Chapter Twenty Three
This is the vision of our future.
-Quincy Morgan, seconds before his suicide attempt
Chris
Drayton family mansion; Riverview Road, 26th Day
Special Agent Nicholas Sheridan, serving as the interim head of the FBI, showed up at the foot of the Riverside Road Mansion with a force of armed personnel in his wake to be reckoned with: He’d summoned at least three dozen FBI, ATF and at least three other law enforcement folks that he could scrape up; it as a damned impressive feat, especially considering the extreme short notice and all that had went down in the city and countrywide in the past 48 hours or so. Chris had heard rumors of the APD going to complete shit, with the entire force splitting into half a dozen smaller units with an as many different allegiances and agendas.
Christopher Prince understood how much Sheridan had put his ass on the line too. If he’d pushed resources away from where they’d truly could have been an asset—if he were wrong…
“What’s our status?” Chris said to Sheridan as a means of greeting. He hadn’t been in the other man’s presence since before Lucy Burgess spilled his personal beans all over the kitchen floor for everyone to trip over.
“I received your report, Agent Prince.” Sheridan shook Chris’ hand with feeling. “And I’m inclined to believe you when you say that there are dozens of House in Chains members who have sealed themselves inside that mansion.”
“Do you have a plan to get them out of there peacefully?”
Sheridan nodded but told Chris that he wasn’t going to like it. Chris followed Sheridan’s eyes to where they circled and fell…on Senior Hostage Negotiator Justin Ryan as he pulled his long self out of the deputy cruiser. He worked his way over to where the two of them were standing, straightened his tie and offered his hand to Chris who shook it, while never taking his eyes off of Sheridan.
Chris repeated his question to Justin Ryan.
“There is no plan in place for extracting them peacefully as you say, Agent Prince.” Ryan told him. “We storm the mansion and force them out—alive if possible.”
“Tell me that you aren’t going to sign off on this?” Chris asked Sheridan in a desperate tone.
Sheridan reminded Chris of the information that he’d faxed over in the report about Grace Edwards, the assassination of his brother Xavier Prince by a traitorous element of the Peacekeepers and now this potential mass suicide ritual serving as the final chapter of Scar by a House in Chains.
He took a deep breath, ran his fingers through his snowcapped hair and his day old beard.
“Give me something concrete to go on here, Agent Prince. Give me something fathomable that tells us anything other than what your report has already informed me on and I’ll consider alternatives.” Sheridan said. “A mass suicide does no one any good here. I would rather have them arrested and tried for the crimes that have been perpetrated tonight.”
“You want something concrete?”
“I do, Agent Prince.”
Chris pointed his index finger at Ryan.
“Tell this man to get back in the car that brought him and lock his door.”
Ryan frowned up and snorted.
“What? I won’t do such a thing.”
“I mean it,” Chris said and folded his arms and stood his ground. “A House in Chains has done all of the damage that it’s going to do. No one else in that building is alert to our potential presence outside of Grace Edwards. We don’t know what the conversation has been like after everyone arrived. Maybe—just maybe cooler heads have prevailed. Hasn’t there been enough ciaos tonight? Hasn’t there been enough death tonight?”
Sheridan scrubbed at his beard until Chris could actually hear the man’s fingers on his skin.
Ryan spoke first, “Don’t be foolish enough to believe that last statement, Sheridan. If I heard through the grapevine correctly, Grace Edwards not only was in the Circle but is the admitted architect of Rapture and Scar. She could have easily set you up which in turn sets us up, Agent Prince. All of this may be grand theatre in an elaborate ruse to lure FBI forces into an ambush—“
Chris snapped.
He reached across Sheridan and grabbed Justin Ryan around his bony neck and pulled him close enough to smell the peppermint on the man’s breath. Sheridan reacted as quickly as his own weariness and surprise allowed him to separate Chris from Ryan.
“I want you hear this and hear it good, Ryan,” Chris said as he tightened the hold on Ryan’s collar. “Scar was madness. Scar was a tragedy of epic proportions. It was madness—but it is over now.”
Sheridan finally succeeded in getting in between the two men and Chris gave him one final shove that nearly toppled Ryan once he was free. The oldest man of the group rubbed at the sore neck and straightened his tie back out.
“Oh my God, Sheridan, don’t tell me that you’re going to even remotely consider going along with this crap of a plan. That mansion is huge. Shit, like I said, they could already know that we are here. They could be either entrenching themselves in the bowels of that place or tunneling out from some unknown passageway as we speak. In fact, your man here, Sheridan, your man Agent Christopher Prince himself, could be stalling for them for all we know. He never disclosed the full measure of his relationship with Grace Edwards.”
