Into Focus (Focus Series Book 1) Read online

  Copyright 2016 Fritzen Media. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover Artwork – © 2016 L.J. Anderson of Mayhem Cover Creations

  Cover Model – Mirish – www.mirish.deviantart.com

  Smashwords Edition

  Prologue

  The kid they sent to meet me was nervous. He was pale, sweaty, nearly shaking with anxiety. He couldn’t have been older than eighteen. I doubted that he had done anything like this before—not alone, at least. He was wearing a baseball cap, extremely dark sunglasses, and had his hood up, obscuring his face in dark shadows.

  In July.

  In Miami.

  The kid couldn’t have been more obvious if he had a neon sign flashing the words HEY, I’M HERE TO MEET A SPY.

  I ground my teeth in frustration before calming my nerves. The kid was probably just a cutout, someone paid to meet a contact in public. The idea was for the parties involved to hide behind multiple layers of people, so that they could maintain deniability.

  It was also so to protect them if the contact was violent.

  I don’t really have that problem. I’m my own cutout; I almost never look like myself anyway. And it would take more than these guys could put together in a public café to kill me. You know, probably. I hadn’t really tested it.

  I squashed down my professionalism for a moment, stuck it in the back of my head, and ambled over to the kid. He sat rigidly in his chair, hardly moving, his eyes darting left and right, desperately tracking both available exits and the people around him. They eventually focused on me, and I saw his eyes widen behind the tinted lenses of his sunglasses.

  I paused a few feet away from the chair across from him. “Sagittarius,” I said quietly.

  I saw his eyes widen even further. They must have been in danger of falling right out of his head.

  “G-Gemini,” he stuttered. He gestured weakly at the seat across from me, and I sat down slowly, taking care to keep my hands in full view. I didn’t want the kid to vapor-lock on me. I placed my palms on the table, and looked at my contact.

  “You’re Deadhead, right?” the kid stammered.

  That was what they called me in the industry. You have to have some kind of name in order to build a brand, you know. My real name was Rick Torin. You don’t just give out that kind of information, though. With my abilities, all I needed was an alias, and I was all but uncatchable. I didn’t even like the Grateful Dead.

  But the kid should not to be so cavalier about divulging details in public, so I simply stared at him for a few moments, not moving a millimeter. I wasn’t actively trying to scare the poor kid, but I had a reputation to uphold.

  “You have something for me,” I said. I kept my voice low, steady.

  The kid gulped audibly, then reached into the front pocket of his sweatshirt. He withdrew a plain manila folder, and placed it on the table. With a single finger, he slid it across the surface toward me.

  I accepted it with casual professionalism, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you meet a rookie (or anyone else, for that matter), and flipped it open. Inside was a series of photographs of a facility, a group of buildings about four stories tall, surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. An aerial photograph showed the overall layout of the compound, like that even mattered to someone like me.

  Behind the photographs was a small pile of documents, detailing the kind of security I could expect to encounter at the target. There wasn’t a letterhead on any of them, which was typical. Any corporation or outfit who hired me wouldn’t want to have any kind of easily identified paper trail attached to the job.

  “What’s the target?” I asked quietly.

  “Blackstone,” the kid mumbled.

  “Mercenary outfit?”

  He jerked his head in disagreement. “Private security and consultation.”

  “Mercenary outfit,” I said with a snort. “There’s nothing in here about what you need.”

  “Client list and bidding information. Should be on one of the higher-ups’ computers.”

  “Deadline?”

  “Ten days. That’s all they told me.”

  I nodded my head. “My fee?”

  “Cash. Black valise under the table.”

  I groaned quietly. “You might as well have stuck it into a big burlap sack with a dollar sign on it.”

  “Is… is that a problem?”

  I shook my head. “I’ll see to it.” I reached down and snagged the handle of the valise, then rose. “Go order something. Sit here for a few minutes. Drink it slowly. Then pay and leave.”

  He nodded his assent, swallowing loudly again.

  “Relax, kid. You did fine. Next time don’t pick something so conspicuous. And for God’s sake, don’t wear a hood in the middle of July. Or in Miami. And you might want to consider some kind of anxiety medication.”

  The kid laughed nervously. I stared at him evenly for a few moments, then sniffed and turned away.

  I headed into the bathroom of the café, near the back of the building. I went in, checked to make sure that it was empty, then slid into one of the stalls, locking it behind me. I opened the clasps on the valise, and peeked inside.

  Five stacks of hundred dollar bills lay at the bottom. The case was absurdly large for its cargo. I had no idea what the kid was thinking. Maybe he thought that fifty grand would take up a lot more space than it did. Sighing at the ignorance of youth, I took the money out, flipping through each stack casually, making sure that nobody had slipped in a ten to try and skim something off the top. Then I simply stuck the cash into the pockets of my jeans. It was tight, but they fit without anything sticking out.

