He stood up, strength infusing his system. His vision was blurred, though when he took off his glasses, he could see perfectly. It was raining outside and dark, even though it was still early afternoon. But light bloomed in his eyes and he could make out figures in front of the Ferry Building, almost half a mile away.
He stretched and smiled. He felt great. Just great.
Mount Blue
They filed into the lab one by one. Mac first, then Jon, then Nick. And there she was, sitting in the lab in a white coat, looking so beautiful she took his breath away. But more than beautiful, she looked . . . right. As if she were born to be sitting in their lab in Haven.
She and Catherine had been conferring, heads together, serious but clearly in tune with each other. Two beautiful women—though, however pretty Catherine was, she couldn’t hold a candle to Elle—one dark-haired, one fair. The smartest women he’d ever met, dealing with some very nasty shit without breaking a sweat.
Nick went over immediately to Elle and sat down next to her. He picked her hand up, kissed the back of it, then leaned over and kissed her cheek.
He totally ignored the stunned expressions on Mac’s and Jon’s faces. They looked as if Nick had sprouted wings and flown loops in the air.
“Hi, honey.” He smiled. He felt new muscles in his face because sure as shit he hadn’t done much smiling these past years. He’d never been a smiler. But seeing Elle sitting there, now officially a part of Haven and officially his—well, that was worth a smile. “Everything okay?”
She sighed and leaned into him. Oh yeah. Nick put an arm around her and didn’t know who was more comforted. Him or her. Whatever was coming, they’d face it together.
“We need to talk,” Catherine announced. “Because there’s something we’re all going to have to decide. I’m going to let Elle talk, but first I think you all should know something about her. You know that I am an empath? That I can read emotions and, lately, thoughts? Though—trust me on this—I make a real effort to stay out of your heads.”
Nick and Jon chuckled. Right now if she was in Nick’s head she’d back out fast, blushing hard. Because a part of him was sitting there ready to absorb information. A briefing. This had all the hallmarks of a briefing and he’d been doing briefings all his adult life. So he was paying attention but there was another bit of him free to just . . . play.
Think about other things.
Like, how incredibly soft Elle’s hand was. And her cheek. And her neck. She was just so fucking soft all over. It seemed impossible to him that human skin could feel that soft. How he’d loved kissing her all over, moving his mouth down over her pale breasts, heartbeat showing in the left breast, his hand moving down over that flat belly, down to the cloud of light brown hair covering her sex . . .
“Elle?”
Nick started slightly. Fuck. He had the beginning of a hard-on. Christ. Bad news. Mac and Jon were as observant as any two men could possibly be. Had they noticed? Nick crossed his legs uncomfortably, glad that he was too tanned to blush. Not that he ever blushed, but still.
Catherine was standing in front of them, holding her hand out to Elle.
Shit. Nick had completely zoned out. If Mac knew, he’d have his ass.
Well, Elle was moving to stand beside Catherine, so he wouldn’t be tempted to think of how very, very soft she was between her . . .
“You know me, of course. My name’s Elle Connolly.” He still couldn’t get used to that name. And it still bugged him that she’d changed it. “I’m a biologist with an interest in the biology of the human brain. There’s one other thing about me you should know.” Elle glanced at Catherine, who nodded imperceptibly. “I can astrally project.”
Whoa. Nick sat forward with a frown. What?
Jon leaned forward too. “The fuck?”
Catherine held up her hand, palm out. “I know this is going to be hard to absorb, but you’ve taken me on board, so this should be a bit easier to swallow.”
Damn straight it had been hard to swallow that Catherine could read emotions by touch. Nick and Jon had been hostile to her, though happy for Mac that he’d found someone who could put up with his ugly mug. But when Catherine came to them with some totally crazy story about Lucius Ward being held prisoner in a clinic in Palo Alto and wanting them to rescue him . . . well he and Jon had nearly mutinied.
Lucius had abandoned them. Betrayed them for money and left them for dead on a bogus mission that had blown up in their faces. The three of them, Mac and Nick and Jon, had taken the fall for blowing up a lab. Their intel—false of course—had been that the lab was brewing a weaponized version of bubonic plague. A nightmare. One of the many nightmares Ghost Ops had been set up to avert. They’d gone in, blown up the lab, killed what turned out to be totally innocent scientists and had been taken down and accused of treason. Lucius had disappeared and they read afterward that he’d had a big financial stake in the lab’s rival. So they’d been sold out by a leader they revered.
That was what they knew, it was the new bedrock of their lives and here Catherine came leading Mac around by the dick with some cockeyed story about Lucius not betraying them after all that only a shit-for-brains who was getting laid like nobody’s business—that would be Mac, who in his previous life had been as unassailable as a stone cliff—could believe.
What was the proof?
Catherine had touched Lucius and had somehow learned the truth. So they had to go risk their lives on a wild goose chase on the say-so of some dame. True, she’d found them, when the entire U.S. government and its military hadn’t been able to find them. But still.
Both Nick and Jon had been about a hair from pulling a gun and tying Catherine up—probably having to shoot Mac in the process—when she’d touched them.
