Page 50 of I Dream of Danger (Ghost Ops #2)

Chapter Thirteen

San Francisco

Jon had hovered for just a moment over a rental unit in Cow Hollow, and Mac had rappelled down.

He was on his way in a big dark van they had stashed there, and would park around the corner of the front entrance of the tall, slender, white building housing Arka, because they had hopes of finding the live bodies of Elle’s friends somewhere inside that building.

They had no eyes into the building, none. Jon had failed to break into the building’s security, a first. Back at the war room in Haven they’d watched, frustrated, as Jon pounded the keyboard shouting obscenities. To their credit, neither Catherine nor Elle even blinked.

The only thing they had was the building’s schematics, on record in City Hall.

So…the building on Battery Street was impregnable in terms of intel. All they could do was break in and…hope for the best.

Not the smartest infiltration plan they’d ever come up with.

But it was the only one they had. Elle had put herself under.

She said she’d be waiting for them at Arka and that she would contact him telepathically.

When she said that, Mac and Catherine hadn’t blinked.

If Elle couldn’t establish contact, he and Jon were fully prepared to find the prisoners and fight their way out however they could. Mac would join them if necessary.

It wasn’t a suicide mission—it wasn’t. Nick kept telling himself that.

He glanced over at Jon, piloting the helo. This was exactly the kind of mission that would appeal to his sense of the absurd, and he expected to find a half smile on Jon’s face. It wasn’t there. What was there was grim purpose, and that surprised him.

Nick hated going in blind. They all did.

The less intel you had, the greater the fuckup potential, in a situation where fuckup was a synonym for messy death.

Though Jon had managed to get the schematics of the building, it was missing whole floors.

It was illegal—every blueprint lodged with the city’s Building Inspection Service had to be complete as to architecture and infrastructure, but somehow Arka had greased some palms so various floors were blank.

It wasn’t even clear if they had electricity.

And the building stopped at the ground floor, which both Catherine and Elle said made no sense. So there were subterranean floors, too.

How many?

Who the fuck knew?

Nick’s jaw was so tight his temples hurt, and he realized how much it sucked to go into battle when you had someone you love waiting for you back home.

Ghost Ops made a hell of a lot of sense.

They’d been screened, carefully chosen, so that no one had anyone waiting back home for them.

Not a woman, not a child, not a dog, not even a fucking goldfish, and Nick got that, got it deep in his bones.

Because wanting to come back, wanting fiercely to hold on to whoever was waiting for you after the op, was the surest way to take your mind off the op. And taking your mind off the op was like taking a gun to your head and pulling the trigger.

Fuck.

Operational readiness was a physical attribute, sure. Train, shoot, train some more, shoot some more. Until it was all automatic and you reacted faster than you could think.

But you had to think. You had to plan out your moves in constantly-evolving situations that were never, ever, ever like the pre-op briefing. No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. Shit happens, and when it does, you adapt.

You had to be wholly one with the op in your head. No thinking of anything else. Forget the fact that he’d left a white-faced Elle behind, doing her damndest—as Catherine was doing with Mac—to be upbeat and brave. Terrified he wasn’t going to come back.

And the shitty thing was—he was terrified, too.

Well, fuck again.

A warrior couldn’t have thoughts like that messing with his head. He had to be down with the mission, and ready to die.

Nick wasn’t ready to die. Not even close.

He wanted to live with Elle for the rest of his life.

In Haven, on Mount Blue. Soon they would become completely self-sufficient and they could just turn their backs on the broken world and live in happy isolation.

Living the rest of his life with Elle—oh man.

Waking up next to her, eating with her, sleeping with her.

Fucking her.

The thought jolted him. First, because it shot a crude rush of heat through his system, and second, because for the first time in his life he realized he’d been making love to Elle, not fucking her, and oh, shit. This was it. He wanted that for the rest of his life.

He wanted her. He needed her.

Nick…

“The rooftop door is open.” Jon’s flat voice broke his pity party and suddenly Nick was back, focused and ready to get the job done.

He checked the rooftop carefully, dialing down the aperture of the NVG. There was some light coming from the aircraft warning light atop a pole that jutted fifty feet in the air above their heads and it blinded him.

