Heart of Danger (3 page)

Bravery in an adversary was bad juju, he knew that.

Was sex messing with his head? It never had before. Sex was off the table when he was on a mission, and his entire life now was a mission, dawn to dusk. Of course sex had been easy to dismiss when he’d actually been getting laid, which was not the case right now and hadn’t been for a year.

Man, if this woman could distract him, he needed to do something about that, ASAP. Get down off the mountain one night in one of their camouflaged vehicles, go to some dive in one of the nearby towns that didn’t have vidcams and find himself a woman for the night. Or for however long it took to get this out of his system.

She was standing quietly, head high, the only sign of stress an accelerated rate of breathing and the trembling of her hands.

“Come with me,” Mac said roughly, and took her elbow, setting off toward the huge elevator that would take them half a mile straight up.

She came obediently, which was smart of her. He didn’t think he could hurt a woman, but he didn’t want to put that to the test. He was the front line of defense not only for his men but for the Haven, and if he had to choose between this woman and those he protected, she’d lose.

He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Best-case scenario—keep her in isolation, extract what intel he could, particularly how she knew his name and in what general direction to find him, what she wanted, who sent her.

Jon had a drug he’d lifted from a pharmaceutical wholesaler that could wipe short-term memories. Couple the drug with a light anesthetic, have her wake up a hundred miles away with no memory of him or Mount Blue or Haven.

He tugged on her arm and she stopped obediently while he pressed the button to open the elevator doors. When they opened, he urged her forward with his hand pressed to her back.

The engineer who’d designed the elevator, Eric Dane, had had fun with the velocity. You’d never know it but the damned thing shot up more than two thousand feet in thirty seconds. It was a wonder nobody got the bends.

Dane was one of his strays. The engineer had gone underground when he’d blown the whistle on structural deficiencies he’d found on the Oakland Bay Bridge and had lost his job for his efforts. Two months after he’d filed a report with the authorities on the bridge’s weaknesses, it had collapsed on the Oakland end after the mild ’21 Halloween quake. Forty people died.

Dane’s structural deficiencies report was wiped from the company files and he was blamed for the collapse. A multimillion-dollar suit was brought against him, but there was no one to sue. He’d disappeared.

One more in Mac’s ragtag army of outlaws and runaways. Men and women who had come under his protection.

Dane had buffered the takeoff and slowdown at the top, so the woman would have no way of judging how far they’d come. For all she knew, they’d climbed a few stories in a building instead of shooting up a half a mile inside a mountain.

The doors opened silently. The hood baffled sounds so she wouldn’t be able to tell that the elevator opened onto their huge atrium, which was their community’s central square. There were four people in sight, working. One of them was Jon, who looked curiously at Mac holding on to the elbow of a hooded woman. Mac signaled with his head to the right. To their meeting room. He made the universal sign of a camera rolling and Jon nodded and took off.

Mac steered the woman through the benches and plants of their huge open space, knowing not much was penetrating the hood. Not sounds or light or smells.

As always, a huge spurt of pride blossomed in his chest when he came out into their outlaw community’s central square.

It was beautiful. Mac got a real lift every time he crossed the square. It was filled with light day and night. During the day, the molecule-thick, totally impenetrable ceiling looked open to the sky and blazed with sunlight. Miniscule solar collectors around the rim flooded the square with light at night. The solar panels were also heaters at the touch of a button. The effect was startling. High overhead, sheets of snow fell from the sky and stopped, disappearing the instant they touched the screen.

There was greenery everywhere—lush, thriving plants that pleased the eye and gave off a fresh fragrance. Fruit trees, flower beds, glossy shrubs, small enclaves of grass.

The lush greenery was thanks to Manuel Rivera, the man with the golden hands. Jon met him when he went tomcatting in Cardan, a small town sixty miles away. They became friends.

Manuel was working eighteen hours a day trying to get his organic farm produce business off the ground. Jon found himself growing fond of the guy. On one trip into town, the owner of the bar Jon always stopped at told him Manuel had been attacked by “muggers,” had refused to go to the local hospital and was in a room upstairs.

Jon ran upstairs, kicked open the door, took one look at Manuel, stopped the bleeding, lifted him over his shoulder, and brought him up the mountain, defying Mac and Nick.

