Deadly Game Page 14

  And that's already happening to me. That's why the leg keeps bleeding and now I'm getting nosebleeds. A frisson of fear crept down her spine. She could deal with anything if she knew what was happening. She would not panic. Why would he continue to give us the drug if he knew it would kill us?

  The pad of Ken's thumb brushed back and forth over her wrist. Blood began to run in a tube from his arm to hers. If you're captured and can't get to him, you die. It's another protection in place for him. If you come back, he administers an antidote and no one is the wiser. If someone comes back late, he either saves them where no one can see or that person simply disappears. He wins any way you look at it. All of us are disposable.

  I'll bet Lily isn't. Mari studied the face of the doctor's daughter. She wore a look of total determination. No one was that good of an actress. Lily Whitney was totally focused on saving Mari's life.

  Has he talked about her lately?

  No one gets that close to him--well--other than Sean. Sean's a supersoldier, and Whitney keeps him around as a bodyguard.

  There was that name again. Sean. Ken often caught glimpses of Sean in Mari's mind. More than that, there was respect--admiration even. His gut twisted into hard knots at the mention of the man, and something dark and shadowy swirled in his brain.

  Could I really die?

  He brought her knuckles to his lips wanting to comfort her, not wanting to answer her, or think about the possibilities. She sounded forlorn, and vulnerable. His heart reacted with a strange shifting. There was more blood at the corner of her mouth. Ken ignored the way air rushed from his lungs, leaving him fighting to breathe. He refused to panic if Mari wasn't. Lily would save her because there was no other choice.

  If something happens to me, tell Briony I thought of her every day--that her happiness mattered more to me than anything else. Even in his mind, her voice sounded faraway, paper thin, as if she struggled to breathe, to live.

  Ken went still, holding her hand tightly against his lips. Her skin was soft, even along the scar that split his lip. "You aren't going to die, Mari. We won't let that happen." He said the words aloud because he wanted Lily to hear. He struggled to keep his voice even, calm, without a threat, when he knew he meant it as a threat--when everyone in the room knew it was a threat. His heart pounded in terror. He couldn't lose her this way. He wouldn't let Whitney win this battle. Mari had to live.

  Lily put her hand briefly on his shoulder. "It's okay, Ken. I understand."

  Maybe she understood, but he didn't. He felt torn in two. Mari was virtually a stranger, yet he felt as if he knew her intimately. He had known the GhostWalkers for some time, many of them for years, but it was Mari he wanted to protect, Mari he needed to know was safe and alive and well somewhere in the world--even if it couldn't be with him.

  "How could he do this?" Ken bit out the question before he could stop himself, glaring at Lily, a sudden flash of anger shaking him.

  Ryland, Lily's husband, frowned, straightening slowly from where he was bent over Ken's arm, making certain blood was flowing smoothly from one patient to the other. There was a certain threat in his manner.

  Lily shook her head slightly to warn her husband not to interfere. "I don't know, Ken. I've asked myself that question a million times. They say the line between genius and insanity is too fine to measure. And he's deteriorating every day."

  "Why do you say he's deteriorating?"

  "He's been hacking into our computers right from the day he disappeared. Flame found a way to get a program into his computer so we can spy on him. From his notations I can see that his mental state is slipping more and more with each new project. He's so far from reality, I can't even begin to guess what he might do next. I have no idea how we're going to stop him."

  There was utter weariness in her voice. Lines of worry edged her young face. Her eyes held sorrow--too much sorrow and responsibility for a woman her age. Ken reached out to touch Lily's hand. "I do." He said it with conviction, wanting her to believe him, wanting to ease her suffering.

  Mari caught his arm and tugged, the gesture weak but insistent. He turned his head toward her. She was glaring at him.

  What's wrong?

  She blinked, her expression changing to one of confusion. I don't know. I didn't like that--you touching her--which is totally absurd. You were only comforting her, and her husband is right there, so it makes no sense to feel upset about it. She sounded puzzled and unguarded and suddenly very fragile.

