Heart of Danger (7 page)

Maybe it was the animal in her, she thought, that wanted to live. The lizard part of her brain waking up, pushing for survival.

She’d spent her childhood and teen years suppressing the lizard brain, believing her gift came from the unconscious. She never let herself be swayed by emotion, by need, ever.

And yet the scientist in her knew that was nonsense. Whatever it was that allowed her to read emotions, it wasn’t a
thing
that could be exorcised from her life. It could be suppressed for a while, sure. She should know because she was the Queen of Suppression.

But when it came roaring back, it was so strong it was uncontrollable.

Maybe that was why she had reacted so very strongly to Nine. To Edward Domino, alias Lucius Ward. He’d come into her life after a long period of repression. She’d immersed herself in her studies, cut herself off from most human relations—certainly from anyone who could evoke an emotional or sexual reaction—and thought she’d rid herself of her dragon.

But the dragon had come swooping back in on black-and-gold wings, breathing fire.

Her gift hadn’t become weaker through suppression, it had become stronger.

The clearest reading she had ever had in her life from another human being had been from Patient Number Nine. Lucius Ward. Crystal-clear, so specific it was as if she’d been handed written instructions for use.

All her other readings had been mostly vague and cloudy. She could pick up on the major emotions—fear, hatred, hidden love, shame, ambition—like picking up on the loud bits of a symphony. Other emotions underneath had been harder to catch or to interpret.

This was something far from the reassuring pilasters of science holding up her world. This was—something else. The fact that she was here—had been
propelled
here by forces beyond her control—was a function of pure instinct.

Instinct told her to eat and drink and she did.

The instant she drained the last of that amazing juice, feeling a billion vitamins coursing through her system, the door whooshed open again and she turned to watch the big man in black enter the room.

He walked over to the other chair and sat down.

For the first time, Catherine noticed how he moved. He was huge, but moved with enormous grace, like an athlete. He obviously was an athlete, among other things. He had the body of an outsized linebacker, bulging muscles evident even under the clothes. He’d shed the tough impenetrable outerwear like an exoskeleton and was now dressed in a black sweatshirt, black jeans, black combat boots. He’d pulled up the sleeves of his sweatshirt, showing strong, muscled forearms with highly raised veins. His body had increased the veins to pump more oxygen into the muscles. An automatic bodily response that couldn’t be faked and that spoke of hours and hours of working out.

Or fighting. Because he was a warrior, not an athlete. The weapons at his hips showed her that.

He sat down in front of her and looked at her, dark eyes unblinking.

There was a slight abatement of the heavy waves of suspicion that had enveloped him like smoke. Though he was far from welcoming or even trusting, there wasn’t overt hostility.

“Thank you for the food,” she said politely.

He dipped his head. “You’re welcome.” The deep, low voice reverberated in the room.

“I was hungrier than I thought.”

Maybe she could trick him, and he’d answer
I noticed.
She was absolutely positive there was a camera in the room, though it was invisible. Nowadays vidcams were in patches slapped on walls and doorknobs and windowsills. They’d have watched her every move; certainly she was being watched right now.

But she underestimated him. He didn’t so much as flicker an eyelash.

Okay. Try another tack. “I’m surprised you fed me.”

His eyes narrowed. “I don’t want to starve you to death. All I want is for you to be gone.”

“I understand that.” Catherine leaned forward on her forearms. “I also understand that I’m eventually going to end up several hundred miles from here with a headache and no memory whatsoever of the past twenty-four hours or maybe even forty-eight hours, depending on the dose of Lethe. My company invented it. In-house we call it MIB. For Men in Black. Only it’s not a light that shines in your eyes, it’s drops in a glass. So I’d like to thank you for not MIB’ing the carrot and apple juice because I have some more things to say before you do.”

Aha!
Anyone less adept than she was at reading body language would have missed it because he didn’t move a muscle except for an involuntary twitch of the sternocleidomastoid muscle in his right jaw. Not all the training in the world could stop fast twitch muscles taken by surprise. Still, he was very very good.

She was better.

