Intimate Danger

by Amy J. Fetzer

  Clancy was still staring at them. “How are you feeling?”

  Mike glanced at her, frowning. “You can put us all under a microscope later, babe,” he said. He’d personally strip for her.

  “You have to admit, it hasn’t had any adverse effect on you, and it could be the same for them.”

  “What’s she talking about?”

  Mike gave Clancy a let’s get out of here first look, then grabbed a torch off the wall and eased into the gap in the wall stretching up more than forty feet. Behind her Krane and DiFazio did the same.

  Mike looked at the compass on his watch, and though it was jumping, it was a general direction. South. Near the river. They moved swiftly, all but Clancy’s head grazing the ceiling, and when they met a fork Mike kept walking.

  She touched him, stopping him.

  “I hear water,” he said.

  Clancy didn’t hear a damn thing.

  A few more steps and she heard the chime, the copper coin medallions on their costumes making a soft clink. Krane and DiFazio moved past her just as the Indians rushed them. Mike used his ammo to clear a path, and then Krane and DiFazio instinctively sandwiched her between them and guided her past the dead.

  “There’s a chamber, I think, but I see light.”

  Clancy moved up beside Mike. “They’ve opened the wall somehow.” She pointed to the far right, the dirt on the ground swept left near a low wall that separated a meeting area. “Did they leave that way, the rest?”

  “Possibly, but light is that way.”

  “Wait a sec.” Krane came near and picked up a large rock. Mike frowned at him, confused. “I’ve seen some interesting things here.” He threw it hard at the tiled floor.

  It shifted the ground, breaking away and leaving a path of square stone on top of some sort of pylon and nothing around it. Dirt still fell.

  “I didn’t hear it hit bottom,” Krane said behind her.

  “Okay.” Clancy peered over the edge. “Next option?”

  “We walk across.”

  She made a face at them. “How about edging it?” she said. There was a small space of stone near the wall to get started and she went to it. Clancy clipped the pack’s waist belt and went left to the wall of rock.

  “Clancy, honey.”

  She looked back. “I’m not going over that. It’s a puzzle, Mike. We have time to figure out a puzzle?” She knew they didn’t. “End of story.” She gripped the rocks, moving slow and sure like a spider on the wall.

  Mike just shook his head, then followed.

  “Boy, does she sound familiar!” Nathan muttered softly, and Mike glanced, smiling.

  Clancy rock-climbed to the entrance, then pushed off and hopped into the tunnel, pulling her knee up, grappling on the edge till she gained leverage. She sat back, waving them on.

  Then the six feet of floor surrounding her—crumbled.

  Hank Jansen didn’t go directly to the lab. In civilian clothes, he went to Major Yates’s home. She hadn’t reported to work since the animals had died, though he didn’t think she was mourning the orangutan. He rang the bell. He glanced around at the Tudor town house. The grounds were unkempt, nothing personal outside, and with the shades drawn, the house look empty. He heard scuffling, and waited for the Gothic door to open, but only the small eye-level spy door did.

  “Please leave, sir.”

  “Open the door, Major.”

  “This is my home, you have no authority here.”

  Hank scowled darkly. “You cannot turn off your rank when it pleases, Major. You are, until your enlistment is over, still in the Army. Are you refusing a direct order?”

  “I can bring the police.”

  “I have no problem with that, but neither of us wants this made public.”

  With a huff, she shut the little door and Hank heard the locks slip. She opened the door and wrapped her arms around her middle. She looked tired, her hair mussed, but even in sweatpants and a T-shirt, she was a beautiful woman.

  “May I come in now?”

  She waved him through and Hank followed her into the living room. Then he realized she wasn’t just tired, but haggard. Her eyes were swollen yet with dark purple circles beneath. She shot him a nasty look before she dropped into the corner of the sofa.

  Hank remained standing. He’d learned early the first defense was intimidation.

  “What do you want, Colonel? Aside from ruining my career.”

  “You did that all by yourself. My concern is my troops. I want to know how to stop it.”

