“Get to the point.”
“Right, well, I was picking up some data for a client, private military contractors. Not particularly nice people, but I’ve worked for worse companies in the past. The idea was to copy a batch of files from this secure server, mostly client lists and field reports. I think they wanted to snipe some of their largest customers. Whatever the case, I got more than I bargained for.” He paused for a few moments before continuing. “I don’t help bad people do bad things. I make it a point to read through any data that I collect for a client. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I helped someone do something terrible.”
“I get it. You’re a gentleman spy.”
Rick shook his head. “No, nothing like that. I just won’t be responsible for helping someone commit murder, no matter how much they pay me. If I find something in the data that I don’t like, I get rid of it and disappear. Clients don’t know what I look like, after all. I’m not easy to track.”
“The point, Rick.”
“Yeah. Well, I went through the data like I always do, and found something terrible.”
“What did you find?”
“Your word. I want your word that you won’t tell anyone.”
“What good will that do? I can just lie to you,” I pointed out.
He looked at me once more, a strange smile on his face. “Nora Tress. You’ve dedicated your entire life to the pursuit of helping people. You were raised by Focus, but you don’t stick with them out of gratitude.”
“And how do you know that?”
His grin widened. “Because you got irrationally angry when I implicated Focus in the catastrophe to come. If you were repaying a debt, you wouldn’t take what I said so personally. You’re a true believer.”
He was right, but I didn’t want to admit that he had read me so easily. “What if I am? What does that prove?”
“Only that the kind of person who genuinely wants to help tends to be the same kind of person who keeps promises.” He leaned forward, and I couldn’t help but do the same. “Can I trust you, Nora Tress? Can you and I do what we can to save the lives of millions?”
I reminded myself that I was dealing with a skinchanger, a shape shifter, someone who could literally lie with their physical body. I told myself that trusting this man would be a mistake. I insisted that I had just met him, that he had been following me, and that I would be an idiot to believe a word he had to say.
But I trusted him anyway. There was something about him, an earnestness that came through his words, even when I didn’t want to hear them. My instincts, the same ones that had warned me that I was being watched, revealed no deceit from Rick Torin.
It didn’t hurt that he was gorgeous, either.
Dammit.
I heaved out a sigh.
“Shit. You’re about to make my life extremely complicated, aren’t you?”
Rick grinned. “Only if you want it to be.”
What the hell does that even mean?
“Fine. You have my word. I’m choosing to trust you, Rick. If you make me regret it, I swear that nothing on this earth will stop me from making sure that you regret it too.”
His smile didn’t fade. “Okay then.”
I stepped over to him and, with a small pocketknife, cut through the duct tape around his wrists. He peeled the rest off, wincing slightly, and rubbing the chafed skin. Then he rose from the chair, and stuck out one hand. I grasped it in my own. His palms were soft, and roughly twice the size of mine. We shook.
“So. The data.”
“Right.”
He pulled a smartphone out of his front pocket. He swiped through the password lock, and started rifling through the contents, evidently searching for information. “You really shouldn’t have let me keep this. If I wasn’t such a good guy, I might have used it to call for help.”
I felt like a moron. I had forgotten to search his pockets in between attacking him and getting him into the car.
“After what I did to your SUV, I’m pretty sure you weren’t thinking about anything but keeping me happy.”
“Mostly I was thinking about that, yeah. Also how to keep millions of people alive. And about how weirdly hot you looked when you were threatening to kill me.”
I blushed at the remark. “Watch it. I can still put you down if I want to.”
He smiled again. “See what I mean? Gorgeous.”
“Just tell me what you found.”
“Requests, estimates, and expected timelines.”
“For what?”
“Corpse disposal.”
I stared at him blankly for a few moments. “Corpse disposal?”
Rick nodded, his eyes still on his phone. “Someone requested a lot of information from Blackstone. That’s the mercenary group I was infiltrating. They wanted estimates for disposing of large quantities of bodies.”
“How many?”
“Thousands. Blackstone does a lot of business in North Africa, and they have an established presence in the area. They have infrastructure in place to handle that kind of operation. We’re not talking about cleaning up after a hit. We’re talking about mass graves, ones that can be hidden from surveillance satellites.”
I digested that for a few seconds. “Okay. I can see how that would track. Nobody asks about corpse disposal unless they plan on making a lot of corpses. How is Focus implicated?”
“All communications were done via email, through proxy servers, and with throwaway email addresses. They covered their tracks pretty well, and it’s standard fare for Blackstone to do business relatively anonymously. They don’t care who’s paying them, as long as it’s on time and in full. But when I saw these emails, I did some digging. I called up a guy I know. He’s not exactly a hacker, but he knows way more about communications than anyone else I know. He followed the email through the IP addresses, and eliminated each one that was a known proxy server. He wound up with three that weren’t directly linked to a proxy at the end of it all, and forwarded their locations to me.”
