“Yes,” he said.
She nodded. “And this one had a different flavor?”
Well, he’d woken up with a woodie, if that’s what she meant. He’d woken up in a sweaty panic.
“Close your eyes, Nick.”
“What?” Christ. Time was this big heavy thing swirling around a drain. Elle was in danger, in danger right now. He didn’t have time for this shit!
Nick shifted on his feet. He wanted to pull away from Catherine, run for the door, but . . . he couldn’t free himself.
He was strong. He’d been strong all his life. He’d been in the military for almost half his life and every single fucking day he’d trained for combat. He was a shooter. He’d shot several million rounds in his life. His hands were strong. Once he’d tested at 180 pounds on the grip-strength test. He could crush Catherine’s hand in a nanosecond.
Except . . . he couldn’t. He couldn’t pull free from her.
“You are scared and you want to spring into action.” Catherine’s eyes exerted a pull as great as her hand. He couldn’t look away from her. “But you have no idea where to go. I’m trying to help you, Nick. If Elle sent you a message, she also sent you the way to find her. So you need to listen hard to what she tried to tell you. Now close your eyes.”
There was no way to disobey her. He closed his eyes.
“Clear your mind,” Catherine said. “There’s only Elle, and the message she sent you. That’s all there is in the world. She’s in trouble and if she called for help, there’s a way to find her in her message. So think carefully. You were dreaming about her. And you heard a cry for help. Think back to that cry.”
Nick nodded, thought back.
“You were dreaming about her, about Elle. Then the dream changed, correct?”
He nodded again. Exactly. That was exactly it. It was as if Catherine had been there.
“All of a sudden, it lost that dreamlike feeling and become real. Something you could touch and feel.”
“Yes.” That had been exactly it.
“You woke up and felt the danger.”
His eyes opened. “Yes.” All over his body, every cell prickling with it. Even before he heard the words, the call.
“Did you see her?”
Did he? Nick dug deep. There was this huge overlay of sweaty panic. He had to get rid of that, try to remember. His jaw clenched. “Yes, I think—I think I did.“
Another squeeze of his hand. “What did she look like?”
“Older.” The word popped out as the images in his head suddenly coalesced. “Tired. Scared. She had— She had her hair all in her face,” he said suddenly. “Short hair. Chin length. She always wore her hair long—” A sudden flash of memory of Elle’s hair trailing over his stomach like a pale waterfall nearly killed him. “But it’s short now. All in her face, messy-like. She’s bleeding—” Mouth dry, he tried to swallow. “From a cut. It’s deep. She’s— She’s worried about it. But not because of the cut itself. There’s something else about the cut, but I don’t know what.” He found himself rocking in distress. “I’m not understanding this.”
“Okay,” Catherine suggested gently, “don’t worry about the cut right now. Put that aside. Is she sitting or standing?”
What the fuck difference did it make? Still— “Sitting,” he said, decisively. Suddenly, the knowledge was there, in his head. A picture of Elle, face in her hands, shoulders sloped in despair. The despair colored the air around her, was deep and dark. Oh Elle. “She’s sitting on the floor, back to the wall.”
“What’s the room like?”
He hadn’t even thought of that. Everything had been centered on Elle, in danger. He concentrated harder. “Not a—a house. Or at least her house. I don’t get that impression. Everything feels cheap, slightly dirty. Not like her at all.” The last time he’d seen her, she’d been absolutely broke, but even then everything had been clean. Threadbare but clean. The place she was in felt dirty and downscale.
“What is she seeing, Nick?”
He screwed his eyes more tightly shut. What was she seeing? He had no idea.
“Dunno. Walls. A bed. But— it feels strange to her, not familiar.”
“Like a—a hotel?”
Jesus, yes! “Yeah, like a hotel. Or . . . she’s on the first floor. Maybe a motel?”
“Do you have a sense of what it looks like from the outside? If it’s an unfamiliar place, she’ll have noticed more about it than her own home, which would be so familiar to her. So think. Reach in through the scream for help to see if there’s more information there. There will be. You just have to find it.”
Damn. Catherine was making sense. But it had been like one huge powerful pulse, strong enough to wake him, to panic him, but no hidden messages.
Nick waited, sweating, then shook his head.
“Think back to the dream. Just before it faded. Can you try to remember what was there before that beacon lit up to call you to her? I’m sure there was an image that must have bled into the beacon. When she called for help, it must have been part of the call. That’s the only way it would work. Any call that strong, to wake you up from a distance, would have information in it. Hidden, maybe. Or rather the beacon call was so strong you can’t perceive the other data in it.” She looked swiftly at her husband, then at Jon, the team cybergeek. “Think of it as—Jon, what do you call it when information is hidden but not encrypted in a computer message?”
“Steganography.” Jon was watching everything soberly. His default emotional mode was manic, teasing, but he wasn’t teasing or facetious now. He was dead serious.
“Steganography, right.” Catherine turned back to Nick. “Think of it as what you’d call intel hidden in a message. She’d have some sense of where she is in the call for help if you got the sense that she wasn’t home. If she were home, that would be background noise for her. But if she’s away from home, on the run, that would be part of the emergency call.”
