Forged in Smoke (A Red-Hot SEALs Novel Book 3) (26 page)

Out of the corner of his eye, Rawls saw the four elders sitting on the benches, along with Wolf, react to the acronym. Hell, Mr. Stoic, who was standing next to him, actually rocked back on his feet, surprise registering on his hard, normally blank face.

“You know this organization?” Rawls asked, turning to address Wolf.

“It would appear,” Wolf said with a tight, cold smile, “that your enemies are our enemies.”

Well that was news. Good news too, considering the arsenal of technology and weapons Wolf had at his disposal.

“Where is the NRO located?” Rawls asked Biesel, and knew from Wolf’s grunt of approval that he wasn’t the only one wanting to know the answer to that question.

“There is no united location. They meet in secrecy, in undisclosed locations, a couple of times a year and plot and scheme to advance their agenda.”

“Their agenda of what? Takin’ over the world? Sounds like an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory,” Rawls said.

There was nothing quite like a conspiracy theory to get many of his SEAL brothers all fired up. Hell, you get a couple of these true-blue believers in the same room and they’d argue the merits of various conspiracies for hours. Generally, there was just enough truth in the telling to make one wonder—which was undoubtedly how the originators of the theories hooked their believers.

“From the sourpuss expression on the Big Bad Wolf’s face, I’d say he’s run into the living embodiment of this debunked conspiracy theory before.” There was a hint of dryness to the hollow voice.

Rawls stole a glance at the man standing so dangerously still beside him. Biesel was right about that. Wolf looked like he’d just swallowed an entire package of Warheads.

“Tell me about the lab we apprehended you in. Were you part of the team that kidnapped the scientists and faked their deaths?” If they could find the scientists and extract them safely, they could exonerate his team and bring Manheim’s involvement out in the open.

“Yeah, you have any idea how hard it is to effectively fake that many people’s deaths?” The hollow voice dropped to an irritated grumble. “But did the big boss appreciate that? Hell no.”

A dizzying sense of unreality swept through Rawls. Sweet Jesus, he was standing here interrogating a ghost, listening to it bellyache about unfair working conditions.

Wolf stirred beside him. “Was this
biitei
involved?”

“Yeah,” Rawls said slowly, for the first time realizing that Wolf couldn’t hear what Biesel was saying. The Arapaho warrior was reacting to Rawls’s responses. Not Biesel’s answers. But what about the four elders? “Can any of you see Biesel?”

“No.” Wolf’s voice was abrupt. “Only those who have crossed over and back within a short time of the
biitei
’s crossing can see it.”

Rawls mulled that over. If he understood that answer correctly, that narrowed the field down to him and Faith.

“Many among us can sense them,” Wolf continued after a moment, his voice slightly less tense.

“Like Jude? And you?” Rawls glanced at the four elderly men on their benches. “And them?” He took Wolf’s grunt as an affirmative.

But after a moment he turned back to the rock circle. He still had plenty of questions left. “Where did you take the scientists?”

Biesel laughed. “Where else? Silicon Valley. Who’s gonna notice another lab springing up there?”

Rawls repeated the address the ghost rattled off, and committed it to memory. “They’re still alive?”

“How the hell should I know? I’m dead and stuck to you, you moron.”

Biesel took him through the layout of the lab where they’d stashed Faith’s team, and Rawls committed every room, every guard to memory. All this shit would come in handy when they moved in to rescue the hostages.

After several minutes of questions and answers, there was only one thing left to ask. “How did they track you to Yosemite?”

The smirk was clear on the transparent face. “Through the same shit they dumped into little Brendan and Benji’s veins. Poor bastards. They’re a walking data stream now.”

Rawls’s mouth tightened at the bastard’s callousness. “How can the compound be neutralized?”

“It can’t, far as I know. Or at least that information wasn’t made available to us.”

Rawls scowled. Unfortunately, the bastard didn’t appear to be lying about that. It was more like he simply didn’t care. Which was believable since it no longer affected him.

“Who developed the compound?” Whoever had developed it had to have an antidote.

“I don’t know. Someone at Dynamic Solutions. Ask James Link. He brought that shit with him when he came on board.” Biesel’s voice turned impatient. “Look, I answered all your damn questions. You want to let me out of this damn cage?”

“Not my call. I’m just a guest here,” Rawls said, although from the Arapahos’ reaction to having a ghost present, he’d bet that Biesel wouldn’t be getting loose anytime soon, if at all. The interrogation wrapped up soon afterward, and Rawls turned to Wolf.

