Tiger in the Hot Zone (Shifter Agents Book 4)

by Lauren Esker

  He was standing in the same room with someone infected with a disease that might kill him—and kill him horribly, from the look of this poor sap.

  "We could all be infected," Noah murmured, staring at the writhing, shuddering man in the bed. "Trish and I were at the morgue back in Seattle; we've been exposed. And Peri and I had contact with Valeria agents again in the Cascades."

  "That doesn't necessarily mean you're infected. It depends on the level of contagion and the incubation period." Breena rolled the IV stand away from the bed, out of reach of the patient's helpless flailing. "If this illness incubates quickly, it's likely that none of you are infected or you'd know by now."

  "Either way, I need to call my boss for sure." Delgado indicated the patient with a tilt of her head. "Do you know this guy's name?"

  "Sandro Felici is the name he was admitted under."

  "Who brought him in?" Noah asked. "Do you know?"

  "I have no idea. I wasn't there when he was admitted. All I know is that when he got to my floor, I took one look at him and knew I had to call someone about it."

  "We can run that down later." Delgado turned toward the door. "I'm calling it in. We'll have him on a medivac flight down to Tucson before he knows what happened."

  "I don't think he knows what's happening now," Noah murmured, following the women out of the room. They began to peel off their scrubs, following Breena's lead, and he shuddered again at the awareness of how flimsy their safety protocols were. This sort of precaution might work to stop flesh-eating bacteria, but not a disease that might, for all they knew, have permeated the air of the hospital already.

  But the initial rush of terror was already fading, and he was starting to feel clearheaded again. At least Peri wouldn't be affected, he thought. If shifters were the only victims, she'd be safe.

  His family wouldn't, though. His friends wouldn't. His all-too-vivid imagination delivered a hideous image of his parents lying in adjacent hospital beds, writhing in agony. Or Trish, or Jen Cho—or the interns, some of whom were just kids—

  "We already knew there was a disease," Delgado pointed out, reading the direction of his thoughts from his face. "Now we know for sure. All we need to do is get the boys and girls in the lab working on it."

  "I never thought I was a germophobe, but this is turning me into one," Noah muttered, bundling his discarded scrubs with the outer surfaces turned in. "How the hell are you so calm about it?"

  She turned to face him. "Easton, I'm scared shitless. Any reasonable person would be. But we've got a state-of-the-art lab back in Tucson. We've got some of the best minds in the SCB working on it, and now we have a living patient they can study. We'll get this. They'll get this."

  "Yeah, I hope you're right. I just—"

  He broke off at an odd scene from the other end of the corridor. A nurse had just turned the corner, walking briskly and pushing an IV stand. From the corner of his eye, he saw a quick flurry of motion: she froze, spun around, and all but ran back around the corner, abandoning the IV stand in the middle of the hallway.

  "What?" Trish asked, seeing his face.

  "I—don't know—" He'd only glimpsed her for a minute. Dark hair pulled back in a ponytail—had that been Dr. Bassi?

  "Shit," he muttered and sprinted down the hallway after her. He turned the corner just in time to see the elevator doors close.

  "What's going on?" Delgado demanded, skidding to a halt behind him.

  "Bassi's here. We gotta head her off. She's in the elevator." He was already running for the stairs as he spoke.

  They were on the third floor. Rather than running down all the stairs, he gripped the railing, took a deep breath, and flung himself over.

  He'd jumped from heights before. His dad had taught him how to hold himself and how to land. The necessary agility and reflexes were among the pleasures of being a cat shifter. However, he'd never jumped from this high onto concrete.

  At least there wasn't much time to think about it.

  Landing was painful, but his knees flexed to absorb the impact; he stumbled forward and caught himself on the wall. In the stairwell above him, he heard Trish say, "No security cameras in here, right? I'm gonna shift. Hold my clothes."

  Delgado made a strangled noise, which was the last thing he heard before plunging out into the lobby. He made it just as the elevator doors opened.

  The woman wearing nurse's scrubs stepped out. For an instant they looked into each other's faces. It was definitely Bassi.