Nick had never known anything like it. It was as if an entire world was there, in her touch. And she knew everything about him. It just slipped from his skin to hers. Everything he’d kept absolutely hidden for almost ten years—it was somehow right there for Catherine to read.
She didn’t know Elle’s name and she didn’t know the details but she caught exactly his sorrow and his deep desperation at not knowing if Elle was alive or dead, sick or well. Happy or needing him. She’d known all of that at a touch. And she knew something about Jon as well, though he wasn’t talking and neither was she. But whatever it was she’d found out, it hurt and it was true.
So, yeah, Nick and Jon were going to believe her if she talked about woo-woo stuff. Mac wasn’t an issue. Catherine could say that the moon was a hologram and Mac would believe her.
There was silence in the room. Nick frowned. “What does that mean exactly?”
This time Elle spoke. “It means that I have out-of-body experiences during sleep. Except I’m not really asleep when that happens. It’s more like a coma. I had an EEG of my brain during an out-of-body experience and it almost flatlined. It’s only in the past year that I’ve tried to analyze this as opposed to hating it. Three months ago I enrolled in a program to study what used to be called paranormal abilities. The study was funded by Arka Pharmaceuticals.”
Nick’s teeth ground and Mac issued a low growl. Arka Pharmaceuticals had kidnapped and tortured Lucius and three of their teammates—Romero, Lundquist, and Pelton—nearly to death. So anything connected to Arka was pretty much on their shit list.
Elle pressed a button, the lights dimmed and a hologram lit up. There were ten faces in two rows of five. Nick saw Elle in the second row. “These are the people who were originally enrolled in the program and two of us, myself and Sophie Daniels, drew up the experimental protocol and oversaw the tests.”
Elle manipulated the tiny remote and the hologram showed low buildings in a green sward. “This is the campus where the tests were carried out.”
“Wait!” Jon was frowning ferociously. “Go back.”
“Okay.” Elle obediently
went back to the previous ’gram. “Here?”
“Yeah. Third from the left, top row. Who is she?” Nick looked over. Jon was grim-faced, practically vibrating with tension, which was totally unlike his usual cool surfer–dude persona. Actually, Nick had never seen him tense, ever. Not even under fire.
Did he know the girl?
Elle smiled at Jon. “Sophie Daniels. She’s one of my best friends. We did our graduate studies together at Stanford, only she studied physiology. She has a master’s in that and is working toward a PhD in virology.”
Jesus. These brainy women.
“Did she have a—a power?” Jon sounded like he was choking, and Nick understood where he was coming from. Women already had all sorts of powers without any of the woo-woo stuff. But these chicks had real powers and their men would just have to suck it up.
Elle pursed her lips. “Not that could be tested, though we were only at the beginning of the trial. But—” She hesitated. “She’s a healer. She never talks about it, but I saw her close up a nasty wound with her touch. It comes with a heavy price, though. She was weak for days after that.” Elle hesitated. “Corona didn’t know. Nobody knew. But she passed an fMRI screening test and was enrolled in the program. Like me she was also tasked with recovering and collating data.”
Jon’s jaws were working. “Isn’t it unusual to have test subjects also running the test?”
“It is, yes.” Elle agreed. “And later on, for publication purposes, that would have been a big problem. But that’s what Corona insisted on and they were paying the bills. So there was that anomaly. And this past week there were others.”
“Such as?” Catherine asked.
“I don’t know. It’s as if the program itself developed a fever. We were asked to do three times the testing we were doing before in half the time. Results were to be sent directly to the coordinator’s office instead of being collected and collated on a weekly basis and then passed on. And then”—Elle stopped and looked at them each in turn—“and then people started disappearing. One, then two and three a day. The protocol stipulates that the test subjects show up at nine A.M. every morning, but we started having massive no-shows. Sophie and I called their cells and home numbers but got no responses. Yesterday—no, two days ago—there were only four of us, plus Sophie. I was being tested and Sophie oversaw the testing. When I got home, I got a panic call from Sophie saying that we were being rounded up. They were after her and were coming after me. I guess you know the rest.”
Oh yeah, they knew the rest. Nick’s fists tightened. They’d come after Elle. They were dead men walking.
Elle’s voice softened, became pleading. “I know you guys are . . . in hiding here. I know these people”—she gestured to the hologram of ten faces—“are complete strangers. But they are not strangers to me and they are being held against their will. And I fear that they are being hurt or . . . worse.” She drew in a deep, steadying breath.
Unlike the war room, which was always kept dim, the lab was brightly lit. The overhead light lit Elle’s hair into a shiny pale halo around her face, but beneath the halo was no angel’s face.
In his heart, in his head, Nick had kept an image of Elle that no longer existed. For so very long, in his head she’d been the young, pampered girl of a wealthy father who led an immensely sheltered life. Then that image had been exchanged for an exhausted waif of a girl, overwhelmed by her father’s illness, almost on her last legs.
So in his head Elle was vulnerable, requiring his protection. That’s the thing that had driven him so crazy—or, well, crazier—all these years. Elle, alone in the world. Alone in a world of predators. He knew precisely how cold and cruel the world was, he’d known since he could walk and talk. He knew that the weak were crushed, whether you were a good person or not.