  I left the valise on the toilet, unlocked the stall, and moved over to the mirrors above the sink. I gazed at my reflection, which actually told a lie that nobody would expect, and concentrated. Ripples slowly began flowing over the surface of my skin, undulating waves that were almost hypnotic. As I watched, my face began to change.

  The eyes went first, shifting from a rather striking blue to a dull, unremarkable brown. They drew slightly closer together, and my brow sank by half an inch. My nose narrowed, the bulge at the bridge shrinking noticeably. My hair grew about three inches, shifting from a bright blonde to a dark brown. My ears shrank, too, and slid up the sides of my skull a bit. My chin, which I had kept strong and intimidating, narrowed, weakening.

  The rest of my body followed suit, and in a matter of seconds, I shrank five inches, my arms losing the tough, corded muscle I had kept for the benefit of anyone looking. I kept my feet the same size so I didn’t have to change shoes, though.

  If this seems weird, then it should. There aren’t a whole lot of people like me. Skinchangers, people who can change their bodies at will, who can become anyone or anything that can be conceived, are few and far between. Aside from my family, I knew a handful of others, people who were part of a small community across the country. We aren’t really sure why we can do what we do, though my parents always said it had to do with our Native American heritage.

  Honestly, I don’t really care how it works or why I can do it. All I know is what I can do with it. It made me one of the most effective freelance espionage agents in the world. With enough planning, I was able to simply walk into anywhere I wanted to go, and if that didn’t work, I could sneak in and out with nobody being the wiser.

  Now I had a new job to do. The client was probably some kind of rival mercenary company to Blackstone if they wanted a list of their customers and bidding information. The only thing they could do with the data they wanted was undercut Blackstone and steal their contracts. It was no skin off my nose, so long as nobody got hurt.

  I bent down and rolled up the cuffs of my jeans, which hung too low now that I had shrunk a few inches. I unbuttoned my shirt and tossed it into the trash can, keeping only a gray, unremarkable (and unlikely to be remembered) undershirt. Then, money in my pocket, I left the bathroom and stepped into the hot Miami sun.

  Chapter One

  Espionage is easy. Don’t let the movies make you think otherwise. High tech security systems, redundancies, backups, passwords, biometric scanners, and whatever other fancy things they like to throw into every script all have the same weakness.

  They’re made and monitored by people.

  People are easy to fool, and anyone with more than a rudimentary understanding of fieldcraft knows it. Someone with enough confidence and audacity can do more in an afternoon than a dozen drones in a week, if they’re in a decent position and know what to do. We’re social animals, like it or not, and we’re all conditioned from birth to respond in certain ways to certain people. We listen to older people, ignore landscapers, sign whatever the delivery guy sticks under our noses, and move on with our lives.

  If you were to ask someone what their opinion of their plumber was, they’d probably remark on the quality of his or her work. They may mention a few side details, like oh, he’s a nice guy, but they don’t really know anything about their plumber to s
hare.

  But everyone has a strong opinion about their boss. Whether they work in an office, a construction site, or one of those new tech startup companies that operate out of someone’s garage, everyone works for someone, and everyone has something to say.

  These are the kinds of things that nobody really thinks about much, if at all, and it’s something that, regardless of how much training someone has, can be exploited.

  After I got the details and the payment for the job, I spent the next week getting ready. The target was in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico, a few dozen miles away from any towns. I wasn’t sure exactly what they did there, but there were always several guards on duty, patrolling the perimeter in shifts. The guards carried actual assault rifles, not the civilian ones that politicians talk about banning every few months—these were ones that could unload a thirty round magazine in less than three seconds. I was extremely durable, but I was not anxious to experience what it felt like to be turned into Swiss cheese.

  The other security measures looked fairly basic, limited mostly to the fence and strong doors, which made sense. In the middle of the desert, particularly a flat desert, it was not only unlikely that anyone would show up to cause trouble, but it would be nearly impossible to do so without being spotted by one of the guards on duty.

  I knew all this because I flew over the compound myself. I was a buzzard at the time.

  Shapeshifting is excellent for reconnaissance. But it’s not always enough to see what’s going on, because, as I said earlier, it’s really about people. So, to remedy that, I watched the guards from a perch on the roof of one of the buildings long enough to see one of them drink from a flask.

  He may as well have handed me a picture of him sleeping with the First Lady. Liking to drink is one thing, but drinking on duty usually indicates something deeper than that. This guy liked to drink. If an outfit like Blackstone caught wind of one of their employees drinking on the job—especially when he isn’t even in the field—he’d be fired and blackballed in a heartbeat. This guy wanted a drink badly enough to risk his career, such as it was. That made him a target.

  So, when he left the compound and headed home, I followed him from the air, then waited unobtrusively for him to go out for the night. He didn’t disappoint; he was only home long enough to shower and change out of his clothes before driving to the local bar, a dive called The Rusty Badger, which was a stupid name. The place was almost empty, because it was a Tuesday evening, but the bartender seemed to know him, and they struck up a conversation over a shared beer.

