Page 78 of I Dream of Danger
O-kay. She would have to be the bad guy.
“That’s very kind of you,” she began gently, “but perhaps?—”
The elderly man turned his head painfully and fixed her with a look. For an instant, Elle wanted to step back, the power of that look was so great. It was a banked power, a power linked to a damaged body, but inside that man strength and intelligence glowed and gathered.
The words came slowly and painfully. “I understand there are still people in their hands. They will experiment on them and then they will kill them. I do not want to live if we can’t make an attempt to rescue them the way my men rescued us. We aren’t physically capable of going on the mission with you, Mac.” His already hoarse voice broke and he hung his head down as if someone had cut a tendon. Then his head rose and his black eyes glowed with strength and purpose. “But we are perfectly capable of manning the war room and providing intel. So we will rescue those people. Together. Hoo-ah.”
“Hoo-yah!” A chorus of seven men’s voices, all strong and true, rang out.
Chapter
Twelve
Arka Pharmaceuticals Headquarters
San Francisco
One entire wall of Lee’s office was a huge glowing hologram. Along the bottom of the hologram ran a series of data packets, including the date. Three months ago.
Millon Laboratories at Palo Alto. Before the facility had been destroyed. Lee clenched his fists at the memory. Catherine Young had suddenly risen up and bit her employer in the ass. She’d taken a huge bite out of him and had almost brought his entire project down. Years of work nearly destroyed because of one woman and the faceless men who’d helped her.
He had a small part of the attack on tape, though it had been mostly destroyed by something the faceless men had done to his security system. His very, very expensive security system.
It still burned.
He’d recognized Young immediately, of course, brazenly breaking into his facility with the use of a cloned pass.
The lab had been hidden and illegal, given the type of testing that had gone on. He’d had to go in and complete the destruction she’d wrought so that when the authorities came to investigate, he’d been able to plausibly state that the extra underground floor was merely equipment storage space. There hadn’t been any technical experts in the law enforcement team, luckily. But he’d had to buy off the three technicians who’d worked on the floor, and it had cost him. Money, time, effort.
Flynn had placed him under pressure, then Beijing had placed him under pressure.
That’s not how science worked. Science proceeded at its own stately pace. Putting pressure on the scientific process was an abomination. This was something non-scientists like Flynn were simply incapable of understanding.
What Lee was working on had the potential to change the world forever, as momentous as the harnessing of electricity. More so, even, as it would change the nature of a part of humanity. This was not something that could be done in a hurry and sloppily.
Injecting himself with SL-61 had been a stroke of genius, because he felt stronger and more intellectually acute than ever. He felt, for want of a better word, invincible.
There had been a missing element, though. An element he’d discerned in an animal experiment on the hidden Level 4 the night the laboratory was destroyed.
How he’d loved Level 4. It had been his very own reign, a place where he held the power of life and death, a place where he created living organisms. A place where he’d been a god. He’d carried out extensive animal testing on Level 4 that would have been illegal under the Animal Testing Bill. The experiments might have been illegal according to a bill passed by a lobby of fanatical men and women who cared more for dumb creatures than for science, but they had been necessary. He’d been testing iterations of SL that would increase strength and speed and intelligence.
He and the SL drugs had been conducting a kind of dance. Two steps forward and one step backward, then three steps forward and two steps backward, then one step forward and three steps backward. Then ten steps forward.
Of course, it was immensely complex, as he was effecting change at the cellular level and trying to make it stable. He was speeding up evolution itself, something no one else in the history of the world had ever attempted. And he was succeeding, damn it. Every single trial that ended with a problem also unveiled a new possibility.
It was impossible to explain to that moron Flynn. To his astonishment, though, it also proved impossible to explain to the Ministry of Science in Beijing. Nobody cared about the process, about the secrets to life itself he was unlocking. All they cared about were tangible results. A drug that would increase the capabilities of soldiers in the field, that would prove stable over time and that was cheap to produce.
In any hands but his it would have been impossible.
Up to that point there’d been 59 iterations. Nothing compared to Edison’s 10,000 failed attempts. Lee had only tried 59 times, but that 59th…
Deep below the earth, in the animal lab, Lee had found part of the key to changing the world in an animal cage housing a bonobo. There’d been ten bonobos, big, healthy apes genetically predisposed to peaceful behavior. SL-59 had had a negative effect on nine of them. They’d turned listless and died.
But the tenth…
Lee watched the holographic recording. He’d been watching it over and over again while poring over the analyses of the blood and brain tissue. He’d gone back post-mortem to the original MRIs and had discovered something that had escaped his researchers’ notice—a slight anomaly of the hypothalamus and increased temperature of the periaqueductal gray of the midbrain. Both qualities had increased notably after administration of SL-59.
In the hologram, so clear someone else in the room would have difficulty in distinguishing between now and three months earlier, he stood before a transparent plexiglass cage, watching the beautiful animal inside.
