Her Undercover Panther : A Paranormal Shapeshifter Romance

by Jasmine White

  “It’s a good thing this beach isn’t solid rocks like it is further south.”

  “If you look south right here, the beach is clear for a few miles,” Luis said pointing to the beach south of GRE and the employee docks. “Wait, do you see that?”

  He was still pointing, and Tara had to lean forward and squint, but she finally saw it.

  “Is that a woman?”

  “It is.”

  “What is she…?”

  Luis turned his gaze to the building then poked Tara and pointed.

  “There. I’d recognize that man anywhere. It’s Antonio.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Looks like he’s sneaking up on the guard while the woman has him distracted. Yep.” He stood. “We should go.”

  “But I don’t think Andrew is here yet.”

  “It doesn’t matter. They’re close, and I think Antonio is trying to escape. Again.”

  “Alright…”

  “Trust me, the entire building is going to be busy with that. We can get to them.”

  Luis was already going down the hill, practically dragging Tara behind him. They went as fast as they could safely go, and when they reached the door, Tara took out her laptop and hacked the keycard lock again. They went through the door and went to the stairwell. They rushed down the stairs and burst through the door.

  A man in a white coat jumped back, startled to see them, and then rushed forward. Tara, still holding the laptop in both hands, swung wildly as the man lunged at her and hit him full force in the face. He dropped to the ground in a heap, moaning and writhing in pain, trying to hold his broken nose together.

  Luis led the way, running down the hall where the test subjects were being kept. Tara was right on his heels, headed straight for the room that housed Martin.

  “Martin,” Luis said through the glass, “how do we open the doors?”

  “They have a control panel in the room across the way or something. They always go in there before the door opens. That’s their office.”

  Tara turned, her eyes landing on the door that led to an office instead of a tiny cell that was supposed to pass for a room. She opened the door and looked around the room until she found a remote sitting on the desk. There was no television in the room, and the remote numbers were well-worn. Tara pointed the remote at Martin’s door, pushing the numbers on the remote that matched the numbers above his door and crying out in relief when his door opened.

  Tara ran into the room, throwing her arms around Martin’s neck and hugging him warmly before grabbing his hand and pulling him toward the door. He didn’t budge, his face tilted in question as he stared at her.

  “Tara?” he said in awe. “Tara Strong?”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “It’s a long story, but we have to go.”

  She tugged again, and this time, he started moving, albeit slower than Tara wanted, following her out the door.

  Luis had the remote and was already opening doors, going into each room and encouraging the ones that were in good health to help the weak ones outside the door so they could escape together. All the doors were open, but only about half of the people had come out.

  “What’s wrong?” Tara asked.

  “A lot of them are weak from malnutrition and being kept in a small space with no exercise for so long. I don’t know how many of them are going to be able to walk out of here on their own two feet.”

  Tara groaned.

  “What do we do?” she asked, the shouts of angry voices already echoing the halls.

  “We protect them here.”

  Tara nodded, then an idea struck her. She ran back into the office, rummaging around in the drawers and finding exactly what she was looking for. She went back into the hall, checking the chamber in the Glock before walking down the hallway and looking cautiously around the corner.

  A shot rang out, and Tara yelled down the hallway. “Stay back or the next shot won’t be a warning.”

  There was a lot of mumbling, hands above head, shaking in terror, and the scientist who had come rushing from the elevator got to his knees as he was ordered to and then face down on the floor.

  There were several loud sounds from the floors above them, lots of shouting, and then the sound of many pairs of boots rushing down the halls overhead.

  “Sounds like the good guys are here,” Luis said.

  “Definitely our guys. They certainly love the flashbang grenades.”

  The stairwell door opened, and men in tactical gear spilled into the basement. They saw Tara there, gun pointed at the scientist, standing in the hallway with the Glock in her hand.

  “Federal agent,” she called out, identifying herself to the men who had just arrived.

  “Is the floor clear?” the lead agent asked.

  “I don’t know. We’re here for the friendlies, but they need medical.”

  The man in the front nodded, speaking into the walkie talkie on his shoulder and calling for medics, then turned to the team.

  “Clear the floor; I’ll stay with them.”

  The man now left in the front of the line nodded, and the agents fanned out, clearing the basement and making sure it was safe. The agent ushered them back into the corridor between the rooms that had held the captives and took her laptop bag from Luis, who had picked it up from where she’d left it.

  She turned to the agent in tactical gear, introducing herself and Luis quickly.

  “You have medics here, too?” Tara asked the man, whose embroidered tactical vest said that his name was T. Wright.

  “Yes. They’re in a boat just offshore. When you told Andrew about the friendlies and their living conditions, he assumed that we would need medics. They were behind us and-”

  There was a loud explosion, cutting the agent off mid-sentence.

  “What was that?” Tara asked, fingers already flying over the keyboard. She pulled up the video feeds, scrolling through them all and coming up empty. “I don’t see anything,” she said.

