Page 29 of I Dream of Danger (Ghost Ops #2)

Cell number three: female, 21 years of age.

She lay, unmoving, only her open eyes showing that she was awake.

Suddenly, a fire bloomed in the corner of the cage, burning brightly, fiercely, seeming to gush out of the floor of the cage.

Just as suddenly it stopped, collapsing in on itself, leaving only blackened stains crawling up the invisible walls.

Cell number four: female, 25 years of age. Only her head turned as she looked at the corner where the invisible cameras were. Her eyes were flat and black.

Flynn gasped, a harsh intake of breath. His eyes widened, bulged.

Lee’s hands went to his own throat, as if he could tear it open with his hands before it closed up completely.

Then it closed tight. No air coming in, no air going out.

His chest heaved uselessly trying to suck in air that couldn’t reach the lungs.

It was as if he were being hanged, something tight and hot around his neck, tightening, tightening…

The world shimmered, the edges of objects limned with violent color, then the colors draining away, leaving everything gray, becoming darker. Edging into blackness.

Lee couldn’t think, couldn’t reason. What he did, he did out of sheer instinct, recognizing in the flat black gaze from the monitor what was happening.

His right arm flailed uselessly…he was a foot away.

His body wouldn’t obey him, he couldn’t move his legs.

All he could do was collapse, and in falling, reach for the control button that would open up the hidden IV bags of the powerful narcotic.

His finger tapped on a point on the desk as he focused ferociously, as if seeing through a tunnel growing ever smaller. The force around his neck tightened, pressing against his Adam’s apple, starting to crush it. He tapped, tapped, head lighter and lighter, starting to black out…

And the force around his neck abruptly ended, like a noose that had loosened.

Lee jolted, fell into a chair gasping. A hoarse choking sound was on his left.

His neck hurt, but he turned to see Flynn on his knees on the floor, head hanging down, face splotched with ugly purple-red stains.

One hand went to his throat as he brought air into his lungs in long loud gasps.

“Jesus!” It came out a hoarse whisper. “What the fuck was that?”

Lee couldn’t speak yet. His shaking finger pointed to the holomonitor showing cell number four. His trembling hand stayed in the air until he could speak. “Her.” He coughed as he tried to make his voice stronger. “She can…somehow…reach out. Touch…people. Things.”

Flynn turned awkwardly until he was sitting on the floor, back to the wall.

“Well, fuck.” His lungs bellowed in and out. His breathing became a little less labored. His complexion was back to his usual florid red without the purple. “Is that what you’re working on? People—things—like them?”

Lee needed to choose his words carefully. Flynn was his lifeline. His source of money. If it was cut off, he couldn’t continue his research. He would never make his way back to China as a conqueror.

But though he knew that, some essential bit of oxygen had cut off his good sense.

“Yes.” Crazily, he smiled. “Once we can control them, extract from them the essence of their powers via spinal fluid, and inject them into our super strong and super smart soldiers—the sky’s the limit.”

Damn! He was supposed to approach the whole subject gingerly. Lee knew only too well how crazy his plan sounded. He had complete faith in it, but to an outsider it would reek of insanity.

And here he’d blurted out the project bluntly to a man who had no imagination and no sense of grandeur. A man who dealt exclusively in dollars and cents, and believed only in what he could touch.

So he was very surprised when Flynn reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a platinum Bump card. He tapped on it. “Give me yours,” he wheezed.

Lee had to stand up, unbutton his lab coat to get at his wallet. His legs would barely hold him. He gave Flynn his own Bump card and tapped it against Flynn’s. When he looked at the card again, he could barely believe his eyes. Flynn had just transfer-bumped fifteen million dollars into his card.

Flynn looked up at him, heavy brows frowning. “Control them.”

Lee nodded.

“Then use them.”

Oh, yes.

Steadier now, Lee stood and looked at his specimens, now comatose on their beds, the only signs that something had happened the steel components of the crash cart scattered on the floor of the cell of number two, and the black scorch marks on the invisible wall of number three’s cell.

He’d hated his American childhood, ripped from what should have been his Chinese destiny. But he’d loved comic books as a kid.

