“The job will go live within the next week. It could be anytime.”
Ms E nodded. “They will be available.”
He quirked an eyebrow and smiled. “Has anyone told you they hate doing business with you?”
She caught the sparkle in his eye and smiled in return. “Many and often. I didn’t catch your name...” She scanned his uniform, looking for clues. “Commander...”
“Van Leeuwen,” he replied. “Matthias Van Leeuwen.”
“Thank you, Commander. It’s been a pleasure.”
“You drive a hard bargain, Ms E.”
“Flattery will get you...” She paused and raised an eyebrow. “Maybe a date.”
“I’d consider it.”
She pursed her lips. “Finger?”
His smile broadened and he held his hand up.
Elizabeth made a show of examining it. “Huh. No wedding ring.”
The man’s face turned serious. “I’m married to the job. Most ladies aren’t too fond of intermittent romance.”
“Hell.” She sighed. “That sounds like more often than never.”
Her comment hit home and his jaw dropped. “You, ma’am, are a poor liar.”
She shook her head. “Nope. I’m not lying.”
He gave her an assessing stare. “Okay, then. I’ll bite. How about sixteen hundred, Saturday?”
“Fourteen hundred,” she returned. “I have to be back by eighteen hundred.”
Van Leeuwen raised an eyebrow, and she smirked. “I have a contract.”
Fleeting regret crossed his face and he shook his head. “I screwed myself.”
She gave him a sympathetic look. “Married to the job, remember?”
“I know the feeling,” he replied. “How long?”
“Well, now you’re getting personal.” She arched an eyebrow. “How long has it been for you?”
He blushed and she snickered. “The job, Commander, the job.”
“How long with the Navy?” he asked and she nodded but made a note to look into his past. “Well...”
When he named a couple of postings, she saw why his romances had been intermittent. She reciprocated with some of her cover jobs that had a similar effect. By the time they hung up, they’d discovered a mutual enjoyment of steak and spices and agreed on somewhere for a late lunch.
“I’ll make the booking,” Elizabeth told him.
“And I’ll pick you up.”
She thought fast. “How about I meet you there?”
He frowned. “I don’t know...” he said. “I’ve seen your traffic record. You can’t duck out on me that easily.”
She laughed. “Fine. You can pick me up.”
Once she’d arranged to have him collect her from the One R&D offices, they hung up, both of them smiling.
As soon as the call had disconnected, Elizabeth typed a quick search into the computer.
“Commander Matthias Van Leeuwen,” she murmured. “You are most intriguing.”
When she had the program running, she looked toward the door and pressed the intercom. “Amy?”
The door cracked open and her newest hire stuck her head into the office. “Ma’am?”
“Please call Tracy and let’s introduce you to the team.”
She smiled. “Yes, ma’am.”
Elizabeth checked her search and noted that it had already found the publicly promulgated information and now rapidly narrowed the personal profiles to find the right ones. “BURT, are you—”
“Your security is important to me,” he replied. “I have tweaked your program and added a sub-routine.”
She didn’t know what to say to that but she frowned. “Don’t interfere with my personal life.”
He chuckled. “You don’t have a personal life, Elizabeth...being married to the job and all.”
She gaped at the computer but a knock at the door interrupted her, so she closed her mouth and scowled. “Don’t mess with me, BURT.”
“My dear Elizabeth,” he replied. “I would never dare.”
She snorted at that but turned to where the newest staff members waited. Both women wore business casual—slacks and jackets with tailored blouses and stylish but functional footwear. Neither were particularly tall but both were well-muscled and moved with the grace of tigers.
Amy was the slightly taller of the two with dark-brown hair and dark eyes. She was also a little stockier than her counterpart, who was a half-head shorter than Ms E and slender-framed. Her chestnut hair was caught up in a French plait and her brown eyes were alert and wary.
“Let’s go meet Stephanie and the boys,” Ms E told them.
The way they fell in beside her made her bristle and she quelled the feeling. She was used to doing the protecting, not being protected, but these girls knew their business and Lars was right. As much as she didn’t like it, she needed the extra security—and Stephanie needed her.
Stephanie, Frog, Johnny, Marcus, and Avery were involved in an animated game of poker, which rapidly devolved as the two cats swiped at the chips. Lars was cleaning his blaster and listened to a news broadcast, and Brenden was making coffee.
They all looked up as Ms E and her two guards walked in.
“Ms E!” Stephanie threw her cards down and came to greet her.
Elizabeth smiled. “How did your parents like the condo?”
The girl’s eyes lit up. “They loved it. I don’t think we’re gonna pry dad out of the den any time soon, and mom is enjoying the peace and quiet.”
The guys grinned. “She’s not the only one,” Frog quipped, and Stephanie shoved him. “Hey!”
The guys eyed the two bodyguards but Ms E ignored their looks.
“Did you enjoy your time off?” she asked, and they all made noises of agreement. Her face sobered. “Good, because it’s time to get down to business. I’ll see you in the conference room in five.”
She and the girls had reached the door when Bumblebee leapt onto the coffee table and scattered cards and chips in all direction. Glancing back, Ms E rolled her eyes and continued up the hall.
