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Metal answered his cell with one hand while holding on to Felicity’s waist with the other.

“Metal.” Midnight.

“Sir.”

“Come in to HQ. We have airport footage.” Metal felt a savage rush of pleasure course through his system. Footage. Footage meant a visual. A visual meant step one in catching the fucker who’d hurt Felicity.

“There in twenty, sir.”

“Wait.” He heard what sounded like a growl at the other end of the line. “It’s snowing, Metal. I want you and Ms. Ward there in one piece. There’s no ticking bomb on this. Drive like someone normal.”

“Normal?” Metal asked philosophically. “What’s normal? Psychologists say—” but he was talking to air. Midnight had hung up.

“So what’s up?” she asked, picking out an outfit from the clothes Lauren had brought over.

Metal watched with sorrow as Felicity dressed, covering up that lovely body. But they had to go out and she had to be dressed to do that. He observed her carefully as he helped her put on a turquoise sweater and black pants. Her movements were smooth and seemed pain-free.

Lauren had packed several changes of clothes in the suitcase. The two were more or less the same size, except Felicity was perhaps two inches taller. The clothes fit. She looked like a million dollars.

Even better, she dressed without wincing once.

“We have to go into my company’s headquarters. My bosses will be there and I think Jacko will be there, too. We’ve got that footage from the airport—legally—and we’re hoping you can pick the guy out.”

“There will be hospital footage too,” she said, pulling all that long, lovely blonde hair up in a ponytail. She looked like a college student just out of high school. Fresh and bright and shiny. And determined.

Miles away from the wounded, panicked woman who’d fallen through Lauren’s door. This was a woman worth saving. Worth protecting. Nobody would ever hurt her again. He was a warrior and he worked for a company of warriors. Together with his team at ASI they were going to find this guy, figure out what he wanted and either waste him or hand him over to the cops.

Metal would rather just waste the fuck, but Bud might not approve.

“I don’t think they’ve got the hospital footage yet. We’ll go with what we’ve got and start to track this fu—this guy down.”

She gave him a funny look then put on the coat Lauren had brought over. Her own coat was bloody and torn. Metal frowned. The coat was pretty but looked thin. “You going to be okay with that coat? Doesn’t look too warm to me. It’s snowing outside.”

She smiled. “I’m 100% Russian. Snow is my natural habitat. I’d die in Texas or Florida.”

Well, maybe. But Metal reached into the hall closet and pulled out a long black scarf, sniffing it surreptitiously. It passed the sniff test so he wrapped it around her neck about ten times then tied the ends together. He stepped back to admire his handiwork and kissed her on the nose. “You look fabulous.”

“Thanks Dad.” She scrunched her nose up at him. “I’m not sure I can move. I feel like Ironman in his suit.”

Metal frowned at her. Something was missing. “Gloves! God I hope Lauren included gloves in her care package.” He rummaged around and found a pair of cashmere lined black leather gloves. Bless Lauren. “None of my gloves would even remotely fit you.”

He put them on Felicity himself and it pleased him on some deep and complicated level that he was making sure she would be warm and comfortable on their way to finding and wasting the fuckhead who’d attacked her.

But she needed to be not just warm and comfortable. She needed to be unrecognizable.

He dressed for the outdoors then grabbed her by the shoulders. She realized this was serious by the expression on his face. “Metal?”

“This is the way it’s going to work.” He pulled a fold of the scarf up over her mouth and nose and put on a black wool watch cap, completely covering her hair and pulling it down to her eyebrows. He grunted with satisfaction. Only her eyes showed and he put a pair of his winter goggles on her. Nothing of her face or body was identifiable. Even a full face photograph wouldn’t help anyone in identifying her. “From the moment you step outside my house to when we are inside my headquarters, you are going to have the scarf around your lower face and the watch cap pulled down over your forehead and you are going to wear those goggles. It’s going to be uncomfortable in my SUV. Are you okay with that?”

