Heart of Danger

by Lisa Marie Rice

  Even though he was armed to the teeth.

  There was a big black gun strapped to his right thigh and a big black knife in a sheath on his other thigh. He didn’t need them. His entire body was a weapon. There was power in every long line of him. Leashed, potent, unmistakable.

  His winter wear was some kind of high-tech stuff—thin black non-reflective material—and it showcased his body, one of the strongest bodies she’d ever seen. Extra wide shoulders tapering down to a lean waist, long, powerful thighs, long arms and massive hands at the ends of them.

  This was truly a formidable man and he’d glowered at her during the entire interrogation. Fierce, dark eyes fixed on hers, as if waiting to catch her out in a lie. Well, she was too steeped in neurolinguistics to make any mistakes in eye displacement even if she were lying. She knew precisely the body language necessary to convey truthfulness. If she wanted to lie, only an fMRI would show it because she couldn’t force her brain to light up specific areas.

  She wasn’t lying so it wasn’t an issue, but the quality of the man’s attention was such that she was certain he’d unmask untruths coming from anyone he cared to unmask.

  His entire body language was still but wary. He didn’t trust her, not an inch. Had she made any kind of aggressive or even evasive move, there was no doubt he’d have snake-fast reflexes. So she stayed still, too.

  But now she’d fulfilled the mission a sick man had sent her on, one she’d been helpless to refuse. It was done, for better or worse. The tension was seeping out of her and she had to force herself to stay upright in the chair and not slump with fatigue. Unfortunately, she was sitting on an amazingly comfortable chair, so maybe he didn’t do interrogations on a regular basis in this room.

  Most interrogations took place in uncomfortable environments.

  She didn’t look around but she’d observed enough to know that it was a comfortable room, pleasant even. Interrogation rooms weren’t supposed to be pleasant, they were supposed to be austere and forbidding. Sort of like a jail cell, which is where you went if you lied.

  What time was it? It must be close to midnight. She’d slept badly the past night, unnerved by Patient Nine.

  Patient Nine—Lucius—had been so desperately insistent, the force of his will had simply washed over her, prickling her skin. The images coming from him had been so very strong, the strongest she’d ever had. As if the barriers between them had dissolved and she was in his damaged head. There were images there, true, not words, except for that one name, murmured brokenly over and over again. Tom McEnroe. Mac. Mac. Mac.

  The images were clear. The mountain. Lonely, broken roads. Obstacles. A dead car.

  And, horrifyingly, his own death. Cold stillness, his body on a steel gurney with runnels. A body laid out for an autopsy.

  Lucius Ward was ill but not at death’s door. His EEG was pathological but his heart and lungs functioned well. But the image was insistent. He expected to die soon.

  He had been agitated yesterday, trying desperately to talk, clinging to her arm with an emaciated hand that still held surprising strength. His throat clicked, over and over, words that weren’t coming out, only a thin trickle of air escaping from his mouth, with a short hum. His eyes bulged, the cords in his thin neck stretched. His mouth opened and closed with a clatter of teeth.

  His efforts to speak were so heartbreaking, she couldn’t stand it. Bending down to him, fixed in his wild, desperate gaze, she bent her ear to his mouth.

  He managed one word.

  “Run,” he whispered, and she’d broken out in goose bumps.

  Troubled, Catherine had gone home. She couldn’t eat and couldn’t sleep, and finally the next morning she decided to follow the pictures in her head. Something about the wild fear he had instilled kept her from calling in sick. She simply left.

  The man in black stood up suddenly and looked down at her. “Stay here,” he commanded, and walked out.

  Stay here. Well, where would she go? The door opened for him and closed behind him before she could even think of making a break for it.

  She looked down at the tabletop. The grain of the wood was unusually fine and she fixated on it until her head drooped. She jerked upright. She’d nearly fallen asleep in the chair.

  Were they going to keep her here all night? There were only two chairs. Maybe she could use the other chair for her legs and try to catch a few hours of uncomfortable sleep.

