Prologue

Terkel looked over at Celia. “How many rooms do we have in this place?”

She burst out laughing. “It seems like hundreds, but we will obviously need to get more bedrooms ready and the plumbing updated in some of the other wings. Still, we have plenty of room for them.”

“Besides,” Calum noted, as he looked over at them, “you wanted a big team, a team we can draw on, a team who could handle having families and being a part of this. So we definitely need to find room for them.”

At that, Cara walked into the room, her belly clearing the way in front of her.

Terkel looked at her and sighed. “Did we get any forward movement on people to help with day care?”

“Not just people to help with day care but we’ll need… probably two nurses to work full-time,” Celia replied. “Plus, we now have a new chef for the kitchen, so Mariana can relax a little more, and we hired more kitchen staff full-time as well. They’ll come back and forth, leaving us at the end of the day, which I think is better.”

“I like that too,” Terk muttered. Just then his phone rang. He looked down at the screen and frowned. “Jonas, what’s up?”

“What’s up is that I have another job,” he barked, his tone grim. “Not exactly sure if this is your thing though.”

“Even if it isn’t, that doesn’t mean we can’t do it. We just have an extra edge on the market for something like this.”

“It’s time sensitive.”

“It always is. What’s up?”

“We had an Eastern Bloc research specialist coming over to England, and she’s been kidnapped,” he stated.

“Was she moving to England?”

“She was leaving her country. She was born over here, which apparently made the decision easier for her, but her parents emigrated over to Russia, and she was raised over there. She has traveled fairly extensively throughout the world, but the Russian government decided she’s too dangerous to let out, that she knows too much, and she’s way too skilled to let the Western world have her, so we worked hard to get her free. To our dismay, she’s just been snagged out of Belgium,” he shared. “We’re still trying to get details, but I need a team, and I need a team now.”

“Got it,” Terk replied. “What doctor is this?”

“It’s not just the doctor herself. It’s her daughter as well.”

“The daughter was kidnapped? How old is she?”

“She’s twenty-six. She worked with her mother and apparently has some of the skills that you guys have. That’s another reason why the mother was trying to get her out of there because the government was starting to make noise about keeping the doctor and her daughter there for their own secret programs.”

“Of course they were,” Terkel muttered, with an ugly frown. “I need details, but I’ve already got somebody here who can go.”

“Good,” Jonas said. “Glad to hear you’re getting more people. I wouldn’t have thought you had such a large pool to draw from.”

“This is someone who contacted me a few days ago. Obviously I have to call and confirm, but that’s my problem, not yours.”

When he ended that call, he quickly dialed Reid Cocheran. When Reid answered, Terk announced, “I’ve got a job for you, Reid.”

“Good, I was getting a little bored.”

“Where are you?”

“Switzerland.”

“You’re heading for Belgium,” Terkel declared, and he mentioned the microbiologist.

“Oh hell,” Reid replied, “that’s Veni’s family.”

“Veni?”

“Yes, her name is Venialla, but she goes by Veni.”

“You already know her?” Terk asked.

“We’ve met. I belong to a large group that she was involved with in terms of psychic work,” Reid explained. “You get a large group of people who like to think they can do what we can do, but really can’t. Like me, she popped in there to see if she found any people like her. The two of us connected, but I don’t think very many others in the group were of any real value in terms of psychic skills. If I had thought there were, I would have told you about them already. So, in the meantime, she was looking to head back to the Western world again. I wasn’t sure if that would work out. I lost track of her about eight months or so ago.”

“Guess what? She resurfaced with MI6 agents who were trying to move her and her mother back to England, but now they’ve gone missing.”

“Okay, I’m on it. Send me the deets. I’m already packed up, ready to go.”