What if Ward was already dead?
When the men halted at Mac’s raised fist, she stopped and closed her eyes, wiped her mind of all sense of self and sent herself out, as if dissolving into mist.
Where are you?
It came from her, though she had no memory of formulating the question. It was out there on its own.
Then the thought formed—We’re coming for you. Your men are coming for you. Where are you?
A faint . . . what? Sense of something. A burst, like fireworks behind a hill.
Coming . . . as faint as the mist at dawn.
Yes, we’re coming for you. Adrenaline spiked through her system. This was him! Unmistakable, though she had no idea how she knew that. But it was, like recognizing someone’s voice or their face. Something in the quality of the whisper in her head.
. . . moving
Oh my God! She’d missed that, a sound at the very edge of her consciousness.
What?
“Go,” Mac said in her ear, and she shot her closed fist up, their sign for halt. The three men stopped immediately and looked at her. She shook her head frantically, they couldn’t bother her now. She had to concentrate, focus, because the voice in her head was becoming fainter. She held her fist up high, closing her eyes to concentrate better.
She could sense Mac’s stillness and that of the other men, and then she banished them from her thoughts.
Tell me where you are.
Silence, but her head filled with pain. Wherever he was, he was hurting. She concentrated so hard she could feel an echo of his pain. Trying to keep all the avenues of communication open, she tried to analyze it. One part of her, the empathic part, linked to the man lying on a bed, perhaps dying, and the other part of her, the neuroscientist, observing and analyzing.
The pain—it was systemic. Most pain is organic and focused. This was diffuse but intense. Fiery. Another wave of pain, coming from . . .
Catherine bent her head, trying to slow her breathing, trying to take her mind out of herself, throwing it over the wall of cypresses, through concrete walls, down laboratory corridors, down to . . .
Him.
What was the pain? Burning, throughout his body, under the skin. When another wave came, she was able to pinpoint its source. Under the clavicle. Coming in through his open shunt. Some kind of drug they were using on him whose side effects were excruciating pain and a dulling of the senses.
Were they killing him?
She hunkered even deeper inside herself.
Where are you . . . Lucius?
A start of surprise.
You know . . . who I am?
Yes, and your men are coming for you. Right now, Lucius.
Lucius . . . A wave of sadness swept over her so profound it nearly knocked her to her knees. I was Lucius, once. Was I?
You still are. We’re coming for you. But we have to know where you are.
Sadness, resignation. It’s too late. Will die, tomorrow.
No! She sent herself out on a wave of energy that came from deep in her bones, a fierce blast she didn’t know she had in her. We’re here! Minutes away! Where are you?
Close? The voice so faint, lightly tinged with hope.
Very close.
Can you come . . . now?
Yes, now. Where are you?
Silence. But she was in his head now, tied there by the faintest of bonds. A whisper and the bonds would break. She could hear what he heard, see what he saw. The drugs in his system were strong, but he was stronger. His vision blurred, focused.
Where? She sent the message frantically. Where are you?
Going soon . . . to Level 4. The thought was sad, growing fainter. To die.
She lost him and swayed as if a strong wind had suddenly blown up.
Christ!
Mac shot out a hand and grabbed Catherine’s elbow, then the other one as he felt her weakness. She was barely able to stand. What the fuck just happened?
He had on night vision so she looked pale green as he held her, possible scenarios running through his mind, each one more terrifying than the next.
Heart attack. Embolism. With all the mind stuff that was going on, an embolism made a lot of sense. Millon had some kind of trip wire system she had stumbled on . . . no. That one could be eliminated. She was in the middle of a safety perimeter they provided; if anyone was to activate a trip wire it would be the man on point. Him.
She was boneless, head tipped back over his arm, long white throat vulnerable and delicate. Her head came forward and she coughed. He could feel strength returning to her. He bowed his head for a second, a rush of something powerful moving through him so strong his entire body broke out in a sweat.
He’d thought she was dead. For one horrible, nausea-inducing second he thought Catherine Young had died trying to rescue his commanding officer. All that warmth and gentleness gone. Gone from the world, gone from his life.
He’d never have it again, of that he was certain. With Catherine gone, Mac’s world would shrink to its usual grim contours, with himself at its cold center. His life would return to iron duty with nothing else. There was no question that he would ever have her warmth in his life, ever again. He hadn’t found it—hadn’t even suspected it existed—in his thirty-four years in this world, and he knew beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt that with her gone, it would disappear from his life forever. He would be condemned to live out the rest of his existence in the icy cold confines of his heart.
Mac shuddered and looked down at the beautiful face of the woman who had changed his life.
They’d had so little time. Three days. Nothing, really. They were three days that had turned his existence upside down. For the very first time, he looked forward to the future. He never had before. The future had been this endless . . . thing stretching out before him. The same as today only perhaps harder. No reason to want the future to arrive. When it did, it would be no different from today.
And yet, with Catherine, the future had looked—well, enticing. Better. Finer. Living with Catherine, sharing his life with her, maybe even forming a family . . .
