Chapter Thirty-Four
Jasmine Robertson sat in a private jet on the runway of the Springbank Airport just west of Calgary.
She had been waiting for an important call—one that would change everything.
The phone rang and she answered without identifying herself.
“Hello… Thank you for watching… I’m sorry to hear that…
Your money is already in the bank.” She disconnected and signalled to the flight attendant.
“Would you please tell the pilot that we’re no longer expecting guests and that she should take off immediately. ”
Jasmine looked out of the window as the plane taxied onto the runway.
It would take a little over an hour to fly to Vancouver.
By the time she arrived, she would have curly grey hair, milky blue eyes—thanks to some clever contact lenses—and she would be travelling in a wheelchair.
Nobody ever questioned someone they perceived to be older, vulnerable, and moneyed.
The British passport she had chosen identified her as Samantha Fleck.
Once she arrived in Vietnam, she would decide who she wanted to be.
There were endless possibilities for her with Monarch.
And if the law tried to tie her to the events that had happened tonight in a basement room in Calgary, they would have to find her first. Even if they did, Canada didn’t have an extradition treaty with Vietnam.
She would have time to separate herself from the fray.
Jasmine was disappointed with her children.
They had failed—not only her, but Monarch.
She reflected on how this had all started, back when she was Gloria Chipping.
She recalled the day that her ex-husband, William, had beaten her so badly that she thought she was going to die.
He’d been angry with her because he had claimed she’d been careless with their daughter, Julie, in the bathtub.
The child had nearly drowned. Julie was just a few years old at the time. Her older brother Tyler was only five.
Maybe she had meant to drown her daughter. Gloria hadn’t been well suited for motherhood. All she’d known was that after that last beating, she’d had to get away. She had vowed to make her own way in the world and never be trapped again by an ungrateful husband, or needy children.
The first few months had been rough. She’d gone from shelter to shelter, uncertain of her next move.
But things had taken a turn for the better when she met Harlen Feist. At the time, she’d completely run out of money and had turned to an escort agency as a source of income.
Harlen was one of her first clients, and they’d hit it off.
For some reason, she had poured out her story of woe and confessed more than she’d intended.
She had talked of wanting her husband dead.
She had confessed that she found her children distasteful.
She had admitted that, at this point in her life, she no longer cared what others thought of her.
Harlen had held her in his arms. They hadn’t even had sex.
Instead, he’d asked if she wanted to do something for him…
something small. All she had to do was go to an address, pick up a package, deliver it, then leave.
He would pay her a lot of money. She had shrugged it off at the time, but agreed to do so and delivered the parcel as requested.
A few days later, she’d read an item in the newspaper.
The police were on the lookout for a woman who had delivered a package that had blown up and killed the recipient.
She matched the description in the newspaper of the person of interest.
Gloria still had Harlen Feist’s number and had called him in a panic.
He’d soothed her and said he would make sure the police never tracked her down.
He’d said he would help her disguise herself.
In fact, he’d said he was so impressed with Gloria, that, if she was interested, he had some other jobs for her.
Part of her had been angry because she felt like she’d been used again.
But part of her liked the power. Harlen had explained that she would be helping to get rid of bad people in the world.
She’d said yes, and discovered that she had unknowingly joined the Monarch family.
Initially she’d only done small errands, and Harlen was always impressed with how convincing she was in the various roles she played while she did Monarch’s bidding.
He’d paid her well, and as time went by, he’d said that he wanted her to have a more stable home base.
He had an idea. There was a man who was climbing the ranks of Monarch named Simon Griffin.
He had a beautiful home in Banff. If she was willing, he would place her there as his housekeeper.
Simon would understand that she was discrete, and could be trusted, but he would never know that she was actually working for Harlen.
That’s when she took on a more permanent persona—Jasmine Robertson.
She had taken great pleasure in all of this.
Great pleasure in the fact that she had a big secret.
She’d loved that she had started to do things for Monarch in a way that only Harlen knew about.
And, in return, he’d given her passports and disguises and money.
He’d even arranged for the contractors who were constructing an addition on Simon’s house to build a little secret spot in Jasmine’s room where she could hide things.
And Simon had never suspected a thing. Nobody had.
She was like a mole within the organisation.
