Heart of Danger

by Lisa Marie Rice

  She sighed. “Okay. My name is Catherine Young. Someone on your team”—she looked around the room, but the vidcams were invisible—“maybe several someones, the ones who are listening to us right now, has Googled me, I’m sure. So you know I am who I say I am, because you’ve already seen the documents I have on me—my driver’s license, my company ID. You probably have my high school picture.”

  “Roger that,” Jon said quietly. “She’s good.”

  She was. It wasn’t anything that argued in her favor.

  “Go on,” he said.

  She watched his face carefully. “I have always been interested in the brain. My Ph.D. thesis was on dementing pathologies. Dementia is a very interesting pathology, the brain winding down. Understand it and you understand how the brain works, only in reverse. I worked at a research lab at the University of Chicago and published some papers on dementia. Millon Laboratories recruited me on a one-year contract to examine some test subjects who were undergoing an experimental protocol. Some of the patients showed almost complete recovery of function. Millon will be looking at billions of dollars in profits if it comes up with a cure for dementia. There are more than ten million patients suffering from dementia worldwide. That number is set to double in twenty years. So you can understand this is a huge priority for the lab.”

  “But there was a problem,” Mac said. The basic interrogation technique was repetition. Have the subject repeat the story over and over again, and if there’s something that’s a lie, it will come out.

  “Yes, there was. Functional and behavioral. Some of the patients . . . made no sense. Scientifically speaking. And I discovered that I was being followed.”

  “Whoa,” Jon murmured in his ear.

  “Followed?” Millon’s security system must suck if a civilian—a nerd to boot—busted them. “How so?”

  She sighed. “I’m a scientist, which basically means I’m a trained observer. People forget that about us. I kept seeing a couple of men, rotating. They thought that glasses or hats made a difference, but they didn’t to me. And my computer was hacked several times on the days I was studying the special patients. I keep a little trapdoor open, just in case. It’s called Red Hat and it is absolutely reliable.”

  “She knows her computers,” Jon said in his ear. “Red Hat’s a really good sniffer. Not many people know about it.”

  “And I set little traps.” She shook her head, long, shiny hair rustling on her shoulders. “I can’t believe they fell for it but they did. I’d leave a stack of printouts on my desk, then leave for half an hour. And sure enough—they’d have been moved. Not by much, once by only a tenth of an inch, but like I say, I’m observant. There was nothing in the printouts of any use to anybody. All my observations went into a highly encrypted thumb drive. They were really stupid and really easy to fool.”

  Her voice was sarcastic. Whatever had happened between her and Millon’s security, she had only contempt for them.

  “Okay.” Mac nodded. “Let’s get back to Patient Nine.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, “let’s.”

  “Do you have a description?”

  “I do, of course I do. But I fear that the man I describe wouldn’t be recognizable to anyone who might have known him in his previous life. I’d say he’s lost about forty percent of his body weight and he has had numerous surgeries.” Her lovely features tightened, a cloud passing over the sun. “The surgeries weren’t in his clinical file, which is unacceptable. I asked the administrative department and got nothing but crap runaround.” Those full lips pursed, her displeasure clear. “The records were lost, then at another office, then hadn’t been digitized, which is nonsense . . . it was always something. He’d undergone an extensive set of surgeries, at least five that I could count. It was right there on his body, plain as day.”

  “Where?” Mac asked.

  “What?” Her head whipped up, more shiny hair shifting on her shoulders. It was an amazing color, all natural. He’d been wrong to think it was just brown. It wasn’t. There wasn’t a chemical product on earth that could color hair about twenty different colors, from ash blonde to chestnut to black, going through the whole gamut of red. The ceiling light was right overhead and her hair was so shiny he looked away not to be blinded.

  “What?” he said instinctively.

  “Boss,” Nick murmured in his ear. “Not a good time to go mentally AWOL.”

  Mac clenched his jaw, ashamed that Nick had to call him to order. What the fuck was this—getting distracted by a woman’s hair? Lucius would be ashamed of him.

