The Chasers - Prologue

Hey there guys. I've been on a massive solstice from writing because I reached a point in my writing where I felt like I wasn't making any progress. I'm back, however, with new content and new motivation. This is the beginning of something I hope I might be able to make into a short novel, but who knows. This is the prologue. I hope you guys like it and please critique honestly! There is more waiting and already written if you enjoy this!

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Caroline got out of the car and thanked the driver with a tip and a smile before looking up at the elaborately ornate hotel. Alex had no idea that she was coming; he thought she was still in New York as she had managed to convince him over Skype. Caroline just hoped that the conference here in London hadn’t put too much stress on him, which usually caused him to get very short tempered with his wife.

The sharp clicking of her heels against the reflective gold floor echoed throughout the lobby as she approached the front desk.

“Caroline Moore, I’m looking for my husband,” she said with a smooth grin to the concierge.

“Not a problem Mrs. Moore, let me just call-”

“No, no. Please, it’s a surprise, he doesn’t know I’m here.”

The concierge hesitated for a moment before returning a toothy smile betrayed by darting eyes. He motioned towards the elevators.

“Room 701, here is the spare keycard.”

Caroline thanked the young man and strutted off towards the elevators. Inside the elevator was as grand as some of the hotel rooms that she and Alex had stayed in while they travelled Europe in college. Golden handrails ran around the mirrored walls that created infinite copies of the tall, dark haired woman.

Floor 7 was reserved for high-profile patrons of the hotel and Alex had stayed here every time he had visited London since becoming CEO of Siwa-Tech. 701 was always his room, and Caroline had come with him to the hotel countless times before, so she found it odd in hindsight that the lobby attendant had offered to call her up to see her husband. The Moore’s where by no means unknown to anyone here.

Caroline studied herself in the reflection of the framed painting outside Room 701, ensuring that her chocolate brown hair was secured tightly in a neat ponytail. The fur on her shoulders trailed down to a thin waste and well fitted dress pants. She exuded class and wealth.

Caroline swiped the key card and swung the door open with arms agape and jazz hands flailing. The television was off and Alex’s coat was slung over a chair in the hall, he couldn’t have gone out without his coat, it was freezing outside.

“Ah-lex!” she sung as she moved inside and closed the door, “Alex honey I’ve come to visit!”

As Caroline rounded the end of the hall into the bedroom, she dropped her Louis Vuitton handbag, her makeup and cellphone clattering out onto the floor.

“Alex!” she screamed, “Alex!” The girl in front of her was screaming back through masking tape, her eyes darting back and forth between Caroline and the fluffy handcuffs that secured her to the bed. She was covered in blood from her neck to her knees and was completely naked.

In a pool of deep burgundy next to the bed was the grisly corpse of Alexander Moore. Two bullet holes lay squarely in his back and one in the side of his head. He laid face down and naked.

Caroline scrambled to the ground and shakily picked up her phone. She couldn’t remember the emergency number for England, but she didn’t even consider calling the police. She didn’t consider calling anyone but one man.

“I need Chase in London, now. It’s Caroline Moore,” Caroline cried into the phone, her hair now a mess and her fur jacket covered in her husband’s blood.

“He’s on the way, Mrs. Moore. Do you have any pertinent information for us?”

“My husband is dead,” she said, standing up to face the woman bound and gagged to the bed, “And I’m with his whore.”

BARELY HOURS LATER

“Alexander Richard Moore, 49 years old,” said Cassie from in front of the screen in the briefing room of the plane.

“CEO of Siwa-Tech, inherited the company from his father in 2010. Rhode Scholar, Law Degree from Yale. He’s an impressive man,” said Ryan Chase, “An impressive man with a weakness for high class escorts.”

Ryan Chase was also an impressive man. His resume featured honorary degrees from multiple prestigious universities around the world, acronyms such as FBI, CIA, NSA and SOCOM. His hands were rugged and creased from handling weapons constantly during his time in the Navy and his hair was immaculately swept across his head from his time as the advisor to the Director of the CIA. He had learnt to transition quickly from veteran soldier to dapper publicist.

He was 32. Ryan Chase was an impressive man.

“Correct,” said Cassie, “His wife, Caroline, 27 years old, chased him to London while he was on a conference visit. When she made it to the hotel she found him dead in the room with a blood covered escort.”

“This sounds like your kind of fix, why am I here?” asked Chase. Cassie was the other half of Chase’s crisis-management company. Chase specialised in what he called ‘hard-fixing,’ jobs that required feet on the ground, perhaps a gun placed to the right head or a secure computer made insecure for a few minutes.

Cassie, however, dealt in ‘soft-fixes.’ Political manipulation and subterfuge, knowing dirty secrets and how to use them as weapons was Cassie’s expertise. This was beginning to sound like something she would be better suited to if given a team to clean up the crime scene.

“I thought the same,” said Cassie, pushing her hair behind her ear, “Until we got into Mr. Moore’s emails. Turns out he’s been doing some dealings with an email address that has no associated names, just numbers and bank details that change for every deposit.”

That piqued the interest of Link, one of Chase’s hard fixers who helped him in the field when he needed it. He leant forward with a copy of the emails in his hands, “Guy does some less-than-obvious banking and winds up with lead in his back. Sounds like a pretty classic cover up hit, but it’s way too messy for a pro. Or, it’s a neat little unrelated discovery and the wife shot him before calling us.”

“We’re about to land at Heathrow,” said one of the flight attendants as he poked his head into the briefing room of Chase's jet.

“Let’s go see the wife,” said Chase, scooping up his phone and jacket, “And untie the girlfriend.”