I Dream of Danger

by Lisa Marie Rice

“Bingo.”

  They smiled at each other, then Elle’s smile faded. “I have a lot of data with me in a pen drive and I know where to access more. But more than anything, we need to find Sophie and the others. They are being rounded up by Corona goons and nothing good will come of it.”

  “No.” Catherine had sobered up too. “Corona is Arka. Nothing good can come of Arka kidnapping people.” Her pretty jaw set. “I have four men I’ll introduce you to. The ones who were brought here half dead three months ago. They’d spent a year in a high-tech lab that was essentially a prison and were experimented on. I’ve never seen anyone with as many surgical scars as their leader.”

  “Lucius Ward? Nick told me about him.”

  “What was done to him and to his men was criminal. If they’ve started kidnapping people, it means that whatever is going on is coming to a head and we must stop them. We have to get your friends out.”

  “Catherine . . .” Elle hesitated. “I once went to an Arka lab. It was scary. They had vast security resources. They had guards everywhere and the labs had high-tech security with a number of backups. I don’t know if we can mount any kind of offensive move.”

  “Oh my dear.” Catherine patted her hand and stood up. “We have something far better than security goons. We have the entire Ghost Ops team, right here. I’d pit them against any foe on earth. They are invincible.” She leaned over the table, pressed a button and spoke quietly. “Mac? Can you and the guys come up? There’s something we need to talk about.”

  Arka Pharmaceuticals

  San Francisco

  Four vials. One, two, three, four.

  Lee studied the brushed aluminum vial holder on the pristine surface of his huge desk. He could see its upside-down reflection, as if it continued on down into the nether regions of his desk. He carefully pushed a button on the side of the holder, entered a code on the keyboard that was projected onto the surface of his desk, and heard the satisfying hiss of a vacuum seal being broken.

  The container was manufactured by a subsidiary of Arka and not only met ISO Standard 900012 for the containment of biohazardous material, it doubled the standards. It was unbreakable and unbreachable. You could take a mallet to it, you could run a tank over it. It would not break and it would not open.

  If civilization were to suddenly stop, a thousand years from now whoever inherited the earth—Lee’s guess would be rats—would find the container intact and rub their paws over the slightly raised Arka logo and wonder in their little rat brains what was inside.

  Power. That was what was inside. Immense power. Power to change the world and it came from him. He’d done this.

  It seemed insane that he was about to unleash all this power and not take it inside himself. Not become immensely powerful himself.

  The Warrior project had gone through so many iterations he’d almost lost hope, but then Edison himself had said that a scientist never failed. He just found the ways an experiment didn’t work.

  Since he was a small child torn from his homeland, China, and dragged to the country he detested, the United States, Lee had dreamed of coming back to his homeland a conqueror. It was clear to anyone who had eyes in their head that China was the world’s foremost superpower now and Lee intended it to remain so for the next thousand years. It was the oldest civilization on earth and had been dormant far too long. But its long sleep was over and now it would take its place as the leader of mankind.

  It would manufacture not only superior products but superior humans. Starting with him.

  Three months ago he’d gone down to the secret underground labs at Millon Laboratories, a small high-tech company Arka had purchased. He’d found it best to carry out the research Flynn was paying for in scattered small-scale labs of companies he held a majority share in. No one knew about this research. Certainly not the board at Arka. It pleased him no end that he was beating American capitalism at its own game. Preparing for its future destruction under its own nose.

  And yet, Lee’s contacts in Beijing had told him that his time was running out. When Lee had first contacted his childhood friend, Chao Yu, who’d risen high in the ranks of the Ministry of Science and Technology, his friend had been enthusiastic, and had taken the Warrior Project directly to the minister himself, Zhang Wei.

  Everyone in the Ministry had been hugely excited, but the excitement waned as Lee kept coming up against problems. The science was impeccable. There had been sporadic successes but not replicable enough to bring to Beijing. All he needed was the money to institute testing on a larger scale in order to speed the process up. He needed Flynn’s money.

