Phoenix

03.

July 26, Birmingham, England.

Tricia Milner always comes home late.
Don't get the wrong idea. She doesn't go to have fun.
She spends her time in her office. After her divorce from her cheater husband five years ago, she has become a completely different person. It was good that they didn't have any children together. So she was a free person to leave that scumbag without a second thought.
And she didn't look for any partner either. The term "relationship" now irks her out.

So here she is, enjoying her life alone.

She spends her days up to 9/10 PM in her office almost every day. Sometimes it goes beyond that time.
Today was eleven o'clock when she returned home.

She went to take a shower after she put down the things in her hands.  Humming a mild song, she dried her hair, and then she went to the kitchen. She always likes to cook for herself rather than eat out. Though it was way past dinner time, she was still a little adamant to have homemade food at least once every day.

She was smelling something very mild for quite a time now. But after opening Kitchen's door, the smell hit her hard. She felt light-headed.
She caught it immediately why the smell seemed so familiar.

Gas...the kitchen was filled with cooking gas. She had no idea how this happened. She can remember clearly that she turned off the burner before going to work in the morning.

Then what? Any leak in the line? How big the leak was to spread the gas to such an extent? Even this time she can hear the sound of gas leaking.

She should look at the situation before calling for help- so she turned on the switch of the light beside the kitchen door.

And then that happened.

That poor woman didn't know that the switch was damaged intentionally. Immediately after she pressed the switch, it burst and sparks lit up. And that was enough to trigger the gas.

The blast was so intense that the whole neighborhood reverberated with a sudden jerk. The glass windows shattered and the fire went out of the window in such a way that it looked like the exhaust of any rocket launching ceremony for a space adventure.

Tricia Milner didn't die on spot though. Her whole body burnt, all skins were gone. She was a fleshy and bloody mess that can barely be recognized as a human.
But in that state even, she managed to drag herself out of the kitchen to the study room beside it.

There was a telephone on a table.
Gathering all the strength in her body, she tried to get up grabbing the table to reach the telephone. She tried to reach the phone but her all tries were in vain. The keyboard and mouse placed beside the telephone smudged with blood as a sign of her last tries.

And a few seconds later, that workaholic lady collapsed to her last sleep.

But her tries didn't reach the eyes of three assassins who were waiting in a car parked a hundred feet away from her apartment.

Seeing the blast gave them the satisfaction they were waiting for. They knew this murder will also be termed an accident. Forgetting to turn off the gas and short circuit causing an explosion isn't a rare thing.
They did what they were supposed to do, observed it, and then left the scene without looking back again.

August 8, Grampian mountain, Scotland.

Eric Mortimer is a renowned mountain climber in the community. He can compete with professional free climbers easily. And this expertise didn't come in one day. He had to try hard for decades to master this skill. He could have been a professional free climber if he wanted to. But this was just a pastime for him. Something he is very much fond of- nothing more.
In reality, he is a computer engineer, working in a high post in a multinational I.T farm.