Page 22 of I Dream of Danger (Ghost Ops #2)

This is what Jane Macy must have felt like after her breakdown. She’d had a psychotic episode after a test and had disappeared. The company had cited privacy issues when Elle asked about her.

Why was she thinking of Jane?

Oh! The memory popped into her head, clear and complete and she pushed off from the lamppost with a surge of energy she knew was the last of her reserves.

Jane had had an affair with a married guy, a lawyer working for one of the many venture capital firms in the area. His wife was really powerful and could do some serious damage to him if she found out.

The one thing everyone knew about the wife was that she really liked being rich, disliked even seeing poor people. She wouldn’t even travel through poorer sections of the cities she visited on business trips, and had her drivers make great circuitous loops to avoid even the sight of the poor.

So Jane had found a tiny motel in the poorer part of town that didn’t ask questions, didn’t take down ID and took cash.

Elle remembered the name of the motel and knew where it was.

It was walkable, just. If her strength held out. And she’d have to walk through more backyards and back roads, because she had to assume there would be cars on the streets looking for her, and cameras they could hack.

The one thing that had been clear when Arka started up the research project was that Arka was awash in money. It had money to burn, and if it sent out its full security force she was in real trouble.

She couldn’t think beyond finding a place to rest, so she pushed off and began the long trudge to the motel that asked no questions.

San Francisco — Arka Pharmaceuticals Headquarters, Financial District

Dr. Charles Lee watched the video of the debriefing of Dr. Elle Connelly for the fifth time.

Dr. Daniels hadn’t been at all thorough and would be reprimanded, but what shone through was that Connelly had penetrated the secret lab at Bayankhongor, apparently during a training session.

There were 20 three-star generals in Mongolia, and Lee would show Connelly photographs, but he was almost certain that the three-star general she’d seen was General Yisu, the head of Mongolian Special Forces.

And the secret camp, whose coordinates he’d given to Connelly, was working on a rail gun.

Surely that would buy him some time with the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology?

Resentment swelled in his chest at the thought.

Though he’d emigrated with his family to America at the age of seven, his heart had remained back in the homeland.

He’d raced through school and university and had risen quickly up through the ranks of Arka with one thought, and one thought only.

Coming back to Beijing a conqueror, bearing the key to making China the uncontested sole superpower in the world and taking his rightful place at the top of the government hierarchy.

He’d started by working with General Clancy Flynn, using black funds from the US military, then funneling the results to Beijing.

The response had been immensely gratifying.

A by-product of one of the research projects was a cancer vaccine.

He’d sent in a black ops team run by Flynn called Ghost Ops—men whose pasts had been erased, men who no longer officially existed—to destroy the lab where the vaccine had been developed and sent the vaccine to Beijing.

The top tiers of the Chinese government were all now vaccinated, and a mass vaccination of the 40-million-strong armed forces was underway.

Flynn had been only too willing to sacrifice his black ops team. Lee understood that Flynn resented the Ghost Ops leader, Captain Lucius Ward. Lee didn’t care either way. It seemed to him the squabbling of children. What he had got out of the operation was four elite warriors to experiment on.

Because his ultimate goal was the creation of a super soldier.

Tougher, faster, smarter. With better eyesight, better hearing, greater healing abilities, faster synapses.

Captain Ward and the three Ghost Ops soldiers that had been caught—another three had escaped and were still at large—proved recalcitrant in the extreme, however.

In the end, Lee had decided to sacrifice them, harvest the brains and study the effects of the drugs he was testing.

The Captain and the other three soldiers had been rescued before they could be sacrificed, and Lee had lost a great deal of research that had been in their bodies and would have been evident in their harvested brains.

He had a new protocol now and was working with the funds funneled to him by Clancy, now retired and the head of a security company. Clancy wanted better contractors to make more money.

Lee wanted to change the world.

Right now, though, their goals meshed.

Back in Beijing, Lee had enemies, men who resented his growing power. They were sabotaging his plans, mocking him behind his back while he was an ocean away in California.

So he’d decided to make himself smarter and faster and stronger, to be living proof of the validity of his Shin-Li project, Project Warrior.

He’d been injecting himself with diluted versions of the experimental drug.

It worked…it worked wonderfully well. Though he gave no outward sign, he felt immensely stronger mentally and physically.

