Heart of Danger (8 page)

“And then?” Mac drummed his fingers on the table. Yeah she was pretty and yeah she was smart, but he was going to get the truth out of her if he had to inject a triple dose of Trooth in her.

She leaned forward, looking him in the eyes. So this was where the big-time lying was going to start.

“After he gave me the message to find Tom McEnroe he was so drugged the next few days he was barely conscious. Then yesterday—the day before yesterday now—I came in and he was in a terrible state, thrashing wildly against the restraints around his wrists and ankles. When he saw me he stilled, motioned with his head for me to come closer, signaled for use of my keyboard. He asked for me to cut the vidcams and I did, and then he wrote they were going to kill him soon. He was . . . very convincing.”

“Though he was sick,” Mac noted.

“Yes, though he was sick. And of course paranoia is actually a symptom of dementia. I tried to calm him down because he was bleeding at the restraints. He said once more I had to find this man called Thomas McEnroe. Mac.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said harshly.

Her smile was sad and tired. “No?”

“No. You said he couldn’t form words, could hardly think straight, and yet here he was telling you all of that. How does that work?”

She watched him for a full minute, breathing quietly. She gently tipped her hand to the side, letting the Hawk she’d been holding roll onto the table. Her hand trembled but her gaze was steady.

They watched as the Hawk rolled once, twice, making a tiny rattling sound in the quiet room. Mac knew Jon and Nick were watching, listening.

And then his world turned upside down.

She reached farther, her hand covering his, grasping it.

At first he thought it was a sex move, otherwise why the fuck would she be touching him? And, God, their two hands together were so damned erotic. His hand was dark and powerful, nicked and scarred and rough. A workingman’s hand. Hers was slender, long-fingered, elegant. Pale creamy skin over delicate bones. A pianist’s hand.

The contrast was arousing, female over male.

So that’s the way she wants to play it,
he thought, and then he was swept away by a blast of painless incandescent heat that moved from his hand up his arm and across his chest. It was as if his body had been taken over by an alien entity. An entity that was warm and enveloping and sweet beyond description. For a second he wondered if he’d been drugged. If her hand somehow contained a micro-syringe and she had injected a dose of . . . something in him. He had no idea what. He’d never heard of a drug that could do this.

Any further thought was impossible, he was in the grip of something powerful, more powerful than he was. He stared at her face as her features tightened, almost as if she were in pain. Her eyes glowed, as if some kind of light bomb had gone off behind them. As if they were a source of light themselves.

That incredible heat now flowed through his entire body, suffusing it with a golden glow. He was completely blocked, as if in a cube of amber. He couldn’t move a muscle, each element of his body locked into place.

“Boss?” Jon asked softly in his ear. “You okay?”

“Should we come in?” Nick growled.

Only it turned out he wasn’t frozen, he wasn’t locked. It’s just that his body didn’t want to dissipate that heat. He could move, and he did. A short, emphatic shake of his head.
No.

“Okay.” Jon let out a long breath. “Standing down. We don’t like it but we’re standing down.”

He jerked his head.
Yes, stand down.

“You are grieving,” she said softly, that luminescent, hypnotic gaze never leaving his eyes. “Grieving badly. There is such sorrow in you, it swirls around like black smoke. You were betrayed by a man you loved like a father. A man you trusted wholeheartedly. Everything you knew about this man led you to believe he would die rather than betray those who trusted him, and yet—he betrayed you. For
money
. It hurts your heart even to think of it.”

His hand had jerked slightly under hers and she exerted a slight downward pressure.

It was ridiculous. She was a small woman. Slender, even fragile. Her hand was almost half the size of his. The idea that she could force him to keep still was ludicrous. And yet here he was, utterly incapable of moving even an inch away from that glowing light gray stare, her small hand tethering his.

“You’re hurting,” she whispered. “So much. And you can’t show it because . . .” She tilted her head, as if listening to something, though her eyes never left his. “Because people count on you. And you’d rather die than betray them the way you were betrayed.”

He couldn’t move. Nothing moved except his lungs. He felt as if she were flaying him alive, but painlessly. And at the same time, for the first time in his life, he knew someone else could see inside him.

