Page 39 of I Dream of Danger
She was gasping with fatigue when she reached the end. She stopped, leaned against the wall, catching her breath. It was so awful, the drumbeat of imminent danger sounding in her head, but her body unable to obey. Stress and danger hummed in her, but she could barely stay upright.
Every minute spent here increased the chances of her being found. If the men in black came down to this basement corridor, she’d be the easiest prey on earth. She’d read somewhere that the latest generation of stunners could kill or maim at five hundred feet.
She straightened away from the wall and turned, her feet moving in a maddeningly slow shuffle.
There were two exits, one up the building stairs that led to the front door and one that let out the side of the building. Instinct had her taking the side exit. She opened the side door cautiously and peeped out. There was absolutely no one in sight.
How much time did she have?
Even if they circumvented her personal security system as easily as they did the building one, surely it would take some time to establish that she wasn’t home? A few minutes at least.
It would have to be enough.
She knew her neighborhood well enough to make it through backyards, going as fast as she could, until she finally came out onto another section of town. On foot it took about ten minutes. By car it would take longer, even if they knew where she was. As it was, when they discovered she wasn’t home, they’d probably cover her neighborhood in a grid search which would take time.
Elle exited the warren of backyards and service alleys into an entirely new neighborhood. Not a savory one, either.
Great, because maybe they wouldn’t look for her here.
Elle stopped, leaning against a broken street lamp, catching her breath. She needed a plan that covered more than the next five minutes, but it was eluding her. Pain and adrenalin and exhaustion were blocking her thought processes. She needed a safe place, but where?
An expensive hotel was out. So were the three or four hotels that the company habitually used for visiting professors, because the men after her would have that list. And of course they’d know if she used her credit card.
Think Elle! She clung to the lamppost, head down, trying to reason her way through this. She was so very tired. The test session had drained almost every ounce of energy out of her. Then the shock of the phone call, the pain of digging around in her own arm, of pulling that chip out, the terror at seeing those men in black after her…
This is what Jane Macy must have felt like after her breakdown. She’d had a psychotic episode after a test and had disappeared. The company had cited privacy issues when Elle asked about her.
Why was she thinking of Jane?
Oh! The memory popped into her head, clear and complete and she pushed off from the lamppost with a surge of energy she knew was the last of her reserves.
Jane had had an affair with a married guy, a lawyer working for one of the many venture capital firms in the area. His wife was really powerful and could do some serious damage to him if she found out.
The one thing everyone knew about the wife was that she really liked being rich, disliked even seeing poor people. She wouldn’t even travel through poorer sections of the cities she visited on business trips, and had her drivers make great circuitous loops to avoid even the sight of the poor.
So Jane had found a tiny motel in the poorer part of town that didn’t ask questions, didn’t take down ID and took cash.
Elle remembered the name of the motel and knew where it was.
It was walkable, just. If her strength held out. And she’d have to walk through more backyards and back roads, because she had to assume there would be cars on the streets looking for her, and cameras they could hack.
The one thing that had been clear when Arka started up the research project was that Arka was awash in money. It had money to burn, and if it sent out its full security force she was in real trouble.
She couldn’t think beyond finding a place to rest, so she pushed off and began the long trudge to the motel that asked no questions.
San Francisco—Arka Pharmaceuticals Headquarters, Financial District
Dr. Charles Lee watched the video of the debriefing of Dr. Elle Connelly for the fifth time. Dr. Daniels hadn’t been at all thorough and would be reprimanded, but what shone through was that Connelly had penetrated the secret lab at Bayankhongor, apparently during a training session. There were 20 three-star generals in Mongolia, and Lee would show Connelly photographs, but he was almost certain that the three-star general she’d seen was General Yisu, the head of Mongolian Special Forces.
And the secret camp, whose coordinates he’d given to Connelly, was working on a rail gun.
Surely that would buy him some time with the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology?
Resentment swelled in his chest at the thought. Though he’d emigrated with his family to America at the age of seven, his heart had remained back in the homeland. He’d raced through school and university and had risen quickly up through the ranks of Arka with one thought, and one thought only. Coming back to Beijing a conqueror, bearing the key to making China the uncontested sole superpower in the world and taking his rightful place at the top of the government hierarchy.
He’d started by working with General Clancy Flynn, using black funds from the US military, then funneling the results to Beijing. The response had been immensely gratifying. A by-product of one of the research projects was a cancer vaccine. He’d sent in a black ops team run by Flynn called Ghost Ops—men whose pasts had been erased, men who no longer officially existed—to destroy the lab where the vaccine had been developed and sent the vaccine to Beijing. The top tiers of the Chinese government were all now vaccinated, and a mass vaccination of the 40-million-strong armed forces was underway.
Flynn had been only too willing to sacrifice his black ops team. Lee understood that Flynn resented the Ghost Ops leader, Captain Lucius Ward. Lee didn’t care either way. It seemed to him the squabbling of children. What he had got out of the operation was four elite warriors to experiment on.
