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Detroit, Michigan, USA
29th of January, 10:08 a.m. (GMT-5)
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Martinez sat outside Leader’s office on the fourth floor of the Salt Mine, drumming her fingers against her thigh. She shifted her weight and checked her watch again. It wasn’t like Leader to be late for an appointment. The note in her in basket had said 10:00 a.m., hadn’t it? She opened her leather bag to double check.
The blond man in the navy suit sitting behind the desk looked up from the computer, making eye contact with a facial expression that boiled down to I’m sure it will only be a few more minutes. To which Martinez replied with a head tilt and neutral smile: Oh, me? I’m fine, continue with your work. Which was redundant, considering his fingers never stopped moving across the keyboard the entire time.
Martinez pulled out her phone, occupying her hands with a familiar prop. It gave her the perfect excuse to break eye contact with the square-jawed man sitting at LaSalle’s desk. She furtively eyed him in her peripheral vision.
His name was Ethan Helms, and he wasn’t normally found below ground. Up until recently, she only saw him outside the penthouse office of Angelica Zervo, CEO of Discretion Minerals—Leader’s official alias topside. By her reckoning, he’d taken over LaSalle’s duties a week ago—at least, that was when she noticed Helms had approved her latest expense report.
It was strange seeing Helms out of context, like when you run into your doctor at the grocery store in their gym clothes, but equally odd to see someone else at LaSalle’s desk. Helms seemed efficient and capable, and Martinez had no doubt about his trustworthiness: if Leader had vetted him, he was good. But he still wasn’t LaSalle.
Physically, they were quite different. Helms was average height and of slim build, in stark opposition to LaSalle’s imposing stature. It was almost comical how small Helms looked in LaSalle’s office chair. She smirked at the thought of his feet dangling behind the wooden front panel, not quite able to touch the ground in order to work at LaSalle’s desk.
Though he lacked the bulk, Martinez was not naive enough to assume Helms had no extra-secretarial skills. Lethality came in many shapes and sizes. Look at Wilson—he was a small guy and could incapacitate or kill a target without batting an eye—and Martinez would hate to be on the receiving end of a blade wielded by Liu. Martinez supposed Helms had to have some esoteric proficiency to pass as Leader’s assistant underground. At the very least, he had to know about magic: that is was real, that it bore a cost, and his boss kept watch on it.
And there was his demeanor—a hard, cold precision underneath the polite facade. Not that there was anything soft about LaSalle, but his stalwart resolve wasn’t frosty. It had allowed Martinez to slowly build up a rapport with Leader’s brick of a secretary-slash-bodyguard, something she had no desire to do with Helms.
There were notable behavioral differences that stemmed from that underlying coldness. For example, LaSalle would have spoken to her about the meeting with Leader, not left a note in her in-basket. He would have offered her something to drink if Leader was running late, which rarely happened on LaSalle’s watch. He would have addressed her if he felt establishing contact was warranted, not glance over his keyboard and down his nose at her. Calling Helms impersonal would be the polite description.
While she enumerated the ways in which Helms was not LaSalle, the rapid click-clack of his typing stopped long enough for him to answer the phone. “Discretion Minerals,” he said in an officious tone on the headset that he never took off. “This is Ms. Zervo’s direct line,” he confirmed. “This is her assistant. How can I help you?”
Martinez could see her smile in the reflection on her phone—another clue that this was temporary. Helms was still actively taking care of business above ground. That, coupled with the fact that the tight-lipped blond with the cleft chin hadn’t reorganized or changed anything at the desk in LaSalle’s absence suggested the posting wasn’t permanent. Which made her wonder where LaSalle was, what he was doing, and when he’d be back.
A string of crisp snaps pulled her attention away from her thoughts. Helms was still on the phone, diplomatically brushing off whoever was on the other end of the line. His even pitch never wavered as he flapped a hand toward Leader’s door, pantomiming that she should enter. Martinez nodded her head and collected her leather bag, drily adding to her mental list. LaSalle would never snap at anyone.
She knocked before opening the door and found the large office much the same as her previous visits. The crystalline white walls sparkled in the artificial light; they were hundreds of feet below the surface, and full spectrum bulbs were as close to natural light as one could get. The subterranean office was cut out of the vast salt deposits underneath Zug Island, and the streaks of pinks, reds, and grays from the mineral impurities gave the otherwise spartan room a touch of whimsy. The only deliberate wall art was Jan Brueghel the Elder’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony. It was a small piece that hung against a wide white wall, making it feel more like a museum display than office decoration.
The bulk of the space was allocated to filing cabinets, lined up along the back wall behind Leader’s desk. Martinez’s eye was immediately drawn to the petite woman dressed in a cream cardigan and chestnut corduroy slacks hovering between the desk and the cabinets. Her salt and pepper bob was on the long end and her flipped-up tips swayed as she put away files and retrieved new ones.
At five foot even, any other person of her stature would have been dwarfed by such a setup; Leader was only a few inches taller than the cabinets. But Leader was unlike anyone Martinez had ever met before. Her presence went well beyond the restraints of her physical person. Martinez took a deep breath before speaking. “You wanted to see me, Leader?”