“Of course I’m aiding them,” Chris laughed at the notion and then his tone boarded on contempt in a minute. “We’re all the same aren’t we?”
Justin Ryan swore.
“Save that racist bullshit for someone who gives a damn, Agent Prince. That’s not what I meant and you know it. You are, however, the lone surviving sibling of Xavier Prince. It would be foolish to for anyone in this bureau to dismiss that you may be carrying emotional baggage in this matter. Call me what you want, Prince, I am not a fool.”
“None of us are fools, Ryan,” Sheridan stepped between the two men again in case things got out of hand again. He turned his attention to Chris. “What if you’re wrong, Chris,”
Chris twisted his head away from the other two as if the question physically stung him. He took a deep breath and tried to calm himself. He’d let his temper get the upper hand far too often lately…that had to change.
He wanted to assure his boss. Although Grace Edwards played a major role in his reinstatement, Sheridan still had to vouch for him somewhere along the way to get him back into this game. Chris owed the man.
And then he saw it.
A vision of his dead brother and Agent Blue being shot by his discharged weapon flashed in front of him—so real that it was almost tangible enough for Chris to reach out and touch it.
And it wasn’t like he’d been above making mistakes. Grace had abandoned him at the triage center inside the Georgia Dome while he’d talked back and forward with Dr. Seth Dupree. He had thought that there was enough of a bond…enough trust to allow her enough space and belief that she wouldn’t dip on him during a point of vulnerability for him.
He’d made one miscalculation after the other in the past few days and hours. And shit, he was exhausted physically. He was sleepy. He was hungry.
And he was dying.
Never forget, my brother, you are dying of the same stomach disorder that killed mamma.
Ryan said, “I’ll answer the question for you, Sheridan, if you are wrong in your judgement of this man and his motives, you are endangering every law enforcement person on duty here. You are also lessoning the death of every city servant who lost their life tonight serving their country all while—the madness—as Agent Prince proclaimed it, unraveled around their ears.”
Chris ignored Ryan for the moment. Instead he turned around to take in the panoramic view of the mansion. The earthquake had damaged a quarter of the windows that he could see. And if only a third of those windows had rooms—this place was indeed enormous.
And yet, it only had one front door.
“I know a way to settle this,” Chris said and by the time he looked at Sherida
n, his boss already knew what he had in mind. “Hear me out, Sheridan. I can’t tell you not to go with Ryan or anyone else’s recommendation on this. The majority of the hardcore violence nationwide has passed. We are in a period of intermission. This resulting earthquake may have pushed us into here faster than it would have happened otherwise. But now we’ve got to think about tomorrow. What happens tomorrow when people of color switch on their TV’s and tablets and laptops and see dozens more of their people—our people have their dead bodies spread across the tiled floor in HD in a firestorm created by the FBI. It won’t matter to them that the truth is a mass suicide or a mass police incursion.”
“We haven’t accomplished much tonight otherwise,” Sheridan shook his head. “We haven’t recovered any of Atlanta’s missing children.”
“And Serena Tennyson is still loose,” Chris added.
Sheridan stole a long look at the mansion. Ryan watched him, but the pain of defeat had painted his face red. Or perhaps that pain is the betrayal you felt when you learned that your dear old friend, Raymond Rice was Pandora’s Regent.
I wonder if you hurt nearly as much as I did when I learned my father was the Caretaker.
Chris continued to watch both men, but found that he kept a guarded eye on Ryan. He could see the man’s muted lips utter: Don’t do this, Sheridan…don’t do this.
Sheridan looked at the top his shoes.
“I look forward to reading your report, Agent Prince.”
For better or worse Sheridan had made decision. For better or worse, Justin Ryan wasn’t finished yet.
“Are you insane, Sheridan? The sooner this crisis ends, the sooner you are likely to be named Rice’s successor. And yet, you are going to throw it all away for this man.”
“Maybe,” Sheridan nodded without looking away from his shoes. “Go on, Agent Prince, let’s not wait any longer.” And then he fixed Justin Ryan with a sharp glare. “This is my call, Mr. Ryan.” And then he turned his attention back to Chris as if it had never left him. “But if I hear as much as one gunshot…all bets are off.”
“Understood,” Chris was off, angling towards the mansion’s front door without bothering to look at Sheridan or Ryan again.
