Page 26 of I Dream of Danger (Ghost Ops #2)

“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 cyber geek.

“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 light bulb 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 night vision. ”

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 backyards, 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 facade. 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 he knew that, he wouldn’t be here, twiddling his freaking thumbs, he’d be on his way to her, wouldn’t he?

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 jackshit.

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 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 Labs 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 Labs-Bringing the future today.

Corona Labs 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.