I Dream of Danger (28 page)

They were visibly young yet they moved as if they were older than the first man. Big-boned but thin, faces emaciated, hollowed out with suffering. They looked like a strong wind would blow them over, but there they were, shuffling forward behind the older man like wraiths following a ghost.

Stella left the old man for a moment and crossed the room to kiss Elle on the cheek. “Welcome to Haven, my dear.” Elle blushed with pleasure. Stella Cummings, kissing her on the cheek!

Stella went back to the old man. A ghost of a smile crossed his face.

“At ease, men,” he said. His voice was hoarse as if he didn’t use it much. He had trouble articulating. But he continued, each word coming out painfully, though he didn’t stop until he’d said all he wanted to say. “I understand we’ve got a chance to grab the motherfuckers who fucked with us—” His dark eyes scanned the room, alighting on Catherine, Elle, and Stella. “Pardon my language ladies,” he said solemnly.

“We’re scientists,” Catherine said. “I think fuckers is the correct technical term.”

Another ghost of a smile. For a fleeting second, Elle could see something of the man he’d been, hidden deep behind the shattered exterior. And that man had been . . . handsome. Yes, she could see it now. And Stella saw it too. Certainly her eyes never left his face.

“We want payback,” he said simply.

The two badly injured men nodded their heads jerkily. They clearly had little motor control. “P-P-P-Payb-b-b-ack,” one stuttered. He had a big perfectly round keloid scar right over where the neocortex was. Someone had punched a sensor right into his brain.

All three men were becoming white-faced with the strain of standing up, and the man with the sensor scar was trembling. They didn’t look as if they could face breakfast let alone a mission. She looked around. No one was saying anything about their obvious physical condition. She waited another second but there was only silence.

O-kay.
She would have to be the bad guy.

“That’s very kind of you,” she began gently, “but perhaps—”

The elderly man turned his head painfully and fixed her with a look. For an instant Elle wanted to step back, the power of that look was so great. It was a banked power, a power linked to a damaged body, but inside that man strength and intelligence glowed and gathered.

The words came slowly and painfully. “I understand there are people in their hands. They will experiment on them and then they will kill them. I do not want to live if we can’t make an attempt to rescue them the way my men rescued us. We aren’t physically capable of going on the mission with you, Mac.” His already hoarse voice broke and he hung his head down as if someone had cut a tendon. Then his head rose and his black eyes glowed with strength and purpose. “But we are perfectly capable of manning the war room and providing intel. So we will rescue those people. Together. Hoo-yah.”

“Hoo-yah!” A chorus of seven men’s voices, all strong and true, rang out.

Chapter
12

Arka Pharmaceuticals
Headquarters

San Francisco

O
ne 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 nonscientists 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, which 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 fifty-nine
iterations. Nothing compared to Edison’s 10,000 failed attempts. Lee had only
tried fifty-nine times, but that fifty-ninth . . .

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 postmortem 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 Plexiglas 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
Plexiglas 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-62 . . . 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 Plexiglas 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 twenty-second 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.

Flynn stood, staggered, righted himself, watching
as a big red flower blossomed out from the handle, covering his pristine white
Armani shirt. He staggered again, fell to one knee, head hanging. Straining
sounds came from his throat, though he wasn’t able to formulate any words.

Good. Flynn talked too much
anyway.

Part of Lee admired the fact that from six feet
away, having had to turn around, pass by his desk to pick up the letter opener,
he’d still instinctively been able to punch it straight between the ribs and
bury it directly into Flynn’s heart.

Lee stood above the man, watching as the other knee
gave out and he fell prone onto the floor. Flynn’s heart continued pumping blood
for another two minutes, then the flow slowed then stopped.

Lee looked at his reflection in the window,
brightly lit against the snowy night sky as darkness descended in his mind. His
eyes were wide, a slight smile on his lips. He watched for a moment, his ability
to recognize the creature in the reflection draining away as quickly as Flynn’s
blood had drained from his body.

Lee looked around, not recognizing anything
familiar in his surroundings. He moved into a slight crouch, hands pulling up
toward his chest, hands open like claws. Walls . . . he had to get
out. Move. His body craved movement, craved blood. It was sheer chance that he
moved toward the wall with the door and not to one of the other three walls. He
walked forward and the door, biomorphic and primed to recognize his profile,
opened.

He didn’t question that. There was very little
reasoning ability left in him, just enough to recognize a door with an image of
stairs and to realize that it led to an exit. The stairs led to the outside
world, a world that awaited him.

He started loping for the stairs.

A woman stepped out from a door. Her eyes widened
when she saw Lee, a binder dropping from her nerveless fingers. “Dr. Lee—” The
tone was a question, but it was never answered. Lee jumped to her, hands out to
hold her shoulders still as he sank his teeth into her neck. In two strong bites
he’d chewed her ear off, then dropped her at his feet, bleeding and
twitching.

Out. He wanted to be out. He was strong and he
wanted—no he needed—to hunt. To kill.

He scrambled down the stairs while he still
recognized the concept of stairs. By the time he reached the lobby teeming with
people he’d lost the concept. But it didn’t matter because there was plenty of
meat here.

He still recognized the concept of prey.

I
n the hallway, the woman slowly rose. She raised a hand to
the side of her head and frowned. Pain, wet . . . She had no words
for the sensations she could only feel. Her hands drew up to her chest,
formed claws. Kill. She wanted to kill. There was prey around, she could
smell it. Unsteady but unyielding, she loped down the corridor where two
creatures had appeared.

Prey.

Mount
Blue

E
at,”
Stella Cummings said, pushing a plate of potato gratin across to Lucius. A very
small portion, since he’d only begun to tolerate food. She looked across at him,
tortured, suffering yet upright and determined. Any other man would have died a
hundred times with what had been done to him. What had been done to her by her
stalker was a fraction of what had been done to him, and it had almost destroyed
her.

He was an extraordinary man.

“That’s all you ever say to me. Eat,” he replied,
dark eyes fixed on her. “You’d think I was five years old.”

Even in his weakened and emaciated state, Lucius
Ward was a man to be reckoned with. She definitely didn’t think he was five
years old.

“Eat,” she repeated and smiled at him.

His face suddenly sharpened. His huge hand covered
hers. “God, Stella. You are so beautiful.”

You are so beautiful.
She’d heard versions of that phrase all her life. The word had been
pretty
when she was a child actress but turned into
beautiful
right about puberty. Through some
accident of bones and hormones, she hadn’t gone through an awkward pubescent
phase at all. She’d continued working as an actress all the way through. By the
time she was thirty-five, she’d made 120 films and had been considered one of
the most beautiful women in the world.