“Kids!” she muttered.
“Just because you were losing,” Marcus grumbled at Stephanie.
She looked at him in mock mortification. “They’re not that smart!”
Frog watched Zeekat swipe his cards from the table. “Do you want to make a bet?”
She pouted. “Oh, come on, Frog. Your hand wasn’t that good.”
Lars finished putting his blaster back together and holstered it. “Come on, guys. Grab your coffees. You know how she hates to be kept waiting.”
They reached the conference room a few minutes later and settled around the table. Frog closed the door behind them and looked over at where Ms E sat with Amy and Tracy alongside.
“So, Ms E,” he said. “Who are your new friends?”
Elizabeth met that with a tight smile and stood, and the two girls stood with her. “Meet Amy and Tracy. They’re the first members of my security team.”
Both women nodded and seated themselves beside her when she sat again.
There were murmurs of, “Nice to see,” and “About time,” from the guys, but Stephanie frowned. “Why do you need a security team, Ms E?”
“Well,” she began and filled them in on the assassination attempt.
“You should have called us,” the girl told her. Her frown deepened and Elizabeth frowned in return.
“I handled it. Now, I’m taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” she snapped.
She rolled her eyes. “I get that you wanted me to take a break, Ms E, and I really appreciate that, but next time—”
Elizabeth glared at Lars and he raised his hands. “Don’t look at me like that,” he told her. “I didn’t put her up to it.”
“Yeah,” Frog added. “You shoulda known keeping something like that from us would make us all unhappy.”
Faced with signs of open rebellion, Ms E pursed her lips and cleared her throat. “Be that as it may,” she told them.
“I took Lars’s advice and have started hiring a second security team.”
She indicated Tracy and Amy. “These ladies are only the beginning.”
“Welcome,” Stephanie said, addressing the guards directly, and the guys followed her lead. The two women smiled but their eyes were wary.
“Good.” Ms E stood. “Now that’s out of the way, I’d also like my security team to be able to work with yours in case we need to switch them out.”
“Training room?” Frog asked and bounced up to open the door for them.
“Training room,” Elizabeth confirmed, and the team pushed to their feet. “We’ll meet you there.”
Stephanie followed her out but didn’t say anything until Lars came up beside her.
“You knew?” she demanded and Elizabeth knew the girl was still pissed.
Well, too bad, she thought. Steph had to learn there were some things momma kept to herself.
Tracy and Amy met the team in the training room a short while later. This time, the two female guards were dressed the same as the guys, save that their training gear wasn’t yet One R&D issue. That was still being made.
“I’ll be in the building,” Ms E told them, “so I’ll be secure, but you need to work with Stephanie and her team so you can integrate if we need you to. Get to know what they’re about and how they fight in the field, okay?”
She added the last as a question, but she wasn’t asking for permission or making a request. The women needed to work with the team or they wouldn’t be any good to them.
Amy and Tracy nodded and moved onto the mats to loosen up and stretch. Seeing the guys make room for them, Elizabeth headed to the door. She had work to do.
“Don’t break my bodyguards,” she called as she turned into the corridor. “I only just got them.”
Amy and Tracy exchanged glances and smirked. It was good the boss could joke with them, but really? They paired off with some of the guys for some light sparring before Stephanie called them all together so they could really get down to business.
Two hours later, she knocked on Elizabeth’s door, still sweating from the workout. Bumblebee and Zeekat came with her, settled at her feet, and licked their paws as she took a seat. “I think your guards thought you were joking.”
Elizabeth gave an exaggerated scowl and rolled her eyes. “If you broke them, you owe me two new bodyguards.”
She laughed. “No, but I think they have a better idea of what they’re getting into, now. A few more days training and they’ll be fine. I think the cats came as a surprise, though.”
Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. “And the magic,” she teased. “I suppose they merely took that in stride.”
Stephanie smirked. “Not exactly, but they adapted fast. You chose a couple of good ones, there.”
“But?” she prodded because she realized there was one coming.
The girl smiled. “No buts, although Amy needs an allergy shot. There’s something about the cats...”
“She never mentioned being allergic to cats.”
“She was as surprised as the rest of us,” Stephanie told her. “Apparently, there’s something about these cats that really sets her off.”
“I’ll stick her in a pod and run a diagnostic,” Elizabeth decided. “I’m sure we can do something.”
Stephanie looked relieved. “Good. I like her,” she revealed. “She sat Frog on his ass in less than a minute.”
“Really?” Ms E pulled up the security feed. ‘Holy hell! Oh...oh, my, that’s funny.”
“Yeah.” She smirked. “She didn’t get away with it the second time around, but she got him in the third.”
They watched the feeds and Ms E was pleased with her choices. One on one, they could take Avery, Brendan, and Frog down in two out of three matches. Lars, Johnny, and Marcus they couldn’t, although Amy took Marcus down once and Tracy did the same for Johnny.
Lars had the advantage of watching them work and had been able to counter most of their tricks. They’d finished the session laughing, although both looked worried when they were told they had to take Vishlog on.
