I Dream of Danger

  “Really, really good sex,” she said primly.

  “We’ll see about that.” Nick slid out from behind her, eased her down in the bed. He kissed her, endlessly, one hand cupping her head, the other stroking her sex. She was very wet, almost embarrassingly so. He circled her with his finger, dipped into her. She was almost hyperaroused from the climax. The feel of his rough finger against her sensitive tissues was almost electric in its intensity.

  He took his hand away but before she could object, he curled her hand around his erection. Oh God. It felt so good. Hard and hot, the skin almost velvety. She pumped her hand up and down, feeling the effect on him. His breathing speeded up, his mouth bit at hers, the hard muscles of his back became even harder.

  “Put me in you,” he whispered in her mouth.

  Elle shifted, opened her legs further, brought him to her and nearly cried out as he slid into her, hot and hard and deep. They both stilled for a moment, as if moving would be sensory overkill.

  Nick raised his torso up on his forearms and watched her eyes as he started moving in her. Slowly at first, watching every inch of her face as she watched his. How wonderful to watch him, to see the pleasure she gave him while feeling the slow honey of the pleasure he gave her. She locked her ankles in the small of his back, loving the feeling of his hard, thick muscles moving against her, in her.

  She moved to kiss his sweaty shoulder, eyes closed. I love you so much, Nick, she thought and he suddenly stilled.

  She opened her eyes to find his face slack with shock. His eyes glowed with an eerie light, skin tight across his cheekbones, neck tendons taut with tension.

  “I love you too, Elle,” he said. She brought her hand to her mouth in shock.

  I heard you. In my head. His voice. Inside her head.

  I hear you too.

  Nick kissed her savagely, slamming into her almost violently. Hard, fast, furious, as if he were trying to crawl inside her body, as if he could physically make them one.

  Now, Nick.

  His movements became even faster as they clung to each other desperately and just as desperately climaxed. She could feel her internal muscles clenching hard around him, as if to draw him even more deeply inside her.

  He slumped on her, limp and sweaty, holding her so tightly she could barely breathe.

  When he whispered sleep in her head, she did.

  Sleep took her like a beloved friend and she fell endlessly into its embrace. Images bloomed, bright and surreal, the stuff of dreams.

  And then—and then she Dreamed.

  She flew high above the earth, pure being, unrestricted by the rules of space and time. No emotion, just purpose, arrowing straight to a city by the bay, to invisible cages and the desperate faces of friends held by monsters, friends who had lost hope, friends who called to her . . .

  She bolted up in bed. Nick sat up too, turning a sober, serious face to her.

  “I know where they are,” she said and he nodded.

  Palo Alto

  Jon crouched in the bushes a block from Elle’s home. He checked his handheld. It had a special screened monitor that was visible only to him via a lens on his nightvision binoculars. It emitted no light that could be seen by anyone else.

  He checked the images sent by the overhead drone. First, he checked himself, pleased but not surprised to see that he didn’t show up on any part of the spectrum—not visually, not in IR, and not in thermal. He was covered head to toe in stealth gear that wouldn’t be available to civilians. Technically, it wasn’t available to him either. He’d liberated it from a military installation in Texas.

  The drone showed that the neighborhood was empty, no security goons held behind to keep an eye out for a lone woman scientist who might want to go back to her home. Pity. He’d have welcomed a fight.

  These were the same fuckers who had tortured his commanding officer and three of the best teammates in the world. Jon had to stop for a second to breathe his rage back out. Rage did no one any good. Just when he thought he had himself under control, though, a vision of Elle’s friend Sophie flashed in his head.

  She didn’t look like Catherine or Elle, but she had their look—smart, gentle, guileless. Someone who worked for the good of humanity. And beautiful, on top of that. The world didn’t grow too many women like that and now she was hunted, too.

  She, too, could end up like Lucius—a tormented animal, a lab rat hounded to death.

  Goddamn.

