Heart of Danger

by Lisa Marie Rice

  Okay, so he’d start the dance.

  “Who the fuck are you and why are you looking for this guy—what the hell was his name?”

  She never blinked. “Tom McEnroe. I’m looking for Tom McEnroe.”

  Mac had been trained to lie by the best. His eyes gave absolutely nothing away. “Never heard of him,” he said. “And who are you? I’m not going to ask a third time, lady.”

  She drew in a deep breath and he kept his eyes on her face. Because for a slender woman, she had a really great rack. Which had nothing to do with anything, of course. Just an observation.

  He was definitely going to head down the mountain next week and get laid, though.

  “My name is Catherine Young,” she said quietly. “Dr. Catherine Young. I am a neuroscientist and I work in a research lab, Millon Laboratories, about twenty miles north of Palo Alto. All of which you obviously read from documents in my purse. I am also an expert on dementia.”

  She stopped, as if giving him time to react.

  Mac simply waited.

  Dementia, huh? Maybe that was his problem. He was demented for not knocking her out and leaving her three hundred miles away from here. Yeah, he was losing it.

  He couldn’t see it, but he knew Jon was tapping away at his virtual keyboard. The woman had barely finished talking when Jon’s voice came in over the invisible ear pod.

  “She’s telling the truth, boss. Catherine Anne Young, born August 8, 1995. Lives on University Road, Palo Alto.” Low whistle. “Got more degrees than my dog has fleas. Cum laude, too. That is one smart lady. I’m looking at her driver’s license, photo matches, and am now looking at . . . ah. At her company ID. Millon Labs. It all checks out.”

  Mac gave an almost imperceptible nod, which she wouldn’t catch but Jon would.

  Then Jon came back on. “Whoa, boss. Millon, the company she works for? It’s owned by Futura Technology. And guess who the final owner of Futura is?” Jon sometimes got carried away with his own smarts. Mac could almost see him smacking himself on the forehead because of course Mac couldn’t answer. “Sorry, boss. Arka Pharmaceuticals. That’s who. Our luscious Dr. Young ultimately works for Arka.”

  Arka Pharmaceuticals. Their last mission. He and Jon and Nick had almost died on that mission and it had made them outlaws. The false intel that Arka Pharmaceuticals was working on a weaponized form of Yersinia pestis—the bubonic plague—had cost them everything.

  Because there had been no plague, only some very bright scientists working on a cure for cancer. Because the mission had cost him his entire team. Only he, Jon and Nick had escaped. And because he and his entire team had been betrayed by their commander, a man they had all loved.

  That was Arka Pharmaceuticals. And that was the company this woman ultimately worked for.

  Mac didn’t believe in coincidences. She might look soft, she might not be an operator in the technical sense and she might well be a doctor with degrees coming out her ears, but his first instinct was correct.

  This woman was dangerous.

  “Go on.” She’d stopped and continued studying his face, as if it was giving something away. Good luck with that. His face didn’t give anything away.

  “I work mainly in the lab, but we have a ward of test subjects suffering from severe rapid-onset dementia. Men and women who are so far gone they can’t remember their names, can’t remember anything about their past. Some are barely sentient. We’re working on a cure for dementia, a way to reestablish the synapses that have been lost. I’ll spare you the technical details. Our protocols are highly experimental, very cutting-edge, but several offer a great deal of promise. Each test subject was informed of the risks at a time when two neurologists certified that they were of sound mind and each patient signed a release. Or, failing that, a family member with power of attorney signed. The patients were assigned numbers, which I would have objected to, but they were all well beyond recognizing their own names. There was one patient in the protocol group, however, known as Number Nine . . .”

  Her voice trailed off and she looked down at her hands, trying to think of what to say next.

  Mac let the silence go on for a while. Finally, he made an impatient gesture with his hand. “Number Nine? What was the matter with Patient Number Nine? Besides being nearly brain-dead.”

  Her eyes lifted. She had truly beautiful eyes. A light gray, rimmed with a circle of darker gray, surrounded by amazingly long, thick eyelashes. Possibly even her own, since she didn’t seem to be wearing makeup.