Her gaze was steady. “Of course.”

His heart swelled. His scarf was itchy and though it passed the sniff test it sure didn’t smell like roses. Ditto the watch cap. She was going to be uncomfortable the entire way but she wasn’t complaining in any way.

“Jacko’s more paranoid than I am. He’s got this film he found on the internet, he coated the windows of his vehicle with it. It’s perfectly transparent to the naked eye from inside the vehicle. From the outside looking in, you look a little indistinct. But the great thing is that the windows are impenetrable to cameras. I have no idea how it works but I do know it works.”

“Probably it induces pixilation,” Felicity said. “Pretty neat.”

“Well, that film is going on to the windows of my SUV and the house as soon as I can manage it. In the meantime—" he pointed his finger at his scarf and the cap, “you’re going to have to make with the improvised burqa. Sorry.”

“It’s in a good cause.” She took his hand and his heart swelled again. She shouldered her laptop backpack and turned to the door. “Let’s go.”

Felicity had no idea what to expect on reaching Alpha Security International, where Metal and Jacko worked. She knew it was a security company of course. The ‘Security’ in the title was clear. They declared upfront exactly what they were. Totally unlike most IT companies that made a point of hiding what they did in the title. They had fun in muddying the waters, calling their company Xanadu or Purple Hat or EonWorks.

She had an idea of what a security company did, of course. God knows she’d been around enough US Marshals and FBI agents.

Security companies provided security and the people who worked there were no nonsense people and she imagined they worked in no nonsense surroundings.

Boy, was she wrong about ASI.

When Metal drove them through gates set in eight foot concrete walls in what looked like a rough part of town she was expecting industrial flooring and the smell of sweat and ozone. Not that different from a startup IT company. Maybe without the lollipops in big glass jars.

Metal himself had undergone a metamorphosis from really nice sexy teddy bear to badass Captain America the instant they walked out his door. Some kind of switch in his head had flipped and he was like a robot that had 360° situational awareness and was absolutely ready for anything. She’d watched without saying anything while he put on a shoulder holster under his parka. Driving, he constantly checked rear view mirror, side view mirrors and out both windows in a regular pattern. It would have been absolutely impossible for anyone to take them by surprise. He was silent as they drove which didn’t surprise her. It was snowing and if she drove in this kind of weather while watching out for bad guys she’d be in a nervous sweat.

Metal relaxed marginally once they were inside what turned out to be a compound.

As soon as the gates rolled back together behind them, and Metal helped her down from his vehicle which wouldn’t have been out of place patrolling in Iraq during the war, they entered coolly elegant and perfumed premises, about a billion miles from what she’d been expecting.

There was a long corridor with terracotta tiling and terracotta sconces, lined with huge enameled planters full of thriving plants interspersed with lemon trees. As someone with a black thumb, Felicity appreciated what it took to keep plants alive. There were several doors along the corridor but Metal went straight for the central door on the left hand side.

A discreet brass plaque was to the right with ASI in black italics. Metal didn’t knock or do anything. The door slid open of its own accord as soon as they were close, which was pretty neat. Had they simply been following the video cameras from inside or was it a facial recognition program?

She was running through what kind of software would be necessary for a facial recognition program for a company that had a wide clientele when she stepped through and barely stopped from gasping.

The lobby looked like a movie set for a sci fi film, Minority Report maybe. Deep earth tones with neutral accents, dark wood and brass, a smooth flow to the furniture, so that it took a moment to realize this was business premises. The actual reception area was such an integral part of the look that she started when someone behind a space-agey desk stood. It was a young guy, very fit, friendly-looking.

“Hey Metal,” he said, “both bosses are waiting in the main office.” He nodded at her. “Ma’am.”

“Great, thanks Ron.” Metal had his hand at her back and escorted her through three sets of glass doors then stood for an instant in front of a big smooth wooden door with no insignia until it too slid open.

