Tiger in the Hot Zone (Shifter Agents Book 4)

by Lauren Esker

  The other agent introduced himself tersely as Agent Caine, no first name given. He was lean, dour, and dark-haired, wearing a black leather jacket. He was the first person Peri had seen so far who didn't have a noticeable tan; his skin tone was almost anemic. She made a mental note to ask Noah if vampires were a thing, because this guy looked about as vampiric as anyone she'd ever seen.

  "Okay," Delgado said cheerfully, moving her finger between them in a quick head count. "Six people, so we'll need two cars. I'll drive one. Cam, you good for the other?"

  Thiessen shrugged. "Sure."

  "Any volunteers to come with me?" Delgado asked. Trish's hand shot into the air. "Good deal. Trish, you and I can—"

  "Wait, wait!" Lafitte slammed open the security door, waving at them. "Good, I caught you before you left. Roll up your sleeves."

  "More needles?" Thiessen groaned, holding out his arm.

  "New antiviral cocktail," Lafitte explained as she injected each of them in turn. "You may be slightly nauseated for an hour or two."

  "Fun," Peri said. "In that case, I'm calling shotgun. I get motion sick in the backseat and I've never been to Arizona before, so I plan to enjoy it."

  Rather than the Mustang, this time Thiessen was driving an SUV with a lot more leg and luggage room. Caine and Noah took the back, Noah with his usual good humor, Caine with a grim expression that implied he never enjoyed anything anyway. Delgado and Trish brought up the rear in a sedan.

  The sun was blinding when they pulled out of the parking garage. For a moment all Peri could see was searing white. "Here," Thiessen said, reaching into the door compartment while they waited for the gate to open. He handed her a pair of sunglasses. "You'll want these."

  Settling the slightly-too-large glasses on her face, Peri looked back as they pulled through the security gate. By daylight, the SCB's Southwest facility looked less scary and top-secret than it did at night. The buildings were a huddle of sun-faded concrete, the fence a marching line of posts and wire wending up and down the hills.

  "How much land do they own out here?" she asked.

  "That's probably classified," Thiessen said, "but it's a big chunk of real estate. I couldn't tell you how much. Parts are off limits to us because of past weapons testing—old Cold War military facility, remember—so there could be unexploded ordnance around. If you end up hiking in the area, pay attention to the warning signs."

  "Wow, that seems ..." She struggled for words, finally settled on, "Unsafe."

  "Definitely different from the Seattle SCB," Noah said from the backseat.

  Thiessen glanced at his passengers in the mirror. "How do you guys handle your field training up there? We've got all this land to run around in."

  "There are some pieces of property outside the city where we do it," Noah said. "Farms we have permission to use. For the most part, though, we're urban shifters, not country types."

  Thiessen laughed. "Welcome to the country, city mouse."

  "I'm a tiger, thank you very much," Noah said with playful offense.

  "What are you?" Peri asked Thiessen. The more she was around shifters, the more curious about them she got.

  "Coyote."

  "No wonder you're in your element here," Noah said.

  "I know, right? As my teenage daughter would say," Thiessen added with a grin.

  Throughout the exchange, Caine remained impassive, looking out the window as if the conversation in the car bored him. Peri decided to ignore him in turn ... and make sure not to expose her neck to him. Just in case.

  It was nice to see more of the countryside than she'd been able to last night. They were on a small country highway, driving past subdivisions and ranches abutted by rolling purple mountains. All too soon, they merged onto the northbound freeway to Phoenix and after that, the desert landscape began to flow together into a patchwork of beige and dusty violet.

  Still, she'd so rarely been out of the Pacific Northwest that she was determined to savor every minute of this. She'd gone on a few road trips with friends back in college, most notably down to Vegas on spring break, and she'd been on school field trips. Other than that, her world had consisted of Washington and Idaho.

  There's so much I haven't seen yet.