He’d kicked the thought out of his head the instant it had formed but then it had returned and stuck, like a burr. Family. Families were for other people, not for him. What he knew of families was that they were violent places where people tore each other apart.
Except, maybe not the one he could found with Catherine.
It was crazy thinking, he knew that, but once there, the thought would not leave his mind. Not thought so much as images. A little dark-haired daughter with silvery eyes. That image stuck in his head, together with a crazy flutter in his chest. Creating a new human being, a small child, watching her grow up, protecting her . . . shit, talk about crazy thinking.
“What’s the matter with her?” Jon asked in his ear, and he started.
“I don’t know.” His voice sounded hoarse in his own ears.
“Mac.” On his other side, Nick placed a hand on his shoulder. It was only then that Mac realized he was shaking. “She’s okay.”
Behind her eyelids, Catherine’s eyes moved back and forth, as if she was following something. Her gloved hand gripped his.
He tapped her cheek. If she’d been one of his men, he’d have slapped her, but the thought of slapping Catherine made his system break out into another sweat.
“Honey.” Tap, tap. “Honey, wake up. Come on, honey, open up your eyes, you can do it.”
Something in his voice must have been way off because Nick and Jon looked at each other, faces carefully blank. Mac didn’t give a fuck because there she was, his Catherine, back from wherever it was she had gone.
“Mac?” Her voice was raw, as if she hadn’t spoken in days. “What happened?”
“Fuck if I know.” Relief coursed through him. “You fucking zoned out. Scared the shit out of me. Don’t ever do anything like that again. Fuck.”
She gave a faint smile, looking at him, then Jon and Nick. “Your vocabulary deter
iorates when you’re scared.”
“Fuck yeah.” But he was smiling, too. “So what the fuck happened?”
Catherine touched her head. “I hope you believe me when I say that I communicated with Lucius Ward. He’s going to be taken down to Level 4 where he thinks they are going to kill him soon. There were rumors that there was another, secret level but I never really believed them. So apparently Level 4 really exists. They gave him a drug that is extremely painful but which I think increased . . . whatever it is in him that can talk to me.” She looked at the three of them. “If he’s taken to Level 4 before we get to him I don’t know how to access it. He might be lost to us. We need to hurry.”
“You can walk?” Mac wanted her to stay right where she was though he knew she wouldn’t, not unless she couldn’t physically walk. If he had to, he could carry her.
“Oh yes. I’m fine.” She touched her head again, tilting it one way, then the other, as if testing it out. “If I zoned out it was because of the link with Lucius, not because of anything in me. We’re going to have to hurry. We have to get to him as fast as we can.”
“Roger that.” Nick was readying something he called the Anthill, checking his handheld, making adjustments. “As soon as we’re past the microwave barrier I’ll unleash the Antz. If we get past the front door we should be able to get to the Captain undetected. I don’t think there’s more than ten men on duty inside the facility.”
“Antz?”
“I’ll explain later, honey. Let’s get going.” Again, Mac marveled at Catherine, at his woman. She simply nodded, readjusted her light backpack and started forward when they did. No questions, no fuss. She wasn’t trained, but she was a teammate down to her bones.
A wave of love shot through him. If they survived this, he was going to marry her the instant they were back and never let her out of his sight again.
They moved forward smoothly, at an even pace. Catherine kept up, carefully staying exactly in the center of their security triangle. The outer perimeter of security was behind them and they were coming up on the microwave barrier.
Their night vision included IR and the area between the huge vases showed up faintly red. The tablets showed no guards within a hundred-meter radius. Nonetheless, Mac kept to hand signals. He signaled for Catherine to stay by his side.
At the barrier, Nick, Catherine and Jon were each behind a vase. Mac was behind Catherine. At his signal, they all climbed the six-foot-high vases, Nick and Jon flowing easily up and over. Mac gave Catherine a boost and Jon was on the other side, helping her down. Mac went over and they huddled in a crouch.
Mac pointed to the small cannon in Nick’s hands and gave the order.
Nick lifted it to the sky, made some adjustments, then pulled the trigger. A bolus lifted in the air, disappeared from sight. They bent over Nick’s handheld, watching the screen.
A thousand tiny drones, small as ants, colored white and nearly invisible, scrambled fast into the entrance of the main facility. A special program put together the jumbled transmissions so the screen showed a clear image of what was in front of them. There were a few blank spots on the screen but a filler program interpolated. What they were seeing on the screen was about 98 percent correct. More than enough. In the upper right hand was the blueprint of the facility showing the position of the drones.
Catherine smiled. “Antz,” she said. “I get it. Mini drones. Smart.”
Nick was calling the scene. “Two guards at the entrance. Armed with?” He glanced at Catherine.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not familiar with weaponry. I know that some of the guards have weapons in their holsters with a particularly thick, heavy handle.”
Mac’s jaws clenched. “Stunners. Fuck. They can deliver anything from an incapacitating up to a fatal dose of electric energy. Can stop a man’s heart at a hundred meters. Experimental.”
“Not good,” Jon murmured.
“Not good,” Mac agreed.
“Direct them there.” Catherine pointed to the end of a hallway on the short end of the L.