  He waited another second to get himself back under control. That was a surprise. Jon had plenty of self-control. He knew exactly what kind of face he presented to the world. Relaxed, cool, hip. Mac and Nick—now, they looked like warriors. Cold and tough and fearsome. Not Jon. He cultivated that loose, friendly look. Those who didn’t know him probably thought he mellowed out on drugs. They couldn’t know how much he hated drugs. And they couldn’t know he was a soldier who had killed many times.

  Jon kept himself detached, doing what he knew had to be done, but more like a pest controller stamping out cockroaches than a man on a crusade.

  He didn’t feel cool or detached when he thought of Sophie Daniels in the hands of the men who’d tortured his commanding officer and his teammates, though. He felt white hot rage, so powerful it distorted his senses. Fuck this, he thought. Get yourself under control. He wasn’t doing anyone any good wallowing in his emotions, imagining even now Elle’s pretty friend strapped down to a table, being cut, being hurt . . .

  Shit.

  In Ghost Ops they’d been taught to control their autonomous system. They were shooters and could slow their own heart rate down to take the shot. He crouched for another full minute, eyes closed, slowing down his breathing, taking down his heartbeat, resolutely not thinking of pretty Sophie Daniels being hurt.

  So he could go after the fuckers who’d taken her and rip their hearts out.

  Okay.

  His eyes popped open and he moved forward like a laser beam focused on the mission.

  The neighborhood was a quiet one of apartment buildings. He ghosted from bush to tree to car, certain that no one saw him and certain that he wasn’t showing up on any surveillance video. When he had Elle’s small house in sight he stopped and tapped on his handheld. This was his own invention—the electronic equivalent of radar to detect any hidden detonators or trip wires around the house. It had a radius of 500 meters and when the monitor remained blank, he moved forward.

  He could be fast now. He got past the front door security and climbed the stairs to the second floor. In a moment, he’d picked Elle’s pathetic lock and was inside her apartment.

  It had been trashed, just as Catherine’s house had been trashed. It had been done systematically, almost scientifically. Everything breakable had been broken, everything soft had been slashed, everything electronic had been smashed.

  Well, she wasn’t coming back here. That door was closed forever. She was with Nick and Nick was part of Haven on Mount Blue. Jon snapped a few photos for Elle, sent them to the war room, then moved into the bathroom. Sure enough, there it was, on the sink. The sensor that had been in Elle’s arm. The goons who’d trashed her house had simply left it there. It wasn’t going to take them to Elle, it wasn’t going to take them anywhere but her empty bathroom.

  He picked it up with tweezers Catherine had given him and studied it, wincing when he saw blood and bits of flesh clinging to the tendrils underneath the chip. That must have hurt like a bitch to pull out.

  The chip itself was tiny, a hard composite shell presenting no visible opening. It was a radio transmitter, sure, but presumably it had to have a facility for a physical data dump. He brought the chip close to his goggles, tapped the side, turning them into powerful microscopes and, Ah! There it was. The tiniest of portals and, Yes! He had the fuckers.

  He had the thinnest fiber-optic thread in existence and with the help of the tweezers he fit it into the portal and started downloading. The data started appearing immediately on his monitor. First physical data go
ing back three months covering every aspect of Elle’s body and then, at the end, a code connecting this tracking sensor with every other. Ten other sensors, for the ten other poor sons of bitches who were in the hands of monsters, including Sophie. Six codes were inert, which probably meant the poor fuckers were dead.

  He overlay the data for the four live codes onto a GPS map and stared at the screen for a full minute, breathing in and breathing out. When he was sure he had his voice under control, he tapped his comms unit and spoke.

  “I know where they are.”

  Chapter 13

  San Francisco

  At five A.M., still three hours from daybreak, the helo landed silently on the rooftop of the Arka building, forty stories up. Though it had stopped snowing and the sky had cleared, Nick was sure no one saw them. The only way they could have been detected was if someone on Market Street was looking up at the night sky and saw the stars eclipse for a second. And even then, it could be a passing cloud. A fast-passing cloud.