Neither of them had been able to beat the big Dreth, although the looks on their faces after each match said they intended to try.
“How’d they go against you?” Ms E murmured, but before she could find out, a call came through. She picked it up. “Yes?”
After a moment, she put the call on speakers.
“Welcome back, Stephanie,” Burt said. “I take it you had a good holiday?”
The sound of his voice made her smile. “Yes, thank you, Burt. And how are you?”
“I am very well, thank you. I thought I would take a moment to check in with you and Elizabeth and find out what your plans were regarding your research.”
“You must have ESP,” Stephanie told him. “I only got back today.”
He chuckled. “As much as I’d like to take credit for that,” he told her, “I have to admit that Ms E let me know she’d called you back.”
Her eyes widened and she looked at Elizabeth. “Later,” the woman mouthed.
“So,” Burt said. “What were you planning as your next step?”
“Oh. Well, I’ve been thinking about that alien we fought on the pirate ship—and that made me think about Nihilistic energy. The closest I can come to it is that it’s like anti-matter for magic.”
“That makes sense,” he confirmed. “Do you know if it is a form of energy you can use?”
Stephanie frowned. “I’m not sure. Thinking back to the fight, I don’t think I sensed his magic before he used it, so that would be the first thing I’d need to work out. I have to find it to be able to draw it, I think...and I don’t know what would happen if I simply tried to pull it in without knowing it’s there.”
“Please don’t do that without testing it in the Virtual World first,” Burt told her. “It’s so much better if you explode in there than in reality.”
Ms E gave a startled bark of laughter and Stephanie cleared her throat. “I’ll try to remember that, Burt.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that.” He paused. “Going back to the alien. Was there truly only one? And do you think that is normal for them, or do you think you’ll face more than one of them in the future?”
“Whoa. Hold up, Burt,” she protested. “Those are all good questions, but I haven’t really thought about it.”
“You should,” Ms E said. “If we’re going up against these things, we need to have an idea of what we’ll face.”
“It’s not like I have a crystal ball,” Stephanie huffed, and her mentor stared at her.
“Well, you should at least consider if the one you faced was one of the best of his race, or merely normal, or maybe even weak.”
“Oh, I doubt he was weak,” Stephanie told her. “If I had to guess, I would say he was probably one of the best because he acted as a liaison with pirates and they respect strength and power. He’d have had to have been strong to be assigned there...if he was.”
“Assigned,” Burt mused. “That’s an interesting concept. Have you thought about how to combat the energy flow if you can’t sense it?”
“That’s another good question to add to the list,” she told him. “Do you think you can set something up in the Virtual?”
“Give me a couple of days,” he told her. “I’ll see what can be done to reflect it. I still need time to go through your last round of research.”
“That’s okay,” she replied. “I have a few other things I want to try in the pod, and I still need time to think through what I experienced. Can we talk more about this tomorrow afternoon?”
“I’ll see what I can do by then.”
“Thank you.” Stephanie turned to Ms E. “So, can you tell me about these assassins?”
Elizabeth sighed. She should have known the girl wouldn’t let it go. “The security system caught them putting a bomb in my apartment and I went after them.”
The witch opened her mouth to protest and she held her
hand up. “Because I’m used to dealing with my own problems,” she said in response to the question she thought she would ask, “and no, you may not ask why.”
She closed her mouth and frowned. After a moment’s consideration, she tried a different tack. “Did you stop them in time?”
“I reached the apartment after they’d left,” Ms E admitted, “but I called a friend on the way and we disarmed the bomb.”
“So how did Lars know?”
She was really asking why Lars knew and she didn’t, and they both knew it. Elizabeth answered it anyway.
“I called him on the way and he realized something was up, so I told him I was dealing with it and to keep an extra good eye on you.”
“But—”
“I also told him not to disturb your date, so he suggested I get a security team of my own to make sure I was kept equally as safe. Believe me, he offered to drag you all into it.”
Stephanie looked a little happier at the news, and Elizabeth had to wonder how much trouble Lars had been in until she’d learned what happened.
“I was gonna kick his ass,” the girl told her, “and he has orders for next time.”
“I’m a big girl, now.” She rolled her eyes.
“Uh huh.”
Ms E gave her companion a long hard look, which she returned without blinking. “I’m not your responsibility,” she told her and knew it was a mistake as soon as the words had left her mouth.
“You don’t really have a say in that,” Steph said bluntly. “You’re like a mother—or the mean older sister or the renegade auntie or something.”
She placed her finger against the girl’s lip. “I think that’s quite enough out of you,” she told her. “Now, tell me. Did anything unusual happen while you were out?”
“You mean did we have someone try to kill us?” she asked. “In that case, no. A couple of knuckleheads tried to start a fight at the club but that was over soon enough.”
Elizabeth narrowed her eyes and she made a note to do some recreational hacking later to find out what had really happened at the club and how much after-care would be required. Instead of saying anything, though, she nodded.
“I’ll do a check on the security here and see if there was anyone hanging around while you were away. Maybe someone wanted to try something and gave it up when you weren’t here.”
Witch Of The Federation III (Federal Histories Book 3) Page 11