Rx Missing (Decorah Security Series, Book #10): A Paranormal Romantic Suspense Novel (10 page)

Lily lay for a moment in the specially designed bed. She could hardly believe she was back in the real world, not after everything that had happened.

Hamilton had told her the stage set called the Mirador Hotel would seem absolutely authentic. She hadn’t quite believed him. She’d expected some kind of barrier between herself and the altered reality. Instead, she had been
there
, right in the middle of everything with all the other hotel guests, like it was the only world that existed. That had never changed during the whole experience, but the rules of the place had shifted in ways she hadn’t expected. Things had started happening that were impossible. Or should be impossible, at least according to the laws of physics.

She gave herself a few moments to adjust to being back in her physical body, then reached up and pulled off the cap that held the electrodes to her head, trying to focus on the task rather than the out-of-kilter experience—or the appealing man she’d been with a few minutes before.

Lord, what a mess. She hadn’t planned on being so attracted to Mack Bradley. For years she’d focused on her work and not her social life. Now she’d finally met a man who made her yearn for all the things she’d denied herself, and she couldn’t have him.

She closed her eyes and clenched her hands and teeth, trying not to think about that.

She’d lied to Mack about a lot of things. She wasn’t a nurse. She was a doctor, a neurocyberneticist, who had taken what had seemed like an exciting job—to give men and women in a coma a chance for a life in a virtual reality by connecting their brain functions to a highly sophisticated computer program. It might not be in this world, but Hamilton had told her they wouldn’t know the difference

Unfortunately, a lot of things weren’t working out the way Dr. Hamilton had told her they would, starting with Jay Douglas’s psychotic break that had caused him to attack her in the hotel lobby.

Okay, she supposed some failures were inevitable when you were dealing with damaged brains, a delicate interface and highly specialized equipment. Apparently Douglas hadn’t been able to take the stress of waking up in a totally unfamiliar environment. Had Hamilton not anticipated something like that—or didn’t he care?

But the screwup with Douglas didn’t explain the other stuff—like the sky changing with impossible speed and the fantasy creatures attacking her and Mack in the woods. Hamilton hadn’t prepared her for any of that. Had he known, or was he going to be as shocked as she was to find out their virtual reality was . . . what? Under attack? Out of control? But how? And why?

When she’d disconnected herself from the machinery that had made it possible for her to enter the virtual environment, she felt a strange sense of loss. She should be glad to be back in the twenty-first century US of A. Glad that she
could
get back here. Yet now reality had a hollow feel.

With one hand on the bed rail, she sat up cautiously. She’d only been in there for a few hours, and the bed had kept her from lying in one position for too long, but she’d better take it slow while she adjusted to her normal body functions.

Where was Hamilton? And what about Mack?

She turned her head, and her insides clenched as she surveyed the rows of beds, each with a sleeping patient. She knew which was Mack. She’d been drawn back to him again and again.

Now she turned away, unable to deal with the difference in the pale, still Mack Bradley who was here and the Mack Bradley who had made love with her.

She had to put that aside—and put aside her own mistake of getting involved with Mack. Right now, she had to find Hamilton and demand to know what he wasn’t telling her.

oOo

Mack was still searching the bedroom when a noise in the suite’s other room made him whirl. Against all odds was she back? Or had someone else come in?

Reaching the area set up like a living-dining room, he stopped short. A cute little girl was sitting at the table, dipping a spoon into a bowl and carrying the contents to her mouth. Her blond hair was caught up in two medium-length ponytails at the sides of her head, and she was wearing a tee shirt with a kitten on the front, jeans and tennis shoes.

She looked up when she saw him and smiled.

“Hi,” she said.

When he was still scrabbling for words, she went on, “This is really good.”

He managed to ask, “What is it?”

“Ice cream. I haven’t had anything this good in . . .” She stopped and took her bottom lip between her teeth. “In a long time,” she finally said in a low voice. “Maybe I could get you some.”

