I Dream of Danger (16 page)

What the fuck difference did it make? Still—
“Sitting,” he said, decisively. Suddenly, the knowledge was there, in his head.
A picture of Elle, face in her hands, shoulders sloped in despair. The despair
colored the air around her, was deep and dark.
Oh Elle.
“She’s sitting on the floor, back to the wall.”

“What’s the room like?”

He hadn’t even thought of that. Everything had been
centered on Elle, in danger. He concentrated harder. “Not a—a house. Or at least
her house. I don’t get that impression. Everything feels cheap, slightly dirty.
Not like her at all.” The last time he’d seen her, she’d been absolutely broke,
but even then everything had been clean. Threadbare but clean. The place she was
in felt dirty and downscale.

“What is she seeing, Nick?”

He screwed his eyes more tightly shut. What was she
seeing? He had no idea.

“Dunno. Walls. A bed. But— it feels strange to her,
not familiar.”

“Like a—a hotel?”

Jesus, yes!
“Yeah, like
a hotel. Or . . . she’s on the first floor. Maybe a motel?”

“Do you have a sense of what it looks like from the
outside? If it’s an unfamiliar place, she’ll have noticed more about it than her
own home, which would be so familiar to her. So think. Reach in through the
scream for help to see if there’s more information there. There will be. You
just have to find it.”

Damn
. Catherine was
making sense. But it had been like one huge powerful pulse, strong enough to
wake him, to panic him, but no hidden messages.

Nick waited, sweating, then shook his head.

“Think back to the dream. Just before it faded. Can
you try to remember what was there before that beacon lit up to call you to her?
I’m sure there was an image that must have bled into the beacon. When she called
for help, it must have been part of the call. That’s the only way it would work.
Any call that strong, to wake you up from a distance, would have information in
it. Hidden, maybe. Or rather the beacon call was so strong you can’t perceive
the other data in it.” She looked swiftly at her husband, then at Jon, the team
cybergeek. “Think of it as—Jon, what do you call it when information is hidden
but not encrypted in a computer message?”

“Steganography.” Jon was watching everything
soberly. His default emotional mode was manic, teasing, but he wasn’t teasing or
facetious now. He was dead serious.

“Steganography, right.” Catherine turned back to
Nick. “Think of it as what you’d call intel hidden in a message. She’d have some
sense of where she is in the call for help if you got the sense that she wasn’t
home. If she were home, that would be background noise for her. But if she’s
away from home, on the run, that would be part of the emergency call.”

Put that way . . .

“Think back. You got this call. What did it feel
like?”

What did it feel like? It felt like shit—Elle in
danger and he didn’t know how to help her. “Like Elle threw a rock at my head.
The way you do at a window. Then screamed for help.”

Catherine was listening to him with every fiber of
her being, concentrated wholly on him, holding his hand. “That feeling you had.
The feeling that she wasn’t in her home, in a familiar environment. That came
from her, from Elle. She wasn’t beaming that at you, but it was in the message.
She must have come to the place from somewhere else. So, in your head, try to
spool back, as if it were a tape on rewind. Just slide your finger from right to
left in your head. Picture it, Nick. Sliding your finger, going back in
time.”

Her voice was almost hypnotic. Her gray eyes were
glowing as if a lightbulb had lit up behind her eyes.

“Back, Nick,” she murmured. “Slide it back. I’m
there with you.”

He slid it back. Back . . .

Catherine’s eyes dimmed. She tightened her hand on
his. “I’m reading
you
too much, Nick. You’re like a
foghorn while I’m trying to listen to music. Calm down, cool it. You’re
deafening me.”

Nick didn’t have to look to know that Mac and Jon
were exchanging glances. No one ever had to tell him to cool it, ever. He was
nothing
but
cool. Cold as ice. Elle was the only
thing that had ever wiped away that cool. He had shed tears exactly once in his
lifetime—sitting on the edge of Elle’s bed back in Lawrence, knowing she was
gone forever.

And now.

Knowing she needed him and being unable to help
because he was a mess inside.

“You are a cool, calm, still lake,” Catherine said.
“Emotionless, inert.”

He was a cool, calm, still lake. Emotionless,
inert.

