Page 24 of I Dream of Danger (Ghost Ops #2)

Wherever the fuck she was. He had no idea. But maybe Catherine did. He stepped closer to Catherine, and Mac took a step forward, too. Jon grabbed Mac’s arm and shook his head.

Well, fuck.

Nick wasn’t going to hurt Catherine. If Mac used his brains instead of his dick, he’d know that. But Nick wasn’t letting Catherine walk away without finding out what she knew, however the hell she knew it.

“That’s the name you said.” Nick ground his teeth at her blank look. “Just now. Just now you said Elle. That’s the name of my—the name of the person I need to find.”

His throat was so tight. Just hearing her name after so many years…he couldn’t think straight.

“Elle,” she said softly.

Nick nodded, like some big dumb animal that couldn’t speak. Elle.

Catherine was focusing on him again. Her other hand came up to clasp his in a tight grip, warm and soft. Something to cling to in the painful darkness of his terror.

“That’s the one I felt, right, Nick? The one you lost?”

He nodded again. Tried to speak. Failed.

“You care about her.” It wasn’t a question.

Oh God, yes. He nodded again, jerkily. Found his voice. “Where is she? She needs me. Now. I have to get to her, right now.” He was vibrating with tension, ready to take off anywhere Catherine said.

There was sadness on Catherine’s beautiful face. She tightened her clasp. “Oh Nick. I’m so sorry. It doesn’t work that way.”

An icy chill worked its way through his veins, and he realized he’d been subconsciously counting on Catherine to do her woo-woo stuff.

Point him in Elle’s direction so he could race to her.

“Then how the hell does it work? Can you tell me that?” He stepped even closer to Catherine, right in her face, his voice rising.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jon grab Mac’s arm again. Not even Jon could stop Mac if Mac didn’t want to be stopped, but Mac got himself under control. Nick wasn’t going to hurt Catherine but he was going to question her.

He was staring wildly down into Catherine’s eyes, as if he could will the information on Elle’s whereabouts out of her, drag it out of her through her skin if necessary.

But staring was an act of aggression. They’d been taught that, at the beginning of their careers as soldiers.

Body language had been a big thing. How to silently threaten, how to pass unnoticed, how to reassure.

He didn’t want to scare Catherine.

With a wrench, Nick turned his gaze away from Catherine and stared blindly at the room. Their war room, they called it. With everything you needed to go on an op. Just as long as you knew where you were going, of course.

As soon as he knew where to head, Nick was going to grab Jon, drag him to their ultralight stealth helo, and take off.

Nick was the team driver. If it was anything that travelled over land, Nick could drive it as fast as it could go over any terrain.

Jon was the pilot. Their little helo could make it anywhere in the continental US.

It was the dead of night. Little Bird could silently land in any private airfield without detection.

They could fuel up and be gone before anyone knew they were there. They’d done it before.

Nick didn’t even want to think what would happen if Elle were OUTCONUS. Didn’t want to go there. Couldn’t.

She’d called out to him. That had been a distress signal he’d heard in his head, loud and clear. Surely there was—was a range for that sort of thing? Surely he wouldn’t have heard it if she were in Europe or Africa?

The signal he’d got was loud and absolutely urgent. She was in danger right now, and if she was across an ocean she was fucked and oh God, he couldn’t wrap his head around that thought.

Elle dead, Elle dying…he couldn’t do this. Simply couldn’t.

Catherine’s sympathetic face—he couldn’t look at that either. His eyes roamed the big room, partly to distract himself from that awful panicky desperation that gripped him, so he could function on some basic level, and partly to see if something in their gear-packed room could help.

Huge holographic monitors ringed the walls.

They had tiny drones of their own hovering 24/7 over a ten square mile radius surrounding Haven, and thus had a 360° IR view of everything.

Highly sensitive motion sensors and sound sensors.

If a fly farted anywhere near them, they knew about it.

Their computers were illegally hooked into the Keyhole 18 satellites, and they could get real-time intel on more or less anything happening in the world, particularly in the Fucked-Up Latitudes.

All Nick needed was a location and he could zoom in on her.

A location he didn’t have.

So the holograms, the satellite feeds, the vast crunching power of their servers—their server farm was bigger than the Pentagon’s, bigger even than Amazon’s—couldn’t help.

