Tiger in the Hot Zone (Shifter Agents Book 4)

by Lauren Esker

  "Sweet," Peri said.

  Lafitte's chagrin was replaced by professional fascination. "How does it work? Do you have chromatophores in your skin as a human?"

  "Search me. Maybe the lab docs know." She trailed her hand along the wall to a piece of framed art, a desert photograph showing a spray of yucca, and spread out her fingers across the edge. The black line of the frame flowed down the middle of her hand, while the side covering the photo darkened and developed a yellower tint to match the desert rocks in the picture.

  Delgado grinned at their impressed faces. "My brother and I used to play like this for hours when we were kids. We'd open up National Geographic and lie down on it and try to match the photos as closely as possible. And you can imagine what hide and seek is like when chameleons are playing. We'd match the wallpaper—here, let me show you."

  She turned to Trish, who had drifted in at her shoulder, and laid her hand lightly on Trish's upper arm, covered by the sleeve of a silk flowered shirt. The pattern emerged on the back of her hand like a developing photo, darker and lighter swirls, with subtle hints of the brighter underlying colors floating to the surface.

  "Oh," Trish breathed, her face soft with wonder.

  Delgado smiled at her and took her hand away, the colors flowing off her fingertips to be replaced by the normal dark caramel color of her skin. Trish touched her shoulder where Delgado's chameleon fingers had rested, and her answering smile was shy and pleased.

  Great, Noah thought; now the Southwest SCB was—literally—wooing away his best employee.

  Recovering her poise, Delgado led the group up a flight of stairs to the second floor and into a cafeteria. It was nearly deserted; the only offerings on display were candy bars and sandwiches in vending machines. Picture windows, each recessed into the side of the building, looked out over the gate area. Delgado nodded to the cafeteria's only occupants, a group of women eating sandwiches at a table in the corner, who nodded back while staring curiously at the party.

  "I brought you here first because there's a good view from here, and you can get an overview of the area." Delgado was now ostentatiously looking anywhere but at Trish, whose eyes were riveted to her. Yep, Noah thought, they're going full-on flirtation in a hurry. He wondered if it was worth taking bets that Trish wouldn't be coming back to Seattle with him.

  "And food," Delgado went on, indicating the row of vending machines. "Sorry the selection isn't better, but at least it's all free. The cafeteria serves a hot lunch, but right now we don't have enough people living on site to make it worth providing more than the bare essentials at other times of day. Anyone have food allergies? Special dietary needs?"

  Headshakes all around. Trish quietly retrieved a sandwich from one of the refrigerated machines and munched on it as the tour continued.

  "The building we're in, the one with the parking garage under it, is where all the residential stuff is located. The dorms are up here, conveniently located near the cafeteria. The rest of this level is all offices. On the ground floor, there's a gym and even a pool." She flashed a quick grin. "Not as much of an extravagance as you might think, since we have a number of water shifters and we're obviously a long way from the ocean."

  She was walking through the cafeteria as she spoke, turned around tour-guide-style. The cafeteria continued straight on into a lounge area, with a large wall-mounted TV, a few tables and conversational groupings of chairs, and some cases containing books, DVDs, and games. No one was up here at all; most of the lights were off. The lounge occupied the corner of the building, so the picture windows looked out in two directions. One way, the gate was visible; in the other direction, the lighted fence marched on around the end of the hill. Across a wide concrete apron, another low dun-colored building, a twin to theirs, was snugged up against the side of the hill.

  "That's the main lab complex," Delgado said as she pointed it out. In the dim light, most of it coming into the lounge from the cafeteria, the scales on the side of her head—what Noah had mistaken at first for a tattoo—glittered soft iridescent colors.

  "Is that a skybridge?" Lafitte asked, holding up her hand to block the reflection of the cafeteria lights in the window.

  "It is. You can also cross between the buildings at ground level. The elevator and stairwell over here goes down to the gym and pool and the ground-floor exits to the outside, and if we keep going, we'll hit the dorms."