He’d worked a lifetime to keep his inner thoughts secret. As a child in violent foster homes, most thoughts or desires led to beatings. Later, in the military, nobody gave a fuck what he thought or felt about things as long as he did his duty, and he liked it that way just fine.

Except Lucius. Lucius had seen into him. The pain rose helplessly, like black tidal waters, choking him. It never stopped. A year and it could still ambush him.

“So sad,” she whispered. “You’re so sad. And yet under the smoke burns love, and duty. You’re determined to protect your people. A life where you can’t protect the innocent doesn’t make sense to you. You’d die to keep them safe.”

Her words were a distant flutter, the sound hummingbird wings might make if amplified. They barely registered. What registered was this hot, melting sensation inside him. For the very first time in his life he felt a connection to someone that was blood- and bone-deep. It was nothing like the loyalty he felt to his men or had felt to Lucius. That had a different flavor, was something else entirely. However strong his ties might be, there was a definite place where they ended, and that was his skin.

Here there were no boundaries, none. He could feel his heartbeat—slow, steady—and hers—light, hammering, almost frantic. He was inside his own skin and inside hers.

It was crazy. Was he drugged after all? He hadn’t felt the prick of a needle, but maybe there’d been some kind of contact patch . . .

Her soft voice continued, her eyes a light hypnotic silver. “You’re worried that I’m a danger to you. That somehow your enemies have found you and that I am their representative. I don’t know how to convince you that who sent me was no enemy of yours. And that I don’t represent any danger to you or . . .” She tilted her head slightly, watching him. “Or to your men.” Suddenly, she whipped her head around, hair whirling out from her head, then falling back onto her shoulders. “They’re watching us. Listening. Ready to come in to save you if I put you in danger. And yet”—she lifted her hand—“the danger doesn’t come from me.”

It all stopped. Dead. And it was like being dead. Where before there had been emotions swirling, bright and warm, heat and light, almost like a carnival going on inside him, now inside it was still and silent. Like a light switch being thrown. A switch that turned him off.

She was still watching him steadily, sadness and knowledge in her silvery gaze.

“I’m not anything you should fear, Mr. McEnroe. Or should I call you Mac?”

Chapter Four

Arka Pharmaceuticals Headquarters
San Francisco

The room was dark, the computer monitor bright. It was 9 A.M. Zulu time and Sierra Leone time. Though it was a chilly January evening in Northern California, in Sierra Leone it was a hot day.

Lee looked down like God at images Flynn’s company, Orion Enterprises, piggybacked off Keyhole 18. Flynn himself was in the fancy company headquarters building in Alexandria, Virginia. Today, SL-58 was being field-tested. Orion had administered 50 cc’s of SL-58 to each operative, the dose calibrated to last at least forty-eight hours. Well over the time it should take them to make their way from the diamond mine in the hinterland of hell to hell’s own port, Freetown.

The mine was very rich, the path to market incredibly dangerous. There were not one but two rebel armies camped out in the jungle, marauders living off terrified villagers and hijacked convoys. So far, one convoy in three made it intact to Freetown. A 66 percent loss was unacceptable, even for the richest diamond mine in the world.

The Amsterdam-based diamond consortium had hired Orion to provide security for the diamonds and Flynn had promised the moon to the consortium in exchange for a million dollars a trip. Considering the haul on each trip was worth roughly five hundred million dollars once the diamonds were cut and set, the consortium had agreed. But Orion had one chance. If this convoy went the way of the others, it could kiss the contract goodbye.

Lee wasn’t interested in diamonds or even the money, though he would get a substantial bonus if this convoy and successive convoys were successful. The bonus would help him speed up his plans.

This was a trial run in another sense, too. A state-controlled Chinese mining company had found a huge deposit of iridium, the largest in the world, in Burundi. No one else knew of the deposit.

With access to plentiful iridium, China was guaranteed to be the world leader in microchips for the next two decades. The mine was even deeper in the hinterland, in the no-man’s-land where artificial lines on maps meant nothing.