  Lee hadn’t planned on showing Flynn the paranormals, but he’d had his hand forced. Flynn had been impressed and doubled the funding, but it was almost too late. The window of opportunity back home was closing.

  And that was when it occurred to Lee that he would be landing in the Fatherland with a terabyte of encrypted data, a case full of vials, and some video footage, nothing more. Chao Yu was a scientist and could be trusted to break the data down and explain it but that could take time. Days, weeks, even months. He didn’t have weeks and months. Time was tight and he needed to arrive with a visibly functioning program, ready to be up and running as fast as doses could be manufactured.

  Manufacturing, distributing, and injecting the doses to the military would already take six months. They needed to start right away and he needed to be credible right away. He himself had to be a walking advertisement for Project Warrior.

  So he’d started experimenting on himself, in minute doses, and the results were overwhelming. He felt stronger, faster. He was stronger, faster. The other day he had clocked himself at under a three-minute mile run. He’d never been a runner, never been an athlete, and he’d casually broken an Olympic record.

  He’d never felt better, stronger, more clear-headed. But it had taken months for the dosage to take effect. Speed was an issue, both in the lab and in the field. The effects had to be immediate. So he’d been experimenting with a fast-acting virus as a vector. It had worked wonders on animal trials.

  Lee missed his soldiers fiercely. He needed Special Forces soldiers for the trials, but though he’d broached the subject several times with Flynn, who would have access to plenty of specimens as an ex-general, the cretin had refused. The theory was that any Special Forces soldiers, either on active duty or retired, would be missed.

  He’d made an exception for the Ghost Ops soldiers who’d been captured, because they were not on any official lists. Were, in fact, officially nonexistent. On the subject of more soldiers to experiment on, Flynn had been unyielding.

  A sudden rush of rage shook Lee—a hot course of hatred pulsing through him. It felt good, it felt right. Flynn had blocked him every step of the way. The original plan had been to celebrate the Chinese New Year in Beijing, as a newly minted senior official of the Ministry. The Chinese New Year had come and gone. He’d stood in the dark in his penthouse apartment on Market Street listening to the sounds of the annual Chinese New Year parade. And now with the new deadlines, it was entirely possible that Flynn’s hesitations and penny-pinching would cost Lee his chance.

  The hatred felt right, felt good. He clenched his fist and imagined it curled around Flynn’s fat neck, crushing the windpipe, watching with glee as that already purple face turned blue, anticipating the tiny snap as the hyoid bone broke.

  Lee could do it now too. One-handed. He’d surreptitiously tested his grip on a dynamometer, and he’d hit two hundred pounds, the most the machine could measure, halfway through the test. In all likelihood, he could tear Flynn’s throat out with one hand.

  The thought pleased him enormously.

  Oh yes. He was going to be a walking advertisement for Project Warrior.

  He broke the final seal on the container and watched as curls of smoke from the dry ice rose together with the central cylinder. It stopped with an audible click, gyrated 90 degrees, and the three vials automatically emptied into a single syringe that ha
d been pushed up from the side.

  Beautiful piece of equipment. America still did this kind of thing so well, so elegantly.

  Lee picked the syringe up with his right hand and turned it until the hair-fine needle pointed at the ceiling. He rolled up his shirtsleeve and placed his left arm on the desktop, admiring it. His suits hid the fact that he’d developed superb muscle definition over the past month. His arm now was lean and hard with veins carrying oxygen to the newly forged muscles.

  He smiled as the needle painlessly slid into the vein. Lean, mean fighting machine. With a double PhD.

  The new dosage with the viral component—SL-62—spread warmth throughout his system, like a healing balm. He felt good, more than good. He felt great.

  A few more tweaks and they’d be ready to roll. They would have been ready six weeks ago if that fucker Flynn hadn’t been so pissy.

  Lee recoiled for a second. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d used the word fucker, or even thought it. It wasn’t him. Or at least it wasn’t the old him. The new Lee could use whatever word he wanted. Fuck them.

  He stood up, strength infusing his system. His vision was blurred, though when he took off his glasses, he could see perfectly. It was raining outside and dark, even though it was still early afternoon. But light bloomed in his eyes and he could make out figures in front of the Ferry Building, almost half a mile away.