Protocol One, the Warrior Project, would create super-soldiers. Forty million Chinese Captain Americas.

But Protocol Two, the Delphi Project, would go one step further.

It would create an elite force of X-men.

Hunkered down in the dark, Elle buried her face in her arms.

She was the very picture of helplessness and she hated that, hated it. But there was no choice. The escape from her apartment had eaten into her reserves so deeply she had none left.

There was possibly some kind of scientific ratio to be studied—the further she went in her projections, the greater the energy expended. It was an entirely new field of scientific research, one that she’d happily devote her life to, only it wasn’t going to happen.

What was going on at Corona Labs? Sophie’s panic call and the men in black… Elle wished she could call some of her other colleagues, to see if this was company-wide, but a cell was a huge arrow in the sky pointing down— here she is!

Sophie’d said to leave hers back in her apartment and she had. The latest generation of phones had an off button for localization, but she didn’t trust it. Not if people with guns were hunting her.

She shivered. Was it cold in the room? Her whole body was trembling and she felt ice cold.

There was no way to tell if it was shock or the temperature in the room.

Maybe shock. She understood perfectly the physiology of shock.

She’d come out weakened from her dream state, had had to perform minor surgery on herself and then go on the run.

All the peripheral blood had rushed to her core to maintain vital organs alive.

Everything in her was cold, even her brain. She was used to being able to think herself out of difficult situations, but it was as if someone had thrown a blanket over her brain and it moved sluggishly, as if stumbling in the dark.

Right now, she needed to analyze the situation carefully, start making plans. She’d disappeared before—surely she could do it again. But no thoughts appeared. No analysis, no strong sense of reasoning her way through as she’d always been able to do.

Instead, with her last reserves, her entire being had sent out what could only be a distress call. Just to show how crazy she was, she hadn’t even sent it out to any of her co-workers.

Nope, she’d sent it to Nick. Who could be anywhere in the world.

Nick, whom she hadn’t seen in ten years and would never see again.

Nick, who, wherever he was, wouldn’t care.

Insanity.

These past years of hard work, rewarding work, making new friends, entering the exciting world of scientific research—she’d tried very hard to forget all about Nick.

Every girl got her heart broken by a handsome man, right?

Nothing new about that. Happened to everyone.

Whole days, then whole weeks would go by when she wouldn’t think of him and then wham!

A smell, a taste, a sound…it was always something.

It would remind her of the years they spent together, or worse, remind her of the night they spent together.

And it was enough to set her off.

Her heart would clench, a cascade of hormones, bad ones, the ones associated with fear and loss and pain, such as CRH or cortisol, would flood her system. Before she knew the words, she understood the mechanism.

And now that she knew the words, now that she’d made this her field of study, she thought she’d banished her ghosts. Her ghost. Nick.

She’d made a successful life for herself, rarely thinking of him, and at the moment of her direst need who did she think of? Nick Ross. Damn him! Wasting time wanting him was dangerous. Folly of the highest order.

Though there really wasn’t anyone to call. Maybe that was it. Most of her friends were fellow research scientists, and lately, members of the experimental protocol. There was no one capable of fighting those men in black, certainly not the men she knew.

Slope-shouldered, near-sighted, pale and thin. No, Paul Mela, Alex Karras, or Thomas Chu—even if she could contact them, even if they came, they’d be massacred.

She’d been right not to call them.

It was so hard to be in the dark, in every sense. She’d seen the men and disappeared. She needed more information. A scientist dealt with data, and she had none.

What was happening?

Could she— dare she check?

Elle was only beginning to test the boundaries of her gift. Today’s projection of herself halfway around the world—that had been the first time she’d tried to deliberately project herself to an unknown place far away. It had left her so depleted she’d felt half dead.

She could do short distances. She’d tested that, over and over. But she didn’t have total control over where she went. It was like being in a Porsche with only the accelerator, no brakes and no steering wheel. Heady and dangerous.

Those men had moved with the professional grace of athletes or military men. They were heavily armed. She needed to know where they were.

The decision was made.