Lisa Marie Rice - [Ghost Ops]

by I Dream of Danger

  Millon Laboratories at Palo Alto. Before the facility had been destroyed. Lee clenched his fists at the memory. Catherine Young had suddenly risen up and bit her employer in the ass. She’d taken a huge bite out of him and had almost brought his entire project down. Years of work nearly destroyed because of one woman and the faceless men who’d helped her.

  He had a small part of the attack on tape, though it had been mostly destroyed by something the faceless men had done to his security system. His very, very expensive security system.

  It still burned.

  He’d recognized Young immediately of course, brazenly breaking into his facility with the use of a cloned pass.

  The lab had been hidden and illegal, given the type of testing that had gone on. He’d had to go in and complete the destruction she’d wrought so that when the authorities came to investigate, he’d been able to plausibly state that the extra underground floor was merely equipment storage space. There hadn’t been any technical experts in the law enforcement team, luckily. But he’d had to buy off the three technicians who’d worked on the floor, and it had cost him. Money, time, effort.

  Flynn had placed him under pressure, then Beijing had placed him under pressure.

  That’s not how science worked. Science proceeded at its own stately pace. Putting pressure on the scientific process was an abomination. This was something nonscientists like Flynn were simply incapable of understanding.

  What Lee was working on had the potential to change the world forever, as momentous as the harnessing of electricity. More so, even, as it would change the nature of a part of humanity. This was not something that could be done in a hurry and sloppily.

  Injecting himself with SL-61 had been a stroke of genius, because he felt stronger and more intellectually acute than ever. He felt, for want of a better word, invincible.

  There had been a missing element, though. An element he’d discerned in an animal experiment on the hidden Level 4 the night the laboratory was destroyed.

  How he’d loved Level 4. It had been his very own reign, a place where he held the power of life and death, a place where he created living organisms. A place where he’d been a god. He’d carried out extensive animal testing on Level 4 that would have been illegal under the Animal Testing Bill. The experiments might have been illegal according to a bill passed by a lobby of fanatical men and women who cared more for dumb creatures than for science, but they had been necessary. He’d been testing iterations of SL that would increase strength and speed and intelligence.

  He and the SL drugs had been conducting a kind of dance. Two steps forward and one step backward, then three steps forward and two steps backward, then one step forward and three steps backward. Then ten steps forward.

  Of course, it was immensely complex, as he was effecting change at the cellular level and trying to make it stable. He was speeding up evolution itself, something no one else in the history of the world had ever attempted. And he was succeeding, damn it. Every single trial that ended with a problem also unveiled a new possibility.

  It was impossible to explain to that moron Flynn. To his astonishment, though, it also proved impossible to explain to the Ministry of Science in Beijing. Nobody cared about the process, about the secrets to life itself, which he was unlocking. All they cared about were tangible results. A drug that would increase the capabilities of soldiers in the field, that would prove stable over time and that was cheap to produce.

  In any hands but his it would have been impossible.

  Up to that point there’d been fifty-nine iterations. Nothing compared to Edison’s 10,000 failed attempts. Lee had only tried fifty-nine times, but that fifty-ninth …

  Deep below the earth, in the animal lab, Lee had found part of the key to changing the world in an animal cage housing a bonobo. There’d been ten bonobos, big, healthy apes genetically predisposed to peaceful behavior. SL-59 had had a negative effect on nine of them. They’d turned listless and died.

  But the tenth …

  Lee watched the holographic recording. He’d been watching it over and over again while poring over the analyses of the blood and brain tissue. He’d gone back postmortem to the original MRIs and had discovered something that had escaped his researchers’ notice—a slight anomaly of the hypothalamus and increased temperature of the periaqueductal gray of the midbrain. Both qualities had increased notably after administration of SL-59.

  In the hologram, so clear someone else in the room would have difficulty in distinguishing between now and three months earlier, he stood before a transparent Plexiglas cage, watching the beautiful animal inside.