He showed me his phone. The display showed a map of the world, with three locations flagged. “One of them is in the middle of the Pacific. One of those marine biology listening posts, doing some research on whales or something. Another is somewhere in the Australian Outback, as far as I can tell, in the middle of nowhere. And the third is right here: Focus, Inc. The headquarters and public face of Focus.” Rick wasn’t smiling anymore. He practically seethed with anger.
On the other hand, I had room for nothing but doubt and despair. Either what Rick was telling me was true, and the organization I had worked for my entire life was planning some kind of cataclysmic event, or Rick’s information wasn’t accurate. I didn’t think he was lying to me, but it was possible that he had been misled.
What almost made me believe it was that the information had been uncovered electronically. Focus was a group of wizards, not software engineers. While it was true that they kept up to date as much as funding allowed, technology was not their strong suit. Only a few wizards had the knowledge necessary to utilize the more advanced systems, like satellite tracking and electronic surveillance. Most of them thought and acted in concert with their own role in the organization, not bothering to study other disciplines. It was one of the great strengths of Focus that they functioned as a team, each member fulfilling a specific, highly specialized job, but one of the greatest weaknesses was that remarkably few of them had much in the way of versatility.
I took a deep breath, and looked at Rick. “Do you want a drink?”
“Hell yes.”
***
The atmosphere changed quickly, from barely contained hostility to amiable, even friendly discussion. I found that I liked Rick quite a bit. He wasn’t the man I had assumed he was when he was following me. He laughed easily, and made me laugh in turn. He seemed kind, genuinely concerned, and I believed that he wanted to help. If nothing else turned up in our investigation, I thought that I might have, at the very least, made a friend for a
change. We met because he was stalking me and I totaled his car in retaliation, which should tell you everything you need to know about my social skills.
Before we could do anything to prevent the event from happening, we first needed to confirm that the information was correct. Over glasses of bourbon and a jar of mixed nuts, Rick and I discussed the best way to do that.
“I was planning on taking your place,” he admitted around a mouthful of cashews. He washed them down with a gulp of bourbon. “It’s why I was following you in the first place. I was gathering data on your personality, the way you moved, how you reacted to things. I was only going to be you for a short time, an hour or two, but I needed to be fairly convincing.”
I took a long drink. “That is the creepiest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Rick nodded. “Sorry. But I didn’t see any other way to do it.”
“Well, if we’re going to work together, I have two rules.”
“Okay.”
“One: we actually work together. That means no secrets, no holding back information. If we find something out, we find it out as a team.”
“Sure, I’m on board with that. What about the second rule?”
I smirked. “You do not get to shape shift into me.”
He put on a show of appearing crestfallen. “It’s because you have a full-length mirror in the bathroom, isn’t it?”
I nodded solemnly. “Pervert.”
“I am as God made me.”
“I was meaning to ask you about that, actually.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when you shift. Your entire body mass changes, right? Like, if you were to turn into an elephant or something, you would be several times your size.”
“Yeah, so?”
“It doesn’t make any scientific sense. You violate the Law of Conservation of Mass.”
He stared at me blankly for a few moments. “No I don’t.”
I shook my head. “Yes, you do. Matter isn’t destroyed, it can only convert to other states of matter. Or energy, but that’s when you’re talking about nuclear fission. And there’s no way in hell that you can possibly produce enough energy to convert to mass when you turn into an elephant.”
“I eat a lot.”
“You’d have to eat nonstop for months, maybe years, to do that.”
“Where is this coming from?”
“I majored in physics. You’re the first skinchanger I’ve ever met, and I thought I might as well ask.”
He pointed a finger towards my chest in mock accusation. “You’re a wizard. You literally do magic. How does that not violate the laws of physics?”
“Because it doesn’t. Thermodynamics, conservation of energy and mass, all of those laws still apply to what I can do. Wizards work in the natural order of things; we only control the energy, we don’t change how it behaves.”
“Okay, well… shit.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Look, I don’t know how any of this crap works. We’re talking about magic. Universal laws can be left at the door as far as I’m concerned. At the end of the day, what’s important is that what we can do works, not the how and why of it.”
“Well, yeah. But I won’t say that I’m not curious about it. I’m surprised you aren’t.”
“Because it doesn’t matter. And no, that wasn’t a bad pun about the Law of Conservation of Mass.”
I grinned anyway. “All right. Let’s table this discussion for another time, then.”
Rick tapped his glass against the surface of my kitchen table. “Motion carried.”
“Focus.”
“Focus.”
“What do we do from here? How can we confirm the information?”
Rick rubbed his chin, the slight stubble rasping like sandpaper. “Do you have access to operation records?”
“Sort of.”
He waved a hand in a grand gesture. “Elaborate, please.”
“Well, I’m not a full member yet.”
“I know. That’s why I picked you to impersonate.”
“Pervert. We both know it was because of my ass.”