  “That was outside,” Agent Wright said. “Trust me, when you’re in a building with an explosion that loud, you feel it. Whatever it was didn’t blow up in this building.”

  Tara nodded, switching to the outside video feeds until she finally found the source of the blast.

  “There it is. It looks like something at the dock exploded,” she said, pointing out a spot on the grainy, black and white feed.

  “Not our boats,” Agent Wright said. “We have all of ours on the north shore, so that must have belonged to one of the scientists. I wonder why they blew it up.”

  Tara shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  Agent Wright turned his attention to Luis. “What branch are you?”

  “Retired army. I served with Andrew.” Luis paused before he added, “I’m a shifter.”

  Agent Wright nodded.

  “Andrew is a good man,” Agent Wright said. “If he thinks that you’re trustworthy, then so do I.”

  Agent Wright smiled at Luis, then turned his attention to the end of the hallway when he heard something.

  “Medics!” the unseen person shouted, obviously not wanting to be shot in a high adrenaline situation.

  “Clear!” Agent Wright called back, and the medics rushed around the corner, each with their own medical kit.

  The medics wore bullet-proof vests and were obviously trained to go into dangerous situations to attend to the injured. There were five medics in all, fanning out among the captives, silently dividing the nineteen people and affixing a colored tag to their shirts before moving on.

  “There were twenty friendlies?” one questioned.

  “I counted rooms, not people. One of the rooms turned out to be an office and was unoccupied.”

  The medic nodded, completing his triage of the patient in front of him and slipping the strings of a red code tag through a button hole on her shirt and tying it off. Tara’s stomach clenched, knowing that the woman sitt
ing there looking half asleep in the hallway would not survive if she didn’t receive urgent medical care.

  Tara looked down the line of captives, all of which had been assessed in the space of a few minutes by the efficient medic team. She saw one other red tag. The rest of the captives sported a yellow or green tag, meaning that all were injured and in need of medical assistance, but the green tags would be able to leave the building on their own two feet. Red would go first, then the yellow, and green would come out as they could make their way through the crowd of people going in and out and moving the wounded.

  The medic in front of Martin was trying to affix a yellow tag to his shirt, but Martin waved him off.

  “I’ll take a green one. I don’t need help getting out of this hellhole.”

  The medic opened his mouth to argue, but Martin leveled a look at him that had him shutting his mouth and handing the man a green tag.

  “Thank you,” Martin said.

  “We’ll wait for the all clear, and then we move,” Agent Wright said, still walking the hall and ready at any moment to protect the people he was covering.

  Meanwhile, Martin stood, going to Tara on feet that were unsteady and grabbing her gently by the arm. He took her a few feet away, then leaned against the wall and stared into her blue eyes.

  “I thought I was imagining you,” he said in a breathless whisper.

  “I’m here.”

  “I know. I can’t believe it. The last time I saw you, they were loading you into an ambulance, and I was wondering if you were going to survive. You had lost so much blood.”

  She pulled up her shirt, showing him the scar.

  “This is all that I have left from that day. And the beautiful violin that came later. I kept that, and I cherish it. I never got to say thank you. You were gone before I left the hospital.”

  “I know. I wanted to get you something to replace the violin that was crushed when I attacked that man. You loved that violin, and I knew you would be heartbroken when you came home and didn’t have it. I was going to just buy you a student one, then I thought about your last concert, and I realized that you were special. The kind of special that needed something better than a mass-produced base model. So, the next morning, after much searching on the internet, I ordered the one that came to your house. No sooner had I paid for it than there was a knock on my door and I opened it to find a man with an order of relocation and four armed men standing on my porch behind him. I went peacefully, but I was enraged. Here I had saved the life of a human child, and someone turned me in as a dangerous shifter.”

  “But you attacked a human to protect me.”

  “And I told them that. It didn’t matter. I had attacked a human, and I was deemed dangerous. It wasn’t long after that that the decree removing all shifters from human safe areas was passed down and shifters were relocated en masse to various islands throughout the world.”

  “That decree will be lifted,” Agent Wright said. “That’s part of what we’re doing here. We need the judge to sign it, but once it’s pushed through, Shifter Island and Isla Escondida are going to be U.S. properties, but otherwise sovereign nations.”

  “And the shifters, will they be exiled?” Martin asked.

  “No,” Agent Wright said. “The shifters will own this land, but they will be free to come and go as they please.”

  Martin closed his eyes, a grateful smile spreading across his face.

  “And I can go home,” he said. “Well, back to the States. I’m sure my home has changed hands in the last ten years.”

  Agent Wright was smiling. “There’s more. The edict calls for restitution. So everything of yours that was seized when you were relocated will be compensated at the market value when you were captured or at the value of today, whichever is greater.”

  Luis and Martin both stared at Agent Wright, shocked by what he’d just said.

  “Wow,” Martin said, looking to Luis and clapping his friend on the shoulder in celebration. “That is wonderful news.”

