Joe and Metal had kept their faces bland because the mission was an important one with the lives of a marine battalion at stake, but they didn’t forget. It had been Joe’s immense pleasure to find the warlord’s head in his crosshairs after a double cross had cost the lives of fifteen marines. Pulling that trigger and seeing that fucker’s head explode had been one of the great pleasures of Joe’s life.

“What do we know about Isabel Lawton, besides the fact that she makes the best boeuf bourguignon I’ve ever tasted?”

“The best what?” Joe and Metal said in unison.

Felicity rolled her eyes. “The best boeuf bourguignon. Hello? What we had for lunch and which we all agreed was fabulous?”

“Oh.” Joe sat back. “The beef stew.”

Felicity rolled her eyes again. “Yeah. The beef stew.”

“Great stuff,” Metal said.

It had been. They’d practically inhaled it. The instant Joe had seen that message he’d invited Metal and Felicity over for a late lunch, making it clear that if Felicity didn’t come along, Metal wouldn’t get to eat.

It was a threat with bite. By now, getting a chance to eat whatever Isabel cooked was a fought-over privilege. Joe got points for Isabel’s cooking.

So they’d eaten and then Joe had shown Felicity the mystery message.

“Was she a chef?” Felicity mused, tapping on her laptop’s nearly invisible keyboard. The keys were barely raised and allowed Felicity’s hands to float and conjure up miracles with what looked like the merest strokes. “Have any chefs gone missing lately?” She briefly consulted a website then sat back. “No.”

For an instant Joe was distracted from the problem of someone stalking Isabel. “There’s a website for disappeared chefs?” he asked, astonished.

“No, dummy.” Felicity shook her head. “I consulted a list of notable chefs and wrote a little algorithm to check for people who were on last year’s list but not on this year’s lists. There were ten people missing but they were all men. Three had died and one is doing time.”

Joe slid his eyes to Metal. Felicity had done all that in less than a minute. “She’s scary.”

Metal grinned smugly. “That’s my girl.”

“Well, someone knows enough about Isabel to know that we see each other on a regular basis and that’s scary, too.” Joe ground his teeth.

“Does she see other people?” Metal asked.

“No.” Joe’s voice was abrupt. Issue closed.

Metal recognized that tone but Felicity didn’t. “How can you be so sure?”

The good thing about Felicity was her smarts. The bad thing about Felicity was her smarts.

“I just know,” Joe said, his tone chilly enough to get a frown from Metal.

Felicity’s head cocked as she studied him. She wasn’t afraid of him in any way, which was good but damn, Joe wished they were in the military and he could shut her down with a command.

Though it was entirely likely that if Felicity was in the military she’d be a general by now. Head of Cyber Command.

“You keep tabs on her,” Felicity said.

Joe sighed. “Yeah.” He made an impatient gesture. “It’s not like I’m stalking her or anything. She’s not in a good way and to tell you the truth, she worries me.”

There, that sounded normal and sane. Concern for a neighbor, no more no less.

“Plus, she is a fabulous cook,” Felicity said dryly.

“Yeah, there’s that too.”

“And probably beautiful, judging by the expression on your face.”

Busted. Joe sighed. “Yeah. She’s a looker.”

Metal rested his arm against Felicity’s seat back and she leaned into it, the movement so natural because she’d probably done that a thousand times.

Metal was a lucky guy. Felicity was a looker, too. Joe and Metal were old enough not to be attracted by looks alone. As a teenager, Joe’d been turned on by just about any girl who didn’t make dogs whine and cringe. The pretty ones had been like catnip. Experience had taught him the hard way that pretty features didn’t mean shit. He’d met some vain and vicious pretty women and his radar was fine-tuned for that. Felicity and Isabel didn’t ping any of his warning buttons.

Like Isabel, Felicity wasn’t vain or neurotic about her looks. She and Metal were lovers, but they were also a team. A pretty cool one, too.

The same with a lot of guys in ASI. At first, Joe had thought it was something in the water out here in Portland. A lot of the guys were in tight, solid relationships. Maybe because the two owners, John Huntington, aka Midnight, and Douglas Kowalski, known as the Senior, had fantastic marriages. Jacko was also engaged to a looker. They were crazy in love, too.

Weird, so many solid couples in one place.

“Someone knows you’re interested,” Metal said soberly. “Otherwise that message doesn’t make sense. You don’t tell someone to look after their neighbor unless you know there’s some relationship there.”

“And you don’t take high-level precautions to hide your identity,” Felicity added. She touched her magic computer. “This guy, or this woman, employed a lot of difficult tricks to hide his or her identity. It’s not just a question of an anonymizer. The person who sent the message had to take a number of steps to hide their identity, and not easy steps, either. That person had to work, and work hard, to hide from me.”

She said it without false modesty. Felicity was the best of the best and she knew it.

“Someone’s watching you,” Metal said. “No way around it.”

“Or watching Isabel.” Joe didn’t know which thought bothered him more.

“And you’re not catching it.” Metal shook his head. “I don’t buy it. You’ve got good situational awareness. You haven’t noticed anything, anything at all?”

Joe shook his head.

“Security cams,” Felicity said suddenly and both men turned to her.

“What?”

But she was too busy communing with her laptop, fingers flying over the keyboard. She sat back and turned the monitor so he and Metal could see. Joe’s eyes widened.

She had some kind of map of their street with an overlay of security cameras with their field of vision. His street with projected cones over several houses.

“Okay, these are the security cams on your street, including yours and Isabel’s. Someone has probably hacked into some of them.”

“Not mine,” Joe said heatedly.

“No,” Felicity said softly. “I set yours up myself and they are not hackable.”

“And I set up Isabel’s system using your equipment and software.” So nobody had hacked his vidcam system or Isabel’s.

“What about the vidcams in the neighborhood,” he asked. “Are they hackable?”

Felicity had kept up the computer patter, fingers flying. “Oh, yeah,” she said and turned the monitor toward him. He and Metal bent forward.

And shit. Sure enough, there was his front doorstep, front and center of the camera view of his neighbor across the street, Edward Crawford, a retired doctor. Isabel’s doorstep was at the edge, barely visible. But when she walked down the small paved path to her gate, she’d be visible.

Felicity scrolled, from vidcam to vidcam, and he got a choppy view of his side of the street down to the park, where security vidcams took over.

“Are these vidcams hackable by someone who’s not you?” he asked.

“Oh yeah,” Felicity said. “You’d need a little nimbleness and savvy but they are hackable. You don’t have to be me to do it.”

Again, she said that without false pride. She knew how good she was.

Joe swallowed. “Have they been hacked?”

Felicity frowned. “Now, that I can’t say. Because I’m assuming that whoever is doing this is pretty good. Good enough to cover his traces.” She gave a half smile. “Or her traces. I’m assuming it’s a guy, though.”

“Yeah.”

“You still have that same email address? You didn’t change it to Joe.Harris123 did you?”

Felicity had a thing with passwords and email addresses. All of her passwords were created using a randomizer—and she remembered them all—and her email address was impossible to guess.