Page 43 of I Dream of Danger (Ghost Ops #2)

Elle pursed her lips. “Not that could be tested, though we were only at the beginning of the trial. But—” She hesitated.

“She’s a healer. She never talked about it, but I saw her close up a nasty wound with her touch.

It comes with a heavy price though. She was weak for days after that.

” Elle hesitated. “Arka didn’t know. Nobody knew.

But she passed an fMRI screening test and was enrolled in the program.

Like me, she was also tasked with recovering and collating data. ”

Jon’s jaws were working. “Isn’t it unusual to have test subjects also running the test?”

“It is, yes,” Elle agreed. “And later on, for publication purposes, that would have been a big problem. But that’s what Corona insisted on, and they were paying the bills. So there was that anomaly. And this past week there were others.”

“Such as?” Catherine asked.

“I don’t know. It’s as if the program itself developed a fever.

We were asked to do three times the testing we were doing before, in half the time.

Results were to be sent directly to the coordinator’s office instead of being collected and collated on a weekly basis and then passed on.

And then—” Elle stopped and looked at them each in turn.

“And then people started disappearing. One, then two and three a day. The protocol stipulates that the test subjects show up at nine a.m. every morning, but we started having massive no-shows. Sophie and I called their cells and home numbers but got no responses. Yesterday—no, two days ago—there were only four of us, plus Sophie. I was being tested and Sophie oversaw the testing. When I got home, I got a panic call from Sophie saying that we were being rounded up. They were after her and were coming after me. I guess you know the rest.”

Oh yeah, they knew the rest. Nick’s fists tightened. They’d come after Elle. They were dead men walking.

Elle’s voice softened, became pleading. “I know you guys are…in hiding here. I know these people—” she gestured to the hologram of ten faces, “are complete strangers. But they are not strangers to me and they are being held against their will. And I fear that they are being hurt or…worse.” She drew in a deep, steadying breath.

Unlike the war room, which was always kept dim, the lab was brightly lit. The overhead light lit Elle’s hair into a shiny pale halo around her face, but beneath the halo was no angel’s face.

In his heart, in his head, Nick had kept an image of Elle that no longer existed.

For so very long, in his head she’d been the young, pampered girl of a wealthy father, who led an immensely sheltered life.

Then that had been exchanged for an exhausted waif of a girl, overwhelmed by her father’s illness, almost on her last legs.

So in his head Elle was vulnerable, requiring his protection.

That’s the thing that had driven him so crazy—or, well, crazier—all these years.

Elle, alone in the world. Alone in a world of predators.

He knew precisely how cold and cruel the world was…

he’d known since he could walk and talk.

He knew that the weak were crushed, whether you were a good person or not.

Elle was a good person. He knew that, deep down inside.

Nothing would ever change that because it was in her bones.

When she was a girl, she’d go out of her way to do casual kindnesses, completely unaware of how unusual that was.

The gardener who came twice a week always got a glass of ice tea.

A kid next door had tragically developed leukemia, and Elle would go over to read to him all through his chemo.

A good heart and weakness equaled disaster. Danger with a loud siren attached.

The Army, Rangers, Delta, and then Ghost Ops.

Nick’s whole adult life was making sure he wouldn’t be weak.

Making sure he could defend himself with every weapon known to man, and failing weapons, with a rock or his fists.

He’d had to defend himself plenty, because God knows the world was a shithole.

What possible defenses could Elle muster against the world? She’d taken off with no money and no friends, and that had been like a spike being hammered into his head, every single fucking day for ten fucking years.

The images came to him nightly.

Elle, alone and penniless in some dump of a town.

Elle, hitchhiking and ending up in a car with a guy with a knife.

Elle, walking alone through the wrong part of some city, a gang of rapists trailing behind her.

And always, always the image of her helpless and alone.

Well, she might well have at some point been helpless and alone, but she sure wasn’t any more.

The woman he was looking at was beautiful, yes, but visibly smart. It was there in her sharp, light-blue eyes that took everything in, there in the strong bone structure of her face, there every time she opened her mouth. Strength and discipline were in every line of her body.

