Jon’s jaws were working. “Isn’t it unusual to have test subjects also running the test?”
“It is, yes.” Elle agreed. “And later on, for publication purposes, that would have been a big problem. But that’s what Corona insisted on and they were paying the bills. So there was that anomaly. And this past week there were others.”
“Such as?” Catherine asked.
“I don’t know. It’s as if the program itself developed a fever. We were asked to do three times the testing we were doing before in half the time. Results were to be sent directly to the coordinator’s office instead of being collected and collated on a weekly basis and then passed on. And then”—Elle stopped and looked at them each in turn—“and then people started disappearing. One, then two and three a day. The protocol stipulates that the test subjects show up at nine A.M. every morning, but we started having massive no-shows. Sophie and I called their cells and home numbers but got no responses. Yesterday—no, two days ago—there were only four of us, plus Sophie. I was being tested and Sophie oversaw the testing. When I got home, I got a panic call from Sophie saying that we were being rounded up. They were after her and were coming after me. I guess you know the rest.”
Oh yeah, they knew the rest. Nick’s fists tightened. They’d come after Elle. They were dead men walking.
Elle’s voice softened, became pleading. “I know you guys are . . . in hiding here. I know these people”—she gestured to the hologram of ten faces—“are complete strangers. But they are not strangers to me and they are being held against their will. And I fear that they are being hurt or . . . worse.” She drew in a deep, steadying breath.
Unlike the war room, which was always kept dim, the lab was brightly lit. The overhead light lit Elle’s hair into a shiny pale halo around her face, but beneath the halo was no angel’s face.
In his heart, in his head, Nick had kept an image of Elle that no longer existed. For so very long, in his head she’d been the young, pampered girl of a wealthy father who led an immensely sheltered life. Then that image had been exchanged for an exhausted waif of a girl, overwhelmed by her father’s illness, almost on her last legs.
So in his head Elle was vulnerable, requiring his protection. That’s the thing that had driven him so crazy—or, well, crazier—all these years. Elle, alone in the world. Alone in a world of predators. He knew precisely how cold and cruel the world was, he’d known since he could walk and talk. He knew that the weak were crushed, whether you were a good person or not.
Elle was a good person. He knew that, deep down inside. Nothing would ever change that because it was in her bones. When she was a girl, she’d go out of her way to do casual kindnesses completely unaware of how unusual that was. The gardener who came twice a week always got a glass of iced tea. A kid next door had tragically developed leukemia and Elle would go over to read to him all through his chemo.
A good heart and weakness equaled disaster. Danger with a loud siren attached.
The Army, Rangers, Delta, and then Ghost Ops. Nick’s whole adult life was making sure he wouldn’t be weak. Making sure he could defend himself with every weapon known to man and failing weapons, with a rock or his fists. He’d had to defend himself plenty, because the world was a shithole.
What possible defenses could Elle muster against the world? She’d taken off with no money and no friends and that thought had been like a spike being hammered into his head, every single fucking day for ten fucking years.
The images came to him nightly.
Elle, alone and penniless in some dump of a town.
Elle hitchhiking and ending up in a car with a guy with a knife.
Elle walking alone through the wrong part of some city, a gang of rapists trailing behind her.
And always, always the image of her helpless and alone.
Well, she might well have at some point been helpless and alone, but she sure wasn’t anymore.
The women he was looking at was beautiful, yes, but visibly smart. It was there in her sharp light blue eyes that took everything in, there in the strong bone structure of her face, there every time she opened her mouth. Strength and discipline were in every line of her body.
And, shit. A PhD from Stanford. They didn’t give those away in cereal boxes. And Stanford was expensive. Over $100K a year the last he heard. So she’d either earned that money or been given scholarships or a combo of both. Either way, she was a woman to be reckoned with.
And if the idea of the pale vulnerable waif broke his heart, this strong, confident woman melted it. She didn’t need him, not in any way. She’d made her way in the world just fine without him.
But if she’d have him, he was hers to the end of time.
So, yeah, he was in. She wanted her friends rescued? Whatever she wanted, he wanted to give it to her.
“I’m in,” he said.
“Me too.” Mac’s deep rumble came with a nod.
“Oh yeah,” Jon breathed.
Elle studied the faces of the three men and one woman before her. Catherine was with her, no doubt. That in itself was a minor miracle. That she’d risk her man, Mac, for people she didn’t know.
Nick was with her. He’d made that clear this morning. It frightened her to think that if she ordered him into a minefield, into the pit of hell, he’d go. That kind of power scared her and she didn’t know if she’d ever get used to it. She’d been alone for so long the idea of having a man like Nick right beside her, ready to do what she asked, was powerful but terrifying.
She might be leading him and Catherine’s husband and surfer dude to their death.
Sophie and the others might be already dead. Corona might use them to set a trap for her. But there was no way she could leave the others in the group helpless and on their own, and there was no way she could rescue them on her own.
So she studied the faces of these three men who were going to have to risk their lives to save some pretty odd people and might lose their own in doing so.
She studied their faces for weakness or doubt and found none.