Elle was a good person. He knew that, deep down inside. Nothing would ever change that because it was in her bones. When she was a girl, she’d go out of her way to do casual kindnesses completely unaware of how unusual that was. The gardener who came twice a week always got a glass of iced tea. A kid next door had tragically developed leukemia and Elle would go over to read to him all through his chemo.
A good heart and weakness equaled disaster. Danger with a loud siren attached.
The Army, Rangers, Delta, and then Ghost Ops. Nick’s whole adult life was making sure he wouldn’t be weak. Making sure he could defend himself with every weapon known to man and failing weapons, with a rock or his fists. He’d had to defend himself plenty, because the world was a shithole.
What possible defenses could Elle muster against the world? She’d taken off with no money and no friends and that thought had been like a spike being hammered into his head, every single fucking day for ten fucking years.
The images came to him nightly.
Elle, alone and penniless in some dump of a town.
Elle hitchhiking and ending up in a car with a guy with a knife.
Elle walking alone through the wrong part of some city, a gang of rapists trailing behind her.
And always, always the image of her helpless and alone.
Well, she might well have at some point been helpless and alone, but she sure wasn’t anymore.
The women he was looking at was beautiful, yes, but visibly smart. It was there in her sharp light blue eyes that took everything in, there in the strong bone structure of her face, there every time she opened her mouth. Strength and discipline were in every line of her body.
And, shit. A PhD from Stanford. They didn’t give those away in cereal boxes. And Stanford was expensive. Over $100K a year the last he heard. So she’d either earned that money or been given scholarships or a combo of both. Either way, she was a woman to be reckoned with.
And if the idea of the pale vulnerable waif broke his heart, this strong, confident woman melted it. She didn’t need him, not in any way. She’d made her way in the world just fine without him.
But if she’d have him, he was hers to the end of time.
So, yeah, he was in. She wanted her friends rescued? Whatever she wanted, he wanted to give it to her.
“I’m in,” he said.
“Me too.” Mac’s deep rumble came with a nod.
“Oh yeah,” Jon breathed.
Elle studied the faces of the three men and one woman before her. Catherine was with her, no doubt. That in itself was a minor miracle. That she’d risk her man, Mac, for people she didn’t know.
Nick was with her. He’d made that clear this morning. It frightened her to think that if she ordered him into a minefield, into the pit of hell, he’d go. That kind of power scared her and she didn’t know if she’d ever get used to it. She’d been alone for so long the idea of having a man like Nick right beside her, ready to do what she asked, was powerful but terrifying.
She might be leading him and Catherine’s husband and surfer dude to their death.
Sophie and the others might be already dead. Corona might use them to set a trap for her. But there was no way she could leave the others in the group helpless and on their own, and there was no way she could rescue them on her own.
So she studied the faces of these three men who were going to have to risk their lives to save some pretty odd people and might lose their own in doing so.
She studied their faces for weakness or doubt and found none.
Elle gestured at the hologram. “I’m asking you to rescue these people, who are in terrible danger. There was an urban legend making the rounds of the Corona researchers that a new method of distilling parts of the brain into a liquid that can be injected has been developed. That a couple of people have been ‘harvested’ already. That’s the charming term used in science, by the way. Harvesting. As if people were crops. There were rumors of a previous study group that disappeared. I didn’t pay much attention because there are constant rumors making the rounds and many of them are silly.
” She stopped, drew in a deep breath. “But now. . . I’m not too sure it’s silly. I think it might be true. I think that the people ultimately running the trial have gone insane and there is no telling what they’ll do, the lengths they’ll go to for results. There’s something behind this I don’t understand. Sophie and I both felt it, but we were so taken up in the results of the tests we decided to let it go. It was just a feeling, after all.”
“But you were right to feel uneasy,” Nick growled.
“Yes.” Elle felt a spurt of relief. He understood. “We were right. I have no idea where to go from here. I don’t know where the subjects were taken. The entire area is studded with labs. Arka owns a number of them. The labs would be underground and would probably not be on any schematics. Actually they could be anywhere. We are not even certain the lab would be in Palo Alto. They could have been taken anywhere in a van.”
The thought terrified her. Sophie and the others taken somewhere where they couldn’t be found, like cattle to slaughter.
Mac spoke, in his deep, gravelly voice that sounded like it came from underground. “Do you have any clues at all as to where they might have been taken? How about other labs that were cooperating with the program? Do you have a list?”
Elle shrugged. “As far as I know, no other labs were involved. I have the e-mail of everyone and I’ve started a program on my computer to search their e-mails for the names of other labs, but so far nothing has come up.”
“The tracking devices?” Catherine asked. Elle had told her about the device she’d pried from her arm.
The men sat up straighter. “What tracking device?” Nick demanded.
Elle held her arm out, pulled up her sleeve and pointed to the bandage. Nick was going to be so mad at her. When he asked about it this morning, she’d simply said that she’d cut herself. “All the members of the trial group were injected with a microchip. We were told that it was to monitor our vital signs. Each week we held our arms over a reader where the data was downloaded. But Sophie said to cut it out of my arm when she called to warn me, so I did.”
I Dream of Danger Page 23