  They went past the elevators and the EXIT sign over the stairs into a utilitarian hallway with a gray industrial carpet. Doors marched along the corridor, starting with 201. The numbers only went up to 214 on this hall, but a right-angle tributary hallway had a sign pointing to 215-230.

  "And I think that completes the tour." Delgado tucked her hands in her pockets. "Your assigned rooms are around the corner. Any questions?"

  "Not on my end," Noah said. "Except for wondering what strings we're gonna have to pull to build something like this up in Seattle."

  "Well, first you need to find an abandoned government facility just lying around."

  They almost certainly had his dad to thank for that, Noah thought. Scouting for old Cold War-era mothballed facilities and sticking stray branches of the SCB in them was exactly the sort of thing Curtis Easton was good at.

  "So who's going over to the labs?" Delgado asked. "As soon as you drop off your luggage, I can take you there."

  Peri shook her head "I just want to crash."

  "Same," Noah agreed. He and Peri had caught a few hours' sleep at his apartment, but they'd been up by the crack of dawn to head over to the SCB.

  "I get that," Delgado said. "Feel free to help yourself to anything in the cafeteria. After I go off duty, I'll be in 204 if you need me, or dial 0 on any of the in-house phones to get the switchboard and duty agent."

  All their rooms were in a cluster. Peri and Noah been given the keys for 217 and 218, across from each other. The rooms were dorm-style, each with a bunk bed and a desk. Sheets and Army-issue blankets were folded on each bed. Noah discovered at a glance that the rooms didn't have private bathrooms; those were at the end of the hall.

  "I don't see any need to have separate rooms, do you?" Peri asked Noah. He shook his head. Number 217 had no view whatsoever—the single window looked out on a narrow utility shaft within the building. 218 looked down on the back garden area. They dropped off their luggage in that one and went to get food.

  "It's like being back in college." Peri selected a boxed salad from one of the vending machines. "The dorms, the communal living, all of it. Your office in Seattle is more like a police station or just a regular office."

  Noah loaded up on sandwiches; his body was still struggling back to equilibrium from all the healing it had been forced to do lately. Between that and the lack of sleep, he felt hung over. "We sometimes say the Pacific Northwest bureau is the unappreciated stepchild of the SCB. The neighboring offices serve a larger geographical area than we do, and the East Coast branch is responsible for a much larger population. We're mostly just there to keep the Southwest and Midwest offices from being stretched too thin."

  "How many offices are there?"

  "Five." Juggling sandwiches and a slice of pie, he ticked them off on his fingers. "The main office in DC serves the East Coast and also handles areas that don't have their own dedicated field office, like the U.S. territories. Then there's the Midwest office in Chicago, the South office in Tampa, and the Southwest one, where we are, that has jurisdiction all the way out to California in the west and over to Texas on the eastern side. And ours, of course."

  "What about other countries?" Peri asked as they carried their food to a table by the window. The women in the corner were gone, so they were the only people in the cafeteria. "Do they have their own versions of the SCB?"

  "Depends on the country. In Canada, it's a branch of the Mounties and it's very recent, basically just since the SCB was created and started liaising across the border with them. Britain, on the other hand, has had a shifter-related police force for
a really long time, but they're considered 'special police' and they don't have all the powers we do. They're more like the rail police or something like that. Some countries don't have anything at all, like most of the Scandinavian countries, I think. Russia has some kind of shifter secret police, we don't know too much about it because they won't liaise with us, but then again, secret police is basically what we are, so it's not like we can point fingers." He took a bite of his sandwich and said around it, "Dad says dealing with the shifter KGB was what gave him the idea to create our own shifter agency at home. He originally envisioned us as something more like the CIA. That's what Dad was in the '80s, a CIA field agent."

  "Wait, your dad actually created the SCB? I knew he ran it, but I didn't know he was, like, the founder or something."

  Noah nodded as he finished the rest of the sandwich, the first of several heaped on his plate. "When he first got it up and running in the '90s, it was tiny, a sort of ambiguous 'nobody knows what to do with us' department that took orders from both the CIA and FBI. It didn't really get on its feet until federal law enforcement got a big shake-up under the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11. That's when the main field offices were established and it really became its own agency instead of a minor division of some other agency."

