Every minute spent here increased the chances of her being found. If the men in black came down to this basement corridor she’d be the easiest prey on earth. She’d read somewhere that the latest generation of stunners could kill or maim at five hundred feet.
She straightened away from the wall and turned, her feet moving in a maddeningly slow shuffle.
There were two exits, one up the building stairs that led to the front door and one that let out the side of the building. Instinct had her taking the side exit. She opened the side door cautiously and peeped out. There was absolutely no one in sight.
How much time did she have?
Even if they circumvented her personal security system as easily as they did the building one, surely it would take some time to establish that she wasn’t home? A few minutes at least.
It would have to be enough.
She knew her neighborhood well enough to make it through backyards, going as fast as she could, until she finally came out onto another section of town. On foot it took about ten minutes. By car it would take longer, even if they knew where she was. As it was, when they discovered she wasn’t home, they’d probably cover her neighborhood in a grid search, which would take time.
Elle exited the warren of backyards and service alleys into an entirely new neighborhood. Not a savory one either.
Great, because maybe they wouldn’t look for her here.
Elle stopped, leaning against a broken street lamp, catching her breath. She needed a plan that covered more than the next five minutes, but it was eluding her. Pain and adrenaline and exhaustion were blocking her thought processes. She needed a safe place—but where?
An expensive hotel was out. So were the three or four hotels that the company habitually used for visiting professors, because the men after her would have that list. And of course they’d know if she used her credit card.
Think Elle! She clung to the lamppost, head down, trying to reason her way through this. She was so very tired. The test session had drained almost every ounce of energy out of her. Then the shock of the phone call, the pain of digging around in her own arm, of pulling that chip out, the terror at seeing those men in black after her . . .
This is what Jane Macy must have felt like after her breakdown. She’d had a psychotic episode after a test and had disappeared. The company had cited privacy issues when Elle asked about her.
Why was she thinking of Jane?
Oh! The memory popped into her head, clear and complete and she pushed off from the lamppost with a surge of energy she knew was the last of her reserves.
Jane had had an affair with a married guy, a lawyer working for one of the many venture capital firms in the area. His wife was really powerful and could do some serious damage to him if she found out.
The one thing everyone knew about the wife was that she really liked being rich, disliked even seeing poor people. She wouldn’t travel through poorer sections of the cities she visited on business trips, and had her drivers make great circuitous loops to avoid even the sight of the poor.
So Jane had found a tiny motel in the poorer part of town that didn’t ask questions, didn’t take down ID and took cash.
Elle remembered the name of the motel and knew where it was.
It was walkable, just. If her strength held out. And she’d have to walk through more backyards and back roads, because she had to assume there would be cars on the streets looking for her, and cameras they could hack.
The one thing that had been clear when Arka started up the research project was that Arka was awash in money. It had money to burn, and if it sent out its full security force, she was in real trouble.
She couldn’t think beyond finding a place to rest, so she pushed off and began the long trudge to the motel that asked no questions.
Arka Pharmaceuticals Headquarters
Financial District
San Francisco
Dr. Charles Lee watched the video of the debriefing of Dr. Elle Connolly for the fifth time. Dr. Daniels hadn’t been at all thorough and would be reprimanded, but what shone through was that Connolly had penetrated the secret lab at Bayankhongor, apparently during a training session. There were twenty three-star generals in Mongolia and Lee would show Connolly photographs but he was almost certain that the three-star general she’d seen was General Yisu, the head of Mongolian Special Forces.
And the secret camp, whose coordinates he’d given to Connolly, was working on a rail gun.
Surely that would buy him some time with the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology?
Resentment swelled in his chest at the thought. Though he’d emigrated with his family to America at the age of seven, his heart had remained back in the homeland. He’d raced through school and university and had risen quickly up through the ranks of Arka with one thought, and one thought only. Coming back to Beijing a conqueror, bearing the key to making China the uncontested sole superpower in the world, and taking his rightful place at the top of the government hierarchy.
He’d started by working with General Clancy Flynn, using black funds from the U.S. military, then funneling the results to Beijing. The response had been immensely gratifying. A byproduct of one of the research projects was a cancer vaccine. He’d sent in a black ops team run by Flynn called Ghost Ops—men whose pasts had been erased, men who no longer officially existed—to destroy the lab where the vaccine had been developed, then sent the vaccine to Beijing. The top tiers of the Chinese government were all now vaccinated and a mass vaccination of the forty-million-strong armed forces was under way.
The Ghost Ops team had been accused of domestic terrorism, forevermore criminals in the eyes of the U.S. government.
Flynn had been only too willing to sacrifice his black ops team. Lee understood that Flynn resented the Ghost Ops leader, Captain Lucius Ward. Lee didn’t care either way. It seemed to him the squabbling of children. What he had got out of the operation was four elite warriors to experiment on.
