Into Focus (Focus Series Book 1) (4 page)

Nothing I can do about it now.

I could just leave the guard behind. I didn’t
owe him anything, and he worked for a company that probably did
very bad things for very big piles of money. He wouldn’t be much of
a loss, if you judged things solely by the numbers. I could turn
into a bird and fly away. Who would be the wiser?

But the guard hadn’t done anything wrong, not
really. He was just a guy who had a skill set that wasn’t in demand
by nice businesses. A lot like me, when you think about it. If I
could escape with him too, why not? I’d have to leave him behind
eventually, but I could at least get him out.

So, rather than do the smart thing, I tried
to do the noble thing, and attempted to save us both.

I swept the suit jacket off, making sure to
switch the hard drive to my pants pocket, and flung it over the top
of the fence. It rested over the barbed wire, and the heavy cloth
(why on earth would a guy wear a suit that warm in the middle of
the fucking desert, I have no idea) should prevent most of the
damage.

The guard grinned and nodded at me, then
motioned for me to go first. I nodded, and quickly scaled the
fence, taking care to be as quiet as possible. I carefully went
over the opening Josh’s jacket provided, and dropped to the ground
on the other side, the next best thing to silent.

The guard made a lot more noise as he went
over, but I didn’t hear any cries of alarm, so I chalked it up as
good enough.

Once we were out of the compound, we both
breathed sighs of relief, and moved quickly toward the desert, not
quite running. There wasn’t a whole lot of sand out there, and most
of the surface was hard, rock or packed sand and dirt, so we had to
be careful until we were far enough away.

After about three hundred yards, sweat
pouring down our faces, we came to a halt.

“That,” the guard panted, “was some quick
thinking. Good job, Mr. Breckan.”

“Don’t mention it,” I said, keeping my voice
casual. “Can you call for help? I don’t have a phone.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Let me catch my breath, and
we’ll see what I can get from the home office.”

I nodded, pretending not to find it odd that
the guy wouldn’t just call the police. It’s not like their business
was illegal… was it?

Heh. Better to handle things internally, I
guess.

“Got a pair of binoculars? I want to see
these guys,” I asked.

He nodded, and reached into one of the
pockets of his vest. He handed me a small pair of binoculars. I
looked through them back toward the compound, scanning the area,
and saw something that was odd.

Damn odd.

The guards, about eight of them, knelt on the
ground, their hands laced together behind their heads. Their
weapons were gathered into a pile off to one side. In front of them
were three people, two men and a woman. One of the men was talking
to the disarmed guards.

None of them held a weapon, which was…
unsettling. There had been a lot of gunfire, a storm of bullets
that had lasted for several minutes, at least. I figured that at
least some of them were coming from whoever had stormed the
compound, but… if they didn’t have the guards under weapons, why
had they surrendered?

Hell, if they were unarmed, why didn’t the
Blackstone guys fight now? They could overwhelm three unarmed
people pretty quickly.

The three strangers were wearing normal
street clothes, jeans and shirts. One of the guys, a tall, skinny
man with long hair that fell past his shoulders, was wearing
sandals for Christ’s sake. It didn’t look like they were wearing
suicide vests, and unless they had planted charges everywhere and
held a switch or something, it just didn’t make sense.

What the hell had happened here?

The weight of the hard drive in my pocket
suddenly seemed very, very heavy.

A chill went down my spine, and I started
breathing a little faster. I had some suspicions as to who—or, I
should say, what— these people were, and it made my mouth dry
up.

Evidence. I might have some evidence on the
hard drive I had copied. Until then, these were just three people,
but if they were what I suspected…

My life could get complicated, fast.

There were a lot of things that I could
reliably fight, but some of them… some of them you just ran away
from. Some things you don’t fight, and the best you can hope for is
to survive.

