Page 83 of Heart of Danger
It was the aftereffects of her connection with Lucius Ward. He had sapped her strength. Connecting with another mind, another heart, was as hard as lifting weights. She felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach while running a marathon.
But as they crossed the wide lawn, Mac having calculated sentry guards’ rounds to the second, she came back into herself. Remembered what she was doing, and why.
She was saving a life.
They were at the side of the building. The three men watched as she swiped Frederick Benson’s code through the system, hoping Jon knew what he was doing.
He did.
The door clicked open. Catherine pushed and the four of them walked through as if they were one. The recorder at the side would merely have registered a larger than usual mass. Not something that would trip an alarm, but definitely something that would target them when looked at tomorrow, with Patient Nine gone.
Catherine was well aware of the fact that she was not only illegally entering Millon Laboratories. She was also crossing over into a new life. She was now a member of Mac’s team, an outlaw. Tied to the men by her side and tied to the community that had congregated around them with unbreakable bonds. Forever now cut off from her old life.
She’d spent four years with Millon and the parent company Arka in various laboratories. They would never give her references, and a scientist with a four year gap in her resume was unhireable. She would never work in science again.
It wasn’t important, though.
She was with Mac, for as long as he’d have her.
Jon was consulting his hand-held but she didn’t need anything now. She knew where to go. “Come with me,” she whispered and they moved fast toward the patient wing. She stopped them at the corner before Hall B. They stacked up behind her.
“Clear?” She looked up at Jon.
“Clear. No, wait. Look here.” He tipped his screen to her, finger pointing at the skewed image a few Antz were giving and her blood froze. Lee! The CEO of Arka in a company car!
“Hurry!” Catherine broke into a run and they followed her. She ran to Nine’s room, ran to the still man on the bed. The first thing she did was cut off the clavicle catheter. Whatever amount of SL-59 Ward had absorbed, she could only hope it wasn’t a fatal dose. She gently pulled the long needle from the permanent shunt and started disengaging him from the EEC, EKG, the catheter, the pads on his chest measuring muscle electricity, the tube down his throat giving extra oxygen, the parenteral feed tube.
Somewhere an alarm was sounding as the machines went dead but she couldn’t think about that as she moved as quickly as she could to disengage him.
Finally, he was cut off from the machinery, a tall, once well-built man, now a husk of a man, a pathetic creature who’d been tortured nearly to death. Something about the quality of the air made her look up and she froze at the expression on Mac’s face. Nick and Jon looked stunned, sick.
“What?”
Mac swallowed. “What did they do to him?”
She looked down at the patient. She’d never seen him in his prime. She’d only ever seen him as he was now—helpless, weak, a shadow of a man. She touched his wrist and suddenly there he was in her mind. The man he’d been. Ramrod straight in a starched uniform, a black beret on his shaved head, fierce and strong and formidable.
That was the man he’d been. That was the man Mac remembered.
The man on the bed was emaciated, skull criscrossed with scars, skin hanging off his bones. Pale, sunken in, barely alive.
Anger filled her. He didn’t deserve this. The man she’d touched and who had touched her was hard but fair. Unswerving in his duty to his country, unswerving in his loyalty to his men.
The man she’d touched had been fully prepared to die in battle, prepared to die an honorable death. This wasn’t an honorable death. It was a lab rat’s death.
Anger, white and hot, shot through her.
“They nearly killed him. They robbed him of his life, of his honor, Mac. We’re going to rescue him.” She shot Mac a glance and saw he understood her. Understood her anger and her own sense of betrayal.
Everything she’d done in life had been with one goal. To understand the human brain, to make things better. To make people better. She’d dedicated her life to science and now someone had takenherscience and twisted it to dark ends. Twisted it until it had become a source of horror and pain.
She’d been betrayed too, just as much as Mac.
“Can you carry him?”
“Yeah. No problem.” Mac bent and with a gentleness she’d only seen reserved for her, picked Ward up in his arms as if he were a child. He looked down at the unconscious body of his former commander and there was such pity in his face Catherine nearly cried.
“Colonel,” Mac said softly and the man stirred, as if troubled.
