Page 45 of I Dream of Danger (Ghost Ops #2)

Chapter Twelve

Arka Pharmaceuticals Headquarters

San Francisco

One entire wall of Lee’s office was a huge glowing hologram. Along the bottom of the hologram ran a series of data packets, including the date. Three months ago.

Millon Laboratories at Palo Alto. Before the facility had been destroyed.

Lee clenched his fists at the memory. Catherine Young had suddenly risen up and bit her employer in the ass.

She’d taken a huge bite out of him and had almost brought his entire project down.

Years of work nearly destroyed because of one woman and the faceless men who’d helped her.

He had a small part of the attack on tape, though it had been mostly destroyed by something the faceless men had done to his security system. His very, very expensive security system.

It still burned.

He’d recognized Young immediately, of course, brazenly breaking into his facility with the use of a cloned pass.

The lab had been hidden and illegal, given the type of testing that had gone on.

He’d had to go in and complete the destruction she’d wrought so that when the authorities came to investigate, he’d been able to plausibly state that the extra underground floor was merely equipment storage space.

There hadn’t been any technical experts in the law enforcement team, luckily.

But he’d had to buy off the three technicians who’d worked on the floor, and it had cost him. Money, time, effort.

Flynn had placed him under pressure, then Beijing had placed him under pressure.

That’s not how science worked. Science proceeded at its own stately pace. Putting pressure on the scientific process was an abomination. This was something non-scientists like Flynn were simply incapable of understanding.

What Lee was working on had the potential to change the world forever, as momentous as the harnessing of electricity. More so, even, as it would change the nature of a part of humanity. This was not something that could be done in a hurry and sloppily.

Injecting himself with SL-61 had been a stroke of genius, because he felt stronger and more intellectually acute than ever. He felt, for want of a better word, invincible.

There had been a missing element, though. An element he’d discerned in an animal experiment on the hidden Level 4 the night the laboratory was destroyed.

How he’d loved Level 4. It had been his very own reign, a place where he held the power of life and death, a place where he created living organisms. A place where he’d been a god.

He’d carried out extensive animal testing on Level 4 that would have been illegal under the Animal Testing Bill.

The experiments might have been illegal according to a bill passed by a lobby of fanatical men and women who cared more for dumb creatures than for science, but they had been necessary.

He’d been testing iterations of SL that would increase strength and speed and intelligence.

He and the SL drugs had been conducting a kind of dance. Two steps forward and one step backward, then three steps forward and two steps backward, then one step forward and three steps backward. Then ten steps forward.

Of course, it was immensely complex, as he was effecting change at the cellular level and trying to make it stable.

He was speeding up evolution itself, something no one else in the history of the world had ever attempted.

And he was succeeding , damn it. Every single trial that ended with a problem also unveiled a new possibility.

It was impossible to explain to that moron Flynn.

To his astonishment, though, it also proved impossible to explain to the Ministry of Science in Beijing.

Nobody cared about the process, about the secrets to life itself he was unlocking.

All they cared about were tangible results.

A drug that would increase the capabilities of soldiers in the field, that would prove stable over time and that was cheap to produce.

In any hands but his it would have been impossible.

Up to that point there’d been 59 iterations. Nothing compared to Edison’s 10,000 failed attempts. Lee had only tried 59 times, but that 59 th …

Deep below the earth, in the animal lab, Lee had found part of the key to changing the world in an animal cage housing a bonobo.

There’d been ten bonobos, big, healthy apes genetically predisposed to peaceful behavior.

SL-59 had had a negative effect on nine of them. They’d turned listless and died.

But the tenth…

Lee watched the holographic recording. He’d been watching it over and over again while poring over the analyses of the blood and brain tissue.

He’d gone back post-mortem to the original MRIs and had discovered something that had escaped his researchers’ notice—a slight anomaly of the hypothalamus and increased temperature of the periaqueductal gray of the midbrain.

Both qualities had increased notably after administration of SL-59.