Put that way . . .
“Think back. You got this call. What did it feel like?”
What did it feel like? It felt like shit—Elle in danger and he didn’t know how to help her. “Like Elle threw a rock at my head. The way you do at a window. Then screamed for help.”
Catherine was listening to him with every fiber of her being, concentrated wholly on him, holding his hand. “That feeling you had. The feeling that she wasn’t in her home, in a familiar environment. That came from her, from Elle. She wasn’t beaming that at you, but it was in the message. She must have come to the place from somewhere else. So, in your head, try to spool back, as if it were a tape on rewind. Just slide your finger from right to left in your head. Picture it, Nick. Sliding your finger, going back in time.”
Her voice was almost hypnotic. Her gray eyes were glowing as if a lightbulb had lit up behind her eyes.
“Back, Nick,” she murmured. “Slide it back. I’m there with you.”
He slid it back. Back . . .
Catherine’s eyes dimmed. She tightened her hand on his. “I’m reading you too much, Nick. You’re like a foghorn while I’m trying to listen to music. Calm down, cool it. You’re deafening me.”
Nick didn’t have to look to know that Mac and Jon were exchanging glances. No one ever had to tell him to cool it, ever. He was nothing but cool. Cold as ice. Elle was the only thing that had ever wiped away that cool. He had shed tears exactly once in his lifetime—sitting on the edge of Elle’s bed back in Lawrence, knowing she was gone forever.
And now.
Knowing she needed him and being unable to help because he was a mess inside.
“You are a cool, calm, still lake,” Catherine said. “Emotionless, inert.”
He was a cool, calm, still lake. Emotionless, inert.
“I’m feeling it,” Catherine said softly. Her hand on his glowed with warmth. She was somehow reading him. Reading Elle through him. “Fear. Not yours, Nick. Hers.”
“Panic,” he said and swallowed.
“Yes.”
Catherine’s eyes were closed now, her voice a whisper so low he could barely hear her. “Panic. She’s on the run. Running away from . . . I can’t tell. Men in black suits, with—” She stopped, the dreaminess in her voice gone. She looked over to Mac and swallowed. “I’ve been around you guys long enough to recognize it. She’s being pursued by men wearing combat gear, fully armed, with nightvision.”
Nick froze. He could almost hear Jon and Mac stiffening with attention. Catherine had just described soldiers. Or if not soldiers, then elite corporate security. Either way bad news. The worst news possible. Trained men gunning for one woman.
Calm, still as a lake . . .
“Men are coming for her, outside her house.” Catherine breathed in and out, somehow glowing once again.
Nick picked up. He was getting images, flickering as if in an old-time movie. Fragmented—there and not there. Yet somehow he could follow because there was the essence of Elle there, and he could follow Elle to the ends of the earth.
Nick spoke. “Those guys in combat gear, they’re coming fast. Coordinated. But she’s been warned. She’s somehow wounded, in her arm. There’s pain that she is blocking out. She grabs her bag and runs out and down, down—down a set of stairs, past the ground floor, down . . . There’s a long dark corridor, very long. She runs to the end of it, goes up the stairs, out into a backyard. She cuts across a number of yards; she knows where she’s going. She runs as fast as she can until she stops. Clings to a lamppost. The street is—anonymous. Just normal houses, not too rich, not too poor. She runs again, as fast as she can, down dark streets with nothing remarkable to identify them. The houses are getting poorer, though. The streets are darker. She’s afraid. It’s a bad part of town. But I don’t know of what town. She stops, winded. She’s looking at a building. Very shabby, faded green façade. There’s a neon sign, VACANCIES. The first A and the E are burned out. I can’t make out the name. She’s feeling—not safe so much as anonymous. She signs in, pays in cash, leaves a false name. Have no idea what it is. She fades in and out.”
“Did you get a sense of where she is, Nick? Where this hotel or motel might be?”
Nick’s free hand clenched. Well, fuck. If I knew that, I wouldn’t be here, twiddling my freaking thumbs, I’d be on my way to her, wouldn’t I? But he couldn’t say that. Couldn’t speak disrespectfully to Catherine. First, because Mac would flatten him. Second, because he liked Catherine. And third, because she was trying to help. “Don’t know.” A shudder ran through him at his own words. “I don’t know.”
“Ah, but you do,” Catherine said, her voice gentle. Nick’s hand jerked in hers. “Listen to your body, Nick.”
What the—
“Your body is talking to you. Listen to it.”
His eyes popped open, slid over her face to the briefcase. Slid back. Nope. His body was telling him jack shit.
Catherine let go of his hand and pulled her briefcase toward her, pulling out a wad of paperwork, a sheaf of what looked like lab reports and some glossy thick paper, brochures of some kind.
For some reason, her movements fascinated him. He watched, almost enthralled.
“This has been calling to you. You haven’t been able to take your eyes off it. There’s something here that is of importance.”
Catherine began methodically placing the paperwork in neat piles all along the ten-foot-long table filled with holographic monitors that served as command central.
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. Som
ehow 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.