  At the thought, another pang of pain shot through his chest. He shouldn’t be thinking that Lucius wouldn’t approve of something when Lucius had fucking sold them out. For money. Lucius had forfeited his right to tell him and Jon and Nick anything, even inside Mac’s own head.

  He reran the tape in his head.

  “I said, where were the surgeries? His body? Bones reset? What?”

  “No, no. All over his head and a cluster at the base of his spine. All neurological surgeries. He was messed with, heavily. And by experts. At one point it looked to me like he’d had two probes inserted in his brain, but they were removed.”

  Mac had to repress the wince. He hated doctors and hospitals. “What were the operations for?”

  “Well,” she said, looking down at her hands as if for inspiration, “that’s the thing. I don’t know. Millon doesn’t have us working in teams, for some reason, so I was the only one trying to figure this out. Particularly since Patient Nine’s clinical charts weren’t available. I ruled out cancerous tumors or even benign tumors. He didn’t have epilepsy. And Patient Nine had extreme difficulty forming words or making signs so he wasn’t any help. There were other anomalies, too.”

  He’d caught her out. Now he knew she’d been sent by an enemy. He jerked his head back.

  “Yeah,” Nick said grimly in his ear. “We caught it, too.”

  She continued. “Nothing about the patient’s functional MRI made any sense. His dementia, which was clinically speaking quite severe, didn’t correspond in any way with known neurological patterns of dementia. I was so puzzled by the man that I took his fMRIs and EEGs home with me to study. And then—”

  “And then?” Mac drummed his fingers on the table. Yeah she was pretty and yeah she was smart, but he was going to get the truth out of her if he had to inject a triple dose of Trooth in her.

  She leaned forward, looking him in the eyes. So this was where the big-time lying was going to start.

  “After he gave me the message to find Tom McEnroe he was so drugged the next few days he was barely conscious. Then yesterday—the day before yesterday now—I came in and he was in a terrible state, thrashing wildly against the restraints around his wrists and ankles. When he saw me he stilled, motioned with his head for me to come closer, signaled for use of my keyboard. He asked for me to cut the vidcams and I did, and then he wrote they were going to kill him soon. He was . . . very convincing.”

  “Though he was sick,” Mac noted.

  “Yes, though he was sick. And of course paranoia is actually a symptom of dementia. I tried to calm him down because he was bleeding at the restraints. He said once more I had to find this man called Thomas McEnroe. Mac.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said harshly.

  Her smile was sad and tired. “No?”

  “No. You said he couldn’t form words, could hardly think straight, and yet here he was telling you all of that. How does that work?”

  She watched him for a full minute, breathing quietly. She gently tipped her hand to the side, letting the Hawk she’d been holding roll onto the table. Her hand trembled but her gaze was steady.

  They watched as the Hawk rolled once, twice, making a tiny rattling sound in the quiet room. Mac knew Jon and Nick were watching, listening.

  And then his world turned upside down.

  She reached farther, her hand covering his, grasping it.

  At first he thought it wa
s a sex move, otherwise why the fuck would she be touching him? And, God, their two hands together were so damned erotic. His hand was dark and powerful, nicked and scarred and rough. A workingman’s hand. Hers was slender, long-fingered, elegant. Pale creamy skin over delicate bones. A pianist’s hand.

  The contrast was arousing, female over male.

  So that’s the way she wants to play it, he thought, and then he was swept away by a blast of painless incandescent heat that moved from his hand up his arm and across his chest. It was as if his body had been taken over by an alien entity. An entity that was warm and enveloping and sweet beyond description. For a second he wondered if he’d been drugged. If her hand somehow contained a micro-syringe and she had injected a dose of . . . something in him. He had no idea what. He’d never heard of a drug that could do this.

  Any further thought was impossible, he was in the grip of something powerful, more powerful than he was. He stared at her face as her features tightened, almost as if she were in pain. Her eyes glowed, as if some kind of light bomb had gone off behind them. As if they were a source of light themselves.

