Heart of Danger (34 page)

They were going hot now, and Mac wanted Catherine out of here. She’d done a fabulous job of getting them here. Smart and beautiful and kind. And now brave. He wasn’t going to lose her. Not now, not after just finding her.

He had to get her out of here, fast.

The Captain was still in his arms, after having what felt like a seizure. His eyes were closed, ravaged face slack. He weighed less than some of the backpacks Mac had carried into battle.

Mac could carry him anywhere. He could carry him down to Level 4. He could do anything as long as he knew Catherine was safe.

“Listen,” he said urgently. “We’ve got the pass. We’ll get down to Level 4, get the men out. Take the Antz, they’ll help you navigate your way out. Can you make it back to the helo and wait for us? You remember how to get over the microwave screen? You—”

She was already walking to the door. “No way, Mac. No way am I leaving you. You need eyes and ears that aren’t the Antz, eyes and ears that know their way around. And you’re definitely going to be needing me to detach those men from their machines, if they are still alive. Make sure you close the door behind me.” She opened the door and signaled Nick at the end of the corridor, looked back at him. “Come
on
! Close the door.”

There was no time to argue and he recognized that it would be useless anyway. Every cell in his body told him to get Catherine out of there but his head told him she was right. They needed her.

Never before in his life had he gone on a mission with a split goal. He was always narrowly focused on getting in, getting the job done, getting out. He went in with men who trained as hard as he did and who were perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. He’d never gone in worried about a teammate like he was now with Catherine, and he hated the hell out of it.

But what could he do?

He followed her out, the Captain in his arms, closing the door. She was already running down the corridor, Nick and Jon following her. He caught up with Nick. “How many?” he asked.

“Three.” He was watching Catherine as she hurried down the corridor. “They’ll be at the corner any second now and they’ll see us.”

“You and Jon be ready to take a knee.”

“Yeah.” Jon and Nick had their weapons out. Mac shifted the Captain to a fireman’s lift and drew his own.

Nick had shifted the screen image to holo. “Boss? They’re just around the—”

“Here!” Catherine had stopped at a door, opened it and ushered them in. Mac, Nick and Jon turned, came in at a dead run. She shut the door quietly just as Nick’s holo showed three guards rounding the corner. There was a quiet sound as they all exhaled. None of them wanted a firefight with a wounded comrade to carry and a noncombatant to protect.

Mac looked around. They were in a large room full of equipment. It wasn’t a sickroom, though. There were no beds, only inert machines stacked all around the walls. The only light came from the holo by Nick’s side. They watched it.

The three guards were walking slowly, completely alert, hands on weapons. These weren’t rent-a-cops filling time.

“Will they check the rooms?” Jon whispered.

“Yes. The Captain’s machinery is dead, there will be a red light flashing above the door. When they see the body missing they will sound the alarm. We have to get down to Level 4 fast. Follow me.”

Catherine didn’t wait for them to acknowledge her, but rushed to the end of the room. There was a door there Mac hadn’t noticed, hidden behind what looked like a huge old-fashioned MRI, completely different from the new handheld ones.

They filed out, into a large, dimly lit corridor.

“That room is essentially a storehouse for equipment that needs recycling or repair or discarding. No one enters except tech guys on a schedule. We’re now in a part of the facility used for maintenance. It’s off the security camera web system. We should be okay until we get to Level 4. And pray there is one.” She was panting as she spoke. Mac let her lead. He had the layout of the Millon facility memorized but they were off the blueprints.

Once again, she was saving their asses.

The corridor ran over three hundred meters and at the end there was an elevator—a freight elevator from the size. They ran to it and Catherine swiped Lee’s card. They filed in and she swiped the card again. There were only three buttons, but when she swiped the card, a big 4 pulsed on the screen. She pressed the screen and they dropped.

Nick had managed to herd a troop of Antz into the elevator and they clung to the ceiling. Mac looked at the handheld and saw the five of them in a bird’s-eye view.

The doors opened onto a huge, gleaming hallway.