“Your ass was just a bonus. The real reason is that I knew that you weren’t a full member of any faction, and would be in sort of advanced training with all of them. That meant that you would have access to all of the factions, whereas a full member would be restricted to just one.”
“Yes and no. The other initiates and I are allowed to freely observe any of the factions we choose, but we don’t have full access. For instance, I couldn’t actively participate in any Fire operations, or even be allowed to have a full briefing on any of them. I can only observe what they are currently doing, not find out why they’re doing it.”
“Hmm. I didn’t realize that.”
“It’s a secret society, Rick. They have different levels of access. That’s why people who first join the Freemasons don’t write tell-all books within a month.”
“I should have figured that.”
“You should be better at espionage than this.”
“Hey! It’s the first time I’m trying to get into an organization like this. Most of the time it’s just corporate offices trying to steal patents before they get filed.”
“The rogue, humbled.”
“Who talks like that?”
“I’m a wizard, Rick. I talk how I want.”
“Yeah, well, fine. Back to the subject.” He paused to take another drink. “Would you be okay with stealing some information?”
“I don’t mind getting my hands dirty.”
“There’s a loaded phrase.”
“No joke. I’ll do what needs to be done. I don’t like it, don’t get me wrong. I love Focus. They’ve done more for this planet than any other single group, and they never take any credit for it, not to mention the things they’ve done for me. But if people within Focus are turning it toward their own agenda, then I owe it to the organization to fix it.”
“Okay. Well, let’s get to work then.”
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Chapter Four
The Fire faction offices were radically different from the others in the building. Whereas Gabriel’s was filled with paraphernalia and personal mementos gathered over a long and complicated career, these were Spartan, devoid of anything that would suggest a personality. A simple, plain desk of oak, available at virtually any retailer that deals in furniture, stood in front of a comfortable but unimaginative chair in each office I passed. They were nearly identical to one another, a stark reminder that this branch of Focus was not concerned with personal comfort.
“I’m almost there. Shouldn’t be too much longer.”
“Move your ass, Nora.”
“Stop talking about my ass, Rick.”
He chuckled into the earpiece I was wearing. I liked his laugh—it had a quality to it that resonated genuine emotion. “Maybe later I’ll get a better look at it.”
I stopped my rapid pace down the hallway for a moment, briefly pausing. The evening before had been strange. Rick and I had stayed up late, discussing how we would go about confirming that the threat existed. Once we had finished our planning, I had offered him the couch. He took it without complaint, but I had seen his eyes lingering on me as I went to bed, and didn’t forget the good-natured flirting from our conversations. Then, as I lay in bed trying to sleep, I had realized how odd it felt to have a man in my house—especially someone who was essentially a stranger. I hadn’t brought anyone home since college, and while I hadn’t exactly brought Rick home for the same purposes, it felt similar.
I liked Rick, but didn’t know if I wanted to go that route with him. He, on the other hand, kept dropping hints that he was completely open to any kind of relationship I wanted.
You’re kind of
in the middle of something, Nora.
Right. Figure out how you felt about Rick later, steal information now.
It was early in the morning, and the building was nearly empty. Only a few security guards waited in the library—Fire agents, disguised as regular old rent-a-cops. The first and main line of defense for Focus was its secrecy; since the world thought that it was just a philanthropic nonprofit—an apt, if inaccurate description—it was highly unlikely that the building would be burglarized. The only people who knew about what we really did were people who were affiliated with us, or were already part of the small supernatural community, mainly consisting of skinchangers and wizards. There were a few other things out there, but they were mysterious, and not a threat or general cause for concern.
Rick and I had decided the night before that I would get into the building on my own—I was a member, after all, and wouldn’t arouse suspicion from the guards—and head for the Fire offices. After describing the general responsibilities of each faction to Rick, we concluded that the most likely branch to be corrupt would be Fire. It wasn’t an accusation of guilt, merely an assumption based on personal experience. Most of the Fire agents I had met weren’t exactly violent or ax-crazy, but they were the type of people with talent for destruction, and a willingness to cause it.
A single Fire agent, with nothing but a relatively small open flame, could level a city block in minutes. A team of a dozen agents could incinerate Chicago in an afternoon. With the right planning, the Fire faction could be capable of horrifying levels of violence. If they had turned, it wouldn’t just be cause for concern—it would be bone-chillingly terrifying.
So we thought it best to check on them first.
I strolled down the hallway, appearing as nonchalant as possible. Rick had given me some pointers about being in places I shouldn’t.
“It’s all about acting like you have every right to be where you are. People tend to be on the lookout for anyone behaving oddly, so creeping around is pretty much the best way to get caught. They don’t check for people hiding in the open; most of the time, once you make it through security, people will assume that you must be allowed to be where you are.”
Shifting Focus (A Paranormal, Urban, Fantasy Novella) (Focus Series Book 2) Page 3
