“Thank you.” Stricken launched right into his message. “At twelve hundred hours today there was a monster-related event in a small town in northeastern Nevada. Due to the isolated nature of the location, law enforcement officials didn’t discover the aftermath until a few hours ago. The scene has been contained, but the MCB was only recently made aware and has gone on full alert.”

So that was what had interrupted Stark’s speech.

“How bad?” a man that looked suspiciously like Buddy Holly asked.

“Ten confirmed dead, fifteen missing, Mister…” Stricken’s head shifted to the other side as he studied a different monitor. “Wylder, Team TALON…Heh…That’s a clever acronym. Allow me to clarify, Mr. Wylder. It was a more of a truck stop with some trailers around it than an actual town, but it’s gone now. Those not ripped limb from limb vanished without a trace. We’re not sure exactly how many, because the containment team is still finding pieces and trying to figure out which pieces go in which body bag. Do not interrupt me again.”

A young man sitting a few rows ahead of me stood up. “Who are you?”

Stricken waited a moment for the information to load. “Pierre Darne…I knew your father. You take directions as well as he does, as in not at all. What part of ‘don’t interrupt me’ did you fail to grasp? I know there’s a language barrier here, and English is your third language, but I’m about to offer you a very lucrative business proposal, so you can either sit your ass down or get the hell out of my meeting and wait for the official MCB press release.”

Darne reluctantly returned to his chair.

“I represent a special, multi-agency task force within the United States government.”

Earl snorted.

“We would like this particular issue dealt with as quickly and quietly as possible. The provisional PUFF bounty for this particular one-of-a-kind entity is listed as the first line on the sheet left on your chair.” I looked down at the $10,000,000.00 and gave a low whistle. “For our foreign friends in the audience, those are American dollars, which must come as a letdown to those of you still collecting bounties in pounds, but at least they’re not pesos. If you go to the PUFF website you’ll see that this new bounty was posted in the last fifteen minutes with all of the applicable information to be filled in later.”

The big Pole leaned across me to ask Earl, “Is he telling truth?”

“He’s from the government, all right,” Earl said, which didn’t really answer the question.