An alarm sounded, a big foghorn sound, wailing every two seconds.

Shit.

Catherine looked up at Nick. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do now. Nick, can we use the Antz to check the rooms?”

He was already deploying and the nearly invisible creatures were scattering, scrambling along the walls, looking into every room. They watched the screen showing room after empty room.

Catherine put her hand on his arm as she watched and Mac felt warmth and hope and fear in equal measure enter his system. With the Captain in his arms he couldn’t cover her hand with his so he bent down and kissed the top of her head.

“Wait! Have them back up.” She still had her hand on his arm and he could feel a jolt of excitement in his system and had no way to tell whether it was hers or his. “There!” She pointed. A dimly lit room with three beds. Three bodies hooked up to machinery.

Outside the door was a brightly lit corridor. As they watched, two people, a man and a woman, both wearing lab coats, came out of a room. Two guards ran around a corner.

Jon was already pulling a flashbang from his backpack.

“Turn your back, close your eyes, open your mouth,” Mac said urgently to Catherine. Nick and Jon had already fitted their tiny ear protectors, handed two to Catherine. Mac gently eased the Captain over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and fitted his own in. He gave Jon a nod.

“Fire in the hole,” Jon whispered, peered around the corner and lobbed the canister down the corridor.

Light bloomed around the corner accompanied by a sonic boom that was nearly painful in its intensity even through the muffler buds.

The jagged image the few Antz who’d followed them showed the two techs falling to the ground, curling up in a fetal position, hands clutching ears. Two sentries ran around the corridor. Nick checked the handheld, stepped out and took them down, one shot each. The screen showed them down, dead.

“Go go go!” Mac chanted, and they rushed the corridor.

Catherine ran to the room, looked in, then looked over at him.

Mac stiffened. Her look was sorrowful, solemn.

It was bad.

They rushed to the room and stopped on the threshold.

It was very bad.

Romero, Lundquist and Pelton were in three beds. If Mac hadn’t seen the jagged, moving colored lines of the machines next to each bed and heard the soft beeps, he would have been convinced they were dead.

They looked worse than the Captain. Thinner, more messed up. The surgeries had been more extensive, probably the drugs they’d been subjected to stronger.

They were very strong, resistant young men. The kind of men sick fucks loved to mess around with. They were comatose, sunken faces already looking like death masks. Dark blue patches showed where IV injections had been used for prolonged periods of time.

Each man was naked, without even the dignity of a hospital gown, spread-eagled out as if a human sacrifice, which was true since they were sacrifices. To someone’s greed.

All three men, young and strong and brave—the best in the world—looked like POWs in a particularly savage prison camp. And yet they were here—in Silicon Valley in the good old US of A.

Mac never went into battle enraged. Rage, anger, revenge—they were all emotions he couldn’t afford. You don’t go into combat with emotions because they blinded you. They were handicaps and they were dangerous. So he made sure he fucking well washed away all emotion before suiting up for an op, and when he went operational he was all cold, clear reasoning and hard calculation.

That was all swept away right now as pity for his men swamped him. Pity that they’d been brought to this. Clearly tortured, tormented, treated as less than animals by their own countrymen.

The rage washed over him, a huge uncontrollable wave he was helpless to resist. He knew he was engendering them all, endangering Catherine and the Captain, and there was nothing he could do.

He stood still for a breath, two. Nick and Jon stood still as statues, too. For all the combat they’d seen, for all the deaths in battle they’d watched, there was something so inherently evil in this scene they were shocked. As if touched by the Devil’s hand.

Catherine was the first to move. Her hands were swift and sure as she gently, quickly started unhooking the men from the machinery. She was whispering under her breath, and after a moment Mac realized she was running down a checklist, much as he and his men checked gear just before going into battle.

Finally the men were unhooked, lying there unmoving, like meat on a butcher’s marble slab, barely breathing. Catherine looked at them in pity.

“Wrap them in sheets, Nick, Jon. I’m going to do something.”

