Lisa Marie Rice - [Ghost Ops] Read online

  In college she could no longer ignore her Dreams, and by the time she got to Stanford, she had a professional interest in them. There seemed to be an unofficial group interested in the neurological underpinnings of paranormal abilities, and to her astonishment, a huge multinational pharmaceutical corporation swooped in and funded an official research group. A functional MRI scan showed that the research subjects shared certain commonalities.

  Like Sophie, Elle signed up as guinea pig and researcher, and found that many of the researchers had a hot spot in their heads and abilities they’d learned to keep secret. They were all very keen on the project and worked long hours, like Elle herself.

  This was the fourth time she’d actually put herself into a controlled Dream state during the day, and each time it was utterly exhausting. Clearly, when she Dreamed at night, her body had time during sleep to recoup its energies. Blood tests showed a depletion in red blood cells after each Dream.

  Sophie came back in, handing her another glass of ice water, casually touching her arm. Sophie didn’t touch people much. Elle had noticed that. And like herself, Sophie didn’t date much. Sophie’s hand on her arm was warm, unusually so, and she held on as Elle downed the tall glass of water.

  By some trick, the warm hand and the cold water seemed to revive her. A little. Enough to smile at Sophie and pretend she was much better.

  “Thanks,” she smiled and the worry lines in Sophie’s face smoothed out. She lifted her hand and Elle immediately felt the cold.

  She suspected Sophie was a healer but understood completely if she wanted to keep it secret for now. Sophie had the same hot spot in her brain that everyone else in the program had.

  “You okay to get home?” Sophie frowned at her, her hand hovering, clearly wondering if she should surreptitiously touch Elle again. “Do you want me to drive you? I could pick you up tomorrow morning and drive you back in.”

  “Didn’t you say you had some work at home to finish up tomorrow morning?”

  “Well, yes. But nothing I can’t put off.”

  Elle stacked her spine. She felt weak and groggy, but she was not going to make Sophie drive in tomorrow morning just for her. “No, I’m fine. See you tomorrow afternoon in the lab, okay?”

  Another searching gaze and Sophie relaxed. “Okay. See you tomorrow.”

  After she left, Elle sat for another ten minutes, then realized she had to get herself home now or sleep over in the lab. It wouldn’t be the first time. But right now, she fiercely wanted her little apartment, its familiarity and its comforts.

  Elle made it home before collapsing. Just. She walked straight through the door, made a beeline for the couch, dropped purse and briefcase on the floor and fell onto it, rather than sitting down. She tilted her head back, trying to let the past twenty-four hours wash over her.

  She had to take a shower and she had to eat, but right now she was too exhausted to do anything but sit there, staring at the ceiling.

  It reminded her of her first year in San Francisco, waitressing by day, attending night courses. She’d been younger, though, and stronger. And excited at the thought of getting her degree. Back in San Francisco, she’d been fueled by the energy of exploring the world after so many years in a state of stasis, looking after her father. She’d imagined she would finally start … Life. Study, find a job she loved and a man she could love. Start a family, just like everyone else.

  The study and the job had worked out. The family, not so much.

  Actually, she hadn’t had much of a love life. To be brutally honest, she hadn’t had any kind of love life.

  When she looked in the mirror, she saw an attractive woman. Judging by the way men reacted to her, she knew she was attractive to men. In the beginning she went on tons of dates, with every guy who asked her out. She was anxious to start dating because what Nick had shown her was so enticing, she knew she wanted more of it.

  Except it seemed that the sex she’d had with Nick was exclusive to him. To her horror, nobody came even close to making her feel the way he did. Elle had actually felt repulsion with a lot of guys, not even wanting to be touched.

  She wasn’t gay, so that was out. She was a heterosexual lock—and the one key that opened her was gone, forever. So she came home every night to her pretty, tiny apartment and tried not to wish that she were not so relentlessly alone.

  She was so tired she fell asleep, right as she was, on the couch, with her coat on. And dreamed.

  It was that day again. She’d relived it endlessly over the past ten years.

