Nothing she was willing to try, either, or tell them about.

If Durgan – or his shadowy boss – was half as smart as he thought he was, he would have a completely different lab team, hand-picked for their ruthless amorality, doing those kinds of experiments. Like the CIA tests back in the sixties, with LSD and things like that. Mind control.

Maybe they were. But she couldn’t do anything about it. All she could do was keep wasting her time running useless tests that she already knew would fail. Burning up time. Hoping her long shot would pay off.

She reached out with her soul, not really believing in anything so…unscientific… but hoping anyway. Daniel, where are you!

***

Daniel watched Vinny at his cyber-research, with his uncle Spooky standing over him. That probably didn’t help much. Zeke eventually said something to the elder Nguyen, so he stalked away to do sneaky Spooky things.

Zeke and Daniel cut back a few bushes that were crowding the cabin, and caught up on personal history. Daniel felt elated but a bit fidgety, waiting on information, like the part between the warning order and the op order, when he knew he had to prepare for something but not for what. Waiting on the intel, which was always the best that could be had but was never as good as you wanted.

Intel specialists. Poor schmucks, usually scrawny googly-eyed nerds with oversized Adam’s apples and way too much trivia packed into their noggins. And the worst thing was, for them, if they provided a perfect assessment, everyone just got on with the mission and no one remembered. If they missed anything, everyone hated them and no one forgot.

He’d rather be an operator any day.

He fidgeted until dinnertime, but a lot less than he would have. He could tell Zeke was a bit awkward around him, acting like he might pop or break or grow another head at any time. He tried to cover it, but Daniel could tell. At the same time he was sure Zeke very much wanted to find out what they needed to know. Desperately wanted to cure Ricky, if it could be done. Probably had other plans, as well. Zeke was a thinker, more than Daniel was, and Daniel never thought of himself as a dumb jock. A smart jock at least, if not a geek like Vinny. But Vinny was too young to think more than one or two steps ahead. Zeke was deep. Dummies don’t get to be senior officers in Special Forces.

They had venison for dinner, along with powdered mashed potatoes, boiled peas, bread and butter. It smelled heavenly. Spooky had brought a deer in, a little buck scrawny from winter, but he cooked up fine. Daniel had no idea if it was deer season or even legal. He laughed to himself. My conscience has worse things to beat me up about right now than a deer out of season.

Over dinner, Vinny laid it out. “INS’s office is in Norfolk, but a few phone calls and some pretexting found out that only two people work there. One office, a front desk, a conference room and a closet. Most of the employees live in Onancock.”

Daniel looked blankly at him. In fact, they all did. He waited for someone to make a vulgar joke about such a funny name.

“It’s a little town up on the peninsula north of Norfolk. Here.” Vinny spun around a map he had printed off, showed them.

“Why there?” Daniel asked.

Vinny smiled, kitty-cream. “I’ll show you. Look over here.” He pointed to the west, off the inner coast of the peninsula, at an island about ten miles off shore from the town of Onancock. There wasn’t even a name printed, but he’d handwritten “WATTS.”

“Watts?”

“Watts Island. Uninhabited for about a hundred years. The INS company bought it from the State of Virginia five years ago for five million dollars. Way overpaid for three acres of usable land and a bunch of wet rocks, but the state didn’t ask too many questions. For that price they got an easement to build a facility and do ‘environmental research.’ Here’s imagery.” He laid down three overhead photos of the little island, with good commercial resolution.

Vinny had marked the facility with a red circle. It looked like a big all-steel building, with two smaller ones of similar design, one at each end offset, with a parking lot between the three. In it was a lone white jeeplike vehicle. The buildings made a kind of ‘C’ shape with the open end to the east. There was a short paved road leading from the parking lot to a pier with a boathouse on the east shore.

On the west side of the complex there was a white ‘H’ in the middle of a cleared circle, the universal symbol for a helicopter landing pad. No helo showed on the photo and there didn’t seem to be a hangar. The only other distinguishing features were some sort of utility installations inside a fence next to the building, probably a pair of generators and what looked like a large and a small satellite dish.

“That’s where they are. I’d bet my next paycheck on it.”

“No deal,” said Zeke. “You make more than I do, and you’re probably right. Great work, Vinny.”

Daniel said so too. Even Spooky looked pleased, which wasn’t something people saw very often.

“So here’s this thing,” Daniel said musingly, “maybe the greatest discovery since fire and the wheel, and it’s all pretty much out in the open to be found.”

“That’s actually the best way to hide something anymore,” said Vinny. “Buried in a mass of innocuous data. I had to dig for this stuff. Without the idea that they had something valuable, they would be just another consulting company among hundreds, sucking down the government cheese and churning out reports nobody reads.”

“The Scarlet Letter,” Daniel said. “Hiding in plain sight.”

“I think you mean the Purloined Letter,” said Zeke. “Unless you think these guys are wearing a mark of shame.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, you never know.” I guess my brain isn’t perfectly healed yet. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

They all looked at the photos for a while, and started familiarizing themselves with the stack of resumes of the employees. No one had formally spoken it into being yet, but they all knew they were going to be planning a rescue operation.

Daniel felt elated, but uneasy. He didn’t want to be put in the position of injuring or possibly killing someone. While he had no problem with killing in self-defense – he’d done it before, to defend his patients or himself – one of the reasons he became a PJ was to get out of the business of assaulting the enemy as his primary mission. It was a fine line, he knew, maybe so fine that some people couldn’t see it, but saving lives is what he wanted, not to take them. But even if they, yea verily, opened the benighted eyes of the poor misguided researchers and consultants, there were six security specialists, probably good Americans all, who would be doing their duty as they saw it by trying to stop him. To kill him, maybe, protecting their people.

And the idea of putting Elise at risk, of her becoming collateral damage, made him positively sick, almost frantic. He had no idea why he was feeling this way, unless it was from the XH. Maybe it’s because she bit me? Like there’s really some biological connection between us now? It made no sense, but he knew how he felt.

The good thing was, as far as he knew, he would be very hard to kill. This might give him some leeway to not kill them, strangely enough. Normally, when it was a matter of a split second, you didn’t hesitate, just put two or three center mass, and if they died, they died, because if you didn’t, they would do the same to you. But now, he could pick a shot. He could take a hit, maybe, especially if he had a Kevlar vest and helmet. He felt confident that wounds to his limbs would take care of themselves, as long as he had food and water and a little bit of time. Elise had recovered from a hideous amount of damage in just a few minutes, though she might have collapsed from starvation if he hadn’t fed her.