  She took one look at him and fled, ducking down a corridor labeled with signs for the emergency room.

  "Sorry—out of the way—" Noah slalomed through startled patients and medical personnel, trying to keep her in sight. If she got out of the ER entrance, the odds of catching her dropped dramatically. He could still shift and follow her with his sense of smell, but a tiger loping through an urban parking lot wasn't exactly subtle.

  He was distantly aware of his phone vibrating in his pocket, but it wasn't like he could stop in mid-chase to find out who was calling. He got to the ER just in time to see Bassi plunging through the main doors, almost bowling over an elderly woman pushing a man in a wheelchair.

  "Someone stop that woman!" Noah shouted. "Call security! She's a criminal!"

  He ran out into the parking lot, prepared to find nothing except a sea of cars and no sign of his vanished suspect. Instead, there was a commotion going on about twenty feet outside the entrance. Bassi was flat on her face on the sidewalk—with a pronghorn antelope standing on her.

  Trish. He'd never seen her shifted before. She was about the size of a deer with attractive orange and white markings. Bassi, wearing a baffled look as if she couldn't understand how this was happening to her, made an effort to escape, bucking her body and trying to twist out from under her four-legged captor. Trish planted a hoof firmly on her head and she desisted.

  Unsurprisingly, the sight of a woman being assaulted by a deer had drawn the attention of everyone nearby. A couple of people were filming it with their cell phones.

  "Sorry," Noah panted, pushing his way through the onlookers. "Sorry, animal control, excuse me." At least pronghorns were native to the area, which made his job a lot easier than if she'd been, say, a snow leopard.

  At his approach, Trish leaped off her captive and bounded away with a satisfied skipping gait. Bassi sat up, looking scuffed and bruised. Noah hauled her to her feet in an armlock.

  "I wasn't expecting to see you this far south, Agent Easton," she said, recovering some composure.

  "What, after you tried to blow me up and kill me? Imagine that."

  Delgado arrived at a jog, looking pink from more than the exertion, Noah guessed, since she'd just watched Trish strip for shifting in the stairwell. He cuffed Bassi and they frog-marched her through the parked cars to Delgado's SUV. "Are you here by yourself, or with someone?" Noah asked.

  "I'll talk, but I want protection."

  "If you wanted help, all you had to do was ask," Noah said dryly without loosening his grip on her in the slightest. "Protection from what?"

  "The Valeria."

  "Say what now?" He couldn't help laughing. "Did you double-cross them too?"

  Bassi clamped her mouth shut in a thin white line.

  "So who is this again?" Delgado wanted to know.

  "She's Veronica Bassi, the forensic pathologist and Valeria spy that we misplaced back in Washington. Or should I say former Valeria spy, from the sound of things. What happened, you guys have a falling out? Dissent in the ranks? The Nazis lied in the recruitment brochure?"

  "You'll get my full cooperation as soon as you promise me protection and immunity," Bassi said mulishly.

  "I don't have the authority to make promises."

  She cursed them out in Italian and English while they put her in the back of Delgado's sweltering car.

  "Look, lady," Noah said. "You've killed one person already, tried to kill two federal agents, and got yourself in a whole world of hurt. We're setting t
he terms of any deals, not you."

  "You won't get anything from me if the Valeria kill me first," Bassi told him through the rolled-down window of the parked car.

  "Yeah, back to that." Noah started to lean on the car's roof and jerked his hand away from the heat. He was used to Seattle's mild summers, not the fierce sun of the Southwest; it was giving him a headache. "Why are they after you? What'd you do?"

  "I didn't do anything," Bassi shot back. "I followed orders. Something changed upstairs. They're liquidating the project. All aspects of the project, including us."

  Noah and Delgado stared at her.

  "Now do you see why I want protection?"

  "Yeah, but ..." Delgado frowned. "What the hell? They must have spent years setting this up."

  "Decades," Bassi said.

  "So why squander all that work, before they even deploy the disease for real?"