And, shit. A PhD from Stanford. They didn’t give those away in cereal boxes. And Stanford was expensive. Over $200K a year, the last he heard. So she’d either earned that money or been given scholarships or a combo of both. Either way, she was a woman to be reckoned with.

And if the idea of the pale vulnerable waif broke his heart, this strong, confident woman melted it. She didn’t need him, not in any way. She’d made her way in the world just fine without him.

But if she’d have him, he was hers to the end of time.

So, yeah, he was in. She wanted her friends rescued? Whatever she wanted, he wanted to give it to her.

“I’m in,” he said.

“Me, too.” Mac’s deep rumble came with a nod.

“Oh yeah,” Jon breathed.

Elle studied the faces of the three men and one woman before her. Catherine was with her, no doubt. That in itself was a minor miracle. That she’d risk her man, Mac, for people she didn’t know.

Nick was with her. He’d made that clear this morning.

It frightened her to think that if she ordered him into a minefield, into the pit of hell, he’d go.

That kind of power scared her and she didn’t know if she’d ever get used to it.

She’d been alone for so long the idea of having a man like Nick right beside her, ready to do what she asked, was powerful but terrifying.

She might be leading him and Catherine’s husband and surfer dude to their death.

Sophie and the others might be already dead. Corona might use them to set a trap for her. But there was no way she could leave the others in the group helpless and on their own, and there was no way she could rescue them on her own.

So she studied the faces of these three men who were going to have to risk their lives to save some pretty odd people, and might lose their own in doing so.

She studied their faces for weakness or doubt and found none.

Elle gestured at the hologram. “I’m asking you to rescue these people, who are in terrible danger.

There was an urban legend making the rounds of the Corona researchers that a new method of distilling parts of the brain into a liquid that can be injected has been developed.

That a couple of people have been ‘harvested’ already.

That’s the charming term used in science, by the way.

Harvesting. As if people were crops. There were rumors of a previous study group that disappeared.

I didn’t pay much attention because there are constant rumors making the rounds and many of them are silly.

” She stopped, drew in a deep breath. “But now…I’m not too sure it’s silly.

I think it might be true. I think that the people ultimately running the trial have gone insane, and there is no telling what they’ll do, the lengths they’ll go to for results.

There’s something behind this I don’t understand.

Sophie and I both felt it, but we were so taken up in the results of the tests we decided to let it go. It was just a feeling, after all.”

“But you were right to feel uneasy,” Nick growled.

“Yes.” Elle felt a spurt of relief. He understood.

“We were right. I have no idea where to go from here. I don’t know where the subjects were taken.

The entire area is studded with labs. Arka owns a number of them.

The labs would be underground and would probably not be on any schematics.

Actually they could be anywhere. We are not even certain the lab would be in Palo Alto.

They could have been taken anywhere in a van. ”

The thought terrified her. Sophie and the others taken somewhere where they couldn’t be found, like cattle to slaughter.

Mac spoke, in his deep, gravelly voice that sounded like it came from underground. “Do you have any clues at all as to where they might have been taken? How about other labs that were cooperating with the program? Do you have a list?”

Elle shrugged. “As far as I know, no other labs were involved. I have the e-mail of everyone, and I’ve started a program on my computer to search their e-mails for the names of other labs, but so far nothing has come up.”

“The tracking devices?” Catherine asked. Elle had told her about the device she’d pried from her arm.

The men sat up straighter. “What tracking device?” Nick demanded.

Elle held her arm out, pulled up her sleeve, and pointed to the bandage.

Nick was going to be so mad at her. When he asked about it this morning, she’d simply said that she’d cut herself.

“All the members of the trial group were injected with a microchip. We were told that it was to monitor our vital signs. Each week we held our arms over a reader where the data was downloaded. But Sophie said to cut it out of my arm when she called to warn me, so I did.”

“And you were going to tell me about this…when?” Nick’s jaws flexed. She shrugged.

“Do you know where the database is held?” Jon asked. Nick had said that Jon was their cyber expert.