  Jon had flown back to Mount Blue to pick them up and fly them to San Francisco. He’d hovered for just a moment over a rental unit in Cow Hollow and Mac had rappelled down. Mac was now on his way in a big dark van they had stashed there and would park around the corner of the front entrance of the tall, slender white building housing Arka, because they had hopes of finding the live bodies of Elle’s friends somewhere inside that building.

  They had no eyes into the building, none. Jon had failed to break into the building’s security, a first. The only thing they had was the building’s schematics, on record in City Hall.

  So the building on Battery Street was impregnable in terms of intel. All they could do was break in and hope for the best.

  Not the smartest infiltration plan they’d ever come up with. But it was the only one they had.

  Elle had put herself under. She said she’d be waiting for them at Arka and that she would contact him telepathically. When she said that, Mac and Catherine hadn’t blinked. If Elle couldn’t establish contact, he and Jon were fully prepared to find the prisoners and fight their way out however they could. Mac would join them if necessary.

  It wasn’t a suicide mission. It wasn’t. Nick kept telling himself that.

  He glanced over at Jon. This was exactly the kind of mission that would appeal to his sense of the absurd and he expected to find a half-smile on Jon’s face. It wasn’t there. What was there was grim purpose and that surprised him.

  Nick hated going in blind. They all did. The less intel you had, the greater the fuckup potential, in a situation where fuckup was a synonym for messy death. Though Jon had managed to get the schematics of the building, it was missing whole floors, which was illegal. Every blueprint lodged with the city’s Building Inspection Service had to be complete as to architecture and infrastructure, but somehow Arka had greased some palms and various floors were blank. It wasn’t even clear if they had electricity. And the building stopped at the ground floor, which both Catherine and Elle said made no sense. So there were subterranean floors too.

  How many?

  Who the fuck knew?

  Nick’s jaw was so tight his temples hurt and he realized how much it sucked to go into battle when you had someone you love waiting for you back home. Ghost Ops made a hell of a lot of sense. They’d been screened, carefully chosen, so that no one had anyone waiting back home for them. Not a woman, not a child, not a dog, not even a fucking goldfish—and Nick got that, got it deep in his bones.

  Because wanting to come back, wanting fiercely to hold on to whoever was waiting for you after the op, was the surest way to take your mind off the op. And taking your mind off the op was like taking a gun to your head and pulling the trigger.

  Fuck.

  Operational readiness was a physical attribute, sure. Train, shoot, train some more, shoot some more—until it was all automatic and you reacted faster than you could think.

  But you had to think. You had to plan out your moves in constantly evolving situations that were never, ever, ever like the pre-op briefing. No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. Shit happens, and when it does you adapt.

  You had to be wholly one with the op in your head. No thinking of anything else. Forget the fact that he’d left a white-faced Elle behind, doing her damnedest—as Catherine was doing with Mac—to be upbeat and brave. Terrified he wasn’t going to come back.

  And the shitty thing was—he was terrified too.

  Well, fuck again.

  A warrior couldn’t have thoughts like that messing with his head. He had to be down with the mission, and ready to die.

  Nick wasn’t ready to die. Not even close. He wanted to live with Elle for the rest of his life. In Haven, on Mount Blue. Soon they would become completely self-sufficient and they could just turn their backs on the broken world and live in happy isolation. Living the rest of his life with Elle— Oh, man. Waking up next to her, eating with her, sleeping with her.

  Fucking her.

  The thought jolted him. First, because it shot a crude rush of heat through his system; and second, because for the first time in his life he realized he’d been making love to Elle, not fucking her and . . .

  Oh, shit. This was it. He wanted that for the rest of his life.

  He wanted her. He needed her.

  Nick. . .

  “The rooftop door is open.” Jon’s flat voice broke his pity party and suddenly Nick was back, focused and ready to get the job done.

  He checked the rooftop carefully, dialing down the aperture of the NVG. There was some light coming from the aircraft warning light atop a pole that jutted fifty feet in the air above their heads, and it blinded him.