  Alarm spread through his body. Ken wanted to gather her into his arms and hold her tight, afraid of losing her. The life was already draining out of her. Blood trickled from her mouth and nose. I'm here, Mari, right beside you. I'll get you through this.

  I know you will. She tried to smile at him, but her eyes closed and she went limp.

  "Damn it! I need more time. Jack, get over here," Lily ordered. "We didn't get enough of the antidote in."

  "Talk to me, Lily," Ken snapped. "Tell me what's happening."

  "She's crashing!" Lily's voice was tight. "Jack!"

  Jack straddled Mari and began CPR while Lily grabbed a syringe with a very long and wicked-looking needle from the surgical tray.

  "Open her shirt, Jack," Lily instructed. She sounded calm and controlled.

  She took Jack's place, sitting on top of Mari, driving the needle through the chest wall straight into the heart to administer the stimulant.

  Ken's stomach lurched. For a moment there was silence. He heard the ticking of a clock. Lily's breath. Someone shuffling their feet. Beside him, Mari wheezed, drawing in a hard lungful of air, her eyes flying open, terror on her face, her hand gripping his wrist as if her life depended on the contact, and then she went limp again.

  Lily bent over her, feeling for her pulse, listening to her heart. "She's back. Get the antidote in her and as much blood as we can. We may need you before this thing is over, Jack."

  While she worked on Mari, Lily kept glancing at Ken. "You said you thought you had a way to stop him. As long as he's allowed to keep up his experiments, none of us are safe. Do you really have a plan?"

  "I can control people's actions with my mind," Ken said, his gaze shifting toward his brother to catch the look of shock he knew would be there. Don't admit you can do the same thing. You have Briony and the babies to think about.

  "That's not possible." Lily stepped back, shaking her head, looking at him with sudden fear in her eyes. "He can't have managed to find a way to do that."

  "You knew he was trying?" Ryland asked his wife gently. He reached for her, drew her into his arms, and held her, tenderness evident on his face as he tried to comfort her. Cleaning up after her father was taking a terrible toll.

  "Of course. That would be the ultimate triumph, wouldn't it?" She pulled away from her husband to go back to working on Mari, although her face was very pale. "There were many arguments on the subject. My father believed mind control was possible and could be used for a multitude of purposes. He tried to sell the idea that mind control could be used to make foreign leaders see the light, even on troublesome teens when their parents couldn't get them to cooperate."

  "You argued often with him about it, or someone else did?" Ken asked.

  "I argued against it, but actually, a couple of his friends were adamant that he shouldn't try to develop mind control. Jacob Abrams often argued against it. I think he was worried about my father having control of that kind of power. People would literally be puppets in his control. No one would be able to stand against him. Jacob didn't like the idea at all, and they would often get into a really heated argument if the subject came up. I was terrified he might actually find a way to do it."

  "He didn't. I had the ability naturally and developed it myself."

  She frowned at Ken. "When did you know you could do that?"

  He shrugged and reached over, trying to look casual as he pulled the edges of Mari's shirt closed. He hated her being exposed to everyone. "I've been able to do it as long as I can remembe
r. When I was a kid I used it mostly on teachers and foster parents, but my control wasn't all that reliable." He grimaced. "Eventually I was able to gain control over it, although it requires complete concentration and if used for a prolonged length of time, or for an intricate task, I'm left completely incapacitated. Also I can't use it on more than one person at a time, or anything really significant, without huge repercussions. I can get guards to look the other way, but all of us have that ability to influence. Real mind control leaves me useless for hours."

  "Why isn't it in your file? You didn't test out for that ability."

  "I figured it best to hold some things back. Put it in my file now as if you've just discovered it. I'm sure Whitney's very interested in both Jack and me right now, and he won't be able to resist looking if he sees you've been pulling us up on the computer. You said he monitors your work, but doesn't realize you're aware of it," Ken said. His knuckles lingered along the swell of Mari's breast as he held the shirt closed. "Put it in there how you've studied both of us and how it's strange that I'm capable of mind control but Jack's not, and you need to further evaluate us. We can figure out a place for him to grab me, without endangering anyone else."

