Fair Game (Alpha & Omega #3)(9)

Chapter 2

Special Agent Leslie Fisher stared out of the window that looked out over downtown Boston. From her vantage point she had a lovely, veryearly-morning view. Traffic was still light, and though it would get a lot heavier as people came to work, lack of parking kept the streets from being as crazy as Los Angeles, the last place she'd been assigned. In the FBI, she got to move every few years whether she wanted to or not, but she'd always thought of Boston as home.

The hotel was old and expensively elegant. Tasteful, striped, satiny paper covered the walls of the meeting room in authentic Victorian style. The smallish room was dominated by the large mahogany table with padded chairs that looked more like they belonged in a dining room than a boardroom. It was a hotel, though, no matter how well decorated, and it lacked even the hint of personalization that managed to break through the government drab in her own office cubicle.

She was here to meet a consultant. Though there was the occasional perfectly innocent computer geek or accountant, in her experience, consultants were quite often bad guys who had made deals so that the good guys could catch bigger bad guys: rewarding the smaller evil so that the big monsters got stopped.

Five people dead in the last month: an old woman, two tourists, a businessman, and an eight-year-old boy. A serial killer was hunting. She'd seen the boy's body, and to catch his killer, she'd have met with Satan himself.

In her time in the FBI, she'd dealt with former drug dealers, an assassin already serving a life sentence in jail, and any number of politicians (some of whom should have been serving life sentences in jail). Once, she'd even consulted a self-proclaimed witch. In retrospect, Leslie hadn't been nearly as afraid of the witch as she should have been.

Today she was talking to werewolves. To her knowledge, she'd never met a werewolf before, so it should be interesting.

She considered the table they'd all be sitting around. The FBI offices or a police station would have given her side the home advantage - her side being those who fought for law and order. Meeting with people on their own turf, in their offices or homes, lost her that advantage, but sometimes she'd used it to get information she wouldn't have gotten if the people she was interviewing hadn't felt comfortable and safe. Prisons, oddly enough, gave the home-court advantage to the prisoner, especially if she brought a nervous greenie along with her.

Hotels were neutral territory - which was why they were meeting here instead of the office.

"Why me?" she'd asked her boss yesterday when he told her she was going alone. "I thought the whole team was going to talk to him?"

Nick Salvador had grimaced and stretched his large self uncomfortably behind his desk - a space where he spent as little time as possible. He preferred being in the field. "FUBAR ahead," he said, which was his code for politics. When Leslie had come into the Boston office, the previous person who'd had her desk had taped a list of Nick-speak to the bottom of her drawer with a note that said he'd had it faxed from Denver, where Nick had last been posted. There was a full page of swearwords, and "FUBAR ahead" had been first on the list. It wasn't that Nick couldn't dance gracefully with the powers that be if necessary; it was that he didn't like doing it.

"I put in the request and word was we were going to talk to Adam Hauptman. He's done a lot of consults - been guest speaker at Quantico a couple of times. Thought we could get information to help us with the case and pick up a bit besides." He twisted his chair around and his knee hit the canvas side of one of his go-bags. He had a number of them stashed around his office. Leslie had three herself - each packed for different jobs. Hers were color-coded; Nick's were numbered. Which made sense - there were more numbers than guy colors (his bags were khaki, khaki, and that other khaki) and he needed more go-bags than she did because his job was broader reaching. She didn't have to keep a suit on hand, for instance, because she was unlikely to get called upon for television interviews or congressional hearings.

"Hauptman has a good rep," Leslie said. "I have a friend who sat in on one of his lectures, said it was informative and pretty entertaining. So what happened to that plan?"

"Got a call yesterday morning. Hauptman's not available - you remember that monster they found in the Columbia River last month? Turns out it was Hauptman and his wife who killed it, mostly his wife - that's for our information only." Not classified, but not to be advertised, either. "She apparently got busted up pretty badly and he can't fly out. Hauptman found us a replacement, someone higher up. But no more than five people can come to the meet - and we have to hold it in neutral territory. No name, no further official information." He pursed his mouth unhappily.

Nick Salvador could play poker with the best of them, but with people he trusted, every last thing he thought bloomed on his face. Leslie liked that, liked working with him because he was smart - and never, ever treated her like the token black female.

"That's not FUBAR," she said.

"FUBAR is hearing that the werewolf consultant is 'higher up' - makes it all sorts of interesting to a lot of people other than the FBI," he said.

"Hauptman is Alpha of some pack in Washington, right?" Leslie pursed her lips. "I didn't know there was a higher-up than an Alpha."

"Neither did anyone else," agreed Nick. "I don't know what the deal is, but I've been informed that two Trippers are coming to the party."