  The hologram clearly showed all the data contained in the data infocubes at the forefront of the cage. Gender, genetic history, MRI and CAT scans, IQ test results, dosages, and times of injections of SL-59.

  The other bonobos had been sitting in their cages, movements slow, eyes lifeless.

  Bonobo Number Eight, though. Ah, he wasn’t sitting listlessly. No, he was upright, well-balanced, brown eyes sharp. In the hologram, Lee stood studying him and it was clear that the animal was studying him right back.

  The camera had been at Lee’s back so he couldn’t see his own face but he knew that he’d glanced down to see the EKG tracing at that point. Bonobos were peaceable within their own groups, but grew agitated in the presence of other species.

  Number Eight’s heart rate remained unchanged.

  Amazing. Either the bonobo had developed an ability to control its own heart rate or an instinctive fear had been overridden by the drug. Perhaps both. And then something remarkable had happened. The animal had checked Lee’s hands for weapons and his eyes for intent. There had been no mistaking the raw intelligence in the animal.

  They had stood there for a minute or two, gauging each other, two beings on either side of a species divide.

  Then the bonobo had smashed itself against the Plexiglas trying to get to him, beating itself into a pulp.

  But those few minutes had been enough to give Lee an insight into attenuating the intensity of the violence while retaining the intelligence, and that insight had led to a virus-borne bit of genetic engineering that he thought represented the breakthrough they needed.

  SL-59 hadn’t worked and SL-60 hadn’t worked. But SL-62 … ah.

  And an hour ago he’d injected himself with the drug.

  In the hologram he watched as the bonobo killed itself against the glass in a frenzy of ferocity. When the animal finally lay on the straw-covered floor of the Plexiglas cage, a ruined sack of broken bones, Lee hit rewind.

  He stood and watched, once more, that moment in which he and the bonobo faced each other down.

  As he watched that moment again, he felt strength course through his system, oxygen flowing deep and rich in his veins, bringing blood to his muscular system. He felt each muscle almost separately, felt how well each muscle fit together with the others to form a strong and powerful whole. Though he was on the twenty-second floor of a skyscraper in the Financial District, he felt as if he were barefoot in the jungle, connected to the earth through skin and blood and bone, taking strength from the earth, giving it back.

  The hologram switched off and he went to the window to look out over the city. He lifted his hand and placed it against the glass and it was as if his hand passed through the glass, out into the city, reaching down to the tiny people below, hurrying to get out of the inclement weather. He could swat them away so easily. Such ants, all that toiling and striving so essentially meaningless. Puny and weak and craving direction.

  Soon their lives would be harnessed to a greater good instead of being so random.

  He would head a triumphant army of supermen. Hadn’t mankind always dreamed of this—of a superior race that would come and lead? All those legends of the gods with immense power over the earth and its creatures—surely their species knew it was always going to end up like this? All Lee had done was speed up the process and place its agency in the right hands.

&nb
sp; Of course, he had the power of the gods too. He could feel it, feel vitality run through him, feel his muscles and sinews reknit into a more powerful whole. Feel his brain rewiring itself. His eyesight was so acute he thought he could see individual strands of hair in the ant-people down below on the street. His hearing was so keen he could hear the centralized air system’s gentle hum. It had started to snow, a bit of sleet mixed in, and he could hear each spicule ping against the window panes. He could hear—

  The door opening.

  “Goddammit, Lee,” Flynn’s grating voice boomed. “What the fuck were you thinking—”

  A hot mist rose in Lee’s mind when he heard Flynn’s voice. The prick. The fucking prick. Every cell in his body pulsed with raw, red hatred.

  Lee flew across the room, grabbing something shiny off his desk, hand punching forward. Flynn’s eyes bugged as he looked down at himself, at the very small shiny handle sticking out from his chest. The handle belonged to a pure titanium letter opener that was deeply embedded in his heart.

  He was dead but he didn’t know it yet.