Because his ultimate goal was the creation of a super soldier. Tougher, faster, smarter. With better eyesight, better hearing, greater healing abilities, faster synapses. Captain Ward and the three Ghost Ops soldiers that had been caught—another three had escaped and were still at large—proved recalcitrant in the extreme, however. In the end, Lee had decided to sacrifice them, harvest the brains and study the effects of the drugs he was testing.
The captain and the other three soldiers had been rescued before they could be sacrificed, and Lee had lost a great deal of research that had been in their bodies and would have been evident in their harvested brains.
He had a new protocol now and was working with the funds funneled to him by Clancy, now retired and the head of a security company.
Clancy wanted better contractors to make more money.
Lee wanted to change the world.
Right now, though, their goals meshed.
Back in Beijing, Lee had enemies, men who resented his growing power. They were sabotaging his plans, mocking him behind his back while he was an ocean away in California.
So he’d decided to make himself smarter and faster and stronger, to be living proof of the validity of his Shin-Li project, Project Warrior. He’d been injecting himself with diluted versions of the experimental drug. It worked, it worked wonderfully well. Though he gave no outward sign, he felt immensely stronger mentally and physically. In the mirror in the morning, he could see muscle definition in his chest and arms. It was growing increasingly difficult to tear himself away from his naked image in the mirror.
He felt different. Lee was an observer, a scholar, a scientist at home in the world of learning. He often thought he would have been an excellent court scholar in the time of Confucius. He was used to studying the world dispassionately, his only passion that of making it back to Beijing a victorious man, the architect of a new world order.
But now—now he felt like he could take on the world himself, single-handedly. He’d been willing to forge a new world w
ith his mind and scientific training, but now, oh now, it was like he could do it physically.
And now he had an even stronger tool. Literally revolutionary. His special Delphi Project, named after the oracle in ancient Greece. A handful of men and women with special powers they tried to hide and suppress. But you can’t hide from an fMRI. He’d gathered them together to study their capabilities and replicate them. He’d expected the project to last at least a year, right up to the moment he expected to defect back to Beijing. But his hand was being forced. The Ministry of Science and Technology in Beijing was about ready to close the door they’d been holding open for him. And that moron Flynn, who was funding both programs, was increasingly shrill about wanting results.
Beijing and Flynn wanted results?
He’d give them results.
He was rounding up the subjects with special powers. He’d infuse them with massive doses of SL-61 and he’d find the secret to developing super warriors who could fly, who could throw fire projectiles halfway across the world, who could read minds.
Project Warrior was on an accelerated schedule and, he thought as he made a fist, admiring the muscles in his forearm, so was he.
Palo Alto
There it was. Probably the only motel in the area that didn’t belong to a chain. It didn’t seem to belong to anyone, really. The once bright green façade was faded to a light pea green. Most of the plants in the courtyard were dead and the bright red neon sign advertising V CANCI S sputtered and fizzed.
It wasn’t much, but Elle had to hope it would offer her shelter and protection for a few hours because she didn’t have the strength to go one step further.
Walking into the dirty, dusty lobby Elle realized she was overdressed for the place. Her big down coat was expensive, as were her boots and purse. Luckily, the young guy behind the counter looked either half asleep or like he’d just taken two tabs of FeelGood.
They turn the cameras off, Jane had said. Still, Elle kept her head down as she registered, pushing across the counter a hundred-dollar bill for the sixty-dollar room. “Keep the change,” she muttered, eyes down. A none-too clean hand with cracked fingernails made the bill disappear and a scratched card key appeared.
A bored voice said, “Down the hall. Take the right corridor.” She walked away, trying to keep her knees stiff. If she fell down or fainted right in the lobby that would make her memorable.
Or not, considering the type of motel it was. Maybe they had drunk or drugged ladies falling down all the time. Elle kept her eyes down on the stained plaid-brown-on-brown carpet, putting one booted foot in front of the other, a huge noise roaring in her head, brightly colored spots in front of her eyes. If the room was far away, she wasn’t going to make it.
Luckily the room was close by, just around the corridor to the right. She held the card up to the sensor with one hand, and balanced herself against the door jamb with the other. She felt more than heard the clunky click as it opened. In a normal hotel, by law the card would log her name and time of entrance and eventual time of exit in the central computer, but Jane had said this kind of place didn’t go in for niceties.
Elle stumbled into the room, pulled the door closed, walked to the window, and closed the blinds. She leaned against the wall next to the window and finally her legs gave way, simply wouldn’t hold her up any longer. Her purse thunked to the floor as her knees buckled.
She slid with her back to the wall down to the dirty carpeting, clasping her arms around her legs, leaning her head forward until it rested against her knees.
Trembling started from her legs, traveling up through her body like an electric wave. She sat there in the dark, arms and legs shaking, a deep chill in her core, riding out the storm.
She lost control over her own body. It shook and shivered and panted and she could do nothing to stop it. It was physical and mental and spiritual. It was as if she’d come up against some inner boundary, a place where everything had to stop because she could go no further.
Had nothing left.
Could barely breathe, let alone plan the next step.
She sank down deep inside herself, the world slowly turning black.
