Nick watched as she butted the lab reports into a neat stack, another set of printouts of God knows what, then she started fanning the brochures and prospectuses, leaving each company logo clear.
One suddenly lit up in his head as if a spotlight shone on it.
“That!” he shouted. His shaking finger pointed.
“What, Nick?”
He stood up, rushed to the fanned-out glossy company brochures. His finger landed on one in the center. Three stylized gold crowns. Corona Labs—BRINGING THE FUTURE TODAY.
“This,” he said, finger tapping. Each time he touched the paper it seemed to get warmer.
This turned out to be the brochure for a new company.
Catherine picked it up, showed it to her husband. “I thought I knew more or less all the research labs in the country, but this is a new one.” Mac turned the glossy paper over in his big hands. There was a videolette loop embedded in the paper, all the rage nowadays. Some smiling woman in a lab coat endlessly raising a test tube in triumph, putting it down, raising it . . .
Nick was shaking with tension. The logo, the name Corona Laboratories meant nothing to him, but still they shone in his mind.
In a corner he could hear Jon restlessly tapping on the light keyboard—a projection of heat-sensitive light on the table. Jon’s fingers were a blur.
Mac handed the brochure to Nick. “This mean anything to you?”
Nick took the thick glossy paper and studied it carefully. The smiling woman, raising her hand with the test tube and putting it down in an endless loop was completely unfamiliar to him. He studied the text—
Corona Laboratories—Bringing the future today.
Corona Laboratories is an offshoot of several highly successful research labs, dedicated exclusively to the study of neuroscience . . .
Technobabble.
Nick flipped back and forth. The brochure was one of those folded into thirds. The videolette on the cover. Opening it, company data on the left-hand side and what they called the “core mission” in the center. The right-hand leaf was taken up with the premises of the company—a crystal Buckminster structure aboveground, extensive skylights set in some grassy meadow. Underground it was huge.
He didn’t give a shit about any of it. This fucking brochure had practically reached out and grabbed him by the balls, so why wasn’t he getting what it was supposed to tell him?
He looked it over again and again, even flipping it upside down, which did nothing but give him a headache. The reflection off the glossy paper nearly blinded him. He narrowed his eyes.
Catherine was watching him closely. “What, Nick?”
He shook his head, like shaking off water. A sharp movement.
The contact info—the address seemed to leap out at him.
1657 McGraw Drive, Palo Alto.
Palo Alto.
“Hey!” Jon shouted just as Nick dropped the paper as if it burned his fingers.
Jon swiveled the screen. He’d turned the hologram function off, the screen was showing a newspaper article with no photographs. “Corona Laboratories was bought a year ago by none other than Arka Pharmaceuticals.” He turned to Nick. “Whatever it is that’s calling to you, buddy, it’s no good.”
Arka Pharmaceuticals had kept their former commander and three of their teammates prisoner, conducting experiments that would have done the Nazis proud, for over a year. The year he, Mac, and Jon had been in exile, convinced their commander had betrayed them. Lucius Ward hadn’t betrayed them. He’d been betrayed himself and had paid a terrible price.
Catherine had worked for a company owned by Arka and they still had men out looking for her. Arka was a multibillion dollar company with a whole board full of people who would testify that it was run by angels. Nobody would ever believe that an Arka-run lab had tortured highly-decorated soldiers. Nobody would believe that they would kill Catherine on sight.
Of course now she was in Haven, their high-tech community of misfits where, like everyone else, she fit right in. She was now revered, actually, as the community doctor. Not to mention the fact that she had Mac guarding her day and night, and if anything ever happened to Mac, then he and Jon would step right in. Both of them would give their lives to keep Catherine safe. Arka wasn’t getting its hands on her.
And now Arka was somehow involved in a threat to Elle too. She was under threat right now and he didn’t know where the fuck she was, except that she was in some seedy motel with a faded green façade . . .
“Palo Alto!” Nick shouted and all but smacked himself in the face. Somehow hidden in the distress call was the image of Corona Laboratories. Maybe she worked there, maybe she didn’t. The fact was that Corona was mixed up in the threat to her and Corona was headquartered in Palo Alto. The city was less than an hour away by helo. “She’s got to be there, that’s why I couldn’t keep my eyes off that goddamned brochure. Jon—”
But Jon was grimly tapping on the conference table surface, connected to four monitors. “On it,” he said.
Nick rushed to his side, skin prickling. He’d been paralyzed with fear, but now urgency rushed over him like a flood that had been dammed up but now released. Elle was in Palo Alto! He knew it, could feel it. He’d been blasted with a distress signal but with no way to know the point of origin, and it had been driving him insane. Elle could have been in New York, Alaska, fucking France. All places it would take him hours and hours to get to. But she was in Palo Alto and their helo could get him to her in less than an hour. Oh Jesus . . .
Jon had pulled up a Google map and was checking a list of motels. It was painstaking work because it wasn’t like facial recognition with known parameters. A faded green façade wasn’t much of an identifier and they needed night shots to see a sign with a letter missing.
“Go to a forty-mile perimeter,” Nick said and the first screen zoomed out. “Go dark.” Jon tapped the table and all the screens showed night shots, most illegally hacked from the Keyhole 15 satellites, some from their own drones.