  Flynn stood, staggered, righted himself, watching as a big red flower blossomed out from the handle, covering his pristine white Armani shirt. He staggered again, fell to one knee, head hanging. Straining sounds came from his throat, though he wasn’t able to formulate any words.

  Good. Flynn talked too much anyway.

  Part of Lee admired the fact that from six feet away, having had to turn around, pass by his desk to pick up the letter opener, he’d still instinctively been able to punch it straight between the ribs and bury it directly into Flynn’s heart.

  Lee stood above the man, watching as the other knee gave out and he fell prone onto the floor. Flynn’s heart continued pumping blood for another two minutes, then the flow slowed then stopped.

  Lee looked at his reflection in the window, brightly lit against the snowy night sky as darkness descended in his mind. His eyes were wide, a slight smile on his lips. He watched for a moment, his ability to recognize the creature in the reflection draining away as quickly as Flynn’s blood had drained from his body.

  Lee looked around, not recognizing anything familiar in his surroundings. He moved into a slight crouch, hands pulling up toward his chest, hands open like claws. Walls … he had to get out. Move. His body craved movement, craved blood. It was sheer chance that he moved toward the wall with the door and not to one of the other three walls. He walked forward and the door, biomorphic and primed to recognize his profile, opened.

  He didn’t question that. There was very little reasoning ability left in him, just enough to recognize a door with an image of stairs and to realize that it led to an exit. The stairs led to the outside world, a world that awaited him.

  He started loping for the stairs.

  A woman stepped out from a door. Her eyes widened when she saw Lee, a binder dropping from her nerveless fingers. “Dr. Lee—” The tone was a question, but it was never answered. Lee jumped to her, hands out to hold her shoulders still as he sank his teeth into her neck. In two strong bites he’d chewed her ear off, then dropped her at his feet, bleeding and twitching.

  Out. He wanted to be out. He was strong and he wanted—no he needed—to hunt. To kill.

  He scrambled down the stairs while he still recognized the concept of stairs. By the time he reached the lobby teeming with people he’d lost the concept. But it didn’t matter because there was plenty of meat here.

  He still recognized the concept of prey.

  In the hallway, the woman slowly rose. She raised a hand to the side of her head and frowned. Pain, wet … She had no words for the sensations she could only feel. Her hands drew up to her chest, formed claws. Kill. She wanted to kill. There was prey around, she could smell it. Unsteady but unyielding, she loped down the corridor where two creatures had appeared.

  Prey.

  Mount Blue

  Eat,” Stella Cummings said, pushing a plate of potato gratin across to Lucius. A very small portion, since he’d only begun to tolerate food. She looked across at him, tortured, suffering yet upright and determined. Any other man would have died a hundred times with what had been done to him. What had been done to her by her stalker was a fraction of what had been done to him, and it had almost destroyed her.

  He was an extraordinary man.

  “That’s all you ever say to me. Eat,” he replied, dark eyes fixed on her. “You’d think I was five years old.”

  Even in his weakened and emaciated state, Lucius Ward was a man to be reckoned with. She definitely didn’t think he was five years old.

  “Eat,” she repeated and smiled at him.

  His face suddenly sharpened. His huge hand covered hers. “God, Stella. You are so beautiful.”

  You are so beautiful. She’d heard versions of that phrase all her life. The word had been pretty when she was a child actress but turned into beautiful right about puberty. Through some accident of bones and hormones, she hadn’t gone through an awkward pubescent phase at all. She’d continued working as an actress all the way through. By the time she was thirty-five, she’d made 120 films and had been considered one of the most beautiful women in the world.

  What had that gotten her? Not much, besides more work. And more work. The men who’d courted her had courted the face, not the person behind it. When they discovered that her life was work, work, work, and very little play, the infatuation disappeared.

  It certainly hadn’t brought her love.

  And now the face was gone.

