Heart of Danger (11 page)

“Mac?” Jon asked. “You think—”

Mac shook his head sharply. He didn’t know. The betrayal had been bad enough. The idea that Lucius might have been betrayed himself, might be in serious danger . . .

“It depends on the woman.” Nick seemed to be the only one who could think clearly about this. He turned to Mac. “Looker like that, I think you should interrogate her more fully.” And then, to Mac’s astonishment, Nick grinned. It lasted just a second and then Nick’s features rearranged themselves into his usual stony façade, but it had been there.

Jon picked up on it. “Yeah, man. Interrogate her. Get to the bottom of this. The front, too.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Hands-on interrogation, if you get my drift.”

“Idiots,” Mac growled. But he’d had a punch to the chest at the thought of putting his hands on her, dammit. That mass of shiny hair, the silver gray eyes and vulnerable expression blossomed in his head and something stirred throughout his body. Stirred south of the border, too. Shit. He started getting a chubby and had to will it down.

That shocked him. He was a focused man, all business, all the time. Sex had its place, a narrow enclosed space, usually bar to bed, couple of hours max. Then back to business.

The woman was fucking with his head. He’d thought of her all night, dammit, and not in a strategic way. Nope. Not focusing on her story, pulling it this way and that looking for holes, which is what he would have done with anyone else.

All night he’d stared at the ceiling, wide-eyed, remembering that burst of heat rushing through his veins at her touch. He’d never taken drugs. His entire childhood had been spent around people who retreated into drugs to wipe out their reality. He was thirty-four and he was sure that most of the people he’d known as a child were either dead or wished they were. So no, drugs had held no appeal. He didn’t want to die, he wanted to live, fiercely. He always had.

But one kid had explained to him the rush of heroin as it hit the system. The kid rented his ass out on a nightly basis to get it and hated himself 23/7. That one hour of heroin was worth it—worth the pain and degradation. Worth being treated like butcher’s meat. Worth being beaten and abused every night. He’d said that when the drug entered him, all the bad things went away and it was like being in heaven, if heaven existed.

Well, fuck it if that wasn’t a pretty good explanation of what had happened when Dr. Catherine Young touched him. A rush. A rush like nothing he’d ever felt before. Like having his heart stroked by gentle hands. Like having his mind invaded by an angel.

He wanted to snort. Angels. There were no angels in this world and there was no other world. Angels didn’t exist, and no one had stroked his heart. Not that he had one anyway.

Damned if he understood what had happened, though.
Something
had. Something huge and scary.

She’d pulled this stuff on him out of thin air. How had she done it? Maybe it was like those magicians onstage who pulled up a member of the audience and asked them to think of a number and write it down. He’d always suspected those acts to be pure bluffs and the members of the audience part of the act.

But what Catherine Young had said had been, terrifyingly, the pure truth. She’d read him. Nailed him, like a butterfly to the board.

Mac wasn’t used to being seen, understood. He was used to being obeyed. The men under him in Ghost Ops knew damn all about him and that was the way he liked it. The only person to have a slight insight into him had been Lucius and already that had made him uncomfortable.

Even now, even in exile, Nick and Jon and the rest of the small community they seemed to be building knew him as a tough, strong leader with no chinks in his armor, nothing there to hang on to but a big, hard, shiny surface.

So being understood like that—it was scary. Even scarier was that he’d liked it, for that short burst of time in which she’d touched him. Before his head could catch up to what she was doing.

It had been like a shot of heroin to his system, and like any addict, now he craved it. He’d spent the night thinking of it—thinking of
her
. Remembering that soft touch, the rush of warmth spreading in an instant from her hand to his entire body, zinging through his veins.

She’d . . . glowed, while touching him. Like some unearthly creature. As if there were a thousand-watt lamp inside her beaming light and warmth. In that instant, she’d been impossibly beautiful, the most beautiful woman in the world. Some enchantress from another planet, too delicate and beautiful for this one.

That hadn’t lasted. When she’d broken the connection it was as if something had broken inside her. That pale skin no longer glowing but ashen. Shadows under those beautiful eyes. Nostrils pinched and pale.