“It would be handy if we could keep him on ice like this, in case any more questions come up,” he said in a low voice.

Apparently Biesel had the ears of a cat. “Ah, come on, man, that’s inhumane. This thing’s smaller than a fucking cell.”

Wolf shook his head. “Too dangerous.
Biitei
grow stronger with age. It must cross back over.”

“Now wait one Goddamn minute.” Biesel’s voice climbed. “I can help you. I know lots of things we haven’t even touched on.”

With a ceremonial half bow, Wolf nodded to the elders. Four male voices rose in chant. In unison, the men stood and emptied their leather pouches into the fire at their feet. Flames hissed and crackled and shot so high in the air they touched the ceiling.

The reflection of the fires engulfed the rock circle and the translucent figure within it. Ravenous orange tongues engulfed the writhing, gyrating form. This time Rawls couldn’t hear the screams. The crackle and pop of the fires drowned the ghost’s cries out.

As the fires burned hotter, the figure inside the circle disintegrated, until there was nothing left but flames.

Her stomach a tight knot, Faith pushed a pair of green beans around with her fork. The tension had started the moment Rawls and Wolf had returned, and it continued to build steadily during lunch. From the reassuring looks he kept sending her, and his comments about how good all her tests looked, Rawls had picked up on her anxiety and assumed it was associated with her heart and the tests she’d undergone, or the tests still to come. He thought she was having trouble adjusting to this miraculous new life Kait had given her.

How to tell him her worry wasn’t linked to her health, rather it was driven by fear for his?

For sure the tests had shown a miracle. A completely functional, totally restored heart. The echocardiogram and EKG had given her reason to believe in a new life. A life without restrictions. A normal life. One where she didn’t have to worry about organ rejections or replacement. She’d barely had a chance to process this realization, to accept it—when Rawls had returned with Wolf and told her that Pachico had told them where her fellow scientists had been taken.

Just listening to Rawls banter with his buddies during lunch had deepened the dark cloud of foreboding hanging over her. From the suppressed tension and barely leashed anticipation emitted by the four men, they were planning something
. . .
And then there was this big meeting with the brass of Shadow Mountain the four men were headed to after lunch.

Her belly cramped and a light gloss of perspiration broke out down her spine. She was very much afraid she knew what the meeting was about, and why the men were vibrating with such adrenaline-fueled anticipation.

If they’d located her fellow scientists, then they had all the information they needed to run off and rescue them. Or try to, anyway.

If Dr. Benton had rebuilt the prototype, and it unleashed the same effect on the brain, they’d be slaughtered during the rescue attempt. Every last one of them.

She stared down at her shaking fingers and forced them to stillness.

She couldn’t let that happen.

“Hey,” Rawls said in a low voice from beside her, nudging her with his shoulder. “You okay? You’re awfully quiet over there.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Faith said. Giving up on the appearance of eating, she pushed the plate aside. “You’re going after them, aren’t you? After Gilbert and the rest of my team?”

Rawls cast a cautious look down the long steel cafeteria table their group had taken over. Beth and Zane sat hip to hip, their heads tilted toward each other, quietly talking. Cosky and Kait sat across from Marion Simcosky, laughing at something she was saying. The women were upbeat and relieved.

Did they know what their men had planned? Or that they were acting off information provided by a ghost? She doubted Wolf or Rawls had explained the circumstances behind this sudden opportunity.

“How about we talk about this when we get back to the clinic?” Rawls said, bending toward her so his request was spoken directly into her ear. “The doc’s doing the stress test in two hours, right? We can talk then.”

She quivered as his warm breath caressed the side of her neck and tickled the inside of her ear. She wasn’t sure exactly where things were headed between them, which was one more thing they needed to talk about. There was definitely a sense of building intimacy in their interactions. He wasn’t pulling away any longer. But what that meant, she didn’t know.

The only thing she knew for absolute certainty, at this moment, was that her information couldn’t wait until after her stress test.

“When are you meeting again to discuss their rescue?” she asked in an equally quiet but persistent voice.

“Faith.” He turned a censoring look on her. “We’ll talk about this later.”

“No.” She half twisted on her seat to look at him. “We’ll talk about this now. I want to be in on this meeting.”

He smiled at her, a patient, maybe even affectionate smile. “Yeah, that’s not gonna happen, darlin’.”

It had to happen. It would happen.

She couldn’t let them attack the building where her team was re-creating the technology she’d been instrumental in creating—not without warning them of what they were walking into. It was true they were military. It was true there was a possibility that once they realized the prototype’s potential, they would move to weaponize it. But she couldn’t let them walk into a possible ambush.