The second screen was flashing hotels and motels. They stopped at a shot of a building with a neon sign flashing VACA CIES. Nick studied it. A tall red brick relic from the thirties, it looked like. A distinctive tattered awning over the entrance. It felt dull and lifeless. Wrong, in every sense. He shook his head. “No.”
Ten minutes later they had it. A low building set in a depressed-looking strip mall. V CANCI S a neon sign posted on top of a pole advertised.
“Day shots coming up—now!” Jon switched the screen and, yes, there it was. A low-lying building once painted green, now faded. The address was underneath—2442 Century Way. The GPS data was there, and it gave distance from landmarks around Palo Alto. Nick was an excellent orienteer. He could get to the place on the monitor blindfolded. Now that he knew Elle was there, he’d walk over glass shards barefoot to get there. The screen shot pulsed with meaning. From the depths of his being came the certainty. Elle was there, in that building, right now.
If she wasn’t dead.
“She’s there!” he shouted. “I can feel it. Jon, start Little Bird up!”
Jon could start Little Bird up from a remote that was kept in the armory. On mission it was set on the inside of his wrist with derma-glue. If he started it up now, Little Bird would be already firing up its rotors by the time they made it down to the hangar.
Nick was at the door, but he was alone. No Jon.
He looked over his
shoulder, wild with urgency. Now that he knew where Elle was, the rush was in his blood like a fever. Even this extra minute might mean the difference between life and death for Elle. What the fuck was Jon waiting for?
“Jon!” he said sharply. “Come on!”
But Jon was shaking his head and if Nick didn’t know better, if he didn’t know that Jon didn’t do emotion, he’d swear he saw sadness in Jon’s eyes. “Can’t.” His voice was lifeless, dull. “Little Bird’s rotor head is broken. I went down to Sacramento to an aviation parts dealer today to steal a new one, but I haven’t had time to install it. It’ll take a couple of hours at least. I’ll step on it, you know I will, but I’m working alone. The only other guy who knows enough about it to help is Pelton.”
Catherine gasped. Pelton, one of the men they’d rescued from Arka’s dungeon three months ago, had only recently come out of a coma. He was in their infirmary, flat on his back still, IVs running in and tubes running out. No way was Pelton going to be any help.
Well, fuck it. Nick wasn’t going to waste any time with regrets. It was what it was. “Send me a drone over the motel! I’m taking the hovercar!” he shouted over his shoulder as he ran for the hangar.
Chapter 8
Arka Pharmaceuticals Headquarters
San Francisco
Former General Clancy Flynn twirled a huge gold ring around his meaty finger, blew out a breath, tugged at his tie. It was a red silk Valentino tie that went nicely with the tailored suit, which was obviously bespoke. No designer made that size.
Dr. Charles Lee suppressed a light shudder.
Flynn became more disgusting every time they met. It was as if Flynn were on this hugely accelerated Bloat Program. He’d put on ten pounds every time they met. He was now at least three hundred pounds. The very weight of Flynn’s flesh had assumed a gravity of its own and it was dragging him down. Though Lee kept his office at a cool and constant 72 degrees, Flynn was sweating, his own flesh acting like a heat generator. His heart had to beat twice as hard to get blood around all that meat. His sweat stank—a rancid odor that was stronger than the men’s cologne he wore and the smell of expensive laundered material swathing his grossly huge body.
Flynn was a heart attack in waiting, except he had to wait to have it until Lee’s program was complete.
Flynn ran a very successful and lucrative security company founded on the contacts Flynn had made in his twenty-five years in the military. Flynn was very greedy. Lee’s program was the key to great wealth, but they’d had some stumbling blocks. Quite a few, actually. The last one cost over a million dollars. But Lee now had something even bigger than the former program, which had aimed at augmenting the aggressiveness, muscle mass, reflexes, and IQs of soldiers.
Flynn was financing the secret program in order to have the best private security company in the world. Lee had his own agenda: he was planning on turning the forty-million-man Red Army of ordinary soldiers into the equivalent of forty million Special Forces soldiers.
Lee was very close to that goal. He’d had annoying setbacks and on one memorable mission run by Flynn’s company, Orion Security, in Africa, the entire team had gone rogue. Well, Lee had adjusted the doses and several other missions had gone very well indeed.
Most of the progress had been made thanks to experiments conducted on the four elite soldiers over the course of a year. The former Ghost Ops soldiers that had been captured in the Cambridge lab conflagration.
Flynn had been particularly happy to know that the main test subject was Captain Lucius Ward. Apparently, Ward had shown Flynn up several times while they were both serving and Flynn had wanted payback.
Well, Lee was a scientist, not a butcher. However, Flynn’s enthusiastic support had made him push the boundaries. A little. Ward had had over forty surgeries and had been slated for destruction when he and three other soldiers from his elite unit had been rescued by forces unknown.
A party to the rescue of the men had been identified as a female research scientist who worked for one of his labs. The woman, Dr. Catherine Young, was brilliant. Cameras had caught her image. He didn’t need to put her features through facial recognition software, he knew her well.