“No thanks,” he answered, wondering where it had come from and where she was going to get more. And at the same time, he was remembering that he hadn’t been particularly hungry since he’d woken up here.

She tipped his head to the side, studying him. “If you’re looking for Lily, you won’t find her.”

“Why not?”

“She’s back in the world.”

He felt a shiver travel over his skin as she confirmed his worst fear. “What does that mean?” he demanded.

“I’m not supposed to say.”

It was a struggle to keep from shouting. “She told you not to say?”

“No. The Preston told me. He says he made. . . special arrangements to bring me here, but I’ll have to leave if I say too much. . .” Her voice trailed off.

Anger and frustration made him want to stride across the room, take her by the shoulders, and shake her. But the look of confusion in her eyes stopped him. She wasn’t being coy. He was pretty sure she didn’t know much more than he did.

He cleared his throat and asked the question that had been circling around in his mind like a top whizzing around on a wooden floor.

“Are you Lily’s sister—Shelly?”

She tipped her head to the side, studying him. “Yes. How did you know? I mean, we never met did we?” The last part sounded doubtful, as though she wasn’t entirely sure.

“She talked about you.”

“Like what did she say?”

“She told me you were in an accident.”

“Uh huh.”

“Did you come here to talk to Lily?”

“Uh huh. The Preston said I should, you know. But I guess I was too late.”

He crossed the room, pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. “The Preston—what is that?

She shrugged. “A guy—I guess. He needs to get out of the woods, but he’s stuck.”

Mack had met a man in the woods—along with a bunch of little warriors and some dangerous animals.

“What does he look like?”

“Ugly.”

“Like how?”

“His head was bald, and he had . . . pictures on his arms. She clasped her hands together. One was a nasty snake. And one was a skull.”

“What else?”

“Big, heavy, black boots. Dirty jeans.”

She was describing the guy Mack had seen standing on the tree branch. The Preston? Maybe that was his name.

“How do you know him?”

“I don’t. He just came and talked to me. I think he’s not very nice.” She stopped, then went on quickly, “But he was nice to bring me here.”

“Why did he do that?”

She squirmed in her chair. “I guess he thinks Lily will do something, if I ask her to.”

“Why?”

“Because she feels bad about my . . . accident.”

Maybe she was telling the truth. Or maybe not. Or maybe she was giving him a child’s interpretation of events. He was sure she didn’t like being questioned.

Dipping her head, she scraped at the ice cream bowl and ate a few more bites.

Was she human? Or was she just a fantasy projection like the creatures in the woods? Only in the form of a little girl instead of monsters.

And for that matter, was Mack Bradley human? Or was he just a figment of someone else’s imagination?

The question made the breath freeze in his chest, and he struggled not to gasp for air.

Could he trust
anything
in this place that was as reliable as a fun-house mirror?

His vision had turned inward, and he didn’t realize the girl was halfway out of her chair until she bolted for the door of the hotel suite. She’d taken Mack by surprise, and he was steps behind her as she leaped into the hall like a forest animal desperate to escape a hunter. He stopped short when he got to the doorway. She wasn’t anywhere in sight. Could she have run fast enough to round a corner? Not unless she’d sprouted jets on her tennis shoes. Of course that could have happened in this place where the rules of physics seemed to have no meaning. Or she could simply have vanished. Again, a tribute to this fantasy-land outpost where it was impossible to know what to expect.

The address of Hamilton Labs was on a narrow road in an isolated area of Montgomery County out past Gaithersburg. As Grant drove slowly by, he took a good look at the three-story building constructed of cement slabs with few windows. He also noted the chain-link fence topped by razor wire and the security cameras at various locations around the exterior of the building. Clearly, whoever ran this place didn’t want surprise visitors.

He turned around in a small woods about a mile past the building and drove by again, noting the location of the exits and the distance of the fence to the building. There were only five cars in the lot, which probably meant there weren’t many people inside at this hour.