  She shifted uneasily, stiff and sore, exhaustion seeping into her bones. Hunger and thirst were added to the discomfort of exhaustion. She turned her head to eye the door. There was no doorknob. It had somehow swished open for the man in black and swished closed again with no visible command having been given. There was no keypad, and even if there were, she didn’t have the code.

  The door whooshed open again unexpectedly and she turned in her chair, heart pounding, muscles tensed for danger.

  But it wasn’t danger, it was only a teenage boy holding a big tray. She was so surprised that by the time she thought to react, to engage the boy in a conversation, to try to pry some information out of him, he was gone, the door whooshing open and closed for him as if invisible genies inhabited the place.

  A cornucopia lay before her. Her stomach rumbled loudly, the wonderful smells sparking some kind of intense endocrine reaction.

  Her hand trembled as she picked up the first thing close to her hand. A taco. But not just any taco, oh no. Maybe it was extreme hunger, but the tastes were incredible. Stone-ground cornmeal shell, fresh tomatoes, perfectly cooked spicy meat . . . even the lettuce was delicious. The best homemade guacamole she’d ever tasted. A baked potato with fresh clotted cream and freshly chopped chives. A salad of tasty red tomatoes drizzled with extra virgin olive oil. A huge slice of the best peach pie she’d ever tasted, so good she nearly laughed aloud as she brought the fork to her mouth.

  A pitcher of absolutely fresh juice. She could taste apples and carrots and a touch of lemon. It went down her parched throat like a dream and it was like being in a garden on a summer’s day.

  Oh man, if they were going to kill her at least they were serving her the best last meal ever.

  Chapter Three

  Arka Pharmaceuticals Headquarters

  San Francisco

  His private cell buzzed. Dr. Charles Lee, head of research, frowned. It was late and he was expecting the results of the Africa trial. Nobody should be calling at this late hour. He checked the number, set the phone in its dock and pressed the icon for hologram. The shaved bullet head of his chief of security at the Millon lab, Cal Baring, appeared in 3D. Baring was scowling ferociously, but then he usually did.

  “Yes, Baring?” Lee continued scrolling through research data. Though one’s instinct was to address a hologram because it was so lifelike, it wasn’t necessary. “What is it?”

  “It’s about Dr. Young, sir.”

  That caught Lee’s attention. He looked up from the screen, frowning. “What about her?”

  Dr. Catherine Young was crucial to the Warrior program. She was a brilliant researcher. If she were in Germany she’d be Frau Doktor Doktor—a double Ph.D. in biology and neuroscience, and an M.D.

  Though incredibly smart in terms of scientific research, she also seemed to be clueless in terms of the broader picture, focusing narrowly on the dementing patients they sent to her, not questioning how they got that way, which was perfect.

  Unlike Roger Bryson in the Cambridge lab. His questions had become irritating, then dangerous. He deserved to die in the fire, he had become much too curious and insistent.

  The ironic thing was that he really had come up with a cancer vaccine, the formula for which was now safely in a vault in the Ministry of Science in Beijing. A canister of the active vaccine had been removed from the Cambridge lab just before the Ghost Ops strike and taken to Beijing by diplomatic pouch. All the members of the Politburo had been vaccinated.

  Later, when the world was theirs for the taking, the vaccine would be offered to all
ethnic Chinese.

  Lee had been born Cheng Li thirty-eight years ago on the outskirts of Beijing. His father was a doctor but he wanted to secure a future for his only son so they immigrated to San Francisco with his paternal grandfather when Lee was seven. His father’s medical degree wasn’t recognized so he drove a taxi.

  Stupid man. His father had died old before his time having done menial labor for thirty years, for what? So Lee could become an American.

