Chapter 1

"I'm new here," the blonde said. She sat the head of the conference table.

I hated meetings; I hated standing room meetings more. I would have gladly given up my seat, but the senior members of management in attendance knew that letting me stand near the door was implicit permission to leave as soon as I got bored. In those days, meetings bored me quickly! Since those senior members put the most work in my queue, it was telling that each one met my eyes as they walked into the conference room. The meeting invite had not been informative, but the titles in the room made me sigh. Too many different departments for the guy (ME!) who best understood how they bridged together on a technological level to be left out of the handholding phase of a project.

"Let's go around the room and introduce ourselves," the blonde suggested with some steel in her voice.

I sighed loudly. I disliked project managers who didn't understand they managed projects ... not me.

"Don't!" Kameron whispered from my left.

The blonde shot me a corporately correct annoyed look. She put her pen on the pad in front of her and stared at me. Clearly, she intended me to understand that she would be taking note of my name. I pushed my chair back and looked at the ceiling. I might have taken a catnap because the next thing I knew Kameron was speaking.

"Kameron Chong," she said. "I work for the Finance Department in Customer Risk Management."

Before her best friend dumped me, Kameron explained to me that her job was going through the financials of potential deals from the view of getting new clients and keeping them on board.

"Pulna Patel," Kameron's boss said from the other side of me. "Director of Risk Management."

"Wait!" the blonde said. "And you are?"

I kept staring at the ceiling tiles. I didn't do names in meetings! People felt that knowing my name meant they could ask me to do their job for them.

"Excuse me!" she raised her voice. "In between Kameron and Pulna. Who are you?"

I turned my head to look at Kameron, who tried to contain a smile. In a moment of male stupidity, I told my ex-girlfriend that Kameron was hands-down the most attractive woman in the company. Melissa, my ex, worked in the same company! Strictly speaking, Kameron wasn't my type. I preferred short, athletic, light-eyed, straight-haired blondes. Kameron was taller than me by a couple inches, had brown eyes, a latte shade to her skin, and a fabulous wealth of nearly curly brown hair. I couldn't complain about Kameron being in the elegantly built category of females rather than athletic.

"Sir," the blonde said. "You're being rude."

She must have stepped on a few toes in her short tenure. People generally tried to keep new employees away from me. When someone pissed me off, I had a tendency to ignore his or her entire department for days.

"I don't do names," I told her.

"You need to do names," she insisted. I didn't like her tone of voice! From the way, the managers and directors looked away I got the message someone expected me to be myself so she'd learn a lesson.

"If I tell you my name, you'll think you know me," I said. "So when you have whatever little problems come up in whatever job you were hired to do, you'll email me to solve them. Considering your tone of voice, you're going to think it should be my highest priority even after you know that your boss's boss's boss sends me similar requests."

Somebody made a mistake in hiring the blonde! Her face turned a variety of red shades. She pushed her chair back and stood up. I smiled--raising your voice at me was direct permission to leave a meeting.

"His name is Michael Jones," the C.E.O. of the company said as he stepped into the room. He put his cell phone away and patted the back of the blonde's chair. She jumped away to let him sit down. "Please don't email him until ... you'll know when you can email him, Elizabeth. If you don't wait, he'll send your boss, me, an email saying 'Make her go away'. I'd prefer not to receive that email!"

Wow! What the fuck had Miss Blonde done? She glared at me. Oh! One of those! Obviously, she held me responsible for looking bad in front of everyone who mattered in the company.

Her boss? Not her boss's boss's boss. Her direct upstream report!

"I'm serious!" the C.E.O. said staring at her.

I studied the senior management members. Obviously, the blonde would be in charge of whatever project we were there to discuss and far too many Senior VPs and C-ofs sat in the room for it not to be MAJOR.

I was wrong--Blondie probably hadn't stepped on any toes, instead I'd been used to send a message. But what message? Although, it was not nice to know my actions could be so easily predicted.

"If you speak about the following information before we package it properly for the media, you will be fired," the C.E.O. told everyone in the room. "Am I understood?"

We nodded.

He stood up and directed the blonde to the chair. She arranged her items back to their proper place. Her eyes met mine with absolutely no sign of the recrimination that had been in them before. Smart and flexible--ooh, la la!

"We've been awarded a Department of Procreation contract," the blonde announced.

It answered all the questions! The DOP might as well have been given their own money-printing press.

"What's her name?" I asked Kameron. "I wasn't paying attention."

"Elizabeth Dare," she replied.

To project manage a DOP contract, Miss Dare's qualifications had to be stellar.

"How much?" I asked, cutting through the excitement in the room.

Miss Dare's eyebrows went up. "We're going to be responsible for tracking the DOP Erotic Mind Control Positives' movements around the country."

"We prefer mapping," a young woman said from beside the door. Brows furrowed around the room. Most of us hadn't seen her walk in so she must have been behind our CEO.

Nodding, Miss Dare continued, "Mapping the movements of DOP EMC-Positives and correlating it to a large number of statistics from around the country."

"To what purpose?" I asked.

The young woman stared at me. Miss Dare's eyes expressed a depth of curiosity as she looked at me. Very flexible!

"Don't bother," I said dismissively. "If you know statistically what an area with a DOP Positive looks like, you'll be able to match it to other areas and find Positives who haven't come into the fold. It's going to take a lot of crunching. Other than birth rates, there's no key identifier. More importantly, a DOP Positive willfully acts to raise the birth rate in an area from zero even if he or she is only passing through. An unaffiliated Positive may not have that affect but other information may lead you to them!"

The young woman raised an eyebrow at me. Miss Dare looked from the woman to me.

"At the contract signing, the DOP made a billion dollars available to us," Miss Dare told me.

I walked out of the meeting. They brought in Elizabeth Dare to do the people and time managing. If they didn't bring in outside technical resources, it meant the decision had already been made to drop the entire environment in my lap and build the group only after establishing a strong, internal foundation.

The message had been for both of us! Miss Dare and I were going to have to learn to work together.

I walked the loop around the company campus when I needed to think. Someone told me it was a mile and half, so two laps around was an easy cardio session during warm months.

I didn't need to think; I needed to blow off some steam. Melissa left me with a bad taste for bullshit games. Someone could have told me they were going to drop a billion dollar project in my lap! They didn't have to let two trains collide so they'd cancel each other's momentum out.

I ran the billing systems for the company. I had intimate knowledge of the various data content and structures because my function pointed externally and internally. In two and half years in my role, we absorbed a number of smaller companies. The takeovers came fast; too many people wanted to keep or grow their slice of the pie for a single technology umbrella. Billing touched everything in the company! I was one of a handful of people who knew how things worked, worked together, were related, and could be made to relate. Incredibly, I might have been the most friendly of the bunch. My life consisted of the gym and my job so I spent most nights and weekends solving a problem or answering some very complicated data questions for someone in the company.