  After months of cold gray weather, it was finally sunny again. The sun shone off the snow and lit her bedroom with a brilliant light that glowed even behind closed lids.

  She smiled, yawned, stretched. Dramatically threw the covers back.

  Smiled some more. Her body felt sore, used, great. Warm from Nick’s touch still. Warm. She was warm down to her bones. Warm and—and light. A great heavy burden had been lifted and she could move with ease.

  She opened her eyes and looked at the rumpled bed, the folds of the sheets and covers making dramatic lights and shadows in the brilliant morning light. Things gleamed in her bedroom, the bright sun catching glints in a silver vase, the mirror over the vanity, the brass lamp.

  She gleamed. She felt all shiny and new.

  And she had a shiny and new love. Nick.

  Who wasn’t in the bedroom or the en suite bathroom.

  Or downstairs.

  Her heart was beating fast now, the beat of imminent danger. The beat of dread. She looked and looked, the drumming of her heart covering the icy silence of the house. Her cheeks were wet as she called Nick’s name. She swiped at her cheeks impatiently, the beating of her heart so loud her ears rang…

  Elle started awake, gasping loudly in the silence of the night. Ashamed that, once more, she’d woken up with tears in her eyes. She could keep the tears away easily during the day. She’d rather submit to torture than cry. But at night, in her sleep, she was caught with her defenses down and she hated it.

  The ringing didn’t stop. It always took a minute or two to come back into herself, whether she’d lost herself in a dream, or a Dream.

  She fumbled for her purse, hands awkward and clumsy, another residue of the dream state. She checked the display and saw the photo of Sophie’s smiling face, hand holding a glass of champagne high, a picture Elle had taken at the reception thrown by Arka for the kickoff to the program.

  Elle coughed to loosen her throat so it wouldn’t sound froggy and thumbed the off-image button so Sophie wouldn’t see her face with its tear tracks. She’d say she’d just put on a masque.

  “Hey, Soph,” she said casually. “What’s—”

  “Elle listen to me because I don’t have much time. Put me on vid.” Elle clicked and Sophie’s drawn face came on, bobbing up and down as she moved around her bedroom. She was pale, sweating, eyes huge and haunted. Her voice was a low whisper, tone rough with anxiety. She glanced quickly over her shoulder, then back into the display. “Les and Roger aren’t playing hooky. And Moira has disappeared too. They’ve been captured and—and taken somewhere. I don’t know where but it’s not good, Elle. It’s like we’re being … rounded up!” She was moving frantically, from room to room. “I got a call a quarter of an hour ago from Nancy, who got a call from Moira. It was only a few seconds but Nancy said men dressed in black were in her house. They were armed. She was hiding out in the closet. Now she’s not answering, her phone is dead. And Moira, Les, and Roger are unreachable too. Listen, Elle, get out. Get out as fast as you can. I don’t know who they are, but it’s not good. And Nancy told Moira our sensors are tracking devices. I don’t—” She froze. Even Elle heard the sound in the background. Something crashing to the floor.

  There wasn’t even a pretense at stealth, which frightened Elle even more.

  The image on her phone blurred, shadowy figures appearing suddenly.

  “Dig the sensor out, dump your phone, and get out!” Sophie screamed a
nd her phone went dead.

  Elle held her own phone in her shaking hand—a thin slab of transparent plastic that had inexplicably become as dangerous as a rattlesnake.

  She opened her hand and it dropped to the floor. It didn’t break, of course. It was the latest generation and there were videos all over the net of it working after having been shot with a bullet. It was made of the same polymer as the blast-proof vests worn by bomb squads.

  It gleamed there, on the floor. She could be tracked through it.

  Get out!

  Good thinking. Get out, escape. But not if she had something inside her that could let them track her.

  No turning the lights on, but it wasn’t necessary. She knew every inch of her home. She rushed to the kitchen, pulled out a small knife she kept razor-sharp, and ran to her en suite bathroom. It didn’t have an outside window, so once she pulled the door shut, no light would betray her if someone was watching outside.