  He became an American, all right. In a city like San Francisco with its fusion population, he fit right in. He learned perfect English, played basketball in high school, liked jazz, went to Stanford on a scholarship. His parents were ecstatic. But his yéyé, his grandfather, a noted scholar who had unwillingly followed his son to America, made sure Lee kept his Mandarin up, made sure his calligraphy was perfect, filled his head with tales of the once-powerful Middle Kingdom.

  Lee’s father was too busy, too tired to notice or even to care that his son was faking loving the American dream. Because he was. By the time he was seventeen, already a sophomore neurobiology student at Stanford, he realized the enormous mistake his father had made. Because America was the past and China was the future.

  His sophomore year, the OECD officially announced that the Chinese economy was bigger than the American economy. And growing, as the American economy was not.

  It was clear all around him—Americans were poor and getting poorer. It had lost its faith in itself and was hunkered down, hoping the new winds blowing over the world would pass soon. But that was not the nature of the winds of change.

  Lee had kept in touch with old school friends back in China, many of whom were now in positions of power. One in particular, Chao Yu, was now right-hand man to the Minister of Defense.

  Lee and Yu had been working on the plan for four years now, ever since Lee realized the potential of the Warrior project. Yu was his conduit to the Ministry of Defense via encrypted, very long-wave propagation channels. The NSA was too good for them to be able to entrust the plan to satellite transmission. They communicated through the earth itself as they built the Warrior project from the ground up.

  Lee had thought it might take a hundred years for China to rule the world. Which would have been fine. China had always taken the long view. America operated on a quarterly basis. Three months was a ridiculous time horizon. China operated on a century basis.

  But with Warrior, China could take over the world in one short year. And Lee would return triumphantly to the homeland he had never forgotten, a hero and a powerful man. The man who had been the ultimate weapon in China’s hands.

  He, Charles Lee, was going to make history.

  Super soldiers. The dream of every military force since time began. Smarter, faster, tougher. The Americans had a comic-book hero for this—Captain America. But Lee and Yu were going to create one for real—Captain China.

  So far everything was on track.

  With the exception of the Cambridge lab—and General Clancy Flynn had taken care of that—things were going well, though some technical problems remained. But all in all, the plan was coming to fruition along the scheduled timeline.

  The Cambridge lab fiasco had yielded some advantages, however. Three gifted soldiers—true warriors—to experiment on. Three men he could do anything to, study as he wished.

  It was perfect terrain for testing their protocols. Artificially dement them, bring them back, then harvest their brains and analyze the neurological tissue. Testing on warriors would have proved impossible if they were of sound mind and body, but they’d been reduced to physical and mental shells and were harmless.

  He focused again on what Baring had said. “What about Dr. Young?”

  “Dr. Young didn’t show up for work, sir. We were only informed an hour ago.”

  “Did she call in sick?” Lee asked Baring.

  “No, sir. And she’s not home. We checked.”

  Lee felt the faintest prickle of unease. Dr. Young was right in the middle of the analyses of the beta doses. She was a dedicated researcher. Not showing up for work was so unusual as to warrant an alarm.

  She had no idea what she was really working on, but if she ever got the big picture, as Dr. Bryson had, she would be very dangerous. But Bryson had been skeptical by nature, which Young was not. “She might not be answering the doorbell.”

  “When I say ‘not home,’ sir, I mean just that. We scanned the house. There was no one inside.”

  The chill grew stronger. This was very unlike Dr. Young. “Did you track her cell?”

  Baring’s voice grew cold. His words were staccato. “Yes. Sir. Not transmitting.”

  This had been a bone of contention. Baring wanted to inject micro tracers into every single researcher on the Millon campus, but Lee had turned the request down. There was massive IQ on-site. All it would take was for one researcher to figure it out and the news would spread and there would be hell to pay.

  Lee made sure the scientists working at the Millon facility saw the project only through straws, but they were very bright men and women and were perfectly capable of putting two and two together. That was why the average stay at Millon was six months. An exception had been made for Catherine Young because Lee felt her work shouldn’t be interrupted and it would take another scientist six months just to get caught up to speed.