Elle gestured at the hologram. “I’m asking you to rescue these people, who are in terrible danger. There was an urban legend making the rounds of the Corona researchers that a new method of distilling parts of the brain into a liquid that can be injected has been developed. That a couple of people have been ‘harvested’ already. That’s the charming term used in science, by the way. Harvesting. As if people were crops. There were rumors of a previous study group that disappeared. I didn’t pay much attention because there are constant rumors making the rounds and many of them are silly.” She stopped, drew in a deep breath. “But now. . . I’m not too sure it’s silly. I think it might be true. I think that the people ultimately running the trial have gone insane and there is no telling what they’ll do, the lengths they’ll go to for results. There’s something behind this I don’t understand. Sophie and I both felt it, but we were so taken up in the results of the tests we decided to let it go. It was just a feeling, after all.”
“But you were right to feel uneasy,” Nick growled.
“Yes.” Elle felt a spurt of relief. He understood. “We were right. I have no idea where to go from here. I don’t know where the subjects were taken. The entire area is studded with labs. Arka owns a number of them. The labs would be underground and would probably not be on any schematics. Actually they could be anywhere. We are not even certain the lab would be in Palo Alto. They could have been taken anywhere in a van.”
The thought terrified her. Sophie and the others taken somewhere where they couldn’t be found, like cattle to slaughter.
Mac spoke, in his deep, gravelly voice that sounded like it came from underground. “Do you have any clues at all as to where they might have been taken? How about other labs that were cooperating with the program? Do you have a list?”
Elle shrugged. “As far as I know, no other labs were involved. I have the e-mail of everyone and I’ve started a program on my computer to search their
e-mails for the names of other labs, but so far nothing has come up.”
“The tracking devices?” Catherine asked. Elle had told her about the device she’d pried from her arm.
The men sat up straighter. “What tracking device?” Nick demanded.
Elle held her arm out, pulled up her sleeve and pointed to the bandage. Nick was going to be so mad at her. When he asked about it this morning, she’d simply said that she’d cut herself. “All the members of the trial group were injected with a microchip. We were told that it was to monitor our vital signs. Each week we held our arms over a reader where the data was downloaded. But Sophie said to cut it out of my arm when she called to warn me, so I did.”
“And you were going to tell me about this when?” Nick’s jaws flexed. She shrugged.
“Do you know where the database is held?” Jon asked. Nick had said that Jon was their cyber expert.
“Sorry, no.” Elle shook her head. “It would presumably be in the company database, except I suspect now that the entire project was off the books. In which case it will be in an encrypted file on someone’s laptop. I don’t even know whose.”
“We’ll go over satellite images of last night. See if we can find any useful images.” Nick looked at Mac. “Did we have any drones out?”
Mac shook his head.
“Damn.” Nick beat his fist lightly on his knee. “And we can’t send them out now until we have some idea of where. Though it sounds too late for drones, if they are all underground.”
Oh man. Elle understood his frustration. How could they rescue the group if they didn’t know where they were? If the group hadn’t been split up. If they were still alive.
“Okay,” Mac said decisively. “I’m assigning tasks. Elle, write up everything you know, absolutely everything and go over it with Catherine and make sure you keep an eye on that troll of yours that’s going through the e-mails.”
“I designed a program that will generate passwords on the basis of keywords. It will generate over a billion and can be sent in one packet to try a massive decrypt just as soon as we have someone’s computer to hack,” Jon said. Elle blinked. God, a program like that could earn millions in the outside world.
She nodded. “That would be really useful.”
Mac continued giving orders. “Also go over satellite shots. Make sure you include Keyhole 15 over a 48-hour spread over the entire Palo Alto area. They might have started rounding the test subjects up early.”
Elle barely stopped from gasping. The Keyhole series of satellites was top secret. Top-top secret. Like having-to-kill-you-if-you-discover-anything-about-it secret. She only knew about it because an analyst who had a crush on her told her about them. She’d gone to the darknet to research it. The rumor was that its lenses could read the numbers on a credit card in moonlight. “You can do that?” She couldn’t stop herself from asking Jon. “Hack into Keyhole?”
“Oh yeah, he can.” Mac did something to his face, moving a muscle or two around in an odd configuration that in anyone else might have been a smile.
“We need to go to Elle’s house and find that tracer, download what was on it and reverse engineer it. Would that be possible, Elle?” Jon asked.
She thought about it. Well, if Jon was that good, it was a possibility. Each tracer would have a set of basic instructions and would be programmed to emit a signal. Catch that signal and scan for other signals . . . She nodded. “Yeah. If we can hack into the basic underlying protocol, maybe we can locate the other devices, unless—”
“Unless they’re all dead,” Jon finished grimly.
Oh God. Elle put a hand to her stomach. She looked at Jon. “And—And suppose the house is still under surveillance? I have no idea if they have enough security personnel to post a guard at each empty house, but it seemed like there was plenty of money available. They just might do that.”
“I’d welcome that,” Jon said, bright blue eyes suddenly dark and flat.
