I Dream of Danger (17 page)

Jon had pulled up a Google map and was checking a
list of motels. It was painstaking work because it wasn’t like facial
recognition with known parameters. A faded green façade wasn’t much of an
identifier and they needed night shots to see a sign with a letter missing.

“Go to a forty-mile perimeter,” Nick said and the
first screen zoomed out. “Go dark.” Jon tapped the table and all the screens
showed night shots, most illegally hacked from the Keyhole 15 satellites, some
from their own drones.

The second screen was flashing hotels and motels.
They stopped at a shot of a building with a neon sign flashing
VACA CIES
. Nick studied it. A tall red brick relic
from the thirties, it looked like. A distinctive tattered awning over the
entrance. It felt dull and lifeless. Wrong, in every sense. He shook his head.
“No.”

Ten minutes later they had it. A low building set
in a depressed-looking strip mall. V CANCI S a neon sign posted on top of a pole
advertised.

“Day shots coming up—now!” Jon switched the screen
and, yes, there it was. A low-lying building once painted green, now faded. The
address was underneath—2442 Century Way. The GPS data was there, and it gave
distance from landmarks around Palo Alto. Nick was an excellent orienteer. He
could get to the place on the monitor blindfolded. Now that he knew Elle was
there, he’d walk over glass shards barefoot to get there. The screen shot pulsed
with meaning. From the depths of his being came the certainty. Elle was there,
in that building, right now.

If she wasn’t dead.

“She’s there!” he shouted. “I can feel it. Jon,
start Little Bird up!”

Jon could start Little Bird up from a remote that
was kept in the armory. On mission it was set on the inside of his wrist with
derma-glue. If he started it up now, Little Bird would be already firing up its
rotors by the time they made it down to the hangar.

Nick was at the door, but he was alone. No Jon.

He looked over his shoulder, wild with urgency. Now
that he knew where Elle was, the rush was in his blood like a fever. Even this
extra minute might mean the difference between life and death for Elle. What the
fuck was Jon waiting for?

“Jon!” he said sharply. “Come on!”

But Jon was shaking his head and if Nick didn’t
know better, if he didn’t know that Jon didn’t do emotion, he’d swear he saw
sadness in Jon’s eyes. “Can’t.” His voice was lifeless, dull. “Little Bird’s
rotor head is broken. I went down to Sacramento to an aviation parts dealer
today to steal a new one, but I haven’t had time to install it. It’ll take a
couple of hours at least. I’ll step on it, you know I will, but I’m working
alone. The only other guy who knows enough about it to help is Pelton.”

Catherine gasped. Pelton, one of the men they’d
rescued from Arka’s dungeon three months ago, had only recently come out of a
coma. He was in their infirmary, flat on his back still, IVs running in and
tubes running out. No way was Pelton going to be any help.

Well, fuck it.
Nick
wasn’t going to waste any time with regrets. It was what it was. “Send me a
drone over the motel! I’m taking the hovercar!” he shouted over his shoulder as
he ran for the hangar.

Chapter 8

Arka Pharmaceuticals Headquarters

San Francisco

F
ormer General Clancy Flynn twirled a huge gold ring around his meaty finger, blew out a breath, tugged at his tie. It was a red silk Valentino tie that went nicely with the tailored suit, which was obviously bespoke. No designer made that size.

Dr. Charles Lee suppressed a light shudder.

Flynn became more disgusting every time they met. It was as if Flynn were on this hugely accelerated Bloat Program. He’d put on ten pounds every time they met. He was now at least three hundred pounds. The very weight of Flynn’s flesh had assumed a gravity of its own and it was dragging him down. Though Lee kept his office at a cool and constant 72 degrees, Flynn was sweating, his own flesh acting like a heat generator. His heart had to beat twice as hard to get blood around all that meat. His sweat stank—a rancid odor that was stronger than the men’s cologne he wore and the smell of expensive laundered material swathing his grossly huge body.

Flynn was a heart attack in waiting, except he had to wait to have it until Lee’s program was complete.

Flynn ran a very successful and lucrative security company founded on the contacts Flynn had made in his twenty-five years in the military. Flynn was very greedy. Lee’s program was the key to great wealth, but they’d had some stumbling blocks. Quite a few, actually. The last one cost over a million dollars. But Lee now had something even bigger than the former program, which had aimed at augmenting the aggressiveness, muscle mass, reflexes, and IQs of soldiers.

Flynn was financing the secret program in order to have the best private security company in the world. Lee had his own agenda: he was planning on turning the forty-million-man Red Army of ordinary soldiers into the equivalent of forty million Special Forces soldiers.

Lee was very close to that goal. He’d had annoying setbacks and on one memorable mission run by Flynn’s company, Orion Security, in Africa, the entire team had gone rogue. Well, Lee had adjusted the doses and several other missions had gone very well indeed.

Most of the progress had been made thanks to experiments conducted on the four elite soldiers over the course of a year. The former Ghost Ops soldiers that had been captured in the Cambridge lab conflagration.

