From the sidewalk, Ms. Mettouchi's offices looked more like a large house than a high-tech startup. Possibly, the building had begun its life as such. But either way, it was clear that so much real estate would fetch a fortune in the San Francisco market.

After passing through an open metal gate into the yard, Tommy let himself in the main door, which was propped open. The entryway beyond was remarkably large and broad, almost like a small ballroom. Straight ahead, there was the top of a blonde head at work behind a receptionist's station cut from fashionable blonde wood. The blonde head popped up but seemed not to notice him. At that same time, a thin male in tight shorts was hoisting a bike onto a hanging rack to the right of the door. In the near distance, three or four people talked amid the clatter of at least two keyboards. The workday was underway.

After a scant few seconds, a shortish woman in blue jeans, sandals, and a black sleeveless blouse appeared from a doorway on the left and made a beeline for him. There was a cup of coffee and some papers in her left hand, and she smiled broadly and gawked openly at his face as she approached. When the woman reached him, she raised her right hand and gave his nose a gentle squeeze with her thumb and all four fingers.

"Fucking amazing," she said just above a whisper. It was clear she realized who he was.

"Now, how do you know I'm not the DHL guy?"

"You are absolutely not the DHL guy," she said aloud, barely holding back laughter. "Unless at this very moment I'm having my favorite porn dream again."

Both broke out laughing. The woman he assumed to be Ms. Mettouchi motioned him to follow in the direction from which she'd come.

"Claudia! I am not to be disturbed, no matter what," she called loudly, at no particular person, as they entered an even larger room around which stretched a long circular staircase.

A handsome woman with just a trace of an accent hollered her assent. Glancing over her shoulder, the accented woman caught sight of Tommy and did a rapid triple take. Suddenly, the room was quiet, and each of the five pair of eyes in the large office focused on Tommy and his companion as they walked up the staircase to the second floor.

"Get your minds out of the gutter and get back to work," the woman above him bellowed, without breaking stride.

The room to which she led him was a large space, with a high ceiling, that may have been a master bedroom at one point. It had become clear that his original guess was correct. The building once had been a mansion of some splendor, and it was equally obvious that Philly resided there in addition to using it for work.

The room's décor was interesting. The walls were lined in high bookshelves, and the center of the room was occupied by a heavy, L-shaped oak desk, with a single comfortable-looking chair on either side. To the right of the desk was a stand that held six large computer monitors, two high and three wide. There was an enormous leather couch just inside the door to the left. The room otherwise was sparsely furnished.

Tommy took a seat in the visitor's chair. He'd already decided on Ms. Mettouchi. It wasn't a Gift, per se, but the years had taught him to be a quick and shrewd judge of character, a subject upon which he almost never was wrong. Like his initial reading of Detective Mueller, he saw Philly Mettouchi and simply knew she was good people. There was a certain rakishness about her, a contempt for form and rules, but in her heart, she was intensely good.

He'd seldom in his life run across so many strikingly decent folks in such a short time: Mueller, Thomas, and now Mettouchi.

"So, Sam told you about me," he said as she took her seat. It was a statement rather than a question.

"Can you turn it off?" she said as she gazed doe-eyed at his face. "I want to see the gruesome mess underneath."

"Nope. I am forever beautiful ... at least to you. It was a good thing Sam braced you beforehand." Tommy wasn't upset that Sam had shared one of his secrets. If they were to work with this woman, they needed to avoid confusion as well as to earn her trust.

"Oh, I'll say. You are so, so beautiful," she stated and stared dreamily. "I've never raped in public, but without Sam's warning, I don't know how things might have played out downstairs."

He motioned to his face. "It looks like 17 miles of bad Arkansas road under here, you know."

She laughed aloud and regained her composure.

"You're not from Philadelphia, are you?" he continued.

"What makes you say?"

"I think you were born and raised much closer to Oxfordshire than Pennsylvania ... Phyllida Mettouchi."

"Ugh ... please do not spread that around. I hate that name," she growled. "It is so, so, so ..."

"English?"

"No."

"You've done a pretty good job of ditching the English accent. But it's still there."

"The accent is sort of sexy," she added honestly. "I didn't want to lose it completely. But that name ... grrr ... that name. I used to be able to nail a Texas belle accent, too. Mamma and daddy moved me from London to Houston when I was just 13 years old," she said with a passable drawl.

"Where you met Sam?"

"At a fight club!" she said aloud.

"You were fighting?"

"Sam was fighting."

Tommy was dumbfounded. "That sonofabitch. I thought he gave that up ages ago."

"Nope," she said. "The first time I saw Sam, he was beating the hell out of a guy twice his size and half his age. And then, afterward, after he whooped on every young stud in the place, he blew every penny he won on food and booze for his fallen opponents. It was so cool, so ... so noble, like something out of King Arthur."

Tommy couldn't control his laughter. "That's Sam," Tommy said, after regaining his breath. It would be agony until he heard this story from Sam directly.

She jumped out of her chair and disappeared into a recess Tommy hadn't earlier noticed. It seemed to be a small galley, and she returned with a couple of bottles of water. She handed him one before dropping back in her chair.

"What can I do for you?" she said soberly.

Over the next hour and a half, Tommy laid out everything they knew about Amy's disappearance and about the disappearances of Sam's other friends. He then set out, in the most detailed way he knew how, everything they suspected about the federal government's involvement. Afterward, he pulled out his phone to show her the documents he'd collected from Amy's house.

The young woman pinched the phone from his grasp and plugged it into a cable port on her desk. Almost immediately, the files from his phone began popping up, one after the other, on the screens in front of Philly's desk.

