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taco. But not just any taco, oh no. Maybe it was extreme hunger, but the tastes were incredible. Stone-ground cornmeal shell, fresh tomatoes, perfectly cooked spicy meat . . . even the lettuce was delicious. The best homemade guacamole she’d ever tasted. A baked potato with fresh clotted cream and freshly chopped chives. A salad of tasty red tomatoes drizzled with extra virgin olive oil. A huge slice of the best peach pie she’d ever tasted, so good she nearly laughed aloud as she brought the fork to her mouth.
    A pitcher of absolutely fresh juice. She could taste apples and carrots and a touch of lemon. It went down her parched throat like a dream and it was like being in a garden on a summer’s day.
    Oh man, if they were going to kill her at least they were serving her the best last meal ever.

Chapter Three
    Arka Pharmaceuticals Headquarters
San Francisco
     
    His private cell buzzed. Dr. Charles Lee, head of research, frowned. It was late and he was expecting the results of the Africa trial. Nobody should be calling at this late hour. He checked the number, set the phone in its dock and pressed the icon for hologram. The shaved bullet head of his chief of security at the Millon lab, Cal Baring, appeared in 3D. Baring was scowling ferociously, but then he usually did.
    “Yes, Baring?” Lee continued scrolling through research data. Though one’s instinct was to address a hologram because it was so lifelike, it wasn’t necessary. “What is it?”
    “It’s about Dr. Young, sir.”
    That caught Lee’s attention. He looked up from the screen, frowning. “What about her?”
    Dr. Catherine Young was crucial to the Warrior program. She was a brilliant researcher. If she were in Germany she’d be Frau Doktor Doktor—a double Ph.D. in biology and neuroscience, and an M.D.
    Though incredibly smart in terms of scientific research, she also seemed to be clueless in terms of the broader picture, focusing narrowly on the dementing patients they sent to her, not questioning how they got that way, which was perfect.
    Unlike Roger Bryson in the Cambridge lab. His questions had become irritating, then dangerous. He deserved to die in the fire, he had become much too curious and insistent.
    The ironic thing was that he really had come up with a cancer vaccine, the formula for which was now safely in a vault in the Ministry of Science in Beijing. A canister of the active vaccine had been removed from the Cambridge lab just before the Ghost Ops strike and taken to Beijing by diplomatic pouch. All the members of the Politburo had been vaccinated.
    Later, when the world was theirs for the taking, the vaccine would be offered to all ethnic Chinese.
    Lee had been born Cheng Li thirty-eight years ago on the outskirts of Beijing. His father was a doctor but he wanted to secure a future for his only son so they immigrated to San Francisco with his paternal grandfather when Lee was seven. His father’s medical degree wasn’t recognized so he drove a taxi.
    Stupid man. His father had died old before his time having done menial labor for thirty years, for what? So Lee could become an American.
    He became an American, all right. In a city like San Francisco with its fusion population, he fit right in. He learned perfect English, played basketball in high school, liked jazz, went to Stanford on a scholarship. His parents were ecstatic. But his yéyé, his grandfather, a noted scholar who had unwillingly followed his son to America, made sure Lee kept his Mandarin up, made sure his calligraphy was perfect, filled his head with tales of the once-powerful Middle Kingdom.
    Lee’s father was too busy, too tired to notice or even to care that his son was faking loving the American dream. Because he was. By the time he was seventeen, already a sophomore neurobiology student at Stanford, he realized the enormous mistake his father had made. Because America was the past and China was the future.
    His sophomore year, the OECD officially