Tiger in the Hot Zone (Shifter Agents Book 4)

by Lauren Esker

  Noah nodded against the top of her head.

  "It was an accident with the tractor while we were breaking up sod in one of the fields. The tractor was dragging a thing behind it—I don't remember the name for sure, I think it's called a harrow? Big blades that tear through the ground and rip it up. I could Google you a picture on my phone."

  "I can picture it fine." A little too well, really. He wasn't sure if his mental image was accurate to the real thing, but he knew he didn't want to see a picture. "Go ahead."

  "Well, Liam's dad was driving the tractor, and me and a couple of the older kids were helping out by clearing brush. We hadn't used the field in awhile, we'd just been grazing animals there, so it was pretty overgrown and the brush kept getting tangled up in the harrow. When it got stuck, we'd stop doing what we were doing, which was stacking armloads of brush at the edge of the field, and come help untangle it."

  She paused, gazing back into the past.

  "It seems so stupid now. So dangerous. But it didn't seem that dangerous to us. We were used to being around heavy equipment. We'd been helping out with stuff like that for years. And this was one of those things where—it was just, everything went wrong at once. The harrow got snagged on an old stump, and Liam's dad, I can't even remember his name now, was creeping the tractor forward while Liam pulled on one side of it and I pulled on the other side. And then it came loose when neither of us were expecting it and lurched forward. And I—I got ..."

  She was shivering now, pressing against him. Noah rubbed his hand up and down her shoulder.

  "You can stop if you need to."

  "No," she said softly. "It's okay. It lurched forward so suddenly my feet went out from under me, sliding in the mud, and I went down flat on my back, and I ... I knew something had happened. I thought it was both my legs at first. They had to get a helicopter to come and airlift me to the hospital in Spokane." She gave a small laugh. "I think it was the only time that stupid UFO landing pad was ever actually used."

  Noah kissed the top of her head, and kissed her again gently on the soft skin at the corner of her eye. "Good thing it was there."

  "Guess so. Oh, Mom was so pissed. She showed up at the hospital. I hadn't seen her in years. Didn't recognize her at first. She tore Dad a new one right in front of the nurses and everybody. And then she went to the compound and packed some suitcases for me—I didn't even know about this until later. When I got out of the hospital, she took me to live with her in Idaho, and I didn't see much of Dad after that."

  "You haven't really talked about your mom before." He kept up the gentle rhythm of his hand on her arm, up and down, up and down. It seemed to be calming her. "Did you two get along?"

  "Eh. We got along about like, well, like a teenager would get along with a mom she hadn't seen since she was four. Especially when the teenager grew up homeschooled in the middle of nowhere and suddenly got dumped into a regular urban living situation and normal school classes. Plus having a disability to deal with."

  "So you fought like cats and dogs, is what you're saying."

  "Pretty much. Or, not even fighting so much as just ... we didn't really like each other. It didn't help that my mom wasn't the best at taking care of herself, let alone somebody else. She's mentally ill—schizophrenic. Did I tell you that?" Noah shook his head. "Which doesn't mean having multiple personalities like some people think; that's a whole other disorder. It means hearing voices and having mood swings, and she was on meds for it, which helped. But she still had a rough time. I had to do a lot of the grown-up stuff for the household, like making sure the bills got paid and doing the shopping, because she wasn't so good at all of that."

  Noah rested his cheek against the top of her head. She'd had to be an adult so young. No wonder she thought she had to take the burdens of the world on her shoulders. "I'm starting to see why your parents were such a disaster together."

  "Right? Dad encouraged all Mom's delusions. I don't even think he meant to, it's just ... okay, so, I sometimes talk about my dad like he's crazy. But he's not. He's perfectly sane, he just believes in stupid stuff. But Mom was literally crazy, and Dad made her worse. The best thing she ever did for herself was get out of that stupid compound—"

  The intercom in the living room buzzed. Peri flinched and fell silent.

  "That's Cho. I need to go let her in." He sat up, easing out from under Peri's clinging warmth. "You okay?"

  "I'm fine." She touched her face and seemed surprised to find her eyes were dry. "Yeah. I really am okay." The smile she gave him was shaky but sincere. "It was good to talk about it. I'm glad you asked."