She shivered. The men who’d rounded up her friends, were keeping them prisoner and were perhaps planning on killing them were evil and she was happy to help in engineering their downfall. She should be happy she had these tough good guys on her side. But that fleeting expression on Jon’s face . . .
“Okay,” Mac said in his deep bass. It was extraordinary. Every time he spoke Catherine just glowed. As if his words were lightbulbs that lit her up from within. “It looks like we’ve got our team and our assignments. So let’s get going.”
“Not so fast, Mac. Aren’t you forgetting something?” A deep voice Elle had never heard before.
The effect on Nick, Mac, and Jon was electric. All three shot to their feet with blinding speed, chairs scraping on the floor. They stood almost quivering to attention, arms stiffly up in a salute, astonishment on their faces.
Catherine stood frozen. Nobody had heard the door behind them open, which already struck Elle as strange. That anyone could get the jump on Nick, Mac, and Jon seemed outlandish.
That the person who got the jump on them was an old, old man leaning heavily on a cane and on a tall woman seemed impossible.
“Sir!” Mac barked, echoed by Nick and Jon.
The man had once been tall and looked as if he’d been strong. Now he was stooped and his skin hung loosely on his big frame. He moved slowly, as if every step hurt, which was probably the case because Elle had rarely seen so many surgical scars as this man sported over his big bald head, running down to disappear into the large sweatshirt that billowed on him.
The woman by his side had the most extraordinary face. It was. . . It was beautiful, but it looked as if Elle was seeing her through a kaleidoscope, lozenge-shaped pieces of her face almost but not quite fitting together. And yet the woman moved with the grace of beauty.
The man shuffled his feet, leaning heavily on the woman, moving steadily until he stood by Catherine and Elle. He leaned over and Elle heard him whisper to the woman supporting him, “Thanks, Stella.” She threw him a blinding smile, her face stretching in odd ways across the white lines crisscrossing her face. His smile in return was tender. There was a flash of something there for a second, and Elle wondered if he was as old as he looked.
Stella! In an instant the kaleidoscope twisted and righted, and Elle could clearly see who she was. Stella Cummings. Once the most famous actress on the planet, deemed one of the most beautiful women in the world, now Haven’s chef. Elle was so busy gaping at her, wondering if she dared ask for an autograph because Stella in Nobody But Me had given her courage and hope five years ago when Elle had gone through a bad period, that she barely noticed the three men following the old man into the room.
They were visibly young yet they moved as if they were older than the first man. Big-boned but thin, faces emaciated, hollowed out with suffering. They looked like a strong wind would blow them over, but there they were, shuffling forward behind the older man like wraiths following a ghost.
Stella left the old man for a moment and crossed the room to kiss Elle on the cheek. “Welcome to Haven, my dear.” Elle blushed with pleasure. Stella Cummings, kissing her on the cheek!
Stella went back to the old man. A ghost of a smile crossed his face.
“At ease, men,” he said. His voice was hoarse as if he didn’t use it much. He had trouble articulating. But he continued, each word coming out painfully, though he didn’t stop until he’d said all he wanted to say. “I understand we’ve got a chance to grab the motherfuckers who fucked with us—” His dark eyes scanned the room, alighting on Catherine, Elle, and Stella. “Pardon my language ladies,” he said solemnly.
“We’re scientists,” Catherine said. “I think fuckers is the correct technical term.”
Another ghost of a smile. For a fleeting second, Elle could see something of the man he’d been, hidden deep behind the shattered exterior. And that man had been . . . handsome. Yes, she could see it now. And Stella saw it too. Certainly her eyes never left his face.
“We want payback,” he said simply.
The two badly injured men nodded their heads jerkily. They clearly had little motor control. “P-P-P-Payb-b-b-ack,” one stuttered. He had a big perfectly round keloid scar right over where the neocortex was. Someone had punched a sensor right into his brain.
All three men were becoming white-faced with the strain of standing up, and the man with the sensor scar was trembling. They didn’t look as if they could face breakfast let alone a mission. She looked around. No one was saying anything about their obvious physical condition. She waited another second but there was only silence.
O-kay. She would have to be the bad guy.
“That’s very kind of you,” she began gently, “but perhaps—”
The elderly man turned his head painfully and fixed her with a look. For an instant Elle wanted to step back, the power of that look was so great. It was a banked power, a power linked to a damaged body, but inside that man strength and intelligence glowed and gathered.
The words came slowly and painfully. “I understand there are people in their hands. They will experiment on them and then they will kill them. I do not want to live if we can’t make an attempt to rescue them the way my men rescued us. We aren’t physically capable of going on the mission with you, Mac.” His already hoarse voice broke and he hung his head down as if someone had cut a tendon. Then his head rose and his black eyes glowed with strength and purpose. “But we are perfectly capable of manning the war room and providing intel. So we will rescue those people. Together. Hoo-yah.”
“Hoo-yah!” A chorus of seven men’s voices, all strong and true, rang out.
Chapter 12
Arka Pharmaceuticals Headquarters
San Francisco
One entire wall of Lee’s office was a huge glowing hologram. Along the bottom of the hologram ran a series of data packets, including the date: three months ago.
I Dream of Danger Page 23
