“And you were going to tell me about this when?” Nick’s jaws flexed. She shrugged.
“Do you know where the database is held?” Jon asked. Nick had said that Jon was their cyber expert.
“Sorry, no.” Elle shook her head. “It would presumably be in the company database, except I suspect now that the entire project was off the books. In which case it will be in an encrypted file on someone’s laptop. I don’t even know whose.”
“We’ll go over satellite images of last night. See if we can find any useful images.” Nick looked at Mac. “Did we have any drones out?”
Mac shook his head.
“Damn.” Nick beat his fist lightly on his knee. “And we can’t send them out now until we have some idea of where. Though it sounds too late for drones, if they are all underground.”
Oh man. Elle understood his frustration. How could they rescue the group if they didn’t know where they were? If the group hadn’t been split up. If they were still alive.
“Okay,” Mac said decisively. “I’m assigning tasks. Elle, write up everything you know, absolutely everything and go over it with Catherine and make sure you keep an eye on that troll of yours that’s going through the e-mails.”
“I designed a program that will generate passwords on the basis of keywords. It will generate over a billion and can be sent in one packet to try a massive decrypt just as soon as we have someone’s computer to hack,” Jon said. Elle blinked. God, a program like that could earn millions in the outside world.
She nodded. “That would be really useful.”
Mac continued giving orders. “Also go over satellite shots. Make sure you include Keyhole 15 over a 48-hour spread over the entire Palo Alto area. They might have started rounding the test subjects up early.”
Elle barely stopped from gasping. The Keyhole series of satellites was top secret. Top-top secret. Like having-to-kill-you-if-you-discover-anything-about-it secret. She only knew about it because an analyst who had a crush on her told her about them. She’d gone to the darknet to research it. The rumor was that its lenses could read the numbers on a credit card in moonlight. “You can do that?” She couldn’t stop herself from asking Jon. “Hack into Keyhole?”
“Oh yeah, he can.” Mac did something to his face, moving a muscle or two around in an odd configuration that in anyone else might have been a smile.
“We need to go to Elle’s house and find that tracer, download what was on it and reverse engineer it. Would that be possible, Elle?” Jon asked.
She thought about it. Well, if Jon was that good, it was a possibility. Each tracer would have a set of basic instructions and would be programmed to emit a signal. Catch that signal and scan for other signals . . . She nodded. “Yeah. If we can hack into the basic underlying protocol, maybe we can locate the other devices, unless—”
“Unless they’re all dead,” Jon finished grimly.
Oh God. Elle put a hand to her stomach. She looked at Jon. “And—And suppose the house is still under surveillance? I have no idea if they have enough security personnel to post a guard at each empty house, but it seemed like there was plenty of money available. They just might do that.”
“I’d welcome that,” Jon said, bright blue eyes suddenly dark and flat.
She shivered. The men who’d rounded up her friends, were keeping them prisoner and were perhaps planning on killing them were evil and she was happy to help in engineering their downfall. She should be happy she had these tough good guys on her side. But that fleeting expression on Jon’s face . . .
“Okay,” Mac said in his deep bass. It was extraordinary. Every time he spoke Catherine just glowed. As if his words were lightbulbs that lit her up from within. “It looks like we’ve got our team and our assignments. So let’s get going.”
“Not so fast, Mac. Aren’t you forgetting something?” A deep voice Elle had never heard before.
The effect on Nick, Mac, and Jon was electric. All three shot to their feet with blinding speed, chairs scraping on the floor. They stood almost quivering to attention, arms stiffly up in a salute, astonishment on their faces.
Catherine stood frozen. Nobody had heard the door behind them open, which already struck Elle as strange. That anyone could get the jump on Nick, Mac, and Jon seemed outlandish.
That the person who got the jump on them was an old, old man leaning heavily on a cane and on a tall woman seemed impossible.
“Sir!” Mac barked, echoed by Nick and Jon.
The man had once been tall and looked as if he’d been strong. Now he was stooped and his skin hung loosely on his big frame. He moved slowly, as if every step hurt, which was probably the case because Elle had rarely seen so many surgical scars as this man sported over his big bald head, running down to disappear into the large sweatshirt that billowed on him.
The woman by his side had the most extraordinary face. It was. . . It was beautiful, but it looked as if Elle was seeing her through a kaleidoscope, lozenge-shaped pieces of her face almost but not quite fitting together. And yet the woman moved with the grace of beauty.
The man shuffled his feet, leaning heavily on the woman, moving steadily until he stood by Catherine and Elle. He leaned over and Elle heard him whisper to the woman supporting him, “Thanks, Stella.” She threw him a blinding smile, her face stretching in odd ways across the white lines crisscrossing her face. His smile in return was tender. There was a flash of something there for a second, and Elle wondered if he was as old as he looked.
Stella! In an instant the kaleidoscope twisted and righted, and Elle could clearly see who she was. Stella Cummings. Once the most famous actress on the planet, deemed one of the most beautiful women in the world, now Haven’s chef. Elle was so busy gaping at her, wondering if she dared ask for an autograph because Stella in Nobody But Me had given her courage and hope five years ago when Elle had gone through a bad period, that she barely noticed the three men following the old man into the room.
