Page 43 of I Dream of Danger
“That’s the name you said.” Nick ground his teeth at her blank look. “Just now. Just now you said Elle. That’s the name of my—the name of the person I need to find.”
His throat was so tight. Just hearing her name after so many years…he couldn’t think straight.
“Elle,” she said softly.
Nick nodded, like some big dumb animal that couldn’t speak. Elle.
Catherine was focusing on him again. Her other hand came up to clasp his in a tight grip, warm and soft. Something to cling to in the painful darkness of his terror.
“That’s the one I felt, right, Nick? The one you lost?”
He nodded again. Tried to speak. Failed.
“You care about her.” It wasn’t a question.
Oh God, yes. He nodded again, jerkily. Found his voice. “Where is she? She needs me. Now. I have to get to her, right now.” He was vibrating with tension, ready to take off anywhere Catherine said.
There was sadness on Catherine’s beautiful face. She tightened her clasp. “Oh Nick. I’m so sorry. It doesn’t work that way.”
An icy chill worked its way through his veins, and he realized he’d been subconsciously counting on Catherine to do her woo-woo stuff. Point him in Elle’s direction so he could race to her. “Then how the hell does it work? Can you tell me that?” He stepped even closer to Catherine, right in her face, his voice rising.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jon grab Mac’s arm again. Not even Jon could stop Mac if Mac didn’t want to be stopped, but Mac got himself under control. Nick wasn’t going to hurt Catherine but he was going to question her.
He was staring wildly down into Catherine’s eyes, as if he could will the information on Elle’s whereabouts out of her, drag it out of her through her skin if necessary. But staring was an act of aggression. They’d been taught that, at the beginning of their careers as soldiers. Body language had been a big thing. How to silently threaten, how to pass unnoticed, how to reassure.
He didn’t want to scare Catherine.
With a wrench, Nick turned his gaze away from Catherine and stared blindly at the room. Their war room, they called it. With everything you needed to go on an op. Just as long as you knew where you were going, of course.
As soon as he knew where to head, Nick was going to grab Jon, drag him to their ultralight stealth helo, and take off.
Nick was the team driver. If it was anything that travelled over land, Nick could drive it as fast as it could go over any terrain. Jon was the pilot. Their little helo could make it anywhere in the continental US. It was the dead of night. Little Bird could silently land in any private airfield without detection. They could fuel up and be gone before anyone knew they were there. They’d done it before.
Nick didn’t even want to think what would happen if Elle were OUTCONUS. Didn’t want to go there. Couldn’t.
She’d called out to him. That had been a distress signal he’d heard in his head, loud and clear. Surely there was—was a range for that sort of thing? Surely he wouldn’t have heard it if she were in Europe or Africa?
The signal he’d got was loud and absolutely urgent. She was in danger right now, and if she was across an ocean she was fucked and oh God, he couldn’t wrap his head around that thought.
Elle dead, Elle dying…he couldn’t do this. Simply couldn’t.
Catherine’s sympathetic face—he couldn’t look at that either. His eyes roamed the big room, partly to distract himself from that awful panicky desperation that gripped him, so he could function on some basic level, and partly to see if something in their gear-packed room could help.
Huge holographic monitors ringed the walls. They had tiny drones of their own hovering 24/7 over a ten square mile radius surrounding Haven, and thus had a 360° IR view of everything. Highly sensitive motion sensors and sound sensors. If a fly farted anywhere near them, they knew about it. Their computers were illegally hooked into the Keyhole 18 satellites, and they could get real-time intel on more or less anything happening in the world, particularly in the Fucked-Up Latitudes.
All Nick needed was a location and he could zoom in on her.
A location he didn’t have.
So the holograms, the satellite feeds, the vast crunching power of their servers—their server farm was bigger than the Pentagon’s, bigger even than Amazon’s—couldn’t help. Behind the titanium door on the left-hand wall was an armory that would do a Delta team proud. Nick had been Delta, and there were a few extra goodies in there that even Delta hadn’t had.
If there was an enemy, they could take them out, no question. They had the tools and the determination to protect what they had.
Hell, Mac had a wife and a baby on the way to protect. Mac all by himself was a war machine.
So they had the stuff to get there, wipe out the opposition, and come back in stealth.
He, Mac, and Jon were really good at slipping into places and extracting things and people. They hadn’t been Ghost Ops for nothing. They were Ghosts because everything about their past had been erased. Wiped clean. They didn’t exist anywhere on earth. And they were Ghosts because they had been trained to move with stealth. When they didn’t want to be found, they weren’t.