  She hesitated, rubbing her forehead, trying to hold back more tears, he thought. Her hands trembled violently. “I can’t,” she said. “I wish I could. Believe me.”

  She said it with such feeling, Hank frowned, noticing his surroundings. Broken dishes littered the wood floor, bric-a-brac piled at the far side of the dining table. She swiped it off, he realized. Then he saw the kitchen cabinets, ripped out of their frames, and the handles looked as if they’d been blasted out with a shotgun.

  “What happened here? Were you robbed?”

  She shook her head and reached for a water glass. Before she brought it to her lips, the glass popped, and shattered in her hand. She stared at the blood on her palm, unmoved. “I don’t even feel it,” she said.

  Hank rushed to the kitchen for a towel, then returned and wrapped it. She took it from him, holding pressure, and Hank heard bones snap. “Good God.”

  She held up her uncut hand; her index finger was broken. “It’s blocking a pain receptor.”

  “You implanted it in yourself?”

  She nodded, then lifted her gaze. “I wanted to experience what they did. It’s amazing, really. A day ago, I could run a two-minute mile. Today, I can’t function. You don’t know what it takes just to sit here. I’m having a rush of adrenaline that’s killing me.”

  He couldn’t care less right now. “Explain.”

  “It’s one of the effects we suspected. The glands produce more adrenaline. It was supposed to produce more. We designed it for highly trained commandos. It’s a…fearless rush, and I’m so pumped right now I could take over Iran.”

  “Jesus.”

  Gripping the bloody towel, she left the sofa so fast he barely saw her move. “Boris tried to tear off his own face last night. Tried?” She scoffed. “He did it. He’s dead. The primate, Natasha, she was implanted at the same time and it had no effect on her. None. She had a teachable intelligence that’s been recorded in any other study, but the pod didn’t do anything to her. Boris, on the other hand, became extremely aggressive. To his mate, sexually, and then to himself.”

  “Is this going to happen to my men?”

  “I don’t know. It’s clear with two specimens that different reactions occur in different candidates.”

  “I want the testing files on my troops, all of them.”

  “I don’t have them anymore.”

  When she refused to meet his gaze, Hank had his doubts.

  “They’re with Colonel Cook.”

  And Cook was running to the nearest senator to spill, he thought. God, the ramifications of this would echo through the military. “Can this pod be removed?”

  “No. It wasn’t designed for removal. It’s too small, sir. Nano,” she stressed. “We made a device to, in a sense, shatter it, and let it be absorbed into the bloodstream.” She snickered to herself, the sound bitter and tired. “It took two years to create, and it was easy to destroy. Clancy McRae, the chief designer, called it the Terminator.”

  “Then why haven’t you—” He stopped midsentence. “She took it.”

  Francine nodded. “I looked. I practically destroyed the lab looking. I even tried breaking into Clancy’s house, but the gate guards wouldn’t let me in since they knew she wasn’t there. I almost hit the guy. I was so hyped up that I could have easily killed him. So I came home and locked myself in.”

  And did damage to her home. Her thoughts were rational, yet the nano overrode them.

  “I kne
w this was wrong.” She waved at the mess in her home. “I wouldn’t find anything, but I kept going. I couldn’t stop.” She looked at him.

  “You lost control.”

  “Yes, sir, I did, and that means they will too.”

  His shoulders fell. “They’re alive, they survived the crash. Does Colonel Cook know you put it in yourself?”

  “Oh yes.”

  For a moment, he wandered over her dark blush, then dismissed it.

  “If you want to start an investigation you’re too late, Cook just left here.”

  Hank tensed. “To where?”

  “Either to destroy every piece of evidence, though that’s several millions in government funding he’ll have to answer for, or take it all to the Senate Oversight, or the Joint Chiefs, probably to dump the blame for this on Clancy McRae.”

  “He didn’t just dump the blame, Major.”

  She looked up.

  “He sent someone to kill her.”

  “Oh God.” She shot out of the chair, and staggered, but waved him off when he tried to help. “We have to stop him. She doesn’t deserve this. She was right, she was right,” Francine said over a sob. “I knew all this time she was, but he gave me direct orders to push ahead.”

