Free Heart of Danger by Lisa Marie Rice Page A

boundaries, none. He could feel his heartbeat—slow, steady—and hers—light, hammering, almost frantic. He was inside his own skin and inside hers.
    It was crazy. Was he drugged after all? He hadn’t felt the prick of a needle, but maybe there’d been some kind of contact patch . . .
    Her soft voice continued, her eyes a light hypnotic silver. “You’re worried that I’m a danger to you. That somehow your enemies have found you and that I am their representative. I don’t know how to convince you that who sent me was no enemy of yours. And that I don’t represent any danger to you or . . .” She tilted her head slightly, watching him. “Or to your men.” Suddenly, she whipped her head around, hair whirling out from her head, then falling back onto her shoulders. “They’re watching us. Listening. Ready to come in to save you if I put you in danger. And yet”—she lifted her hand—“the danger doesn’t come from me.”
    It all stopped. Dead. And it was like being dead. Where before there had been emotions swirling, bright and warm, heat and light, almost like a carnival going on inside him, now inside it was still and silent. Like a light switch being thrown. A switch that turned him off.
    She was still watching him steadily, sadness and knowledge in her silvery gaze.
    “I’m not anything you should fear, Mr. McEnroe. Or should I call you Mac?”

Chapter Four
    Arka Pharmaceuticals Headquarters
San Francisco
     
    The room was dark, the computer monitor bright. It was 9 A.M. Zulu time and Sierra Leone time. Though it was a chilly January evening in Northern California, in Sierra Leone it was a hot day.
    Lee looked down like God at images Flynn’s company, Orion Enterprises, piggybacked off Keyhole 18. Flynn himself was in the fancy company headquarters building in Alexandria, Virginia. Today, SL-58 was being field-tested. Orion had administered 50 cc’s of SL-58 to each operative, the dose calibrated to last at least forty-eight hours. Well over the time it should take them to make their way from the diamond mine in the hinterland of hell to hell’s own port, Freetown.
    The mine was very rich, the path to market incredibly dangerous. There were not one but two rebel armies camped out in the jungle, marauders living off terrified villagers and hijacked convoys. So far, one convoy in three made it intact to Freetown. A 66 percent loss was unacceptable, even for the richest diamond mine in the world.
    The Amsterdam-based diamond consortium had hired Orion to provide security for the diamonds and Flynn had promised the moon to the consortium in exchange for a million dollars a trip. Considering the haul on each trip was worth roughly five hundred million dollars once the diamonds were cut and set, the consortium had agreed. But Orion had one chance. If this convoy went the way of the others, it could kiss the contract goodbye.
    Lee wasn’t interested in diamonds or even the money, though he would get a substantial bonus if this convoy and successive convoys were successful. The bonus would help him speed up his plans.
    This was a trial run in another sense, too. A state-controlled Chinese mining company had found a huge deposit of iridium, the largest in the world, in Burundi. No one else knew of the deposit.
    With access to plentiful iridium, China was guaranteed to be the world leader in microchips for the next two decades. The mine was even deeper in the hinterland, in the no-man’s-land where artificial lines on maps meant nothing.
    If SL-58 turned out to be successful for Orion, it could be administered early to the Chinese troops who would set up a convoy to take the mined iridium east to the Indian Ocean, then by ship to China.
    Lee’s main monitor had shown the Orion convoy starting out at first light. Two Unimogs in front and two more at the rear guarding the central security truck carrying a titanium vault with 5 kilograms of uncut diamonds.
    Since the nuking of the Orapa diamond mine in