Heart of Danger (30 page)

His attention focused tightly on Catherine when she gasped and swayed a little. He was about to leap to her side when the words she spoke froze him in place.

Her voice deepened, became low and rough, as male as her vocal cords allowed.

“Saddle up, boys, it’s time to ride. You wanna live forever?”

It was the Captain’s war cry at the beginning of every mission. Catherine even had a touch of the South in her voice, a faint echo of the Captain’s deep Georgia accent.

The hairs on Mac’s forearms rose and brushed against the sleeves of his sweatshirt and he felt the blood drain from his face. Nick and Jon looked pale, too. Jon actually looked sick, a drop of sweat dripping off his temple.

Catherine let go of his hand as if it burned her and opened her eyes. Her hand went to her throat and she looked frightened. “Mac . . .” Her voice was a mere thread. She coughed and tried again. “Mac. What just happened? I blacked out for a second.”

It took him a moment to find his own voice. He couldn’t stand to see that lost look on her face. He stood and pulled her into his arms. She was trembling as she put her arms around his waist, hiding her head against his shoulder. He held her tightly, looking over her head at Nick and Jon.

They both stood, as determined as he was.

“She was reading me and then I heard—” Jon shook his head sharply, as if he wanted to get rid of even the thought, but it stuck. “I heard the Captain. He was in her head and in mine. He’s alive in Palo Alto, and he’s in danger. Right now. We have to go get him.”

“No question,” Nick growled.

“Yeah.” Much as he didn’t want to, Mac let go of Catherine. Her trembling had subsided. He wanted to keep her in his arms but he was already switching into mission mode, half of him here with her, half of him planning an on-the-fly hostage rescue mission. They’d been working on it, but at a slow pace. Now they were going to go with what they had.

They could do it. They’d rescued a downed American pilot in the heart of Tehran. All they needed was more intel and Catherine would have that.

“Okay, men, we’ve got some mission planning to do. We’ve got about six hours of darkness still. Go get your gear and suit up and I’ll start debriefing Catherine. I’ll have the beginning of a plan by the time you get back. Double time.”

“I’ll need some gear, too,” Catherine said, and they all three froze.

“What?” She looked each one of them in the face. “I’m coming with you, of course.”

“No,” Nick and Jon said together, horrified.

“
Fuck
no,” Mac said.

Chapter Fourteen

Millon Laboratories

Palo Alto

His strength was ebbing, the cold fingers of death reaching deep into his heart and squeezing. The fingers had reached for him often, he was used to their icy touches, the feeling of falling, falling . . .

He’d resisted up until now even though he had almost lost all sense of himself. Who he was, what he was—a blank. Lost. He sometimes tried to recall something of who he’d been but everything always danced just out of his reach. There was no language left, only images, growing more and more faded.

Men. Hard-faced, dressed in black. One, taller than the rest, bearing the scars of burns. He’d seen those burns, seen him on fire. The men . . . they were somehow his. Somehow . . . him. He didn’t know who they were or where they were. He had no names, just the faces floating in and out of memory, always just beyond reach.

Pain had blasted so much out of him. He had the faintest recollection of resisting when he’d started this new existence. When he’d lost the man he’d been and became Patient Nine. He’d fought . . . hadn’t he?

Images came. White-coated men with syringes and worse . . . liquid that burned his veins. Waking up over and over again with new stitches, with lost memories, ever weaker. They wanted something from him and he wouldn’t—couldn’t—give it. There had been anger, more needles, more surgeries.

Now they left him alone. It had been days since he had seen anyone except—except The Man. He had no name for the man, but if he concentrated hard, he could see him, as if in a fog. Tall, thin. Dark skin, thin nose, clever, slanted black eyes. The needles came from him.

The man disappeared and though he clutched at the image it was gone. It was all gone, everything.

It was the end. He accepted it, almost welcomed it.