By that time, though, Mac and Nick were resigned. Their ragtag community already counted Dane, a famous actress whose face had been slashed by a stalker, an ER nurse who’d had to turn away a pregnant woman with preeclampsia and no insurance, and about forty other refugees from modern life.

Manuel had sued a big agro business with test fields of genetically modified plants next to his, contaminating his organic produce. The day after the lawsuit was filed, two thugs had beaten him up, leaving torn-up pieces of the lawsuit fluttering down onto his blood on the ground.

The agro business was an offshoot of Arka Pharmaceuticals.

Manuel now filled their public spaces with plants and ran two huge fields of orchards and vegetables which provided them all with organic fresh fruit and vegetables.

In exile and hunted like animals, they ate like kings.

The lush greenery reminded Mac of what he was fighting for, and why he had to be wary with this woman. Everyone else at Haven had found their way here by accident and by fate. This woman came specifically for
him.

Mac opened the door of their meeting room and ushered her over the threshold. Jon would have already seeded the room with vidcams, tiny ones she wouldn’t be able to detect. Jon and Nick would be watching from next door.

The woman stood quietly just inside the room. She didn’t pester him to let her go, didn’t ask where they were. He found that interesting. It showed self-discipline. Was she an operator?

Only one way to find out.

He pulled off his balaclava, tapped his wrist unit twice, unlocking her restraints, and whipped off her hood.

She blinked in the light, getting her bearings.

Mac watched her carefully. People see different things. Operators are always “on.” They don’t sign up by chance. They’re born that way, hard-wired for trouble, then drift to where someone can train them and hone their gifts.

An operator would walk into a baby’s nursery, check the exits and the kid’s hands in his crib. Just in case.

So if she was here on an infiltration mission, she’d check his hands, check the door to see what kind of locking mechanism it had, check all the walls for windows and see what could possibly be used as a weapon. She’d do it fast, and in about a second and a half she could list in detail every single item in the room.

Mac could do it, Jon and Nick could do it. They’d been taught by the best, by Lucius Ward.

At the thought of his former commanding officer, Mac’s heart gave a small pump of rage. He repressed the thought ruthlessly. Now wasn’t the time. It wouldn’t ever be the time. And anyway the fucker was living it up in Rio.

The woman didn’t size up the room at all. She sized him up. Her gaze rested thoughtfully on his face, without even a flicker of attention to his hands. Even though his hands hovered over his Beretta 92 and the black carbon combat knife in its sheath. The knife was three hundred times stronger than steel. He could not just slit her throat but he could decapitate her without any effort at all.

An operator would have understood all that, instinctively. Would have upped the vigilance level, started dancing on the balls of her feet in anticipation of action.

Nothing like that. She simply stood before him, looking him in the eyes. Breathing regular, muscles relaxed, hands loose.

And Christ, she was beautiful. Right now, that was the only factor in favor of her being an operator. Services throughout the world were scrambling to recruit beautiful, athletic women, sometimes training them from high school on. “Honey pots” they were called—and they were spectacularly effective.

Ghost Ops had had two such women available, in training to make it up to the big leagues. Women so beautiful any straight man would let them get near because biology tripped them up. Conquest by hormones. The men the women preyed on never felt the knife that slipped between the ribs or the garotte around the neck or the microbullet between the eyes.

But Francesca and Melanie had had a look about them that was unmistakable. They could hide the fact that they were soldiers under fashionable clothes and makeup but they couldn’t hide the fact that they were dangerous. If a man had eyes to see, they gave off danger vibes like beautiful rattlesnakes.

Nothing like the aura around this woman. She was too soft, too sad. This woman wasn’t a predator. She looked vulnerable and tired.

Fuck this.

“Sit down,” he rapped.

She looked around and took one of his easy chairs at the table they used for one-on-ones, ignoring the long table they used for meetings. He sat down across from her. If he shifted his knees, he’d be touching her.

He sank into the softness of his chair, making sure he didn’t touch her. Wishing he didn’t have to do this, wishing he didn’t have to be here, interrogating this woman, knowing he’d have to make some hard choices if her story wasn’t convincing.

Because he was the protector of his outlaw band and if he had to get rid of her to keep them all safe, he’d do it. He wouldn’t like it but he’d do it.

