I Dream of Danger

by Rice, Lisa Marie

  Catherine smiled gently and Elle had the impression she understood exactly what she felt.

  “Stella said she’d send breakfast up to you and Nick. Did she?”

  Elle didn’t blush. It hadn’t been in any way a suggestive comment, any kind of observation about her and Nick. Catherine simply wanted to know if Elle was comfortable, had had breakfast. Elle relaxed even further.

  “Breakfast. Well. I don’t know if what this Stella sent up could really be called breakfast. Breakfast is usually coffee and yogurt, so breakfast doesn’t quite cover it. I think ‘feast’ would be a more appropriate term. And ‘delicious’ should be in there too.”

  Catherine’s smile was blinding. “That’s our Stella.”

  “I know you’re not supposed to tell me who she is.” Elle cocked her head. “Jon seemed to think that I would know who she is if I heard her name. But I’m not up on trendy chefs. As a matter of fact, since Alice Waters retired, I don’t think I know the names of any chefs at all. And certainly not a Stella.”

  Catherine hesitated a beat. Big secret. “Sorry,” Elle said. “I guess that’s none of my—”

  “Stella Cummings.” Catherine dropped the name like a stone in a pond and Elle’s jaw dropped along with it.

  “Stella Cummings the actress?” A legendary actress, two-time Oscar winner, the first when she was a child. The youngest Oscar winner ever. Considered one of the most beautiful women in the world. Word had it that she’d been attacked by a stalker and disappeared. Every once in a while there was a Stella sighting—like there used to be Elvis sightings—but they always turned out to be fake. “She’s here?”

  Catherine took her hand and once more that weird warmth rushed under her skin. “Yes, she’s here. It’s a long story, but the essence is that she was in serious danger and she found refuge here. A lot of people have found refuge here, including myself. This is—for want of a better word—a community. We call it simply the Haven. We grow our own food and are almost completely self-sufficient in terms of energy. We don’t need the outside world. And some, including myself and definitely including Nick, Mac, and Jon, are on wanted lists. It’s a long story.”

  “Nick told me some of it,” Elle said quietly.

  “Good. Then you’ll understand that we want to keep our existence quiet.”

  “Absolutely. I do too. Not to mention the fact that I had four men out to get me. And they would have if Nick hadn’t come.”

  Catherine showed Elle to two small armchairs, a surprising addition to a lab. No armchairs in Corona Laboratories, that was for sure. But through the open door, Elle could see what looked like a small and very well-equipped infirmary, so it was possible that the lab doubled as a place where patients could talk to the doctor. There was so much about this place that intrigued her.

  They sat knee to knee, both bending forward slightly. Something about this place—its beauty, the sense of order, the kindness she was being shown and—let’s admit it—Nick’s presence all relaxed her. The usual reticence Elle felt with people she didn’t know, and often with people she did know, fell away like an old, uncomfortable garment.

  Elle always gave partial accounts of herself, cutting out whole sections and most particularly the section where she went elsewhere when she slept. Only at Corona, working with Sophie and the others, did she feel she could let her powers unfurl.

  Catherine managed to make her feel as if she were wrapped in a warm bubble of trust and understanding. “About Nick,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “He got what he described as a call from you last night. It was a strong and irresistible message that he felt came from you. I can tell you that he absolutely believed you called for help and that he was in a frenzy to get to you.”

  Elle nodded. The difficult part was right ahead. She was going to have to convince Catherine that she’d somehow contacted a man who was far away. A man she hadn’t seen in ten years. She sent him a huge SOS and managed to let him know where she was without using a cell or a Personal Communicator. Just through the magic of her crazy head.

  Any person on earth would consider her nuts. Elle was fully prepared to undergo a long, slow process to convince Catherine that she wasn’t crazy, she just had this crazy power. All the scientific evidence she had that she wasn’t a lunatic was back in the lab, so she had to replace graphs and videos with words.

