Page 64 of Heart of Danger
But oh, God, he couldn’t take his eyes from her face. She was so beautiful. It was as if someone had reached deep into his head to pull out his own personal template for a beautiful woman and had created her entirely from what was in him. Everything about her was just so fine—the pale, porcelain-smooth skin, huge silver eyes, luscious mouth, long slender neck. Though the sheet she was holding up covered her breasts, he didn’t need to see them because burned in his memory was the feel of them in his hands, soft and firm, the way her nipples felt against his tongue…
A flash of heat. From her. He couldseecolors swirl around her breasts, faintly red and orange, while her skin turned rosy from her face to her shoulders. And there, between her thighs, under the blanket, a glow—unmistakably warm with desire.
Catherine let go of the sheet she’d been clutching to her chest and rose up onto her knees, kissing him gently, the hand over his heart smoothing its way up, over his shoulder, around his neck.
“Yes,” she said.
CHAPTERELEVEN
PALO ALTO—ARKA LABS
Lee lovedthe forbidden and secret fourth subterranean floor of the laboratory.
Level 4.
Millon management had no idea it was there.
He’d bribed the construction company who had brought in an entirely new crew for the floor and had sealed it off when the regular crew started working on Level 3. It was more than state of the art, it was years ahead of its time. There could be an 8-magnitude earthquake, a ten ton atom bomb could be set off, a tsunami could roll in to the Sierra Nevada and the lab would survive. It had its own generator, the power coming in over separate cables from hidden solar panels. Ferrite rods piercing the flooring into the earth were capable of sending very long wave broadcasts directly through the earth to Beijing. Should anyone get through his net security, he had a backdoor method of communication.
Lee was king here. When he came, he came as CEO of the majority holding company, a businessman, nothing more. Nobody at Millon had a clue he was directing research in a secret lab.
He had three assistants sworn to secrecy, thinking they were working under top secret conditions for the company itself and had been promised nonexistent stock options in a nonexistent rollout of a drug that reversed heart disease. The researchers and his personal security team were the only ones with access.
SL-59 was being tested. Behind a sliding steel door was the animal testing lab, where accelerated testing was carried out in ways which were illegal under the Animal Testing Bill. If they’d followed protocol, they would still be on SL-8. Lee swiped his security card and walked through, feeling a slight wind at his back due to the negative pressure of the animal test lab.
The drug was delivered via modified viruses and care was taken to make sure nothing escaped.
He strolled to the back of the huge room, ignoring the rows and rows of animals in cages in varying stages of death, knowing that federal officials would shut the lab down if they could see this. What they were doing contravened every single animal protection law on the books.
And yet the human experiments were perfectly legal, with the Informed Consent forms signed. Even though many of the consent forms had been signed five minutes before the patient had been declared incompetent.
It still baffled him how Americans almost seemed to care more for animals than for humans, though animals were absolutely necessary for testing drugs. They would never have made the progress they had without unimpeded animal testing. It would have taken years, decades maybe, to get to this point. And here he was, very close to the formula of a drug that would enhance soldiers’ abilities by a factor of ten and it had only taken two years.
The door to the animal lab opened silently, the security software recognizing his facial morphology. In the upper-level official labs, there was a tedious series of codes, thumbprint and retina checks which slowed everything down. This lab,hislab, was streamlined, focused like a laser beam on results.
Yesterday, ten bonobos had been administered 5 ccs of SL-59. They would be thoroughly studied in the weeks to come, but Lee wanted to be the first to observe them, get a feel for the effects before analysis started.
The lab was huge, stretching 400 feet, row after pristine row of animals in plexiglass cages. Ordinarily, he’d check every cage, each row undergoing a specific test protocol. But he was angry at Clancy and pressed for time so he strode straight to the back, without looking left or right. The back row held the bonobos, infocubes of data accessible via a touchpad on the front of each cage. The gender, genetic history of each animal, a full medical workup, MRI and CAT scan data, results of intelligence tests, remote sensing of ECG and EKGs, dosages of SL-59—all that and more was in the infocubes.
He went down the row, clear cage after clear cage, swiping his finger on the touchpad, screening for major anomalies. Two of the animals were dying, ECGs irregular, EKGs with unusual spikes he’d study later. The spikes would hold the key to their deaths, he was sure.
Four more seemed normal, with normal readings, but they were listless.
Number 8, a largish male, on the other hand, was standing, eyes alert. Hmm. Lee swiped and scanned the data that appeared in light letters in the air. Perfectly normal values. The animal was watching him, seeming almost to take his measure, brown eyes deep and steady.
Interesting.
Bonobos were a placid species, not aggressive by nature, but their heart rate tended to increase slightly in the presence of another species. Number 8’s heart rate remained steady and regular. The animal stood straight and still and watched him calmly. Only his eyes moved, checking Lee’s face, then his hands. Was he checking for weapons? That would be a sign of unusual intelligence.
Very interesting.
Lee stepped forward and in the space of a heartbeat, so fast the ECG didn’t have time to measure the acceleration of heartbeat, the bonobo flung himself straight at Lee, so hard and fast the animal’s snout smashed against the plexiglass at the front of the cage, inches from Lee’s face, spattering blood out to the corners. The glass was so transparent Lee took a quick step back, flinching, before he stopped himself. The blood looked as if they were drops suspended in the air.
Undeterred, Number 8 smashed against the glass wall again and again in a frenzy of ferocity, trying to bite his way to Lee, striking his snout so hard against the unbreakable glass bloody shards of teeth flew in all directions. He tried to claw his way to Lee, too, striking his paws so hard he broke first his left ulna and then his right humerus in a compound fracture exiting bloodily from the hairy flesh of the arm. Number 8 struck again and again and again, even after he surely understood there was no breaking through the glass.
Bonobos reasoned, on a primitive level. Lee had watched them make rudimentary tools, obey a limited vocabulary of words. An ordinary primate would have learned that attacking the wall was utterly pointless, yet Number 8 kept battering himself wildly against the wall of the cage which was no longer transparent but covered in blood and fur and spittle.
He attacked, over and over, mindlessly, eyes trained on Lee’s.