  He stretched and smiled. He felt great. Just great.

  Mount Blue

  They filed into the lab one by one. Mac first, then Jon, then Nick. And there she was, sitting in the lab in a white coat, looking so beautiful she took his breath away. But more than beautiful, she looked . . . right. As if she were born to be sitting in their lab in Haven.

  She and Catherine had been conferring, heads together, serious but clearly in tune with each other. Two beautiful women—though, however pretty Catherine was, she couldn’t hold a candle to Elle—one dark-haired, one fair. The smartest women he’d ever met, dealing with some very nasty shit without breaking a sweat.

  Nick went over immediately to Elle and sat down next to her. He picked her hand up, kissed the back of it, then leaned over and kissed her cheek.

  He totally ignored the stunned expressions on Mac’s and Jon’s faces. They looked as if Nick had sprouted wings and flown loops in the air.

  “Hi, honey.” He smiled. He felt new muscles in his face because sure as shit he hadn’t done much smiling these past years. He’d never been a smiler. But seeing Elle sitting there, now officially a part of Haven and officially his—well, that was worth a smile. “Everything okay?”

  She sighed and leaned into him. Oh yeah. Nick put an arm around her and didn’t know who was more comforted. Him or her. Whatever was coming, they’d face it together.

  “We need to talk,” Catherine announced. “Because there’s something we’re all going to have to decide. I’m going to let Elle talk, but first I think you all should know something about her. You know that I am an empath? That I can read emotions and, lately, thoughts? Though—trust me on this—I make a real effort to stay out of your heads.”

  Nick and Jon chuckled. Right now if she was in Nick’s head she’d back out fast, blushing hard. Because a part of him was sitting there ready to absorb information. A briefing. This had all the hallmarks of a briefing and he’d been doing briefings all his adult life. So he was paying attention but there was another bit of him free to just . . . play.

  Think about other things.

  Like, how incredibly soft Elle’s hand was. And her cheek. And her neck. She was just so fucking soft all over. It seemed impossible to him that human skin could feel that soft. How he’d loved kissing her all over, moving his mouth down over her pale breasts, heartbeat showing in the left breast, his hand moving down over that flat belly, down to the cloud of light brown hair covering her sex . . .

  “Elle?”

  Nick started slightly. Fuck. He had the beginning of a hard-on. Christ. Bad news. Mac and Jon were as observant as any two men could possibly be. Had they noticed? Nick crossed his legs uncomfortably, glad that he was too tanned to blush. Not that he ever blushed, but still.

  Catherine was standing in front of them, holding her hand out to Elle.

  Shit. Nick had completely zoned out. If Mac knew, he’d have his ass.

  Well, Elle was moving to stand beside Catherine, so he wouldn’t be tempted to think of how very, very soft she was between her . . .

  “You know me, of course. My name’s Elle Connolly.” He still couldn’t get used to that name. And it still bugged him that she’d changed it. “I’m a biologist with an interest in the biology of the human brain. There’s one other thing about me you should know.” Elle glanced at Catherine, who nodded imperceptibly. “I can astrally project.”

  Whoa. Nick sat forward with a frown. What?

  Jon leaned forward too. “The fuck?”

  Catherine held up her hand, palm out. “I know this is going to be hard to absorb, but you’ve taken me on board, so this should be a bit easier to swallow.”

  Damn straight it had been hard to swallow that Catherine could read emotions by touch. Nick and Jon had been hostile to her, though happy for Mac that he’d found someone who could put up with his ugly mug. But when Catherine came to them with some totally crazy story about Lucius Ward being held prisoner in a clinic in Palo Alto and wanting them to rescue him . . . well he and Jon had nearly mutinied.

  Lucius had abandoned them. Betrayed them for money and left them for dead on a bogus mission that had blown up in their faces. The three of them, Mac and Nick and Jon, had taken the fall for blowing up a lab. Their intel—false of course—had been that the lab was brewing a weaponized version of bubonic plague. A nightmare. One of the many nightmares Ghost Ops had been set up to avert. They’d gone in, blown up the lab, killed what turned out to be totally innocent scientists and had been taken down and accused of treason. Lucius had disappeared and they read afterward that he’d had a big financial stake in the lab’s rival. So they’d been sold out by a leader they revered.