And it was because she was so weak and so depleted, because she reached some dark place of despair that held her deepest truths, that it slipped from her.
Something she’d sworn she’d never do, something that in any other moment she’d rather die than think, came welling out.
From deep inside her, it came. Totally unstoppable, torn from her.
A call so strong it was a scream inside her head.
Help me, Nick.
Chapter 7
Mount Blue
Haven
Northern California
Nick Ross bolted up in bed on a gasp, heart drumming against his ribs, sweat popping out all over his body. Clapping his hands for the light, he threw back the covers and rushed for the door. Remembering at the last minute that he was naked.
In a fever of impatience, he turned back and hopped into the clothes he’d thrown onto a chair an hour ago. His usual—black jeans, black sweatshirt, black combat boots. Without bothering to lace his boots he raced outside.
Usually, he got a rush when he walked outside his door. He’d rather die than say it, or even show it, but he loved Haven. He and his teammates were on the run from the U.S. government: fugitives, outlaws. They’d built a secret city and somehow a community of misfits had gathered around them. He and Jon Ryan and Mac McEnroe didn’t even question it after a while. People came, always on the run from something bad, and the three soldiers protected them.
It was a mountain—a forgotten, hollowed-out silver mine that had been turned into a thriving community of runaways and outlaws. Like Hole in the Wall in the old west, only high-tech. The community was circular, built inside the mountain. Every time Nick stepped out from his quarters, he always paused along the balcony that ringed the huge open atrium below. His community, his people. Gave him a rush, every time.
Except now.
He’d pressed their emergency button, the one that had never been used up until now, connected to Jon’s and Mac’s rooms, before bolting out the door. Jon’s room was on his floor, Mac’s was two stories up. He ran straight to the end of the corridor and when he passed Jon’s door he bellowed, “Jon! Situation room, stat!” He banged his fist, hard, on the door, then hit the stairs at a run. The elevator would be too slow. He took the stairs four at a time and at the end simply vaulted over the bannisters down to the floor below and ran for the situation room.
The doors of the room were biomorphically programmed to open for him, Mac, or Jon, but it took two seconds to process and he had to stand there, three feet out, practically hopping in place, fear and panic prickling along his nervous system, until the door whooshed open.
He rushed inside and skidded to a stop, looking around wildly for something—anything—that could help.
Their situation room wouldn’t have been out of place in the New Pentagon. They had it all, including holographic monitors showing every inch of the security perimeter around Haven. If a jackrabbit shat in the woods, they knew about it. They were illegally linked into every overhead satellite, and at any given moment one or two of their almost invisible drones was dropping visual, IR, and thermal images onto their servers. That kind of intel would be considered a security breach serious enough to warrant a court-martial, but since the entire U.S. military was gunning for them, and a court-martial had found them guilty of treason in absentia anyway, they figured why not. Their server farm, hidden in the mountain, was one of the largest in the world. They had serious crunching power at their disposal.
Not to mention serious firepower. The armory would do any military installation proud.
None of it helpful at the moment because what Nick really, really needed was—
What?
Fuck. He didn’t know what he needed, but he needed it now.
The door whooshed open, Jon came in at a run. Wheeling to a st
op, he checked the monitors—which showed acres and acres of nighttime mountainside. Utterly peaceful, utterly normal, utterly calm. Sensors blinking green. “What the fuck, Nick?” Jon’s bright blue eyes narrowed as he glared at him. His blond hair was tousled, shirt buttoned wrong, sweatpants hanging off his hips. He looked around again at the monitors, brought his gaze back. “I repeat—what the fuck?”
It took every ounce of his self-control, but Nick managed not to twirl around, hands on head, looking for something that could be an outside sign of what was going on inside. His heart was pounding, adrenaline running through his system and he had nowhere to go with it. Nothing to hang this huge flaming ball of desperation on.
He tried to speak, but his throat was too tight. On the second try he got it but what he wanted to say was so enormous his voice cracked. “She needs me. She’s in danger and I have to get to her now, and I don’t know where she is and she fucking needs me.” Normally he would have been ashamed to death that his indrawn breath sounded like a sob, but right now he didn’t give a fuck. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but Elle.
Jon’s eyes narrowed further. “Who needs you? What are you talking about?”
All Nick could do was stand there and pant, fists clenched so hard the knuckles were white. Ready to fight Jon, ready to fight the world if it could help her, but it wouldn’t. He couldn’t help her until he knew where she was and what she needed.
“Elle,” he said simply, because with all the thoughts swirling in his head, that was the only thing that stood out. That made sense. Elle.
Elle. In danger. God. He couldn’t even stay in the same room with that thought.
Jon shook his head and turned gratefully when the door opened. Mac walked in, arm around his wife. His pregnant wife. The pregnant wife Nick had woken up. Both men were now glaring at him. Catherine McEnroe was an incredibly special woman and Mac wasn’t happy that she’d had her rest interrupted. Even pregnant, she worked tirelessly as a doctor taking care of their little community. So, yeah, interrupting Catherine’s sleep was a big no-no.
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