Page 50 of Heart of Danger
His jaw set. “No, you haven’t.”
“Yes.” She drew up in a deep breath and looked like she was steeling herself for something. Finally. Maybe she was going to tell the truth. “Except for one thing. I lied about one thing.”
All right. This was going somewhere. She was going to confess.
He leaned down until his nose nearly touched hers. “Spit it out.”
She didn’t flinch. “Patient Nine can’t talk. Not a single word.”
CHAPTERNINE
ATLANTA, GEORGIA—HEADQUARTERS, ORION SECURITY
Clancy Flynn thumbedthrough the job offers, the fruit of his subtle campaign testing the market waters. He’d wanted to see what the market was like once SL was available and holy shit, the market was booming.
He was going to make a fucking fortune.
He leafed through the offers for bids. He’d discreetly let his primary clients know that there was a possibility he could do security jobs in half the time using a third of the personnel. Security was a crowded market, getting more crowded by the day. The world was a dangerous place, but it was filling up fast with former soldiers. Plenty of manpower, highly trained, well-armed, tough. A lot of companies were springing up, vying for work.
Security cost money, though, and Flynn knew his corporations. Security was something corporations spent money on grudgingly. Shareholders didn’t like that item in the budgets because there was no return. By definition, security wasn’t an investment. Shareholders couldn’t get it into their greedy heads that security was theconditionfor investments. The thing that let them sit back, do no work, and rake in the money.
Flynn had let word get out that he had a new technology that would allow him to bid for work cheaply. He chose the companies he contacted carefully. They wouldn’t be curious about the technology, all they cared about was the bottom line. Most of the work would be done far from the view of the suits in the boardrooms of corporate headquarters.
They bit.
He stared at the spreadsheet, allowing himself just a quick drum of his manicured fingers on the maple desk top.
One year contract for security for gas pipeline construction from the Tengiz Field in Kazakhstan to Baku in Azerbaijan. Seven million dollars. One year contract for security for new Brazilian-owned oil wells in Iraq, ten million dollars. One year contract for timber operations on an Indonesian island known for Muslim terrorism, five million dollars.
If SL had worked, he could have used teams of ten men on each job, tops. 100k per operator, three million dollars. It would have left him with a profit of nineteen million dollars. In one year. He would double that the year after, once it had proven its worth on the market.
Lee had told him that he was sure they had the right formula. He had found something in Lucius Ward’s head that had been the key to the correct dosage. It would have been the very first time something in Lucius Ward’s head would have been useful to him.
Sanctimonious bastard. Ward had been tripping Clancy up his entire military career. Clancy had always outranked him because he knew how to play the Pentagon game, but Ward had been a slippery bastard, always outshining him. Fucking hero. And then setting up Ghost Ops. Fucker had placed himself completely outside the military command structure and had become untouchable.
The Ghost Ops team had been damned effective and Ward had grown in power and prestige. And since Ward was such a canny son of a bitch, he’d picked up on what Clancy and Lee had been working on. Clancy had sent the orders under the secret code that was the only thing that could send Ghost Ops on a mission. A code emanating from the White House—from the Commander in Chief himself. Ward believed he had gone on a sanctioned op.
It had been dangerous. If Ward had in any way questioned the op, he would have found out it didn’t come from his command structure and they would have tracked it back to Clancy. And if there was one thing Clancy knew, it was that Ward was a vindictive son of a bitch.
Clancy could have kissed his life and his pension goodbye and would never have had a chance to enjoy his newfound wealth as an entrepreneur. If Ward had found out the orders came from him, Clancy would either be tits up in a grave or scrounging money for margaritas in a village in Costa Rica, looking constantly over his shoulder.
But Ward had been about to blow the whistle and the op had been put together on the fly. They’d gained a year, a year in which SL should have come online and started making them rich.
Fucking Lee. So fucking slow.
Clancy was leaking money by the day.
He went on the encrypted line not even God could hack and sent an email to Lee. It used a domain name guaranteed anonymous.
From: [email protected]
Speed things up. I’ve got clients waiting. You’ve burned through five million dollars so far and I have nothing to show for it. Either I see progress within a week or I’m pulling the money and going to Nova. I heard they’re working on neural enhancers. They might have more luck than you.
Two
He sat back, a grim smile on his face. That should stir Lee up. Put a fire under his skinny ass. Lee couldn’t get anything done with just the Arka research budget. Clancy’s money was key.