  Nick. . .

  The field was green, flat. He reconned in quarters—a quarter of the field of vision, blink, another quarter . . .

  There it was. The rooftop door. Open, just as Jon had said.

  He looked over and their eyes met. That’s not good. They might as well have spoken the words aloud.

  Nick. Something’s wrong.

  Nick jerked as he realized Elle had been trying to contact him. She’d done it! Elle had said she’d try to go under when they landed on the roof of the Arka building.

  Nick. . .

  For a second Nick forgot that they were on the top of a building with serious security trying to rescue four people who were God knows where and in God knows what condition. What did it matter? Elle was here with him.

  And now he felt her completely, like a gentle hand petting him, a steady warmth in his head.

  “I’ve got Elle,” he told Jon.

  Jon’s mouth tightened. “Yeah? What’s she say?”

  “That something’s wrong.”

  Jon’s response, almost scripted, should have been, No shit, Sherlock. But he didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything. He just tightened his mouth again.

  In a moment they were both in a crouch, weapon in hand, moving toward the open door from two different directions. It if was a trap, maybe one of them could survive.

  Elle followed him in his head, utterly quiescent, instinctively understanding that he couldn’t deal with distractions.

  They reached the door. It was open only an inch and behind the door it was dark. Jon flattened himself on the right side, weapon shouldered. Nick waited a moment, trying to hear what was on the other side.

  No one there, a faint voice whispered in his head.

  Well, if this was going to work, he was going to have to trust her.

  He kicked open the door, jumping over the high barrier designed to keep heavy rain from seeping into the stairwell, landing lightly on a landing, weapon up, completely ready to face the enemy—

  Who wasn’t there.

  Nobody in the stairwell. Elle sounded uncertain. Puzzled.

  Nick peered over the banister at the endless flights leading downward. There were faint emergency lights on the landings, but they were no help. The bottom was down there somewhere but invisible.

  Arka headqu
arters covered all the floors from the twenty-second floor to the ground floor.

  Nick jerked his weapon and they fell into a rhythm, Nick treading lightly on the edges of the steps, covering the field of fire below them, Jon moving down backward, covering the field of fire behind them. Both weapons up, fingers on the trigger button. They could switch from stunner to bullets in a fraction of a second.

  Go on.

  On the twenty-second floor, the door to the floor was ajar. Up until now all the doors had been closed, a keypad on the wall next to the door. Nick took point again and slowly opened the door with the muzzle of his weapon.

  Jesus! A man was lying on the floor, a pool of blood around his head. A clerical worker, dressed in a white shirt and black slacks. He was lying on his side, one arm at an unnatural angle.

  His throat was torn out. Something—someone?—had taken a huge chunk out of his throat and he’d bled out.

  He’s dead.

  Nick nodded at Elle in his head. Yeah. No need to reach down with two fingers over the carotid to check.

  His eyes met Jon’s.

  Nick! Behind you! Elle’s voice screamed in his head and he turned just as something came at him, a beast making terrifying animal noises, a creature with blood smeared over its face, hands up and reaching for him. It made a wild leap and it—

  Fell to the ground in a lifeless heap, half its head shot away. Nick had opted for good old-fashioned bullets.

  “Jesus!” Jon’s voice came out a harsh whisper. They’d both taken a knee, ready to deal with other crazies who might be coming, but there was no one. Nick focused on the man who’d attacked him and rose slowly. He hadn’t noticed many details—too busy killing the fucker—but now he walked over to the carcass. The . . . man was covered in blood and had—Jesus. Nick bent over. Did he have a human ear in his mouth? While attacking, the man had seemed all teeth and claws, but disregarding the blood and the human ear between his teeth, he looked like an executive. An out-of-shape executive who probably took a golf cart around the course twice a month just before a hearty lunch at the club.

  He was chubby. His once white, now red shirt strained at the buttons around his belly. He was balding. His suit was good quality and his shoes were shined—and he’d come at Nick like a maddened grizzly bear.