He’d made one last effort, reaching out, touching . . . someone. Someone familiar. A . . . woman? Soft voice, long, dark hair, very pretty. Yes, a woman. She wasn’t here but . . . she was. He’d heard her voice, in his head. When she came and touched him, warmth spread through him, the first warmth he’d felt in . . .

It was gone. Sometime in his life he’d known warmth, physical warmth, the sun on his skin. But he didn’t know when, he didn’t even know if the faint memory was true. Maybe he’d spent his entire life here, half-naked, with needles and probes and liquid fire in his veins.

No.

No, there had been a time . . . before. Again, hard-faced men appeared briefly in front of him, then disappeared.

He’d called out. He had. He’d called out so hard he had lost consciousness, with no idea whatsoever of how long.

He’d called because he was dying. Someone was going to make him die, soon. So he’d reached out and someone had been there. Softness and warmth. The woman.

But there was no woman, there was only an empty room filled with beeping machines and bright lights that never let him sleep.

Sleep . . . soon he would sleep. Soon he’d sleep forever.

Mount Blue

It wasn’t a funny situation, but Catherine had to stifle the urge to laugh.

All three men looked horrified, and Mac looked both horrified and angry. An angry Mac was formidable. If she didn’t know him so well, know him down to his bones, she’d be frightened.

His face was dark, the scarred parts pulled tight with tension, eyes narrowed. He seemed even huger, broad shoulders blocking the rest of the room from her sight, enormous hands opening and closing as if ready to do battle.

He was.

With himself.

Catherine looked him in the eyes, then at Nick and at Jon.

What a revelation the two men had been when she’d looked inside their souls. Nick, with his lost love, yearning for her, knowing he would never see her again, sick with worry that she might be in trouble. No one would ever know looking at that cold closed façade he faced the world with that he had all those emotions inside. That he had all that love inside.

And Jon—burning with rage at the treachery that had undermined his life. She hadn’t understood who or what had betrayed him as a boy but it went beyond the betrayal as a man. No, this was something in the past and colored his every emotion. And again, who would have thought all that rage and pain swirled under the Surfer Dude exterior.

Three large, strong men, warriors, trained to kill, standing right in front of her and looking enraged and determined to block her from going with them into the lab to rescue their former leader.

“You can all stand down,” she said quietly. “You know deep in your hearts that I have to come with you. If we have any hope of saving your leader, you need me. I know the laboratory inside out. I know their security system, I know the layout. Above all, you’re going to need me when we find Nine. He is hooked up to machines and it will be a very delicate task to detach him from the machines without killing him. None of you have a hope of doing that. Only I can free him from the machinery he is tethered to, and only then can you rescue him.”

There was utter silence in the room if you could ignore teeth grinding. Well, they were going to grind even harder.

“And I have something else to say. I am not trained as the three of you are. I promise that I will obey you absolutely. Tell me to duck and I duck. I will be your shadow and will follow your instructions. I know full well I am a potential liability, and trust me, I don’t want to be, so count on me to do exactly as you say. But”—she held up her hand when Mac opened his mouth—“the instant we are inside the facility you obey me, all three of you. Instantly. Unless we are actually being fired upon, at which point your training trumps mine, you do exactly as I say. There can be no other way.”

She looked at each one again. “So. You can all stop scowling now and man up. Nick, Jon, go get your gear like Mac said, get something for me, and we’ll reconvene here in ten minutes. I’ll prepare the briefing on the lab.”

For such determined men, they looked strangely uncertain. She knew that having her along went against every instinct they had. Not only because she wasn’t trained but mostly because each man, quietly and deeply, couldn’t endanger a woman. All three of them had a furious protective streak in them that wouldn’t allow them to contemplate putting her in danger.

Catherine made a show of checking her watch. “You’ve used up a full minute. A minute that might make the difference between life and death for your captain. Mac?”

She looked up at him, appreciating his struggle, knowing he hated this, knowing he understood how necessary it was. He stood immobilized by warring factions inside his heart and reason won out. By a hair.

“Get going,” he said tightly, then pulled her into his arms the instant Nick and Jon left the room. “God,” he said into her hair, “I hate this.”

