Heart of Danger Read Online Free PDF Page A

She had truly beautiful eyes. A light gray, rimmed with a circle of darker gray, surrounded by amazingly long, thick eyelashes. Possibly even her own, since she didn’t seem to be wearing makeup.
    Shit. What was the matter with him? Letting himself be distracted by pretty eyes during an interrogation that might have life-or-death consequences. Lack of sex wasn’t an excuse. There wasn’t any excuse. He forced himself to focus.
    She just stared at him. Her face was soft, open, vulnerable. Much as Mac wanted to read operational awareness and craft in her expression, he simply wasn’t seeing it. Everything he’d ever learned about interrogation techniques was signaling something impossible. Either she was very, very good—better than anyone he’d ever come across—or the woman wasn’t lying. Was no threat to him.
    Except . . . she’d come looking for him in a snowstorm. For him specifically.
    Of course she was a fucking threat.
    “Dr. Young?”
    She started slightly, as if she’d gone into a trance. There were white brackets around her mouth and her nostrils were pinched. She’d driven up a mountain in a snowstorm and had nearly gone into hypothermia. She’d be exhausted. Now that he thought of it, he looked for signs of exhaustion and found them. She was swaying lightly in her chair as if sitting up straight took effort.
    Mac had a thin membrane on his left forearm which was a keypad. He pulled up the sleeve of his sweater and typed under the table— bring food and something hot to drink in 30 min —and nearly smiled at the treat awaiting this woman, who didn’t deserve it.
    They had the best chef in the world here in Haven.
    He lifted his hands up from under the table and gestured impatiently.
    “What about this Number Nine? Who was he?”
    “Number Nine was a large man, fifty-three years of age, according to his file, though he looked much older. Dementia patients often look ten, even twenty years older than they are. They are incapable of looking after themselves and age rapidly. Number Nine’s files said he was a business executive who had worked for a succession of companies, the turnover being extremely rapid in the previous four years. This is consistent with a diagnosis of a dementing disorder. He’d be hired on the basis of his track record, then the company would discover he wasn’t up to the job. And then soon, of course, the track record was one of failure. Divorced, no children. His medical plan didn’t cover a shelter home. He enrolled himself in the program, while he was still capable of signing documents. Everything was normal, if anything about these patients can be considered normal.”
    Her eyes flicked to a pitcher and she cleared her throat. “May I have a glass of water?”
    He poured her a glass and she drank, that long white throat bobbing. When Mac realized he was avidly watching her drink, he turned his gaze away.
    Christ.
    “Thank you.” She put the glass down and smiled at him. He didn’t smile back. It wasn’t a smiling kind of situation. But as smiles went, hers was a thousand on a scale of one to ten. Slightly shy, warm. Creating a tiny dimple on her left cheek.
    Oh, fuck me. Get back on track.
    “So something about this guy—this Number Nine—didn’t add up?”
    “There was something about him, yes, that was unusual. We have developed a semiportable functional MRI and we use it to track changes in the patients’ brain scans. Seeing what stimulates various parts of the brain, particularly under the drug protocol.
    “Dementia has many origins. Sometimes it is a series of mini strokes that choke off oxygen to sections of the brain, making them essentially dead tissue. Alzheimer’s is the result of plaque that tangles the synpases, exactly as if the brain gums up. All of these have distinct fMRI signatures. Number Nine had something else altogether. The brain scan of this patient made no sense to me. His brain was damaged in a completely new way. The clinical