Heart of Danger

by Lisa Marie Rice

  She was hooded and her hands were restrained but she wasn’t uncomfortable and she wasn’t cold. The strange vehicle was warm and the man had thrown a blanket over her. It was very thin, almost like a cotton sheet, but underneath it, she was incredibly warm.

  It was a lucky thing she wasn’t suffering from severe hypothermia. People died from rewarming collapse, a sudden drop in blood pressure that sends the system into deep shock, then death.

  They rode in silence.

  For one of the few times in her life, Catherine was tempted to just reach out and touch, touch the driver. Skin against skin. She never touched anyone if she could help it. Often the results were painful, sometimes dangerous.

  Her hands were bare. Bringing her restrained hands over and touching him would at least tell her if he meant her harm. If she was being driven to her death.

  If his mind was filled with hatred and violence, as many minds were, she’d fight to the death when they got out of the vehicle.

  But there was nowhere she could be sure to touch his skin. He seemed to be covered all over in that light, tough material, including his hands.

  Once again her gift was useless, dangerous. Driving her to danger, but giving her no way out of it.

  She could do nothing but sit and try to keep her heartbeat calm and slow, try to empty her mind of all thought, try to just . . . be. If she was going to fight to the death at the end of this ride, she couldn’t afford to waste energy on useless speculation.

  She was on a mission to find this Tom McEnroe, propelled by forces beyond her control. And—God help her—propelled by overwhelming love for this McEnroe, for a man she’d never met.

  Mac drove into the base of HQ, entering a vast cavern. Their security was tight—he’d designed it himself—but the remote sensors situated along the hidden route to the mouth of the cavern recognized the ID signals given off by the hovercraft. If they hadn’t, an electromagnetic pulse would have shut the vehicle down well before it came within sight of the hidden entrance. The same EMP that had fried her car’s circuits.

  And if by some wild chance the vehicle didn’t stop dead, whoever was manning the security monitors would give the order to one of their drones overhead and a tiny, powerful precision missile would be unleashed that would leave a smoking crater and some splashes of protoplasm and nothing else.

  The hovercraft stopped, the cushions dropping them to the concrete floor.

  Mac got out and opened the passenger side door. The woman, Dr. Catherine Young, sat still and unmoving. He would have thought her a statue if it weren’t for the slight trembling of her hands. They were beautiful hands, he had to admit. And she was a beautiful woman, no doubt about that, either.

  That made him uneasy. Beautiful women were trouble, always.

  The woman he’d pulled out of the freezing car had been whitefaced with cold, startled, then terrified, and with all that, so beautiful he’d taken her for a model. Some airhead, both stupid and crazy because otherwise what the fuck would she be doing on their deliberately crap, almost-impassable road at night in the middle of a snowstorm?

  She wasn’t an airhead, she was a doctor, so that left crazy. What the fuck did she think she was doing?

  He’d been about ready to invent some story about being out hunting and being caught in the snowstorm and offering to drive her back to Regent, forty miles back down the mountain, when she’d dropped her bomb.

  I’m looking for Tom McEnroe.

  Mac didn’t do surprise, but that—well, that was a real shocker.

  After dropping the bomb, there was no question of driving the clueless, pretty civilian back down the mountain. She wasn’t a civilian and she wasn’t there by chance.

  This was one dangerous woman.

  A woman who knew where to look for him when the entire U.S. government didn’t have a clue. She was possibly a spy, definitely a threat. And she wasn’t leaving their compound until he knew who had sent her and why and how the hell she knew where to look in the first place.

  And he wouldn’t bet on her leaving the compound alive.

  “Out,” he said.

  Mac trained hard men to do hard things. He trained men he knew perfectly well would be sent straight into lethal danger. They’d stay alive only if he trained them hard. Under fire, team cohesion was everything and he was team leader. He was used to being instantly obeyed because he had to be instantly obeyed. The alternative was death, and not a good one, either.