Nick made some adjustments and the image moved in a blur down corridors. At one point, a tech rounded a corner and the image tilted, turned upside down, the floor sliding by fast as a river in spate.
“They scrambled to the ceiling to avoid detection,” Nick said.
They waited, following the grouping of tiny red dots as it made its way across to the corridor Catherine wanted.
“Can you split them up?”
“Sure,” Nick said. “What do you want?”
“Check these four rooms.” Her finger landed on four boxes.
The images became slightly less clear as the drones separated into the four rooms. Three empty. One with a figure lying on a white cot, tubes going in and out of him. His head lolled to one side, mouth slackly open, eyes closed.
“Fuck,” Nick breathed. “The Captain. Is he dead?”
“Tilt the drones so I can see the monitors,” Catherine ordered. “And get all the drones into this room.”
The image tilted, became clearer. “No, he’s not dead. But his heart rate is very low. EKG shows only baseline function. He’s essentially in a coma. Nick, show me what’s on his IV bag.”
The image tilted again, focused on the clear bag hanging from the tree.
“They’re pumping him full of SL-59!” Catherine sounded angry. “Damn them! That’s a highly experimental drug. We haven’t even completed animal testing yet. It’s viscous and extremely painful. I felt his pain. I can’t believe they are doing that. They’re pumping him full of the drug and then they’ll dissect the brain soon and see the effects.”
“How can they do that?” Jon asked. “Isn’t it illegal?”
“Of course it’s illegal, it’s murder.” Catherine stood. “We’re going in right now. I don’t know how long his heart can stand up to this, and he was in a weakened state already. That drug is killing him. We can’t wait any longer. Mac, get us in there now.”
Her look was imperious. Mac’s heart swelled with pride and foreboding. She had clearly forgotten any danger to herself. She was totally focused on one thing and one thing only. If she’d been alone he had no doubt she’d march right in and try to rescue the Captain.
She was brave and that scared the shit out of him. Brave, untrained people died often and badly.
“It’s pointless going in through the main entrance.” His finger moved to a point fifty meters from where the Captain was lying. “That’s the closest door. Is it alarmed?”
“They are all alarmed,” Catherine replied. “And they all require a swipe card. Let’s hope what Jon cloned will work.”
“Damned straight it’ll work!” Jon answered indignantly. “I don’t do failure.”
“We need a way to mask the infrared, too. On most doors, the security system counts how many people come through an entrance, and if there is a discrepancy between numbers of entrances and number of swipes an alarm sounds.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Jon said, and Catherine nodded.
“Then let’s go.” She was quivering with impatience. All three of them looked at him.
“Saddle up, boys,” Mac whispered, and gave the go sign.
Lee leaned forward and tapped his driver on the shoulder. “Can’t you go any faster?”
“No, sir. I’m not allowed to exceed the speed limit. Not for anyone, not even for you. I could lose my job.” The driver answered in a monotone. He was a Millon employee with no special brief to cater to Lee’s needs. Lee made a note to get himself a driver with explicit instructions to do what he was told.
Lee checked his watch. 3 A.M. He’d given the order to start the IV infusion of SL-59 an hour ago. He’d harvest the brain at eight, together with the other three soldiers, who’d proven almost as useless as Nine himself. Six hours of perfusion should be enough to get an idea of the effects on the nervous system and on neurological tissue.
This could have waited until next week or even next month, of cour
se, but something was eating at him. His usual calm was broken and a huge sense of urgency was riding him. It was ridiculous. He was in the middle of a twenty-year plan. Urgency wasn’t necessary, thoroughness was. But though he was a scientist and though he believed in the rigors of reason, he had also learned to follow his gut.
It made him uneasy to be rushing to the laboratory in the dead of night to oversee something his secret team could easily take care of themselves, but it made him even more uneasy to stay at home.
Sleep was out of the question.
Perhaps it was like dreams. Though a scientist, Lee believed absolutely in the predictive power of dreams. Dreams were a manifestation of what the conscious mind had observed and extrapolated. He felt this biting drive to be there perhaps because it was important for him to observe firsthand the effects on Patient Nine. Maybe he would see something that eluded the vidcams or that the techs would fail to report.
If his subconscious told him to be there, it was for a reason.
Not to mention the fact that that idiot Flynn was threatening to cut off funding.
And then, of course, there was the sheer pleasure of watching Nine die. He’d been recalcitrant, a difficult patient. The most difficult patient Lee had ever had. It was going to be a real pleasure watching him die in a useful way.
He checked his watch again. Nine had received an infusion of 20 cc’s.
At a guess, Lee imagined that the useful dosage for performance enhancement would be 2 cc’s over a period of a week. Twenty was ten times the amount, delivered in the space of six hours. The autopsy was going to be very interesting.
On the whole, Lee was glad he’d decided to come along now. He’d observe the final effects firsthand. He tapped his ear. “Levinson, in half an hour take Patient Nine down to the autopsy suite in Level 4. I’m coming in.”
“Yes, sir.” Levinson was one of the three scientists who knew of the secret protocol.