  Elle drew a deep breath. “Okay. There are a few things I’m going to have to say, which you’re going to find hard to believe. Really, really hard.”

  Catherine gave a faint smile. “Try me.”

  Elle’s stomach hurt and she had to consciously slow her breathing down. She knew everything there was to know about the physiology of stress and anxiety. Her body was trying to give her enough oxygen to deal with an upcoming trial.

  “I can astrally project. It’s an old-fashioned term for an out-of-body experience. I’ve always had this . . . talent. Ability. Call it what you will. When I was a child I used to have what I thought were very vivid dreams, and when I had my special dreams I would wake up very tired. In my dreams I roamed around Lawrence, Kansas, where I grew up. Sometimes I’d see my father playing poker with his buddies, sometimes I’d see schoolmates or other people I knew. The dreams increased in frequency around the time my mother died, when I was six. Sometimes I’d have several a week. I think my father thought I was always tired because I was sad at the loss of my mother and he was right, in a roundabout way. Nick came into our lives soon after my mother’s death and the dreams stopped for a long time. Then Nick suddenly disappeared and my father became ill with Alzheimer’s. It was . . . a bad time.”

  Catherine nodded. “As you know, dementia is one of my main fields of study. It’s awful when it happens to someone you love.”

  Elle bowed her head.

  “So,” Catherine said, “when Nick disappeared and your father developed Alzheimer’s you . . . projected more often?”

  She nodded. “All the time, it seemed. I was exhausted because I Dreamed all night. To me, those are Dreams with a capital D, to keep them distinct from the normal dream state, because those Dreams aren’t—aren’t normal.”

  Catherine made a noncommittal sound in her throat.

  “And yet—and yet I swear to you that every word is true—I have the capacity to project myself outside my body. I know how crazy that sounds, but—”

  “Oh!” Catherine’s eyes rounded with surprise. “I believe you. No question.”

  “You do?” Elle felt her own eyes round with surprise.

  “Yes.” Catherine leaned forward and clasped her hand around Elle’s wrist, as if it were a shackle. A warm, soft shackle. That rush of warmth began, tingly and somehow pleasant.

  Catherine closed her eyes. “You’re frightened of the men coming after you. You’re worried about your good friend.” She frowned. “Sophie?” Elle nodded in surprise but Catherine couldn’t see her. “She’s been taken somewhere and you have no idea where and you don’t know what’s happened to her. Through all of this, you’re scared and also overwhelmed with joy that you’re with Nick. You have loved him . . .”

  “Forever,” Elle said softly. “I’ve loved him forever.”

  “Yes. You have loved him forever.” Catherine nodded and opened her eyes. When she lifted her hand, it felt as if a light had gone out. “I’m an empath. For most of my life I thought I was a freak. Unlike you, I never thought to scientifically study my gift. I thought of it as a curse. Reading people is not always a barrel of laughs.”

  Elle nodded. “I’ll bet.” She leaned forward in her chair again. “So you—you’re working on your power. Is power the right word? We were calling them Perceptual Studies. Just to—you know—give it a name.”

  “It’s not a bad name. Ultimately, your study was funded by Arka, wasn’t it?”

  Elle nodded.

  “We recently rescued
a number of men who had been involuntarily enrolled in a series of studies carried out by Arka. Jon has hacked into their computers and I have access to all the data. I’ll enjoy going over it with you.”

  “They also funded a study at Stanford that was the precursor to the Delphi Project. The Delphi Project is a study of extrasensory perception. We were coming up with some interesting theories.”

  “Would you like to continue your studies here?” Catherine waved a hand. “We have a good lab here and we have access to every single piece of equipment you could possibly need. We have unlimited funds and can acquire more or less anything we need. What’s not available commercially, well, we use the five-finger discount.”

  “I’ll bet that’s Jon too.”

  “Bingo.”