They were visibly young yet they moved as if they were older than the first man. Big-boned but thin, faces emaciated, hollowed out with suffering. They looked like a strong wind would blow them over, but there they were, shuffling forward behind the older man like wraiths following a ghost.
Stella left the old man for a moment and crossed the room to kiss Elle on the cheek. “Welcome to Haven, my dear.” Elle blushed with pleasure. Stella Cummings, kissing her on the cheek!
Stella went back to the old man. A ghost of a smile crossed his face.
“At ease, men,” he said. His voice was hoarse as if he didn’t use it much. He had trouble articulating. But he continued, each word coming out painfully, though he didn’t stop until he’d said all he wanted to say. “I understand we’ve got a chance to grab the motherfuckers who fucked with us—” His dark eyes scanned the room, alighting on Catherine, Elle, and Stella. “Pardon my language ladies,” he said solemnly.
“We’re scientists,” Catherine said. “I think fuckers is the correct technical term.”
Another ghost of a smile. For a fleeting second, Elle could see something of the man he’d been, hidden deep behind the shattered exterior. And that man had been . . . handsome. Yes, she could see it now. And Stella saw it too. Certainly her eyes never left his face.
“We want payback,” he said simply.
The two badly injured men nodded their heads jerkily. They clearly had little motor control. “P-P-P-Payb-b-b-ack,” one stuttered. He had a big perfectly round keloid scar right over where the neocortex was. Someone had punched a sensor right into his brain.
All three men were becoming white-faced with the strain of standing up, and the man with the sensor scar was trembling. They didn’t look as if they could face breakfast let alone a mission. She looked around. No one was saying anything about their obvious physical condition. She waited another second but there was only silence.
O-kay
. She would have to be the bad guy.
“That’s very kind of you,” she began gently, “but perhaps—”
The elderly man turned his head painfully and fixed her with a look. For an instant Elle wanted to step back, the power of that look was so great. It was a banked power, a power linked to a damaged body, but inside that man strength and intelligence glowed and gathered.
The words came slowly and painfully. “I understand there are people in their hands. They will experiment on them and then they will kill them. I do not want to live if we can’t make an attempt to rescue them the way my men rescued us. We aren’t physically capable of going on the mission with you, Mac.” His already hoarse voice broke and he hung his head down as if someone had cut a tendon. Then his head rose and his black eyes glowed with strength and purpose. “But we are perfectly capable of manning the war room and providing intel. So we will rescue those people. Together. Hoo-yah.”
“Hoo-yah!” A chorus of seven men’s voices, all strong and true, rang out.
Chapter 12
Arka Pharmaceuticals Headquarters
San Francisco
One entire wall of Lee’s office was a huge glowing hologram. Along the bottom of the hologram ran a series of data packets, including the date: three months ago.
Millon Laboratories at Palo Alto. Before the facility had been destroyed. Lee clenched his fists at the memory. Catherine Young had suddenly risen up and bit her employer in the ass. She’d taken a huge bite out of him and had almost brought his entire project down. Years of work nearly destroyed because of one woman and the faceless men who’d helped her.
He had a small part of the attack on tape, though it had been mostly destroyed by something the faceless men had done to his security system. His very, very expensive security system.
It still burned.
He’d recognized Young immediately of course, brazenly breaking into his facility with the use of a cloned pass.
The lab had been hidden and illegal, given the type of testing that had gone on. He’d had to go in and complete the destruction she’d wrought so that when the authorities came to investigate, he’d been able to plausibly state that the extra underground floor was merely equipment storage space. There hadn’t been any technical experts in the law enforcement team, luckily. But he’d had to buy off the three technicians who’d worked on the floor, and it had cost him. Money, time, effort.
Flynn had placed him under pressure, then Beijing had placed him under pressure.
That’s not how science worked. Science proceeded at its own stately pace. Putting pressure on the scientific process was an abomination. This was something nonscientists like Flynn were simply incapable of understanding.
What Lee was working on had the potential to change the world forever, as momentous as the harnessing of electricity. More so, even, as it would change the nature of a part of humanity. This was not something that could be done in a hurry and sloppily.
Injecting himself with SL-61 had been a stroke of genius, because he felt stronger and more intellectually acute than ever. He felt, for want of a better word, invincible.
There had been a missing element, though. An element he’d discerned in an animal experiment on the hidden Level 4 the night the laboratory was destroyed.
How he’d loved Level 4. It had been his very own reign, a place where he held the power of life and death, a place where he created living organisms. A place where he’d been a god. He’d carried out extensive animal testing on Level 4 that would have been illegal under the Animal Testing Bill. The experiments might have been illegal according to a bill passed by a lobby of fanatical men and women who cared more for dumb creatures than for science, but they had been necessary. He’d been testing iterations of SL that would increase strength and speed and intelligence.
