Page 6 of Heart of Danger
Bravery in an adversary was bad juju, he knew that.
Was sex messing with his head? It never had before. Sex was off the table when he was on a mission and his entire life now was a mission, dawn til dusk. Of course sex had been easy to dismiss when he’d actually been getting laid, which was not the case right now and hadn’t been for a year.
Man, if this woman could distract him, he needed to do something about that. Get down off the mountain one night in one of their camouflaged vehicles, go to some dive in one of the nearby towns that didn’t have vidcams and find himself a woman for the night. Or for however long it took to get this out of his system.
She was standing quietly, head high, the only sign of stress an accelerated rate of breathing and the trembling of her hands.
“Come with me,” Mac said roughly, and took her elbow, setting off toward the huge elevator that would take them half a mile straight up.
She came obediently, which was smart of her. He didn’t think he could hurt a woman, but he didn’t want to put that to the test. He was the front line of defense not only for his men but for the Haven and if he had to choose between this woman and those he protected, she’d lose.
He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Best case scenario—keep her in isolation, extract what intel he could, particularly how she knew his name and in what general direction to find him, what she wanted, who sent her.
Jon had an experimental drug he’d lifted from a research lab that could wipe short term memories. Couple the drug with a light anesthetic, have her wake up a hundred miles away with no memory of him or Mount Blue or Haven.
He tugged on her arm and she stopped obediently while he pressed the button to open the elevator doors. When they opened, he urged her forward with his hand pressed to her back.
The engineer who’d designed the elevator, Eric Dare, had had fun with the velocity. You’d never know it but the damned thing shot up over two thousand feet in 30 seconds. It was a wonder nobody got the bends.
Dare was one of his strays. The engineer had gone underground when he’d blown the whistle on structural deficiencies he’d found on the Oakland Bay Bridge and had lost his job for his efforts. Two months after he’d filed a report with the authorities on the structural weaknesses, the Bridge had collapsed on the Oakland end after the ’29 Halloween quake, which had been mild. Forty people died.
Dare’s structural deficiencies report had been wiped from the company files and he was blamed for the collapse. A multimillion-dollar suit was brought against him, but there was no one to sue. He’d disappeared.
One more in Mac’s rag tag army of outlaws. Men and women who had come under his protection.
Dare had buffered the takeoff and slowdown at the top, so the woman would have no way of judging how far they’d come. For all she knew, they’d climbed a few stories in a building instead shooting up a half a mile inside a mountain.
The doors opened silently. The hood baffled sounds so she wouldn’t be able to tell that the elevator opened onto their huge central atrium. There were four people in sight, working. One of them was Jon, who looked up curiously at Mac holding onto the elbow of a hooded woman. Mac signaled with his head to the right. To their meeting room. He made the universal sign of a camera rolling and Jon nodded and took off.
Mac steered the woman through the benches and plants of their huge open space, knowing not much was penetrating the hood. Not sounds or light or smells.
This woman spelled trouble and he was going to get intel out of her. He was concentrated on that, but as always, a huge spurt of pride blossomed in his chest when he came out into their outlaw community’s central square.
It was beautiful. Mac got a real lift every time he crossed the square. It was filled with light day and night. During the day, the molecule-thick totally impenetrable ceiling looked open to the sky and blazed with sunlight. Miniscule solar collectors around the rim flooded the square with light at night. The solar panels were also heaters at the touch of a button. The effect was startling. High overhead, sheets of snow fell from the sky and—stopped. Disappearing the instant they touched the screen.
There was greenery everywhere—lush, thriving plants that pleased the eye and gave off a fresh fragrance. Fruit trees, flower beds, glossy shrubs, small enclaves of grass.
There’d been no stopping him. Manuel Rivera, who rented a cheap room above a dive. Jon had met him tomcatting around in Cardan, a small town sixty miles away.
Manuel had been having trouble with his ancient POS computer, pecking frustrated at the keyboard, sitting in the back of the dive where he did odd jobs to earn extra money.
Jon—who’d never met a computer he couldn’t dominate—had casually stopped by, pushed one key, and earned a friend for life. Jon said he tried to resist, but Manuel just adopted him, like a stray puppy following a new owner around whether the new owner liked it or not.
Manuel was working 18 hours a day trying to get his organic farm produce business off the ground. Jon found himself growing fond of the guy. On one trip into town, which wasn’t to get laid as Jon pretended, Manuel was nowhere to be found. The bar owner reluctantly told him Manuel had been attacked by ‘muggers’, and had refused to go to the Emergency Room.
Nick ran upstairs, kicked open the door, took one look at Manuel, stopped the bleeding, lifted him over his shoulder, and brought him up the mountain, defying Mac and Jon.
By that time, though, Mac and Jon were resigned. Their ragtag community already counted Dare, a famous actress whose face had been slashed by a stalker, an ER nurse who’d had to turn away a pregnant woman with preeclampsia and no insurance, and about forty other refugees from modern life.
Manuel had sued a big agro business with test fields of genetically modified plants next to his, contaminating his organic produce. The day after the lawsuit was filed, two thugs had beaten him up, leaving torn up pieces of the lawsuit fluttering down onto his blood on the ground.
The agro business was an offshoot of Arka Pharmaceutical.
Manuel now filled their public spaces with plants and ran two huge fields of orchards and vegetables which provided them all with organic fresh fruit and vegetables.
In exile and hunted, they ate like kings.
It reminded Mac of what he was fighting for, and why he had to be wary with this woman. Everyone else at Haven had found their way here by accident and by fate. This woman came specifically forhim.
