Monster Hunter Nemesis (14 page)

She rubbed her face with both hands. Heather could recognize when she was exhausted—not physically, because it was hard to keep a werewolf down—but she was emotionally drained. Las Vegas had been a nightmare . . . literally, and she couldn’t believe she was being called back up already. STFU didn’t give a damn about its monsters. They were expendable assets, nothing more, and if they were lucky enough to survive to the end, then they’d get a PUFF exemption that said the government wouldn’t murder them unless it became convenient. It was a hell of a deal.

Hotel rooms sucked for anybody, but they sucked more when you could still smell the last hundred people who slept in your bed, and especially how gross some of them were. She went to the shower, got the water as hot as possible, which wasn’t nearly hot enough, and tried to scrub herself clean. Since she could regenerate, her body was free of scars, but she couldn’t say the same thing for her mind.

The last year had been nuts. Ever since she’d been forced to leave Earl and coerced into this shitty job, it had been nonstop awfulness. There’d been a brief training period, but STFU’s methods tended to be
throw the monster at the problem and see what happens
. Stricken liked to say he was a proponent of on-the-job-training, but that was code for
I’m an asshole who doesn’t particularly care if you live or die
.

So far she’d gotten to visit scenic places like Pakistan and Venezuela, and eat interesting people. Luckily for her, everyone and everything she’d been sent after so far had been astoundingly, obviously evil, and up to no good, so she at least had some moral justification left to get her by. But every time Stricken called, she was terrified to find out what the next assignment was going to be, and his definition of what constituted a threat to America seemed a little loose. She feared her luck wouldn’t hold out, Stricken was going to send her after somebody who really didn’t deserve a werewolf in their face, and then she was going to face some very difficult choices.

Heather got dressed, grabbed her backpack of extra clothes—being a werewolf tended to be hell on your wardrobe—and took the elevator down to the lobby.

It was really early in the morning. The free breakfast bar wasn’t even open yet, which was a bummer. Lycanthropy didn’t have too many perks, but being able to eat an entire tub of biscuits and gravy and still having a figure was one of them.

The lobby was nearly empty, but even if it hadn’t been, she still would have been able to pick out her contact because the person smelled like monsters. The handlers weren’t monsters themselves. Every STFU handler she had met had been a perfectly normal human. This one was a woman, sitting in a corner, reading a paper. She stood up when she saw Heather coming. Heather still had
cop eye
so she sized her up quickly. Mid fifties, approximately five seven, one twenty, attractive but relatively normal looking, dressed nice but casual, nothing about her appearance suggested that she was an STFU operative, except for the fact that something supernatural had shed on her sweater.

When you were around supernatural beings you tended to get their scent on you. It was especially odd for a regular person to have the scent of multiple types of monsters on their clothing at the same time. Heather picked through the details as she approached. “You’ve got an ogre, an undead something or other, and a weird thing I’ve never met before, but it likes Korean food. And you’ve got big dogs for pets.”

For being a top secret monster wrangler, the woman had a friendly smile. “I raise Irish wolf hounds.”

“Oh, I love dogs,” Heather said, except dogs didn’t love her anymore. In fact her presence scared them to death. And she could understand why, since she’d lost her mind and eaten poor Otto. She still felt like crap about that.
Poor little guy.
“Well, I used to. I’m Heather.”

“Beth Flierl. I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m sorry about Las Vegas.”

“You win some, you lose some . . .”

“And some you get sent into a bad situation and lose friends when your shot-calling muckety-mucks screwed up because they didn’t do their homework. They shouldn’t have sent you in there at all.”

It was a little surprising to hear one of STFU’s human employees come out and say something like that. “I won’t lie. I’m still mad about it.”

“You should be. That was terrible. You lost friends for no reason and you feel like this organization thinks everyone like you is expendable. That’s not how I run my people.” It was nice to hear an STFU handler use the word
people
. Heather had gotten used to being called an
asset
. Losing
assets
didn’t keep you up at night. “You should be getting some R and R, not being called up again, but our employer is on the warpath. We’ve got a serious problem.”