That had kept him awake, too, because the glowing fairy princess from Planet Zog had been fascinating but the vulnerable, fragile woman who’d sprinkled fairy dust over him and paid a price for it nearly broke his heart.

He’d had to fist his hands to keep from putting his arms around her. He, Mac McEnroe, balls-to-the-wall tough guy who could and had watched enemies die by his hand without blinking, had been about to put his arms around a potential enemy. A completely unknown entity, who had somehow found them in their hideout. Someone who could put his community in jeopardy.

“Okay,” he said, putting on his war face, making his voice cool. “I’m going to see what else I can get out of her.”

Nick gave a curt nod, turned away and picked up the Hawk again.

Jon grinned and made kissy noises.

Mac flipped him the bird and walked out.

Chapter Six

Arka Pharmaceuticals Headquarters
San Francisco

The next morning, a vein in Lee’s temple started throbbing. He looked at the attendance sheet for work at the Millon facility. Dr. Catherine Young had not clocked in for the second day in a row.

He’d sent the Africa footage to the three research scientists at the Palo Alto Millon lab who were part of the complete protocol. Even so, they didn’t have the full picture, of course. All they knew was that they were engaged in secret military research beyond their normal duties. And that they were earning $100K a year more than the regular research scientists. They had no clue that Lee had another agenda entirely, which was, of course, perfect.

The day Lee defected back to the mainland with a complete program to turn the Red Army into history’s greatest military machine, he’d leave behind a charred corpse in his car at the bottom of a ravine and clues that would implicate the three scientists in treason.

He was so damned close and yet so far! The Orion Africa debacle was going to set him back by months. His new life was dancing out of his grasp.

He tapped a holographic image of a lock and key on the monitor to his right. It immediately dissolved into Baring’s bullet head.

“Sir?”

“Dr. Catherine Young hasn’t come in to work this morning, either. Check hospitals within a hundred-mile radius and check police reports. Break into her home and see what you can find and make sure she knows we looked. Report back in an hour.”

“Sir.”

Lee drummed his fingers on the shiny teak desktop, jaws clenched as he thought.

What had happened to Young? Had she been mugged, had she had a car accident, was her lifeless body at the morgue? That would be very unfortunate, as she seemed to have an almost uncanny ability to understand the workings of all the iterations of SL on the human mind and was able to make an fMRI sing. If anyone could tweak the molecule, give them another iteration, it was Dr. Young.

She was the very best imaging analyst he’d ever come across. At times it seemed to him that she could look at an fMRI and figure out what the patient ate for breakfast. In her hands, each image yielded so much data they were creating the fullest map of the human brain in existence.

Why wasn’t she at work? The woman who was all work and no play?

She had no friends among her coworkers, and the baseline vetting his security staff had done on her hadn’t turned up a large number of friends. Any friends at all, actually.

She seemed to be wedded to her work, arriving early, leaving late. She showed no signs of political awareness or even unusual interest in the company she worked for.

No, Lee decided. She wasn’t spilling her guts to the FBI right now. Something must have happened to her. Had she spent the night with someone and was still there? Somehow Lee doubted that. She seemed as sexless as she was friendless.

It had been a real selling point with him.

He regretted bitterly his decision not to place tracers in the cars of his top research staff.

The instant Young showed up, a company transponder was going into her car, one that wouldn’t turn off when the car was turned off. Or better yet, Baring would slip into her bedroom, anesthetize her, and inject minute traces of a radioactive isotope with a specific signature into her. She’d never know, and they’d know her whereabouts at all times.

And when SL-59 was complete, tested and flawless, when it had been delivered to the People’s Liberation Army, Young would be slated for destruction. Together with Clancy Flynn, she would be the only one who could recognize what had happened to the soldiers of the PLA. They both had to be silenced. The loss of one blowhard former general and one mere woman was nothing in comparison to the plan.

Catherine leaned forward on her elbows, fascinated. “Come on, Stella. Tell me the truth. Is Gary Hopkins a good kisser?”

God,
that scene
. The world’s most famous kiss, an iconic image, on the poster of
The Hunter.
Stella and Gary being pulled apart by enemies, their only point of contact lips locked in a kiss.