  That incredible heat now flowed through his entire body, suffusing it with a golden glow. He was completely blocked, as if in a cube of amber. He couldn’t move a muscle, each element of his body locked into place.

  “Boss?” Jon asked softly in his ear. “You okay?”

  “Should we come in?” Nick growled.

  Only it turned out he wasn’t frozen, he wasn’t locked. It’s just that his body didn’t want to dissipate that heat. He could move, and he did. A short, emphatic shake of his head. No.

  “Okay.” Jon let out a long breath. “Standing down. We don’t like it but we’re standing down.”

  He jerked his head. Yes, stand down.

  “You are grieving,” she said softly, that luminescent, hypnotic gaze never leaving his eyes. “Grieving badly. There is such sorrow in you, it swirls around like black smoke. You were betrayed by a man you loved like a father. A man you trusted wholeheartedly. Everything you knew about this man led you to believe he would die rather than betray those who trusted him, and yet—he betrayed you. For money. It hurts your heart even to think of it.”

  His hand had jerked slightly under hers and she exerted a slight downward pressure.

  It was ridiculous. She was a small woman. Slender, even fragile. Her hand was almost half the size of his. The idea that she could force him to keep still was ludicrous. And yet here he was, utterly incapable of moving even an inch away from that glowing light gray stare, her small hand tethering his.

  “You’re hurting,” she whispered. “So much. And you can’t show it because . . .” She tilted her head, as if listening to something, though her eyes never left his. “Because people count on you. And you’d rather die than betray them the way you were betrayed.”

  He couldn’t move. Nothing moved except his lungs. He felt as if she were flaying him alive, but painlessly. And at the same time, for the first time in his life, he knew someone else could see inside him.

  He’d worked a lifetime to keep his inner thoughts secret. As a child in violent foster homes, most thoughts or desires led to beatings. Later, in the military, nobody gave a fuck what he thought or felt about things as long as he did his duty, and he liked it that way just fine.

  Except Lucius. Lucius had seen into him. The pain rose helplessly, like black tidal waters, choking him. It never stopped. A year and it could still ambush him.

  “So sad,” she whispered. “You’re so sad. And yet under the smoke burns love, and duty. You’re determined to protect your people. A life where you can’t protect the innocent doesn’t make sense to you. You’d die to keep them safe.”

  Her words were a distant flutter, the sound hummingbird wings might make if amplified. They barely registered. What registered was this hot, melting sensation inside him. For the very first time in his life he felt a connection to someone that was blood- and bone-deep. It was nothing like the loyalty he felt to his men or had felt to Lucius. That had a different flavor, was something else entirely. However strong his ties might be, there was a definite place where they ended, and that was his skin.

  Here there were no boundaries, none. He could feel his heartbeat—slow, steady—and hers—light, hammering, almost frantic. He was inside his own skin and inside hers.

  It was crazy. Was he drugged after all? He hadn’t felt the prick of a needle, but maybe there’d been some kind of contact patch . . .

  Her soft voice continued, her eyes a light hypnotic silver. “You’re worried that I’m a danger to you. That somehow your enemies have found you and that I am their representative. I don’t know how to convince you that who sent me was no enemy of yours. And that I don’t represent any danger to you or . . .” She tilted her head slightly, watching him. “Or to your men.” Suddenly, she whipped her head around, hair whirling out from her head, then falling back onto her shoulders. “They’re watching us. Listening. Ready to come in to save you if I put you in danger. And yet”—she lifted her hand—“the danger doesn’t come from me.”

  It all stopped. Dead. And it was like being dead. Where before there had been emotions swirling, bright and warm, heat and light, almost like a carnival going on inside him, now inside it was still and silent. Like a light switch being thrown. A switch that turned him off.

  She was still watching him steadily, sadness and knowledge in her silvery gaze.

  “I’m not anything you should fear, Mr. McEnroe. Or should I call you Mac?”

  Chapter Four

  Arka Pharmaceuticals Headquarters

  San Francisco

  The room was dark, the computer monitor bright. It was 9 A.M. Zulu time and Sierra Leone time. Though it was a chilly January evening in Northern California, in Sierra Leone it was a hot day.