In the mirror in the morning, he could see muscle definition in his chest and arms. It was growing increasingly difficult to tear himself away from his naked image in the mirror.

He felt different. Lee was an observer, a scholar, at home in the world of learning.

He often thought he would have been an excellent court scholar in the time of Confucius.

He was used to studying the world dispassionately, his only passion that of making it back to Beijing a victorious man, the architect of a new world order.

But now—now he felt like he could take on the world himself, single-handedly. He’d been willing to forge a new world with his mind and scientific training, but now, oh now, it was like he could do it physically.

And now he had an even stronger tool. Literally revolutionary.

His special Delphi Project, named after the oracle in ancient Greece.

A handful of men and women with special powers they tried to hide and suppress.

But you can’t hide from an fMRI. He’d gathered them together to study their capabilities and replicate them.

He’d expected the project to last at least a year, right up to the moment he expected to defect back to Beijing.

But his hand was being forced. The Ministry of Science and Technology in Beijing was about ready to close the door they’d been holding open for him.

And that moron Flynn, who was funding both programs, was increasingly shrill about wanting results.

Beijing and Flynn wanted results?

He’d give them results.

He was rounding up the subjects with special powers. He’d infuse them with massive doses of SL-61, and he’d find the secret to developing super warriors who could fly, who could throw fire projectiles halfway across the world, who could read minds.

Project Warrior was on an accelerated schedule and, he thought as he made a fist, admiring the muscles in his forearm, so was he.

Palo Alto

There it was. Probably the only motel in the area that didn’t belong to a chain.

It didn’t seem to belong to anyone, really.

The once bright-green facade was faded to a light pea-green, most of the plants in the courtyard were dead, and the bright-red neon sign advertising V CANCI S sputtered and fizzed.

It wasn’t much, but Elle had to hope it would offer her shelter and protection for a few hours because she didn’t have the strength to go one step further.

Walking into the dirty, dusty lobby, Elle realized she was overdressed for the place. Her big down coat was expensive, as were her boots, briefcase, and purse. Luckily, the young guy behind the counter looked either half asleep or like he’d just taken two tabs of FeelGood.

They turn the cameras off , Jane had said.

Still, Elle kept her head down as she registered, pushing across the counter a hundred-dollar bill for the sixty-dollar room.

“Keep the change,” she muttered, eyes down.

A none-too-clean hand with cracked fingernails made the bill disappear, and a scratched card key appeared.

A bored voice said, “Take the right corridor.” She walked away, trying to keep her knees stiff. If she fell down or fainted right in the lobby that would make her memorable.

Or not, considering the type of motel it was.

Maybe they had drunk or drugged ladies falling down all the time.

Elle kept her eyes down on the stained, plaid brown-on-brown carpet, putting one booted foot in front of the other, a huge noise roaring in her head, brightly colored spots in front of her eyes.

If the room was far away, she wasn’t going to make it.

Luckily the room was close by, just around the corridor to the right.

She held the card up to the sensor with one hand, and balanced herself against the door jamb with the other.

She felt more than heard the clunky click as it opened.

In a normal hotel, by law, the card would log her name and time of entrance and eventually time of exit in the central computer, but Jane had said this kind of place didn’t go in for niceties.

Elle stumbled into the room, pulled the door closed, walked to the window and closed the blinds. She leaned against the wall next to the window and finally her legs gave way. Simply wouldn’t hold her up any longer. Her purse thunked to the floor as her knees buckled.

She slid with her back to the wall down to the dirty carpeting, clasping her arms around her knees, leaning her head forward until it rested against her knees.

Trembling started from her legs, travelling up through her body like an electric wave. She sat there in the dark, arms and legs shaking, a deep chill in her core, riding out the storm.

She lost control over her own body. It shook and shivered and panted and she could do nothing to stop it. It was physical and mental and spiritual. It was as if she’d come up against some inner boundary, a place where everything had to stop because she could go no further.

Had nothing left.

Could barely breathe, let alone plan the next step.

Her forehead rested on her knees as she sank down deep inside herself, the world slowly turning black.

And it was because she was so weak and so depleted, because she reached some dark place of despair that held her deepest truths, that it slipped from her.

Something she’d sworn she’d never do, something that in any other moment she’d rather die than think, came welling out.

From deep inside her, it came. Totally unstoppable, torn from her.

A call so strong it was a scream inside her head.

Help me, Nick.