“Patient Nine didn’t say so in so many words—” Actually he hadn’t said it in
any
words, just vague images of shadowy men. “But I think that there are several of you here. Two, maybe three others. Like you. Somehow friends of his?”

Again, he didn’t move a muscle, but a coldness crept over his features.

“Not friends of his?”

Silence.

“Look.” She bit her lips. “Before you knock me out, I want to know that somehow I got this message across. In the way it was given to me. I—” She hesitated. Stilled her trembling hands under the table. Tried to calm her fast-beating heart. “I came here at some personal risk. Because a patient of mine, a man who is deathly ill, could find no rest until I promised him I would make every effort to find—”
You,
she thought. Find
you
. “To find this man, this Tom McEnroe. Mac. To give him that object I gave you, the tiny metal hawk, and to tell him Code Delta. You can believe me or not believe me. But I am telling the truth. And I think your friend—at least he considers himself your friend—is in danger. I have no idea if any of this means anything to you, Mr. McEnroe. Because that’s who you are. I hope all of this makes sense, because otherwise I have just made a huge mistake.”

Calmer now, having done all she could do, she placed her hands on the table, as if laying cards down. And she had. She’d laid it all out for him, for this tall, deadly-looking man. She’d done her best and possibly risked her life.

The rest was up to him.

“Tell her the truth, Mac,” Jon’s voice said in his ear. “I think the time for games is over.”

“Yeah,” Nick echoed, ever laconic.

Mac sat, eyes narrowed, looking at the woman carefully. She sat completely still under his gaze. He got no read off her, none at all. She could be telling the truth, she could have been sent by their traitorous former commander, Lucius Ward, to trap him. She could have been sent by goddamned Martians for all he could tell.

Shit. He’d been trained in interrogation techniques. They all had. He didn’t like torture, not for intel. If he had to off someone, he just did it without drawing it out. Pain wasn’t always useful if you wanted the truth. Most everyone would say anything, anything at all, certainly what the interrogator wanted to hear, just to make pain stop, go away. But he’d interrogated his share of shitheads and had made them talk and pain had been involved.

Men like Mac or Jon or Nick wouldn’t talk at all, under any conditions. They’d been trained to resist torture, but beyond the resistance training, they were unbreakable. They’d been selected and tested for that trait, then hardened, like hardening steel. And most of the time they had a discreet suicide method on them.

Just check out. Try pumping a corpse for intel, asshole.

So he knew all about breaking people down and—

Shit.

He couldn’t do it with this woman. Just couldn’t.

What the fuck was the matter with him? She’d
found
him. Nobody could find him.

“Take it from the top,” he said. “Beginning to end. And make me believe you or I’ll MIB your medical degree out of you.”

She sighed. “Okay. My name is Catherine Young. Someone on your team”—she looked around the room, but the vidcams were invisible—“maybe several someones, the ones who are listening to us right now, has Googled me, I’m sure. So you know I am who I say I am, because you’ve already seen the documents I have on me—my driver’s license, my company ID. You probably have my high school picture.”

“Roger that,” Jon said quietly. “She’s good.”

She was. It wasn’t anything that argued in her favor.

“Go on,” he said.

She watched his face carefully. “I have always been interested in the brain. My Ph.D. thesis was on dementing pathologies. Dementia is a very interesting pathology, the brain winding down. Understand it and you understand how the brain works, only in reverse. I worked at a research lab at the University of Chicago and published some papers on dementia. Millon Laboratories recruited me on a one-year contract to examine some test subjects who were undergoing an experimental protocol. Some of the patients showed almost complete recovery of function. Millon will be looking at billions of dollars in profits if it comes up with a cure for dementia. There are more than ten million patients suffering from dementia worldwide. That number is set to double in twenty years. So you can understand this is a huge priority for the lab.”

“But there was a problem,” Mac said. The basic interrogation technique was repetition. Have the subject repeat the story over and over again, and if there’s something that’s a lie, it will come out.

“Yes, there was. Functional and behavioral. Some of the patients . . . made no sense. Scientifically speaking. And I discovered that I was being followed.”