  "Because of that guy in there." Noah pointed at the hospital. "Your bosses can't deploy a disease that affects them too. Or ... no ..." The implications were falling together, pieces clicking into place one by one. "It's not because they're afraid of the disease. Or not just because of that. It's because it proves that your people and ours are the same. That's what they're trying to cover up."

  Bassi's jaw clenched. She said nothing.

  "You hate that, don't you?" Delgado said. She leaned in the car window and pushed her sunglasses down on her nose. Bassi flinched away from Delgado's staring lizard eye. "You can't stand looking at this and knowing that we're distant cousins."

  "We're not," Bassi said. Her voice shook. "I'm not a Witchfinder."

  "Yeah? Seems like a pretty narrow distinction to me. You guys don't ever marry each other? Have kids with each other?"

  Noah's phone vibrated again. He stepped away from the car and checked the screen to find several missed texts from Peri:

  Call me.

  Call me NOW.

  U ok? Please call.

  Even as he was reading the texts, the phone lit up again with Peri's number. "Noah," she said when he answered. "Thank God. Are you all right?"

  "I'm fine." He glanced back at Delgado's car, where Trish had joined the group. "Just busy. What's the matter? Is everything okay?"

  Peri gave a shaky burst of laughter. "No. No, I think you can safely say that everything is definitely not okay."

  He could hear voices in the background and bursts of static. Police radios. "Peri, hon, where are you? What happened?"

  She lowered her voice. "Our scar-faced friend came back. He—he killed Thiessen, and—look, Noah, I—"

  "He what? Peri, are you okay? Tell me you're somewhere safe."

  "I'm basically all right." She didn't sound like it. "The cops are here, and Caine. I got scraped up a little, that's all."

  "Peri. God." Noah dragged his hand over his face. "I'm so sorry I wasn't there—"

  "Stop it," Peri said, sounding a little more like herself. "You can't sit on me every minute of every day. I don't think either of us would appreciate that."

  "Yeah, but I can try not running across town on the morning that you make yourself a target."

  "Let's not, okay?" Her voice cracked. "You wish you'd been here, I get that. I kinda do too, but we both made our choices, and if you were here maybe he'd have killed you too. Anyway, Julius is hurt and he's running around Flagstaff somewhere."

  "I'll tell the others. I don't think we're going to be in Flagstaff much longer anyway. We've had some breaks here—but I'll tell you when I see you. Which will be soon."

  After some more murmured reassurances, on both sides, he went back to Delgado's car shaking with reaction.

  "What's wrong?" Trish asked, seeing his face.

  "Julius went after Peri. She said he killed Thiessen." He remembered as soon as he said it, seeing the stricken look on Delgado's face, that Thiessen had been her colleague and friend. But there was no way to soften the blow. "I'm heading over there now."

  Trish turned wide eyes on Delgado, who took a deep breath and visibly composed herself. "I'll get on the horn to Base. We've got work to do."

  Chapter Nineteen

  The SCB chartered them a flight to Tucson from the Flagstaff airport. Rather than going through security, they flashed their badges and drove through a gate into the industrial part of the airport, where a cargo plane that looked to Noah's eyes like a Second World War relic awaited them. Its propellers were just spinning down, their relief shift deplaning to join Nakamura's team in searching for Julius and securing the Flagstaff crime scene.

  A headache throbbed at Noah's temples, threatening to blow up to migraine proportions. He was tired, achingly, bone-deep tired. He'd spent the afternoon fielding questions from the local police and media while sticking as close to Peri as possible. So far, there was no sign of Julius, but if the damage he'd taken in Washington wasn't slowing him down, being shot a couple of times with a shotgun and run over with a forklift probably wasn't going to do it either.

  What's this guy made of, concrete?

  Peri looked exhausted, too, as she helped Trish coax their human witness, Dawn, out of the backseat of the car.

  "Why are we at the airport? Where are you taking me?"

  "You're going to be in protective custody for a little while," Trish told her.

  "I'm a single parent! Don't you people understand that? I can't just leave."

  "You can't go home either," Noah told her. "You may have been exposed to a potentially lethal disease. None of us can go home right now."