After the recon, he stopped by a nearby home improvement warehouse that was still open. Using more of the cash he’d taken from the dead man at the Roosevelt Memorial, he bought a wire cutter and some other equipment before heading back to the lab.

Glad that it was fully dark, he used the wire cutters to snip through a section of fence, then ducked inside and waited for several minutes. When no floodlights came on and no siren sounded, followed by armed men charging in his direction, he bent low as he ran to the closest car. Again he waited before sprinting to another vehicle that was closer to the building. This time, to make sure he hadn’t tripped a silent alarm, he waited for ten minutes with the vehicle blocking him from view while he got some of his supplies out of his knapsack.

He’d taken the thugs at the Roosevelt Memorial by surprise with his ploy of arriving early. He was betting his life he could throw them off-balance again.

Five minutes later, the car was on fire, sending smoke and flames into the air. He hurried away into the darkness, pretty sure that guys who shot one of their own men weren’t going to call in the local fire department for an auto fire on their own turf.

As he’d anticipated, a squad of men came running out with fire extinguishers, some from the main entrance and some from a door at the side of the building.

“Christ, how did that happen?” someone shouted.

“Looks like a diversion,” a hard voice answered. The man speaking was Jack Wilson, who had ordered one of his own operatives cut down.

“A diversion from whom?”

“I’m betting on the brother.”

“How would he find this place?”

“I don’t know. But we’re not taking any chances. Greg and Martin, check the parking lot. Tim and Brad, check the building interior.”

Grant listened, thinking that two guys would be spread pretty thin in there, and the sooner he got inside, the better. Staying in the shadows, he moved toward the side door and slipped inside, weapon in hand. A long hallway lined with offices led to the front of the building. Looking into a few, he saw that some of the rooms were totally empty and others had desks and chairs that could have just been delivered from a rental furniture company, making the first floor look like it was designed to function as a buffer zone between the exterior and the upper floors

At the end of the corridor, he could see a security guard glued to the window, watching the men outside dealing with the burning car. Cole snorted. So much for the guy’s doing his job. Before reaching the front of the building, Grant stepped into a stairway and hurried up, stopping at the door to listen.

When he eased it open, he found himself in another hallway with offices. Moving quietly, he looked in a few doors. Up here some of the offices were clearly in use, with computers and papers on the desks and coffee cups sitting next to some of them.

Still, he encountered no one and climbed the stairs to the next level. At the end of the hall, he came to a large room where he saw a very strange sight.

The place was full of beds. He had a good view of the nearest ones and saw sleeping men and women hooked to machinery. The beds moved, shifting the sleepers from time to time so that they were never lying in one position for long.

A surge of excitement rippled through Grant. Could one of them be his brother? Before he could find out, he saw that there was someone here besides the sleepers, a man dressed like an orderly stood beside one of the beds, massaging the legs of a sleeping man. His back was to Grant who quickly crouched behind one of the beds. The guy stopped, made notations on an electronic notepad he carried, then went on to another patient.

Voices from down the hall alerted Grant that someone was approaching, and he slipped between two of the beds where he hoped he couldn’t be seen from either direction.

A man and a woman walked in, talking intently.

The orderly turned. “Dr. Hamilton. Dr. Wardman.”

“Carry on, Durant,” the man said.

Grant took a quick look. The man was in his fifties, Grant judged, and dressed in dark slacks and a white shirt. She was a pretty young brunette, probably in her thirties, wearing an outfit that looked like a medical scrub suit. She seemed to be in an agitated state, and the man was apparently trying to calm her.

Judging from the name of the lab and the man’s apparently superior status, Grant would guess he was Hamilton—the guy who’d given the facility his name—and she was Wardman. But he could be wrong.

“We were expecting you back earlier,” the one he assumed was Hamilton said.

“I couldn’t get away sooner.”