Flynn had been particularly happy to know that the main test subject was Captain Lucius Ward. Apparently, Ward had shown Flynn up several times while they were both serving and Flynn had wanted payback.

Well, Lee was a scientist, not a butcher. However, Flynn’s enthusiastic support
had
made him push the boundaries. A little. Ward had had over forty surgeries and had been slated for destruction when he and three other soldiers from his elite unit had been rescued by forces unknown.

A party to the rescue of the men had been identified as a female research scientist who worked for one of his labs. The woman, Dr. Catherine Young, was brilliant. Cameras had caught her image. He didn’t need to put her features through facial recognition software, he knew her well.

After that daring rescue, Young had disappeared off the face of the earth. Lee had put his entire security apparatus to the task of finding Young, but they were stymied. She’d somehow gone beyond their reach even though he had vast resources to throw at the search.

How could a nerdish scientist who didn’t have much of a life outside the lab completely disappear?

He wanted Young because she’d taken four promising soon-to-be cadavers from his research, but also because she had something he desperately wanted. Something in her brain. What was in Young’s brain—and in the brains of a number of people Lee had rounded up—was much more valuable than increasing Flynn’s bank account. Increasing Flynn’s bank account was a mere byproduct of the Warrior Project. And, anyway, if everything worked to plan, Flynn’s bank account would soon be seized by the Chinese Finance Ministry.

After the invasion of the United States.

A drum of fat, heavy fingers. Flynn’s jaws flexed as he suppressed a yawn.

Well, if Flynn was bored, Lee would soon cure him of that.

Flynn shot his wrist out and showily checked the time on his new gold Rolex. It was a Trasparénce, the new line introduced last Christmas. The dial was a blank pure crystal screen to everyone but the owner. The screen was set to the owner’s retina and would show the time only to the owner.

No one will ever steal your Rolex.
The ads had been everywhere.

The watch cost $130,000.

How Flynn loved his expensive toys.

“It’s four
P.M
.,” Flynn growled. “I interrupted negotiations with members of the Libyan regime to come here because you said it was so goddamned important. So I’m here. What is it? I need to be back in Virginia by eight.” Orion consulting had a FastJet company plane that could fly in the stratosphere at 1000 mph. It could cross the country in two hours, coast to coast.

“Watch,” Lee said simply, and flicked on the array of four holomonitors. He saw Flynn move his head from monitor to monitor. Before Flynn’s gaze reached the last one, Lee started talking.

“This is the secure lab of a small research company we bought about a year ago. It carries out legitimate research on vaccines, but there’s a separate lab that only carefully selected researchers can access and they are carrying out an entirely different kind of research. This is linked to the research at Millon Laboratories, which we had to shut down after the unfortunate incident.”

Each monitor showed a patient lying unconscious on a gurney, with an IV line that ran into the back wall. It wasn’t readily discernible on the screen, but each patient was in a nearly indestructible and completely transparent cage made of graphene. The patients were young, in their midtwenties, evenly distributed by gender. Two men, two women. There had been ten, originally. Six had been sacrificed.

“What you’re seeing is people we discovered by hidden fMRIs. Each has a zone of their brain—the parahippocampal gyrus—that lights up, particularly under thermal imaging. It is a part of the brain that is undiscovered territory. We are uncertain as to its function, but in these specimens the parahippocampal gyrus is unusually active and seems to correspond to unusual . . . abilities the specimens have.”

Flynn checked his watch again. He’d never been interested in the science itself, only in the results. And the results had to be of use to him and to his company for him to be interested. Well, he was about to get an eyeful.

Lee tapped his finger on the table. He was so used to the light projection keyboard’s settings that he didn’t actually have to have the light projection on. It was a minor ploy, but to an ignorant outsider like Flynn, it would look like magic.

The commands he gave changed the nature of the liquid being pumped into the patients’ systems. From a powerful narcotic to a powerful stimulant. From zero to hyperawareness in a minute.

“I’ll remind you of the thrust of the main project,” he said softly. “We are perfecting a system that will improve the motor skills, neural response times, muscle mass, eyesight, and hearing of soldiers, sometimes by a factor of 300 percent. Essentially, we will create supersoldiers who will be stronger, faster, and smarter than any other soldiers in the world. There will be no warriors that will be able to defeat your men, General Flynn.”

Lee never used Flynn’s former title except when he wanted to make a very strong point. And this was one of those times. He could actually hear Flynn’s breathing speeding up, becoming loud in the silent room. The moron was getting excited, exactly as if he were seeing a naked lady. Lee refrained from shaking his head at how pitifully easy to manipulate Flynn was.

“But—” And here Lee turned to Flynn and looked him in the eyes, distracting him for the minute it would take for the superstimulant to hit the specimen’s bloodstreams. “But I think we can take it one step further. In addition to superstrength and speed, we can add superpowers.”

A crease formed on Flynn’s fleshy face. Superpowers. That was crazy, right? Lee could almost read Flynn’s thoughts.

Only it wasn’t.

He had four more specimens he’d caught recently, being prepped. He very much suspected that one, Sophie Daniels, was a healer. That would be a battlefield power to reckon with.

