Page 9 of Heart of Danger
Her eyes flicked to a pitcher and she cleared her throat. “May I have a glass of water?”
Mac reached over and poured her a glass, cursing himself for not thinking of it earlier. He might end up drugging her and dumping her, but the idea of her going thirst or hungry while here went against the grain.
She drank, that long white throat bobbing. When Mac realized he was avidly watching her drink, he turned his gaze away.
Christ.
“Thank you.” She put the glass down and smiled at him. He didn’t smile back. It wasn’t a smiling kind of situation. But as smiles went, hers was a thousand on a scale of one to ten. Slightly shy, warm. Creating a tiny dimple on her left cheek. Genuine.
Oh, fuck me.Get back on track.
“So something about this guy—this number Nine—didn’t add up?”
“There was something about him, yes, that was unusual. We have developed a portable functional MRI and we use it to track changes in the patient’s brain scans. Seeing what stimulates various parts of the brain, particularly under the drug protocol.
“Dementia has many origins. Sometimes it is a series of mini strokes that choke off oxygen to sections of the brain, making them essentially dead tissue. Alzheimer’s is the result of plaque that tangles the synapses, exactly as if the brain gummed up. All of these have distinct fMRI signatures. Number nine had something else altogether.”
Mac was tired and it was the dead of night. “Is this coming to a point?”
She smiled again, weary and sad. “Yes, actually, I am coming to the point. The brain scan of this patient made no sense to me. His brain was damaged in a completely new way. The clinical symptoms were consistent with dementia but the scans weren’t. Dementia patients have a general overall degradation of function due either to apoxia or plaque in the case of Alzheimer’s. Mainly centered around the hippocampus. Here I was seeing degradation of the striatum, unusually so. The patterns were unusual. If I hadn’t seen the patient myself, I would have said that his brain had been…destroyed by an outside force. A little like a cloak thrown over the higher functions. But underneath, the scan showed a great deal of activity, like a banked fire. He tried to communicate verbally, but it wasn’t working too well. He became exhausted. Dementia patients forget words. It didn’t seem like this patient forgot words so much as was unable to physically get them out.”
Though Mac still didn’t see the connection, the fact that this was a company controlled by Arka Pharmaceuticals made it definitely his business.
“So…what? You read his mind?”
His sarcasm got more of a reaction than he’d thought. She jerked slightly, eyes rounded.
“No.” She drew in a deep breath. “No, I didn’t read his mind. They don’t teach that at med school. I found the key by sheer chance. I was typing my notes onto my screen when his head jerked. His eyes went from my pad to me and then back to the tablet. I turned my tablet around and was astonished when he started keying in letters.”
“Okay,” Mac said. “I’ll bite.”
“He wrote—say nothing and turn off the vidcams. I have a security code that allows me to do that. However, so it wouldn’t alert the guards watching the monitors or any bots that might have been established, I simply created a loop of him sleeping.”
Smart thinking. Even if she wasn’t an operator, she had some good moves in her. But then, Mac reflected, you don’t get several PhDs by being dumb.
“From then on, we communicated laboriously, by fits and starts. The first thing he told me is that his name wasn’t the name in our files, Edward Domino, which immediately made me suspicious. Dementia can merge into psychosis easily, and dementing patients are often paranoid. I’ve had patients who insisted they were John Kennedy, George Washington, Marco Polo, Albert Einstein. So I was prepared to hear something preposterous, but he gave me another name which meant nothing to me. But I have a feeling it might mean something to you.”
She stopped, looking at him. Mac turned his face to stone
She sighed. “Lucius Ward.”
“Holy. Shit.” Jon’s voice said in his ear. Mac could hear Nick swearing in the background.
“The name means nothing to me,” Mac said, raising his eyebrows slightly. He felt as if he’d been sucker punched but nothing showed on his face. “Why should it?”
“I have no idea. All I know is the fierce determination of this man—whether he was Edward Domino or Lucius Ward makes no difference to me. He communicated with great difficulty, he sweated and he shook, but he wouldn’t give up. He said I absolutely had to find Tom McEnroe. That’s a direct quote. He spent an hour, white-faced with fatigue, telling me this. He also gave me something.” She dug in a pants pocket and brought something out in a small fist. She tossed it onto the table where it rolled a few times then stopped a few inches from Mac’s hand. He stared at it, barely able to breathe.
“Jesus Christ.” This time it was Nick’s voice coming in over his earbud. “The Colonel’s Hawk.”
It looked like nothing. A tiny, almost invisible pin made of black metal. Only under a microscope could you see that it was beautifully detailed. The pin was a hawk in flight, perfectly crafted down to individual feathers, a tiny gold stripe running down its back. It was made from the barrel of the gun that had killed Bin Laden.
It was the badge of a Ghost. Ghosts were banned from having flashes or insignia of any sort. They were even banned from wearing US military uniforms. They were only allowed that one tiny badge, smaller than a shirt button. There had been only twenty of them in the world, and only one with a thin stripe of gold. The one that belonged to the Ghosts’ commanding officer, Colonel Lucius Ward.
One thing Mac knew—traitor or no traitor, Lucius would have relinquished his Hawk pin only on death or the direst emergency. Even if he’d betrayed his men, even if he’d sold them out, even if absolutely everything Mac thought he knew about Lucius was wrong, this one thing wasn’t wrong. It would take a cataclysm or death to pry Lucius’s Hawk from his fingers.
“Do you know what that is?” she asked.
He searched her eyes for irony but found nothing. She was genuinely puzzled. Well, considering the fact that the existence of Ghost Ops was SCI—secret compartmented information—and that only a handful of people in the world knew about them, and even fewer knew of their secret badge, it was entirely possible she had no idea what the Hawk was.