Leader looked over one shoulder and a swish of her bob preceded her hawkish gaze by a millisecond. She had expected the firm knock on the office door, but not an unaccompanied agent. It was yet another small reminder that Helms was assisting her today, along with the mildly disappointing Earl Grey tea and his reflexive habit of calling her Ms. Zervo instead of Leader. She preferred to keep her worlds separate, but minor allowances had to be made in LaSalle’s absence. She quickly recovered and swept her arm toward the chairs in front of her desk. “Lancer, please come in and take a seat. I’ll be with you in just a minute.”
Martinez entered and closed the door behind her, cutting out Helms’s smooth voice mid-sentence. She hadn’t realized how soundproof Leader’s office was until that very moment; although when she really thought about it, she’d never heard LaSalle’s voice through the door before, either. While Leader’s gaze was elsewhere, Martinez quickly situated herself in an oversized chair, planting her feet solidly on the floor and putting her leather tote beside her to fill the lateral space. In terms of territorial display, it was one of confidence without being aggressive. Finally, she picked a point on the wall and anchored her focus there.
When Leader returned to her chair with files in hand, her keen gray eyes cut across Martinez. Her otherwise conscientious agent had failed to produce a green folder with red lettering from her bag. “Lancer, did you receive a mission brief this morning?”
Martinez felt the weight of the gaze and question and started to sweat a little. “No, just a note informing me of the appointment on top of the dailies,” she answered, and rifled through her bag to produce the evidence.
As Leader examined the neat print on the post-it note, Martinez felt the pressure ease a little but dared not relax. Leader pressed the buzzer on the side panel with her other hand. “Ethan, did you send Lancer the file on Lafayette?”
“Yes, Ms. Zervo,” he said automatically.
Leader raised her right brow. “To her office on the fifth floor?”
The brief sliver of silence before he answered was the only indication he’d realized his mistake. “No, Ms. Zervo. I sent it to her email.”
An email I can’t check while I’m in the Salt Mine, Martinez completed the sentence for him in her head. She kept her face still but cringed on the inside for Helms. No one wanted to come up short in Leader’s eyes.
“I appreciate the effort to go green, Ethan, but do try to remember the working parameters when you are below ground,” Leader commented neutrally.
“Yes, Ms. Zervo. My apologies. It won’t happen again,” he replied emphatically.
Leader released the button without further comment to her assistant and drily remarked, “Well, that’s one mystery solved.” The unexpected hint of sarcasm was too much for Martinez and despite her best efforts, the corners of her mouth upturned ever so slightly.
“I’m sending you to Lafayette, Louisiana,” Leader announced as she slid her file across the desk to Martinez. “Multiple missing persons case reported last Friday. Your mission is to determine if supernatural forces are responsible.”
Martinez opened the dossier and did a quick scan—a wedding gone wrong? That was far from her typical case, which usually started with a dead body. “What brought this to the Salt Mine’s attention? Did we get a tip? Or is one of the missing persons someone of interest?” She wouldn’t normally have asked questions without having first reviewed the brief, but felt she had some latitude thanks to Helms’s oversight.
“No on all counts. One of our analysts spotted it as a suspicious circumstance.” Leader sat back in her ergonomic chair and drummed her fingers together, giving Lancer the broad strokes of the incident. “Five women vanished into thin air hours before a wedding, one of which is the event coordinator at the venue and had no personal connection to the wedding party. The bridal suite and reception area were tossed over, but the police found no bodies or blood.”
“Unlikely to be a runaway bride or last minute lover’s spat,” Martinez agreed as she rifled through the images captured at the scene. She paused at the picture of the splattered cake. She had been barking mad before, but never smash-a-cake-into-the-wall mad. “Any witnesses?”
“Not of the damage, but another employee saw a man in the chapel shortly before the police were called. However, they have been unable to identify him, and his description fits no one involved with the wedding or the missing people,” Leader patiently fielded questions.
And when things don’t make sense, why not magic? Martinez thought to herself as she closed the file. “I’ll go over everything in more depth on my way south, but is there anything in here that strikes you as suggestive?”
Leader paused briefly to consider the matter. “The employee that called 911 said she heard music shortly before the screams. And the man she saw in the chapel asked for Pauline, but none of the missing women had that name.”
Martinez took a mental note of those two points as she returned the folder to the desk, trusting its duplicate was sitting in her email’s inbox. “Parameters?”
“Local law enforcement is at a loss. They haven’t found any of the women, dead or alive, and they shouldn’t protest too loudly if the FBI stepped in on this one, if you feel that is necessary,” Leader qualified.
Martinez nodded. Neither of them wanted to introduce more pretense or paperwork into the process. Her job wasn’t to find the missing women, it was to determine if something supernatural was involved and nip that in the bud. However, she liked having options.
“I’ll bring my FBI badge just in case, but with no bodies to need access to, I should be able to ascertain if there is anything of interest without it,” she stated plainly as she slipped the straps of her bag over one shoulder. “When do I fly out?”
“Ethan should have your travel and lodging arranged, but you might want to confirm that on your way out,” Leader added. And then, she sighed so softly that it was almost imperceptible. It may have been the most human thing Martinez had ever seen her indomitable employer do. As she took her leave, it brought an enigmatic smile to her face. Apparently, she wasn’t the only one on the fourth floor missing LaSalle.