Lee gestured toward the monitors and watched Flynn’s face as he took in what was happening.

Almost to the second, all the patients bolted up in bed. Lee had calculated body mass in the ccs of stimulant he pumped into them, so it worked on each individual at the same time. Every specimen was brought abruptly and rapidly into consciousness, with no self-defense mechanism.

It was spectacular.

“Fuck.” Flynn breathed as he leaned forward. Lee could have easily “pushed” the holograms closer to him, but it was better this way. Make him work for it. Flynn’s eyes were bright with the reflected light of the monitors and he was watching with his whole body.

Cell number one: male, 23 years of age. The instant consciousness hit him, he levitated a foot above the bed, the sheet dangling from the sides of his body. He sat up, looked around with a frown, and his body floated gently back down to the surface of the bed.

Cell number two: male, 27 years of age. He bolted up, face angry. The bedside cart flew violently against the wall and shattered. Flynn flinched. It was hard to watch. The walls were powerfully strong yet completely invisible. The cart shattered against a wall they couldn’t see.

Cell number three: female, 21 years of age. She lay unmoving, only her open eyes showing that she was awake. Suddenly, a fire bloomed in the corner of the cage, burning brightly, fiercely, seeming to gush out of the floor of the cage. Just as suddenly it stopped, collapsing in on itself, leaving only blackened stains crawling up the invisible walls.

Cell number four: female, 25 years of age. Only her head turned as she looked at the corner where the invisible cameras were. Her eyes were flat and black.

Flynn gasped, a harsh intake of breath. His eyes widened, bulged.

Lee’s hands went to his own throat, as if he could tear it open with his hands before it closed up completely. Then it closed tight. No air coming in, no air going out. His chest heaved uselessly trying to suck in air that couldn’t reach the lungs. It was as if he were being hanged, something tight and hot around his neck, tightening, tightening . . .

The world shimmered, the edges of objects limned with violent color, then the colors draining away, leaving everything gray, becoming darker. Edging into blackness.

Lee couldn’t think, couldn’t reason. What he did he did out of sheer instinct, recognizing in the flat black gaze from the monitor what was happening. His right arm flailed uselessly, he was a foot away. His body wouldn’t obey him, he couldn’t move his legs. All he could do was collapse, and in falling, reach for the control button that would open up the hidden IV bags of the powerful narcotic.

His finger tapped on a point on the desk as he focused ferociously, as if seeing through a tunnel growing ever smaller. The force around his neck tightened, pressing against his Adam’s apple, starting to crush it. He tapped, tapped, head lighter and lighter, starting to black out . . .

And the force around his neck abruptly ended, like a noose that had loosened. Lee jolted, fell into a chair gasping. A hoarse choking sound was on his left. His neck hurt but he turned to see Flynn on his knees on the floor, head hanging down, face splotched with ugly purple-red stains. One hand went to his throat as he brought air into his lungs in long loud gasps.

“Jesus!” It came out a hoarse whisper. “What the fuck was that?”

Lee couldn’t speak yet. His shaking finger pointed to the holomonitor showing cell number four. His trembling hand stayed in the air until he could speak. “Her.” He coughed as he tried to make his voice stronger. “She can . . . somehow . . . reach out. Touch . . . people. Things.”

Flynn turned awkwardly until he was sitting on the floor, back to the wall.

“Well, fuck.” His lungs bellowed in and out. His breathing became a little less labored. His complexion was back to his usual florid red without the purple. “Is that what you’re working on? People—things—like
them
?”

Lee needed to choose his words carefully. Flynn was his lifeline. His source of money. If it was cut off he couldn’t continue his research. He would never make his way back to China as a conqueror.

But though he knew that, some essential bit of oxygen had cut off his good sense.

“Yes.” Crazily, he smiled. “Once we can control them, extract from them the essence of their powers via spinal fluid and inject them into our superstrong and supersmart soldiers—the sky’s the limit.”

Damn!
He was supposed to approach the whole subject gingerly. Lee knew only too well how crazy his plan sounded. He had complete faith in it, but to an outsider it would reek of insanity.

And here he’d blurted out the project bluntly to a man who had no imagination and no sense of grandeur. A man who dealt exclusively in dollars and cents and believed only in what he could touch.

So he was very surprised when Flynn reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a platinum bump card. He tapped on it. “Give me yours,” he wheezed.

Lee had to stand up, unbutton his lab coat to get at his wallet. His legs would barely hold him. He gave Flynn his own bump card. Flynn tapped the two cards together. When Lee looked at the card again, he could barely believe his eyes. Flynn had just transfer-bumped fifteen million dollars into his card.

Flynn looked up at him, heavy brows frowning. “Control them.”

Lee nodded.

“Then use them.”

Oh, yes.

Steadier now, Lee stood and looked at his specimens, now comatose on their beds, the only signs that something had happened were the steel components of the crash cart scattered on the floor of the cell of number two and the black scorch marks on the invisible wall of number three’s cell.

He’d hated his American childhood, ripped from what should have been his Chinese destiny. But he’d loved American comic books as a kid.