  So his command voice was the voice of God, screamed straight into his men’s ears.

  Normally, he moderated his command voice for women. But right then he was mad and suspicious and he wasn’t about to moderate his voice for someone who might be endangering his entire world.

  No matter how pretty she was.

  Her whole body shrank in on itself at that one barked word, which was the reaction of any small animal to a threat from a larger animal. Hunker down, become small. Then, to his astonishment, the woman straightened up, head high under the hood, shoulders back, visibly trying to give herself courage.

  Well . . . shit.

  Mac recognized that.

  He knew all about trying to give yourself courage in bad situations. He’d been a prisoner of fundamentalist fucks in Yemen for two hellish months in which he’d been kept hooded and uncertain, knowing that at any moment he could have a blade to his throat or a muzzle to the back of his head. He knew precisely what she was feeling because he’d felt it himself.

  If she was going to clock out, she wanted to go with her head high. Man, he knew what that was like. Knew it inside out.

  For a second, just a fleeting moment, he identified with her, flashed on what this must be like for her. But then it passed.

  Fuck that.

  He couldn’t afford to let himself feel anything for this woman. She’d come to him. Found him against all the odds. She’d cracked security designed by three men who were the world’s greatest experts and he had no idea how she’d done it.

  She was a menace—to him, to his men, and to this crazy community they’d gathered around themselves.

  “Come,” he said, injecting impatience in his voice.

  He had to interrogate her as soon as possible. If this woman, however soft and pale and helpless she looked, turned out to be the tip of the spear of an invasion, he and his men had to scramble. The faster he found out what she wanted, and who was behind her, the better he could defend them.

  She swung her legs out the open door, feeling for the ground with one booted foot. At least she’d had the sense to wear woolen pants and boots. Though her legs looked like they went up to her neck, she was only of medium height. Her foot tapped down tentatively, seeking firm ground. Finally, exasperated, Mac fit his hands around her small waist and bodily lifted her out and down to the ground. Like a dancer, she pointed one foot at the ground and seemed to land like some goddamned ballerina.

  She felt good between his hands.

  God-damn.

  Shocked, Mac took a long step back. He had no business thinking that way. He was a soldier, now and forever. He hadn’t left the military, the military had left him.

  At heart he was still a soldier, protecting his own, and this woman represented danger. What the fuck did he care if she felt light and graceful under his hands, if she was beautiful, if she was brave? That made her doubly dangerous.

  Bravery in an adversary was bad juju, he knew that.

  Was sex messing with his head? It never had before. Sex was off the table when he was on a mission, and his entire life now was a mission, dawn to dusk. Of course sex had been easy to dismiss when he’d actually been getting laid, which was not the case right now and hadn’t been for a year.

  Man, if this woman could distract him, he needed to do something about that, ASAP. Get down off the mountain one night in one of their camouflaged vehicles, go to some dive in one of the nearby towns that didn’t have vidcams and find himself a woman for the night. Or for however long it took to get this out of
his system.

  She was standing quietly, head high, the only sign of stress an accelerated rate of breathing and the trembling of her hands.

  “Come with me,” Mac said roughly, and took her elbow, setting off toward the huge elevator that would take them half a mile straight up.

  She came obediently, which was smart of her. He didn’t think he could hurt a woman, but he didn’t want to put that to the test. He was the front line of defense not only for his men but for the Haven, and if he had to choose between this woman and those he protected, she’d lose.

  He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Best-case scenario—keep her in isolation, extract what intel he could, particularly how she knew his name and in what general direction to find him, what she wanted, who sent her.

  Jon had a drug he’d lifted from a pharmaceutical wholesaler that could wipe short-term memories. Couple the drug with a light anesthetic, have her wake up a hundred miles away with no memory of him or Mount Blue or Haven.

  He tugged on her arm and she stopped obediently while he pressed the button to open the elevator doors. When they opened, he urged her forward with his hand pressed to her back.