The guard was talking into a radio, a murmur
that I didn’t really pay attention to. He seemed canny enough, and
had obviously thought to switch channels before calling for help,
or I suspect I would have seen some sudden activity in the
compound.

One of the buildings was obviously a total
loss, its walls barely holding together as it burned merrily. The
smoke was probably enough of a signal to get someone’s attention
eventually, but we were in the middle of nowhere. I doubted that it
would be any time soon.

I saw the guy wearing sandals grin at
something the woman said, and they both burst into obvious
laughter. It looked like they were having a good time.

“How many guards were with you today?” I
asked my companion quietly.

He had evidently finished with the radio,
because he answered quickly enough. “Twelve, me included.”

I counted again. There were only eight guards
kneeling down. Either the other three had escaped like us, or they
had been killed in the fight. I swallowed against a lump that had
formed in my throat.

I didn’t say anything to the guard. I just
passed him the binoculars, and stepped away while he looked. I saw
him take in what he saw, do the math, and come to the conclusion
that I had. His face fell, but I saw his jaw clench.

“What’s your name again?” I asked.

“Brett, sir. Brett Childress.”

“You can drop the ‘sir,’ I think, Brett. Just
Josh is fine.”

“Josh, then.” He took in a breath, and his
voice barely contained his rage. “Looks like they got three of
ours. Home office is sending in help. I told them to come in
heavy.”

“That sounds appropriate.”

“Who the hell are these people?” He turned
and eyed me carefully. “What did you guys get us into?”

I shook my head. “Son, I have no idea.”

I debated what I should do next. Brett didn’t
strike me as a trigger-happy idiot looking for an excuse to kill
people, which is what most media tend to think of mercenaries. But
these guys were veterans, ones who did their service and either
washed out, were drummed out of service, or just wanted a better
paycheck. I couldn’t really blame them for joining up with an
outfit like Blackstone. Three years could provide what the military
paid in twenty, and they mostly did the same job and fought the
same people.

Today, if the President needed an oil field
secured in the Middle East, he was just as likely to call someone
like Blackstone as he would the Joint Chiefs. Well, I doubt that
he’d make that call personally, but still.

These guys weren’t just a bunch of assholes.
They were just soldiers who did it for money rather than
country.

I could stick around for a while, but
whatever backup was on the way would be likely to pick up Josh
where I had left him. I’d be found out eventually.

I had to leave, but I’d have to shift to do
it. I wasn’t about to walk across several miles of desert. Brett
would see me. He’d either freak out and shoot me, or freak out and
have a breakdown.

I could kill him. But I really didn’t want to
do that. Like I said, he wasn’t an asshole who deserved a bloody
death.

So I did the next best thing, what I hoped
would preserve his life. I turned my eyes back to the compound, and
stepped back a few feet.

“Something’s happening,” I muttered.

Brett stepped ahead, looking intently through
the binoculars. While he was distracted, I stretched out one arm,
and concentrated. My hand widened and flattened out, but didn’t
harden; I wanted it to be heavy and soft. The fingers joined
together, and it looked like I was wearing some kind of bizarre
mitten. I ground my teeth, and made the bones of the hand dissolve,
turning them into something quite like fine sand. I piled more
muscle onto my biceps, the skin of my arm bulging weirdly,
straining against the fabric of my shirt. It took me all of six
seconds or so to get what I needed.

“I don’t see what—“

I swung the improvised flesh-and-bone
blackjack across the back of Brett’s head, and he dropped like a
stone. The impact actually split open my skin, and I bled for a few
seconds before I closed the wound, shifting my hand back to
normal.

I knelt down next to Brett’s still form, and
rolled him onto his back. He was still breathing, but was knocked
clean unconscious. He’d be down for a while. I reached down and
found his canteen, and spilled a little water onto his lips, making
sure he had some go down his throat. It was going to be hot soon,
and I didn’t want the guy to die of heat stroke before help
arrived. I probed the back of his skull, and didn’t feel anything
broken, which was good. He would probably be fine after a few days.
I rolled him back onto his stomach to keep his eyes out of the
sun.

