Page 41 of I Dream of Danger (Ghost Ops #2)

“Would you like to continue your studies here?” Catherine waved a hand.

“We have a good lab here, and we have access to every single piece of equipment you could possibly need. We have unlimited funds and can acquire more or less anything we need. What’s not available commercially, well, we use the five-finger discount. ”

“I’ll bet that’s Jon, too.”

“Bingo.”

They smiled at each other, then Elle’s smile faded. “I have a lot of data with me in a pen drive, and I know where to access more. But more than anything, we need to find Sophie and the others. They are being rounded up by Corona goons, and nothing good will come of it.”

“No.” Catherine had sobered up too. “Corona is Arka. Nothing good can come of Arka kidnapping people.” Her pretty jaw set.

“I have four men I’ll introduce you to. The ones who were brought here half dead three months ago.

They’d spent a year in a high-tech lab that was essentially a prison, and experimented on.

I’ve never seen anyone with as many surgical scars as their leader. ”

“Lucius Ward? Nick told me about him.”

“What was done to him and to his men was criminal. If they’ve started kidnapping people it means that whatever is going on is coming to a head, and we must stop them. We have to get your friends out.”

“Catherine…” Elle hesitated. “I once went to an Arka lab. It was…scary. They had vast security resources. They had guards everywhere and the labs had high-tech security with a number of backups. I don’t know if we can mount any kind of counter offensive.”

“Oh my dear.” Catherine patted her hand and stood up.

“We have something far better than security goons. We have the entire Ghost Ops team, right here. I’d pit them against any foe on earth.

They are invincible.” She leaned over the table, pressed a button and spoke quietly.

“Mac? Can you and the guys come up? There’s something we need to talk about. ”

San Francisco — Arka Pharmaceuticals

Four vials. One, two, three, four.

Lee studied the brushed aluminum vial holder on the pristine surface of his huge desk.

He could see its upside-down reflection, as if it continued on down into the nether regions of his desk.

He carefully pushed a button on the side of the holder, entered a code on the keyboard that was projected onto the surface of his desk, and heard the satisfying hiss of a vacuum seal being broken.

The container was manufactured by a subsidiary of Arka, and not only met ISO Standard 900012 for the containment of bio-hazardous material, it doubled the standards.

It was unbreakable and unbreachable. You could take a mallet to it, you could run a tank over it.

It would not break and it would not open.

If civilization were to suddenly stop, a thousand years from now whoever inherited the earth—Lee’s guess would be rats—would find the container intact and rub their paws over the slightly raised Arka logo and might wonder in their little rat brains what was inside.

Power. That was what was inside. Immense power. Power to change the world, and it came from him. He’d done this.

It seemed insane that he was about to unleash all this power and not take it inside himself. Not become immensely powerful himself.

The Warrior project had gone through so many iterations he’d almost lost hope, but then, Edison himself had said that a scientist never failed. He just found the ways an experiment didn’t work.

Since he was a small child torn from his homeland, China, and dragged to the country he detested, the United States, Lee had dreamed of coming back to his homeland a conqueror.

It was clear to anyone who had eyes in their head that China was the world’s foremost superpower now, and Lee intended it to remain so for the next thousand years.

It was the oldest civilization on earth and had been dormant far too long.

But its long sleep was over, and now it would take its place as the leader of mankind.

It would manufacture not only superior products, but superior humans. Starting with him.

Three months ago, he’d gone down to the secret underground labs at Millon Laboratories, a small high-tech company Arka had purchased.

He’d found it best to carry out the research Flynn was paying for in scattered small-scale labs of companies he held a majority share in.

No one knew about this research. Certainly not the board at Arka.

It pleased him no end that he was beating American capitalism at its own game.

Preparing for its future destruction under its own nose.

And yet, Lee’s contacts in Beijing had told him that his time was running out.

When Lee had first contacted his childhood friend, Chao Yu, who’d risen high in the ranks of the Ministry of Science and Technology, his friend had been enthusiastic, and had taken the Warrior Project directly to the minister himself, Zhang Wei.

