piercing blue eyes he’d ever seen. A skirt of alternating black and white billowed around her as she swept around the desk, holding out her hand to him.
“Agent Ryder, it’s good to see you,” she said, her voice throaty and melodic.
“It’s a pleasure, Director Harrison.”
He took her hand, unsurprised to find his dwarfed her own. It was a little strange, finding so small a woman, dressed in a loose flowing blouse and skirt, in so stark and hard a building. Her grip was strong, and her voice was both steady and in control. She bore the veneer of a soft and gentle woman, but in just a few moments of interaction, he thought he would find a rod of unrelenting steel in her soul.
“Have a seat,” she said, motioning to a chair across from her desk. “As much as I would like to exchange pleasantries, I’m afraid I have other obligations I need to attend to.”
“Forty hours of work to shove into twenty-four?” He guessed as he took the indicated seat.
“Something like that, and perhaps a little more,” Harrison said as she sat down behind the desk smoothly.
“Can’t say I know much about that lately,” he grunted.
She flashed him a smile, plucking her tablet up and tapping away furiously. “Yes, you’ve been on medical leave for quite some time. Based on your record, I’m sure two months of nothing to do has driven you to near insanity.”
“That’s...one way of putting it. Doing nothing isn’t my specialty.”
“Let’s see, six years in the Army. In the middle of your deployment, when you were brought to us,” she recited.
That was definitely one way of putting it. What should have been a routine sweep through a formerly deserted outpost had become a disaster almost as soon as Jacob and his platoon had entered. It was the first exposure he’d ever had to something outside what he’d been taught to accept as truth.
“Telekinetic,” he told her with a shrug. “One that apparently had slipped his leash and decided to use the Middle East as his personal playground. And my men were the next on his list of things to play with.”
Harrison chuckled humorlessly. “You weren’t brought to us because you saw a man move objects with his will. You were brought to us because of how you reacted to it.”
A telekinetic might be absolutely terrifying, especially when they were at the level the crazed man had been. Jacob still had no idea what the guy’s name was, but he had watched how easy, both in skill and intent, it had been for the man to rip apart living people and laugh. That had also been his first exposure to how a bullet to the brain could stop a psychic as quickly as it did ordinary people.
“Adaptable. Calm under fire,” she recited without a hint of irony. “And you were willing to believe what you saw without screaming it up and down to anyone who would listen.”
Jacob cocked his head. “Not that I mind being praised by my superior, but what’s the point of this assessment?”
Harrison’s eyes twinkled. “Straight to the point, good. It’s your adaptability that I’m most interested in, Agent Ryder. You’ve been working on our strike teams for the best part of three years and have proven to be an effective follower and leader. That sort of malleability is what we notice around here.”
Jacob waited, sensing there was more to come. If there was one thing he’d learned about people in charge, no matter how no-nonsense they might be, there was always a speech lurking somewhere.
She motioned to the air around her. “The DDI needs people able to swoop in and grab or contain an incident, but they also need people who are willing to undertake less immediate action as well. The job you’ve been doing for the past few years has been the equivalent of emergency surgery. In other words, what has to happen when something has already gone to hell. Most of the work we do here in the DDI is formed around the idea of stopping a problem before it becomes one.”
Jacob blinked. “You’re...reassigning me.”
“We’re testing you.”
“Well, that’s blunt.”
She smiled. “I imagine you find that refreshing. If the assessments of you are any indication, that is.”
True, but bluntness wasn’t something he was used to from the DDI either. He knew his place and his role, and that was enough for him to deal with the secrets. If he was being shunted around, he wasn’t quite sure where he stood anymore.
“What