by Harper Allen
A woven-steel garrote had been part of the standard weapons issue for Lab 33 internal security for as long as she could remember…and for as long as she could remember, she’d instinctively known that particular weapon had been issued with only one opponent in mind. She could survive a bullet or a knife but, as she’d told Peters, she was an ordinary human being in some respects…one of which was that she couldn’t survive without oxygen.
So be it, Dawn thought with deadly calm. If I die, I die knowing I’ve taken him with—
Without warning the throbbing shot through her head again. As fast as it had come it faded, and as her vision cleared she realized something had disconcerted Peters. His next words revealed what that something had been.
“The last thing I expected to see in your eyes when I questioned your loyalty was pain, but apparently the psych profile Drs. Wang and Sobie prepared on you was accurate,” he said slowly. “This changes everything.” He leaned back in his chair. “It seems I misjudged you, Dawn. Welcome home.”
“It’s good to be back.” Her clipped reply betrayed nothing of the relief sweeping through her. You did it, O’Shaughnessy! she thought in fierce exultation. You lied through your teeth to Aldrich Peters and the bastard bought it. Now nothing can stop you from—
“Unfortunately, your little vacation couldn’t have been more regrettably timed.” Peters’s composure was firmly back in place. “You’re dying.”
The man was a consummate manipulator, Dawn thought in disbelief, but whether he knew it or not his days of manipulating her were over. “Either I’m cleared for duty or I’m not,” she said tightly. “But if you think I’m going to jump through any more of your psychological hoops, forget it. I’ve had enough of—”
“I broke it to you clumsily, but believe me, it’s the truth.” He shook his head with every appearance of regret. “To put it as simply as I can, your genes are breaking down. I’ve had my best people working on the problem for almost a year, but although we’ve isolated the triggering factor, we haven’t been able to perfect the reversal process.”
“Almost a year.” Her mind still processing his stunning news, Dawn seized on the one detail she felt able to deal with. “You mean you knew about this before I went AWOL and you didn’t inform me?”
“If I’d suspected you were thinking of taking some unauthorized R and R, I would have,” Peters countered. “Be thankful that the medicals and psychological evaluations the doctors here have subjected you to all your life drew our attention to this as soon as it started to show up. Lab 33’s always had your best interests at heart.”
“Lab 33 has always had Lab 33’s best interests at heart. And Lab 33’s best interests include knowing the inner workings of their human lab rat,” she answered flatly. “Spare me the hearts and flowers, Doctor, and cut to the chase. How much time do I have?”
“Worst-case scenario, twenty-one days. The degeneration of your genes is following a mathematically predictable time line that can be precisely charted.” The well-tailored shoulders of his suit jacket lifted in a shrug. “We don’t know exactly when the symptoms will start, but they should begin exhibiting soon. Unfortunately, we don’t know what they’ll be, either.” He hesitated. “About the only thing besides the time line that we know for certain from our experiments is that your death will be painful. In effect, your body will turn on itself.”
She’d taken on every conceivable enemy during her dangerous career. She’d gone up against those enemies, confident that she would be their final and ultimately unbeatable opponent. Was it irony or simple justice that her own final battle would be desperately waged and lost against herself?
Simple justice, O’Shaughnessy, Dawn thought bleakly. Justice was the only word that fit when the genes that had helped her become Lab 33’s killing machine were the very ones that would bring about her—
Her thoughts came to a halt as a terrible realization filled her. Her mind went blank with fear before it grasped a possible glimmer of hope.
“You said worst-case scenario is that I have twenty-one days,” she said through stiff lips. “What’s the best case?”
Aldrich Peters steepled his fingers on the desk. “Your survival, of course. And there’s a good chance we can achieve that, now you’re on board with Lab 33 again.”
It took the space of a heartbeat for her to comprehend what lay behind his smile. When she did, it took all her self-control not to jerk Peters’s silk tie into a noose and end everything there and then.
“You know how to reverse the process and you deliberately let me think it was hopeless?” Her hands clenched into fists at her sides. “Enough with the games, Doctor. Let’s get started with my treatment.”
Because the sooner I receive it, the sooner I can get word to the Cassandras that Faith and Lynn are probably facing the same genetic breakdown, she thought. Maybe I deserve to pay for my past that way, but they don’t. And even if it means I have to push my own personal agenda back a little, I’m going to make sure they won’t.
She wasn’t giving up the payback that was coming to her, but Kayla had been right—despite the fact that she barely knew them, despite the very different lives they’d led, her sisters were her first priority.
“Get one thing straight.” Peters’s voice was a whiplash. “If I choose to make you sweat a little to bring you back into line after your irresponsible disappearance, you’ll take it and like it. Yes, we can create a reversal serum, and yes, as a slap on the wrist I didn’t immediately reveal its existence to you. But I agree, the tit for tat stops here…because you’re leaving Lab 33 tonight on an assignment for me.”
She shook her head decisively. “No deal. I get the serum before I take on the job.”
“Getting the serum is the job.” A wintry smile crossed his features as he dropped his bombshell. “Our scientists are missing the final piece of the puzzle that will allow them to formulate the reversal serum. In fact, there’s only one man in the world who’s possibly cracked the puzzle.”