  "Anytime you want to talk more, I'm listening."

  "I know." She leaned up to kiss him. "I really do know. Thank you."

  Noah went out to the living room to buzz Cho in. A moment later she showed up at the door with bags of takeout cartons. She wasn't alone; Stiers and Dr. Lafitte were with her.

  "So we're giving up on quarantine completely, then?" Noah asked, taking one of the bags. His stomach growled. He'd been managing to avoid thinking about food, but the warm, spicy scents coming from the bags sent his instincts into overdrive.

  "No point," Lafitte said briskly. She was carrying a plastic case, which she laid on the coffee table and opened to reveal various instruments and a blood draw kit. "Neither of you had direct contact with the bodies. The odds of contagion are relatively small. The odds that you'll infect someone else when you're showing no symptoms yourself are smaller yet. However, I'm going to need to take your vitals, if you don't mind."

  "Long as you don't mind me eating while you do."

  "Go ahead." She fastened a blood pressure cuff over his arm. Peri was helping Cho unpack the bags and open cartons of takeout, while Stiers leaned on the end of the couch, arms folded, watching with her sharp owl's eyes.

  "Jen said you were injured," Lafitte went on, checking the readout and making an entry on her tablet computer. "In what way?"

  "Shot," Noah said. "Multiple times. It's mostly healed now, though."

  Peri turned to give him a look, just as Lafitte looked up and met her gaze. The two women—the only two humans in the room—broke into a shared, commiserating grin. "Yes," Lafitte said in answer to Peri's unasked question, "they're all like this. And for the record, Noah, I am going to want to look at those bullet wounds anyway."

  "He was also burned," Peri said.

  "Tattletale," Noah said as Lafitte swabbed the inside of his elbow for a blood sample.

  Looking up as the syringe filled, Lafitte said, "I'd like to get a blood sample from you as well, Ms. Moreland."

  "I guess so." Peri presented her arm to be swabbed and stuck. "What are you looking for?"

  "Signs of infection," Lafitte said calmly. "Which, so far, I don't see at all. Since we still don't know what we're dealing with yet, that doesn't necessarily mean you haven't been infected with a pathogen, but you don't appear to be sick at the present time. Noah, I'm also going to need a throat swab and, when you get a chance, a urine sample."

  "Hooray," Noah muttered, accepting the kit she handed him.

  "All that aside, it's good to see you well, Agent Easton," Stiers spoke up. She looked exhausted, and Noah wondered if she'd slept at all since this started. "Ms. Moreland, I apologize, but we're going to need to discuss classified matters. Would you mind stepping into the bedroom for a few minutes?"

  "No." Noah reached for Peri's hand. "She's staying here. She's as involved as I am now." He glanced up at her. "I mean, if you want to." Her nod came as no surprise.

  Stiers sighed in exasperation and pinched the skin between her brows. "How much have you told her?"

  "Everything I know," Noah said. "You can bust me down to the SCB version of traffic cop if you want to. I don't care. They tried to kill her too. She has a right. And she saw me shift. At that point it was come clean or hope the lab comes up with one of those little memory-erasing devices from Men in Black."

  "You don't have those, right?" Peri asked anxi
ously.

  "We're still a couple years out," Lafitte said, deadpan. Over at the kitchen counter, Cho smirked as she dished food out onto a plate.

  "She's a civilian," Stiers said. "Come on, Easton, be sensible."

  Peri spoke before he could come up with a rational defense. "What if you deputize me? Do you have those?"

  "We have consultants," Cho said. Stiers looked even more exasperated. "You'll have to sign some non-disclosure agreements, that's all."

  "Sure," Peri said eagerly.

  "Which we don't have with us," Stiers pointed out.

  "I won't talk to anyone," Peri said. "I'll sign whatever you want me to sign."

  Noah was skeptical but kept it to himself.

  "And what are you bringing to the table?" Stiers asked. "A consultant has skills we need. What do you have?"