  And above all, she was glad that she was getting to see it with Noah. Glad that he'd allowed her to be part of his world. As terrifying and alien as that world could be, it had also opened up new vistas of wonder to her. Now, looking out the car window at the desert landscape gliding past, she couldn't help thinking about the hidden marvels that might be concealed behind the everyday world. Was that wide-winged vulture circling high above them actually a shifter, watching the world from above? How about that hawk, lifting off a fence post with a sharp beat of its wings? Were there herds of deer shifters roaming those distant blue mountains, wolf shifters howling in the night?

  And what else was out there? Vampires? Dragons? Aliens?

  Her ordinary, prosaic world now had magic in it.

  All because of Noah.

  She reached a hand between the seats, groping for Noah's. Strong, warm fingers closed over hers.

  They stopped for gas north of Phoenix, Delgado and Trish pulling in a few minutes later. Thiessen suggested that everyone load up on cold drinks. Peri bought herself a pair of sunglasses with sparkly blue and green frames that complimented her hair, as well as a Grand Canyon keychain.

  "You haven't even been to the Grand Canyon yet," Noah remarked, hanging out with her in the checkout aisle with a handful of candy bars and water bottles.

  "This way I'm properly souvenired even if I don't get a chance to go." She held it up. "Look, there's an emergency whistle on it. That could come in handy."

  From there, they drove up into the mountains. The open desert gave way to pine forest, and the conversation in the car, which had been bouncing between various light topics, took a turn for the serious as Noah and Thiessen began to discuss their plans once they got to Flagstaff. Caine appeared to have fallen asleep with his head leaning against the window, but Peri glimpsed a flicker beneath his eyelids—he was awake and listening.

  "Just remember," Noah was saying, "if we can recognize them, they'll also be able to recognize us. We don't want to tip them off that we're onto them. The tricky thing is going to be finding them without giving ourselves away. Especially since they can sense us."

  "What about hiding in plain sight?" Peri asked.

  "What do you mean?" Thiessen asked. To her surprise, both of the men stopped their conversation and listened to her attentively. She hadn't expected that, and the sudden scrutiny, as well as the unfamiliar feeling of having her ideas taken seriously, made her falter for a moment.

  "Well ... I mean, look at me." She waved a hand to indicate her colorful hair and artificial leg, blatantly visible at the moment since she was wearing cargo shorts. "I'm a reporter, but I don't get stories by sneaking around hiding who I really am. You can see me coming a mile away. And that's exactly what I've banked on for my entire career. I'm Peri Moreland, professional crank."

  Thiessen looked confused, but Noah leaned forward between the seats intently. "You mean that you always have a reason to be everywhere."

  "Exactly. No one is surprised to see me turn up. A lot of times they don't want me there, but back in Seattle, I'm a regular part of the scenery when anything weird goes down. And like I said earlier, I have contacts throughout the underground conspiracy blogosphere. The Southwest is a hotbed of it, with Roswell and Area 51 and so forth. If they know I've stumbled onto their trail, the Valeria won't be shocked to see me here."

  As the implications sank in, Noah frowned, while a smile had broken out on Thiessen's face. "You're saying just let them think that you're investigating them for your blog," Thiessen said.

  "Right on." She held up a fist; he bumped it.

  "I'm not okay with making her a target," Noah protested. "Anyway, the point is to avoid attention. How is it not going to make them suspicious if you turn up in Flagstaff?"
>
  "Because no one takes me seriously," Peri told him, twisting around in her seat. "That's how I can get access to places that regular reporters can't. I'm a conspiracy blogger with rainbow-colored hair who says ludicrous things on the Internet. Who's going to be threatened by that? At worst, I might put out some of their secrets on a blog that only a handful of weirdos read. And don't look innocent at me. I know that your department puts out misinformation for bloggers like me to snap up. You use us."

  Noah winced. "It's not like that. Well, okay, it is like that, but—"

  "Hey." She caught his hand, squeezing it to show him there were no hard feelings. "I know how the game is played. Believe me, I never wanted to be a crank. I wanted to be a serious reporter working for a respectable paper. But the more resigned I've gotten to what I actually am, the more I've realized that I have a lot of advantages regular reporters don't. I'm not constrained in the same way they are, by a boss or a legal department or, to be more blunt, by journalistic ethics or the truth. I'm not constrained like you guys are by your jobs, either."