  The engineer who’d designed the elevator, Eric Dane, had had fun with the velocity. You’d never know it but the damned thing shot up more than two thousand feet in thirty seconds. It was a wonder nobody got the bends.

  Dane was one of his strays. The engineer had gone underground when he’d blown the whistle on structural deficiencies he’d found on the Oakland Bay Bridge and had lost his job for his efforts. Two months after he’d filed a report with the authorities on the bridge’s weaknesses, it had collapsed on the Oakland end after the mild ’21 Halloween quake. Forty people died.

  Dane’s structural deficiencies report was wiped from the company files and he was blamed for the collapse. A multimillion-dollar suit was brought against him, but there was no one to sue. He’d disappeared.

  One more in Mac’s ragtag army of outlaws and runaways. Men and women who had come under his protection.

  Dane had buffered the takeoff and slowdown at the top, so the woman would have no way of judging how far they’d come. For all she knew, they’d climbed a few stories in a building instead of shooting up a half a mile inside a mountain.

  The doors opened silently. The hood baffled sounds so she wouldn’t be able to tell that the elevator opened onto their huge atrium, which was their community’s central square. There were four people in sight, working. One of them was Jon, who looked curiously at Mac holding on to the elbow of a hooded woman. Mac signaled with his head to the right. To their meeting room. He made the universal sign of a camera rolling and Jon nodded and took off.

  Mac steered the woman through the benches and plants of their huge open space, knowing not much was penetrating the hood. Not sounds or light or smells.

  As always, a huge spurt of pride blossomed in his chest when he came out into their outlaw community’s central square.

  It was beautiful. Mac got a real lift every time he crossed the square. It was filled with light day and night. During the day, the molecule-thick, totally impenetrable ceiling looked open to the sky and blazed with sunlight. Miniscule solar collectors around the rim flooded the square with light at night. The solar panels were also heaters at the touch of a button. The effect was startling. High overhead, sheets of snow fell from the sky and stopped, disappearing the instant they touched the screen.

  There was greenery everywhere—lush, thriving plants that pleased the eye and gave off a fresh fragrance. Fruit trees, flower beds, glossy shrubs, small enclaves of grass.

  The lush greenery was thanks to Manuel Rivera, the man with the golden hands. Jon met him when he went tomcatting in Cardan, a small town sixty miles away. They became friends.

  Manuel was working eighteen hours a day trying to get his organic farm produce business off the ground. Jon found himself growing fond of the guy. On one trip into town, the owner of the bar Jon always stopped at told him Manuel had been attacked by “muggers,” had refused to go to the local hospital and was in a room upstairs.

  Jon ran upstairs, kicked open the door, took one look at Manuel, stopped the bleeding, lifted him over his shoulder, and brought him up the mountain, defying Mac and Nick.

  By that time, though, Mac and Nick were resigned. Their ragtag community already counted Dane, a famous actress whose face had been slashed by a stalker, an ER nurse who’d had to turn away a pregnant woman with preeclampsia and no insurance, and about forty other refugees from modern life.

  Manuel had sued a big agro business with test fields of genetically modified plants next to his, contaminating his organic produce. The day after the lawsuit was filed, two thugs had beaten him up, leaving torn-up pieces of the lawsuit fluttering down onto his blood on the ground.

  The agro business was an offshoot of Arka Pharmaceuticals.

  Manuel now filled their public spaces with plants and ran two huge fields of orchards and vegetables which provided them all with organic fresh fruit and vegetables.

  In exile and hunted like animals, they ate like kings.

  The lush greenery reminded Mac of what he was fighting for, and why he had to be wary with this woman. Everyone else at Haven had found their way here by accident and by fate. This woman came specifically for him.

  Mac opened the door of their meeting room and ushered her over the threshold. Jon would have already seeded the room with vidcams, tiny ones she wouldn’t be able to detect. Jon and Nick would be watching from next door.

