t question you if you looked like you belonged. He strode through the entryway, scanned himself in—or, rather, scanned Ian Dryscall in—and made his way toward where he imagined the stairwell to be.

  Their informant had laid quite the map in his head, and as he walked along the halls, he felt as though he had been here before. Which was useful, considering that speed made the job all the easier to accomplish.

  After turning left at a junction in the corridors, Darius’ heart stopped. Daggro was walking straight toward him. She looked awful, her hair a thatched bird’s nest, and her eyelids dark and heavy. He knew her from the pictures he had been shown ahead of the mission. She should have been off duty by now.

  She floated past him like a ghost, barely registering his existence when he acknowledged her. He heard her disappear into a nearby room and breathed a sigh of relief.

  Thank your lucky stars, Darius. Now it’s showtime.

  He passed down the stairs and found the holding cells. This was where things had the highest chance of getting messy. One wrong move and the whole plan could be foiled. It was a lot of pressure to put on one man, but Darius wasn’t just any man. He had trained for this moment for years. From the first time the Dragon had introduced him into his inner ring and imparted his wisdom of the spectral realm, he had been prepared.

  Two guards blocked the door. “Hey. No unauthor
ized personnel.”

  Darius drew his two pistols faster than the guards could blink. He shot them simultaneously, and the darts silently flew from the barrels and into their necks. Their eyes widened for just a moment before they slipped down the walls and were soon snoring.

  He grabbed one of the guard’s keycards and swiped himself into the cells. He didn’t spare a glance back at the CCTV cameras, knowing that every second wasted was a second he could lose the Dragon and fail him.

  That was something he could not allow.

  He peered into the cells through the letterbox windows, a grin spreading on his face when he found the Dragon sitting cross-legged and in a world of his own. The glasses he had taken from the agent worked perfectly, and it was crazy to think that he could now see specters, just because of a piece of technology.

  The Dragon glowed like a holy effigy. Darius set to work installing the tiny metal device that had been created purely for this moment—a device that would hack into the lock and replicate the last code used to open it.

  Is there anything technology can’t do?

  The lock clicked. He checked through the window. The Dragon didn’t bat an eyelid.

  The door creaked as it opened. Darius stepped inside. He paused in front of the Dragon and waited. The world was silent.

  Out of nowhere, Darius’ head was filled with a chaotic din. It sounded like a thousand voices all screaming at once, and he clapped his hands to his ears. He fell to his knees and grunted against the pain that filled his head, wondering what the hell was going on and if maybe this was some kind of new alarm the SIA had installed to prevent intruders.

  Then, as suddenly as it started, it stopped. Darius was left breathless, surprised to find himself on all fours. He glanced up at the Dragon, expecting him to be in a similar position from the assault of noise, but instead found him grinning, his eyes boring into Darius.

  The Dragon chuckled. “You have done well, my child.”