Page 72 of I Dream of Danger
Catherine made a noncommittal sound in her throat.
“And yet—and yet I swear to you that every word is true. I have the capacity to project myself outside my body. I know how crazy that sounds, but?—”
“Oh!” Catherine’s eyes rounded with surprise. “I believe you. No question.”
“You do?” Elle felt her own eyes round with surprise.
“Yes.” Catherine leaned forward and clasped her hand around Elle’s wrist, as if it were a shackle. A warm, soft shackle. That rush of warmth began, tingly and somehow pleasant.
Catherine closed her eyes. “You’re frightened of the men coming after you. You’re worried about your good friend.” She frowned. “Sophie?” Elle nodded in surprise but Catherine couldn’t see her. “She’s been taken somewhere and you have no idea where and you don’t know what’s happened to her. Through all of this, you’re scared and also overwhelmed with joy that you’re with Nick. You have loved him…”
“Forever,” Elle said softly. “I’ve loved him forever.”
“Yes. You have loved him forever.” Catherine nodded and opened her eyes. When she lifted her hand, it felt as if a light had gone out. “I’m an empath. For most of my life I thought I was a freak. Unlike you, I never thought to scientifically study my gift. I thought of it as a curse. Reading people is not always a barrel of laughs.”
Elle nodded. “I’ll bet.” She leaned forward in her chair. “So you—you’re working on your power. Is power the right word? We were calling them Perceptual Studies. Just to—you know—give it a name.”
“It’s not a bad name. Ultimately, your study was funded by Arka, wasn’t it?”
Elle nodded.
“We recently rescued a number of men who had been involuntarily enrolled in a series of studies carried out by Arka. Jon has hacked into their computers and I have access to all the data. I’ll enjoy going over it with you.”
“They also funded a study at Stanford that was the precursor to the Delphi Project. The Delphi Project is a study of extrasensory perception. We were coming up with some interesting theories.”
“Would you like to continue your studies here?” Catherine waved a hand. “We have a good lab here, and we have access to every single piece of equipment you could possibly need. We have unlimited funds and can acquire more or less anything we need. What’s not available commercially, well, we use the five-finger discount.”
“I’ll bet that’s Jon, too.”
“Bingo.”
They smiled at each other, then Elle’s smile faded. “I have a lot of data with me in a pen drive, and I know where to access more. But more than anything, we need to find Sophie and the others. They are being rounded up by Corona goons, and nothing good will come of it.”
“No.” Catherine had sobered up too. “Corona is Arka. Nothing good can come of Arka kidnapping people.” Her pretty jaw set. “I have four men I’ll introduce you to. The ones who were brought here half dead three months ago. They’d spent a year in a high-tech lab that was essentially a prison, and experimented on. I’ve never seen anyone with as many surgical scars as their leader.”
“Lucius Ward? Nick told me about him.”
“What was done to him and to his men was criminal. If they’ve started kidnapping people it means that whatever is going on is coming to a head, and we must stop them. We have to get your friends out.”
“Catherine…” Elle hesitated. “I once went to an Arka lab. It was…scary. They had vast security resources. They had guards everywhere and the labs had high-tech security with a number of backups. I don’t know if we can mount any kind of counter offensive.”
“Oh my dear.” Catherine patted her hand and stood up. “We have something far better than security goons. We have the entire Ghost Ops team, right here. I’d pit them against any foe on earth. They are invincible.” She leaned over the table, pressed a button and spoke quietly. “Mac? Can you and the guys come up? There’s something we need to talk about.”
San Francisco—Arka Pharmaceuticals
Four vials. One, two, three, four.
Lee studied the brushed aluminum vial holder on the pristine surface of his huge desk. He could see its upside-down reflection, as if it continued on down into the nether regions of his desk. He carefully pushed a button on the side of the holder, entered a code on the keyboard that was projected onto the surface of his desk, and heard the satisfying hiss of a vacuum seal being broken.
The container was manufactured by a subsidiary of Arka, and not only met ISO Standard 900012 for the containment of bio-hazardous material, it doubled the standards. It was unbreakable and unbreachable. You could take a mallet to it, you could run a tank over it. It would not break and it would not open.
If civilization were to suddenly stop, a thousand years from now whoever inherited the earth—Lee’s guess would be rats—would find the container intact and rub their paws over the slightly raised Arka logo and might wonder in their little rat brains what was inside.
Power. That was what was inside. Immense power. Power to change the world, and it came from him. He’d done this.
It seemed insane that he was about to unleash all this power and not take it inside himself. Not become immensely powerful himself.
The Warrior project had gone through so many iterations he’d almost lost hope, but then, Edison himself had said that a scientist never failed. He just found the ways an experiment didn’t work.