  Shit. What was the matter with him? Letting himself be distracted by pretty eyes during an interrogation that might have life-or-death consequences. Lack of sex wasn’t an excuse. There wasn’t any excuse. He forced himself to focus.

  She just stared at him. Her face was soft, open, vulnerable. Much as Mac wanted to read operational awareness and craft in her expression, he simply wasn’t seeing it. Everything he’d ever learned about interrogation techniques was signaling something impossible. Either she was very, very good—better than anyone he’d ever come across—or the woman wasn’t lying. Was no threat to him.

  Except . . . she’d come looking for him in a snowstorm. For him specifically.

  Of course she was a fucking threat.

  “Dr. Young?”

  She started slightly, as if she’d gone into a trance. There were white brackets around her mouth and her nostrils were pinched. She’d driven up a mountain in a snowstorm and had nearly gone into hypothermia. She’d be exhausted. Now that he thought of it, he looked for signs of exhaustion and found them. She was swaying lightly in her chair as if sitting up straight took effort.

  Mac had a thin membrane on his left forearm which was a keypad. He pulled up the sleeve of his sweater and typed under the table—bring food and something hot to drink in 30 min—and nearly smiled at the treat awaiting this woman, who didn’t deserve it.

  They had the best chef in the world here in Haven.

  He lifted his hands up from under the table and gestured impatiently.

  “What about this Number Nine? Who was he?”

  “Number Nine was a large man, fifty-three years of age, according to his file, though he looked much older. Dementia patients often look ten, even twenty years older than they are. They are incapable of looking after themselves and age rapidly. Number Nine’s files said he was a business executive who had worked for a succession of companies, the turnover being extremely rapid in the previous four years. This is consistent with a diagnosis of a dementing disorder. He’d be hired on the basis of his track record, then the company would discover he wasn’t up to the job. And then soon, of course, the track record was one of failure. Divorced, no children. His medical plan didn’t cover a shelter home. He enrolled himself in the program, while he was still capable of signing documents. Everything was normal, if anything about these patients can be considered normal.”

  Her eyes flicked to a pitcher and she cleared her throat. “May I have a glass of water?”

  He poured her a glass and she drank, that long white throat bobbing. When Mac realized he was avidly watching her drink, he turned his gaze away.

  Christ.

  “Thank you.” She put the glass down and smiled at him. He didn’t smile back. It wasn’t a smiling kind of situation. But as smiles went, hers was a thousand on a scale of one to ten. Slightly shy, warm. Creating a tiny dimple on her left cheek.

  Oh, fuck me. Get back on track.

  “So something about this guy—this Number Nine—didn’t add up?”

  “There was something about him, yes, that was unusual. We have developed a semiportable functional MRI and we use it to track changes in the patients’ brain scans. Seeing what stimulates various parts of the brain, particularly under the drug protocol.

  “Dementia has many origins. Sometimes it is a series of mini strokes that choke off oxygen to sections of the brain, making them essentially dead tissue. Alzheimer’s is the result of plaque that tangles the synpases, exactly as if the bra
in gums up. All of these have distinct fMRI signatures. Number Nine had something else altogether. The brain scan of this patient made no sense to me. His brain was damaged in a completely new way. The clinical symptoms were consistent with dementia but the scans weren’t. Dementia patients have a general overall degradation of function due either to apoxia or plaque, in the case of Alzheimer’s. Mainly centered around the hippocampus. Here I was seeing degradation of the striatum, unusually so. The patterns were strange. If I hadn’t seen the patient myself, I would have said that his brain had been . . . destroyed by an outside force. A little like a cloak thrown over the higher functions. But underneath, the scan showed a great deal of activity, like a banked fire. He tried to communicate verbally, but it wasn’t working. He became exhausted. Dementia patients forget words. It didn’t seem like this patient forgot words so much as was unable to physically get them out.”

  Though Mac still didn’t see the connection, the fact that this was a company controlled by Arka Pharmaceuticals made it definitely his business.

