Page 157 of The Black Trilogy

“Oh, joy. I need coffee first.”

“Overall, things are doing well,” Nate said as I sucked down my third espresso. Of the eight people in the room, I was winning in terms of caffeine consumption. “Revenues are up, profits are up. Cash balances are good. The old mattress is overflowing.”

“And operationally?” I asked.

“No serious problems since you left.”

“Any minor ones?”

“Just the usual niggles.” He looked down at the tablet in front of him. As head of the Technology Division, Nate would never resort to a pen and paper.

I, on the other hand, needed something to doodle with.

“There was a dispute with the local army in Pakistan,” Nate continued. “They thought we were treading on their toes when we escorted a convoy of American businessmen through a conflict zone. We’ve smoothed that over now.”

“And one of our celebrity clients in LA had a few hysterics,” Nick chipped in. “The bodyguard we provided refused to let her fiancé backstage since he didn’t have the correct pass.”

I laughed. That kind of drama was why I happily left the Executive Protection Division to Nick. “Did the guard not recognise him?”

“He knew the woman was engaged to a rapper called T-Dog, but not what the dude looked like. When this kid wearing a pair of sweatpants with the crotch around his knees and enough gold necklaces to make a killing on eBay turned up, our guard didn’t realise he was a musical prodigy.”

“All that bling and no backstage pass? Our guy was just doing his job.” We drilled our security staff time and time again: if people didn’t have the right credentials, they didn’t get past. Someone had obviously listened. “Send him a bonus. What’s happening with Investigations?”

Dan shuffled papers on the desk in front of her. She’d headed up that division since my husband’s death, a promotion by default. “Running smoothly.” She gave us a brief rundown of the priority cases. “I’ve got a team flying to Puerto Rico tomorrow to try and find that missing kid and another heading for the Cayman Islands to hunt for the fraudster.”

I poured another coffee from the carafe on the table, aware of fourteen eyes following my every move. Dagnabbit. I couldn’t put it off any longer.

“So,” I said. “Special Projects?”

That was my division. We took on the tasks others had decided were so difficult, so dangerous, so unusual, or so crazy that they were impossible. It was our job to make them possible. All the tasks nobody else wanted to touch flowed our way, and not just our company’s problems. Governments, corporations, and oligarchs the world over flung theirs in our direction too. And they paid our outrageous prices.

What joyous tasks were on the list today?

“We’ve been telling your prospective clients you were working on a long-term project overseas,” Nate said.

“That wasn’t entirely untrue.”

“If you count finding your sanity as a project, it’s one you’ll never finish.”

Good to see he hadn’t changed. As usual, I ignored him.

“Did they believe the story?”

“Some were suspicious, some were annoyed, but most just accepted it. The CIA was trying to track you down, from what I heard on the grapevine.”

“Doesn’t surprise me, but they didn’t do a very good job.” Lower Foxford, the English village where I’d been living with Luke, wasn’t the type of place they cultivated assets. Lower Foxfordians got their intelligence from the local pub and the Women’s Institute, and the CIA had yet to tap into those.

“Rumour has it they sent a team to Barbados.”

“Wonder which genius got that signed off?” I took a cookie from the plate in the middle of the table. Sawdust and raisin—Toby had been around. “What’s on my agenda?”

Nate stuck a bullet-pointed list up on the plasma screen. “Number one: A civilian contractor who’s gone missing from his home in Afghanistan. The investigations team out there referred it up.”

“Why can’t the local office deal with it?”

“They’ve been looking into it,” Dan said. “But he’s been gone three days and the guy’s employer, who’s picking up our bill, is getting upset we haven’t found him yet.”

“The local team’s more than competent, and they’ve probably got better contacts out there than I do. Three days is nothing for locating a hostage, if he even is a hostage. From this report, there’s no evidence he’s been kidnapped.”

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