Heart of Danger by Lisa Marie Rice Read Free Book Online Page B

years once the project was viable.
    But Lee had no intention of letting Flynn get his hands on SL once it was perfected. Millions of vials of the first effective doses were going straight to the People’s Republic of China to be manufactured on an industrial scale and administered systematically to the seven million troops and the forty million reserve troops of the PLA. It would become literally unstoppable. China would be unstoppable.
    When the secret program began seven years before, it had been given the anodyne and generic name of SL for Strategic Leadership. But Lee knew that SL stood for Shen Li.
    Warrior.
    He’d hoped, for symmetry’s sake, that the brain of a warrior would give him and his country the means to conquer the world. It would be fitting. Captain Lucius Ward was one of the best warriors America had ever produced.
    But perhaps it was not to be. Pity.
    He would wait for another day or two for Dr. Young to show up. If she didn’t, he would terminate the Captain and autopsy his brain and move on. The formula was close.
    China’s time was almost here.
    In a few hours he’d be watching test results of a beta version that just might be the right formula. If it worked, he was months away from his goal, a triumphant China.
     
    Mount Blue
     
    “Well, what the fuck do we know about her, besides the fact that she’s smart and enjoys really good tacos?” Nick Ross asked. His dark, hard face was as expressionless as Mac’s own.
    They were in Mac’s study, watching Catherine Young on his 3D monitors.
    “Well, we know she’s a babe,” Jon said cheerfully. “What?” He opened up his hands when Mac and Nick turned to him. “She is a babe. That hair, those eyes, those boobs . . .”
    “Jon . . .” Nick let out a long breath, an attempt at restraint.
    No one would believe that Jon Ryan could be anything but Surfer Dude. Sun-streaked blond hair, laid-back ’tude, a weakness for truly garish Hawaiian shirts and women, he was as lethal as Mac or Nick, but it didn’t show.
    Men instinctively moved out of Mac’s way and out of Nick’s way, but they always underestimated Jon and were always really really sorry afterwards. If they lived long enough to be sorry.
    “She says she’s treating the Captain,” Mac reminded them quietly, and it was like a large, dark stone dropping into a pond. “He’s alive and he’s close, according to her. He’s not sipping tropical drinks in Bali and he’s not living upriver in the Mekong and he’s not in Tajikistan.” Some of their favorite speculations because Lucius was intimately familiar with those places. Like he was intimately familiar with Colombia, Sierra Leone and the more remote islands of Indonesia. If it was tough and remote, Lucius knew it. Their speculations that he might be in Bali with a couple of women and a mansion had been tinged with bitterness because that new deluxe life would have been bought with their lives.
    “Hot or not, we’re going to have to get more intel from her. She’s lying about the Captain but she knows something and we’re going to have to find out what.” Nick’s voice was low. He looked each of them in the eye. “By whatever means possible. Though I wouldn’t advise trying to fuck it out of her. No time for it, not even for you, Jon.”
    Jon breathed out a sigh of regret. None of them was capable of hurting a woman, but Jon had seduced his share of intel out of women.
    Not Mac. Women didn’t fall for Mac. Women didn’t even like looking at him. One look at his face and they either ran screaming or decided he was good for one thing and one thing only—a fuck. After which they were gone.
    Fine by him. He’d been born ugly with big, irregular features. An opponent who’d had a boot knife and slashed his face open with it had scarred one side of his face, and then the Arka fire that had burned the other side of his face had taken care of the rest. Most people flinched when they saw him the first time. They avoided