I Dream of Danger Page 13

  The doors of the room were biomorphically programmed to open for him, Mac, or Jon, but it took two seconds to process and he had to stand there, three feet out, practically hopping in place, fear and panic prickling along his nervous system, until the door whooshed open.

  He rushed inside and skidded to a stop, looking around wildly for something—anything—that could help.

  Their situation room wouldn’t have been out of place in the New Pentagon. They had it all, including holographic monitors showing every inch of the security perimeter around Haven. If a jackrabbit shat in the woods, they knew about it. They were illegally linked into every overhead satellite, and at any given moment one or two of their almost invisible drones was dropping visual, IR, and thermal images onto their servers. That kind of intel would be considered a security breach serious enough to warrant a court-martial, but since the entire U.S. military was gunning for them, and a court-martial had found them guilty of treason in absentia anyway, they figured why not. Their server farm, hidden in the mountain, was one of the largest in the world. They had serious crunching power at their disposal.

  Not to mention serious firepower. The armory would do any military installation proud.

  None of it helpful at the moment because what Nick really, really needed was—

  What?

  Fuck. He didn’t know what he needed, but he needed it now.

  The door whooshed open, Jon came in at a run. Wheeling to a stop, he checked the monitors—which showed acres and acres of nighttime mountainside. Utterly peaceful, utterly normal, utterly calm. Sensors blinking green. “What the fuck, Nick?” Jon’s bright blue eyes narrowed as he glared at him. His blond hair was tousled, shirt buttoned wrong, sweatpants hanging off his hips. He looked around again at the monitors, brought his gaze back. “I repeat—what the fuck?”

  It took every ounce of his self-control, but Nick managed not to twirl around, hands on head, looking for something that could be an outside sign of what was going on inside. His heart was pounding, adrenaline running through his system and he had nowhere to go with it. Nothing to hang this huge flaming ball of desperation on.

  He tried to speak, but his throat was too tight. On the second try he got it but what he wanted to say was so enormous his voice cracked. “She needs me. She’s in danger and I have to get to her now, and I don’t know where she is and she fucking needs me.” Normally he would have been ashamed to death that his indrawn breath sounded like a sob, but right now he didn’t give a fuck. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but Elle.

  Jon’s eyes narrowed further. “Who needs you? What are you talking about?”

  All Nick could do was stand there and pant, fists clenched so hard the knuckles were white. Ready to fight Jon, ready to fight the world if it could help her, but it wouldn’t. He couldn’t help her until he knew where she was and what she needed.

  “Elle,” he said simply, because with all the thoughts swirling in his head, that was the only thing that stood out. That made sense. Elle.

  Elle. In danger. God. He couldn’t even stay in the same room with that thought.

  Jon shook his head and turned gratefully when the door opened. Mac walked in, arm around his wife. His pregnant wife. The pregnant wife Nick had woken up. Both men were now glaring at him. Catherine McEnroe was an incredibly special woman and Mac wasn’t happy that she’d had her rest interrupted. Even pregnant, she worked tirelessly as a doctor taking care of their little community. So, yeah, interrupting Catherine’s sleep was a big no-no.

  Everyone treated Catherine with kid gloves. Even Nick, who liked her and respected her. But Elle—Elle trumped Catherine any day.

  He didn’t give a shit about anyone’s sleep if Elle was in danger.

  “Elle,” he repeated, his voice raw.

  “L?” Mac asked, frowning. “The letter?”

  Jon took it up. “L for link? L for lonely? L for—”

  “Elle.” It was the only thing he could say. His head was going to blow up. Every single danger hormone in his body was awake with nowhere to go. He was a guy built for action, and he always knew which action to take. To be so primed, so pumped, so fucking scared and dying to race to the rescue but have no idea where was driving him bat-shit crazy.

  His fingers beat a harsh tattoo against his thigh and his foot was tapping. Jon, Mac, and Catherine simply stared at him. He knew what they were thinking—Nick Ross agitated? Scared? What was that about?

  Nick didn’t do agitated and scared.

  “Nick,” Catherine said gently and took his shaking hand in both of hers. Mac tensed. Everyone knew Nick didn’t like being touched. But this wasn’t someone he didn’t know entering his personal space. This was Catherine, and her touch . . . soothed. Calmed him, just a little.

  She held on to his hand, watching his eyes. After a moment she nodded. “It’s her, isn’t it?”

  His head jerked awkwardly, neck stiff with tension.

  Catherine had something. He didn’t know what, nobody knew what really, but she had . . . something. If she touched you, she understood you. And, lately, if she touched you, you felt better. Which explained why her husband, Mac, the toughest, meanest son of a bitch on the planet, was walking around with a goofy grin on his hard, ugly, scarred mug.

  Nick had wondered about that. About being married to someone like Catherine. Someone who understood you inside out with a touch. Understood you and loved you.

