I Dream of Danger (18 page)

Protocol One, the Warrior Project, would create supersoldiers. Forty million Chinese Captain Americas.

But Protocol Two, the Delphi Project, would go one step further.

It would create an elite force of X-men.

H
unkered down in the dark, Elle buried her face in her arms.

She was the very picture of helplessness and she hated that,
hated
it. But there was no choice. The escape from her apartment had eaten into her reserves so deeply she had none left.

There was possibly some kind of scientific ratio to be studied—the further she went in her projections the greater the energy expended. It was an entirely new field of scientific research, one that she’d happily devote her life to, only it wasn’t going to happen.

What was going on at Corona? Sophie’s panic call and the men in black. What was happening? Elle wished she could call some of her other colleagues, to see if this was companywide, but a cell was a huge arrow in the sky pointing down—
here she is
!

Sophie’d said to leave hers back in her apartment and she had. The latest generation of phones had an off button for localization, but she didn’t trust it. Not if people with guns were hunting her.

She shivered. Was it cold in the room? Her whole body was trembling and she felt ice cold. There was no way to tell if it was shock or the temperature in the room. Maybe shock. She understood perfectly the physiology of shock. She’d come out weakened from her dream state, had had to perform minor surgery on herself and then go on the run. All the peripheral blood had rushed to her core to maintain vital organs alive.

Everything in her was cold, even her brain. She was used to being able to think herself out of difficult situations, but it was as if someone had thrown a blanket over her brain and it moved sluggishly, as if stumbling in the dark.

Right now, she needed to analyze the situation carefully, start making plans. She’d disappeared before—surely she could do it again. But no thoughts appeared. No analysis, no strong sense of reasoning her way through as she’d always been able to do.

Instead, with her last reserves, her entire being had sent out what could only be a distress call. Just to show how crazy she was, she hadn’t even sent it out to any of her coworkers.

Nope, she’d sent it to Nick. Who could be anywhere in the world.

Nick, whom she hadn’t seen in ten years and would never see again.

Nick, who wherever he was, wouldn’t care.

Insanity.

These past years of hard work, rewarding work, making new friends, entering the exciting world of scientific research—she’d tried so very hard to forget all about Nick. Every girl got her heart broken by a handsome man, right? Nothing new about that. Happened to everyone. Whole days, then whole weeks would go by when she wouldn’t think of him and then
wham
! A smell, a taste, a sound—it was always something. It would remind her of the years they spent together—or worse, remind her of the night they spent together.

And it was enough to set her off.

Her heart would clench, a cascade of hormones, bad ones, the ones associated with fear and loss and pain, such as CRH or cortisol, would flood her system. Before she knew the words, she understood the mechanism.

And now that she knew the words, now that she’d made this her field of study, she thought she’d banished her ghosts. Her ghost. Nick.

She’d made a successful life for herself, rarely thinking of him. And yet at the moment of her direst need, who did she think of? Nick Ross.
Damn
him! Wasting time wanting him was dangerous. Folly of the highest order.

Though there really wasn’t anyone to call. Maybe that was it. Most of her friends were fellow research scientists and, lately, members of the experimental protocol. There was no one capable of fighting those men in black, certainly not the men she knew.

Slope-shouldered, nearsighted men, pale and thin. No. Paul Mela, Alex Karras, or Thomas Chu—even if she could contact them, even if they came, they’d be massacred.

She’d been right not to call them.

It was so hard to be in the dark, in every sense. She’d seen the men and disappeared. She needed more information. A scientist dealt with data, and she had none.

What was happening?

Could she—
dare
she check?

Elle was only beginning to test the boundaries of her gift. Today’s projection of herself halfway around the world—that had been the first time she’d tried to deliberately project herself to an unknown place far away. It had left her so depleted she’d felt half dead.

She could do short distances. She’d tested that, over and over. But she didn’t have total control over where she went. It was like being in a Porsche with only the accelerator, no brakes and no steering wheel. Heady and dangerous.