  Hurry-Hurry-Hurry! She chanted to herself as she doused her left bicep with disinfectant. She pressed her finger on the almost-invisible dent in her skin and felt it—a tiny chip Corona had said was a biosensor. The biosensors were to be surgically removed after a year and the recordings placed on a graph.

  It was randomized. Half the staff of volunteers had taken SL-61, the experimental drug, and half placebos. Elle had no idea which camp she was in, but it made no difference if the sensor was also a tracking chip. It had to come out, now.

  There was nothing to dull the pain. She had only a rudimentary first aid kit in the bathroom. Above all, she had no time.

  Gritting her teeth, she slid the knife into her skin and stopped, brow beaded with sweat, trying to get used to the pain, red hot, almost electric. There was no getting used to it. There was only getting through it as quickly as possible. She turned the tip of the knife and cut at a right angle, then stopped, head bowed over the sink. The pain was so sharp it was nauseating. She waited for the nausea to pass, lifted the flap of flesh she’d cut out, reached into the bloody meat of her bicep with thumb and index finger. It was deeper than she thought and she had to actually dig to find it. Twice she had to stop because she was about to pass out.

  Finally, finally, her index fingernail touched the edge of the sensor. She was in almost halfway up the first knuckle. She looked up. The mirror showed her bloodless face, white lips, face drawn in pain. Taking a deep breath, she curled her fingernail under the edge of the chip and pulled.

  She screamed, knees buckling. Only her left arm hooked over the bowl stopped her from falling to the floor. That hurt! Magnitudes more than cutting into herself. It felt like electrical wires transmitting pain down to her bone.

  God. Sophie said to hurry! But she couldn’t go anywhere as long as she had this … this thing inside her. There was a keening sound inside the bathroom and it took her a full minute to realize it was her own voice, panting and sobbing with pain.

  She couldn’t pull her finger from her flesh because she’d never have the nerve to dig it back in. With her right hand she pulled, harder and harder, feeling the resistance of the chip, almost as if it were alive.

  This wasn’t working. Was it deeper than she thought? But no, she could feel it. It should have been out by now. With her left hand she pulled a clean washcloth from the counter, stuffed it into her mouth and before she could rethink it, braced her feet and pulled as hard as she could. The washcloth muffled her screams as she bent her head back, incapable of breathing from the pain.

  Her head spun, black spots danced before her eyes. She was a whisper from passing out when the chip moved under her finger. She pulled harder, the pain so sharp it felt almost like a living thing, then staggered back when she finally pulled the chip out.

  Elle spat out the washcloth, head hanging over the washbasin, her panting loud in the room, trying hard not to throw up. Finally, the room stopped swimming. The tears of pain dripped into the sink, her arm throbbed.

  Everything disappeared though when she brought the chip up for inspection. It had the Corona logo of three tiny crowns in one corner. It was a standard chip except for one thing—there were tendrils growing out of it, twisting and curling. Alive. Holding the chip close to her eyes, she touched the tendrils with a set of tweezers and watched, horrified and fascinated, as they retracted, as a sea anemone’s tendrils would.

  The tendrils had grown out of the chip. Whatever was in the chip, it was semi-alive. No, scratch that. Alive.

  There was no time now to explore the chip, though. She left it on the edge of the sink, then set about repairing herself. She applied gel from her derma-glue tube that would hold the skin together better than stitches, then stuck on an antibiotic bandage with a painkiller gel.

  There. The best she could do.

  The pain had powered down to a dull throbbing that hurt like hell but didn’t impede her movements. She moved fast now, in the dark, choosing cold-weather sports clothes from her closet. There might be the faintest of chances that Arka had seeded its employees’ clothes with trackers, so she chose clothes she’d never worn to work.

  Warm cashmere sweater, wool pants, thermal socks, boots, long down coat. In the living room her fingers ran across one of the shelves until she reached a familiar book by feel. She couldn’t read the title but she knew what it was. A thick tome on advanced biochemistry, guaranteed to spark not an atom of interest in anyone. Inside she’d carved out a hole in the pages large enough to hold cash. She pulled out the entire stash—two thousand dollars. She knew only too well what it meant to be on the road without cash.