  "No." Jack said the single word in a low tone that spoke volumes. "I won't let you set yourself up so this bastard can grab you. It's not happening, Ken."

  "We can trap him, Jack. He'll come out into the open for me."

  "Lily, don't listen to him," Jack cautioned. "He's a little nutty right now. Meeting Mari has shaken him up and he's in martyr mode. I'm not allowing it, and anyone trying to help him is going to be in trouble."

  Lily continued to work on Mari, wiping her face with a cold cloth, adding another bag of the yellow liquid, and checking the amount of blood Ken had given her. Seeing that Ken couldn't let go of Mari's shirt, she tugged up a thin sheet to add to her patient's privacy while Logan removed the needle from Ken's arm.

  Ken sat up and let his feet drop to the floor.

  "Sit there for a minute and let Ryland get you some juice," Lily cautioned. Her gaze slid to Jack. "You don't need to threaten me, Jack. I have no intention of ever handing anyone over to my father. Whatever Ken's reasons, and I'm certain he has them, nothing is worth that."

  "We can find him," Ken insisted. "Right now he's in the shadows. He's got all kinds of protection, layers of coverage we can't break through. His security clearance raises red flags every time we try to hunt him using a computer. If we go through the admiral or the general, they get the same runaround. Someone very high up is protecting him. The only chance we're ever going to have to stop him is to get him out in the open."

  "And then what, Ken?" Lily asked. "What do you think is going to happen? If we take him prisoner, whoever is protecting him will simply step in and take him away from us."

  There was a small silence. Lily looked from Ken to Jack and then to her husband. She shook her head. "You want to use me to draw my father out into the open so you can kill him? Is that your big plan?"

  "Actually no, Lily," Ken replied. "I was planning on using myself as the bait to draw your father out into the open so we could eliminate him."

  "By eliminate you mean kill," she persisted.

  "What do you think we should do with him? Hand him back over to his friends so they can pat him on the back and give him a bigger budget for his experiments?"

  Lily glared at him. "I've done everything I can to help all of you, but I'm not about to lure him to you so you can kill him. I won't." She backed away from the bed and glared up at her husband. "Not that--not for any of you. No matter what he's done, he's still my father. I want to get him help." Even as she said it, she pressed a hand to her rounded belly and shook her head. It was clear she knew what had to be done; she just couldn't accept it yet.

  Ryland held out his hand to her. "There is no us or them, Lily. There is only we. We're all in this together. We're GhostWalkers; we're what your father made us and we stick together. We can only trust each other. That's it. We can't even trust the men who send us out on missions."

  Lily opened her mouth to protest, and then closed it again. It was well known that her family had been very close with General Ranier, the man in charge of the special ops team Ryland Miller was responsible for. Whitney and Ranier had been good friends. Lily had grown up practically in Ranier's house. He too had believed Peter Whitney had been murdered, and he seemed to be on the side of the GhostWalkers.

  "Someone attempted to have General Ranier murdered," Lily pointed out. "He isn't part of all this."

  "His wife wasn't in the house, Lily," Ryland said gently, "and you and I both know she is almost always there. Odd coincidence."

  "You don't trust the general, Ryland? We've had dinner at his house several times. How can you sit at his table and at the same time suspect him of conspiring with my father to do these horrible things?"

  "What horrible things, Lily?" Jack asked. "Peter Whitney has worked for the government in one capacity or another for years. He's got the highest security clearance, has provided weapons and defense systems as well as drugs and genetic enhancement far before the rest of the world even knew it existed. He's been invaluable. He came up with an idea for supersoldiers, enhancing both physical and psychic abilities, and he has provided both of those things. As far as the people he answers to are concerned, Whitney has delivered."