Those men had moved with the professional grace of athletes or military men. They were heavily armed. She needed to know where they were.

The decision was made.

She slid down until she was lying on her back on the dirty carpet, grabbing a pillow from the bed and putting it under her head. Close to the floor, the smell of grime intensified. She shut it from her mind, along with the lumpiness of the carpet and the lint she could see under the bed. She wasn’t here for comfort, she was here for safety. A little dirt and a few smells were a small price to pay.

She closed her eyes and willed herself to start shutting down. Slow down her pounding heart, will her hands to still, her breathing to slow.

It was all so very new. She’d only gone on four voluntary trips before. All her life, her Dreams had taken her away when they wanted, where they wanted. There’d never been any question of directing herself, projecting herself where she wanted to go.

Hell, she’d been twenty-one and still heartbroken over Nick before she realized that what happened to her sometimes wasn’t merely crazy dreams. It had been in San Francisco, working hard to pay tuition before the grants and scholarships had kicked in. Desperate for reading material, she’d taken the bus to Clement Street and gone to Banana Split, a huge bookstore with tons of used books and a friendly staff that didn’t mind if you spent hours there. On the second floor, browsing the Paranormal section she’d seen a book, dusty and badly printed, and it had changed her life.

A simple title—
Astral Projection
. But she’d recognized instantly that it spoke directly to her, to what she’d always been able to do but had been unable to recognize. She learned she wasn’t alone. A number of people were able to astrally project, and Elle started to make it her business to know everything about it. That semester, she switched to biology, aiming at a PhD in neuroscience, and it had led her straight to Corona, which was studying extrasensory powers.

Until she’d actually enrolled in the Delphi Protocol, she’d never been able to control her projections. They just . . . happened. Maybe more when she was stressed than when she was relaxed, but there’d been very little relaxation in her life after her father became ill, so that wasn’t a big help.

Some nights her trips were brief. A few minutes in an unfamiliar landscape and then she’d be back. One constant was that the longer the trip, the more exhausted she was when she woke up.

The Delphi Protocol was controlled in every aspect. From the drugs in the IV line to the monitors checking her status. And still, she’d been told her vital signs had gone dangerously low in today’s experiment. What would happen if her vital signs started plummeting? She was alone here. She could lapse into a coma, even die.

But she could die, anyway. Those men had been armed and Sophie’s call had been a panic call. Sophie had said some people had been killed. In all likelihood, for whatever reason, something highly dangerous was going on and it was entirely possible that the men in black had orders to shoot her on sight.

So staying here, alone in the dark, wasn’t going to save her.

They’d know she hadn’t hailed a taxi and there was only so far anyone could get on foot. If they had the right resources they would find her, no question. She’d signed in under another name but presumably they’d have a photo of her. That bored and stoned young man at the front desk might remember her.

They could break in her door at any minute.

The Delphi Protocol had been exact and precise. Elle tried to duplicate it, though she had no equipment at all except her body and her mind. First, she’d been told to lie flat on her back, arm out for the IV. Silly as it seemed, she lay there flat on her back and put her arm out from her body. There hadn’t been a pillow so she removed it from under her head.

What had Sophie done next? Inserted the needle. It was the new generation of hypodermics—thin as a human hair while inserted, it expanded once in a vein. It hadn’t hurt at all going in, and she’d felt only the lightest whisper of sensation when it expanded. But the drug had burned a little when it started flowing in her veins.

Corona had refused to give the exact molecular structure of the drug, citing patent concerns, but Sophie had told her that though she didn’t know its exact composition either, it had been tested thoroughly on animals and had never caused an adverse effect.

So Elle lay still and imagined the whisper of the superthin needle being inserted into the vein of her right arm, the slight sensation of fullness as the needle expanded, the feeling of warmth as the drug began to course through her system.

There must have been a light sedative in the drug because she had instantly relaxed and had felt so light that it was as if she floated an inch or two above the mattress.