  Lee looked down like God at images Flynn’s company, Orion Enterprises, piggybacked off Keyhole 18. Flynn himself was in the fancy company headquarters building in Alexandria, Virginia. Today, SL-58 was being field-tested. Orion had administered 50 cc’s of SL-58 to each operative, the dose calibrated to last at least forty-eight hours. Well over the time it should take them to make their way from the diamond mine in the hinterland of hell to hell’s own port, Freetown.

  The mine was very rich, the path to market incredibly dangerous. There were not one but two rebel armies camped out in the jungle, marauders living off terrified villagers and hijacked convoys. So far, one convoy in three made it intact to Freetown. A 66 percent loss was unacceptable, even for the richest diamond mine in the world.

  The Amsterdam-based diamond consortium had hired Orion to provide security for the diamonds and Flynn had promised the moon to the consortium in exchange for a million dollars a trip. Considering the haul on each trip was worth roughly five hundred million dollars once the diamonds were cut and set, the consortium had agreed. But Orion had one chance. If this convoy went the way of the others, it could kiss the contract goodbye.

  Lee wasn’t interested in diamonds or even the money, though he would get a substantial bonus if this convoy and successive convoys were successful. The bonus would help him speed up his plans.

  This was a trial run in another sense, too. A state-controlled Chinese mining company had found a huge deposit of iridium, the largest in the world, in Burundi. No one else knew of the deposit.

  With access to plentiful iridium, China was guaranteed to be the world leader in microchips for the next two decades. The mine was even deeper in the hinterland, in the no-man’s-land where artificial lines on maps meant nothing.

  If SL-58 turned out to be successful for Orion, it could be administered early to the Chinese troops who would set up a convoy to take the mined iridium east to the Indian Ocean, then by ship to China.

  Lee’s main monitor had shown the Orion convoy starting out at first light. Two Unimogs in front and two more at the rear guarding the central security truck carrying a titanium vault with 5 kilograms of uncut diamonds.

&n
bsp; Since the nuking of the Orapa diamond mine in Botswana the year before, diamonds were the most valuable commodity on earth.

  Three vehicles including the armored truck carrying the diamonds. All heavily armed, each vehicle with a mini gun firing .50 caliber bullets at the rate of a thousand a minute. Flynn had said they were carrying more than fifty thousand rounds of ammunition.

  In Nanjing, fifty members of the elite “Flying Dragon” squadron were waiting, pending the outcome of today’s trial. If it was successful, SL-58 would be administered and in a month they would start accompanying trucks of iridium to the waiting ships.

  For now, it was Flynn’s men who were being tested. Some ex– U.S. military and several South Africans familiar with the African bush. Each soldier had received an injection of SL-58 the previous evening. Orion’s men had been told it was a benign, long-lasting amphetamine that would let them stay awake and alert for the twenty-hour journey.

  Lee was sending everything to Beijing via long burst encryption.

  It was an important trial. It was an important day. The first field test of the drug. So far, so good. The field doctor’s report had been mundane, even boring, which Lee approved of. Boring was predictable. Boring was good.

  Lee had watched the recording of the convoy starting out at 5 A.M. local time, the trucks heading out precisely, well-timed and well-organized.

  The speed and precision of the soldiers at departure were visible, almost tangible. Lee wasn’t a logistics expert but he had some idea of what it took to get a convoy of twenty-five men going. They did everything at top speed, quick and efficient. While the men were loading the trucks, Lee had to check the monitor dashboard to make sure the recording wasn’t somehow fast-forwarding. But it wasn’t on fast-forward. Everything was in real time. The men were walking as fast as most men could run, loading movements a blur.

  Flynn was watching in Virginia, observing the tactical situation. Lee watched with a scientist’s eye, delighted with what he was seeing.

  It was as if the soldiers’ movements were choreographed. Worked out beforehand and rehearsed a thousand times. It could have been on Broadway. However good Flynn’s men were, they couldn’t be that good. He was seeing the effects of SL-58.