  The woman stood quietly just inside the room. She didn’t pester him to let her go, didn’t ask where they were. He found that interesting. It showed self-discipline. Was she an operator?

  Only one way to find out.

  He pulled off his balaclava, tapped his wrist unit twice, unlocking her restraints, and whipped off her hood.

  She blinked in the light, getting her bearings.

  Mac watched her carefully. People see different things. Operators are always “on.” They don’t sign up by chance. They’re born that way, hard-wired for trouble, then drift to where someone can train them and hone their gifts.

  An operator would walk into a baby’s nursery, check the exits and the kid’s hands in his crib. Just in case.

  So if she was here on an infiltration mission, she’d check his hands, check the door to see what kind of locking mechanism it had, check all the walls for windows and see what could possibly be used as a weapon. She’d do it fast, and in about a second and a half she could list in detail every single item in the room.

  Mac could do it, Jon and Nick could do it. They’d been taught by the best, by Lucius Ward.

  At the thought of his former commanding officer, Mac’s heart gave a small pump of rage. He repressed the thought ruthlessly. Now wasn’t the time. It wouldn’t ever be the time. And anyway the fucker was living it up in Rio.

  The woman didn’t size up the room at all. She sized him up. Her gaze rested thoughtfully on his face, without even a flicker of attention to his hands. Even though his hands hovered over his Beretta 92 and the black carbon combat knife in its sheath. The knife was three hundred times stronger than steel. He could not just slit her throat but he could decapitate her without any effort at all.

  An operator would have understood all that, instinctively. Would have upped the vigilance level, started dancing on the balls of her feet in anticipation of action.

  Nothing like that. She simply stood before him, looking him in the eyes. Breathing regular, muscles relaxed, hands loose.

  And Christ, she was beautiful. Right now, that was the only factor in favor of her being an operator. Services throughout the world were scrambling to recruit beautiful, athletic women, sometimes training them from high school on. “Honey pots” they were called—and they were spectacularly effective.

  Ghost Ops had had two such women available, in training to make it up to the big leagues. Women so beautiful any straight man would let them get near because biol
ogy tripped them up. Conquest by hormones. The men the women preyed on never felt the knife that slipped between the ribs or the garotte around the neck or the microbullet between the eyes.

  But Francesca and Melanie had had a look about them that was unmistakable. They could hide the fact that they were soldiers under fashionable clothes and makeup but they couldn’t hide the fact that they were dangerous. If a man had eyes to see, they gave off danger vibes like beautiful rattlesnakes.

  Nothing like the aura around this woman. She was too soft, too sad. This woman wasn’t a predator. She looked vulnerable and tired.

  Fuck this.

  “Sit down,” he rapped.

  She looked around and took one of his easy chairs at the table they used for one-on-ones, ignoring the long table they used for meetings. He sat down across from her. If he shifted his knees, he’d be touching her.

  He sank into the softness of his chair, making sure he didn’t touch her. Wishing he didn’t have to do this, wishing he didn’t have to be here, interrogating this woman, knowing he’d have to make some hard choices if her story wasn’t convincing.

  Because he was the protector of his outlaw band and if he had to get rid of her to keep them all safe, he’d do it. He wouldn’t like it but he’d do it.

  By default, he’d been appointed king of his little kingdom. And though he’d rather be anywhere else, here he was, in his comfy easy chair. As a soldier, he’d never have allowed easy chairs in his office. Nothing easy about being a soldier; the harder the life, the faster you learned. He had a Ph.D. in hardship.

  But here, goddamned if people didn’t come to him with their problems. They were fucking civilians. Much as he’d like to, he couldn’t order them to stand to attention and give a sitrep. The civilian world didn’t work like that. So he’d learned to offer his people a comfortable chair and even a goddamned cup of coffee—he drew the line at tea—waiting for them to get to the point.

  She sat there, not relaxed against the back of the chair but not tensely poised on the edge of her seat, either. She simply looked at him, as if waiting.