  “So . . . what? You read his mind?”

  His sarcasm got more of a reaction than he thought it would. She jerked slightly, eyes rounded.

  “No.” She drew in a deep breath. “No, I didn’t read his mind. They don’t teach that at med school. I found the key by sheer chance. I was typing my notes onto my iPad when his head jerked. His eyes went from my pad to me and then back to the tablet. I turned my tablet around and was astonished when he started keying in letters.”

  “Okay,” Mac said. “I’ll bite.”

  “He wrote that I should say nothing and turn off the vidcams. I have a security code that allows me to do that. However, so it wouldn’t alert the guards watching the monitors or any bots that might have been established, I simply created a loop of him sleeping.”

  Smart thinking. Even if she wasn’t an operator, she had some good moves in her. But then, Mac reflected, you don’t get several Ph.D.s by being dumb.

  “From then on, we communicated laboriously, by fits and starts, over the course of two days. The first thing he told me is that his name wasn’t the name we had in our files, Edward Domino, which immediately made me suspicious. Dementia can merge into psychosis easily, and dementing patients are often paranoid. I’ve had patients who insisted they were John Kennedy, George Washington, Marco Polo, Albert Einstein. So I was prepared to hear something preposterous, but he gave me another name which meant nothing to me. I have a feeling, however, that it might mean something to you.”

  She stopped, looking at him. Mac turned his face to stone.

  She sighed. “Lucius Ward.”

  “Holy. Shit,” Jon’s voice said in his ear. Mac could hear Nick swearing in the background.

  “The name means nothing to me,” Mac said, raising his eyebrows slightly. He felt as if he’d been sucker-punched but nothing showed on his face. “Why should it?”

  “I have no idea. All I know is the fierce determination of this man—whether he was Edward Domino or Lucius Ward makes no difference to me. He communicated with great difficulty, he sweated and he shook, but he wouldn’t give up. He repeated his name and said I absolutely had to find Tom McEnroe. That’s a direct quote. He spent an hour, white-faced with fatigue, telling me this. He also gave me something.” She dug in a pants pocket and brought something out in a small fist. She tossed it onto the table, where it rolled a few times, then stopped a few inches from Mac’s hand. He stared at it, barely able to breathe.

  “Jesus Christ.” This time it was Nick’s voice coming in over his earbud. “The Captain’s Hawk.”

  It looked like nothing. A tiny, almost invisible pin made of black metal. Only under a microscope could you see that it was beautifully detailed. The pin was a hawk in flight, perfectly crafted down to individual feathers, a tiny gold stripe running down its back. It was made from the barrel of the gun that had killed bin Laden.

  It was the badge of a Ghost. Ghosts were banned from having flashes or insignia of any sort. They were even banned from wearing U.S. military uniforms. They were only allowed that one tiny badge, smaller than a shirt button. There had been only seven of them in the world, and only one with a thin stripe of gold. The one that belonged to the Ghosts’ commanding officer, Captain Lucius Ward.

  One thing Mac knew—traitor or no traitor, Lucius would have relinquished his Hawk pin only on death or in the direst emergency. Even if he’d betrayed his men, even if he’d sold them out, even if absolutely everything Mac thought he knew about Lucius was wrong, this one thing wasn’t wrong. It would take a cataclysm or death to pry Lucius’s Hawk from his fingers.

  “Do you know what that is?” she asked.

  He searched her eyes for irony but found nothing. She was genuinely puzzled. Well, considering the fact that the existence of Ghost Ops was SCI—secret compartmented information—and that only a handful of people in the world knew about them, and even fewer knew of their secret badge, it was entirely possible she had no idea what the Hawk was.

  “No.” He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. “Should I?”

  “I have no idea.” She closed her hand over the Hawk and held it casually. Not knowing that the little metal pin represented blood, sweat and tears on a vast scale and was the symbol of a man Mac, Jon and Nick had loved like a father. A man who’d betrayed them. Who’d led them into a trap of fire, sacrificed them as casually as you’d swat at flies. For money.

