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“Which is why I didn’t take them up on it.”
Philip turned to Merlin. “I’ve heard about what they make their employees go through to ensure their loyalty.”
“Like what?” I demanded.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Yes, I do, considering that they’ve approached me, and this may be our chance to infiltrate them.”
“They make you betray someone you care about, and they’d probably make you turn on this company and the people in it. Instead of you infiltrating them so you could defend MSI, you might be the weapon they used to bring down the company. That’s probably why they approached you.”
I could feel myself go pale. “Okay, then, losing the card. But we need a plan B, and we need to find all those missing people. If they’re frogs, how will they survive in this weather?”
Philip shivered. “I am fortunate that I was enchanted in the summer. By the time winter arrived, my frog instincts were strong enough that I knew what to do. Someone enchanted in cold weather would be unlikely to find shelter before perishing.”
I was just about to ask Minerva if she’d come up with anything when she said, “My people haven’t been able to verify the whereabouts of anyone on the list. Several of them are definitely still alive, but I can’t determine where or what state they might be in. We can try again in summer, in case they’re frogs, and then we may be able to get a bearing on them so we can break the spell without having to kiss every frog in the city.”
I felt so helpless, but there was little we could do right now. The halls of the sales department were awfully empty when I headed to my office, but that could have just been the first day back after the holidays. I shook my head. This whole thing was making me paranoid. Nothing much had changed in the company, but knowing there were people from a secret group there made it feel different.
Rod came to my office in the middle of the afternoon. I could tell who it was even before he spoke by the way Perdita’s tone changed. Rod was what might best be described as unique-looking—not conventionally handsome, but if he made the most of his features and was smiling, he was striking in his own way. He had a habit of using an illusion to make himself more handsome, and while he’d mostly stopped using it in his social life, he didn’t want to give it up at work because then people might not recognize him. As a result, my assistant was swooning over what she saw as movie-idol looks.
“It’s okay, Perdita, you can send him in,” I called out.
Rod entered my office, shut the door behind him, and performed a privacy spell on the room. “I’m sure we can trust Perdita,” I told him as he finished the spell.
“I’m not taking any chances,” he said, his eyes grim.
That got my attention. “Whoa, what is it?”
He sat in the guest chair in front of my desk and handed me a sheet of paper. “The list of people who didn’t show up today. None of these people are on approved vacation, none called in sick, and we haven’t had any response when calling to check on them.”
There were perhaps a dozen names on the list. I recognized several from Sales. “Is that unusual?”
“For the first day after a holiday? Not entirely. It’s a bit higher than I would have expected, but I wouldn’t have been all that alarmed if I hadn’t known to be looking for anything. However, we crossed a number of names off the list we started with when we called around. That was the usual amount. There were some travel snags, oversleeping, illness.” He pointed to the list. “These are the ones you might say have disappeared. But that’s not all.”
“Do tell.”
“I cross-referenced these names with our list of Collegium associates, and they’re mostly immediate supervisors of Collegium-related employees.”
“Oh boy,” I said. “That should suggest that where you didn’t find that relationship, it might involve someone we don’t know about who was hired during your tenure.”
“Yeah, but that’s a little harder to track, since there are a lot of employees under each supervisor, and it could be any one of them.”
“So they’re getting people out of the way to move their plants up into critical positions. It sounds like they’re definitely making a move,” I said. “We need to do something.”
“But not you taking a job with them.”
“No, of course not.” But I couldn’t help considering it, since it wasn’t as though we had many other options. “What do you plan to do?”
“It’s not up to me who gets promoted in each department, but I’m going to try to swing it so that as few as possible of the Collegium people get promoted into the empty slots. We have to let some in, or else it will be obvious that we’re on to them.”
“I just wish we knew what they were up to.” I ran my fingers through my hair around my templ
es, then realized that was Owen’s customary gesture of frustration combined with deep thought. We weren’t even married yet, and I was already turning into him. “Maybe Kim will get some nibbles now that the holidays are over,” I said, grasping at straws. “Since we pretended to fire her, they wouldn’t ask her for loyalty tests against us, would they?”
“I have no idea how they work. But even if she got in, I wouldn’t expect overnight miracles. No one’s going to get in close enough to learn anything major. Those mafia undercover operations spanned years.”
“Then is there a way to magically bug them? That’s the other way the FBI went up against the mob.”