  Young was tasked with making an fMRI map of the altered minds, creating a baseline for further research. Her work had to remain confidential, which is why Lee had planned on having Baring terminate her once the map was complete, instead of transferring her.

  Young knew a lot. More than enough to create trouble.

  He kept her under surveillance. Baring’s surveillance had been very tight in the beginning, but nothing had shown up and they’d decided they could take it down a notch or two.

  And now she’d slipped through their net.

  “What about her car?”

  “Not transmitting. Transponder dead.” Baring’s lips clamped closed in disapproval.

  Baring had petitioned to put trackers in staff cars, too. But most of the staff had electric cars, which would soon become mandatory in California anyway. All cars were run by microchips which were hackable with just a little effort. There Lee definitely ruled against Baring. An external tracker on a car would be a dead giveaway that something was wrong, particularly when any car could be hacked as long as it was running.

  All eCars had transponders which allowed them to send out an emergency signal.

  So Catherine Young’s car was somewhere out there, but not running and the transponder was dead.

  Lee drummed his fingers on the console, once. It was all he allowed himself. No one knew better than he the importance of keeping body language serene.

  “Did you check the cameras in the lab?”

  “Yessir.” Even in the hologram, Lee could see Baring’s color change, face becoming ruddy. “Of course.”

  “Anything untoward happen yesterday?”

  “It didn’t seem so. Sir.” Baring’s jaw muscles tightened, as if he’d been questioned.

  Then again, what would Baring know? He wasn’t a scientist. He couldn’t follow any of the researchers’ work.

  “Did she seem . . . agitated in any way? Did she do anything different?”

  Lee watched Baring’s disembodied head. Even just a few years ago there was half a second’s delay in holographic telephony, sometimes making conversations surreal. But Arka had state-of-the-art technology and Baring reacted in real time. “No, sir.”

  “Who was she working on yesterday?”

  “Number Nine, sir,” Baring replied.

  Lee felt that prickle of coldness once more.

  Baring had no idea who Nine was. It was a good thing that Captain Ward had always worked in the shadows. Only a handful of people were familiar with his spectacular military career. Baring was ex-military but he came from infantry. What Ward did had always been above Baring’s pay grade.

  This was nothing.
And yet . . . Catherine Young disappearing after working on Ward was not good.

  Ward was the key, Lee was sure of it. They were so close, so very close. SL-57 hadn’t worked, but each successive iteration brought them closer to their goal. A virus-borne cocktail of hormones and chemical stimulants to neurotransmitters and muscle enhancers was being fine-tuned. Currently, the protocol to enhance intelligence and speed of reflexes caused fulminating dementia in most patients, but they were closer to understanding the cause and reversing the effect. SL-58 was being tested. Right now, in fact.

  It had been a top secret government project known by the harmless name of Strategic Leadership that Lee had run under the orders of General Clancy Flynn, the money coming from a black fund Flynn controlled. Flynn was retired now, CEO of a private security company. Lee knew that Flynn wanted to create an unstoppable private army via SL.

  Flynn was funneling private money into Arka’s research at the Millon Labs. He was pumping close to ten million dollars a year into Lee’s project. Flynn’s projections were of one billion dollars profit the first year, and double that within three years once the project was viable.

  But Lee had no intention of letting Flynn get his hands on SL once it was perfected. Millions of vials of the first effective doses were going straight to the People’s Republic of China to be manufactured on an industrial scale and administered systematically to the seven million troops and the forty million reserve troops of the PLA. It would become literally unstoppable. China would be unstoppable.

  When the secret program began seven years before, it had been given the anodyne and generic name of SL for Strategic Leadership. But Lee knew that SL stood for Shen Li.

  Warrior.

  He’d hoped, for symmetry’s sake, that the brain of a warrior would give him and his country the means to conquer the world. It would be fitting. Captain Lucius Ward was one of the best warriors America had ever produced.