  Even Caine was no longer pretending to sleep and was now openly listening.

  "So what are you suggesting?" Thiessen asked. "I sincerely hope you're not up to anything that's going to get us paycheck-collecting government stiffs fired. You realize if you break your NDAs with the SCB it's going to be bad news for you, right?"

  "Of course I do, I'm not stupid. All I'm saying is I can investigate without it being weird. They don't have to know that you guys are here. And I can say whatever you want me to say on my blog. Whatever would be most likely to flush them out into the open."

  Noah let out a bright laugh and brought her hand up to his lips, kissing the back. "Sweetheart, you're brilliant."

  "I know," she said, trying not to preen. Sweetheart. It made her heart glow.

  But even better was the way they were listening to her as if she was a fully respected member of the team. Not dismissing her as a crank, not condescending to her as a girl from the sticks who didn't know what she was talking about. They listened. And now that the idea was out there, the conversation turned to details: what they wanted her to say, where they wanted her to go. Peri had a few suggestions along those lines—this was what she did for a living, after all—and each one was taken seriously by the others in the car.

  Well, most of the people in the car. Caine listened through most of the brainstorming session without saying anything, and finally put in, "This plan is ridiculous." His voice was a low rasp, as if something had damaged his vocal cords.

  "Thank you for being helpful," Thiessen said, his tone light.

  Noah said in a sharper voice, "If you have a better idea, feel free to share."

  "It won't work." Fixing Peri with a stare from behind his sunglasses, he said icily, "It'll only get you killed."

  A spike of cold went down to the pit of her stomach. She slammed anger over the top of it. "Do you have knowledge of the future that the rest of us don't? Look, the risk is mine. Isn't it my choice to take it?"

  Between the sunglasses and lack of expression, it was impossible to tell what Caine was thinking. "It's your funeral," he muttered, and went back to staring out the window as they passed through the outskirts of Flagstaff.

  ***

  Flagstaff was a small city framed by picturesque mountains, and Peri liked it at first sight. The pretty, quaint downtown shopping district was visible from a window of their hotel. She wanted nothing more than to run out and explore it.

  Instead she was stuck in a hotel room on a conference call with Stiers and Costa. Actually, Noah was doing most of the talking—Thiessen and Caine having gone to get takeout and meet up with Delgado—while Peri had curled up on the bed with her new laptop to start working on her blog post and reassure her Twitter followers that she hadn't died or otherwise come to harm. Apparently a theory was going around the conspiracy blogosphere that the government had snatched her.

  Oh, if you only knew.

  Right now Stiers and Costa were arguing about whose agent should take lead on the investigation, their tinny voices coming out of Noah's phone lying in the middle of the bed. "If you think you can swoop into my jurisdiction, Pam, and snake a case out from under my agents—"

  "I'm not suggesting anything of the sort, Quinn, and I'm well aware that your agents know the area better than mine do, but my agent has personally encountered the opposition on multiple occasions—"

  "All the more reason to have my agents take point, since they know his face!"

  "If I can interject, ma'am—sir—" Noah interrupted. "I'm perfectly fine with being second on this case. Whatever you feel is best."

  There was a brief silence from the phone's speaker before Stiers said in a more moderate tone, "Who were you going to put on lead, Quinn?"

  "Cam Thiessen."

  "He's good. Reminds me a lot of our Jack Ross up here."

  "So he passes your high standards," Costa said dryly. "Good to know. With that settled, moving on ... since it looks like we're going forward with the plan to dangle a lure for the Valeria, I'm sending a second team up to Flagstaff with a decoy agent to play Moreland. They should be there by morning."

  Peri looked up from her computer. "Wait, what?"