  “Commendable. But authorization for implantation came from Cook, and you went along with it. Cry in your beer all you want,” he said, unsympathetic. “He set you up.”

  She frowned, panicked.

  “You made a call from your laboratory phone to a hitter. To kill Clancy. You’re in this deeper than you think.”

  “I didn’t! I would never do that!”

  Hank would let NCIS sort it out. “And implanting my men and yourself, were you thinking of lives or your own career?”

  She looked up, bleak. “Both. I still believe in this technology, Colonel.” Her chin lifted a bit, the truth finally spilling. “Your men did volunteer, just not for the implantation.” At his look, she hurried to say, “I swear to you, I only learned they hadn’t a couple days ago. They thought they were agreeing to a stress test for comparisons for the future. Cook told me they’d volunteered for the insertion. I saw the paperwork, and I wanted to believe him. It was a blind test, no knowledge. We told them the injection was the latest biomarker to monitor them when they were out of touch. It was a lie, all of it. But you know that, don’t you?”

  “What I know is if my men die, you’ll go to Leavenworth. With Cook.”

  She swallowed and confessed, “It’s in Gannon too.”

  He felt his skin grow hot with outrage. “Prison is too good for you.” He spun on his heel and headed to the door.

  “They won’t do anything. He knows too many secrets, Colonel. You’ll have to jail him or silence him.”

  At this point, Hank didn’t have a problem with that.

  Clancy smothered a shriek as she grabbed for the wall, but she couldn’t grip, sliding down into the dark pit below. Suddenly, she stuck her foot out, hitting the pylon, and she stopped short. The pylon tottered.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she heard Mike say, then strained to look at him.

  “Oops. My bad.”

  Mike tried to reach out for her.

  “No, don’t, don’t!” she said. “Go back. Walk it. It must be a pressure-sensitive combination. You can’t cheat it.”

  Clancy couldn’t move a fraction or she’d fall. Her grip was stretched to the limits of her reach. The dirt beneath her foot was too soft to hold for long, and she forced herself to be rational. If she pushed off, it could possibly destroy the last pedestal step. The guys had to cross first. She was balanced out in the open, her body as if ready for a jackknife into the endless cavern. And, jeez, there were spears down there. Who did I hurt in a past life to get all this bad karma?

  DiFazio hadn’t started to rock-climb and he overtook each step quickly, wobbling on the last. “I’m jumping past you.”

  Pushing the torches into the holder, Mike shouldered off the pack, dug in it for the nylon rope. Yet with her precarious position, there was no way to reach her from here. He had nothing to rope except her neck. Sal aimed somewhere past her.

  A twenty-foot jump? “That’s too far!”

  He ignored her and leaped. He landed hard, then immediately braced himself to reach for Clancy. She met his gaze. “I can’t move.”

  “When I have a good hold, push off toward me,” he said, then grasped her wrist, his left hand gripping the rock for anchor. He nodded. She pushed off, swinging her left arm around. Her fingers grazed Sal’s as her footing started to crumble. Sal lurched, gripping her with both hands, and pulled, nearly throwing her over his head.

  Clancy hit with a teeth-clicking impact, wincing, and then she scrambled back from the edge. Mike was halfway across and moving fast. She had confidence in him and not the technology. He jumped and Sal grabbed him, then swung him deeper into the tunnel. They turned for Nathan. Long-legged, he landed easily.

  Krane glanced back and said, “Better than a land mine.”

  Immediately, Mike went to Clancy, grabbing her up and hugging her tightly. “I hate watching stuff like that,” he said before he kissed her, devouring and heavy, his hands pushing her into him, and his pent-up emotions flowed through her like pure energy. She hung on, savoring the power he wanted her to feel in a kiss that was less about desire and more about everlasting.

  When they broke apart, she rubbed her thumb over his lower lip, then flicked her eyes toward their audience. DiFazio and Krane just stared, highly amused. Mike shot them a no-trespassing look. Clancy winked at Nathan, then behind Mike, walked into the dark. The flashlight was dead, and without torches the darkness forced them to go slow. The corridor turned slightly and light suddenly silhouetted Mike. He lurched back.

