Heart of Danger

by Lisa Marie Rice

  She looked at each one again. “So. You can all stop scowling now and man up. Nick, Jon, go get your gear like Mac said, get something for me, and we’ll reconvene here in ten minutes. I’ll prepare the briefing on the lab.”

  For such determined men, they looked strangely uncertain. She knew that having her along went against every instinct they had. Not only because she wasn’t trained but mostly because each man, quietly and deeply, couldn’t endanger a woman. All three of them had a furious protective streak in them that wouldn’t allow them to contemplate putting her in danger.

  Catherine made a show of checking her watch. “You’ve used up a full minute. A minute that might make the difference between life and death for your captain. Mac?”

  She looked up at him, appreciating his struggle, knowing he hated this, knowing he understood how necessary it was. He stood immobilized by warring factions inside his heart and reason won out. By a hair.

  “Get going,” he said tightly, then pulled her into his arms the instant Nick and Jon left the room. “God,” he said into her hair, “I hate this.”

  “I know.” She did. She could feel his heartbeat against her cheek. In bed, it had been the steady beat of an athlete’s heart but now it beat fast and furious and wild, as if he were running. He was, in a way. He was conducting a running battle inside himself, an internal war. Keep her here and have already slim changes whittled down to nothing, or take her along, worry dogging his every step.

  No good choices.

  Mac didn’t worry when he was in mission mode. She’d read that in him. Anxiety wasn’t part of his mental makeup. She understood that he prepared as hard as a man could—and she’d felt that most of his life was training—and then he just went ahead without any fear.

  She also knew he was fully prepared to die at any time. That kind of thing simply could not be hidden.

  But now fear all but oozed out of his pores. It wasn’t fear for himself but for her.

  “Mac.” She kissed his chest over his heart and pulled away. His face was cold and hard but his nostrils were pinched white with stress. “It has to be this way. What I told Nick and Jon is true for us as well. Every second I spend trying to reassure you, give you strength, is a second lost and drains my energy.”

  His hands dropped with surprise. She’d done it deliberately, pretending she was infusing him with strength when the opposite was true. She gained strength and courage just from being near him. But the thought that he might be endangering her with his fear shocked him.

  “Okay. Let me set up to brief them on the facility. I’ll need to use one of your computers.”

  “Over there,” he growled. “Tell me what I can do.” Unexpectedly, he looked awkward, big hands held clumsily to his side, opening and closing futilely, when at all times he was the epitome of male grace.

  “There’s not much you can do until I get some information together,” she said gently.

  “Can I get you coffee at least?”

  He needed to do something for her. She understood that. Her stomach was roiling and the last thing she needed was caffeine but . . . “Sure, that would be helpful.”

  He pressed a button and spoke quietly.

  Millon had the blueprints of the facility, plus security regulations and lab safety rules, in a file given to all employees. She pulled it up, ran it through a program that created a hologram and enlarged it. She had just finished printing out the security and safety rules when Jon and Nick came back together with a Haven citizen rolling in a cart.

  Stella again, bless her.

  The cart had coffee and tea, bless her again. On the cart were plates piled high with mini panini, mini donuts and apple slices with a sprinkling of fresh cinnamon. Mac, Nick and Jon fell on the coffee and panini and donuts while she savored the tea and ate the apple slices. She felt energized by the instant injection of fructose.

  “Okay, settle down, men.” The three men exchanged glances but obeyed without grumbling. Catherine paced back and forth as she briefed them. A comforting, familiar feeling. She’d taught undergrad classes for several years in Boston, and though these three tough, fierce men were totally unlike the soft baby nerds she was used to, she couldn’t complain about their attention. They were focused on her, taking in every single word.

  “Let’s go over this again. This is the main facility. There are ancillary structures but this is where the work is carried out and this is where the Captain is held.” The holo was slightly tilted, giving an indication of its shape. Size in meters was given in white letters at the top. “It is an L-shaped facility, one long wing and one shorter wing. The shorter wing is only labs and the other wing has what some of my creepier colleagues calls ‘meatware’—the human patients and test animals.” She indicated both wings with a pen, touching air. Mac’s computer system was top-of-the-line. The holo was so realistic it was like having a 3D copy to scale of the facility in front of her. When she tapped the air to indicate each wing, she kept having a tiny jolt of surprise that her pen met air and not steel and glass. “There are three aboveground levels and three belowground levels. The bottom level is given over to production of test batches. It is a production facility and has separate entrances. My security pass covers the six levels but that will of course have been canceled. Jon, do you think you could make me a duplicate in the name of a colleague I know is out of state?”

  “No problem,” Jon answered.

  “Great. So, before I go through the building floor by floor, I need to brief you on what I know of security arrangements. Millon has to turn a family-friendly face to the world so it is not surrounded by a visible wall but an invisible one. There is a microwave beam circling the building, strong enough to cook anything mammalian, certainly including humans. The beams lose focus after about ten yards so these very expensive designer vases rimming the periphery are actually microwave emitters.”