  I left long enough to scrounge some clothes I had stashed before starting my recon, and returned, this time as a human, though I didn’t look like myself at all. I made myself a little taller than normal, though not tall enough to be too intimidating, and changed my features enough to be unrecognizable. Nobody got to see my real face except for me and my family. It wasn’t professional.

  I went inside, and, after I bought the guard (whose name turned out to be Sam, though his friends called him Lucky) a few drinks, then a few more drinks, I started to learn some things. Lucky had washed out of the Marines, for example, because he had had “disagreements” with the CO. He had worked for Blackstone for two years, though he had never seen any action. He and most of the guards were bored most of the time.

  And they all hated their boss, Josh Breckan, to whom Lucky referred as “a pencil-pushing pencil-neck.” Josh Breckan, according to the file provided by my employer, was high up enough in the organization to have the information I was looking for on his personal computer in his office at the compound.

  Lucky, who plied me for about a dozen drinks in exchange for information that he thought was worthless but was actually worth at least fifty grand, eventually was driven home by the bartender, who had apparently done it often enough that he wasn’t particularly bothered at the prospect.

  That was how, eight days after I had had a conversation with a nervous wreck in the humid Miami heat, I stood across the street from the home of Josh Breckan, Pencil-neck of Blackstone’s New Mexico compound.

  Chapter Two

  Okay, so when I said that espionage was easy, I may not have been clear. See, it isn’t particularly difficult, especially not when you can change your face into whatever you want, because it involves skills that just about anyone can learn. But there is a lot of legwork involved. I was faster and better at it than just about anyone, but that was because I could spy on people as a bird, or a lizard, or a fly. But, if anybody had access to the same information I did, they would be able to get Lucky to tell them whatever they needed. I simply knew what Lucky liked, and followed through to get where I needed to go.

  None of that was hard for me, but even easier was breaking into Josh’s house. The guy had a state of the art security system, motion sensors covering every bare inch of the exterior and the perfectly manicured lawn, sensors on every window and door, and even one covering the skylight above his bedroom. And those were just the things I could see. For all I knew, he might sleep with a gun under his pillow. He was, after all, in a dangerous business.

  But none of that mattered to someone like me. It doesn’t matter how secure you make the obvious entrances to a building; spiders, flies, ants, and even larger animals like mice could virtually always find a way inside. They only needed the tiniest crack, and they’d be in. Something that size with the intelligence of a human was even harder to keep out.

  I waited until the wee hours of the morning before I did anything. Then, under cover of darkness, I shifted into a squirrel.

  Shifting doesn’t exactly hurt, but you know it’s happening. One of my brothers who was too stupid to realize that he could literally replace any teeth he wanted had had a particularly large cavity filled at the dentist once, when he was fourteen. He said that the grinding, drilling sensation against his numbed tooth was really, really close to how it felt, except it was experienced everywhere. I have no idea if that’s true, and I don’t plan on letting anyone go prospecting around in my mouth long enough to find out.

  And, before anyone asks, I have no idea what happens to the extra mass of my body when I shift into something smaller than my normal human form. The cells that don’t get used have to somewhere, I guess, but it’s not something I’m keen to find out. The only way I would be able to really learn would be in a laboratory, and, if I’m being honest, the thought terrified me.

  If a scientist of any kind found out about skinchangers, even if there was only one of us, it would not go well. We weren’t just proof of the supernatural, we would be regarded as a finite resource, and treated as such. I’d be stuck in a lab for the rest of my life—which could, potentially, be a very long time, if my grandfather was any indication—probably held under constant sedation. My individual cells could be harvested to produce all kinds of things.

  Stem cells, for one; a limitless supply, ready to go at a moment’s notice. Maybe even more obscure things, if they figured out what allowed me to shapeshift. Organic fibers, carbon nanotubes… hell, I could probably provide enough internal organs to take care of every patient on the transplant lists.

  Maybe it’s selfish of me to not do that. I don’t exactly work in a friendly industry, but I’d never killed anyone, and only ever used force if there was no other option. Generally speaking, I don’t hurt people. I’m a skinchanger, and though I can look like one if I really wanted to, I’m not a monster.

  But I never felt guilty about refusing to sacrifice my freedom, my life in the name of science and progress. I’m not a lab rat.

  At that moment, I was, in fact, a squirrel.

  I scampered across the lawn, too small to trip the motion sensors, and skittered up the fence enclosing the backyard with careless ease. Quickly, I hopped over to the patio, about a foot away from the back door. Then I concentrated once again, shifting back to my original body.

  One of the limits of my abilities is that I usually have to revert to normal before I can shift again. When I shift to double someone, I’m still a human, and am really only moving parts of my body around. That means I can do it quickly and on the fly. But shifting from one animal to another was something entirely different, and can have really nasty consequences. One of my grandfather’s brothers did it too many times, and wasn’t able to quite get back to normal again. He looked normal enough, if you didn’t count the excess hair, but he wasn’t the same anymore; something in his mental state had changed, and nobody was sure exactly what it was.