After that daring rescue, Young had disappeared off the face of the earth. Lee had put his entire security apparatus to the task of finding Young, but they were stymied. She’d somehow gone beyond their reach even though he had vast resources to throw at the search.
How could a nerdish scientist who didn’t have much of a life outside the lab completely disappear?
He wanted Young because she’d taken four promising soon-to-be cadavers from his research, but also because she had something he desperately wanted. Something in her brain. What was in Young’s brain—and in the brains of a number of people Lee had rounded up—was much more valuable than increasing Flynn’s bank account. Increasing Flynn’s bank account was a mere byproduct of the Warrior Project. And, anyway, if everything worked to plan, Flynn’s bank account would soon be seized by the Chinese Finance Ministry.
After the invasion of the United States.
A drum of fat, heavy fingers. Flynn’s jaws flexed as he suppressed a yawn.
Well, if Flynn was bored, Lee would soon cure him of that.
Flynn shot his wrist out and showily checked the time on his new gold Rolex. It was a Trasparénce, the new line introduced last Christmas. The dial was a blank pure crystal screen to everyone but the owner. The screen was set to the owner’s retina and would show the time only to the owner.
No one will ever steal your Rolex. The ads had been everywhere.
The watch cost $130,000.
How Flynn loved his expensive toys.
“It’s four P.M.,” Flynn growled. “I interrupted negotiations with members of the Libyan regime to come here because you said it was so goddamned important. So I’m here. What is it? I need to be back in Virginia by eight.” Orion consulting had a FastJet company plane that could fly in the stratosphere at 1000 mph. It could cross the country in two hours, coast to coast.
“Watch,” Lee said simply, and flicked on the array of four holomonitors. He saw Flynn move his head from monitor to monitor. Before Flynn’s gaze reached the last one, Lee started talking.
“This is the secure lab of a small research company we bought about a year ago. It carries out legitimate research on vaccines, but there’s a separate lab that only carefully selected researchers can access and they are carrying out an entirely different kind of research. This is linked to the research at Millon Laboratories, which we had to shut down after the unfortunate incident.”
Each monitor showed a patient lying unconscious on a gurney, with an IV line that ran into the back wall. It wasn’t readily discernible on the screen, but each patient was in a nearly indestructible and completely transparent cage made of graphene. The patients were young, in their midtwenties, evenly distributed by gender. Two men, two women. There had been ten, originally. Six had been sacrificed.
“What you’re seeing is people we discovered by hidden fMRIs. Each has a zone of their brain—the parahippocampal gyrus—that lights up, particularly under thermal imaging. It is a part of the brain that is undiscovered territory. We are uncertain as to its function, but in these specimens the parahippocampal gyrus is unusually active and seems to correspond to unusual . . . abilities the specimens have.”
Flynn checked his watch again. He’d never been interested in the science itself, only in the results. And the results had to be of use to him and to his company for him to be interested. Well, he was about to get an eyeful.
Lee tapped his finger on the table. He was so used to the light projection keyboard’s settings that he didn’t actually have to have the light projection on. It was a minor ploy, but to an ignorant outsider like Flynn, it would look like magic.
The commands he gave changed the nature of the liquid being pumped into the patients’ systems. From a powerful narcotic to a powerful stimulant. From zero to hyperawareness in a minute.
“I’ll remind you of the thrust of the main project,” he said softly. “We are perfecting a system that will improve the motor skills, neural response times, muscle mass, eyesight, and hearing of soldiers, sometimes by a factor of 300 percent. Essentially, we will create supersoldiers who will be stronger, faster, and smarter than any other soldiers in the world. There will be no warriors that will be able to defeat your men, General Flynn.”
Lee never used Flynn’s former title except when he wanted to make a very strong point. And this was one of those times. He could actually hear Flynn’s breathing speeding up, becoming loud in the silent room. The moron was getting excited, exactly as if he were seeing a naked lady. Lee refrained from shaking his head at how pitifully easy to manipulate Flynn was.
“But—” And here Lee turned to Flynn and looked him in the eyes, distracting him for the minute it would take for the superstimulant to hit the specimen’s bloodstreams. “But I think we can take it one step further. In addition to superstrength and speed, we can add superpowers.”
A crease formed on Flynn’s fleshy face. Superpowers. That was crazy, right? Lee could almost read Flynn’s thoughts.
Only it wasn’t.
He had four more specimens he’d caught recently, being prepped. He very much suspected that one, Sophie Daniels, was a healer. That would be a battlefield power to reckon with.
Lee gestured toward the monitors and watched Flynn’s face as he took in what was happening.
Almost to the second, all the patients bolted up in bed. Lee had calculated body mass in the ccs of stimulant he pumped into them, so it worked on each individual at the same time. Every specimen was brought abruptly and rapidly into consciousness, with no self-defense mechanism.
It was spectacular.
“Fuck.” Flynn breathed as he leaned forward. Lee could have easily “pushed” the holograms closer to him, but it was better this way. Make him work for it. Flynn’s eyes were bright with the reflected light of the monitors and he was watching with his whole body.
I Dream of Danger Page 15