  She zoomed in on the line of huge gray-and-tan ceramic vases, man-high, that circled the company, containing pencil-thin Italian cypresses imported at vast expense from Tuscany. There were more than three thousand of them. It was visually stunning and had featured in a number of design magazines.

  “The system is turned off at four A.M. and an army of sweepers rushes in to sweep away the dead animals, insects and leaves burned to a crisp, and the microwaves are turned back on again at four-fifteen.”

  “Do you know where the C & C is?” Nick asked.

  Catherine frowned, confused. She shook her head.

  “Command and control,” Mac said. “Where they give the orders and check that they’re carried out.”

  “Oh. No, I’m sorry, I have no idea. There is a security module on the first floor in the lab part of the facility and in the wing where the patients are kept. But I have no idea whether the microwave fence is controlled from there. It could also be controlled from the security module in the entrance.”

  Mac nodded. “Okay, we need to know whether their security perimeter stretches out past that. I’d be surprised if it didn’t. Jon?”

  From his tablet, Jon projected another holo. A bird’s-eye view of the Millon facility only with a much larger footprint, and at night. At a guess, Catherine would say that the footprint was a mile on a side. As she watched, lights flashed by almost faster than her eyes could perceive and the image changed from black to light gray, then back again. About ten red points moved back and forth in a short arc.

  She looked over at Jon. “What am I seeing?”

  His jaws bunched. “I went back in time. You’re seeing about a week’s worth of night shots from a Bright Eye satellite. It can see the balls on a mosquito so I enlarged the scope of it and created a bot that blanked out random events, otherwise the detail would overwhelm us.”

  “Wow,” she breathed. She had a low-level government security clearance linked to her job at Millon but it didn’t cover anything like this. The Bright Eye series of orbiting satellites were a rumor that often showed up in novels and tabloids, capable of amazing detail.
Privacy activists often marched against them, though the government blandly denied Bright Eye existed. “Please don’t tell me how you got that. I could probably go to jail for knowing this.”

  She got three hard, blank stares and suppressed a grin. She could probably go to jail for knowing them. “But if I have to go to jail, at least let me know what I’m looking at.”

  The holo kept flashing, black to gray and back again.

  “What you’re seeing is a recording from last light to first of that area. We’re now going back to a month ago.” With a swipe of his finger, Jon stopped the flicking images. “Here’s what we need to know. Screening out random events—events that are not repeated at least three times in one month—we have vehicles patrolling this area on a regular round.” His finger sketched a perimeter a mile out surrounding the facility. “They mainly use night lights but I used an algorithm and enhanced the light so we could see them. I’d estimate these are people carriers—roofless, all-terrain vehicles, carrying five soldiers plus one manning what looks like a .50 cal.” The image zoomed and zoomed again until four shapes inside the vehicle were visible, plus one man sitting on a sort of raised platform on the back manning a long cylinder.

  Catherine stared. This was far beyond the level of security that she was aware of.

  Mac was tapping on a handheld. “I’ve got their routines and I’ll get the security holes. Go on.”

  Jon pointed with a pen to the red lights moving back and forth quickly in short arcs farther in near the facility. “And that’s patrols. There are ten of them covering an arc of about a mile, hourly patrol. They are backup to the wheeled patrols.”

  “Wait.” Nick leaned forward, his hard dark face intent. “Run those through again.”

  The holo showed the series of vehicle and foot patrols, gray to black and back. He studied them, eyes tracking back and forth for several minutes. Mac and Jon gave him the time. Mac continued tapping into his handheld and Jon was using another computer, doing some complicated research. She could see screens flash by, too quickly for her to understand what it was he was looking for.

  She could do nothing but wait. Once she’d given them the security protocol that had been in her initial briefing, she had nothing else to offer.

  “Security is aimed inward,” Nick said finally, sitting back.

  Mac stopped tapping on his handheld and Jon’s hands lifted from the keyboard.

  “Look.” Nick pointed at the red dots, freezing the faint images of the vehicles, tilting the Millon holo. “Every weapon is aimed inward. The path the patrols take, the direction of the .50 cal, it all makes sense if you are directing your security to keeping things in instead of out.”

  “Jesus,” Mac breathed.

  “Does that make sense?” Catherine asked. “I mean, surely Millon is guarding against intruders. This lab alone must have a billion dollars’ worth of industrial secrets to steal. Surely they must be scared of someone coming along and stealing them?”

  “Nick’s right,” Mac growled. “They have plenty of internal security. What you showed us is already top-of-the-line. These outer-perimeter trip wires—they are expensive and labor-intensive. They make sense if they are there in case someone from inside escapes and the alarm is sounded. That security is definitely aimed at keeping whatever is in there from getting out.”

  “Well,” Catherine said, considering. “Maybe that makes our task that much easier. Maybe we can get in.”

  “Yeah.” Mac sighed. “The trick will be getting back out alive.”

  Fifty minutes later, Mac tapped his ear. Or rather, tapped a spot on the lightweight helmet.

  Catherine obediently tapped the same spot on her own helmet. It was the spot that connected her to the team leader, Mac. A spot an inch to the left hooked her comms system into the entire team’s system.