  Ryland nodded. "Colonel Higgens tried to highjack his program and sell the information to other countries, and he was stopped. If Whitney told his people he needed to fake his own murder and disappear, well, it was one more sacrifice for his country. Ranier would view it that way. He would fake grief, promise to look after you, assume command of all of us, and be thankful a man such as Peter Whitney existed in the world."

  Lily leaned against the bed as if her legs couldn't hold her up. "Why didn't you tell me this before? You've mentioned it in passing, but no one ever has just come right out and explained why you believe it is a possibility. Put like that, there's every possibility, because that makes my father look a hero, rather than a traitor."

  Jack glanced at Ken. Lily is a brilliant woman when it comes to academics, but she's so blind when it comes to people. It was a small warning to keep Ken's anger from boiling over. She's struggling to accept that Whitney needs to die, but she needs more time. The pregnancy also probably makes her more emotional when it comes to her father.

  When the hell did you get so smart? Ken demanded.

  I've been reading all the pregnancy books. Jack sounded a little smug.

  "He isn't selling his work to a foreign country. He turns over his work to the government, and as long as no one knows how he got his results, they're all happy," Jack said aloud. "They don't want to know how he does it, only that he gets the job done. And Whitney has a track record of providing results."

  "We can screw all that up by exposing him, and that means exposing the government, at least a very elite group of men in the know," Ken said, trying to gentle his voice when he really wanted to yell at her.

  "The president?" Lily asked.

  "Probably not. My guess is he knows he has supersoldiers and a few special ops teams called GhostWalkers, but I doubt he knows anything more than how we can be used," Ken added. "Someone goes before the committee and gets funding for some of these projects. He has to report the results and sugarcoat it so Whitney's extremes are never brought to the light. I'll bet the breeding program is called something altogether different. The president and the committee of senators are certainly not going to approve anything with the word breeding in it."

  "Everything we do is classified," Ryland said. "No one knows we do it, and no one is going to admit it. If we take out a drug lord in Colombia, or tip the scales of power in the Congo, the last thing the government wants is for anyone to know we were there. There's the entire point of having us. GhostWalkers don't exist."

  "So why are we being pitted against one another?" Jack asked. "Why was Mari's team told about the assassination attempt when ou
r team was already on it? You know the admiral is talking to the general, and whoever is giving orders to Whitney's team has to know what we're doing at all times. How else was Mari's team tracking her?"

  "The other thing I think we're going to have to accept," Ken said, "is that Whitney has his own team, men reported dead, men who have, like us, gone through the School of Warfare, special ops training, and had plenty of experience. Whitney tested their psychic abilities and profiled them, just as he did all of us. Something in their profiles appealed to him, so he set out collecting his own little army of supersoldiers. Jack and I ran into them when he sent them after Briony. Jack recognized one of them from when he tested. He was supposedly killed in Colombia right after a mission he went on with Jack."

  Lily frowned at them. "What would be different about those soldiers?"

  Ryland and Ken exchanged a long look. There was a small silence. Lily straightened. "Don't keep me in the dark. I know my father has lost his grip on reality. I know something has to be done about him. I need to know all the facts."

  Ryland stroked a caress down her hair. "The fact is, some soldiers enjoy killing. It doesn't much matter whether it's a soldier or civilian, they like the rush having the power over life or death gives them. We think he's collected a few of them, enhanced both their psychic and physical powers, and now he uses them for his own end. He has to be sinking into paranoia at this point, Lily."

  "So you think he has soldiers no one knows about for his own personal use as well as a team considered black ops that he can command when orders come down."

  "Yes, that's exactly what we think," Ryland said.

  "Where do Mari and the other women come in?"

  "They were originally, from childhood, educated and trained as soldiers. He needed them to continue his experiments as well as have women he could study who hadn't been raised in families," Ken said. "When he decided it was too difficult to hook the women up with the men he had intended to pair them with . . ."