Into Focus (Focus Series Book 1) (3 page)

He jolted in surprise and panic, jerking the
wheel in shock, and almost went off the road before he righted the
sedan, and slammed on the brakes instead. I hit my nose on the
headrest in front of me, though not hard enough to do more than
cause a few involuntary tears to fill my eyes. I blinked them away,
and spoke to my target for the first time.

“Don’t move. Don’t scream. I am not going to
hurt you unless you make me. Do you understand?”

Making small mewling sounds of protest, he
nodded rapidly.

“Good. That’s good, Josh. Pull over here, on
the side of the road.”

Cautiously, moving as slowly as possible,
obviously trying to avoid any sudden movements, he complied.

“Now, Josh, I know you aren’t much of a
fighter. I want you to consider two things before we move forward
with this conversation. First, there is very little that you can do
to stop me if I am forced to hurt you. I outweigh you by at least
sixty pounds, and even if you get a few lucky hits in, that won’t
stop me for long.”

Slowly, I eased the pressure off of Josh’s
throat. I kept my arm in place, but let him breathe more
comfortably.

“Second, I could have had this conversation
with you back at your house. With your family. Do you understand
what I mean?”

He met my haze in the rearview mirror, his
eyes wide with fear. Slowly, he nodded. “Y-yes,” he said. “Yes, I
understand.”

“Good, Josh. Thank you.” I relaxed, removing
my arm from him completely, and sat back, eyes on his. “I’m going
to ask you some questions. I want complete answers from you. If you
give them to me, I won’t hurt you. Do you understand?”

He nodded once again, the motion jerky.

“Good. Let’s begin.”

***

I didn’t feel great about threatening the
little guy, but he had information that I needed, and it saved
time. He had been more than willing to listen once I had explained
the situation to him, and gave me complete, concise answers.

He didn’t even question how I had managed to
hide in his backseat for a half hour in the middle of the desert.
Or why I was naked. Honestly, that would have been the first thing
out of my mouth if it had happened to me, but at that point, I
don’t think he was thinking about that. He was probably just
grateful that I had gone out of my way to keep his family out of
things.

But that didn’t stop him from protesting
severely when I told him to strip to his underwear and left him on
the side of the road with a water bottle and stole his car. I
simply leveled my gaze at him and stared for a few moments before
he complied.

God bless the cowardly.

I drove the rest of the way in silence,
comfortable in my new disguise. Josh was a lot shorter than me, and
it felt odd to be in such a small, skinny body. It was actually odd
that it even felt odd, considering that I had been a freaking
lizard a little while ago, but my mental state isn’t really all
that important. Anyway, the suit fit me well, and I wouldn’t have
any trouble getting into the Blackstone office. It would be a
couple of hours at least before anyone happened to spot Josh on the
side of the road. He’d be fine as long as he didn’t guzzle the
water down in the first few minutes. The desert got hot really
early, but if he had lived here long enough he’d know what to
do.

At the end of the day, it really just wasn’t
the guy’s fault. He had a job, and was just a paper pusher. His
company didn’t do very nice things, but that wasn’t really on
him.

My job wasn’t particularly nice, either. But
it paid pretty well.

***

People see what they expect to see, and I
managed to get into the Blackstone office without incident. I
flashed an ID badge at the gate, though the guard didn’t even look
twice at me once he recognized the car. I parked, and strolled
right through the rest of the security, and found Josh’s office
from the directions he had given me.

It was still early, and it didn’t look like
Josh’s bosses, two men named Mr. Roberts and Mr. Plonsky, were in
yet. According to him, they normally rolled in around nine-thirty.
I wanted to be gone by then, so I moved quickly.

I sat down at his computer, punched in the
password he had graciously provided, and had access to all of the
information I needed. I opened the briefcase I brought with me
(which I had stuck in the trunk of Josh’s car the night before),
pulled out the hard drive I’d be working with, plugged it in, and
started cloning.