“Okay . . . Beth, is it? I’m not exactly used to anything about this outfit ever being truthful, so I’m just going to smile and nod now in case this is another head game.”

Beth shrugged. “You’re not a volunteer, you’re not a lifer. The way I see it you’re a normal woman who got put in a bad spot and is making the best of it. You’re in it for the exemption and then you want to go home. I know you’re a straight shooter so I’m not going to waste your time. My husband and I run a tight ship. We’re given people who want what you want, and in exchange we help them perform services for our country.”

“So you prefer facilitator to overseer then?”

“I’ve read your file and your psych evaluations, and those have made me predisposed to like you. Don’t screw that up already. You can look at it however you want. You were a police officer, dear. Think of this as mandatory community service and I’m your parole officer. I’ll be happy as can be when your sentence is served and you can go home. Believe it or not, I like seeing our special people brought through the system, and then go on to live productive, happy lives with their exemptions. I can believe in the mission, and not like the people currently running it. So any personal problems you have with our employer, I don’t want that baggage on my team. And that’s all I’m going to say on the matter.”

“Wow . . . Okay.” Heather really didn’t know what to think. It would be really nice to not be lied to for a little bit. “That’s refreshing.”

“Come on. My husband’s parked out front with the rest of the team.”

Heather followed her. “What’s the job?”

“Let’s not talk about that here.” They went through the spinning doors of the front entrance. Beth shivered inside her sweater. The locals thought it was cold. Heather was from northern Michigan. This was T-shirt weather. And now that she was a werewolf with a hyperactive metabolism the cold mattered even less. Beth seemed satisfied with the amount of ambient noise from traffic to brief her. “Have you heard of Agent Franks?”

“Mr. Tall, Dark, and Terrifying. My boyfriend told me a few stories about that freak of nature.” While he had hated what Franks stood for, Earl had admitted a grudging respect for him because he was just that much of a badass. For Earl, that was saying something. “Everybody has heard of him.”

“Good. Then I can skip the part of the briefing about how scary he is. A few hours ago Franks murdered a bunch of innocent people.”

“Isn’t that his job?”

“Not like this. These were MCB employees. The numbers are still coming in, but there’re at least forty dead. He tried to assassinate the MCB Director, shot the place up, and then left a bomb for the responders. I’m afraid Franks has finally snapped. Our job is to catch him.”

I never should have answered the phone. . . .

A black Suburban with tinted windows and government plates pulled up. The way it sat heavy made her guess it was armored. It was obvious from the powerful engine noise that this was not a stock vehicle. “Well, that’s low key.”

“Actually, in this town it is. We borrowed it specifically for this assignment.” Beth opened the back door for her to get in. “It belonged to Franks. You’re going to use it to pick up his scent for us. Hop in.”

* * *

Archer’s cubicle was a mess. The other agents enjoyed teasing him about being borderline OCD, but Archer really did appreciate a tidy, organized life. Now his office was a crime scene and a bomb had gone off down the hall. It was the opposite of tidy. The crime scene unit was examining everything, searching for evidence, taking pictures, and bagging anything that looked suspicious. Then there were agents tasked with the manhunt trying to do their jobs, and the inevitable clashes between the two groups. It was really loud, and there were bullet holes in his workstation and a bloodstain on the carpet. Taken all together it was making it really hard to concentrate, especially since they weren’t supposed to be here.

“Come on, man. What’ve you got?” Grant whispered as he snuck into the cubicle.

His partner wasn’t making it any easier either. “Quit bugging me for a minute and I might be able to answer that.”

“Hurry up. We’re not supposed to be here.” Since their official assignment had been Franks-sitting, they’d been pulled from the investigation for being
too close
. Of the agents that Myers had put on the detail, Radabaugh was dead, and Strayhorn was in critical condition. The two of them were supposed to be on the Potomac checkpoint with the local cops, pulling over boats and coming up with reasons to search them, like Franks would be dumb enough to get caught like that. “The SAC catches us here, we’re screwed.”

The Special Agent in Charge who was leading the manhunt for Franks was Leigh “the Butcher” Fargo. There were several different rumors about how she’d earned that nickname, but none of them hinted at anything pleasant happening if it was found out some of her subordinates were disobeying orders.