She simply couldn’t.

If the prototype was working at capacity, they’d be massacred.

“Look, there are things you don’t know about the research we were doing. Things that will get you killed.”

He studied her face intently, and in some indefinable way, his gaze seemed to sharpen. “What things?”

She released a frustrated breath. “I’ll tell you at the meeting!”

“What meeting?”

It was Cosky’s flat voice. Faith glanced down the table to find everyone’s gaze locked on her. The argument had finally caught the attention of the rest of the table.

“Our nineteen hundred,” Rawls said after a moment, still studying Faith’s face. A faint frown furrowed his brow.

“That’s classified.” Mac’s tone was clipped and abrupt—like the subject was closed.

“She has critical information to share about her research,” Rawls said, shooting Mac a flat look.

“Sure she does,” Mac snorted.

“Information,” Rawls continued, his voice cold and challenging, “that is essential to any rescue attempt.”

Faith’s stomach tightened and churned. For a moment it felt like the small amount of chicken and bread she’d managed to force down was about to come up. She glanced down the table at Beth and Kait, wondering how the two women were handling the news that their men were about to throw themselves into harm’s way. Neither woman looked surprised. And if they were worried, they had locked the fear behind calm faces.

A wave of shame washed over her at their courage and her lack thereof. She was barely involved with Rawls and the thought of him in danger left her crumbling inside.

“If you have vital information, then tell us now, and we’ll pass it on,” Mac said impatiently.

Rawls ran a hand over his hair and shook his head. “We’re not runnin’ this show. Wolf and his team are. And somethin’ tells me they’re gonna want to hear the information directly from the horse’s mouth.”

Chapter Seventeen

R
AWLS HAD NO
luck hunting Wolf down before their 1900 strategy session, so when the two men sent to escort Rawls to the meeting showed up in the clinic after Faith’s stress test, Rawls took them aside and explained the situation to them. After a moment of conferring with each other, Faith was motioned forward. They were both escorted outside the clinic to where another golf cart waited, but this one had rows of seats for extra passengers.

Cosky, Zane, and Mac were already seated in the back row of the vehicle. Rawls helped Faith into the cart and took the seat beside hers. Once they were settled, the driver took off in the opposite direction from where Wolf had taken Rawls earlier.

Apparently they weren’t going to the same office where they’d gone to report the information Pachico had given them
. . .
curious.

This time the trip through Shadow Mountain was short. Their driver took the first corridor to the right after the medical bay, and drove less than a hundred feet before pulling into an empty parking space against the wall. They followed their escorts through one of those strangely translucent sliding doors and into a web of connected offices and halls.

None of the offices they passed were marked, nor had there been any indication above the entrance to tell them where they were. And now that he thought about it, nothing was marked in this place. The only way you could tell you’d arrived at the hospital was that the people exiting and entering were wearing scrubs, and at the mess hall, by the smell of food.

Nothing about the place shouted operations.

Until their escorts turned a corner and he found himself in front of an open set of double doors.

Behind the doors was a large round table, which could accommodate a dozen men, and a huge freestanding dry-erase board. Dozens of maps ringed the room and a white projection screen swallowed the entire front wall.

Half a dozen hard, watchful faces turned to study them.

Instantly he knew where he was. Instantly he felt at home.

He’d spent thousands of hours seated at similar tables, in similar rooms, eyes glued to wall maps or schematics projected on giant screens. He’d drunk gallons of coffee from identical Styrofoam cups from coffeepots placed in similar unobtrusive, out of the way places.

He’d been in this same room, in dozens of different locales, over the course of his career. It was as comfortable as an old pair of combat boots.

He spotted Wolf across the room and beckoned him over. For a moment it looked like the big warrior was going to ignore him, but then his gaze fell on Faith and a frown touched his face. Without saying a word to the men standing beside him, he headed across the room.

“Dr. Ansell,” he said when he reached them, and offered her a formal half bow. After straightening, he glanced at Rawls, his gaze shrewd. “Problem?”

Before Rawls had a chance to explain, Faith stepped up.

“There are
. . .
aspects
. . .
of the research we were doing that are classified,” Faith said, tugging at the bottom of her T-shirt. “But in light of the rescue, and the fact that my team was kidnapped rather than killed outright so they could repeat the process—” She cleared her throat. “So in light of all that, there are things you need to be aware of. Things you may run into. Things you won’t be prepared for.”

