Page 76 of I Dream of Danger
And if the idea of the pale vulnerable waif broke his heart, this strong, confident woman melted it. She didn’t need him, not in any way. She’d made her way in the world just fine without him.
But if she’d have him, he was hers to the end of time.
So, yeah, he was in. She wanted her friends rescued? Whatever she wanted, he wanted to give it to her.
“I’m in,” he said.
“Me, too.” Mac’s deep rumble came with a nod.
“Oh yeah,” Jon breathed.
* * *
Elle studied the faces of the three men and one woman before her. Catherine was with her, no doubt. That in itself was a minor miracle. That she’d risk her man, Mac, for people she didn’t know.
Nick was with her. He’d made that clear this morning. It frightened her to think that if she ordered him into a minefield, into the pit of hell, he’d go. That kind of power scared her and she didn’t know if she’d ever get used to it. She’d been alone for so long the idea of having a man like Nick right beside her, ready to do what she asked, was powerful but terrifying.
She might be leading him and Catherine’s husband and surfer dude to their death.
Sophie and the others might be already dead. Corona might use them to set a trap for her. But there was no way she could leave the others in the group helpless and on their own, and there was no way she could rescue them on her own.
So she studied the faces of these three men who were going to have to risk their lives to save some pretty odd people, and might lose their own in doing so.
She studied their faces for weakness or doubt and found none.
Elle gestured at the hologram. “I’m asking you to rescue these people, who are in terrible danger. There was an urban legend making the rounds of the Corona researchers that a new method of distilling parts of the brain into a liquid that can be injected has been developed. That a couple of people have been ‘harvested’ already. That’s the charming term used in science, by the way. Harvesting. As if people were crops. There were rumors of a previous study group that disappeared. I didn’t pay much attention because there are constant rumors making the rounds and many of them are silly.” She stopped, drew in a deep breath. “But now…I’m not too sure it’s silly. I think it might be true. I think that the people ultimately running the trial have gone insane, and there is no telling what they’ll do, the lengths they’ll go to for results. There’s something behind this I don’t understand. Sophie and I both felt it, but we were so taken up in the results of the tests we decided to let it go. It was just a feeling, after all.”
“But you were right to feel uneasy,” Nick growled.
“Yes.” Elle felt a spurt of relief. He understood. “We were right. I have no idea where to go from here. I don’t know where the subjects were taken. The entire area is studded with labs. Arka owns a number of them. The labs would be underground and would probably not be on any schematics. Actually they could be anywhere. We are not even certain the lab would be in Palo Alto. They could have been taken anywhere in a van.”
The thought terrified her. Sophie and the others taken somewhere where they couldn’t be found, like cattle to slaughter.
Mac spoke, in his deep, gravelly voice that sounded like it came from underground. “Do you have any clues at all as to where they might have been taken? How about other labs that were cooperating with the program? Do you have a list?”
Elle shrugged. “As far as I know, no other labs were involved. I have the e-mail of everyone, and I’ve started a program on my computer to search their e-mails for the names of other labs, but so far nothing has come up.”
“The tracking devices?” Catherine asked. Elle had told her about the device she’d pried from her arm.
The men sat up straighter. “What tracking device?” Nick demanded.
Elle held her arm out, pulled up her sleeve, and pointed to the bandage. Nick was going to be so mad at her. When he asked about it this morning, she’d simply said that she’d cut herself. “All the members of the trial group were injected with a microchip. We were told that it was to monitor our vital signs. Each week we held our arms over a reader where the data was downloaded. But Sophie said to cut it out of my arm when she called to warn me, so I did.”
“And you were going to tell me about this…when?” Nick’s jaws flexed. She shrugged.
“Do you know where the database is held?” Jon asked. Nick had said that Jon was their cyber expert.
“Sorry, no.” Elle shook her head. “It would presumably be in the company database, except I suspect now that the entire project was off the books. In which case it will be in an encrypted file on someone’s laptop. I don’t even know whose.”
“We’ll go over satellite images of last night. See if we can find any useful images.” Nick looked at Mac. “Did we have any drones out?”
Mac shook his head.
“Damn.” Nick beat his fist lightly on his knee. “And we can’t send them out now until we have some idea of where. Though it sounds too late for drones, if they are all underground.”
Oh man, she understood his frustration. How could they rescue the group if they didn’t know where they were? If the group hadn’t been split up. If they were still alive.
“Okay,” Mac said decisively. “I’m assigning tasks. Elle, write up everything you know, absolutely everything, and go over it with Catherine and make sure you keep an eye on that troll of yours that’s going through the e-mails.”
