Into Focus (Focus Series Book 1)

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

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.

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 share.

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.