Page 10 of Hawk on the Hunt

He nodded. “You made it.” Ace stepped aside. “Come in. The rest of the gang is eager to meet you.”

Still keeping his guard up, Dylan entered and glanced around the large foyer with the sweeping staircase leading to the second floor. Despite its size, the house gave off a homey feel. He inhaled. Maybe it was the smell of coffee and something freshly baked that gave him this feeling of being in somebody’s home, rather than a sterile office or medical facility.

“Nice place,” he commented, while Ace ushered him across the hallway to a door that was ajar.

“Thanks.” Ace held the door open wider.

Dylan looked inside, noticing the dark grey walls first, before he cast his gaze over the desks and computer monitors, where several people worked. He entered, and Ace followed him. When the door closed behind them, the three men turned their heads in his direction.

“Hey guys, this is Hawk,” Ace introduced him, before he pointed to one after the other. “This is Fox, our computer genius.”

He nodded at Fox, who did indeed look a little geeky.

“That’s Tiger,” Ace continued, and pointed to a tall black man, who’d jumped up from his chair. He looked lean, and his movements were graceful like those of a cat.

“And that’s Yankee.”

The last man Ace introduced was a man who looked like he could be at home on any catwalk or model photoshoot. He wasn’t just handsome; he was stunningly good looking like a movie star or a supermodel.

“Hey, guys, nice to meet you all,” Dylan said, and the three men greeted him in return.

Then Dylan turned back to Ace. “So, where do we start?”

“I figured we’d fill you in on what we know so far.” Ace motioned to the others, and everybody walked to the oval table in the middle of the room, taking their seats.

Fox brought a laptop with him, and put it down on the table, tapped on a few keys, and a large monitor on the wall across from the table flickered briefly before showing a desktop. Dylan hadn’t even noticed that a monitor was mounted on the wall. It had blended in perfectly with the grey paint.

Everybody sat down, and Dylan took a seat between Ace and Fox.

“Let’s bring you up to speed,” Ace started. “Fox, the photos of the MRI machine.”

Fox typed something on his laptop, and the screen showed images of large medical equipment.

“Looks like a fucking big MRI machine,” Dylan commented.

“That’s because it’s really something else.” Ace turned his face to him. “We know that our enemy is trying to create a quantum computer, and the data he’s feeding it comes from brain scans of agents who have precognitive skills like us. By feeding the quantum computer whatever is in our brains that causes our premonitions, he’s creating a machine that will be able to predict the future with amazing accuracy.”

“How amazing?” Dylan asked, his eyebrows rising.

“99 percent,” Fox interjected.

Dylan blew out a breath. “Something tells me that’s not good news.”

“Nope,” Ace said. “It would give our enemy unimaginable power.”

“How is he doing this? I mean, get brain scans. I’m assuming nobody’s volunteering…”

“You’ve got that right,” Tiger answered, looking across the table at him. He pointed to the image on the monitor. “That machine scans the brain. But it’s so powerful that once it’s scanned everything there is, it leaves your brain like mush. Your brain doesn’t survive it. They got the jump on me. I was already strapped into that machine, and I would have died—” He motioned to the other agents. “—had these guys not shown up in time to save me.”

“Fuck,” Dylan ground out.

“Yeah,” Ace said. “Tiger was lucky. But Smith and Jones already have the data from several of our agents. River and Echo for certain. We’ve confirmed that they’re both dead. We believe there may have been even more.”

“Smith and Jones? Who are they?”

The image on the wall changed. Dylan looked at the picture of a man in his mid to late fifties.

“That’s Smith, as he likes to call himself, though we now know that his real name is John Bancroft. He’s the one who runs the operation, hires assassins, scientists, and strong men who do the dirty work. But we know that he’s not the head of the operation.”