“Possibly?” she repeated blankly. “Dammit, you’re not sure?”
“That’s part of your assignment—to ascertain he’s made the breakthrough we believe he has.”
“Why not simply ask him?” she retorted. “Don’t scientists practically fall all over themselves to publicize their findings?”
“Most do.” Peters’s lips thinned. “Sir William London’s the exception, a paranoid megalomaniac who won’t reveal anything until he’s ready. He’s also the greatest genius the world has ever known in the field of genetics.”
“So I’m to break into the research facility where London works, steal his notes and bring them back for our people to use. Getting past a few security guards should be easy enough,” Dawn said in defeat.
A simple B & E she could live with, she told herself edgily. At worst she’d have to temporarily disable a guard or two, but she’d make sure no one got seriously hurt.
And if it hadn’t been a simple break and enter? If you’d been ordered to kill for the serum, would you have stepped over the line once more to save yourself and your sisters? The uncomfortable question came to her before she could thrust it away. She didn’t know, Dawn admitted. She’d made a vow never to carry out Aldrich Peters’s murderous orders again, but if the serum was all that stood between her sisters and a terrible death….
Pain spiked with sudden intensity behind her eyes. She fought against it as Peters pulled a sheaf of papers toward him with a frown.
“I should have made myself clear. Sir William is funded by the Defense Department in a joint venture with the British, and his laboratory’s inside a compound in the middle of the Arizona desert. It’s guarded by a crack team of military personnel headed by a certain Captain Des Asher—who’s not only London’s nephew, but a highly trained British Special Air Services officer. You’ll pose as a research assistant and get close to London that way.”
He held the papers out to her. “Study Asher’s military bio. He’s going to be your big
gest obstacle, so assassinate him first.”
Chapter 2
Status: nineteen days and counting
Time: 2300 hours
She was going up against Des Asher naked. She couldn’t deny that there was a tiny ripple of excitement deep inside her at the thought.
With deliberate clumsiness, Dawn shifted the gears of the junker hatchback she was driving and was rewarded by the labored whine of an engine being pushed beyond its limits. She shifted again, this time correctly.
Of course, naked just meant without weapons. The most lethal piece of hardware anyone would find on her if she were searched was a nail file…and although she could remember an instance when, armed with little more, she’d taken out a couple of sadistic goons without even messing up the polish she’d been applying when they’d burst in on her, she didn’t think a nail file would raise any red flags as far as Des Asher’s people were concerned.
Especially not when it was being carried by Dawn Swanson.
“Swanson’s never done the horizontal mambo, way I see it. I mean, repressed? Chick’s a total man-hater, plus she’s a dweeb,” Carter Johnson had said with a grin two nights ago when she’d left Peters’s office and reported to Lab 33’s Identities Department. He’d extracted a glossy eight-by-ten photo from a file and passed it to her. “Check out your new hair, babe. Not that the big boss man told me any more than he had to, but with the rock-solid credentials I’ve created for you, I’m guessing this isn’t a simple in-and-out assignment where a wig would be enough. After we’re through here, you’ll be scooting that fine butt of yours over to Helga for the works—a bad cut, an even worse perm and a mud-brown dye job.” His grin widened. “I almost forgot the bottle-lens glasses we got for you to wear. Behind them your eyes look way magnified, but Carlos in Research and Development made them so they won’t affect your vision at all. Man, I love this job!”
Carter was one of Lab 33’s youngest employees, probably close to her own age. Much to the irritation of the older staff, he cultivated an indie-rebel air, wearing his hair in a spiky, bed-head style and using a skateboard to cruise up and down Lab 33’s endless corridors. But Dawn wasn’t taken in by his “Dude, where’s my wheels?” manner. He worked here. That meant two things: one, he had to be the best at what he did, which was creating false identities and the documentation to back them up; and two, he’d willingly sold his soul to Aldrich Peters—either for money or because of some crime he’d committed in the past that Peters had made go away.
Whatever the reason, Carter Johnson wasn’t the boy next door. He was part of an organization that made the Mafia look like pussycats. To complicate matters, he’d borne a grudge against her ever since she’d told him, in no uncertain terms, that she didn’t intend to date him until she had definite confirmation hell had frozen over.
She’d returned the photo to him. “Go back to the computer and reconfigure this. No perm. My hair stays the length it is. I’ll go with a temporary rinse and wear it scraped into a bun while I’m undercover as Little Miss Repressed. When I walk out of here, I’ll be Dawn Swanson, right down to the baggy science-geek sweatshirt, but that persona’s not going to come from clothes or a hairstyle, it’s going to come from me. If you’ve got a problem with that, we’ll go talk to the big boss, as you refer to Dr. Peters, together.”
She’d won that round, Dawn reflected now as she deliberately clashed the hatchback’s gears again. It hadn’t been until she’d reached the motel where she’d stayed last night and read the extensive bio prepared for her—a bio she’d later burned before flushing the charred scraps down the motel room’s toilet—that she’d realized Carter, with his own waspish sense of revenge, had gotten the last laugh.