Catherine put down her perfect cup of coffee next to the plates which had once held a perfect stack of blueberry pancakes and a perfect whites-only cheese omelette, and the bowl which had once held perfect homemade yogurt with a dollop of perfect homemade strawberry jam.

It was more food than she’d been able to consume in one meal for as long as she could remember. She’d eaten every delicious bite and had scraped the bowl of yogurt, making an embarrassing sound.

It was, hands down, the best breakfast she’d ever eaten, and that included in France. But now that she was replete, fascination with the woman sitting across from her held her in its grip.

Stella Cummings, once the most famous actress in the world, who’d commanded $20 million a picture, whose face had graced a thousand gossip magazines, who’d been a celebrity almost as long as she’d been alive until she’d disappeared from the public eye.

That woman had been a fashion plate, waif-thin and blindingly beautiful. Remote, untouchable. Perennially unsmiling and gorgeous in the pictures of her on the red carpet or in the tabloid snapshots. A twenty-first-century Greta Garbo, only thinner.

The Stella that sat across from Catherine was a healthy-looking woman who was no longer beautiful and laughed constantly.

Her face had been savagely slashed then carefully put together again by a master plastic surgeon, but nothing would ever make her beautiful again. Catherine forgot the scars ten seconds after Stella had knocked on her door bearing a tray of delicious-smelling food.

Stella gave a lopsided smile and rolled her eyes. “Gay, honey.”

Catherine’s eyes bugged. “Gary Hopkins is
gay
?”

“As a plaid suitcase. Like Lawrence Rome. The two actually dated.”

“Man.” Catherine sat back. Gary Hopkins and to a lesser extent Lawrence Rome were the epitome of macho. Ripped and brooding. Gary had personally saved Planet Earth by his courage and ability with humongous weaponry in
Deadly Evil
. “Makes a girl think, doesn’t it? Though I suppose he was too good-looking to be straight.”

They both turned as the door to Catherine’s room whooshed open.

“Speaking of good-looking men,” Stella said as Mac walked in.

He gave her the hairy eyeball, but she responded with a sunny smile.

Catherine could barely move. The instant Mac filled the doorway, her muscles were paralyzed, the breath left her body, her palms started sweating. Though her muscles were in lockdown, inside she was a riot of boiling emotions she could barely understand and couldn’t control.

He fascinated her.

That über-male thing made up of long, lean muscles, shoulders out to here, huge, capable hands that looked like they could snap a man’s neck in two and then repair a tank. He made Gary Hopkins look like a cocker spaniel.

Then there was the fear thing. She’d touched him and had felt that he didn’t plan on killing her. Today. But her gift was uneven, unreliable, incomplete, and she knew he had violence in him. Violence he could wield like a surgeon, but still.

She could very well be wrong. The expression on that flat, ugly yet compelling face was stony. There was danger in every single line of his big body and she had no guarantees that the danger wasn’t to herself.

And then there was the attraction thing. Last night she’d been exhausted, frightened out of her mind, in the iron grip of her compulsion. But now, rested and refreshed, the sudden appearance of Mac made her heart leap in her chest. Part of it was the fear and part was the fascination, but a goodly portion of it was sheer old-fashioned sex.

He turned her on.

It happened to her so seldom she barely recognized it as something belonging to her. The whole sex thing was so incredibly fraught with problems, whole thorny forests of problems, she’d more or less given up on it.

Her body hadn’t. It was as if her body had been quietly lying in wait to jump for something it wanted and it turned out what her body wanted was Mac. She shuddered. This wasn’t just inappropriate, like getting a crush on your married dentist or your banker. This was dangerous. Because the man who walked in, swept the room with a fierce scowl and stood there like an immovable force of nature, was terrifying.

She had no idea of his background but he looked like a soldier, and not the ceremonial kind who stood around in a fancy uniform with a long, shiny sword and who knew how to snap out a salute. No, he looked like Special Forces. The kind of guys who came in under cover of darkness, snapped necks rather than salutes, then left quietly before you even knew they were there.