The process of cloning a hard drive wasn’t
exactly fast, but it would’ve been unbearably slow even a year or
two before this. I guess people got tired of spending two days
backing up their pirated movies, and figured out ways to cut down
on the hassle of petty larceny.

I kept my head on a figurative swivel,
looking around the office building, alert for signs that anything
had gone wrong. If one of the guards had come in late for his
shift—or, God forbid, showed up early—it was possible that they
would be the ones to find Josh. That would be an interesting
conversation, to say the least.

But I wasn’t particularly worried. It wasn’t
like I didn’t have virtually limitless ways to escape.

Skinchangers are rarely, if ever, caught.

I stood up from the chair when the process
was at about twenty percent. It was a few minutes after eight
o’clock, and I still had plenty of time to finish up and be gone
before anyone was the wiser.

I walked around the office building casually,
keeping an ear out for shouts of alarm. I poked around for a while,
trying to see if there was anything significant that I should know
about. You know, secret labs hidden in the lower levels of the
building in which Blackstone grew hideous biological creatures that
would serve as foot soldiers in a bid for world domination, that
kind of thing.

But it was just an office. Alas, the real
world is often far less interesting than we hope. I mean, hell, I
was a freaking skinchanger walking around an honest-to-God
mercenary company, and these flatfoots didn’t even have the
courtesy to be part of some kind of horrifying conspiracy.

Just once, once, I’d like to find out
something that wasn’t completely boring. But all I turned up was
human resources complaints, tax information, personnel files, and,
on one of their computers, a surprisingly varied and meticulously
organized folder filled with pornography.

Lame.

I went back to good old Josh’s office, and
flopped back down in front of the computer. The building itself was
totally empty except for me. The guards apparently were posted in
positions to keep people from getting into the compound at all, not
to monitor what happened inside. They probably didn’t particularly
care what happened inside. It’s not like there was anything
interesting.

The transfer was up to ninety percent, which
was good. I wanted out of there. If I had to hang around for much
longer, the sheer boredom might just kill me. I checked the desk
clock. It was just after eight-thirty. That was fine. I’d be gone
before the work day officially started.

Just as the transfer reached ninety-six
percent, I heard a chorus of shouts from the courtyard outside the
building. It sounded like hurried demands, voices giving orders
that should be followed, and that most sane men would obey.

Shit. They must’ve found Josh.

There wasn’t much I could do just yet; the
transfer wasn’t complete, and you never know what the client was
really looking for. I didn’t want to have to do this again, so I
didn’t scrap everything and bug out. Besides, it was almost
finished. And it’s not like they wouldn’t spend some time figuring
out what had happ—

Ka-WHAM.

An explosion, impossibly loud, erupted from
the direction of the shouts. The blast shook the building, and the
windows of the office rattled in their panes, threatening to
shatter. I jumped up from my chair, almost frantic, trying to
remain calm. It’s hard to do that when the fucking building
shakes.

I staggered to the door and closed it, but
there wasn’t a lock on it. I cast about for something to barricade
it, and as I considered the heavy file cabinet against the wall, a
hail of gunfire shattered the relative quiet. Renewed shouts of
alarm were barely audible in brief pauses between the gunshots, but
they sounded panicked.

I forced myself to look at the situation
rationally. It didn’t make sense. If Josh had returned, then they
would have come for me. There shouldn’t be a freaking battle
breaking out.

The compound was, it seemed, under
attack.

I didn’t know why it had happened, or who had
done it. It didn’t particularly matter to me, either. I had a job
to do, and getting myself involved wouldn’t get that done.

Cursing the awful timing of paramilitary
conflicts, I practically dove over the desk to get to the computer.
The transfer was, I was happy to see, just about complete, hovering
at ninety-nine percent. In my experience, that could have either
meant it was done or would hang there for an hour.

I didn’t have an hour.

I stood over the desk, staring at the little
progress bar, wondering what pencil-necked code monkey had designed
this to estimate remaining time so poorly, when the door swung open
and a white-faced guard burst inside.