If SL-58 turned out to be successful for Orion, it could be administered early to the Chinese troops who would set up a convoy to take the mined iridium east to the Indian Ocean, then by ship to China.

Lee’s main monitor had shown the Orion convoy starting out at first light. Two Unimogs in front and two more at the rear guarding the central security truck carrying a titanium vault with 5 kilograms of uncut diamonds.

Since the nuking of the Orapa diamond mine in Botswana the year before, diamonds were the most valuable commodity on earth.

Three vehicles including the armored truck carrying the diamonds. All heavily armed, each vehicle with a mini gun firing .50 caliber bullets at the rate of a thousand a minute. Flynn had said they were carrying more than fifty thousand rounds of ammunition.

In Nanjing, fifty members of the elite “Flying Dragon” squadron were waiting, pending the outcome of today’s trial. If it was successful, SL-58 would be administered and in a month they would start accompanying trucks of iridium to the waiting ships.

For now, it was Flynn’s men who were being tested. Some ex– U.S. military and several South Africans familiar with the African bush. Each soldier had received an injection of SL-58 the previous evening. Orion’s men had been told it was a benign, long-lasting amphetamine that would let them stay awake and alert for the twenty-hour journey.

Lee was sending everything to Beijing via long burst encryption.

It was an important trial. It was an important day. The first field test of the drug. So far, so good. The field doctor’s report had been mundane, even boring, which Lee approved of. Boring was predictable. Boring was good.

Lee had watched the recording of the convoy starting out at 5 A.M. local time, the trucks heading out precisely, well-timed and well-organized.

The speed and precision of the soldiers at departure were visible, almost tangible. Lee wasn’t a logistics expert but he had some idea of what it took to get a convoy of twenty-five men going. They did everything at top speed, quick and efficient. While the men were loading the trucks, Lee had to check the monitor dashboard to make sure the recording wasn’t somehow fast-forwarding. But it wasn’t on fast-forward. Everything was in real time. The men were walking as fast as most men could run, loading movements a blur.

Flynn was watching in Virginia, observing the tactical situation. Lee watched with a scientist’s eye, delighted with what he was seeing.

It was as if the soldiers’ movements were choreographed. Worked out beforehand and rehearsed a thousand times. It could have been on Broadway. However good Flynn’s men were, they couldn’t be that good. He was seeing the effects of SL-58.

They moved fast and precisely and were bristling with weaponry. But trouble was brewing.

Lee switched every five minutes to IR and noted human-sized bodies in the jungle, starting about a hundred meters from the staging area.

Flynn had noted, too, and reported. The men were perfectly aware they were under observation.

At first the red dots could have been any large mammals, but their stillness over time as the convoy was marshaled and then set off could mean only one thing—rebel soldiers, observing.

Doubtless the rebels were in radio contact with other soldiers along the route—the only road to Freetown. It was a well-known technique—attack convoys away from home base.

Well, if they attacked the enhanced convoy they were in for a nasty surprise.

The orders were to barrel ahead. An ordinary convoy would take three or four days to get to Freetown, traveling between 15 and 20 miles an hour during the day over the badly rutted road, laagering at night. This was to be a straight run, with no rest stops, pissing in bottles, shitting in cans, eating MREs. These soldiers wouldn’t need rest stops. All they needed after the injection was a minimum of 8,000 calories a day and they could drive and fight nonstop for forty-eight hours. Twenty hours was nothing.

A twenty-hour convoy run would guarantee an increase in profits of 300 percent for the diamond corporation and would represent a cash cow for Orion. But more important, it would be the first successful battlefield test run of SL-58. If it was successful, Flynn would be allowed to play with it for a year, during which time the Chinese would be producing it in industrial batches and injecting its soldiers. After a year of field trials through Orion, Lee would destroy the lab producing it, destroy the formula and the few scientists who knew of it, and would be exfiltrated from America, bound for Beijing before the first bomb detonated in Millon’s labs.

Lee had read up on his African history. African battles were often won by sheer numbers. After the Battle of Isandlwana, Western forces knew they had to be overwhelmingly better-armed to prevail. This was going to change the face of battle in Africa.