“I’m feeling it,” Catherine said softly. Her hand
on his glowed with warmth. She was somehow reading him. Reading Elle through
him. “Fear. Not yours, Nick. Hers.”

“Panic,” he said and swallowed.

“Yes.” Catherine’s eyes were closed now, her voice
a whisper so low he could barely hear her. “Panic. She’s on the run. Running
away from . . . I can’t tell. Men in black suits, with—” She stopped,
the dreaminess in her voice gone. She looked over to Mac and swallowed. “I’ve
been around you guys long enough to recognize it. She’s being pursued by men
wearing combat gear, fully armed, with nightvision.”

Nick froze. He could almost hear Jon and Mac
stiffening with attention. Catherine had just described soldiers. Or if not
soldiers, then elite corporate security. Either way bad news. The worst news
possible. Trained men gunning for one woman.

Calm, still as a lake . . .

“Men are coming for her, outside her house.”
Catherine breathed in and out, somehow glowing once again.

Nick picked up. He was getting images, flickering
as if in an old-time movie. Fragmented—there and not there. Yet somehow he could
follow because there was the essence of Elle there, and he could follow Elle to
the ends of the earth.

Nick spoke. “Those guys in combat gear, they’re
coming fast. Coordinated. But she’s been warned. She’s somehow wounded, in her
arm. There’s pain that she is blocking out. She grabs her bag and runs out and
down, down—down a set of stairs, past the ground floor, down . . .
There’s a long dark corridor, very long. She runs to the end of it, goes up the
stairs, out into a backyard. She cuts across a number of yards; she knows where
she’s going. She runs as fast as she can until she stops. Clings to a lamppost.
The street is—anonymous. Just normal houses, not too rich, not too poor. She
runs again, as fast as she can, down dark streets with nothing remarkable to
identify them. The houses are getting poorer, though. The streets are darker.
She’s afraid. It’s a bad part of town. But I don’t know of what town. She stops,
winded. She’s looking at a building. Very shabby, faded green façade. There’s a
neon sign,
VACANCIES
. The first A and the E are
burned out. I can’t make out the name. She’s feeling—not safe so much as
anonymous. She signs in, pays in cash, leaves a false name. Have no idea what it
is. She fades in and out.”

“Did you get a sense of where she is, Nick? Where
this hotel or motel might be?”

Nick’s free hand clenched.
Well, fuck. If I knew that, I wouldn’t be here, twiddling my freaking
thumbs, I’d be on my way to her, wouldn’t I?
But he couldn’t say
that. Couldn’t speak disrespectfully to Catherine. First, because Mac would
flatten him. Second, because he liked Catherine. And third, because she was
trying to help. “Don’t know.” A shudder ran through him at his own words. “I
don’t know.”

“Ah, but you do,” Catherine said, her voice gentle.
Nick’s hand jerked in hers. “Listen to your body, Nick.”

What the—

“Your body is talking to you. Listen to it.”

His eyes popped open, slid over her face to the
briefcase. Slid back. Nope. His body was telling him jack shit.

Catherine let go of his hand and pulled her
briefcase toward her, pulling out a wad of paperwork, a sheaf of what looked
like lab reports and some glossy thick paper, brochures of some kind.

For some reason, her movements fascinated him. He
watched, almost enthralled.

“This has been calling to you. You haven’t been
able to take your eyes off it. There’s something here that is of
importance.”

Catherine began methodically placing the paperwork
in neat piles all along the ten-foot-long table filled with holographic monitors
that served as command central.

Nick watched as she butted the lab reports into a
neat stack, another set of printouts of God knows what, then she started fanning
the brochures and prospectuses, leaving each company logo clear.

One suddenly lit up in his head as if a spotlight
shone on it.

“That!” he shouted. His shaking finger pointed.

“What, Nick?”

He stood up, rushed to the fanned-out glossy
company brochures. His finger landed on one in the center. Three stylized gold
crowns. Corona Labs—
BRINGING THE FUTURE
TODAY.

“This,” he said, finger tapping. Each time he
touched the paper it seemed to get warmer.

This
turned out to be
the brochure for a new company.