  Elle had loved him. It had been clear in her eyes, her voice, her face. She’d loved him and he’d lost her and—Oh God, she was in danger. She needed him and he didn’t know how the fuck to find her.

  He shivered, turned his sweaty face to Catherine.

  “Yeah. She’s the one you felt when you touched me.” A few days after Catherine somehow found them in Haven—a place three experts in security had hidden carefully away from the world—she’d touched him and understood that he’d lost someone, that he was worried sick about someone.

  She never went there again and neither did anyone else.

  But now it had to come out.

  He grabbed Catherine’s hand, barely noticing Mac and Jon exchanging looks. “Read me,” he whispered urgently, clasping her hand hard between his trembling hands. “Tell me where she is. What’s happening to her. I got a call for help and I don’t know where she is and, Oh God . . .”

  Nick’s throat closed tight. Nothing more could come out. He clung to Catherine’s hand as if it were a lifeline. A raging river was tumbling him over and over down an endless descent into hell and only her touch could make sense of it.

  Catherine was shaking her head slowly, eyes on his, face sad. “I am so sor—” She stopped, breathed out, tilted her head. Even though she was looking straight at him, her eyes grew distant as if watching something a thousand yards away. Her grip tightened, her hand warming up until it felt red hot in his cold ones.

  “Elle,” she whispered and Nick broke out in a cold sweat. He was shaking, could barely breathe.

  “Yeah,” he said hoarsely.

  “What?” Catherine blinked.

  “Elle, Elle, Elle,” he shouted.

  Mac’s jaw tightened. Nick didn’t give a shit. Mac could shove it up his ass if it bothered him that Nick was shouting at his wife. Because Catherine knew something and something was better than what he had right now, which was a shitload of nothing. No intel, no idea where she was, nothing but ashes in his hand and his head exploding from the n
eed to get to Elle as fast as humanly possible. Wherever the fuck she was . . .

  He had no idea. But maybe Catherine did. He stepped closer to Catherine and Mac took a step forward too. Jon grabbed Mac’s arm and shook his head.

  Well, fuck.

  Nick wasn’t going to hurt Catherine. If Mac used his brains instead of his dick, he’d know that. But Nick wasn’t letting Catherine walk away without finding out what she knew, however the hell she knew it.

  “That’s the name you said.” Nick ground his teeth at her blank look. “Just now. Just now you said Elle. That’s the name of my— The name of the person I need to find.”

  His throat was so tight. Just hearing her name after so many years—he couldn’t think straight.

  “Elle,” she said softly.

  Nick nodded, like some big dumb animal that couldn’t speak. Elle.

  Catherine was focusing on him again. Her other hand came up to clasp his in a tight grip, warm and soft. Something to cling to in the painful darkness of his terror.

  “That’s the one I felt, right, Nick? The one you lost?”

  He nodded again. Tried to speak. Failed.

  “You care about her.” It wasn’t a question.

  Oh God, yes. He nodded again, jerkily. Found his voice. “Where is she? She needs me. Now. I have to get to her, right now.” He was vibrating with tension, ready to take off anywhere Catherine said.

  There was sadness on Catherine’s beautiful face. She tightened her clasp. “Oh Nick. I’m so sorry. It doesn’t work that way.”

  An icy chill worked its way through his veins and he realized he’d been subconsciously counting on Catherine to do her woo-woo stuff. Point him in Elle’s direction so he could race to her. “Then how the hell does it work? Can you tell me that?” He stepped even closer to Catherine, right in her face, his voice rising.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jon grab Mac’s arm again. Not even Jon could stop Mac if Mac didn’t want to be stopped, but Mac got himself under control. Nick wasn’t going to hurt Catherine, but he was going to question her.

  He was staring wildly down into Catherine’s eyes, as if he could will the information on Elle’s whereabouts out of her, drag it out of her through her skin if necessary. But staring was an act of aggression. They’d been taught that, at the beginning of their careers as soldiers. Body language had been a big thing. How to silently threaten, how to pass unnoticed, how to reassure.

  He didn’t want to scare Catherine.

  With a wrench, Nick turned his gaze away from Catherine and stared blindly at the room. Their war room, they called it. With everything you needed to go on an op. Just as long as you knew where you were going, of course.

  As soon as he knew where to head, Nick was going to grab Jon, drag him to their ultralight stealth helo, and take off.

  Nick was the team driver. If it was anything that traveled over land, Nick could drive it as fast as it could go over any terrain. Jon was the pilot. Their little helo could make it anywhere in the Continental U.S. It was the dead of night. Little Bird could silently land in any private airfield without detection. They could fuel up and be gone before anyone knew they were there. They’d done it before.

  Nick didn’t even want to think what would happen if Elle were OUTCONUS. Didn’t want to go there. Couldn’t.

  She’d called out to him. That had been a distress signal he’d heard in his head, loud and clear. Surely there was—was a range for that sort of thing? Surely he wouldn’t have heard it if she were in Europe or Africa?