  That was what they knew, it was the new bedrock of their lives and here Catherine came leading Mac around by the dick with some cockeyed story about Lucius not betraying them after all that only a shit-for-brains who was getting laid like nobody’s business—that would be Mac, who in his previous life had been as unassailable as a stone cliff—could believe.

  What was the proof?

  Catherine had touched Lucius and had somehow learned the truth. So they had to go risk their lives on a wild goose chase on the say-so of some dame. True, she’d found them, when the entire U.S. government and its military hadn’t been able to find them. But still.

  Both Nick and Jon had been about a hair from pulling a gun and tying Catherine up—probably having to shoot Mac in the process—when she’d touched them.

  Nick had never known anything like it. It was as if an entire world was there, in her touch. And she knew everything about him. It just slipped from his skin to hers. Everything he’d kept absolutely hidden for almost ten years—it was somehow right there for Catherine to read.

  She didn’t know Elle’s name and she didn’t know the details but she caught exactly his sorrow and his deep desperation at not knowing if Elle was alive or dead, sick or well. Happy or needing him. She’d known all of that at a touch. And she knew something about Jon as well, though he wasn’t talking and neither was she. But whatever it was she’d found out, it hurt and it was true.

  So, yeah, Nick and Jon were going to believe her if she talked about woo-woo stuff. Mac wasn’t an issue. Catherine could say that the moon was a hologram and Mac would believe her.

  There was silence in the room. Nick frowned. “What does that mean exactly?”

  This time Elle spoke. “It means that I have out-of-body experiences during sleep. Except I’m not really asleep when that happens. It’s more like a coma. I had an EEG of my brain during an out-of-body experience and it almost flatlined. It’s only i
n the past year that I’ve tried to analyze this as opposed to hating it. Three months ago I enrolled in a program to study what used to be called paranormal abilities. The study was funded by Arka Pharmaceuticals.”

  Nick’s teeth ground and Mac issued a low growl. Arka Pharmaceuticals had kidnapped and tortured Lucius and three of their teammates—Romero, Lundquist, and Pelton—nearly to death. So anything connected to Arka was pretty much on their shit list.

  Elle pressed a button, the lights dimmed and a hologram lit up. There were ten faces in two rows of five. Nick saw Elle in the second row. “These are the people who were originally enrolled in the program and two of us, myself and Sophie Daniels, drew up the experimental protocol and oversaw the tests.”

  Elle manipulated the tiny remote and the hologram showed low buildings in a green sward. “This is the campus where the tests were carried out.”

  “Wait!” Jon was frowning ferociously. “Go back.”

  “Okay.” Elle obediently went back to the previous ’gram. “Here?”

  “Yeah. Third from the left, top row. Who is she?” Nick looked over. Jon was grim-faced, practically vibrating with tension, which was totally unlike his usual cool surfer–dude persona. Actually, Nick had never seen him tense, ever. Not even under fire.

  Did he know the girl?

  Elle smiled at Jon. “Sophie Daniels. She’s one of my best friends. We did our graduate studies together at Stanford, only she studied physiology. She has a master’s in that and is working toward a PhD in virology.”

  Jesus. These brainy women.

  “Did she have a—a power?” Jon sounded like he was choking, and Nick understood where he was coming from. Women already had all sorts of powers without any of the woo-woo stuff. But these chicks had real powers and their men would just have to suck it up.

  Elle pursed her lips. “Not that could be tested, though we were only at the beginning of the trial. But—” She hesitated. “She’s a healer. She never talks about it, but I saw her close up a nasty wound with her touch. It comes with a heavy price, though. She was weak for days after that.” Elle hesitated. “Corona didn’t know. Nobody knew. But she passed an fMRI screening test and was enrolled in the program. Like me she was also tasked with recovering and collating data.”