was an opportunity—and an honor—Danny couldn’t possibly pass up. And while Danny knew that the professor had a habit of expressing his opinions more forcefully and vociferously than most, he detected something else in his voice now. There was a hurt, an indignation that he hadn’t heard before.
“What would your reaction have been?” The second man’s voice, which wasn’t familiar to Danny, was equally inflamed.
“The same,” Reece replied emphatically.
“Come on, just think about it for a second. Think about what we can do together. What we can achieve.”
Reece’s fury was unabated. “I can’t help you do this. I can’t be a party to it.”
“Dom, please—”
“No.”
“Think about what we can—”
“No,” Reece interrupted. “Forget it. There’s no way.” The words had an unmistakable finality to them.
A leaden quiet skulked behind the door for a few tense moments, then Danny heard the second man say, “I wish you hadn’t said that.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Reece shot back.
There was no reply.
Then Reece’s voice came back, tinged with a sudden unease. “What about the others? You haven’t told any of them, have you?” An assertion, not a question.
“No.”
“When were you planning on letting them in on your revised mission statement?”
“I wasn’t sure. I had to get your answer first. I was hoping you’d help me win them over. Convince them to be part of this.”
“Well that’s not going to happen,” Reece retorted angrily. “As a matter of fact, I’d like to get them all the hell away from here as soon as possible.”
“I can’t let you do that, Dom.”
The words seemed to freeze Reece in his tracks. “What do you mean, you can’t let me do that?” he said defiantly.
A pregnant silence greeted his question. Danny could just visualize Reece processing it.
“So what are you saying? You’re not going to . . .” Reece’s voice trailed off for a beat, then came back, with the added urgency of a sudden, horrible realization. “Jesus. Have you completely lost your mind?”
The outrage in the old man’s tone froze Danny’s spine.
He heard Reece say, “You son of a bitch,” heard thudding footfalls striding toward him, toward the door, heard the second man call out to Reece, “Dom, don’t,” then heard a third voice say, “Don’t do that, Reece,” a voice Danny knew, a harsh voice, the voice of a man who’d creeped Danny out from the moment he’d first met him: Maddox, the project’s shaven-headed, stone-faced head of security, the one with the missing ear and the star-shaped burn around it, the man he knew was nicknamed “The Bullet” by his equally creepy men. Then he heard Reece say, “Go to hell,” and the door swung open, and Reece was suddenly there, standing before Danny, a surprised look in his eyes. Danny heard a distinctive, metallic double-click, a sound he’d heard in a hundred movies but never in real life, the all-too-familiar sound of a gun slide, and the second man, the man who’d been arguing with Reece all along and who Danny now recognized, turned to the Bullet and yelled, “No—”
—just as a muffled, high-pitched cough echoed from behind Reece, then another, before the scientist jerked forward, his face crunched with pain, his legs giving way as he tumbled onto Danny.
Danny faltered back, the suddenness of it all overwhelming his senses as he struggled to keep Reece from falling to the ground. A warm, sticky feeling seeped down his hands as he struggled to support the stricken man, a thick, dark red liquid gushing out of Reece and soaking Danny’s arms and clothes.
He couldn’t hold him. Reece thudded heavily onto the ground, exposing the inside of the tent, the second man standing there, horrified, frozen in shock, next to the Bullet, who had a gun in his hand. Its muzzle was now leveled straight at Danny.
Danny dived to one side as a couple of shots cleaved through the air he’d been occupying, then he just tore off, running away from the tent and the fallen professor as fast as he could.
He was a dozen yards or so away when he dared glance back and saw Maddox emerging from the tent, radio in one hand, the gun in the other, his eyes locking onto the receding Danny like lasers as he bolted after him. With his heart in his throat, Danny sprinted through the temporary campsite—there were a few smaller tents, for the handful of other scientists who, like him, had been recruited for the project. He almost slammed into two of them, top minds from