Page 28 of I Dream of Danger (Ghost Ops #2)

Chapter Eight

Arka Pharmaceuticals Headquarters

San Francisco

Former General Clancy Flynn twirled a huge gold ring around his meaty finger, blew out a breath, tugged at his tie. It was a red silk Valentino tie which went nicely with the tailored suit, which was obviously bespoke. No designer made that size.

Dr. Charles Lee suppressed a light shudder.

Flynn became more disgusting every time they met.

It was as if Flynn were on this hugely accelerated Bloat Program.

He’d put on ten pounds every time they met.

He was now at least 300 lbs. The very weight of Flynn’s flesh had assumed a gravity of its own and it was dragging him down.

Though Lee kept his office at a cool and constant 72°, Flynn was sweating, his own flesh acting like a heat generator.

His heart had to beat twice as hard to get blood around all that meat.

His sweat stank—a rancid odor that was stronger than the men’s cologne he wore and the expensive laundered material swathing his grossly huge body.

Flynn was a heart attack in waiting, except he had to wait to have it until Lee’s program was complete.

Flynn ran a very successful and lucrative security company founded on the contacts Flynn had made in his twenty-five years in the military.

Flynn was very greedy. Lee’s program was the key to great wealth, but they’d had some stumbling blocks.

Quite a few, actually. The last one cost over a million dollars.

But Lee now had something even bigger than the former program, which had aimed at augmenting the aggressiveness, muscle mass, reflexes, and IQ of soldiers.

Flynn was financing the secret program in order to have the best private security company in the world. Lee had his own agenda—he was planning on turning the 40-million-man Red Army of ordinary soldiers into the equivalent of 40 million Special Forces soldiers.

Lee was very close to that goal. He’d had annoying setbacks, and on one memorable mission run by Flynn’s company, Orion Security, in Africa, the entire team had gone rogue. Well, Lee had adjusted the doses and several other missions had gone very well indeed.

Most of the progress had been made thanks to experiments conducted on four elite soldiers over the course of a year. The former Ghost Ops soldiers that had been captured in the Cambridge lab conflagration.

Flynn had been particularly happy to know that the main test subject was Captain Lucius Ward. Apparently, Ward had shown Flynn up several times while they were both serving and Flynn had wanted payback.

Well, Lee was a scientist, not a butcher. However, Flynn’s enthusiastic support had made him push the boundaries. A little. Ward had had over forty surgeries and had been slated for destruction when he and three other soldiers from his elite unit had been rescued by forces unknown.

A party to the rescue of the men had been identified as a female research scientist who worked for one of his labs. The woman, Dr. Catherine Young, was brilliant. Cameras had caught her image. He didn’t need to put her features through facial recognition software—he knew her well.

After that daring rescue, Young had disappeared off the face of the earth. Lee had put his entire security apparatus to the task of finding Young but they were stymied. She’d somehow gone beyond their reach even though he had vast resources to throw at the search.

How could a nerdish scientist who didn’t have much of a life outside the lab completely disappear?

He wanted Young because she’d taken four promising soon-to-be cadavers from his research, but also because she had something he desperately wanted.

Something in her brain. What was in Young’s brain—and in the brains of a number of people Lee had rounded up—was much more valuable than increasing Flynn’s bank account.

Increasing Flynn’s bank account was a mere by-product of the Warrior Project.

And anyway, if everything worked to plan, Flynn’s bank account would soon be seized by the Chinese Finance Ministry.

After the invasion.

A drum of fat, heavy fingers. Flynn’s jaws flexed as he suppressed a yawn.

Well, if Flynn was bored, Lee would soon cure him of that.

Flynn shot his wrist out and showily checked the time on his new gold Rolex. It was a Trasparénce , the new line introduced last Christmas. The dial was a blank pure crystal screen to everyone but the owner. The screen was set to the owner’s retina and would show the time only to the owner.

No one will ever steal your Rolex. The ads had been everywhere.

The watch cost $230,000.

How Flynn loved his expensive toys.

“It’s 4 p.m.,” Flynn growled. “I interrupted negotiations with members of the Libyan regime to come here because you said it was so goddamned important. So I’m here.

What is it? I need to be back in Virginia by 8.