He and the SL drugs had been conducting a kind of dance. Two steps forward and one step backward, then three steps forward and two steps backward, then one step forward and three steps backward. Then ten steps forward.
Of course, it was immensely complex, as he was effecting change at the cellular level and trying to make it stable. He was speeding up evolution itself, something no one else in the history of the world had ever attempted. And he was succeeding, damn it. Every single trial that ended with a problem also unveiled a new possibility.
It was impossible to explain to that moron Flynn. To his astonishment, though, it also proved impossible to explain to the Ministry of Science in Beijing. Nobody cared about the process, about the secrets to life itself, which he was unlocking. All they cared about were tangible results. A drug that would increase the capabilities of soldiers in the field, that would prove stable over time and that was cheap to produce.
In any hands but his it would have been impossible.
Up to that point there’d been fifty-nine iterations. Nothing compared to Edison’s 10,000 failed attempts. Lee had only tried fifty-nine times, but that fifty-ninth . . .
Deep below the earth, in the animal lab, Lee had found part of the key to changing the world in an animal cage housing a bonobo. There’d been ten bonobos, big, healthy apes genetically predisposed to peaceful behavior. SL-59 had had a negative effect on nine of them. They’d turned listless and died.
But the tenth . . .
Lee watched the holographic recording. He’d been watching it over and over again while poring over the analyses of the blood and brain tissue. He’d gone back postmortem to the original MRIs and had discovered something that had escaped his researchers’ notice—a slight anomaly of the hypothalamus and increased temperature of the periaqueductal gray of the midbrain. Both qualities had increased notably after administration of SL-59.
In the hologram, so clear someone else in the room would have difficulty in distinguishing between now and three months earlier, he stood before a transparent Plexiglas cage, watching the beautiful animal inside.
The hologram clearly showed all the data contained in the data infocubes at the forefront of the cage. Gender, genetic history, MRI and CAT scans, IQ test results, dosages, and times of injections of SL-59.
The other bonobos had been sitting in their cages, movements slow, eyes lifeless.
Bonobo Number Eight, though. Ah, he wasn’t sitting listlessly. No, he was upright, well-balanced, brown eyes sharp. In the hologram, Lee stood studying him and it was clear that the animal was studying him right back.
The camera had been at Lee’s back so he couldn’t see his own face but he knew that he’d glanced down to see the EKG tracing at that point. Bonobos were peaceable within their own groups, but grew agitated in the presence of other species.
Number Eight’s heart rate remained unchanged.
Amazing. Either the bonobo had developed an ability to control its own heart rate or an instinctive fear had been overridden by the drug. Perhaps both. And then something remarkable had happened. The animal had checked Lee’s hands for weapons and his eyes for intent. There had been no mistaking the raw intelligence in the animal.
They had stood there for a minute or two, gauging each other, two beings on either side of a species divide.
Then the bonobo had smashed itself against the Plexiglas trying to get to him, beating itself into a pulp.
But those few minutes had been enough to give Lee an insight into attenuating the intensity of the violence while retaining the intelligence, and that insight had led to a virus-borne bit of genetic engineering that he thought represented the breakthrough they needed.
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SL-59 hadn’t worked and SL-60 hadn’t worked. But SL-62 . . . ah.
And an hour ago he’d injected himself with the drug.
In the hologram he watched as the bonobo killed itself against the glass in a frenzy of ferocity. When the animal finally lay on the straw-covered floor of the Plexiglas cage, a ruined sack of broken bones, Lee hit rewind.
He stood and watched, once more, that moment in which he and the bonobo faced each other down.
As he watched that moment again, he felt strength course through his system, oxygen flowing deep and rich in his veins, bringing blood to his muscular system. He felt each muscle almost separately, felt how well each muscle fit together with the others to form a strong and powerful whole. Though he was on the twenty-second floor of a skyscraper in the Financial District, he felt as if he were barefoot in the jungle, connected to the earth through skin and blood and bone, taking strength from the earth, giving it back.
The hologram switched off and he went to the window to look out over the city. He lifted his hand and placed it against the glass and it was as if his hand passed through the glass, out into the city, reaching down to the tiny people below, hurrying to get out of the inclement weather. He could swat them away so easily. Such ants, all that toiling and striving so essentially meaningless. Puny and weak and craving direction.
Soon their lives would be harnessed to a greater good instead of being so random.
He would head a triumphant army of supermen. Hadn’t mankind always dreamed of this—of a superior race that would come and lead? All those legends of the gods with immense power over the earth and its creatures—surely their species knew it was always going to end up like this? All Lee had done was speed up the process and place its agency in the right hands.
Of course, he had the power of the gods too. He could feel it, feel vitality run through him, feel his muscles and sinews reknit into a more powerful whole. Feel his brain rewiring itself. His eyesight was so acute he thought he could see individual strands of hair in the ant-people down below on the street. His hearing was so keen he could hear the centralized air system’s gentle hum. It had started to snow, a bit of sleet mixed in, and he could hear each spicule ping against the window panes. He could hear—
I Dream of Danger Page 24