Page 75 of I Dream of Danger
Elle manipulated the tiny remote and the hologram showed low buildings in a green sward. “This is the campus where the tests were carried out.”
“Wait!” Jon was frowning ferociously. “Go back.”
“Okay.” Elle obediently went back to the previous ‘gram. “Here?”
“Yeah. Who is she?” Nick looked over. Jon was grim-faced, practically vibrating with tension, which was totally unlike his usual cool-surfer-dude persona. Actually, Nick had never seen him tense, ever. Not even under fire.
Did he know the girl?
Elle smiled at Jon. “She’s one of my best friends. We did our graduate studies together at Stanford only she studied physiology. She has a master’s in that and is working toward a PhD in neuroscience.”
Jesus. These brainy women.
“Did she have a—a power?” Jon sounded like he was choking, and Nick understood where he was coming from. Women already had all sorts of powers without any of the woo-woo stuff. But these chicks had real powers, and their men would just have to suck it up.
Elle pursed her lips. “Not that could be tested, though we were only at the beginning of the trial. But—” She hesitated. “She’s a healer. She never talked about it, but I saw her close up a nasty wound with her touch. It comes with a heavy price though. She was weak for days after that.” Elle hesitated. “Arka didn’t know. Nobody knew. But she passed an fMRI screening test and was enrolled in the program. Like me, she was also tasked with recovering and collating data.”
Jon’s jaws were working. “Isn’t it unusual to have test subjects also running the test?”
“It is, yes,” Elle agreed. “And later on, for publication purposes, that would have been a big problem. But that’s what Corona insisted on, and they were paying the bills. So there was that anomaly. And this past week there were others.”
“Such as?” Catherine asked.
“I don’t know. It’s as if the program itself developed a fever. We were asked to do three times the testing we were doing before, in half the time. Results were to be sent directly to the coordinator’s office instead of being collected and collated on a weekly basis and then passed on. And then—” Elle stopped and looked at them each in turn. “And then people started disappearing. One, then two and three a day. The protocol stipulates that the test subjects show up at nine a.m. every morning, but we started having massive no-shows. Sophie and I called their cells and home numbers but got no responses. Yesterday—no, two days ago—there were only four of us, plus Sophie. I was being tested and Sophie oversaw the testing. When I got home, I got a panic call from Sophie saying that we were being rounded up. They were after her and were coming after me. I guess you know the rest.”
Oh yeah, they knew the rest. Nick’s fists tightened. They’d come after Elle. They were dead men walking.
Elle’s voice softened, became pleading. “I know you guys are…in hiding here. I know these people—” she gestured to the hologram of ten faces, “are complete strangers. But they are not strangers to me and they are being held against their will. And I fear that they are being hurt or…worse.” She drew in a deep, steadying breath.
Unlike the war room, which was always kept dim, the lab was brightly lit. The overhead light lit Elle’s hair into a shiny pale halo around her face, but beneath the halo was no angel’s face.
In his heart, in his head, Nick had kept an image of Elle that no longer existed. For so very long, in his head she’d been the young, pampered girl of a wealthy father, who led an immensely sheltered life. Then that had been exchanged for an exhausted waif of a girl, overwhelmed by her father’s illness, almost on her last legs.
So in his head Elle was vulnerable, requiring his protection. That’s the thing that had driven him so crazy—or, well, crazier—all these years. Elle, alone in the world. Alone in a world of predators. He knew precisely how cold and cruel the world was…he’d known since he could walk and talk. He knew that the weak were crushed, whether you were a good person or not.
Elle was a good person. He knew that, deep down inside. Nothing would ever change that because it was in her bones. When she was a girl, she’d go out of her way to do casual kindnesses, completely unaware of how unusual that was. The gardener who came twice a week always got a glass of ice tea. A kid next door had tragically developed leukemia, and Elle would go over to read to him all through his chemo.
A good heart and weakness equaled disaster. Danger with a loud siren attached.
The Army, Rangers, Delta, and then Ghost Ops. Nick’s whole adult life was making sure he wouldn’t be weak. Making sure he could defend himself with every weapon known to man, and failing weapons, with a rock or his fists. He’d had to defend himself plenty, because God knows the world was a shithole.
What possible defenses could Elle muster against the world? She’d taken off with no money and no friends, and that had been like a spike being hammered into his head, every single fucking day for ten fucking years.
The images came to him nightly.
Elle, alone and penniless in some dump of a town.
Elle, hitchhiking and ending up in a car with a guy with a knife.
Elle, walking alone through the wrong part of some city, a gang of rapists trailing behind her.
And always, always the image of her helpless and alone.
Well, she might well have at some point been helpless and alone, but she sure wasn’t any more.
The woman he was looking at was beautiful, yes, but visibly smart. It was there in her sharp, light-blue eyes that took everything in, there in the strong bone structure of her face, there every time she opened her mouth. Strength and discipline were in every line of her body.
And, shit. A PhD from Stanford. They didn’t give those away in cereal boxes. And Stanford was expensive. Over $200K a year, the last he heard. So she’d either earned that money or been given scholarships or a combo of both. Either way, she was a woman to be reckoned with.