Swanson lives, breathes and sleeps fruit flies and genetics, the typed pages had informed her. Since seventy-two-year-old Sir William London is the world authority on her chosen passion, Swanson hero-worships him to the point of having a kind of crush on him. Several of the contacts we’ve blackmailed to supply references on our fictitious lab technician will mention the poster that supposedly hung above her bed at her college dorm—the famous shot of Sir William taken just before he won his first Nobel Prize in ’58, when he was one of Oxford’s “crazy young men.”
In the margin, Carter had added a penciled note: Who knows, O’Shaughnessy, you might get lucky with the old geezer. Here’s hoping, girlfriend!
“And here’s hoping that when the Cassandras and I take down Lab 33, you spend the rest of your sorry life behind bars,” Dawn muttered. She narrowed her gaze as the hatchback’s headlights cut through the desert blackness to illuminate an unmarked secondary road up ahead. Although the slight rises and dips in the terrain made it impossible to see what lay ahead, the road had to be the turnoff to London’s small but highly secure laboratory complex. She felt a surge of anticipation run through her. Since sound carried in arid terrain such as this, more so at night, her little maneuvers with the gears hadn’t been premature. They’d insured that any sentry with ears sharp enough to catch the first faint sounds of a vehicle approaching wouldn’t have heard Dawn O’Shaughnessy driving with her usual speed and skill, but Dawn Swanson, a woman who preferred to be surrounded by test tubes and petri dishes instead of behind the wheel of a car.
Live the lie, Dawnie. Unbidden, the tobacco-roughened voice of Lee Craig broke through her concentration, so clearly that he might have been sitting beside her in the dark. That’s the first rule of deep cover. Forget who you are and become the identity you’ve taken on. It’s not always easy…but once in a while you might even find yourself wishing you didn’t have to go back to being the real you.
This time when she geared down there was no pretence in her mishandling of the car’s controls. As she made the turnoff the hatchback veered dangerously close to the crumbling verge of the dirt road before she corrected its course.
“Don’t worry, Lee,” she said savagely under her breath. “I’m living the lie, just like you did, you bastard. And like you, when my cover’s outlived its usefulness I won’t forget who I am and what my real agenda is. You took down my mother. I’m going to take out Aldrich—”
Her words were cut off by a gasp and the hatchback swerved again. Her responses hampered by the intense pain behind her eyes, Dawn’s corrective maneuver came a split second too late. She felt the rear end of the car slide off the road, felt the back tires fight for purchase on the sandy soil, heard them churning uselessly as they merely dug themselves deeper.
The hatchback stalled. The pain behind her eyes faded. Her hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly that her knuckles showed white in the greenish glow from the instrument panel.
It was time to face facts, she thought numbly. Lab 33’s scientists might not know what the symptoms of her gene degeneration would be, but she couldn’t fool herself any longer. She’d never had a headache in her life before now, just as she’d never caught a cold or contracted the normal childhood bouts of measles and mumps and tonsillitis. So the migraines she’d been experiencing with increasing frequency over the past few months had to be a first warning signal of—
Before her train of thought could reach its logical conclusion, she jerked open the driver’s side door and stepped swiftly from the car. Striding toward the back of the stalled vehicle, she planted her hands on her hips and glared at the deep depressions in the sand where the rear tires were now embedded.
But standing still was a mistake. Unwillingly she found her mind completing the deduction she’d tried to thrust aside. If the loss of her invulnerability to common human ailments was the first symptom of her genetic breakdown, what else would be taken from her before she returned to Lab 33 with London’s research?
In effect, your body will turn on itself. Peters’s words had filled her with dread at the time, but only now could she fully comprehend the horrific possibilities of his prediction. Her sight—would it slowly dim or would she suddenly be plunged into a world of darkness? Or maybe it would be her reflexes that would desert
her at the very moment she needed them, or her hearing or her strength or—
Her lips tightening, she bent to grab the rust-specked bumper of the hatchback. She took a deep breath and heaved.
Even for her, it was a near-impossible effort. She felt the muscles in her arms scream in protest, felt her balance shift treacherously as the sandy soil beneath her feet crumbled. Sweat beading her brow and running down behind the heavy horn-rimmed glasses Carter had provided her with, she set her jaw in grim determination and began pivoting the rear of the car toward the road.
There was a possibility that the security measures guarding Sir William London’s laboratory included roving teams patrolling past the fenced perimeter of the facility. If even one of those teams came upon her now, not only would her Dawn Swanson cover be blown, but the enhanced abilities she’d always been so careful about revealing would be immediately exposed. She was taking an insane chance.
She didn’t care. All that was important right now was that she accomplish the superhuman task she’d set herself.
“This is what you are.” The barely intelligible words came from her in a strained grunt as she took another trembling step sideways, the tendons in her shoulders feeling as though they were about to pop. “No matter what you told Peters, you’ll never be an ordinary woman—not like Kayla, with her unshakable integrity, or the rest of the Cassandras, who’ve found support in one another. Your strength and abilities may have come from a test tube, but they’re all you have. And when they’re gone…”