Body Master (3 page)

He pursed his lips again.
Sonofabitch,
she thought. “What the hell kind of initiative puts a shapeshifter on the force that’s supposed to be getting rid of them?”

MacGregor gave a big sigh. “Apparently, this one.”

Well, she was wide-awake now and all she wanted to say was,
Are you fucking crazy?
Luckily, a few responsible brain cells thought better and she said, “No. We aren’t doing this.”

He held up his palm. “Don’t even try. This is bigger than you or me.”

Apparently he hadn’t heard her the first time. “Okay, let me rephrase.
I’m
not doing this.”

MacGregor pushed back in his chair and regarded her for a serious moment. “If you don’t take him, the Committee will shut us down.”

She leaned over his desk. “We go out there and face death every night. We’re the only thing standing between the public and murderers who come in all shapes. How can the Committee even think about shutting us down?”

He shrugged. “Because they’re paying the bills?”

She couldn’t believe this was MacGregor. The man who handpicked every member of this team. The man who never left this office. The man who’d built this agency from the ground up. “Why are you buying into this crap?”

He looked at her, and she caught his frustration full bore. “I’ve lost twenty-seven agents in the past year. Two-thirds of my force. It’s the same in the XCEL offices in Chicago, LA, Vegas, Miami . . . The Committee doesn’t find that acceptable, and frankly, neither do I. I’m tired of seeing my agents come back to me in body bags.”

He didn’t need to quote statistics to her. Twenty-six funerals were forever burned in her memory. Soon to be twenty-seven. She knew the stakes. She also knew what would happen if they stopped trying.

“We’ve also captured over eighty Shifters,” she reminded him.

“Sixty-two of those were in the first nine months,” he pointed out. “Now they’ve adapted to every conventional weapon we have, and R and D can’t develop new ones fast enough. And hell, we still don’t have equipment to identify a Shifter on sight. One could walk in that door, and we wouldn’t know it.”

“We can handle this ourselves,” she told him, feeling her dread grow. “All those deaths will have been for nothing if the Committee lets Shifters in here.”

“You can’t look at it that way,” he said. “It isn’t about vengeance. It’s about finding a policy that works.” He stood up slowly with a grunt and walked to the window overlooking Manhattan. “All we’re doing now is wasting time and lives.”

“That’s not true,” she said, her fists clenching in her lap.

“Maybe not, but something needs to change.”

She rubbed her forehead where the dull headache she’d had for the past few hours was turning to thunder. “I have an idea. How about we round all the Shifters up, put them on the space shuttle, and send them back where they came from?”

MacGregor snorted. “If only it were that easy, and they were that stupid. Christ. They’ve managed to master to our DNA, learn our language and our customs, blend in. This is a great place to live if you can become anyone you want.”

The bastards
could
be any human they wanted to, become an exact replica. She’d seen them on the streets, walking around like they belonged here. They didn’t. But XCEL agents were strung out thin as it was, and she was too busy dealing with the bad ones to worry about the ones posing as model citizens.

Besides, unless she wanted everyone to know she
could
see Shifters, she’d have to keep her mouth shut. If she didn’t, she’d be labeled a freak, lose her XCEL job, and her second vision would be worthless. Nothing but pure torture.

Seneca crossed her arms. “It doesn’t help that we have to catch these guys and keep it all quiet, like they don’t exist. We can’t even go after them in the daylight, when they don’t have the ability to shift.”

MacGregor sat back down at his desk. “No argument from me. I’m too goddamned old to work all these nights, but the Committee thinks we’d cause too much chaos.”

“God forbid their secret gets out,” she muttered.

He sighed. “Don’t start. The Committee also wants alternatives to freezing these guys. Something more productive.”

Seneca looked at him. “Alternatives to freezing? Do they really think these criminals can be rehabilitated?”

MacGregor only shrugged, and Seneca added, “There’s nothing wrong with putting them on ice after they maim and murder until we figure out what to do with them.”

“Except that we’ve never successfully thawed one out,” he pointed out.

Her turn to shrug. “Minor detail. If it were up to me, I’d put them all out of our misery.”

“This is still America,” MacGregor reminded her.

“Not for long.”

“You don’t know that.” But he didn’t sound entirely convinced. “Try to look at this from the point of view that we could do better. This guy is a prototype shapeshifter XCEL agent. He volunteered for this. Gave us more information about Shifters than we could ever get on our own. He’s been tested, retested, studied, probed God knows where, and passed all our training with flying colors. He can ID his own kind, get into places we can’t, and he can take them on head-to-head.”

Like she cared. She could do those things too. “If he’s so great, why does he need us?”

MacGregor gave her a telling look. “They want to see how he partners with one of our own.”

Real fear replaced the dread in her bones, and that took some doing. “They want to change our partner structure? One Shifter and one human?”

“Maybe,” he hedged.

Or worse. Her heart sank in understanding. “All-Shifter teams.”

“Unless we can prove we’re good for something,” he admitted.

“Good for something? How about to keep an eye on
them
?” she shot back. He didn’t say anything, and the reality of it hit her. She’d be out of the loop, and
they
would be in control. Good God, what was this world coming to?

“We can’t trust them, Mac. You’re giving them too much credit. And the Committee is talking out of their collective asses. Have they ever seen a Shifter in action?”

MacGregor answered, “The majority of Shifters keep to themselves.”

“It’s only a matter of time before that changes. Once the Shifters feel they can take us, they will. And they can.”