“Whoa,” Jon murmured in his ear.

“Followed?” Millon’s security system must suck if a civilian—a nerd to boot—busted them. “How so?”

She sighed. “I’m a scientist, which basically means I’m a trained observer. People forget that about us. I kept seeing a couple of men, rotating. They thought that glasses or hats made a difference, but they didn’t to me. And my computer was hacked several times on the days I was studying the special patients. I keep a little trapdoor open, just in case. It’s called Red Hat and it is absolutely reliable.”

“She knows her computers,” Jon said in his ear. “Red Hat’s a really good sniffer. Not many people know about it.”

“And I set little traps.” She shook her head, long, shiny hair rustling on her shoulders. “I can’t believe they fell for it but they did. I’d leave a stack of printouts on my desk, then leave for half an hour. And sure enough—they’d have been moved. Not by much, once by only a tenth of an inch, but like I say, I’m observant. There was nothing in the printouts of any use to anybody. All my observations went into a highly encrypted thumb drive. They were really stupid and really easy to fool.”

Her voice was sarcastic. Whatever had happened between her and Millon’s security, she had only contempt for them.

“Okay.” Mac nodded. “Let’s get back to Patient Nine.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “let’s.”

“Do you have a description?”

“I do, of course I do. But I fear that the man I describe wouldn’t be recognizable to anyone who might have known him in his previous life. I’d say he’s lost about forty percent of his body weight and he has had numerous surgeries.” Her lovely features tightened, a cloud passing over the sun. “The surgeries weren’t in his clinical file, which is unacceptable. I asked the administrative department and got nothing but crap runaround.” Those full lips pursed, her displeasure clear. “The records were lost, then at another office, then hadn’t been digitized, which is nonsense . . . it was always something. He’d undergone an extensive set of surgeries, at least five that I could count. It was right there on his body, plain as day.”

“Where?” Mac asked.

“What?” Her head whipped up, more shiny hair shifting on her shoulders. It was an amazing color, all natural. He’d been wrong to think it was just brown. It wasn’t. There wasn’t a chemical product on earth that could color hair about twenty different colors, from ash blonde to chestnut to black, going through the whole gamut of red. The ceiling light was right overhead and her hair was so shiny he looked away not to be blinded.

“What?” he said instinctively.

“Boss,” Nick murmured in his ear. “Not a good time to go mentally AWOL.”

Mac clenched his jaw, ashamed that Nick had to call him to order. What the fuck was this—getting distracted by a woman’s
hair
? Lucius would be ashamed of him.

At the thought, another pang of pain shot through his chest. He shouldn’t be thinking that Lucius wouldn’t approve of something when Lucius had fucking
sold them out.
For
money
. Lucius had forfeited his right to tell him and Jon and Nick anything, even inside Mac’s own head.

He reran the tape in his head.

“I said, where were the surgeries? His body? Bones reset? What?”

“No, no. All over his head and a cluster at the base of his spine. All neurological surgeries. He was messed with, heavily. And by experts. At one point it looked to me like he’d had two probes inserted in his brain, but they were removed.”

Mac had to repress the wince. He hated doctors and hospitals. “What were the operations for?”

“Well,” she said, looking down at her hands as if for inspiration, “that’s the thing. I don’t know. Millon doesn’t have us working in teams, for some reason, so I was the only one trying to figure this out. Particularly since Patient Nine’s clinical charts weren’t available. I ruled out cancerous tumors or even benign tumors. He didn’t have epilepsy. And Patient Nine had extreme difficulty forming words or making signs so he wasn’t any help. There were other anomalies, too.”

He’d caught her out. Now he
knew
she’d been sent by an enemy. He jerked his head back.

“Yeah,” Nick said grimly in his ear. “We caught it, too.”

She continued. “Nothing about the patient’s functional MRI made any sense. His dementia, which was clinically speaking quite severe, didn’t correspond in any way with known neurological patterns of dementia. I was so puzzled by the man that I took his fMRIs and EEGs home with me to study. And then—”