The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

A Dangerous Plan

By the time the two detectives had managed to find a ride back to the chaos that was the Foothills General Hospital to retrieve Dee's car and drive to her apartment, darkness was settling over the city. Stepping from the elevator onto the fifth floor of the seven-story apartment block lost somewhere in the domestic sprawl of the lower south side, the two quickly moved down the hallway to Dee's apartment, a humble one-bedroom suite with a view of the river valley.

As apartments went, the tiny one-bedroom unit wasn't much to look at: a simple living room with a kitchen nook just off, a truncated hallway leading to the postage-stamp sized bathroom and closet sized bedroom. And it was sparsely furnished with a pint-sized couch that looked like a Goodwill reject, a couple of equally battered chairs and a ancient-looking television sitting on a couple of cinder blocks.

The paint was peeling, there was a smell of mold in the air and the naked bulbs in the ceiling flickered fitfully in the last moments of their brief lives. But it was enough for the enigmatic detective, a place to throw her coat and get away from the world for a couple of hours to recuperate.

The woman known as Tragedy McMaster was a contradiction even at the best of times. First, she was the daughter of the infamous Terrance Bartholomew 'Jack' McMaster, one of Canada's most successful cat burglars. Jack, before being caught in 1976 by a RCMP special task force, managed to steal millions of dollars US worth of gemstones, precious metals and industrial secrets.

However a young Dee, staring at her father's face on the television as he was dragged away to prison an unrepentant man, decided not to follow in her father's criminal footsteps, though she knew his world intimately. Instead, despite pressure from Jack's former 'business' partners, she forsook a life of crime and charged into higher learning, quickly becoming the first McMaster with a university degree in less than two years. Hard on the heels of that achievement, she obtained her Law degree a year later and quickly applied to get into the RCMP.

With her intimate knowledge of the dark underworld of society, Dee quickly climbed to the top of her class in both forensics and deductive reasoning at Depot, the RCMP's massive training facility in Saskatchewan. Graduating from her training with top marks, she went into the field to serve five years as a constable in Northern Alberta, where she served with distinction. There wasn't many constables with as thorough a knowledge of the law as Dee McMaster, both practical and book experience under her belt.

Dee's unique blend of knowledge, experience, skill and ability quickly caught the eye of the high command in Ottawa. She swiftly found herself in Toronto, a member of the RCMP's special high-tech task force where she served nearly four years before taking a leave of absence to accept a position with CSIS, Canada's intelligence agency.

The intelligence agency quickly made use of the highly touted and equally well decorated RCMP constable in several controversial counter-intelligence operations all over the world, including Africa, Europe, Asia and South America before burnout pushed her from CSIS as well. She had seen too much in too short of a time.

Dee's fall from the law enforcement lime light was as swift and spectacular as her climb; within a few short weeks of taking a leave of absence from the ranks of intelligence agents at CSIS, she was busking in the streets of Vancouver. There, trying hard to forget the images that had been burned into her memories in the dark streets of Hong Kong, the alley ways of Berlin, the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro and the decay of downtown London, she played her beloved guitar for pocket change.

Moving to Calgary after two years out on the coast, Dee puttered around the prairie city doing odd jobs, working in turns as a landscaper, warehouse crew, McDonald's, 7-Eleven and as a janitor at a local recreational facility. She made only enough to pay the rent and buy her food, which was enough for her.