  She sighed. “He was trembling when he gave it to me, as if it were something that meant a great deal to him. But he was trembling before then anyway. The more we communicated, the more motor control he lost.” She raised her eyes to his. “Even more important than the badge, though, it seems, was to find this Tom McEnroe and give him a message.”

  “And what message would that be?” Mac asked, his voice casual, though his heart had begun a low, deep thumping inside his chest. This was way beyond what he had bargained for.

  The three of them had simply assumed Lucius had disappeared with his money to some Caribbean island or some enclave in Southeast Asia. If there was one man in the world who knew how to disappear, it was Lucius Ward. He was a master of the art.

  They’d often bitterly speculated how he would be in some tropical paradise, a rich man, while they lived as outlaws.

  And then it turned out he was in some lab only two hundred miles from here? Hurt and sick? For a moment, Mac battled with himself. The idea of the boss hurt and sick and alone was impossible to bear. He could hardly sit in the same place with the thought and his hands literally itched to get going, to go get the Captain who was . . .

  The man who had betrayed them. Mac had to keep reminding himself of that. The Captain had betrayed them, led them into a trap, left them to die.

  She opened her hand and studied the small badge thoughtfully, as if answers could be found in it.

  “He said—he said I had to find this—this Mac.” She lifted her head and Mac saw pain and sorrow in those huge gray eyes. “He said when I found him to tell him Code Delta. I don’t know what that means.”

  But Mac did.

  Danger.

  The huge man leaned back in his chair, fist beating lightly on the desktop. Catherine’s heart rate jumped even though he wasn’t giving off danger vibes. Or rather, though he looked dangerous, very dangerous, he didn’t seem out of control, and he hadn’t threatened her directly.

  Most violent men had their temper on a short leash. It took very little to set them off, and anything could do it. A wrong word, a wrong look.

  Catherine had dated a man once. They’d met in a bookshop, reaching for the same book. They’d had coffee in the in-shop Starbucks and he asked her out to dinner the next night. Catherine was wary of men, but he’d seemed so nice—soft-spoken, funny and smart. They hadn’t touched but she’d liked him. They’d had a great meal. Back in his car, she’d decided to let him kiss her and that she’d accept another dinner invitation. And maybe on the weekend she’d invite him ove
r for lunch.

  Nice and slow. The way she liked it.

  And he’d leaned over, fisted his hand in her hair and kissed her hard, aggressively, opening her jaw with his other hand and thrusting with his tongue. He took her completely by surprise and she resisted.

  He liked that. Oh yeah he liked that. A lot.

  And what he was inside, under that nice, bland exterior, rushed like ice over her skin. Swirls of violence filled her head, red-tinted and hot. Sickness pulsed through her in nauseating waves, nearly overwhelming her. It had been there all along, and she hadn’t seen it because she hadn’t touched him. She recognized at his kiss that violence filled him, as if his skin was a sack full to the brim with it. All it took was the slightest abrasion and the skin broke and aggression and violence came geysering out.

  She’d pushed at him and run to her small house, slamming the door behind her, panting. Listening until, finally, she heard his car tires squeal as he took off fast.

  That night had been like a watershed, the lowest point of her life. After slamming the door shut, she’d slid down the wall, huddling in on herself and trembling for hours.

  It had occurred to her for the first time that maybe this was it. It was never going to get better, ever. She’d misjudged the man because she kept herself so isolated. And she kept herself isolated because her gift poisoned the well whenever she wanted to get close to someone.

  The episode scared her so much she hadn’t touched a man since, for fear she’d chance upon someone else just brimming with violence.

  That wasn’t the impression she was getting here, though granted, she wasn’t touching him. What she got was impenetrable granite. Massive self-control. What was under it was invisible to her. It might be violence, it might not, but whatever it was, it wasn’t going to come geysering out. It wasn’t going to come out at all.

  She met his eyes. Women tended to look people in the eye, but some men interpreted that as aggression, as lack of respect, and responded accordingly. She didn’t get the sense in any way that this man was out of control. On the contrary. Every single line of his big body remained still, clearly leashed to his will.