“You hear anything out there?” Archer asked absently as he navigated through the folders. They’d not cut his access yet, so he had to move quickly.

“They found some green slime in the elevator. They’ve taken it to the lab for analysis. Someone was saying that maybe Franks had help.”

“Or maybe the slime is from our real perp.” Archer scrolled through the menu of security camera logs. They’d been turned over to the manhunt in the hope that they’d somehow help. At minimum, they would be a great motivator to catch Franks, because there was nothing like watching your friends and coworkers get executed in cold blood. Archer had already watched several portions of the video and they seemed pretty conclusive. “Something’s not right here.”

“Like Franks suddenly shooting a bunch of people?” Grant muttered. “Tell me about it.”

Franks shooting a bunch of people wasn’t really farfetched, but that wasn’t his problem. “The SAC thinks Franks’ motive was to kill Director Stark, only Stark’s in the hospital, injured, but he’ll probably live, and then Franks went and shot everybody else because . . . what? He was upset? He was having a bad day? Does that sound like the Franks we know?”

“Like anybody really
knows
Franks,” Grant said. He poked his head over the top of the cube and looked around for anyone who might know they weren’t supposed to be there.

“Bullshit. We might not know what he does for fun, but we know how he takes care of business. We know how he conducts violence. This is too unfocused. If Franks wanted to kill the Director for personal reasons and then mess up headquarters, he would’ve found a way to blow the whole place to kingdom come.”

“Maybe Franks wanted to minimize casualties?” Grant thought about that for a second. “Okay, never mind.
Minimize
and Franks don’t go together. What’re you looking at?”

“Something weird is going on. I feel like there are gaps in the security camera footage but there aren’t.” Archer had already pulled every file showing Franks, and there was video of him for nearly the whole event. “This is too clean.”

Grant looked down at the blood on the carpet. “I don’t—”

“All the visual evidence fits too well. This is what I do. My background was communications. My first job at MCB was dicking around with records, doctoring videos, altering logs, all to hide monster events. I know what the video from chaotic events looks like. This is too smooth. This is like a movie about crazy shit, not how crazy shit really looks.”

“It fits the forensics and eyewitness reports we’ve got so far. Doctoring this much evidence takes way too much time. It would take all of Media Control days to make something like this.”

“I don’t know how, but my gut tells me this has been screwed with. It’s too much. If this was tweaked, it was by somebody who had full access to our system and who could change the time stamps on the fly.” That was an ominous thought. The MCB’s system was supposedly as secure as anything out there. “Video shows Franks leaves here, goes down, kills the guys at the entrance, grabs his guns from the locker, then kills his way back up to get Stark, then comes back here to where he’s got a perfectly good machine gun hidden?”

Grant was chewing on his lip. “They ran the serial numbers on those guns. Those were MCB property, but one was listed as lost in 1969 and the other one in 1980.” Other agents were running a metal detector down the wall looking to see what else Franks had stashed. They’d not seen what had been found, but there had been a few excited shouts of
eureka
and loaded evidence bags going out.

“Why risk tipping off his target by killing the guys downstairs? If I was Franks—”

“You’re going to need a lot of protein powder and steroids.”

“
If I was Franks,
I would have taken that old Commando out of the wall, walked right up to Stark and put a few in his head. Hell, this is Franks we’re talking about. He could have killed Stark with an unsharpened pencil first, and then gone after everyone else. All this other stuff is too weird, Grant.”

“In addition to the video, which you’ve got to admit there’s no way even our best guys could doctor it that quick, we’ve got a bunch of people who saw Franks in action.” The way Grant was speaking, Archer wasn’t sure if he was actually that stupid or if it was some devil’s-advocate lawyer trick to help him think it through. “What about that?”

“Doppelgangers, magic cultists, Fey, hell if I know, but I make my living hiding the truth, Grant, and I’m really good at it. This feels too much like something I would do if I had to make a bunch of evidence fit a narrative. This is good, really good, and it’s only working because we’re not used to being the ones getting lied to, but it isn’t good enough.”