Jasmine had worked her connections in ways that would have made a James Bond villain blush.
The only downside was that Simon had a son named Milo.
He wasn’t a bad kid, but he was nosy and troublesome, and he was unhappy.
She’d known that he wanted to run away, and had arranged it so that an opportunity was available to him—car keys easily accessible, the security gate left open, and a backup plan to get rid of him, if all failed. That was over ten years ago.
Milo had disappeared. Things had settled into a routine…
that was, until a few years back. Jasmine had read an article about her ex-husband.
He was stirring up trouble connected to a police task force.
She wondered what had become of her children and discovered that they had both made the papers…
in a small way. Julie had been arrested for breaking and entering, and car theft.
The older sibling had been implicated in a gambling ring, and the making of pornographic movies.
Jasmine wasn’t sure if it was some dormant maternal instinct, or raw curiosity, but she’d decided to get in touch with them. An idea had begun to form. Her children seemed to have a sense of amorality that could be put to good use.
And so it was that she’d reconnected with her son Tyler six months before his thirtieth birthday.
At first, he’d been angry with her for abandoning him, but she had lied.
She’d told him that she’d been locked away in a mental institution for a long time, and had only recently rejoined society under a new name.
She’d also let him know that she had access to money and wanted to help him, but on the condition that he didn’t tell his father that she was alive.
Jasmine had gotten Tyler a job, and Tyler had grown closer to her.
He didn’t have many friends. He said he had been ostracised because he was gay.
Tyler had told her how he was trying to make his way, but he kept sleeping with co-workers and getting fired.
He needed money. He’d also revealed that his father had said that if Tyler didn’t make something of himself by the time he was thirty, he would be cut out of the will.
Jasmine had taken note of this fact and arranged for William to have a tragic accident, not long before Tyler’s birthday. Tyler had inherited a lot of money.
Jasmine had loved the fact that she was so many people at once. She was the housekeeper who was discretely pulling strings for Monarch, and at the same time she was secretly keeping a different relationship with her son.
Next, Jasmine had reached out to her daughter. She’d gotten in touch with the minimum-security facility where Julie was being held, and arranged for her to get out of prison.
As she’d done with her son, Jasmine had built a bridge with her daughter, helping her with money and bringing her in on some small tasks for Monarch.
Jasmine had told the same lies—that she’d been locked away and was unable to reach out to her children until now.
Her daughter had swallowed the story, hook, line and sinker.
Julie had shown promise. She looked much younger than her actual age, and people trusted her easily. She wasn’t book-smart, but she had strong intuition and she was good at conning people.
Jasmine had hoped she could groom her two children into becoming members of the Monarch family that she could be proud of.
But things in the past year had gone awry.
Declan Hunt and his assistant Charlie had kept nipping at the edge of Monarch’s wings.
And last winter, they’d gotten too close.
In fact, they’d worked their way right into Simon Griffin’s home.
While it was true that their discoveries had helped her ascend to a higher position in Monarch, Jasmine had worried that they would cause her more trouble, and she’d known they had to be disposed of.
She knew that Tyler had an obsession with Declan, and she’d decided that she could use that to her advantage.
Julie was happy to do anything for money.
And so, Jasmine made a plan with her son and daughter.
If they would do her bidding and get rid of Declan and Charlie, then they could sit beside her near the top of the Monarch pyramid.
They would all fly away and work some place far from Calgary.
Monarch would reward them all for getting rid of two troublesome investigators that seemed to stir up trouble for the organisation.
At first things had seemed to go well, but the plan had come undone due to Julie’s carelessness. When Jasmine discovered that her private phone had a message on it from Charlie Watts looking for ‘Jules’, she knew the game was up.
Tonight, Jasmine had sent someone to the Monarch Bakery location to watch from a distance.
If Tyler and Julie walked out without any indication that the police had caught on, then they could pick up their luggage and join her on the plane.
But if there was any sign that the police had uncovered the game, then her children would be left to fend for themselves.
The plane flew westward over the Rocky Mountains.
Jasmine, soon to be Samantha, took one last look.
She would never see her children again. She would never see the Rockies again.
But she would move on, and she would maintain control over her own life.
She would build Monarch’s operations in the far east. It was enough. It was her destiny.