  “Not so beautiful anymore, Lucius,” she said without any sadness. Crazily, her lost beauty had freed something up in her. Everyone in her life now liked her, not her face. Liked Stella, the member of an underground community and not Stella the remote movie star.

  She was no movie star now. She could never be in the business again. The stalker had sliced her up too badly. Ninety-seven slashes all over, fourteen to her face. One slice had gone right through her cheek, making it impossible to smile on the right side of her face. She looked like someone had put her into a kaleidoscope and shaken it.

  His hand tightened on hers. “Beautiful,” he repeated forcefully.

  Oh God.

  Sex, love—those were things that had completely fled her life after the stalker. There’d been lots of sex before, though not love. But afterward, both had been out of the question. She’d taken refuge in anonymity while her scars had healed as much as they ever would, cooking near Mount Blue in a small diner belonging to the cousin of her former housekeeper. She’d needed to do something, something tangible, with her hands, the way she’d needed to breathe. And Elena had sent her to her cousin, where she’d buried herself in the kitchen in the back and started creating. The greasy spoon became a diner and was on its way to becoming a restaurant when the news told her that her stalker had escaped.

  She’d been on a break, chatting with a customer, a good-looking, mysterious guy who showed up from time to time and who never told her his name. If there was one thing Stella had learned in her life to respect it was privacy. “Don’t ask don’t tell” covered a lot of things, not just one’s sexuality. She didn’t want to talk about herself and he didn’t want to talk about himself, and that suited them both.

  And then the news flash—Steve Gardiner, stalker, slasher, and all-around psycho, who’d convinced the judge to put him in a mental institution instead of the deepest darkest cell on earth, had escaped.

  She’d been talking to Jon when she heard. Suddenly she began to shake all over, the trembles coming from deep in her core. A fear so great she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.

  He’d taken one look at her, seen how terrified and broken she was, and simply brought her up to Mount Blue, to Haven, where she’d joined the community of misfits and runaways and had been happy ever since.

  Here in Haven she’d found companionship and purpose. But love? It hadn’t even occurred to her that she might find it here, of all places.

  She
looked down at the large hand covering hers. She remembered well that terrible night three months ago when Lucius and Miguel Romero, Larry Lundquist, and Bob Pelton had been rescued from a lab that had been like something out of a Nazi concentration camp and brought to Haven. The four men had been starved, full of surgical scars, so weak they couldn’t walk. It had taken Catherine a week of IVs just to get them to be able to sit up in bed.

  That’s when Stella had taken over, making it her personal mission to get them to eat as much good nourishing food as they could hold down.

  Particularly their leader. Lucius Ward. Captain as Mac, Nick, and Jon called him.

  Their respect for him had been evident in every line of their bodies, and once she got to know him, even the terrible tortured version of him, a strong man who had been rendered down to bedrock, she understood why. This was a formidable man in every sense.

  She’d seen him put himself together inch by agonizing inch. If Catherine said to walk ten steps, he’d walk fifty. Grimacing with pain every inch of the way.

  And though he never smiled and the lines in his face clearly showed he’d never been a smiling kind of man, his face lit up when she entered a room.

  So, yes, wow, sex seemed to be on the table.

  But something needed to be said first. “You don’t have to call me beautiful, Lucius,” Stella said gently. “I know I’m not beautiful, not any longer. And if you don’t care, I sure don’t.”

  While she talked his dark eyes roamed over her face, over every inch of it. It was something she was used to. When she’d been beautiful, men had stared openly at her, as if she were something rare and different, belonging to a different species. After she’d been sliced open, people had stared for a different reason, the way you’d stare at a train wreck.

  One of the many things she loved about Haven was that no one seemed even to notice her scars.

  Lucius smiled, pulling at the burn scar on his right cheekbone. He brought her hand to his mouth and placed his lips in the palm of her hand. He kept it there for a long time, so long that she moved the tips of her fingers over the skin around his mouth, feeling a few scars, feeling the small bite of his heavy beard.