She went from tugging the bottom of her shirt to smoothing it repeatedly over her hips. It was a nervous tic. She’d done the same thing in the tunnels. A grin threatened at the memory, until he got a good look at the tension on her face.

Wolf studied her face for a moment and then dropped his gaze to the constant smoothing of her hands. “Your insight is appreciated,” he finally murmured, his voice unusually gentle. “Sit. We begin soon.”

She acknowledged his suggestion with a tight nod and let Rawls take her elbow and escort her to the table. Once she was seated, however, her hands had nothing to smooth, so she started absently picking at her cuticles.

Rawls watched her quietly before covering her restless hands with his. “Everythin’s gonna be fine. You just wait. You’re worryin’ over nothin’,” he said, trying to project encouragement and calm in his voice.

She nodded, but without much conviction. Luckily, the side door swung open and four older men with tanned, leathery faces and long, graying hair in immaculate braids strode in. From the way Wolf greeted them, it was obvious he’d been waiting for them, which meant they’d be getting started soon.

As Wolf spoke to the middle elder, recognition stirred. The four newcomers were dressed differently from the four elders in the cave. Rather than roughhewn rawhide poncho-styled garments, they wore loose jeans and button-down shirts, but he’d swear they were the same four elders who’d performed the binding ceremony.

With Wolf still talking, the lead elder glanced at Faith. After a moment he nodded. The four elders took seats at the head of the table, leaving Wolf standing alone. Not that he appeared uncomfortable, but then, Rawls had never seen Wolf look uncomfortable.

“Dr. Ansell, if you would join me,” Wolf said, his gaze steady on Faith’s tense face.

Rawls frowned; he hadn’t expected them to call her to the front of the room like some schoolgirl being disciplined. She didn’t seem to mind, though. Without hesitation, she pushed back her chair, climbed to her feet, and walked up front.

“Thank you.” She cleared her throat nervously. “I’m not sure how much Commander Mackenzie and his team told you about the research my team and I were involved in.”

“We are aware you were advancing the new energy paradigm and created a prototype capable of pulling energy from the atoms in the air,” Wolf said. “And that your lab was targeted and your team kidnapped because of this.”

“Yes, all of that is true.” She coughed, fidgeting, looking more conflicted than ever.

“Dr. Ansell?” Wolf’s voice was so quiet Rawls barely heard it.

She glanced up, stared directly at Wolf, and squared her shoulders. “Yes, everything I told Commander Mackenzie is true. However, much of our research is classified, so there were
. . .
things
. . .
I didn’t mention during that conversation.”

“Such as?” Wolf prompted when Faith fell silent.

“Such as the fact that the prototype is capable of connecting with and augmenting certain people’s brain waves and expanding their brain’s capacity.” She seemed to force the explanation out.

An uneasy stir went around the table.

Brain waves? Expanded capacity? Of all the possibilities he’d expected her to spill, this news hadn’t even been in the periphery of his mind.

“Augmenting? How?” This time it was Wolf’s superior who asked the question. And while all Rawls could see was the back of the guy’s head, his voice was the same as the elder who’d worn the red etchings in the cave.

“The machine basically turbocharges certain people’s brains. It makes them capable of doing extraordinary things
. . .
mentally.”

“Specify,” Wolf said.

From the sharpness in Wolf’s voice and the grim expressions ringing the table, he wasn’t the only one who saw the ugly ramifications in Faith’s news. No wonder she’d been so dead set on addressing Wolf’s superiors.

“In one experiment, the subject turned on a microwave just by thinking about it. In another, she blew the same microwave up—just by thinking about it.”

Blew something up with just a thought. A chill feathered down his spine. How the hell did you protect yourself against something like that?

Down the table someone swore softly.

“You’re telling us”—Zane’s calm voice ruptured the stunned silence—“that this machine you developed can turn certain people’s thoughts into weapons? They can kill by just thinking about it?”

“Yes.” She responded to Zane’s question as calmly as he’d asked it. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

She was remarkably collected now, as though letting the cat out of the bag had drained all the tension away.

“And you didn’t tell us about this. Jesus Christ, with the hands it’s fallen into, this thing could destroy the world. This thing could give one person the ability to control the whole fucking world. And you didn’t tell us about this? Jesus Christ.” Mac shook his head, stunned disbelief lifting his voice.