I’d done all I could for Brett and myself. I
needed to get away, as fast as I could. If those people were what I
thought, it was possible I was in huge trouble. If they knew about
me, I was definitely in trouble.

So I took the hard drive out my pocket,
placed it on the ground in front of me, stripped down, and shifted
again. A few moments later, wearing the shape of a buzzard, I
picked up the hard drive in my talons, and flew to safety.

Several hours later, I was seated in a cheap
motel room in front of a laptop. I was extremely careful in my line
of work, and I made sure that I had had a place to go and a car
after the job was complete. Aside from the benefit of having a
place to run to, I had set it up so that I could go over whatever
data I recovered.

See, clients are just as dangerous as marks
in my business. In the “clandestine services,” itchy trigger
fingers often led to dead freelancers, and I found that usually
people were more likely to be twitchy if they had asked me to steal
something especially important.

To avoid situations that would end with
sudden and acute lead poisoning (which probably wouldn’t kill me,
but it’s not like I would enjoy the experience) I made it my policy
to examine anything I stole for a client. If the information was
too dangerous for me to know, I disappeared. I’d done it three
times in the past, all when extremely dangerous people wanted to
know extremely dangerous things.

One of them, it turned out, had been planning
a terrorist attack. I managed to piece together the details of what
they were going to do, and turned the information over to the
Secret Service anonymously. They must’ve stopped the plot in its
tracks, because I never heard anything about it again. If you live
in Virginia, you’re welcome.

Anyway, this time was different. I wasn’t
just looking for something that was vaguely dangerous, I was
looking for something that would lead to three unarmed people
attacking a paramilitary organization. So I read with as much
attention as possible, thoroughly going through each document I had
recovered across a full terabyte of data.

And it was freaking boring.

Do you realize how much a terabyte of data
is? When most of what you’re looking through is emails, that’s an
insane amount of things to read. To put it in perspective, it’s
about three hundred and fifty thousand copies of War and Peace.
More, if they’re compressed adequately.

I paid closer attention to messages that had
been sent in the past couple of months. If there was anything
dangerous, it would probably be recent; most of this stuff
pertained to jobs already completed. So I read.

And read.

And read.

The light in my hotel room, half a state away
from the seedy motel where I had stayed during the job, was uneven
and particularly annoying. One of the lamps flickered occasionally,
and, frankly, it drove me nuts. I glowered at it every so often,
trying to impress upon it the scope of my displeasure. The lamp
remained unimpressed, and continued to flicker lamely at me.

No respect.

It took the rest of that day and half of the
second, about thirty hours before my deadline, for me to find
something that made my heart race.

I read through the email chain carefully,
blinking away my weariness. Then I shook my head, got up, and made
a pot of coffee in the little one that the hotel provided. I
splashed some cold water on my face while it brewed. Then I made
myself a cup, took a few sips, and sat back down, rubbing my eyes.
I took another few minutes to make sure that I was firmly awake,
alert, and conscious.

Then I read through it again.

By the time I finished, a cold weight had
settled in the pit of my stomach.

Shit.

The email chain was similar to the others. It
was calm, quiet, and extremely professional. The sender had
requested an estimate of costs for a contract, and Josh and his
cohorts had provided a simple, conservative bid to complete the
job.

Words like “disposal,” “cleanup,” and
“covert” jumped out at me. Plans for digging large, bafflingly huge
trenches were included. Diagrams showing the exact dimensions and
estimates for the total amount of volume clearly showed the
practicality of the plan. Timelines, work schedules, and all of the
logistical data were included, in a coolly professional manner.

One word was used just a single time, in the
initial estimate request: “cadavers.”

Someone had requested an estimate for the
secret disposal of a large number of corpses.

An impossibly large number of corpses.
Thousands. Tens of thousands.