By default, he’d been appointed king of his little kingdom. And though he’d rather be anywhere else, here he was, in his comfy easy chair. As a soldier, he’d never have allowed easy chairs in his office. Nothing easy about being a soldier; the harder the life, the faster you learned. He had a Ph.D. in hardship.

But here, goddamned if people didn’t come to him with their problems. They were fucking civilians. Much as he’d like to, he couldn’t order them to stand to attention and give a sitrep. The civilian world didn’t work like that. So he’d learned to offer his people a comfortable chair and even a goddamned cup of coffee—he drew the line at tea—waiting for them to get to the point.

She sat there, not relaxed against the back of the chair but not tensely poised on the edge of her seat, either. She simply looked at him, as if waiting.

Okay, so he’d start the dance.

“Who the fuck are you and why are you looking for this guy—what the hell was his name?”

She never blinked. “Tom McEnroe. I’m looking for Tom McEnroe.”

Mac had been trained to lie by the best. His eyes gave absolutely nothing away. “Never heard of him,” he said. “And who are you? I’m not going to ask a third time, lady.”

She drew in a deep breath and he kept his eyes on her face. Because for a slender woman, she had a really great rack. Which had nothing to do with anything, of course. Just an observation.

He was definitely going to head down the mountain next week and get laid, though.

“My name is Catherine Young,” she said quietly. “Dr. Catherine Young. I am a neuroscientist and I work in a research lab, Millon Laboratories, about twenty miles north of Palo Alto. All of which you obviously read from documents in my purse. I am also an expert on dementia.”

She stopped, as if giving him time to react.

Mac simply waited.

Dementia, huh? Maybe that was his problem. He was demented for not knocking her out and leaving her three hundred miles away from here. Yeah, he was losing it.

He couldn’t see it, but he knew Jon was tapping away at his virtual keyboard. The woman had barely finished talking when Jon’s voice came in over the invisible ear pod.

“She’s telling the truth, boss. Catherine Anne Young, born August 8, 1995. Lives on University Road, Palo Alto.” Low whistle. “Got more degrees than my dog has fleas. Cum laude, too. That is one smart lady. I’m looking at her driver’s license, photo matches, and am now looking at . . . ah. At her company ID. Millon Labs. It all checks out.”

Mac gave an almost imperceptible nod, which she wouldn’t catch but Jon would.

Then Jon came back on. “Whoa, boss. Millon, the company she works for? It’s owned by Futura Technology. And guess who the final owner of Futura is?” Jon sometimes got carried away with his own smarts. Mac could almost see him smacking himself on the forehead because of course Mac couldn’t answer. “Sorry, boss. Arka Pharmaceuticals. That’s who. Our luscious Dr. Young ultimately works for Arka.”

Arka Pharmaceuticals. Their last mission. He and Jon and Nick had almost died on that mission and it had made them outlaws. The false intel that Arka Pharmaceuticals was working on a weaponized form of
Yersinia pestis
—the bubonic plague—had cost them everything.

Because there had been no plague, only some very bright scientists working on a cure for cancer. Because the mission had cost him his entire team. Only he, Jon and Nick had escaped. And because he and his entire team had been betrayed by their commander, a man they had all loved.

That was Arka Pharmaceuticals. And that was the company this woman ultimately worked for.

Mac didn’t believe in coincidences. She might look soft, she might not be an operator in the technical sense and she might well be a doctor with degrees coming out her ears, but his first instinct was correct.

This woman was dangerous.

“Go on.” She’d stopped and continued studying his face, as if it was giving something away. Good luck with that. His face didn’t give anything away.

“I work mainly in the lab, but we have a ward of test subjects suffering from severe rapid-onset dementia. Men and women who are so far gone they can’t remember their names, can’t remember anything about their past. Some are barely sentient. We’re working on a cure for dementia, a way to reestablish the synapses that have been lost. I’ll spare you the technical details. Our protocols are highly experimental, very cutting-edge, but several offer a great deal of promise. Each test subject was informed of the risks at a time when two neurologists certified that they were of sound mind and each patient signed a release. Or, failing that, a family member with power of attorney signed. The patients were assigned numbers, which I would have objected to, but they were all well beyond recognizing their own names. There was one patient in the protocol group, however, known as Number Nine . . .”