In the hologram, so clear someone else in the room would have difficulty in distinguishing between now and three months earlier, he stood before a transparent plexiglass cage, watching the beautiful animal inside.

The hologram clearly showed all the data contained in the data infocubes at the forefront of the cage. Gender, genetic history, MRI and CAT scans, IQ test results, dosages and times of injections of SL-59.

The other bonobos had been sitting in their cages, movements slow, eyes lifeless.

Bonobo Number Eight, though. Ah, he wasn’t sitting listlessly. No, he was upright, well-balanced, brown eyes sharp. In the hologram, Lee stood studying him, and it was clear that the animal was studying him right back.

The camera had been at Lee’s back so he couldn’t see his own face, but he knew that he’d glanced down to see the EKG tracing at that point. Bonobos were peaceable within their own groups, but grew agitated in the presence of other species.

Number Eight’s heart rate remained unchanged.

Amazing. Either the bonobo had developed an ability to control its own heart rate or an instinctive fear had been overridden by the drug.

Perhaps both. And then something remarkable had happened.

The animal had checked Lee’s hands for weapons and his eyes for intent.

There had been no mistaking the raw intelligence in the animal.

They had stood there for a minute or two, gauging each other, two beings on either side of a species divide.

Then the bonobo had smashed itself against the plexiglass trying to get to him, beating itself into a pulp.

But those few minutes had been enough to give Lee an insight into attenuating the intensity of the violence while retaining the intelligence, and that insight had led to a virus-borne bit of genetic engineering that he thought represented the breakthrough they needed.

SL-59 hadn’t worked and SL-60 hadn’t worked. But SL-61…ah.

And an hour ago he’d injected himself with the drug.

In the hologram he watched as the bonobo killed itself against the glass in a frenzy of ferocity. When the animal finally lay on the straw-covered floor of the plexiglass cage, a ruined sack of broken bones, Lee hit rewind.

He stood and watched, once more, that moment in which he and the bonobo faced each other down.

As he watched that moment again, he felt strength course through his system, oxygen flowing deep and rich in his veins, bringing blood to his muscular system.

He felt each muscle almost separately, felt how well each muscle fit together with the others to form a strong and powerful whole.

Though he was on the 22nd floor of a skyscraper in the Financial District, he felt as if he were barefoot in the jungle, connected to the earth through skin and blood and bone, taking strength from the earth, giving it back.

The hologram switched off and he went to the window to look out over the city.

He lifted his hand and placed it against the glass, and it was as if his hand passed through the glass, out into the city, reaching down to the tiny people below, hurrying to get out of the inclement weather.

He could swat them away so easily. Such ants, all that toiling and striving so essentially meaningless. Puny and weak and craving direction.

Soon their lives would be harnessed to a greater good instead of being so random.

He would head a triumphant army of supermen.

Hadn’t mankind always dreamed of this—of a superior race that would come and lead?

All those legends of the gods with immense power over the earth and its creatures—surely their species knew it was always going to end up like this?

All Lee had done was speed up the process and place its agency in the right hands.

Of course, he had the power of the gods, too.

He could feel it, feel vitality run through him, feel his muscles and sinews reknit into a more powerful whole.

Feel his brain rewiring itself. His eyesight was so acute he thought he could see individual strands of hair in the ant-people down below on the street.

His hearing was so keen he could hear the centralized air system’s gentle hum.

It had started to snow, a bit of sleet mixed in, and he could hear each spicule ping against the window panes. He could hear?—

The door opening.

“Goddammit, Lee,” Flynn’s grating voice boomed. “What the fuck were you thinking?—”

A hot mist rose in Lee’s mind when he heard Flynn’s voice. The prick. The fucking prick. Every cell in his body pulsed with raw, red hatred.

Lee flew across the room, grabbing something shiny off his desk, hand punching forward. Flynn’s eyes bugged as he looked down at himself, at the very small shiny handle sticking out from his chest. The handle belonged to a pure titanium letter opener that was deeply embedded in his heart.

He was dead but he didn’t know it yet.