“And we couldn’t exactly break the neural connection if you were with any of them.”

“Right.”

“Why couldn’t you leave?”

She hesitated. “We had talked about my slipping away after the initial adjustment period, but everybody was nervous. They decided to stick together in the bar, and there wasn’t an opportunity to be alone.” She dragged in a breath before saying. “From their reactions, I think there should have been an orientation session—so the subjects would know what was going on.”

“I wanted to see how they’d react without that information.”

“Badly,” she answered, sounding like she was trying to rein in anger.

“How so?”

“They were worried, frightened and confused.”

“Uh huh.”

His answer made it sound like he wasn’t going to give on that point. Changing the subject, she blurted, “And it wasn’t anything like I expected.”

“Nothing?” the man asked, his voice growing sharp.

“Well, some of it was what we talked about before I went in. The environment was totally detailed, perfectly realistic. Landon did a marvelous job with the setting.” She hesitated.

“What?”

“Well, one of the patients noted that the outside temperature was the same as the inside, which wouldn’t be true in India.”

“Okay. What else?”

“They all noted the lack of hotel staff. Someone asked about the liquor in the bar. If they drank from a bottle, would it be replenished in the morning?”

“I honestly don’t know. We’ll have to ask Landon.”

She went on in a rush. “And what happened to Jay Douglas?”

“How did it appear from your end?”

“I encountered him in the lobby. He was . . .” she stopped and thought. “I’d have to say acting paranoid and hostile. He attacked me.”

Hamilton winced. “But you were okay? No—physical—damage?”

“One of the patients knocked him out.”

“Which one?”

“Mack Bradley.”

When he heard his brother’s name, Grant felt a hot flare like an electric shock inside his chest. She’d said Mack Bradley. His brother. Mack was here. But he was one of the patients? And what did it mean? The patients were lying in these beds, but Wardman had said Mack saved her from an attack. How could he do that if he was a sleeping patient here?

Grant was trying to puzzle that out, but the doctors were talking again—apparently about the guy who had gone nuts. And Grant had better listen for clues.

“His records showed that he was mentally stable before he went in. Apparently the environment was too much for him, and he flipped out—for want of a better way to put it.”

“And now?” the woman pressed.

“We kept close check on everybody. He went absolutely flat on the Glasgow Coma Scale. We could tell something was wrong, and we pulled him out, but we couldn’t save him.”

“What was the terminal event?” she asked, her voice going high at the end of the sentence.

“A cerebral hemorrhage.”

The woman answered with a sound of acknowledgment, then asked, “What about Ben Todd? About his sense of taste?”

“Apparently his taste center sustained damage. He seemed otherwise normal?”

“Yes. He was aggressive. What you’d expect from a lawyer.”

“I want to talk about the anomalies in the environment. Like the clouds you mentioned?”

“Okay.”

Grant raised his head enough to see her again. She looked like she had come into contact with something completely outside her experience. Something she feared and could not explain in rational terms. “And the things in the woods.”

Hamilton kept his speculative gaze fixed on her as though he thought she might be suffering from some kind of mental problem.

Before she could say more, Grant heard a discreet electronic ping.

The man held up his hand for her to stop talking, then pulled a cell phone from a holster on his belt.

“Hamilton,” he said, confirming Grant’s assumption.

He listened for a moment, then said, “That was Wilson. There may be a security breach in the building. I have to go downstairs for a few minutes.”

“Can’t he take care of it?”

“He wants to talk to me in person.” Hamilton turned to the orderly. “Come with me.”

The two men hurried out of the room, leaving Grant alone with the sleepers and the woman.

She stared after the departing figures, then ran a shaky hand through her hair before starting toward one of the beds,

“Just a minute,” Grant said, standing, the gun held down by his leg where she wouldn’t see it yet.

The movement must have startled her, and she whirled, staring at him with a mixture of astonishment and hope.

“Mack? My God, Mack?”