“I know.” She did. She could feel his heartbeat against her cheek. In bed, it had been the steady beat of an athlete’s heart but now it beat fast and furious and wild, as if he were running. He was, in a way. He was conducting a running battle inside himself, an internal war. Keep her here and have already slim changes whittled down to nothing, or take her along, worry dogging his every step.

No good choices.

Mac didn’t worry when he was in mission mode. She’d read that in him. Anxiety wasn’t part of his mental makeup. She understood that he prepared as hard as a man could—and she’d felt that most of his life was training—and then he just went ahead without any fear.

She also knew he was fully prepared to die at any time. That kind of thing simply could not be hidden.

But now fear all but oozed out of his pores. It wasn’t fear for himself but for her.

“Mac.” She kissed his chest over his heart and pulled away. His face was cold and hard but his nostrils were pinched white with stress. “It has to be this way. What I told Nick and Jon is true for us as well. Every second I spend trying to reassure you, give you strength, is a second lost and drains my energy.”

His hands dropped with surprise. She’d done it deliberately, pretending she was infusing him with strength when the opposite was true. She gained strength and courage just from being near him. But the thought that he might be endangering her with his fear shocked him.

“Okay. Let me set up to brief them on the facility. I’ll need to use one of your computers.”

“Over there,” he growled. “Tell me what I can do.” Unexpectedly, he looked awkward, big hands held clumsily to his side, opening and closing futilely, when at all times he was the epitome of male grace.

“There’s not much you can do until I get some information together,” she said gently.

“Can I get you coffee at least?”

He needed to do something for her. She understood that. Her stomach was roiling and the last thing she needed was caffeine but . . . “Sure, that would be helpful.”

He pressed a button and spoke quietly.

Millon had the blueprints of the facility, plus security regulations and lab safety rules, in a file given to all employees. She pulled it up, ran it through a program that created a hologram and enlarged it. She had just finished printing out the security and safety rules when Jon and Nick came back together with a Haven citizen rolling in a cart.

Stella again, bless her.

The cart had coffee and tea, bless her again. On the cart were plates piled high with mini panini, mini donuts and apple slices with a sprinkling of fresh cinnamon. Mac, Nick and Jon fell on the coffee and panini and donuts while she savored the tea and ate the apple slices. She felt energized by the instant injection of fructose.

“Okay, settle down, men.” The three men exchanged glances but obeyed without grumbling. Catherine paced back and forth as she briefed them. A comforting, familiar feeling. She’d taught undergrad classes for several years in Boston, and though these three tough, fierce men were totally unlike the soft baby nerds she was used to, she couldn’t complain about their attention. They were focused on her, taking in every single word.

“Let’s go over this again. This is the main facility. There are ancillary structures but this is where the work is carried out and this is where the Captain is held.” The holo was slightly tilted, giving an indication of its shape. Size in meters was given in white letters at the top. “It is an L-shaped facility, one long wing and one shorter wing. The shorter wing is only labs and the other wing has what some of my creepier colleagues calls ‘meatware’—the human patients and test animals.” She indicated both wings with a pen, touching air. Mac’s computer system was top-of-the-line. The holo was so realistic it was like having a 3D copy to scale of the facility in front of her. When she tapped the air to indicate each wing, she kept having a tiny jolt of surprise that her pen met air and not steel and glass. “There are three aboveground levels and three belowground levels. The bottom level is given over to production of test batches. It is a production facility and has separate entrances. My security pass covers the six levels but that will of course have been canceled. Jon, do you think you could make me a duplicate in the name of a colleague I know is out of state?”

“No problem,” Jon answered.

“Great. So, before I go through the building floor by floor, I need to brief you on what I know of security arrangements. Millon has to turn a family-friendly face to the world so it is not surrounded by a visible wall but an invisible one. There is a microwave beam circling the building, strong enough to cook anything mammalian, certainly including humans. The beams lose focus after about ten yards so these very expensive designer vases rimming the periphery are actually microwave emitters.”