"I'm sorry they're all .jpg," he said.

"Don't worry about it," she replied casually, concentrating on the monitors. "It was the technology you had at the time. I have a program that'll convert these into readable and searchable documents in a few minutes." She perused the items on the screen a little longer. "Oh, these are a good start. Here's what I suggest."

Over the next 10 minutes, Philly drew out a provisional plan as to how they should proceed. It began with building a database of all those who had disappeared, with every imaginable variable about age, occupation, domicile, criminal record, as well as details about who they knew, companies with which they interacted, and government associations. A separate, related database would track their finances, taxes, bank accounts, and credit cards. And yet another would be a compilation of police reports, witness statements, circumstances of disappearance, and any other variables they could devise.

"Look, we can work out the variables we want to track, later. The important thing is to start building a broader picture of who the abductees are and what they might have in common ... other than being like us, that is. Frankly, we can just start with the variables someone might use in doing a credit check or a pre-employment investigation."

She paused for a moment.

"It sounds harsh," she said flatly, "but statistics work best with greater numbers. If there's some deep conspiracy out there, the more people like us we can identify who've been snatched—and the more we can identify who haven't been taken—the better chance we'll have of finding meaningful connections. Meaningful connections will lead us to clues to follow and to facts on the ground."

Tommy was adequately wowed. "Okay, a couple of questions. What can Sam and I do?"

"Oh, easy. Keep gathering information. And if we start drawing connections, you'll both be doing a lot of running around following up on things." She leaned forward then, as if talking to a child. "Look, stop using your phones ... at least for important stuff."

"Sorry?"

"If we're dealing with who you think we're dealing with, they can track your phones and your internet use."

"So, how do we keep in touch?"

"Well, I'm glad you asked that," she said in a voice that may have been her attempt to mimic a B-Movie villain. Walking over to a bookshelf, she came back with a small tablet.

"This pad is a little thicker and heavier than most minis, but it can fit in a large pocket. More important, it has a great anonymizer on it ... one of my own design, thank you. It's at least as good as Tor, but no one knows about this one. You can keep using your phone for trivial things, but any important information you can upload onto the tablet and send to me as a burst when you are near 3G, 4G, or Wifi. I am pretty confident even Uncle Sam couldn't tap into this system, assuming he even knew it existed. The tablet also has quite a bit of storage, and there's even a video chat App. It's primitive, but it'll work fine when you're connected to the net—and chat is encrypted, too."

She handed him the tablet and then fished out a small, stiff bag.

"You can store it in this. There's a charger inside. It's otherwise just a normal clone-type tablet." She wrote something down on a post-it and handed it to him. "I'll send you a link via e-mail. Click on the link on your home computer, and enter these digits. All the software from the tablet will download and install automatically on your hard drive. Does Sam have a home computer?" she asked hesitantly.

Tommy laughed.

"Okay, I'll send someone out to get him set up. I'll also send him a tablet ... unless you're going to see him first."

"I'll see him later tonight or early tomorrow."

She reached into the cabinet and procured another tablet and valise.

"Next question," Tommy said. "If you need help, do you have people who you trust to do the work? And I mean trust absolutely."

Philly sat back in her chair with an uncertain look on her face. She began to nibble at her right thumb.

Tommy continued, voicing what they both realized. "If we begin collecting information and building databases on people like us, then that's dangerous information in the wrong hands. I have friends who are not like us who I trust completely. If you bring anyone on this project, you have to have 100 percent confidence in their skills and discretion."

Philly appeared to think for a moment.

"You're right," she said finally. "I'll do most or all of this myself. But if I need to bring anyone else onboard, I do know a few people I trust without reservation. If nothing else, I'll put together a plan for strategic division of labor."

Tommy gave a feigned cough, and the young woman saw his look of misunderstanding.

"I'll divide labor up so only I'll know the full extent of what's going on," she said.

"Thanks," he replied. "I understand what you mean. But that leads to the final question. What sort of budget do you have in mind for this?"

She took a few moments to speak. "I'll put one together before I start, but I can absorb the cost of everything I'm doing here. I've done pretty well for myself financially. Besides, I don't think Sam has a pot to piss in."

"Nah." Tommy laughed. "He has a pot to piss in, but it's usually at the pawn shop. We all want to pitch in as much as we can. Sam may be tapped, but I have some money set aside for emergencies. I can't emphasize enough that what we're doing here we're doing wholly sub rosa. That means expenses will come up, most of which we can't anticipate, that you won't want your accountant to know about. I've done stuff like this before."

A look of clarity crossed Philly's face.

"What are you up to the rest of the day?" he asked her.

"I'm gonna start building that database we talked about and begin looking at the files you got from your friend Amy's house."

He remembered and gave her Linda's phone number.

"Okay," he continued. "I'm gonna go yak with a lawyer, go by the bank, and then run some errands. Afterward, by midafternoon, I'll be bringing a bag of cash by here. Do you have a place to store it?"

"I have a panic room," she answered sheepishly. The conspiratorial nature of what they were about to do seemed to have settled on her.

"You definitely live in California."

As they both chuckled, the small amount of awkwardness that had been in the room dispersed.

"Okay," he said. "I'm going to run my errands. I'll leave the tablets and my jacket here, if it isn't too much trouble." He stood up. He was clad in blue jeans, work boots, and a dark purple t-shirt from some long-extinct ska band. "Remember what I'm wearing."

She gave him a blank look.

"When people first meet me, it takes them time to build a permanent image of me in their minds. I'll look different next time you see me."

"Oh, shit, yes ... your Gift. I'm not used to being around people like us"

Tommy again thanked her for joining the team and departed.