Page 48 of I Dream of Danger
Calm, still as a lake…
“Men are coming for her, outside her house.” Catherine breathed in and out, somehow glowing once again.
Nick picked up. He was getting images, flickering as if in an old-time movie. Fragmented—there and not there. Yet somehow he could follow because there was the essence of Elle there, and he could follow Elle to the ends of the earth.
Nick spoke. “Those guys in combat gear, they’re coming fast. Coordinated. But she’s been warned. She’s somehow wounded, in her arm. There’s pain that she is blocking out. She grabs her bag and runs out and down, down…down a set of stairs, past the ground floor, down…There’s a long dark corridor, very long. She runs to the end of it, goes up the stairs, out into a backyard. She cuts across a number of backyards, she knows where she’s going. She runs as fast as she can until she stops. Clings to a lamppost. The street is—anonymous. Just normal houses, not too rich, not too poor. She runs again, as fast as she can, down dark streets with nothing remarkable to identify them. The houses are getting poorer, though. The streets are darker. She’s afraid. It’s a bad part of town. But I don’t know of what town. She stops, winded. She’s looking at a building. Very shabby, faded green façade. There’s a neon sign, VACANCIES. The first A and the E are burned out. I can’t make out the name. She’s feeling—not safe so much as anonymous. She signs in, pays in cash, leaves a false name. Have no idea what it is. She fades in and out.”
“Did you get a sense of where she is, Nick? Where this hotel or motel might be?”
Nick’s free hand clenched. Well, fuck. If he knew that, he wouldn’t be here, twiddling his freaking thumbs, he’d be on his way to her, wouldn’t he? But he couldn’t say that. Couldn’t speak disrespectfully to Catherine. First, because Mac would flatten him. Second, because he liked Catherine. And third, because she was trying to help. “Don’t know.” A shudder ran through him at his own words. “I don’t know.”
“Ah, but you do,” Catherine said, her voice gentle. Nick’s hand jerked in hers. “Listen to your body, Nick.”
What the?—
“Your body is talking to you. Listen to it.”
His eyes popped open, slid over her face to the briefcase. Slid back. Nope. His body was telling him jackshit.
Catherine let go of his hand and pulled her briefcase toward her, pulling out a wad of paperwork, a sheaf of what looked like lab reports and some glossy thick paper, brochures of some kind.
For some reason, her movements fascinated him. He watched, almost enthralled.
“This has been calling to you. You haven’t been able to take your eyes off it. There’s something here that is of importance.”
Catherine began methodically placing the paperwork in neat piles all along the ten-foot table filled with holographic monitors that served as command central.
Nick watched as she butted the lab reports into a neat stack, another set of printouts of God-knows-what, then she started fanning the brochures and prospectuses, leaving each company logo clear.
One suddenly lit up in his head as if a spotlight shone on it.
“That!” he shouted. His shaking finger pointed.
“What, Nick?”
He stood up, rushed to the fanned out glossy company brochures. His finger landed on one in the center. Three stylized gold crowns. Corona Labs-BRINGING THE FUTURE TODAY.
“This,” he said, finger tapping. Each time he touched the paper it seemed to get warmer.
This turned out to be the brochure for a new company.
Catherine picked it up, showed it to her husband. “I thought I knew more or less all the research labs in the country but this is a new one.” Mac turned the glossy paper over in his big hands. There was a videolette loop embedded in the paper, all the rage nowadays. Some smiling woman in a lab coat endlessly raising a test tube in triumph, putting it down, raising it…
Nick was shaking with tension. The logo, the name Corona Labs meant nothing to him, but still they shone in his mind.
In a corner he could hear Jon restlessly tapping on the light keyboard—a projection of heat-sensitive light on the table. Jon’s fingers were a blur.
Mac handed the brochure to Nick. “This mean anything to you?”
Nick took the thick glossy paper and studied it carefully. The smiling woman, raising her hand with the test tube and putting it down in an endless loop was completely unfamiliar to him. He studied the text?—
Corona Labs-Bringing the future today.
Corona Labs is an offshoot of several highly successful research labs, dedicated exclusively to the study of neuroscience…
Technobabble.
Nick flipped back and forth. The brochure was one of those folded into thirds. The videolette on the cover. Opening it, company data on the left-hand side and what they called the CORE MISSION in the center. The right-hand leaf was taken up with the premises of the company—a crystal Buckminster structure aboveground, extensive skylights set in some grassy meadow. Underground it was huge.
