Page 13 of Heart of Danger
Lee drummed his fingers on the console, once. It was all he allowed himself. No one knew better than him the importance of keeping body language serene.
“Did you check the cameras in the lab?”
“Yessir.” Even in the hologram, Lee could see Baring’s color change, face becoming ruddy. “Of course.”
“Anything untoward happen yesterday?”
“It didn’t seem so. Sir.” He hesitated. “One of the patients had a meltdown but he didn’t say anything to Dr. Young. Other than that, it was a perfectly normal day.”
Then again, what would Baring know? He wasn’t a scientist. He couldn’t follow any of the researchers’ work.
“Did she seem…agitated in any way? Did she do anything different?”
Lee watched Baring’s disembodied head. Even just a few years ago there was half a second’s delay in holographic telephony, sometimes making conversations surreal. But Arka had state of the art technology and Baring reacted in real time. “No, sir.”
“Who was she working on yesterday?”
“Number Nine, sir,” Baring replied. “The one who had the meltdown.” Lee felt that prickle of coldness once more.
Baring had no idea who Nine was. It was a good thing that Colonel Ward had always worked in the shadows. Only a handful of people were familiar with his spectacular military career. Baring was ex military but he came from infantry. What Ward did had always been above Baring’s pay grade.
This was nothing. And yet…Catherine Young disappearing after working on Ward was not good.
Ward was the key, Lee was sure of it. Goddamn it, he wasn’t done with Ward. He needed those scans Dr Young was working on.
Because they were so close, so very close. SL 57 hadn’t worked, but each successive iteration brought them closer to their goal. A virus-borne cocktail of hormones to create smarter, faster, tougher soldiers. Currently, the protocol to enhance intelligence and speed of reflexes caused fulminating dementia in most patients, but they were closer to understanding the cause and reversing the effect. SL-58 was being tested.
It had been a top secret government project Lee had run under the orders of General Clancy Flynn, funded from a black fund he controlled. Flynn was retired now, CEO of a private security company and Lee knew that he wanted to create an unstoppable private army.
Flynn was funneling private money into Arka’s research. He was pumping close to ten million dollars a year into Lee’s project. Flynn’s projections were of ten billion dollars’ profit the first year, and double that within three years once the project was viable.
But Lee had no intention of letting Flynn get his hands on SL once it was perfected. Millions of vials of the first effective doses were going straight to the People’s Republic of China to be cloned and administered systematically to the seven million troops and the 40 million reserves troops of the PLA. It would become literally unstoppable. China would be unstoppable.
When the secret program began seven years before, it had been given the anodyne and generic name of SL for Strategic Leadership. But Lee knew that SL stood for shen li.
Warrior.
He’d hoped, for symmetry’s sake, that the brain of a warrior would give him and his country the means to conquer the world. It would be fitting. Colonel Lucius Ward was one of the best warriors America had ever produced.
But perhaps it was not to be. Pity.
He would wait for another two days for Dr Young to show up. If she didn’t, he would terminate the Colonel and autopsy his brain and move on.
China’s time would come. It was almost here. Lee knew that the OECD was about to publish the bombshell news that according to the latest economic data, China was the largest economy in the world.
His country was three thousand years old and knew how to plan and how to wait.
He was working on a great plan, a world-altering plan. He would not let one woman hold him up.
MOUNT BLUE
“Well, what the fuck do we know about her, besides the fact that she’s smart and enjoys really good tacos?” Nick Ross asked. His dark, hard face was as expressionless as Mac’s own.
They were in Mac’s study, watching Catherine Young on his 3D monitors.
“Well, we know she’s a babe,” Jon said cheerfully. “What?” Opening up his hands when Mac and Nick turned to him. “Sheisa babe. That hair, those eyes, those boobs…”
“Jon…” Nick let out a long breath, an attempt at restraint.