Getting inside the residence wasn’t as difficult as he would have thought. He picked the lock with the skill and silence that Xavier had taught him when they were teens. Once inside he got his gun out, got low and slid himself along walls, behind furniture and along the floor inching his way forward.
The entrance opened into a huge atrium longer than one he’d ever seen even over at Ernestine Johnson’s place. The walls were newly painted, the floor’s wood finish spit shined and immaculate. Huge paintings of famous black leaders lined the walls down one of the nearby halls. He needed to keep moving, but he couldn’t help note all of the historical figures in his presence. He saw Martin Luther King Jr, Malcom X, and President Adolphus Sweet…
…As well as portraits of his father Isaac Prince and his brother Xavier.
And then Special Agent Christopher Prince smelled the unmistakable scent of already rotting bodies even before he saw them.
There were bodied sprawled on top of other bodies loitered along seemingly every inch of space in the next room on the floor. Two bodies were keeled over on a nearby couch. Three more were slouched over loveseats. Many more had died while they sat at the dining room table.
They had poisoned themselves. It was the only logical conclusion. The common factor near each and every body was a plastic cup with red wine, or some similar substance, spilling on the surfaces around the dead bodies like blood. Chris went numb. Chris couldn’t move. And all he could think of was if he would look like these people here when his mother’s cancer overtook him months from now.
He got his guard back up and his gun out in front of him again. Most of the poor bastards were probably higher level Peacekeepers, members of the board and others loyal to a House in Chains from a distance.
Where are you Grace Edwards? Where are you Quincy Morgan?
And then he found the two members of the Circle as well.
There was a small breakfast nook directly behind the dining room. Small was a relative term, of course, in a place as vast as this mansion was. What he saw there reminded him of the classic setting from the Last Supper that he’d seen even as a child.
Grace Edwards was dead…of that it was no doubt. And to see the finality of it, to see her like that after the loyalty and love that she’d shown her brother and the help that she’d provided him—and yet, the born investigator in him was far more interested in how she had died—and by the looks of it she had not gone down without a fight. Good for you, Grace
Chris kneeled over to where her body lay flat on the tile. He examined her fingernails, as polished and beautiful as they were earlier, were now broken and cracked. Someone else’s skin and bruised blood was underneath them as well. This wasn’t about his betrayal of Xavier, he thought, as turned her hand over and again. It was far more personal than that. In the end, even with this potential of a HIV infection from her undercover work with the Bishop, Grace didn’t want to go through with this. She didn’t want to die. He felt for her pulse a long time after that to see if fate had awarded her wish …but to no avail.
Quincy Morgan had gone with even more of a bang; a death worthy of a Sargent of Arms of a House in Chains.
He’d shot himself in the back of the head, undoubtedly minutes after watching his flock die in front of him. In his mind’s eye Chris could remember meeting this man for the first time in the Fox Theatre during the siege there. It felt like years ago now. And the special agent hadn’t forgotten the sense of jealously that he felt towards the other man for his build and intelligence. How he had missed being him in his younger days. How much he wanted to be respected and even feared by other men once again.
And now it was little time left before Special Agent Christopher Prince joined this man in eternity.
Chris stopped in his tracks and prayed for God to send him a sign—any sign or angel to let him know that He was still on the side of what was still good and righteous.
And then his business cell phone rang, startling him.
Chris answered the call without looking at the caller ID.
“Christopher,”
Angel. It was an angel on the line.
“Christopher. Thank God you are alive. Thank God I reached you in time.”
“Angel, where are you?” The questions came pouring out of him. “Where have you been? Are you alright?”
The Doctor tells him where her approximate location is.
“Christopher, listen to me closely,” She sounded as she had been waiting to unload her information for a long time. “Four of the missing children survived the ordeal. He and I have come to agreement for him turning himself in. Keaton’s prepared to surrender to you and you only. Do you understand me? No cavalry, no copters. No one should be there when this goes down except you, me, him and these children. We need you to hurry though. I think we’re being tailed, but I’m not sure whether it is Pandora or somebody even more dangerous.”
Chris heard shots ring through the phone. A second series of shots sounded even closer.
“Angel,” Chris shouted into the receiver. “Angel,”
“Hurry, Christopher,” The fear in Angel’s voice was tangible and real. “I don’t know how long we can make it out here.”
And then the signal between the phones was lost.
He looked at the receiver for a minute before he dialed Special Agent Nicholas Sheridan and reported to his boss A House in Chains’ horrible Vision of the Future that he’d found inside the mansion.
How could he have forgotten to tell Angel that her husband was alive, well and here in Atlanta?