Toxic Game (GhostWalkers 15)

Draden was used to going his own way. His team consisted of a group of mavericks. They were cohesive when they needed to be, but their strength was their individual thinking. Many of their enhancements enabled them to do their jobs better alone than in a group. The idea had been that the GhostWalkers easily could do teamwork or perform alone. It was clear Shylah had those same skills because she worked seamlessly with him yet could strike out on her own.

“That makes sense,” he conceded, mostly because there was worry in her voice. He hadn’t experienced that in a very long time, but he hated losing a single minute. His head needed to stop pounding, and he was exhausted. If he closed his eyes for a couple of hours, it couldn’t hurt anything. “Talk to me while you fix food,” he ordered. “Tell me about these men.”

“Two are brothers, Tyler and Cameron Williams. They’re from the United States. Mississippi to be exact. The third man, Agus Orucov, is from Sumatra. They met in college and became friends. Whitney recruited them with the promise of big money. Their purpose, as far as I could make out, was solely to develop the viruses that would kill each of us.”

Draden was never surprised that like-minded people always found one another. He’d learned that lesson at a very early age. He slid down on the bed and closed his eyes against the morning light, all the better to concentrate on the magic of her voice. He found her soothing. She reminded him of Wyatt’s grandmother, Grace Fontenot. She was no-nonsense, but still all woman with that ability to nurture that he seemed to have been born without.

“I’m listening.”

She pulled out a cooking pot and went to the gas stove. It was hooked up to a large canister the rangers must truck in after the rainy season when a vehicle could get back in the area. Within minutes, the aroma of food was tantalizing. He hadn’t realized he was hungry.

“I don’t know what went wrong between them. Maybe Whitney wasn’t paying them what they thought they were worth or something else. It wouldn’t surprise me, the way they argued, that it had to do with money. In any event, the three virologists wanted to go in a different direction with the viruses than what Whitney wanted. At least that’s what he claimed. Whitney could very well have decided he wanted a weapon once they’d created it. Or he could have had them working on it all along. Who knows? He always had them develop an antiserum to what he put inside us …”

“Wait.” Draden’s eyes flew open and he waited until she half spun around to look at him. “Shylah, there has to be a therapy, antibodies that work against it. They wouldn’t have worked on a virus like this one in what amounts to primitive conditions unless they believed they were immune.”

She frowned and shook her head. “They definitely developed the virus in Whitney’s lab, but they weren’t completely finished or why have a lab here? More, Whitney was convinced they hadn’t come up with a vaccine or antiserum.”

“Could it be this is where they were trying to develop the therapies to counter it? Or the vaccine?”

She stared down into the small cooking pot, seeming mesmerized by stirring the contents. “They’re brilliant men or Whitney never would have recruited them,” she finally said. “Which means you’ve got to be right. They would have come up with a vaccine or some sort of protection before they took a chance of testing the virus or releasing it. I haven’t been inside the lab, but I looked through the windows.”

For some reason that got to him. He didn’t know too many women who would trudge through a forest filled with exotic and rare, but dangerous animals, with terrorists close, hunting three men to assassinate them. His body stirred at the thought of her courage. She took his breath away. It was a cliché, but so damned true he could barely think with wanting her.

“I’m not much of a lab person. I wasn’t schooled to work with viruses, so I stayed out of the hut. I didn’t want to tip them off that I had found them.”

“Can you describe what’s inside?”

“I definitely saw a couple of computers, a Bunsen burner. Microscope. There was a small freezer and fridge. A hood. None of the elaborate safety features that were in the laboratory in the compound.”

“I need to go there. If they have a computer, they definitely are using a satellite.”

“We have it here intermittently.” She turned toward him, spoon in the air. “Why would they feel they had to test it on the village?”

“I can’t imagine wiping out an entire village of people, so I don’t have an answer for you.”

She turned back to her cooking. “I’ve been trying to puzzle that out. Do you have any ideas? Especially that village. At first, I thought it was because it was remote enough to contain the virus, but even the choices of the first two fishermen found dead made no sense … unless—” She broke off completely, paying attention to the mixture in the cooking pot.

“Unless what?” he prompted. He liked that she gave the questions thought. That she actually saw the mysteries and worked at solving them.