  "Hey, we're not trying to make a target out of her," Noah protested. "I mean, not—as such, exactly—"

  "You're trying to smoke them out of hiding, so let's put up a smokescreen. She's completely untrained," Costa said, "but she's very, er, visible. We'll need to find someone human, of course—about her size, preferably with field training—"

  There was a brisk knock at the door. "Pizza's here," Delgado's voice called.

  Peri hopped up to answer it, while Noah wrapped up the conference call. Delgado was in the hallway, still in her normal-human guise. "How's this for service?" she said with a quick smile. "Wood-fired pizza delivered right to your room."

  "How'd Costa take the news?" Thiessen asked as he came in after Delgado, laden with pizza boxes, with Trish and Caine behind him.

  "Find out for yourself." Noah held out the phone. "He wants to talk to you."

  While Thiessen talked to his boss, Trish passed around napkins and paper plates, and people found places to sit on the bed or the room's two chairs. Peri couldn't help being amused at seeing Caine doing something as ordinary as settling in for a pizza party. He looked vaguely uncomfortable in his vampiric way.

  Delgado, the last to sit down, took a patch of floor next to Trish's knees—with her human side, not her lizard side, turned in Trish's direction. Trish darted a look at her from under her eyelashes and shifted ever so slightly closer, so her knees brushed lightly against Delgado's back. Delgado almost dropped her slice of pizza.

  Noah winked at Peri, who grinned back.

  "So we hear you guys have a plan," Trish said through a mouthful of pizza.

  As they ate, Peri explained the basics. Delgado was skeptical. "Is anyone actually going to believe a bunch of stuff on a conspiracy blog?"

  "We don't need anyone to actually believe it," Noah said. "All we need to do is put just enough out there to make the Valeria nervous. We're not going to mention the word 'Valeria' or anything about shifters, just try to make them sweat a little."

  "Anyway, trust me," Peri said, "I could put out stuff that's way more bonkers than anything we're planning, and I'd have people lining up for it. Clickbait just has to look appealing and have all the right buzzwords in it. It has to ask a question that the audience wants an answer to. That's what gets the clicks. And in order to make a living at it, I've gotten pretty good at getting clicks."

  "If your site is targeted to conspiracy theorists," Trish said, "won't they click on basically anything if it's got a picture of a Bigfoot or a UFO on it?"

  "The true believers are a relatively small number of my readers. The casual audience are the ones I'm trying to pick up, and the ones I'm trying to convince to come back and keep giving me eyeballs on my ads. All clickbait is like that, only mine's not '5 S
ecrets to Lose 10 Pounds in a Week!' It's more like 'This man didn't believe in UFOs ... and you'll never believe what happened next!'"

  "Going out on a limb here, I'm going to guess he was abducted by a UFO," Delgado said with a grin.

  "Or maybe it's really an AP article about a John Doe who turned up in the hospital emergency ward, with my blog post to give it creative context. You just have to kinda ..." She made a twisting gesture with her hands. "Tweak the truth a little bit. Not ... too much. I wouldn't outright make something up unless it's been a really slow week and I just don't have anything else. The life cycle of a website is incredibly fast-moving. You need to keep your hits up and keep people coming back, and they won't do that if you don't have something interesting for them to read. But you don't want all your facts to be fake. Just mix the fake ones in with the real ones enough that everything looks legit."

  "That's exactly what we do in the PR department," Trish said. "Except we're deliberately trying to mislead people as to our real purpose."

  Thiessen, who had been talking to Costa by the window, hung up and came over to join the others. He tossed the phone back to Noah and started loading up a paper plate with slices of pizza.

  "The Chief's on board?" Delgado asked.

  "Reluctantly. Though I have to say, he took the whole thing with remarkably little yelling."

  "I think he got all the yelling out of the way at us earlier," Peri said.

  Delgado laughed. "Trust me, there is no limit to how many people the Chief can yell at, when he's in the right mood."

  "Is he still sending up a second team?" Noah asked.

  Thiessen nodded, chewed and swallowed before he said, "There's a second team coming up in the morning with a Peri decoy. The real Peri needs to stay out of sight as much as possible."