He held an assault rifle in his hands, an
honest-to-God assault rifle, not just a civilian one that was
semi-automatic. That one would rip a man to shreds in a few
seconds, and might even kill me if he got lucky enough. I sized up
the distance between us, and was about to strike when the guard
closed the door quietly and crouched down where he couldn’t be
seen.

His eyes found mine, and he mouthed “Get
down!” with startling sincerity. I obliged him, ducking behind the
desk. I crawled around it, and looked at my new friend.

“What’s happening?” I whispered. I wondered
why we bothered being so quiet; there was still gunfire aplenty to
cover the sounds of our voices.

The guard shook his head. “I don’t know,” he
whispered. “A few guys showed up, laughed at us when we asked for
ID, and then a fucking bomb went off. They must’ve planted charges
or something. We shot at them, but…” He shook his head again. “I
don’t know. Nothing seemed to get through. They didn’t get
hit.”

That wasn’t normal. If they had been fired at
by a bunch of panicky civilians with weapons they weren’t trained
with, well, that would be one thing. But these guys all had
military backgrounds, and they knew what they were doing. They were
paid to fight, and there were over a dozen of them. They should
have made short work of a few men, bomb or not.

“A bunch of guys went down. I didn’t see
how,” he continued. He was almost babbling, the stress of a sudden
combat situation on comfortable, safe ground obviously getting to
him. “It didn’t look like they had any guns or nothin’. Maybe
snipers or something outside the compound.”

The gunfire abruptly ceased outside.

That was either very good or very bad.

“Ssh!” the guard said, which was totally
unnecessary. I hadn’t made a sound.

We both listened closely, and we heard a
calm, mocking voice from the courtyard. It was impossible to make
out, but the tone was unmistakable. Someone was having a very good
day, and I doubted that it was Blackstone.

“What are we going to do?” I asked the guard.
It seemed in character for Josh to defer to whoever had the most
experience in life-and-death situations.

The guard shook his head. “I don’t know, man.
I don’t know what their objective is. They just started fighting.
They’re probably going to search the buildings next.”

Well, that wouldn’t do.

I nodded. “Well, we’ll have to get out of
here. We can’t stay where we’ll be found.”

“Nowhere to hide, man. This place isn’t
exactly built for something like this.”

I shook my head slowly, then crept around to
the computer. Lucky for me, the transfer was complete. I unplugged
the portable hard drive, stashed the cables in my suit pockets, and
rose to my feet. I shut down the computer completely, and pushed
the chair back in, so it looked like nobody had been here at
all.

“What are you doing?” the guy asked.

“Escaping,” I said blithely. “Want to
come?”

The guard’s mouth fell open, and he shut it
firmly a few seconds later. Then I saw him visibly calm himself
down, taking a deep breath with his eyes closed for a moment. When
he opened them, there was steel in his spine, and he rose
cautiously from the floor, and nodded to me.

“They’re at the front of the complex, right?”
I asked, my voice low.

“Yeah, last I saw. Three or four guys,
max.”

I nodded. “Okay. We’re only on the second
story. We can get out through the window, pop over the fence, and
call for help.”

He shook his head. “Barbed wire, man. Do you
think that—“

“It’s either get a few cuts or get killed.
Which do you prefer?”

He shook his head once again, but didn’t say
a word. I took that as acceptance, and stepped over to the window.
I opened it up slowly, a little surprised that they were the kind
that slid up all the way rather than the weird narrow ones office
buildings usually had. I poked my head out cautiously and looked
around. I didn’t see anyone, but the voices were a bit louder
outside.

I placed both hands on the windowsill, swung
my feet over, and hung down. The drop was only about twelve feet,
and if I landed right, it wouldn’t even hurt.

I let go, and kept my knees loose on the way
down. I collapsed to the ground, which wasn’t exactly comfortable,
but Josh was a lightweight, and I didn’t even have a scratch.

The guard followed a moment or two later, his
impact significantly louder with all of his extra weight. I pressed
a finger to my lips, and he nodded. Together, we crept toward the
chain link fence. It wasn’t all that high, only about ten feet. My
main concern was the noise it would make.