The main office was vast and that amazing décor continued here, too, though the look had been melded with utility. High end monitors everywhere and the familiar ozoney smell of electronics. The room was colder than the rest of the building. Of course. There must have been at least $500,000 worth of electronics in that room and they had to be kept cool.

“Felicity!” Lauren jumped up from a chair in the immense room and ran to her and hugged her. “I’m so glad you see you looking so well! So I guess Metal’s been taking good care of you, huh?”

The tone was warm, caring, absolutely not suggestive but Felicity lit up like a stoplight at the memory of Metal’s tender loving care. Lauren held her shoulders and stepped back, eyes widening at Felicity’s super blush.

“Oh.” Lauren blinked. “Oh!” Her eyes rounded and her jaw dropped. She whirled to Jacko but he was busy conferring with two older guys. They both had ‘boss’ stamped on their foreheads in invisible ink.

One handsome, one ugly, both scary-looking. Definitely guys you wanted on your side. Felicity hoped with all her heart that they were on her side. Jacko was on her side because of Lauren and Metal was definitely on her side because…well.

But these two?

Her heart was beating a little faster. These guys could help or not. She’d called in a bomb alert in a major airport and she’d stolen an ambulance. Who knew how they’d react to that?

Well, maybe she could soften them up with her thank you gift.

“Honey.” Metal bent low and murmured in her ear, exerting a little pressure to the small of her back with his huge hand. He hadn’t stopped touching her since their arrival through the back entrance of his work premises. Even now, he stood so close behind her she could feel his body heat. Living reassurance.

Felicity would have thought that he would want to keep things discreet, for professional reasons, and was perfectly prepared to have him treat her like a stranger. But no. His entire body language proclaimed that they were a couple.

The two scary guys behind two huge desks stood up, walked around to her. “John Huntington,” the good looking scary guy said and shook her hand gently.

“Douglas Kowalski,” the ugly, scarred scary guy said and, alarmingly, held out his hand. Felicity looked at it for a second. It was huge, scarred like his face, raised veins on the back. She needed her hands for keyboarding. If he squeezed her hand it would take a month to get the hand back to normal.

But he, too, held her hand in a gentle grip for a few seconds then gave it back to her.

“Nice to meet you,” she said to both. They were really hard to read, not that she was an expert in male psychology. Or even female psychology for that matter.

Still, most people either wore their emotions on their face or it was clear they were hiding something. Not Huntington and Kowalski. Their faces simply gave absolutely nothing away.

There was a silence that would have been awkward if anyone showed awkwardness, but no one did. Except for her. She was cringing inside.

“So, um.” She fidgeted, met Lauren’s eyes. Lauren gave her a sweet smile. Okay. “I, um, I understand that you have footage for me to go over. More than that, I, um, I understand, or rather Metal told me that, um, you guys are willing to help me.” Her voice went up, as if it were a question, even though Metal had made it clear that this wasn’t in doubt. The entire resources of his company, and apparently they were considerable, were going to be used to help her figure out why she’d been attacked and above all, to track the man down and bring him to justice. And it was all free of charge. She was a hacker and she often worked free, like all hackers, but more for the thrill of a new problem than anything else. This wasn’t a new problem, this was the oldest problem on earth. A woman in trouble.

“That’s right, Ms. Ward,” the ugly one—Douglas—said. “We’re here to help and we’re going to be zooming with a close friend who works at the Portland PD. So why don’t you sit down and we can get started.”

She hoped with all her heart that the Portland PD guy didn’t want to slap handcuffs on her.

“I’d say I don’t know how to thank you—” she held up her hand when both John and Douglas opened their mouths. “But actually, I do.”

Felicity handed John a flash drive. He took it, looked it over curiously, handed it over to Douglas, who looked it over carefully too.

Felicity pointed to the drive. “That’s a little program I wrote.” Actually, it was a great program and worth a lot of money if she wanted to monetize it, which she didn’t. “Do you guys have an IT tech you trust? One who is really good?”