  Peri smiled slightly. She was still more subdued than Noah was used to seeing her, but being away from Seattle seemed to have helped her bounce back a little. "You know, I grew up with black helicopters and secret federal agencies as my personal bogeymen. I wasn't afraid of the monster under the bed, I was afraid of being dragged off to a top-secret autopsy lab. It's so weird to meet the men in black and find out that they're just regular people with computer labs and mortgages and cafeteria food."

  "Well, most of us are shapeshifters," Noah reminded her.

  "Okay, yeah, that's true." Her smile widened into a true grin. "That part is awfully cool. Hey, we can talk about it openly here, right? Everyone around here knows."

  "Nice change from the last few days."

  "No kidding." Peri hid a yawn behind her hand. "You know, cafeteria sandwiches aren't holding my interest compared to bed. I think I have about three days' worth of sleep to catch up on. And you know I just realized is weird?"

  "What's that?"

  "I actually feel safe here." She sounded wondering. "I'm deep in the heart of men-in-black territory, and I guess it's still possible the government is going to vanish me, but one thing I'm not at all worried about is Julius or Smith or whatever his name is getting past that gate, going through ten layers of security, and finding me without being stopped."

  "See? It's just a matter of making deals with the lesser evil."

  Peri wrinkled her nose at him. "Dork. Let's go to bed."

  Noah held out a hand; she placed her fingers in his. "And is bed the only thing you want to do?" he asked playfully.

  "Now that you mention it ... Think we'll both fit on one of those bunk beds?"

  As it turned out, they both did, but sleep wasn't their first priority.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Cesar Quinn Costa, chief of the Southwest SCB, had a deep tan, a faint drawl, and startling red hair. His office was decorated in a way that made Peri think of a hunting lodge, right down to mounted trophy fish on the walls. Although she did notice the lack of stuffed and mounted animal heads, usually obligatory in a situation like this. Would that be considered rude in the shifter community? she wondered. If she were a deer shifter, she definitely would not want to walk into a room with a deer head displayed on the wall.

  Did fish shifters exist? She stared at a large bass on the wall. She'd have to ask Noah later. They'd been eating breakfast in the cafeteria when Thiessen had come in to tell them the Chief needed to see them. Now she felt like a naughty child called into the principal's office. She had to struggle not to fidget and kick her feet.

  "So it looks like I'm the lucky winner who gets to deal with the big boss's son and a woman whose main claim to fame is telling everybody's secrets on the Internet," Chief Costa grumbled. "Okay, folks, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm sending you up to Flagstaff with a security escort. Since the whole reason you're here is because you can ID the perps, we want you on the ground in Flagstaff. Assuming your office's intel is good and Flagstaff is the next ground zero for whatever the hell is going on."

  "Has there been any trouble down here, sir?" Noah asked. "Odd-looking bodies at the morgue, that kind of thing."

  "Not that we've heard of. We've got the support staff combing through reports now, and your first stop in Flagstaff is going to be the medical examiner's office—Yes, what?" This was to Peri, who had been waving her hand in the air like a grade schooler seeking a teacher's attention.

  Peri dropped her hand back into her lap. "I'm good with computers and social media, sir."

  "Yes, and your point?" Chief Costa's eyes were light hazel, startling against his darkly tanned face.

  "My point is that if you want to know about something outside the ordinary, like corpses with animal features, you're going to want the internet—my part of the internet. I have passwords to all the message boards where the real weirdos hang out. I know people in that community, and they know me. I can ask questions without raising suspicions in a way you guys can't."

  Noah was gazing at her admiringly. It was a heady feeling and she decided to bask in it. Costa looked much less impressed; he stared at her for a long moment without speaking and then said, "You've signed NDAs, right?"

  "Yes, sir. Back in Seattle."