They nodded, and started wrapping the sheets around their fallen comrades’ naked torsos. They had barely finished and were hoisting them up when another alarm sounded, high-pitched, even more urgent than the other one.

Catherine ran back into the room.

“What’s that alarm?” Mac asked.

“I pulled the fire alarm, and that’s the evacuation signal. All external doors are now open. Let’s go.”

Lee got out of the limo, thinking he might stop by the recreation room. At this time of night, it would be empty.

Millon treated its employees well. There was a Nespresso machine which made divine coffee, there were trays of loose-leaf Chinese teas, a large selection of herbal infusions.

The chairs were comfortable and the staff kept the place very neat and clean. All in all, Lee thought, he deserved a nice cup of tea. Review his notes while he was at it, and perhaps even meditate. He was early.

He was looking forward to this, in every sense. Patient Nine and his confreres had proven to be most meddlesome. All in all, it was going to be a pleasure harvesting Nine and the others. Though he was a scientist and didn’t believe in something as arbitrary as luck, he did feel that the program would regain its natural rhythm once these men were out of the way and he could test on more ordinary patients.

Nine and his men were outliers, in every sense of the word.

He got out of the car and signaled the driver to pull away, watching the red backlights disappear from view.

Lee knew the grounds were patrolled by security agents, but for the moment it was as if he were alone in the entire facility. In the state of California, even.

They were close. Lee could feel it. Once his outliers were gone, he was certain he could start bringing the program to a successful conclusion. Another six months of testing—or rather having that moron Flynn test the program—and he’d be ready.

Why, this time next year he could be in Beijing, undersecretary to the Minister of Science. Or perhaps to the Minister of Defense. An honored member of the high councils of his country, a man who had been instrumental in shaping his country’s future. A man who had been true to his country through a long, lonely and bitter exile.

Ah, but the taste of triumph would be all the sweeter for having waited. He was a young man still, not even forty yet. He’d handed over the cancer vaccine. Members of the Politburo were given the finest medical care the world could offer.

He could live to be a vigorous eighty-year-old, even ninety-year-old. Another forty, fifty years of power at the pinnacle of the world’s most powerful country to look forward to.

He drew in a deep breath and glanced west. He was inland, of course. But thirty miles would take him to the Pacific. He could almost feel his homeland calling to him across the wide body of water. The greatest civilization mankind had ever known, triumphant once more.

Thanks to him, Charles Lee.

He smiled and reached for his security pass, frowning. Odd, it wasn’t in his front pants pocket, as it usually was. It wasn’t in any pocket at all, he found as he rummaged. Nor in his briefcase.

The stress was getting to him and he was very glad the major source of his stress—besides that moron Flynn—was going to be eliminated tonight. He had never forgotten an important document in his life and here he’d forgotten or misplaced his security pass.

Well, there was a go-around.

The security staff had prepared for just such a contingency. He and ten others also had a special code assigned them in case they didn’t have their pass or the pass was chipped and had to be replaced. He entered in the code.

In his head, he was already in the recreation room, calmly preparing his tea, settling his troubled spirit, so at first he didn’t understand what was happening.

The door didn’t open. Lee punched in the code again and the fire siren sounded from the outside loudspeakers, signaling evacuation, and the door opened. He knew why the door hadn’t opened at first, why the alarm was sounding and who had pulled it. The system had already clocked him in and it hadn’t clocked him out. He was being read as an intruder. Someone else had clocked in using his security pass. And he had a good idea who.

The same person who called in the fire alarm.

Catherine Young.

She was here.

Christ! Four nearly dead men and three men to carry them. Nick and Jon were already stripping a bed to fashion a travois to be carried by two men, each also carrying a man. It was going to be hard and they were going to be sitting ducks, but there was no question of leaving their teammates behind. They weren’t going to die like rats in a lab.

Catherine stood for a second with a frown on her face, clearly puzzling something out, and Mac nearly dropped to his knees in a burst of love for her. Any other woman in the world would be screaming in panic or rushing around using up her energy in useless things but not his woman. No, she was thinking.