John nodded. “We outsource our IT. We use Rajiv Anand of Xtec.”

That lobe in her head where geekhood reigned lit up like a Christmas tree. “Oh great! He is really really good. So…I just gave you a security program. Tell him I will buy him a vintage 1977 Pacman machine in pristine condition if he can break into it. If he can’t, then that program is yours. And your in-house computer security will be completely impenetrable.”

The two men looked at each other, then Douglas left the room with the flash drive.

“So, Ms. Ward?—”

“Felicity, please.” Felicity was her name of the heart. The name she’d chosen for herself. Ward had been picked by the government computers.

“And I’m John and the guy who just left is Douglas.”

John nodded soberly. He was really quite handsome if you overlooked the fact that he could probably kill you with his pinkie and he looked like a pirate with good teeth. Of course Metal could probably kill you with his pinkie, too. She leaned back a little and smiled inwardly to feel his solid bulk behind her.

He didn’t want to kill her with his pinkie.

“Felicity.” John swept Metal and Jacko with his glance. “Let’s look at the footage from the airport. It just arrived and we got it only through a friend of a friend. They are still really pissed at the false bomb alert.”

She froze just as she started sitting down in front of a monitor and keyboard. Three men were looking at her. Lauren had disappeared somewhere. “Uh. Sorry. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.”

“Oh!” John scowled. “Good God, don’t misunderstand me. That was really quick thinking. I wasn’t blaming you, I was just saying why it took us a while to get the footage. Actually you were amazingly quick-witted. You saved your life. That’s worth a little chaos at the airport. So let’s look at it. We’re expecting the hospital footage any moment.”

Any moment? If she hadn’t been recovering and, um, otherwise engaged with Metal, she’d have had that footage yesterday.

The screen in front of her – all 60 inches of it – came alive and the three men leaned forward. The screen was split into six sections, obviously the six security cameras that had been on in the concourse. The footage was dated and timed. Three days ago at 3:20 pm. Her flight had landed at 3:05. The screen was chaotic, a sea of bobbing heads. It was impossible to make out faces.

“Wait a second,” she said. “Can I enter your system?”

John nodded.

Felicity took a quick snapshot of herself full face with the screen’s camera, entered the code for her super secure cloud server and pulled out her facial recognition software. The software took the coordinates of her facial features, made a dataprint, matched it against the images from the concourse and isolated her face in the crowd. A faint pink square highlighted her face as she moved so she couldn’t be lost again.

She checked her second hand. The whole process had taken twenty seconds. Not bad. Not great but not bad.

There was a weird quality to the silence and she swiveled left and right. “What?”

Metal cleared his throat. “We, uh, we don’t have facial recognition software.”

Well, duh . “I know, I checked. So I used mine.” She focused back on the screen.

Okay, there she was, before the world crashed down on her. She was smiling as she moved past the purse shop, the shoe shop, the cosmetics shop. Oh man. The emotions swept over her. She’d felt so free. So light and hopeful. She’d even felt…young. Young and carefree and about to embark on a visit to a new city with a new friend. And minutes later, the whole thing crashed.

“Sorry to interrupt but—” John took a deep breath. “You, ah, checked our computer system for facial recognition software?”

Well, yeah . She’d said that, hadn’t she? Felicity nodded.

“So when did you do that?” There was a slightly choked quality to his voice.

“When I sat down.” All three of them looked at her as if she had suddenly been beamed into the chair from space, à la Star Trek. “What? I did a quick check of your system. Facial recognition software has distinct features and your system didn’t have them. So I pulled my own program, loaded it and searched. Don’t worry, I’ll remove the program later, unless you want me to leave it in?”

Silence.

“Okay guys, this is creepy. What’s wrong?”

Metal put a big hand on her shoulder, squeezed gently. “I think we’re in awe of what you just did. It would have taken me an entire morning to check to see if a system had a specific program, then finding my own, loading it and doing a search. If I could do it at all. You did it in seconds.”