Catherine picked it up, showed it to her husband.
“I thought I knew more or less all the research labs in the country, but this is
a new one.” Mac turned the glossy paper over in his big hands. There was a
videolette loop embedded in the paper, all the rage nowadays. Some smiling woman
in a lab coat endlessly raising a test tube in triumph, putting it down, raising
it . . .

Nick was shaking with tension. The logo, the name
Corona Laboratories meant nothing to him, but still they shone in his mind.

In a corner he could hear Jon restlessly tapping on
the light keyboard—a projection of heat-sensitive light on the table. Jon’s
fingers were a blur.

Mac handed the brochure to Nick. “This mean
anything to you?”

Nick took the thick glossy paper and studied it
carefully. The smiling woman, raising her hand with the test tube and putting it
down in an endless loop was completely unfamiliar to him. He studied the
text—

Corona
Laboratories—Bringing the future today.

Corona Laboratories is
an offshoot of several highly successful research labs, dedicated
exclusively to the study of neuroscience . . .

Technobabble.

Nick flipped back and forth. The brochure was one
of those folded into thirds. The videolette on the cover. Opening it, company
data on the left-hand side and what they called the “core mission” in the
center. The right-hand leaf was taken up with the premises of the company—a
crystal Buckminster structure aboveground, extensive skylights set in some
grassy meadow. Underground it was huge.

He didn’t give a shit about any of it. This fucking
brochure had practically reached out and grabbed him by the balls, so why wasn’t
he getting what it was supposed to tell him?

He looked it over again and again, even flipping it
upside down, which did nothing but give him a headache. The reflection off the
glossy paper nearly blinded him. He narrowed his eyes.

Catherine was watching him closely. “What,
Nick?”

He shook his head, like shaking off water. A sharp
movement.

The contact info—the address seemed to leap out at
him.

1657 McGraw Drive, Palo Alto.

Palo Alto.

“Hey!” Jon shouted just as Nick dropped the paper
as if it burned his fingers.

Jon swiveled the screen. He’d turned the hologram
function off, the screen was showing a newspaper article with no photographs.
“Corona Laboratories was bought a year ago by none other than Arka
Pharmaceuticals.” He turned to Nick. “Whatever it is that’s calling to you,
buddy, it’s no good.”

Arka Pharmaceuticals had kept their former
commander and three of their teammates prisoner, conducting experiments that
would have done the Nazis proud, for over a year. The year he, Mac, and Jon had
been in exile, convinced their commander had betrayed them. Lucius Ward hadn’t
betrayed them. He’d been betrayed himself and had paid a terrible price.

Catherine had worked for a company owned by Arka
and they still had men out looking for her. Arka was a multibillion dollar
company with a whole board full of people who would testify that it was run by
angels. Nobody would ever believe that an Arka-run lab had tortured
highly-decorated soldiers. Nobody would believe that they would kill Catherine
on sight.

Of course now she was in Haven, their high-tech
community of misfits where, like everyone else, she fit right in. She was now
revered, actually, as the community doctor. Not to mention the fact that she had
Mac guarding her day and night, and if anything ever happened to Mac, then he
and Jon would step right in. Both of them would give their lives to keep
Catherine safe. Arka wasn’t getting its hands on her.

And now Arka was somehow involved in a threat to
Elle too. She was under threat right now and he didn’t know where the fuck she
was, except that she was in some seedy motel with a faded green
façade . . .

“Palo Alto!” Nick shouted and all but smacked
himself in the face. Somehow hidden in the distress call was the image of Corona
Laboratories. Maybe she worked there, maybe she didn’t. The fact was that Corona
was mixed up in the threat to her and Corona was headquartered in Palo Alto. The
city was less than an hour away by helo. “She’s got to be there, that’s why I
couldn’t keep my eyes off that goddamned brochure. Jon—”

But Jon was grimly tapping on the conference table
surface, connected to four monitors. “On it,” he said.

Nick rushed to his side, skin prickling. He’d been
paralyzed with fear, but now urgency rushed over him like a flood that had been
dammed up but now released. Elle was in Palo Alto! He knew it, could feel it.
He’d been blasted with a distress signal but with no way to know the point of
origin, and it had been driving him insane. Elle could have been in New York,
Alaska, fucking France. All places it would take him hours and hours to get to.
But she was in Palo Alto and their helo could get him to her in less than an
hour. Oh Jesus . . .