She felt herself relax, as if she’d been perfused with the drug. It had been a wholly pleasant sensation and she willed herself into feeling it. Feeling weightless, as if gravity had suddenly been revoked. So light that she rose a little, hovered, then continued up, up, up . . .

It was pitch-black outside, the darkness broken only by the few intact streetlights. Palo Alto was a prosperous community, and further east she could see well-lit streets and cars whishing by, brightly lit storefronts and restaurants and bars. But in this small corner of town, darkness reigned.

Few cars passed by on their way to somewhere else. Nobody was walking on the sidewalks, which were narrower than normal, cracked in places from the roots of the big, old, unpruned trees lining the street the motel was on.

Elle drifted over the rooftops, all sense of anxiety gone. It was peaceful up here in the chill air, under the star-filled sky. The moon had set. The brightly lit center of town was aglow in the distance, like a huge campfire. Two streets over, where the shops started selling something other than cheap clothes and liquor, some young kids spilled out of a bar, reeling in the street, shouting. They were drunk and laughing. One kid, tall and lanky, bent over from the waist, hands on knees, and threw up in the gutter. They all laughed harder.

Students,
she thought with an inward smile. Always the same . . .

What was that?

Thick, untrimmed bushes across the street two blocks down from the motel quivered, as if a wind had passed through. But it was a windless night. Two men stepped out, clad in black, black mask, black goggles. Black holsters with thick black handles sticking out of them.

They didn’t speak, instead communicating with hand signals, easy to follow. Two more men stepped out from the bushes another block down and they met up with the first two.

The men were utterly silent, almost invisible in the blackness of the night. Nobody noticed them. One man, taller than the rest, pointed his finger at one of them, then pointed the finger down the street, at the motel whose flickering sign could be seen. The man who’d been singled out pulled off his mask and pulled a windbreaker from a side pocket. In a second, he looked almost normal.

Maybe an observant person would notice a bulge on his hip, but the stoned guy at the front desk wouldn’t notice if a grenade went off right beside him.

The man in the windbreaker walked down and across the street, stride easy and relaxed. Guy crossing the street to a motel.

The other men melted back into the bushes.

Elle followed the man into the lobby where the night clerk was gently dozing, a
Justice League Dark
comic draped across his chest. His mouth was open and he was snoring lightly.

At the sound of the bell over the door ringing, he gave a slight start and opened his eyes. They were unfocused. When he saw the man in the windbreaker he smiled. “Hey, dude.”

“Hey.” The man dug into his pocket. “I need to ask you a question. I just had a fight with my girlfriend. A big one.” He winced and gave a rueful smile. “She’s right and I was wrong and I need to talk to her now that I’ve sobered up.”

The clerk waggled his head. “I hear you, man.”

The man in the windbreaker placed a photograph on the counter and tapped it. “That’s my girlfriend. She isn’t with any of her friends, so I’m making the rounds of hotels and motels. I really need to talk to her. Did she check in here?” A hundred-dollar bill slid across the counter and disappeared behind it.

“Pretty, pretty lady.” The clerk smiled dreamily.

“Yeah. That she is. So . . . you seen her this evening?”

“Yeah, man. Came in about two hours ago.”

The man in the windbreaker slumped in relief. “Thank God! I was so worried that she was walking around in the dark. What’s her room number?”

That rang a bell of alarm. The clerk’s eyes opened wide. “Hey, man. Sorry. I’m not supposed to—”

Another hundred-dollar bill slid across. “I really need to talk to her. Tell her how much I love her.”

The bill was pocketed. “Awww. Okay. I can tell you’re a good guy. She’s in room number nine. Down the hall and to the right. She’s checked in until—”

Elle watched the man pull a stunner from his holster, set to green. Lethal charge. In a second, he’d pulled it, placed it against the clerk’s heart, and pulled the trigger. He turned around before the clerk fell to the floor and gestured out the door.