  Another brief stare. "Okay," he said abruptly. "Do it. Easton, make sure she has the resources she needs to take with her to Flagstaff."

  Peri perked up. "Ooh. A laptop? And I could also use—"

  "Do I look like the place to dump your requisition list? Tell the IT department, not me."

  "How long are we going to be in Flagstaff, sir?" Noah asked. "Just wondering if we should take our luggage or not."

  "At least a couple of days. Depends on what happens once you get up there." He waved a hand. "Go!"

  Peri was practically bouncing. Having Internet access on her phone again was great, but she desperately missed her stolen laptop. She wondered if she could also talk the technology department into giving her a spare phone charger so she could stop borrowing Noah's. Hers had been incinerated at the safehouse.

  "So what does he turn into?" she whispered to Noah as soon as they were outside Costa's office.

  "Costa? What kind of shifter is he, you mean? I don't know. We can't tell by looking."

  "But you can tell if someone is a shifter, right?"

  "Yeah, it's sort of a ... I can't really describe it. Some people say it's like a smell. I don't really get that; it's more of a—a feeling, I guess. You just know."

  "That's weird."

  "Not for us," he pointed out.

  "Hmmm. Anyway. Laptop."

  Vir was in the computer lab and cheerfully acquiesced to the spare charger as well as the laptop specs Peri requested. She figured that if the government was going to give her one, she'd make sure it was top of the line, even if she didn't get to keep it.

  "So, Vir, you'd probably know this," she said, sitting on the edge of his desk while he popped RAM into the laptop. "What kind of animal is Chief Costa?"

  "He's a boar. Belligerent and cranky. They call him the Red Boar around the office sometimes, but only when he's not in earshot." Vir winked. "Don't tell me you heard it here."

  "Sweet. Thanks. Your secret is safe with me." Because it seemed impolite not to ask, she added, "And what about you?"

  "Dhole."

  "What's that?"

  "Southeast Asian wild dog." He looked up from screwing the back of the laptop together and gave her a grin. "We're also called whistling dogs."

  "Really? Do you whistle?"

  Vir whistled a few bars of Snow White's "Whistle While You Work," which startled her into a laugh.

  "I meant do dholes whistle. Can you do that as a dhole?"


  "I can, actually. I'll have to show you sometime."

  Peri noticed Noah, who had been flipping through a magazine at one of the other desks, was now giving Vir a distinctly unfriendly look. She had to run back the last part of the conversation to figure out why. Oh gosh. Vir's flirting with me, isn't he? And Noah's jealous.

  She was so unused to being flirted with that she hadn't even recognized it. The punk hair and her accompanying air of don't-give-a-damn tended to intimidate most guys. With nearly all of her previous boyfriends, she'd approached them.

  But Vir was kind of punk himself, with the purple hair and earring.

  Sorry, buddy. You're too late. You seem nice, but no regrets here.

  Seeming to recognize her withdrawal, Vir turned all business. He flipped over the laptop and handed it to her. "Let me know if you have any problems, okay? The password is Tucson."

  "Thank you," she said, smiling in a way that she hoped was sincere and not at all flirty.

  Out in the hall, she murmured to Noah, "You were jealous."

  "No I wasn't," he said, a little too quickly.

  "Yeah you were." She grinned up at him. "It's flattering. But you've got nothing to be jealous about."

  "I never said I was jealous."

  "I know." She stopped in the hallway, caught him with the arm that wasn't holding the laptop, and stretched up to kiss him. She could feel him relaxing, and Peri grinned against his mouth.

  "All right," he admitted when she broke the kiss. "Maybe a little jealous. Trust me, it wasn't you I was worried about."

  They retrieved their luggage from their room, picking up Trish along the way, and went down to the underground parking garage. Thiessen was waiting for them, along with two agents Peri didn't know—at least she thought she didn't, until Trish broke into a beaming grin and greeted the dark-haired woman in sunglasses, and then Peri realized, with a shock, that it was Delgado, wearing sunglasses with her hair combed over the scaly side of her head. This must be her going-out-in-public guise.