  “You okay, honey?” Mac’s deep voice sounded in her ear. The sound was so good, so deep and calm, so all-enveloping it was as if he were talking inside her head. “You remember the drills?”

  A huge amount of information had been fed into her earpiece from him as she was being dressed by Nick and Jon in an amazing lightweight, flexible suit she was assured would stop bullets. On top of the suit, though, she was the only one wearing another layer of protection, a light plate covering her chest and back which Mac said would stop a missile. Then Nick winked at her. Nick! Cold, remote Nick. Maybe she imagined it because when she looked at him again, his face was as frozen as ever.

  Luckily, she was a fast study and could retain big chunks of technical data.

  The combat suits were made of nanotube carbon technology. The material tightened under ballistic pressure and was much more resistant than the old-fashioned, heavy Kevlar protection some police officers still wore in poor cities.

  What she was wearing also repelled infrared and instantly took on background coloring, making them almost invisible all along the visible spectrum.

  “I remember the drills,” she answered softly. He looked at her intently for a long minute in the dimness of the helicopter cabin, then nodded and turned away.

  She knew he’d just paid her a huge compliment. She knew how protective he was. When he held her hand she could feel his terror for her, feel how badly fear sat on him and knew that it was exclusively fear for her, not for himself.

  But right now, he trusted in the information he and Nick and Jon had given her and her ability to process that information. She understood what a struggle it was for him and the demons he’d had to overcome to trust her to keep safe.

  Jon was piloting a helicopter the likes of which she had never seen. It was tiny. They sat tightly squeezed together. The men’s gear and weaponry were loaded into two metal bladders affixed to the sides which Jon said were bulletproof.

  The helicopter was a stealth one, invisible to radar, with a heat signature so dissipated it took highly sensitive instruments to track it or even show up on IR scans. Mac was counting on the fact that no one scanned the sky and the fact that they were off every flight path.

  The helicopter was also completely silent. That was another thing that astonished her. Even inside, there was barely a sound—not louder than wind rustling in the trees. They were communicating via their inbuilt helmet comms because the men didn’t want to have to stop to put them on and test them when they landed.

  And when they landed, Jon had assured her that they would have to land right on top of a person for him to hear the “helo,” as the men called it. And they weren’t going to do that because the helo boasted every single imaging device known to man and some that were unknown even to her. Jon was getting readouts about every single data pertinent to the mission, complete pictures of the terrain they were flying over, a complete picture of the empty sky around them, info so complete all that was missing was the price of pizza in the fast food franchises they flew over.

  The bird was practically flying itself, though Jon told her he could grab control back in a microsecond. She believed him. On a mission, he was no longer Surfer Dude, laid-back and detached. He was all fervent focus, like Mac and Nick.

  The men were bent over a tablet showing a bird’s-eye view of the Millon compound, sent from a drone that had preceded them. They had watched as the sentries changed over at 2 A.M., as per protocol.

  It was 2:30 A.M. and they were scheduled to land just outside the furthermost security perimeter in fifteen minutes.

  The men were discussing tactics in a low murmur inside her helmet, their deep calm voices sounding like a river rushing by . . .

  She started as a large gloved hand shook her shoulder. “We’re there, honey,” Mac said in her ear. “ETA sixty seconds. You ready?”

  Her heart was pounding and her mouth was dry. She willed her heart rate down, thankful for all the biofeedback exercises she’d taken in grad school, took a sip of water from a reservoir that was secreted somewhere on her back and nodded.

  “Yes,” she said, glad her voice sounded calm. “I am.”

  She
saw his eyes narrow at her. “Remember the drill. You stay—”

  “Inside the triangle you and Nick and Jon make at all times. I obey all hand signs—halt, forward and down—and I am to keep a low profile.” She narrowed her eyes back at him. “I told you. I know the drill.”

  “Landing,” Jon’s voice sounded in their ears, and the little helicopter simply drifted down and landed with barely a bump.

  “Go go go,” Mac said, and the men simply ghosted out, making no noise whatsoever. Catherine tried to emulate them but wasn’t as graceful as they were. Her boot brushed the helo skid with a little clang. She winced but they weren’t paying attention as they unloaded their gear in total silence from the external bladders.

  “Gear check,” Mac said quietly, and they ran down the frighteningly long list of things they carried. At the end they jumped up and down silently, checking to see if anything jingled as they moved, but nothing did.

  Mac gave the forward hand sign and they moved out, Catherine in the middle of a triangle of three very large and very brave men whose lives she held in her uncertain hands.

  As they moved forward silently into the night, through a hole in the outer perimeter of security Mac had discovered, she sent her mind out tentatively, little tendrils of thought. Coming in on the helo, she thought she could detect faint echoes from Nine—Lucius Ward. It was a new development, a talent she had never had before and she had no idea if she could trust it.

  It might even have been her intense desire to save the man blinding her into thinking she was receiving signals. If so, they were in deepest shit. It was terrible to think she might be leading Mac, Nick and Jon into danger on the false premise that she could somehow communicate with Ward when actually what she was communicating with was her own mind, leading them straight into the heart of danger.