  She bolted for the window. Sophie’s voice had been raw with fear. Sophie was so steady and stable. Hearing that note of panic in her voice had galvanized Elle.

  There was no background light to betray her as she peered out the edge of her front window. In the back of her mind, she knew what she wanted to see and she saw it. The small empty garden of the front of her building and the empty street beyond it. It was a dead end street, and she knew every car on it and knew every person who lived there.

  Nothing. Dark and silent and safe. Was she overreacting? Had Sophie been somehow having a psychotic episode? And yet, that chip with the terrifying tendrils— Maybe it would be best to disappear for a few days. She started to turn away, then stopped as something dark glided into view.

  A car she’d never seen before—black and unfashionably huge—slid to a stop and four men exited. The interior lights didn’t come on as they slipped out of the car like shadows. Dressed in black, they seemed to meld into the night, but not so much that Elle couldn’t tell where they were headed.

  Straight to her building.

  The car rolled forward, made a U-turn on the empty street and stopped right in front of her building’s driveway.

  Her four-story apartment building was built slightly back from the road with a small garden in front. The garden was protected by a chest-high wrought-iron fence with a six-foot gate in the middle.

  The four men had black full-face helmets with the dull black lenses of nightvision.

  Two of the men moved like shadows to the corners of the fence and crouched, the other two disappeared. Elle had no doubt where they had gone—to the back of the building via the alleyway. As she watched, the two men out front tapped their ear and stood.

  It didn’t take much to guess what they’d heard. The other two were stationed in the back and they could make their move. In a synchronized flow that would have won medals at the Olympics, the two black-clad men smoothly cleared the fence in a lithe leap and moved slowly, deliberately forward.

  Toward the front door. And, eventually to her apartment on the second floor.

  Oh my God, Sophie was right!

  Elle realized she had seconds to get out. Run and go— She drew a blank. But wherever she was going she had to get there fast. She scooped her purse off the floor and ran.

  Her apartment building was part of a complex of four condos, connected by basement corridors invisible from outside the house. Heart
thumping, she tumbled down the stairs to the first floor, then kept on going down. She swiped her card past the basement entrance sensor, slapped her hand on the sensor that read the vein pattern of her palms, then let out a sharp exhale as she heard the click of the front door unlocking. The building had excellent security, both digital and bio. She’d traded space for safety. If these men were able to circumvent it in mere seconds, they were very good. Professional. That scared her more than if DOPA addicts were breaking into her home.

  Her car was lost to her. They’d parked right across the driveway, blocking her. She had to get as far away as she could on foot, when she could hardly stand.

  There was no noise from the building. If they were breaking into her apartment, they were doing it silently. Well, her security was a step down from the building security that they’d laughed at when they broke in.

  The basement corridor was long and almost completely dark, the only light coming from dim chemical bulbs every ten feet. It felt like the corridor stretched forever. She leaned against the wall, legs weak, arm throbbing.

  It had to be done. The wall at the end of the long corridor looked at least a mile away, receding constantly, like some movie effect. Cold sweat covered her face and chest. She swayed and would have fallen if she hadn’t slapped a hand against the wall.

  For a moment, for just a moment, she was tempted to simply slide down that wall and wait for whoever was up there to make it down to the basement. If they were thorough, they’d check the building plans on record. The underground connecting corridor was a feature of the building.

  If she didn’t move, they’d come for her and find her.

  Three people were missing from the program—four now, with Sophie—and it was very likely they’d been abducted by whoever had sent the men who were right here, at this very moment going through her house. Whatever they wanted, it wasn’t good.

  Sophie had risked precious minutes warning her. Had maybe compromised her escape to warn her.

  Go, Elle told herself. And a couple of seconds later, her feet obeyed.

  She was gasping with fatigue when she reached the end. She stopped, leaned against the wall, catching her breath. It was so awful, the drumbeat of imminent danger sounding in her head, but her body unable to obey. Stress and danger hummed in her, but she could barely stay upright.