Nick…

The field was green, flat. He reconned in quarters—a quarter of the field of vision, blink, another quarter…

There it was. The rooftop door. Open, just as Jon had said.

He looked over and their eyes met. That’s not good . They might as well have spoken the words aloud.

Nick. Something’s wrong.

Nick jerked as he realized Elle had been trying to contact him. She’d done it! Elle had said she’d try to go under when they landed on the roof of the Arka building.

Nick…

For a second Nick forgot that they were on the top of a building with serious security, trying to rescue four people who were God-knows-where and in God-knows-what condition. What did it matter? Elle was here with him.

And now he felt her completely, like a gentle hand petting him, a steady warmth in his head.

“I’ve got Elle,” he told Jon.

Jon’s mouth tightened. “Yeah? What’s she say?”

“That something’s wrong.”

Jon’s response, almost scripted, should have been No shit, Sherlock. But he didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything. He just tightened his mouth again and started unbuckling.

In a moment they were both in a crouch, weapon in hand, moving toward the open door from two different directions. It if was a trap, maybe one of them could survive.

Elle followed him in his head, utterly quiescent, instinctively understanding that he couldn’t deal with distractions.

They reached the door. It was open only an inch and behind the door it was dark. Jon flattened himself on the right side, weapon shouldered. Nick waited a moment, trying to hear what was on the other side.

No one there , a faint voice whispered in his head.

Well, if this was going to work, he was going to have to trust her.

He kicked open the door, jumping over the high barrier, designed to keep heavy rain from seeping into the stairwell, landing lightly on a landing, weapon up, completely ready to face the enemy.

Who wasn’t there.

Nobody in the stairwell. Elle sounded uncertain. Puzzled.

Nick peered over the banister at the endless flights leading downward. There were faint emergency lights on the landings, but they were no help. The bottom was down there somewhere but invisible.

Arka headquarters covered all the floors from the twenty-second floor to the ground floor.

Nick jerked his weapon and they fell into a rhythm, Nick treading lightly on the edges of the steps, covering the field of fire below them, Jon moving down backwards covering the field of fire behind them.

Both weapons up, fingers on trigger button.

They could switch from stunner to bullets in a fraction of a second.

Go on.

On the twenty-second floor, the door to the floor was ajar. Up until now, all the doors had been closed, a keypad on the wall next to the door. Nick took point again and slowly opened the door with the muzzle of his weapon.

Jesus! A man was lying on the floor, a pool of blood around his head. A clerical worker, dressed in white shirt and black slacks. He was lying on his side, one arm at an unnatural angle.

His throat was torn out. Something—someone?—had taken a huge chunk out of his throat and he’d bled out.

He’s dead .

Nick nodded at Elle in his head. Yeah. No need to reach down with two fingers over the carotid to check.

His eyes met Jon’s.

Nick! Behind you! Elle’s voice screamed in his head and he turned just as something came at him, a beast making terrifying animal noises, a creature with blood smeared over its face, hands up and reaching for him. It made a wild leap and it?—

Fell to the ground in a lifeless heap, half its head shot away. Nick had opted for good old-fashioned bullets.

“Jesus!” Jon’s voice came out a harsh whisper.

They’d both taken a knee, ready to deal with other crazies who might be coming, but there was no one.

Nick focused on the man who’d attacked him and rose slowly.

He hadn’t noticed many details—too busy killing the fucker—but now he walked over to the carcass.

The…man was covered in blood and had—Jesus.

Nick bent over. Did he have a human ear in his mouth?

While attacking, the man had seemed all teeth and claws, but now, if you discarded the blood and the human ear between his teeth, he looked like an executive.

An out-of-shape executive who probably took a golf cart around the course twice a month just before a hearty lunch at the club.

He was chubby. His once white, now red shirt strained at the buttons around his belly. He was balding. His suit was good quality and his shoes were shined and he’d come at Nick like a maddened grizzly bear.

Nick…

Yeah, honey ? He thought it abstractedly, trying to puzzle out the two men, two members in good standing of the office drone class, one maimed, the other …

maimer? Nick touched the man’s head with his toe, turning his head this way and that.

The ear in the man’s mouth wasn’t his. It was someone else’s.