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believe too much that this man told her. ‘You had hoped?’ she said demonstrating her unerring knack of pouncing on the one thing in a statement that you hoped she would not notice. 
    However, The Director answered smoothly. ‘Your boyfriend’s attitude, so I am told, when approached was less than receptive. We have decided that he, at least, is independent of your influence, wouldn’t you agree?’
    Tamar reluctantly had to admit that this was true. She nodded shortly.
    ‘A pity,’ The Director continued. ‘I had hoped he might also lead a team. He has qualities of his own; second only to your own.’
    ‘Sexiest man in the world,’ murmured Tamar.
    ‘I was not referring to his attractions,’ replied The Director, apparently hearing this. ‘Nor yours for that matter,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘Ah, here we are.’
    He showed her into a large room equipped like a cross between a laboratory and NASA mission control.  Tamar’s internal radar went on the alert at once. The room was dim, lighted only by banks of small computer monitors on benches, which blinked and hummed constantly,  from a very large LCD screen across the back wall, and from small lights fixed above the laboratory equipment, which was set up on a long bench running along the adjacent wall. To Tamar it was a weird, alien world. 
    There were seven people in the room, four men and three women. Two of the men were working at computer consoles, as was one woman. Standard geeks, thought Tamar, who ought to have known better than to make snap judgements like that.  Another man, extremely good looking with white blond hair and an air of extreme arrogance, was leaning back casually with his feet on a desk, one hand running through his hair the other hand contained a phone, into which he was talking animatedly. He looked like a stockbroker, but Tamar’s sixth sense said “con man”. She disliked him immediately. Two others, one man and one woman appeared to be soldiers, standing to attention at the opposite door. The last woman was more interesting. She was unquestionably a witch, but not like any witch Tamar had met personally.  She was wearing a lab coat for one thing and wore her hair in a tight bun. Her face and hair looked faded like an old photograph from which the original colour had drained. She might have been a redhead once, and her eyes may have been blue, now the hair was sandy and the eyes grey.  To the untrained eye she looked a lot like a high school science teacher. She was using the lab equipment to mix a potion or something like it.  She looked up and smiled, the only one who did, Tamar smiled back, but she had reservations. These people did not look to her like a field unit. She wondered how any of them would handle an encounter with a werewolf, for example, or a vampire. She was willing to bet that not one of them had ever faced such an encounter. And there were worse things out there. She would rather have Denny at her back in that kind of a situation than any of these people. Especially that blond man, who looked as if he might crease up in a shower of rain; and all of them looked like they would faint at the sight of blood. Even Cindy would have been an improvement.
    She gave no sign of what was going through her mind, however.
    But The Director seemed to read her thoughts. ‘I can see you’re impressed,’ he said dryly. ‘But I wonder if you have considered that your own erstwhile little band of soldiers do not exactly look like a formidable front line in the fight against evil and yet … they have proved to be just that – with you to lead them.’
    Tamar did not answer. ‘ Erstwhile?’ she thought.‘He’s taking a lot for granted isn’t he?’
    ‘Perhaps I should introduce you,’ he added.
    But Tamar had already moved away from him. She stood silently behind the blond man on the phone for a few minutes listening to his subtle blandishments to a girl named Tiffany before suddenly darting forward and