“The three of them were furious with Whitney. What is the one thing above all else he holds as his greatest accomplishment?”

He frowned, sitting up straighter. “The GhostWalker program.”

“Exactly. Whitney defied humanity by getting female orphans and conducting experiments on them. He knew if those experiments came to light he would be forever branded among the worst mad scientists of all time, but he did it because he believes that strongly in his Ghost-Walker program. Suppose this is all about revenge. The three of them despise Whitney, but along the way, they must have had personal demons, men or women who wronged them in some way.”

Draden took a deep breath and let it out slowly, turning over and over what she’d said. For once, the pounding in his head receded as he considered that she might be right. “If that’s the case, why use the MSS?”

“Money. Whitney has friends in high places. His first retaliation would be to freeze their bank accounts. They would need money to operate. Sell the virus but have them use it on the village of Orucov’s choice. He probably used it on the individuals himself. If Orucov had ties to Lupa Suku, we’re on the right track. I can use the satellite to get the information from Whitney.”

He didn’t want help from Whitney, not in any way, but this virus was too dangerous to worry about where information came from. “We can’t waste time, Shylah. If this is about vengeance and not money, we’re going to have to move fast. The three are already gone. That means they could be anywhere.”

“We can’t move anywhere, Draden.” Her voice was soothing.

He felt her touch his mind, and instantly there was the flow of information between them. She was looking to see if he intended trying to follow the three into a populated area. If he was she intended to stop him.

She flushed, color creeping up her neck to her face. “I’m sorry.” She ducked her head.

He flashed her a grin. “I told you I was falling in love with you, and I wasn’t far off the mark. You’re extraordinary. Don’t feel bad because you want to protect the population, sweetheart. I was, with regret, thinking the same way.”

She divided the food into two bowls. He didn’t ask what it was, but it smelled edible.

“I guess that makes us a pair of serial killers,” she teased and brought his bowl to him.

He kept his head down. As serial killers went, he could have been labeled one. He wished he had more remorse for those he’d killed, but he didn’t. They were in his sights for a reason. Anyone able to annihilate an entire village of peaceful people didn’t deserve to share the earth with others. But then some would say he didn’t have the right to judge.

“That bother you?”

“What?” She perched on the end of the bed rather than at the small table that she’d been using as a desk.

“Don’t pretend you weren’t in my head. That I think that way. That I don’t let the deaths of men like that tear me up at night.”

“It doesn’t tear me up, so why should I judge you more harshly than I do myself? I wasn’t

sent here to talk them into going home to Daddy. I was sent to kill them. I might cry over the people in that village, I might even obsess over them, but you won’t catch me crying over the deaths of the ones who orchestrated that.”

Draden shook his head. “Why the hell did it take me this long to find you?”

She sent him a small smile and indicated the bowl he held. “You won’t be singing that same tune when you taste that. It’s calories and it contains all the vitamins you need, but Whitney didn’t believe tasting good was a prerequisite for food in the field.”

He studied the expression on her face, but more importantly, he stayed connected to her, reading the sorrow for the villagers in her mind. She didn’t compartmentalize the way he did. He could feel anger. Rage even. Ice-cold fury. But he could push the sight of them aside. He could look at them as something other than fellow human beings, mainly because he wasn’t certain he looked at himself as a human being. It was clear his little peony couldn’t do that.

There was kindness in her and compassion. Two characteristics he didn’t have. Or at least, not in abundance. He was the perfect killing machine. He didn’t need to feel bad. Once unleashed, set on a course, he followed it until it was done. He knew why he was wiping out the MSS. To him, it wasn’t political. He wasn’t a political man.

The MSS had murdered an entire village of their own people. Those people had been peaceful, doing their best to live on their own, not asking anything of anyone. He didn’t care why the MSS had targeted them or what the overall agenda was. The terrorists had committed an atrocity against humanity and had to be stopped because they would continue to do so. That was a good enough reason to wipe them out, and he didn’t give a damn whether others agreed with him or not.

Then along came his little peony.

“Stop it. Stop calling me that. And don’t think of me as that.” She gave him the most adorable little frown.

“Peony?”

“It sounds awful.”