MacGregor shook his head. “I’m just saying, they aren’t
all
bad.”

“Tell that to my mutilated partner.”

He rubbed his eyes. “I get it, okay? But we don’t have a choice, Seneca. The Committee has spoken.
Our
job is to keep America safe from the Shifter criminal element so we don’t have rioting in the streets. And that’s just what you are going to do.”

She slumped further in her chair. This day was pure hell.

“And another thing,” he went on. “
Everyone
is watching this collaboration. Consider your ass under a microscope, because your new partner is writing the final report. Apparently, he has friends in higher places than you or me.” He paused. “Be very careful.”

Although they never discussed her extraordinary abilities, MacGregor knew she was different from the other agents. Only a handful of people knew exactly how different. And one of them was stretched out in the morgue.

“Do I get to write my report on him?” she asked.

He replied, “Fine by me. But I can’t promise you it’ll go anywhere.”

Perfect.
She pushed to her feet, fighting the weight of the day. “Why me?”

“That’s what you get for being the best.” MacGregor smiled and folded his hands on his belly. “He’s waiting outside. Name’s Max Dempsey. And I’d prefer you keep his secret identity just between the two of us. No sense in causing undue friction.”

She stared at him, trying to restrain herself from doing something stupid like telling her boss to shove it. All she could do was say, “You call keeping our agents informed that there’s a Shifter among them ‘undue friction’?”

He raised his hands. “Don’t shoot the messenger. No one is supposed to know until we get the final report. The fate of this entire operation depends on you. So play nice.”

“I don’t have to be nice to do my job.”

“Fine, just don’t kill him.” He handed her a folder. “Your next assignment. Code name ‘Dillinger.’ Confirmed Shifter. He murdered six people in a bar in lower Manhattan last week.”

Seneca stormed out of the office with Dillinger’s folder and slammed the door behind her. The outer office area was an open suite lined with desks in the center and private offices around the perimeter. It was usually a noisy, hopping place, but as soon as she stepped out, it got real quiet. Heads poked out from every cubicle and corner.

An agent wearing a lanyard badge stood in front of her. He was well over six foot tall and solidly built under a leather jacket, white-collared shirt, and blue jeans. His hair was thick and brown, eyes a muted shade of gray, face angular, hard, and serious.

A Shifter shadow pulsed around him that no one except her or another Shifter could see.

He studied her for a moment and wisely didn’t offer a hand to shake. “Agent Max Dempsey. Nice to meet you, Seneca.”

Fuck you,
was on the tip of her tongue, and he must have seen it in her eyes because one of his eyebrows rose marginally.

The enemy stood in the center of her sanctuary. It wasn’t fair. She’d busted her ass to get here and, along the way, lost more friends than she could count. She’d put in seventy-hour weeks, become a permanent night owl, and bore scars of missions gone wrong. She hated the bastards ripping her world apart with a passion second to none. If she could give her life to get rid of every single one of them, she would.

The other agents and staff were pretending to be busy, but a few were watching with growing interest.

Boy, did they pick the wrong person. But like a good little soldier, she flashed the folder and walked around him toward her office. “We have a case.”

He let her pass, but she heard his footsteps as he followed. She sat behind her desk while he closed the door and took Riley’s chair at the desk facing her. Her throat tightened up when she heard his chair creak.

Riley was gone. His wife had no husband, his kids had no father, and she was going to miss the hell out of him.

Now she was being betrayed by her own people. From the gutless suits who sat in their offices all day making up politically correct policy and didn’t have a damn clue what was happening in the real world. They had no idea how much damage five thousand plus aliens could inflict on their people.

That was what kept her from sleep, and that was what kept her coming back here every night.

Dempsey leaned back, watching her as she shuffled through the file. She sensed curiosity and slight amusement, which only made her want to shoot him more.

She read the report. Six dead, killed by Dillinger after he lost a pool game and shifted from a mild-mannered boozer to Primary-form shapeshifter murderer. How many of these had she read? Forty? Fifty? They all had the same ending. Innocent people died horribly.

She turned the page to find a description of both his forms—Shifter and human. One thing the agency had learned was that it took a good deal of time and energy for a shapeshifter to assume the genetic coding of a new form. So once they did, they used it a lot. The shifts were fast, and when the transformation was complete, the form was self-maintaining. Good for the Shifter; bad for everyone else.

After she gleaned what she could out of the written report, Seneca handed it to Dempsey without comment. She realized it was rude, but he had eyes. He could read it himself.

A stack of photos was next, apparently taken during the melee at Dave’s Bar & Grill. She blinked when she saw them, because they almost never got photos. Usually, it required lots of legwork and investigation to identify all the Shifter forms. Weeks of work. And then it occurred to her—MacGregor had given them a gimme assignment so they’d look good. Hell. Nothing was going right today.

One photo was of Dillinger as a human, wearing a tattered flannel shirt and baggy pants and swinging a pool stick just before all hell broke loose. Scruffy beard, unkempt and unholy. The rest of the photos were of him in Primary form on the attack.

She glanced at the note attached to them. It said Dillinger killed the photographer, who’d been using a camera phone, but the photos had survived. It was duly noted that “luckily,” no one had survived long enough to tell the press.

She clenched her jaw tightly. It was getting more and more difficult to hide the fact that the aliens were here. One of these days, the government was going to have to come clean to the people of this country.

Or not. Look at Roswell.

She handed the photos off to Dempsey. As she passed them over, he didn’t take them, forcing her gaze up. His eyes locked onto hers.