Body Master Read Free Page B

couldn’t believe this was MacGregor. The man who handpicked every member of this team. The man who never left this office. The man who’d built this agency from the ground up. “Why are you buying into this crap?”
    He looked at her, and she caught his frustration full bore. “I’ve lost twenty-seven agents in the past year. Two-thirds of my force. It’s the same in the XCEL offices in Chicago, LA, Vegas, Miami . . . The Committee doesn’t find that acceptable, and frankly, neither do I. I’m tired of seeing my agents come back to me in body bags.”
    He didn’t need to quote statistics to her. Twenty-six funerals were forever burned in her memory. Soon to be twenty-seven. She knew the stakes. She also knew what would happen if they stopped trying.
    “We’ve also captured over eighty Shifters,” she reminded him.
    “Sixty-two of those were in the first nine months,” he pointed out. “Now they’ve adapted to every conventional weapon we have, and R and D can’t develop new ones fast enough. And hell, we still don’t have equipment to identify a Shifter on sight. One could walk in that door, and we wouldn’t know it.”
    “We can handle this ourselves,” she told him, feeling her dread grow. “All those deaths will have been for nothing if the Committee lets Shifters in here.”
    “You can’t look at it that way,” he said. “It isn’t about vengeance. It’s about finding a policy that works.” He stood up slowly with a grunt and walked to the window overlooking Manhattan. “All we’re doing now is wasting time and lives.”
    “That’s not true,” she said, her fists clenching in her lap.
    “Maybe not, but something needs to change.”
    She rubbed her forehead where the dull headache she’d had for the past few hours was turning to thunder. “I have an idea. How about we round all the Shifters up, put them on the space shuttle, and send them back where they came from?”
    MacGregor snorted. “If only it were that easy, and they were that stupid. Christ. They’ve managed to master to our DNA, learn our language and our customs, blend in. This is a great place to live if you can become anyone you want.”
    The bastards could be any human they wanted to, become an exact replica. She’d seen them on the streets, walking around like they belonged here. They didn’t. But XCEL agents were strung out thin as it was, and she was too busy dealing with the bad ones to worry about the ones posing as model citizens.
    Besides, unless she wanted everyone to know she could see Shifters, she’d have to keep her mouth shut. If she didn’t, she’d be labeled a freak, lose her XCEL job, and her second vision would be worthless. Nothing but pure torture.
    Seneca crossed her arms. “It doesn’t help that we have to catch these guys and keep it all quiet, like they don’t exist. We can’t even go after them in the daylight, when they don’t have the ability to shift.”
    MacGregor sat back down at his desk. “No argument from me. I’m too goddamned old to work all these nights, but the Committee thinks we’d cause too much chaos.”
    “God forbid their secret gets out,” she muttered.
    He sighed. “Don’t start. The Committee also wants alternatives to freezing these guys. Something more productive.”
    Seneca looked at him. “Alternatives to freezing? Do they really think these criminals can be rehabilitated?”
    MacGregor only shrugged, and Seneca added, “There’s nothing wrong with putting them on ice after they maim and murder until we figure out what to do with them.”
    “Except that we’ve never successfully thawed one out,” he pointed out.
    Her turn to shrug. “Minor detail. If it were up to me, I’d put them all out of our misery.”
    “This is still America,” MacGregor reminded her.
    “Not for long.”
    “You don’t know that.” But he didn’t sound entirely convinced. “Try to look at this from the point of view that we could do better. This guy is a prototype