  They smiled at each other, then Elle’s smile faded. “I have a lot of data with me in a pen drive and I know where to access more. But more than anything, we need to find Sophie and the others. They are being rounded up by Corona goons and nothing good will come of it.”

  “No.” Catherine had sobered up too. “Corona is Arka. Nothing good can come of Arka kidnapping people.” Her pretty jaw set. “I have four men I’ll introduce you to. The ones who were brought here half dead three months ago. They’d spent a year in a high-tech lab that was essentially a prison and were experimented on. I’ve never seen anyone with as many surgical scars as their leader.”

  “Lucius Ward? Nick told me about him.”

  “What was done to him and to his men was criminal. If they’ve started kidnapping people, it means that whatever is going on is coming to a head and we must stop them. We have to get your friends out.”

  “Catherine . . .” Elle hesitated. “I once went to an Arka lab. It was scary. They had vast security resources. They had guards everywhere and the labs had high-tech security with a number of backups. I don’t know if we can mount any kind of offensive move.”

  “Oh my dear.” Catherine patted her hand and stood up. “We have something far better than security goons. We have the entire Ghost Ops team, right here. I’d pit them against any foe on earth. They are invincible.” She leaned over the table, pressed a button and spoke quietly. “Mac? Can you and the guys come up? There’s something we need to talk about.”

  Arka Pharmaceuticals

  San Francisco

  Four vials. One, two, three, four.

  Lee studied the brushed aluminum vial holder on the pristine surface of his huge desk. He could see its upside-down reflection, as if it continued on down into the nether regions of his desk. He carefully pushed a button on the side of the holder, entered a code on the keyboard that was projected onto the surface of his desk, and heard the satisfying hiss of a vacuum seal being broken.

  The container was manufactured by a subsidiary of Arka and not only met ISO Standard 900012 for the containment of biohazardous material, it doubled the standards. It was unbreakable and unbreachable. You could take a mallet to it, you could run a tank over it. It would not break and it would not open.

  If civilization were to suddenly stop, a thousand years from now whoever inherited the earth—Lee’s guess would be rats—would find the container intact and rub their paws over the slightly raised Arka logo and wonder in their little rat brains what was inside.

  Power. That was what was inside. Immense power. Power to change the world and it came from him. He’d done this.

  It seemed insane that he was about to unleash all this power and not take it inside himself. Not become immensely powerful himself.

  The Warrior project had gone through so many iterations he’d almost lost hope, but then Edison himself had said that a scientist never failed. He just found the ways an experiment didn’t work.

  Since he was a small child torn from his homeland, China, and dragged to the country he detested, the United States, Lee had dreamed of coming back to his homeland a conqueror. It was clear to anyone who had eyes in their head that China was the world’s foremost superpower now and Lee intended it to remain so for the next thousand years. It was the oldest civilization on earth and had been dormant far too long. But its long sleep was over and now it would take its place as the leader of mankind.

  It would manufacture not only superior products but superior humans. Starting with him.

  Three months ago he’d gone down to the secret underground labs at Millon Laboratories, a small high-tech company Arka had purchased. He’d found it best to carry out the research Flynn was paying for in scattered small-scale labs of companies he held a majority share in. No one knew about this research. Certainly not the board at Arka. It pleased him no end that he was beating American capitalism at its own game. Preparing for its future destruction under its own nose.

  And yet, Lee’s contacts in Beijing had told him that his time was running out. When Lee had first contacted his childhood friend, Chao Yu, who’d risen high in the ranks of the Ministry of Science and Technology, his friend had been enthusiastic, and had taken the Warrior Project directly to the minister himself, Zhang Wei.

  Everyone in the Ministry had been hugely excited, but the excitement waned as Lee kept coming up against problems. The science was impeccable. There had been sporadic successes but not replicable enough to bring to Beijing. All he needed was the money to institute testing on a larger scale in order to speed the process up. He needed Flynn’s money.