There was a strangled quality to his voice, too.

She was about to answer when she saw him! Oh God, a shudder went through her as she remembered her happiness, then this man behind her with the guttural voice, threatening her. Wanting to kidnap her.

She froze the video, feeling that panic and terror all over again.

Metal was talking to Jacko, something about the hospital footage. Her voice wasn’t working so she grabbed his hand. She was shaking.

Metal stopped talking immediately, placed her cold hand between his two warm ones. “Honey? Honey, what’s wrong?”

She couldn’t catch her breath. All she could do was place the locator box around the man’s head and point.

All three men understood immediately, leaning forward.

“That the guy?” Metal said. It wasn’t really a question. He tapped the screen over her attacker’s head and the screen zoomed. “He’s threatening you right now, isn’t he?”

She nodded. She could almost feel the sharp bite of the knife in her side.

Metal’s nose was practically pressed against the screen, eyes narrowed, a fierce expression on his face. “Enlarge the frame again.”

She pressed a key and there he was, three quarters profile, hat low over his eyes. This was going to be a problem because eyes were important to a faceprint, which measured the exact distance between pupils, the vertical distance between forehead and cheekbones, depth of eye sockets. Nodal points, measurable and indispensable.

“Gotcha,” Metal whispered.

“Not quite.” Felicity’s hands left the keyboard and twisted together in her lap. Her hands were shaking and she didn’t want anyone to see. “I don’t think I’m going to have enough data points for a face print, not unless he looks up. But I think he knew what he was doing with that hat. Let’s watch the footage in real time and see if his face shows up more clearly. Then we’ll go through that sector frame by frame.”

The three men grunted, eyes glued to the screen.

So she watched it all over again, living it all over again. Hands trembling as she watched a man try to kidnap her.

She saw herself pull away, stumble because she’d been sliced. Moving fast through the crowd, disappearing into the bathroom. A few minutes later the bomb alert. She’d been in the bathroom so she hadn’t seen this. There was no sound. One minute the concours was filled with passengers walking, shopping, eating, talking. Then everyone froze to listen to the announcement and at the exact same moment, like starlings in flight, mouths opened in silent screams and they started rushing the exits. The only people who remained still were foreigners, who were watching everyone go crazy. Instant panic, as if someone had stirred a stick in an anthill.

“Go over the attack again, but start earlier, and track both faces,” Metal said and she clicked back.

They watched on two screens from two different angles. She saw herself walk through the doors into the arrivals area together with most of the other passengers on her flight.

“See that?” Metal pointed. Her attacker walked into the airport from outside, shaking snow off his coat. They tracked him as he made a beeline for the exit she came through. He positioned himself to one side, carefully watching the passengers enter the concours. Only this time her face and the attacker’s face were outlined. As she watched herself bebopping down the concours like a puppy let off the leash, he followed. “He knew everything,” Metal said.

“Timed it just right, too.” John frowned. “Didn’t spend a moment more than he had to in the airport in full view of the security cams. So he knew what flight she was on and timed it to be there when she exited.” He turned to Felicity. “Was your flight on time?”

“No, it was twenty minutes late. Pilot said he ran into headwinds.”

“You didn’t have a suitcase with you so you didn’t check any luggage.”

“No. I just had my carryon. When we landed I walked straight out of the plane and to the exit.”

“Do you think he could have hacked into the system to see if the plane was late?” Metal asked her.

Felicity snorted. A chipmunk could have hacked into the system to see if the plane was late, let alone a human with half a brain.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” Metal was biting his lips as if holding back a smile. “So what we know is that your attacker didn’t spend an extra second getting himself to where he could cross your path. He knew your flight was late so waited somewhere outside. He was smooth and efficient and wasn’t hanging around getting himself noticed. Which means he had intel on you.”

This was sort of scary. She nodded.