  Peri gave him a look. Noah took a slow breath, calming himself down. "Do you have anyone who can stay with your children, ma'am?"

  "My mother," Dawn said. "She's there now. I need to call her if I'm going to be gone overnight."

  Trish looked at Noah, who nodded. Dawn turned away, pulling out her phone.

  As the sun set, the rest of their convoy pulled in, consisting of an ambulance carrying Patient Zero and a second vehicle with Delgado and Caine escorting their prisoner.

  "You!" Peri snarled.

  Bassi tried to retreat behind a thoroughly unsympathetic Caine as Peri charged forward with vengeance in her eye. Noah leaped to intercept her, holding her back.

  "Let me go! She tried to murder us all in our sleep! She killed Zach!"

  "And she's in custody. We're taking her to the SCB. Honey." He gripped Peri by the shoulders, held on until she stopped struggling and looked up with red-rimmed eyes. "I know what she's done. Believe me, I know. She'll pay for her crimes. But right now, she's exactly where she belongs, in cuffs."

  For her part, Bassi was quiet and cooperative, especially after the body bags containing Thiessen and the dead Valeria agent were loaded onto the plane. Patient Zero was hustled into a makeshift containment facility that the Tucson medical team had set up in the back of the plane's cargo hold.

  The flight, at least, was short. There were no windows in the back of the plane. As Noah's ears popped to signal their descent to Tucson, he looked over at Delgado. Peri was half asleep on his shoulder, her hand twined firmly in his. "Where are we landing?" he called over the noise of the turboprop engines.

  "We have our own airstrip at the facility," Delgado called back.

  Of course they did.

  The plane jolted to a halt and the cargo doors opened onto runway lights and, beyond them, the complex of SCB buildings lit up against the dark sweep of the desert. Full darkness had fallen during their flight. A van was waiting for them on the airstrip, along with a team in quarantine suits.

  As Noah gave Peri a hand down to the rocky ground, an ATV skidded to a halt behind the van. Chief Costa leaped off and strode forward, his red hair whipping in the wind from the plane's lazily spinning turboprops. He, at least, didn't seem worried about contagion; he was too pissed to care.

  "What the actual fuck do you think you're playing at?" Costa roared, his face almost as red as his hair. "You Seattle yahoos land on my turf and now I have a dead agent, a human witness I have to do something about, an
d a royal fucking mess up there in Flagstaff, in the middle of town, in full view of a store full of witnesses. You—"

  "We came down here to help you stop a plague," Noah interrupted. He interposed his body between Costa and Peri without thinking about it. "If we weren't here, you'd still have the Valeria in your jurisdiction, except they'd be able to do whatever the hell they wanted because you wouldn't know about it."

  "So is that what I'm supposed to tell Thiessen's wife and kid?" Costa shot back. "This entire op was bungled from the get-go. We've got civilians running around, we've got—"

  "You wanna yell at someone, yell at me," Delgado snapped, jumping down from the hatchway steps. "With Cameron dead, I'm the ranking local agent. I signed off on—"

  "No," said a small voice from behind Noah. Peri stepped into view, one hand touching his arm. "It was my idea in the first place. I'm the one who thought smoking them out into the open would be a good idea."

  "We all made the decision together," Noah said firmly, taking her hand.

  Costa swept his disbelieving gaze across them. Noah looked over to find that Trish had debarked and was standing next to Delgado. Even Caine, at the top of the hatchway steps with a firm grip on Bassi's cuffs, appeared to have decided to lend his support to their united front.

  "We're all sick and grieving about Cam," Delgado said more gently. "And there should be questions, there should be an inquiry, but for God's sake not now. Unless you're planning to keep us out here in the plane all night—"

  "It's not a bad idea," Costa growled.

  And Noah had the sudden sinking realization that the SCB could detain them. The SCB could do whatever it wanted with them. All of the watching agents were armed. In the quarantine suits, with their face masks reflecting the plane's running lights, they seemed more like faceless robots than people, a hostile wall standing between Noah's group and the facility.

  If they really think we're infected, there's no telling what they might do next.