  Tara was watching the emotions play across Luis’s face, but she couldn’t begin to figure out what he was thinking. Would he go back to the States? Or was the island his home now? She wanted to ask him right then and there, but with twenty people watching them, she was sure that now wasn’t the time to talk about the future.

  Especially since Luis hadn’t even talked about being a couple, she thought, realizing that their “relationship” was nothing more than friends with benefits, and even then, that was reading more into what they had than was actually there. Her elation turned to defeat. She had been able to handle it when he wasn’t allowed to leave and start a life with her, but now that he had a choice, the impending rejection stung even more.

  “All clear,” a voice came over the walkie talkies, letting the agents in the building know that every GRE employee was captured now and it was safe to move.

  Agent Wright looked at Tara and back at Luis, not stating the obvious even though Tara could see in his eyes that he had figured them out.

  “It’s all clear,” he said. “Time to get these people out of here.”

  He got on his walkie, requesting red tag evacuation for the two that were critical.

  “We’re going to need life flight extraction for our red tag evacs,” Agent Wright said.

  “No life flight available,” the voice came back, and Agent Wright pursed his lips in frustration.

  “They’re not going to make it on the boat ride,” he said quietly, almost to himself.

  “Wait,” Tara said, looking excitedly at Luis. “Didn’t you say that one of the scientists has a seaplane?”

  Luis’s eyes lit up, and he smiled.

  “I did, and I saw it on the video feed when you were looking for the explosion, but I didn’t pay attention.”

  “Was it on the dock that exploded?” Agent Wright wanted to know.

  “No,” Luis and Tara said in unison.

  “Perfect,” Agent Wright said. He got back on the walkie talkie. “Can anyone fly a seaplane?” he asked the agents at large.

  “I can,” a man said. “I’ll go down and see if I can find the owner and get the keys.”

  Relief washed over Agent Wright’s face.

  “Hurry,” he urged the man on the walkie talkie, “they’re quickly fading to black tag.”

  “Ten-four,” the man said.

  They heard the elevator ding, and agents carrying collapsible stretchers poured into the hallway, opening the stretchers and securing the captives to them. They took the two marked with a red tag to the end of the corridor closest to the elevators, and two of the medics broke off to start IVs, one medic for each patient.

  The other captives were secured, lined up along the wall in order of severity, several of them being injected with pain killers and lifesaving medication to stabilize them for the journey back to Peru. Tara watched the scene unfold, stepping in when asked and standing back when she was in the way.

  When they started taking the captives up in the elevator two at a time, Agent Wright looked at Tara.

  “Andrew is in the lobby. You should check in with him and take Martin with you.”

  Tara nodded.

  “Thank you,” she said to the agent, shaking his hand and turning to Martin. “Are you above taking the elevator?” she asked.

  “I can make it up two flights. I’m not broken.”

  Tara looked at Luis, and he shrugged.

  “Alright,” Tara said. “Suit yourself.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Tara and Luis stood back from where Andrew was standing in the lobby, a piece of paper held low in front of him as he spoke into a small camera being held by another agent.

  “What is he doing?” Luis asked.

  “The Bureau doesn’t give live reports. He’s pre-recording answers to questions that would typically be asked by major news outlets, and then those will be distributed later today or tomorrow when we’ve already cleared out.”

  “Why?”

&nb
sp; Tara shrugged. “It’s one of the things that the FBI just does. I’m sure it’s a security measure. It keeps thrill seekers from showing up when a scene is still dangerous. With the instant gratification society we live in today, it’s not hard to see how some people would be inspired to come to this place to get a firsthand view of the carnage. In the past, that has proven to lead to more bloodshed on both sides; the bad guys want to get on camera and go about it the most violent way possible, and the agents are surrounded by the media and wannabes, yelling questions at them when they’re in the middle of a takedown.”

  “So, the short answer is that people are stupid,” Luis said.

  “In a group, they absolutely can be.”

  “That makes sense.”

  They were silent for a moment, listening to Andrew give clear, fluid answers to preapproved questions that the news stations would be asking on the video feed. The segment would start out with the claim that Agent Figueroa was joining them live via satellite. But in truth, Agent Figueroa would likely be watching himself on the news from the comfort of his hotel room before heading back home.

  “Thank you,” Andrew said, looking into the camera while the agents still in tactical gear went about what they were doing, taking captured GRE employees through the lobby with their hands over their faces to keep from being seen on the news. “There’s not much that I can tell you, but after an extensive investigation, we’ve shut down a human trafficking ring and turned this island and the other island back over to the locals.”

  Andrew paused, watching the screen intently as if listening to a question on the other end.

  “He’s good,” Luis said, leaning over to whisper in Tara’s ear.

  “He’s the best,” she whispered back, watching Andrew work the nonexistent news anchor into his hands. He was phenomenal at fake interviews and could probably finish out his career doing just that.

  “Yes, it is. But the U.S. maintains a hands-off approach with the indigenous people, and the actions of GRE and their employees have gone against a treaty signed by our government a decade ago.”

  Andrew waited again, then jumped in as if he was cutting the person on the other end off.