  The signal he’d got was loud and absolutely urgent. She was in danger right now, and if she was across an ocean she was fucked and, oh God . . . He couldn’t wrap his head around that thought.

  Elle dead, Elle dying . . . he couldn’t do this. Simply couldn’t.

  Catherine’s sympathetic face—he couldn’t look at that either. His eyes roamed the big room, partly to distract himself from that awful panicky desperation that gripped him, so he could function on some basic level, and partly to see if something in their gear-packed room could help.

  Huge holographic monitors ringed the walls. They had tiny drones of their own hovering 24/7 over a ten-square-mile radius surrounding Haven, and thus had a 360-degree IR view of everything. Highly sensitive motion sensors and sound sensors. If a fly farted anywhere near them, they knew about it. Their computers were illegally hooked into the Keyhole 15 satellites and they could get real-time intel on more or less anything happening in the world, particularly in the Fucked-Up Latitudes.

  All Nick needed was a location and he could zoom in on her.

  A location he didn’t have.

  So the holograms, the satellite feeds, the vast crunching power of their servers—their server farm was bigger than the Pentagon’s, bigger even than Amazon’s—couldn’t help. Behind the titanium door on the left-hand wall was an armory that would do a Delta team proud. Nick had been Delta, and there were a few extra goodies in there that even Delta hadn’t had.

  If there was an enemy, they could take them out, no question. They had the tools and the determination to protect what they had.

  Hell, Mac had a wife and a baby on the way to protect. Mac all by himself was a war machine.

  So they had the stuff to get there, wipe out the opposition, and come back in stealth.

  He, Mac, and Jon were really good at slipping into places and extracting things and people. They hadn’t been Ghost Ops for nothing. They were Ghosts because everything about their past had been erased. Wiped clean. They didn’t exist anywhere on earth. And they were Ghosts because they had been trained to move with stealth. When they didn’t want to be found, they weren’t.

  Even here, creating a community of geniuses and misfits, they hadn’t been found.

  Taking stock of the war room calmed Nick, just a little. When he found out where Elle was, there’d be firepower and the will to use it. He didn’t care if she had a fucking army after her.

  But where was she?

  It was a male operator’s paradise, full of high-tech gear and comms. With a woman’s touch in the far corner. Catherine had been a researcher before going on a mission to find a man she’d never met, Mac. She’d been sent on that mission by their former commander, Captain Lucius Ward, the man they thought had betrayed them.

  Ward hadn’t betrayed them. He’d been betrayed himself and had lost his health and his sanity after a year in the hands of monsters. They’d gone to the rescue of the captain and been astonished to find three of their comrades who had been experimented on until they were nearly dead.

  Romero, Lundquist, and Pelton had lost almost a third of their body weight, had been crisscrossed with surgical scars, and had lost the ability to talk when they’d been brought back to Haven.

  So Catherine was caring for them, bringing them back to life, while trying to figure out what had been done to them. That something was very, very bad.

  She was a neat woman so her corner wasn’t the mess that their space was, but she’d obviously been interrupted. Maybe by her husband Mac carrying her off to their cave. They disappeared together a lot.

  A big briefcase had toppled on Catherine’s desk, paperwork spilling down out of it like a glacier’s moraine. She was researching what had been done to their teammates and the captain. A series of glossy company brochures and prospectuses cascaded down. He stared at the pile of documents.

  Catherine’s soft voice cut in.

 
“What? What is it, Nick?”

  She repeated whatever it was she’d said before. Nick saw her mouth move but couldn’t figure out the words. He was staring at Catherine’s corner of their war room. He couldn’t tear his eyes away. It was as if a spotlight had lit up her briefcase.

  She said something else and Nick tried really, really hard to concentrate. But it was useless. He’d focus on her, then his mind and his eyes would wander.

  A slap to the back of his head nearly sent him spinning to the floor. “Focus, you dickhead,” Mac growled. “Catherine’s trying to help your sorry ass.”

  Nick breathed in, breathed out. Without moving his head, his eyes slid back to Catherine’s corner. Catherine’s arm snaked out and it took him a second to realize that she blocked her husband’s arm.

  “Wait, Mac,” she said, tilting her head to look at Nick. “Is something happening?”

  Was something happening? Fuck if he knew.

  “Why are you staring at my briefcase, Nick?”

  “Huh?” He felt so stupid. Usually he was quick. His usual response to things was at lightning speed. He was on alert, always. Nothing ever took him by surprise. He was reacting to danger before most other men even realized it was there.

  Now he felt slow, sluggish. Thoughts occurred to him slowly, as if they had to take a huge trip to get to his head. It was as if his head were taken up by a computer virus slowing everything down.

  Soft warmth on his cheeks. Catherine’s hands on his face. “Look at me, Nick.”

  He looked at her, though his eyes swiveled. She shook him lightly. “Look at me.”

  Reluctantly, he tore his eyes from the corner and looked into her eyes, fiercely focused on him. “There’s something over there that is sparking something in you. What is it?”