“No. I didn’t tell you about it,” she agreed, her voice empty of apology. “And I wouldn’t be telling you now if you didn’t absolutely need to know. How do I know you won’t use it for yourself? Turn it over to your military and weaponize it? How do I know that what you’d do with it would be any better than what they’d do with it? I didn’t know if I could trust you. There’s a good chance the people who stole the schematics for the prototype haven’t realized its full potential and it could be recovered and destroyed without anyone realizing what it can do.”

Dead silence followed her retort. The four elders glanced among each other, and Rawls saw a new respect in the eyes that turned back to Faith.

“You said it affects certain people’s brains,” Cosky finally reminded her. “What percentage of people does it affect?”

“From the data we’ve been able to gather, it syncs with certain brain chemistries and brain waves. In the lab and surrounding offices, three out of nineteen were affected. But it wasn’t a large enough sampling to foretell what the rate would be in the general population.”

Rawls nodded absently. What she said made sense. Brain chemistry varied slightly between individuals. Much of the data would depend on the range of brain chemistries or waves the machine could sync with. Only through sampling hundreds of brains would they have been able to work out an average. Yet sampling the volume of brains necessary to acquire a percentage would have caught someone’s attention eventually. Attention they couldn’t afford.

In fact, from what he remembered from their earlier conversation, Dr. Benton had destroyed the prototype for fear it would fall into the wrong hands.

The precaution made much more sense now, as did the NRO’s interest in the research.

Christ, if this technology got into the wrong hands
. . .
it was absolutely essential they recover it before the NRO re-created the prototype.

“You said it took years to develop the original prototype, and that Dr. Benton destroyed all the research along with the machine before they were taken,” he reminded her.

If it took years or even months to create the machine, they’d have plenty of time to track the scientists down and retrieve them before their invention went online and operational.

“Yes, but Dr. Benton has a photographic memory. He won’t need the research to complete the necessary steps. And he’ll be able to complete those steps faster since he’s done it before. I’m sure he’ll try to slow the process down, but
. . .
” Her voice trailed off and she swallowed hard, her gaze clinging to his.

He could see the pain from the memory of her murdered friends burning in her eyes. And she was right. They couldn’t count on Benton stalling. The bastards who held him had proved repeatedly that they were ruthless and deadly.

“How long would you estimate it will take them to re-create the prototype?” Zane asked, his voice thoughtful.

Faith shook her head. “I honestly don’t know. But the machine doesn’t need to be fully operational before it can sync with the human brain. Last time it started at sixty-nine percent.”

Rawls frowned, something niggling at him. “How did you find out about the machine’s ability?”

The original intention of the machine had been energy based after all; they hadn’t been doing any research on people’s brains.

“It started small. Lights turning on or off randomly. Machines as well. We thought the lab had an electrical short. We didn’t put it together until Marcy asked Julio to turn on Big Ben and the machine suddenly powered up. Marcy laughed, said, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if it turned off just by asking too?’ And it just
. . .
turned
. . .
off. That’s when we started testing her on other machines, the centrifuge, the microwave, the lights, everything. It became obvious fast. All she had to do was think about turning a machine on or off, and it did. But we didn’t know why. Not at first.” Her face tightened for a moment and she took a deep, calming breath. “We didn’t realize her sudden almost-supernatural ability was connected to the Thrive generator until the machine overheated and shut down during our flurry of testing. Just like that, Marcy was normal again. That’s when we put it together. The ability was only present when the prototype was on.”

Rawls’s chest tightened in sympathy. Marcy and Julio had been two of her friends murdered in the lab that day. Apparently two people those bastards hadn’t had any use for.

“You said three of you had the ability to sync with the machine. If they do create the prototype, they can use it too—”

“No,” Faith broke in. “None of the people kidnapped were able to sync with the machine.”

“So they killed those of you who could sync with it?” Cosky asked, a puzzled tone in his voice.

“Not exactly. Whoever attacked us and kidnapped my team didn’t know about the machine’s side effects. We were very careful to keep that quiet. They must have been after the new energy utilization, or possibly they were interested in repurposing the prototype as a clean bomb. It would take very little rewiring to create an energy distributor.” She paused for a moment to frown and then shrugged. “I’m guessing, of course. But if they’d known about the secondary effect, they wouldn’t have killed Marcy or Bekka, and they would have tried harder to find me.”

It took Rawls a second to realize what she’d just admitted.

Oh hell, no.

His whole body stiffened. He didn’t bother praying that nobody else had picked up on that confession because every single person in the room had been trained to zero in on and use such slips of the tongue.

Jesus—Faith had no fucking clue what she’d just brought down on her head.

“Let me get this straight,” Mac said slowly. “You were one of the three who could sync with the machine.”