  Lee hadn’t planned on showing Flynn the paranormals, but he’d had his hand forced. Flynn had been impressed and doubled the funding, but it was almost too late. The window of opportunity back home was closing.

  And that was when it occurred to Lee that he would be landing in the Fatherland with a terabyte of encrypted data, a case full of vials, and some video footage, nothing more. Chao Yu was a scientist and could be trusted to break the data down and explain it but that could take time. Days, weeks, even months. He didn’t have weeks and months. Time was tight and he needed to arrive with a visibly functioning program, ready to be up and running as fast as doses could be manufactured.

  Manufacturing, distributing, and injecting the doses to the military would already take six months. They needed to start right away and he needed to be credible right away. He himself had to be a walking advertisement for Project Warrior.

  So he’d started experimenting on himself, in minute doses, and the results were overwhelming. He felt stronger, faster. He was stronger, faster. The other day he had clocked himself at under a three-minute mile run. He’d never been a runner, never been an athlete, and he’d casually broken an Olympic record.

  He’d never felt better, stronger, more clear-headed. But it had taken months for the dosage to take effect. Speed was an issue, both in the lab and in the field. The effects had to be immediate. So he’d been experimenting with a fast-acting virus as a vector. It had worked wonders on animal trials.

  Lee missed his soldiers fiercely. He needed Special Forces soldiers for the trials, but though he’d broached the subject several times with Flynn, who would have access to plenty of specimens as an ex-general, the cretin had refused. The theory was that any Special Forces soldiers, either on active duty or retired, would be missed.

  He’d made an exception for the Ghost Ops soldiers who’d been captured, because they were not on any official lists. Were, in fact, officially nonexistent. On the subject of more soldiers to experiment on, Flynn had been unyielding.

  A sudden rush of rage shook Lee—a hot course of hatred pulsing through him. It felt good, it felt right. Flynn had blocked him every step of the way. The original plan had been to celebrate the Chinese New Year in Beijing, as a newly minted senior official of the Ministry. The Chinese New Year had come and gone. He’d stood in the dark in his penthouse apartment on Market Street listening to the sounds of the annual Chinese New Year parade. And now with the new deadlines, it was entirely possible that Flynn’s hesitations and penny-pinching would cost Lee his chance.

&
nbsp; The hatred felt right, felt good. He clenched his fist and imagined it curled around Flynn’s fat neck, crushing the windpipe, watching with glee as that already purple face turned blue, anticipating the tiny snap as the hyoid bone broke.

  Lee could do it now too. One-handed. He’d surreptitiously tested his grip on a dynamometer, and he’d hit two hundred pounds, the most the machine could measure, halfway through the test. In all likelihood, he could tear Flynn’s throat out with one hand.

  The thought pleased him enormously.

  Oh yes. He was going to be a walking advertisement for Project Warrior.

  He broke the final seal on the container and watched as curls of smoke from the dry ice rose together with the central cylinder. It stopped with an audible click, gyrated 90 degrees, and the three vials automatically emptied into a single syringe that had been pushed up from the side.

  Beautiful piece of equipment. America still did this kind of thing so well, so elegantly.

  Lee picked the syringe up with his right hand and turned it until the hair-fine needle pointed at the ceiling. He rolled up his shirtsleeve and placed his left arm on the desktop, admiring it. His suits hid the fact that he’d developed superb muscle definition over the past month. His arm now was lean and hard with veins carrying oxygen to the newly forged muscles.

  He smiled as the needle painlessly slid into the vein. Lean, mean fighting machine. With a double PhD.

  The new dosage with the viral component—SL-62—spread warmth throughout his system, like a healing balm. He felt good, more than good. He felt great.

  A few more tweaks and they’d be ready to roll. They would have been ready six weeks ago if that fucker Flynn hadn’t been so pissy.

  Lee recoiled for a second. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d used the word fucker, or even thought it. It wasn’t him. Or at least it wasn’t the old him. The new Lee could use whatever word he wanted. Fuck them.