Everyone in the Ministry had been hugely excited, but the excitement waned as Lee kept coming up against problems. The science was impeccable.

There had been sporadic successes, but not replicable enough to bring to Beijing.

All he needed was the money to institute testing on a larger scale in order to speed the process up. He needed Flynn’s money.

Lee hadn’t planned on showing Flynn the paranormals, but he’d had his hand forced. Flynn had been impressed and doubled the funding, but it was almost too late. The window of opportunity back home was closing.

And that was when it occurred to Lee that he would be landing in the Fatherland with a terabyte of encrypted data, a case full of vials and some video footage, nothing more.

Chao Yu was a scientist and could be trusted to break the data down and explain it, but that could take time.

Days, weeks, even months. He didn’t have weeks and months.

Time was tight, and he needed to arrive with a visibly functioning program, ready to be up and running as fast as doses could be manufactured.

Manufacturing, distributing, and injecting the doses to the military would already take six months. They needed to start right away and he needed to be credible right away. He himself had to be a walking advertisement for the Warrior Protocol.

So he’d started experimenting on himself, in minute doses, and the results were overwhelming.

He felt stronger, faster. He was stronger, faster.

The other day he had clocked himself at under a three-minute mile run.

He’d never been a runner, never been an athlete, and he’d casually broken an Olympic record.

He’d never felt better, stronger, more clear-headed. But it had taken months for the dosage to take effect. Speed was an issue, both in the lab and in the field. The effects had to be immediate. So he’d been experimenting with a fast-acting virus as a vector. It had worked wonders on animal trials.

Lee missed his soldiers fiercely. He needed Special Forces soldiers for the trials, but though he’d broached the subject several times with Flynn, who would have access to plenty of specimens as an ex-general, the cretin had refused.

The theory was that any Special Forces soldiers, either on active duty or retired, would be missed.

He’d made an exception for the Ghost Ops soldiers who’d been captured because they were not on any official lists. Were, in fact, officially nonexistent. On the subject of more soldiers to experiment on, Flynn had been unyielding.

A sudden rush of rage shook Lee, a hot course of hatred pulsing through him.

It felt good, it felt right. Flynn had blocked him every step of the way.

The original plan had been to celebrate the Chinese New Year in Beijing, as a newly minted senior official of the Ministry.

The Chinese New Year had come and gone. He’d stood in the dark in his penthouse apartment on Market Street listening to the sounds of the annual Chinese New Year parade.

And now with the new deadlines it was entirely possible that Flynn’s hesitations and penny-pinching would cost Lee his chance.

The hatred felt right, felt good. He clenched his fist and imagined it curled around Flynn’s fat neck, crushing the windpipe, watching with glee as that already-purple face turned blue, anticipating the tiny snap as the hyoid bone broke.

Lee could do it now, too. One-handed. He’d surreptitiously tested his grip on a dynamometer and he’d hit 200 lbs., the most the machine could measure, halfway through the test. In all likelihood, he could tear Flynn’s throat out with one hand.

The thought pleased him enormously.

Oh yes. He was going to be a walking advertisement for the Warrior Protocol.

He broke the final seal on the container and watched as curls of smoke from the dry ice rose together with the central cylinder. It stopped with an audible click, gyrated 90°, and the three vials automatically emptied into a single syringe that had been pushed up from the side.

Beautiful piece of equipment. America still did this kind of thing so well, so elegantly.

Lee picked the syringe up with his right hand and turned it until the hair-fine needle pointed at the ceiling.

He rolled up the shirt sleeve and placed his left arm on the desktop, admiring it.

His suits hid the fact that he’d developed superb muscle definition over the past month.

His arm now was lean and hard, with veins carrying oxygen to the newly-forged muscles.

He smiled as the needle painlessly slid into the vein. Lean, mean fighting machine. With a double PhD.

The new dosage with the viral component—SL-62—spread warmth throughout his system like a healing balm. He felt good, more than good. He felt great .

A few more tweaks and they’d be ready to roll. They would have been ready six weeks ago if that fucker Flynn hadn’t been so pissy.