” Orion consulting had a FastJet company plane that could fly in the stratosphere at 1000 mph.

It could cross the country in three hours, coast to coast.

“Watch,” Lee said simply, and flicked on the array of four holomonitors. He saw Flynn move his head from monitor to monitor. Before Flynn’s gaze reached the last one, Lee started talking.

“This is the secure lab of a small research company we bought about a year ago. It carries out legitimate research on vaccines, but there’s a separate lab that only carefully-selected researchers can access and they are carrying out an entirely different kind of research.

This is linked to the research at Millon Laboratories, which we had to shut down after… the unfortunate incident.”

Unlike Flynn, Lee made a point of never showing emotion.

But he felt a spurt of rage pulse in him at the thought of losing those four test specimens.

Each monitor showed a patient lying unconscious on a gurney, with an IV line that ran into the back wall.

It wasn’t readily discernible on the screen, but each patient was in a nearly indestructible, completely transparent cage made of graphene.

The patients were young, in their mid-twenties, evenly distributed by gender.

Two men, two women. There had been ten, originally. Six had been sacrificed.

“What you’re seeing is people we discovered by hidden fMRIs.

Each has a zone of their brain—the parahippocampal gyrus—that lights up, particularly under thermal imaging.

It is a part of the brain that is undiscovered territory.

We are uncertain as to its function, but in these specimens the parahippocampal gyrus is unusually active and seems to correspond to unusual… abilities the specimens have.”

Flynn checked his watch again. He’d never been interested in the science itself, only in the results. And the results had to be of use to him and to his company for him to be interested. Well, he was about to get an eyeful.

Lee tapped his finger on the table. He was so used to the light projection keyboard’s settings that he didn’t actually have to have the light projection on. It was a minor ploy, but to an ignorant outsider like Flynn, it would look like magic.

The commands he gave changed the nature of the liquid being pumped into the patient’s systems. From a powerful narcotic to a powerful stimulant. From zero to hyper-awareness in a minute.

“I’ll remind you of the thrust of the main project,” he said softly.

“We are perfecting a system that will improve the motor skills, neural response times, muscle mass, eyesight, and hearing of soldiers, sometimes by a factor of 300%. Essentially, we will create super-soldiers, who will be stronger, faster and smarter than any other soldiers in the world. There will be no warriors that will be able to defeat your men, General Flynn.”

Lee never used Flynn’s former title except when he wanted to make a very strong point.

And this was one of those times. He could actually hear Flynn’s breathing speeding up, becoming loud in the silent room.

The moron was getting excited, exactly as if he were seeing a naked lady.

Lee refrained from shaking his head at how pitifully easy to manipulate Flynn was.

“But—” And here Lee turned to Flynn and looked him in the eyes, distracting him for the minute it would take for the super stimulant to hit the specimen’s bloodstreams. “But I think we can take it one step farther. In addition to super strength and speed, we can add super powers.”

A crease formed on Flynn’s fleshy face. Super powers. That was crazy, right? Lee could almost read Flynn’s thoughts.

Only it wasn’t.

He had four more he’d caught recently, being prepped. He very much suspected that one, Sophie Daniels, was a healer. That would be a battlefield power to reckon with.

Lee gestured toward the monitors and watched Flynn’s face as he took in what was happening.

Almost to the second, all the patients bolted up in bed. Lee had calculated body mass in the ccs of stimulant he pumped into them, so it worked on each individual at the same time. Every specimen was brought abruptly and rapidly into consciousness, with no self-defense mechanism.

It was spectacular.

“Fuck,” Flynn breathed, as he leaned forward. Lee could have easily ‘pushed’ the holograms closer to him, but it was better this way. Make him work for it. Flynn’s eyes were bright with the reflected light of the monitors and he was watching with his whole body.

Cell number one: male, 23 years of age. The instant consciousness hit him, he levitated a foot above the bed, the sheets dangling from the sides of his body. He sat up, looked around with a frown, and his body floated gently back down to the surface of the bed.

Cell number two: male, 27 years of age. He bolted up, face angry. The bedside cart flew violently against the wall and shattered. Flynn flinched. It was hard to watch. The walls were powerfully strong yet completely invisible. The cart shattered against a wall they couldn’t see.