  Clancy curled up behind him and peered past his shoulder. “We find the most interesting things on this trip.”

  It wasn’t sunlight.

  Incandescent bulbs whitened the entire chamber, shining down on rows of wood crates like the ones he’d spotted with the trio back at the river. They were in the process of being sealed and loaded, he realized. Hammers and bags of nails were left near the crates. He eased along the wall, aiming his gun. Krane and DiFazio split up and circled the chamber from both sides, then met in the middle. Mike waved Clancy over.

  “This is what they’re protecting,” she said softly.

  DiFazio covered the single exit and Nathan came to them.

  Mike reached inside and held up a rock. “Unless there’s diamonds inside these, I don’t think so.”

  Clancy hurriedly searched the crates. “Rock. Just freaking rocks?”

  “And kilos.” Nathan held up a block neatly sealed in plastic. “The freshness is locked in.”

  Clancy’s lips barely curved, her attention on the crates. There were wheeled handcarts to pull them out.

  “The trio that were on the river,” Mike said, and she looked at him. “They were stealing a crate of rocks. It was further north.”

  Clancy inhaled sharply. “That’s what we saw, at the river, when they kidnapped me. The crates.” With the flat of her hand, she patted the top of the wood box. “These crates.”

  “They are sending rocks up the river masquerading them as drugs? That’s just asking for it.”

  “But you said intel wasn’t getting anything here. No movement. If they were caught, the police wouldn’t find any evidence for charges. And Richora’s the big banana, so police weren’t getting close unless it was some outside agency, DEA, Peru Intelligence?”

  “It’s a shell game,” Nathan said quietly, and DiFazio glanced back once, frowning. “It’s a diversion. Watch the left so hard, you don’t see what the right is doing. There’s hundreds of eyes on this area to stop drugs. Ship this down the river like a drug cargo while the real cargo is transported in plain sight.”

  “But the kilos are here, and we’re near the river.”

  “This shipment must leave when that one does,” Clancy said. “Somewhere close by.”

 
Then Mike laid the bomb. “Gantz’s trajectory of the rocket put it somewhere around here.” If he could get outside and turn on the GPS, he’d know exactly where.

  “We have movement,” DiFazio said, and Krane moved up behind him. “They probably evacuated at the earthquake and are coming back.”

  “These are harmless right now.” Mike inclined his head to the crates. “We get out first.” Blowing it was out of the question. Mike didn’t know how deep they were in the mountain, and that would bring it down on them. They moved along the wheel tracks and Mike felt the change in grade, the lower pressure on his ears. As he looked at his compass watch, the needle jumping lessened. Toward the river, he thought as the air changed, the dry earthen mustiness of the inner cavern freshened, damp now. The sound of water strengthened and he saw a crack in the cavern wall, water fountaining. Clancy was the first to stick her face under it and drink. Mike leaned over for a sip, then moved carefully around a turn. True sunlight spilled. He jerked back and held up his fingers, all of them. There was over ten men out there. That he could see.

  Clancy’s eye flew wide and she grabbed his arm, shook her head. He mouthed, Trust me, and Krane and DiFazio took up position opposite Mike with an angled view outside.

  “One operation,” Mike said. “All in the same area. This is secret, the rest in the open.”

  Clancy signaled Sal, scowling. “Don’t leave me out.”

  He inclined his head and she darted to him. Clancy inhaled the fresh warm air and saw a warehouse. From her angle it was low, maybe fifteen feet tall, and completely hidden under vines and trees. The outside was painted brown and green, its wide doors open. With more pallets and crates inside.

  “We need a look in there.”

  Clancy wanted to say, No, we need to go to the hospital, but it would take time to convince these guys to stop now and get a checkup. “That’s right across the middle of them.”

  “We go around again,” Mike said.

  “I just hope there’s no more water,” she muttered, still dripping from the last dousing.

  Mike looked at Sal and Nathan. “I’d say use extreme prejudice.”