  "Information," Peri said without hesitation. "A network of informants among exactly the people who might know something about your disease and your Valeria—yes, I know about that too," she added, as Stiers shot a glare at Noah. "I know most of the conspiracy theorists and other fringe types in the greater Seattle area. Come on, I bet you've always wanted to get me in your corner so you can take advantage of my assets."

  "You overestimate your importance, Ms. Moreland. However ..." Stiers let out a long sigh and pressed her thumb against the spot between her eyes. "... very well. Peri Moreland, you're now an SCB consultant. You will be held legally liable for anything classified that you disclose. In the morning, we'll have you sign the NDAs. Right now I need your verbal confirmation. Do I have it?"

  "Yes," Peri said. She reached for a box of rice.

  While they ate, Noah filled them on the events at the compound, with Peri injecting comments as necessary. When he got to Scar Face's attack on the house, Cho interrupted, "If that's the guy who was at the safehouse fire, my contact knows him. He's a Valeria assassin they call Julius."

  "Don't suppose you've changed your mind on letting me talk to your contact," Stiers said.

  Cho shook her head. "He only goes through me. It's the deal. Sorry."

  "Yeah, well, Julius or Smith or whatever his name is," Noah said, "one thing we do know is that he's a shifter. He turns into the biggest bear I've ever seen."

  Cho looked startled. "He's a shifter? Are you sure?"

  "Unless I hallucinated a huge bear trying to kill us."

  "Which you didn't," Peri said. "I was there."

  "He killed two people at the compound and escaped," Noah said. "I last saw him running off into the woods as a bear. Oh, that reminds me, we've still got his clothes and wallet for the lab, down in my car. There's nothing much that's useful, just an ID and credit card in what's probably a fake name."

  "We can still trace the card," Stiers said. "There's a team headed out to the mountains right now, by the way—Agent Hollen and a few other people. Did any witnesses see him shift?"

  "No one other than me and Peri, that I know of."

  "Chief, I have a longstanding theory that the Valeria are shifters," Cho said. "From the sound of things, this confirms it."

  "It'll also make cleanup more complicated. And we're stretched thin enough as it is."

  "Yeah, about that ...?" Noah said. "I assume if we had a full-blown plague on our hands you would've said something, right?"

  "The news is actually pretty good on that front," Cho said, gesturing with her fork.

  Stiers nodded. "Thanks to a tip, we recovered the missing van from the shoreline near Tacoma. It had been burned using a strong accelerant, then dumped in the ocean, but the waves pushed it back to shore. The lab is still working on it, but they've found traces of organic material in the van that suggest the bodies were burned along with it. At least that's our working theory right now."

  "Dumped in the ocean." Noah swallowed. "If they were contaminated—"

  "Burning would almost certainly have destroyed any pathogens," Lafitte put in. "If anything made it through, the diluting effect of the water should do the rest. One tiny dose of cholera in an entire ocean isn't going to make anyone sick. That said," she added, "until we know what kind of pathogen we're dealing with, we won't know how contagious it is, or how long it stays in the environment."

  Comforting. "What about Dr. Bassi? Have you found out anything else about her?"

  "Aha!" Cho exclaimed. "I can give you an answer there. Dr. Veronica Bassi is an American citizen of Italian and—wait for it—Allegardan ancestry."

  "She's Valeria, then," Noah said. "She was all along."

  "We're proceeding on that assumption," Stiers said. "Records show she was hired at the King County Medical Examiner's Office a year and a half ago. They're playing a long game."

  Noah rubbed idly at the needle puncture site on his arm; it itched as it healed. "Any idea what their next move is?"

  "According to Agent Cho's informant among the Valeria, there are three locations where the Valeria might be running tests of their new weapon," Stiers said. "Seattle, Flagstaff, and Buffalo. As far as we can tell, their Seattle operation is completely burned now—literally and figuratively. They've pulled out. So now we're concentrating on the other two cities. Noah, right now we have three agents who can personally ID one or more of the suspects—you, Begay, and Cho. Since you and Cho are both experienced agents, I'm sending one of you to each location to work with the local response teams."

  "What, now?"

  "In the morning, yes."

  Not much time to sleep in his own bed, that was for sure. Noah looked over at Cho. "Buffalo or Flagstaff, huh? Which one are you going to?"