Behind the titanium door on the left-hand wall was an armory that would do a Delta team proud.

Nick had been Delta, and there were a few extra goodies in there that even Delta hadn’t had.

If there was an enemy, they could take them out, no question. They had the tools and the determination to protect what they had.

Hell, Mac had a wife and a baby on the way to protect. Mac all by himself was a war machine.

So they had the stuff to get there, wipe out the opposition, and come back in stealth.

He, Mac, and Jon were really good at slipping into places and extracting things and people.

They hadn’t been Ghost Ops for nothing. They were Ghosts because everything about their past had been erased.

Wiped clean. They didn’t exist anywhere on earth.

And they were Ghosts because they had been trained to move with stealth.

When they didn’t want to be found, they weren’t.

Even here, creating a community of geniuses and misfits, they hadn’t been found.

Taking stock of the war room calmed Nick, just a little. When he found out where Elle was, there’d be firepower and the will to use it. If she had a fucking army after her, he didn’t care.

But where was she?

It was an operator’s paradise, full of high-tech gear and comms. With a woman’s touch in the far corner.

Catherine had been a researcher before going on a mission to find a man she’d never met, Mac.

She’d been sent on that mission by their former commander, Captain Lucius Ward, the man they thought had betrayed them.

Ward hadn’t betrayed them, he’d been betrayed himself, and had lost his health and his sanity after a year in the hands of monsters. They’d gone to the rescue of the Captain and been astonished to find three of their comrades who had been experimented on until they were nearly dead.

Romero, Lundquist, and Pelton had lost almost a third of their body weight, had been crisscrossed with surgical scars and had lost the ability to talk when they’d been brought back to Haven.

So Catherine was caring for them, bringing them back to life, while trying to figure out what had been done to them. That something was very, very bad.

She was a neat woman, so her corner wasn’t the mess that their space was, but she’d obviously been interrupted. Maybe by her husband Mac carrying her off to their cave. They disappeared together a lot.

A big briefcase had toppled on Catherine’s desk, paperwork spilling down out of it like a glacier’s moraine.

She was researching what had been done to their teammates and the Captain.

A series of glossy company brochures and prospectuses cascaded down, as she tried to trace back the companies involved in the secret project.

He stared at the pile of documents.

Catherine’s soft voice cut in.

“What? What is it, Nick?”

She repeated whatever it was she’d said before. Nick saw her mouth move but couldn’t figure out the words. He was staring at Catherine’s corner of their war room. He couldn’t tear his eyes away. It was as if a spotlight had lit up her briefcase.

She said something else and Nick tried really, really hard to concentrate. But it was useless. He’d focus on her, then his mind, his eyes would wander.

A slap to the back of his head nearly sent him spinning to the floor. “Focus, you dickhead,” Mac growled. “Catherine’s trying to help your sorry ass.”

Nick breathed in, breathed out. Without moving his head, his eyes slid back to Catherine’s corner. Catherine’s arm snaked out and it took him a second to realize that she blocked her husband’s arm.

“Wait, Mac,” she said, tilting her head to look at Nick. “Is something happening?”

Was something happening? Fuck if he knew.

“Why are you staring at my briefcase, Nick?”

“Huh?” He felt so stupid. Usually he was quick. His usual response to things was at lightning speed. He was on alert, always. Nothing ever took him by surprise. He was reacting to danger before most other men even realized it was there.

Now he felt slow, sluggish. Thoughts occurred to him slowly, as if they had to take a huge trip to get to his head. It was as if his head were taken up by a computer virus slowing everything down.

Soft warmth on his cheeks. Catherine’s hands on his face. “Look at me, Nick.”

He looked at her, though his eyes swiveled. She shook him lightly. “ Look at me.”

Reluctantly, he tore his eyes from the corner and looked into her eyes, fiercely focused on him. “There’s something over there that is sparking something in you. What is it?”

He shrugged. “Dunno,” he mumbled. And he didn’t. He had no idea what was in Catherine’s briefcase and he didn’t care. And yet, his eyes slid back to the corner.

Another slap to the back of his head he barely felt. “Nick…” Mac growled.

Catherine rolled her eyes. “Stop that, Mac. You’re not helping. Step back.”

And Mac stepped back.