  Cho shrugged. "No assignment yet. I don't care."

  "Very well," Stiers said. "Cho, you've got New York; Easton has Arizona. I'm also sending Trish Begay down there, because it's her home territory and she knows people in the area. You two will serve as a security escort on scientific samples from our work here that we're sending down to the Arizona field office in Tucson, and then work with the local agents there. The Tucson office is our biggest research division, compared to any of our other branch offices, which makes it a good place to centralize the work we're doing on the unknown pathogen."

  "You're leaving?" Peri asked. Her voice cracked.

  Noah squeezed her knee reassuringly. "Ma'am, I'd like to suggest that Ms. Moreland accompany me."

  "We can protect her here."

  Not based on past experience. "She's a witness too," Noah said. "If I'm useful down there because I can ID the suspects, so is she."

  Stiers turned her golden stare on Peri. "Ms. Moreland? What's your preference?"

  Peri's fingers curled tightly around Noah's. "I want to help."

  "With luck," Stiers murmured, "I won't regret this." Her voice firmed. "That's settled, then. In the morning, Easton, you and Moreland can work with a police sketch artist to get headshots of the suspects. We've already done that with Cho and Begay, and now that you've seen Julius up close, we need to get a full description from you. We'll get the consultant paperwork drawn up for Ms. Moreland, and you two can be on a flight by early afternoon."

  ***

  With the food demolished and the urine sample (reluctantly) obtained, Noah walked the other agents down to the parking garage, where Stiers bagged Julius-or-Smith's discarded clothing. Cho hung back to fish a tissue out of her pocket and blow her nose, causing all three of the others to look at her in varying degrees of alarm.

  "Calm down, I'm not sick. It's just allergies. Stupid Pacific Northwest. One of these days I'm transferring down to the Arizona office."

  "You sure you don't mind going to Buffalo?" Noah asked.

  "I don't mind." She blew her nose again. "Never been there. It'll be fun."

  Noah left Lafitte and Cho arguing over taking a new round of blood samples to rule out any possibility of contagion—Cho insisting that it wasn't possible for her to get sick before Noah, since she'd been exposed through him in the first place—and went back up to his apartment. Peri was wandering around gathering up takeout containers.<
br />
  "You don't have to clean up."

  "Such hard work. Nothing but work, all the time." She bagged up the trash and left it by the door. "So one night in Seattle and off we go on a new adventure."

  Noah pulled her in for a hug, resting his chin on top of her head. "Are you okay with leaving again so soon?"

  "Like I'm actually any better off here. Julius found me twice." She shuddered and leaned against him. "For what it's worth, I'm not sure if I feel completely safe anywhere right now, but, Noah ... I feel safer when I'm with you."

  Her sincerity kindled a soft heat in his chest. "We'll get 'em, Peri. This won't go on forever, I swear."

  "Don't make promises you might not be able to keep," she told him, looking up with a strained grin.

  "Then how about I make you this promise." He gripped her by the shoulders as she gazed up into his face. "Peri Moreland, I promise I will protect you to the best of my ability, no matter what. With my life, if that's what it takes."

  "It's your job," Peri pointed out, but the slight hitch in her voice gave the lie to her nonchalant tone.

  "It was a job in the beginning. Now, it's a ... a calling, I guess. It's my duty and my pleasure to protect you, Ms. Moreland. And I swear that I will, here or in Tucson or Flagstaff or anywhere. With my last dying breath."

  Peri raised her hands to clasp each of his and lift them off her shoulders, pressing them to the sides of her face. "I have to admit," she murmured, turning her head to kiss his left palm, "I'd be lying if I said I didn't like the idea of going to Tucson with you because you're there."

  Noah stroked his thumb across her lips. "Maybe we'll make it a little bit of a vacation while we're there. When all this is done, when everyone is safe, we'll have to get ourselves a hotel and see Arizona. Go visit a ghost town, see a rodeo. Sound fun?"

  Her laugh was soft but genuine. "I wouldn't miss it. But right now ... we hardly got started on the bedroom tour and that's a real shame, don't you think?"

  Part Two

  SOUTHWEST

  Chapter Fourteen