Toxic Game (GhostWalkers 15)

“I don’t understand the need to feel powerful, to hold life and death over others. I’m a soldier and I have to kill enemies. That’s a fact of the life I’m in and I do it. I’m good at it. But I certainly don’t think of myself as a god, making decisions like that. Most of the time it’s kill or be killed. Some of the time, it’s save the world, like now,” Draden said.

“Whitney craves power,” Shylah said. “He definitely has the idea that he’s superior to all others and that entitles him to make life-and-death decisions. I imagine the three virologists he hired got sick of him always putting them down. Intellectually, they had to believe they were his equals. I didn’t hear that, Bellisia did. We often practiced hiding in plain sight. She was doing that near their laboratory, and they had taken a break and all of them were very angry with Whitney.”

“Did she overhear that they wanted to create weapons instead of viruses that would specifically target your immune systems?”

She shook her head. “Whitney told me that.”

“Did she report the conversation to Whitney?”

Shylah leveled her gaze on him. “Seriously? It was us against Whitney. We never told him anything unless it got us something we needed. We weren’t protecting them either; they were our enemy. As far as we knew they were the ones coming up with the viruses Whitney planted in us to force us back to him.”

“Were you aware they were working on a hemorrhagic virus?”

“How would I know that? I’m no scientist,” Shylah denied. “I don’t know the first thing about viruses. And, honestly, I don’t want to.”

Draden went still, anger beginning a slow burn through his mind. What the hell had Whitney been thinking, sending her into a mess she couldn’t possibly understand or protect herself adequately from?

“Are you saying you’d never seen the results of the Ebola or Marburg viruses on human beings?”

“We keep up on the latest news. I heard a few years ago when Africa got hit so hard and then when there was a scare in the United States, but that was all until this latest news of the small outbreak in the Congo again.”

He forced himself to breathe. He wanted to strangle Whitney with his bare hands. “Why the hell would Whitney send you into this situation?” Draden was furious. “You aren’t in the least equipped to deal with a hemorrhagic virus, one that could start a pandemic if let loose in a crowded populated area. He had no right to send you, Shylah.”

“I wasn’t sent to deal with the virus. That wasn’t my job.” Her brown eyes didn’t flinch away from his. Almost defiant. No remorse. “I’m a tracker. A very good one.”

“A tracker?” he prompted, but he was certain he knew what it meant. He could track anything or anyone. He had an acute sense of smell and his eyesight was phenomenal. His hearing was exceptional and even when he was running full out, he was aware of everything around him in relationship to him.

“I can track anything. In this case, the three wayward scientists. You save lives, and I take them.”

Draden stared at her in utter shock. It was the last thing he expected her to say. He knew she’d been sent after the three virologists, but it didn’t occur to him that was her regular job. He had thought she was experienced with viruses so she’d drawn the short straw as an assassin. To call herself a tracker meant she was elite. She was Whitney’s assassin. Given her personality, that was insane. She was too compassionate for that kind of work. It wasn’t a façade. He’d been in her mind. He saw how empathetic she was.

“All of Whitney’s creations are assassins, especially the ones he’s been working on lately.” He struggled to make sense of what she was telling him.

“Yes, but the genetic altering he did on me makes me singularly equipped to be the one he sends out when it’s needed. I have more cat DNA than most, specifically tiger.”

Instantly he stiffened. Knowing. Not wanting to know. “What the hell else do you have in you?” He refused to let his mind come up with any possibilities. He kept wiping the slate clean as fast as answers surged in.

“I’m a cocktail of things. I run fast, not like Zara, but where she is superfast, I can go all day.”

He didn’t want to tell her that Zara was no longer superfast. Her feet had been damaged when she’d been tortured, and she would never have that ability again.

“Eyesight, hearing, my ability to smell, all of my senses are heightened. My hair acts the same way a cat’s whiskers do. All that enables me to be very good at hunting prey.”

He had those same traits. Whitney liked to pair females with males. He didn’t want to think the man had paired them, but it was just too much of a coincidence. He turned away from her, looking back at the room. “I think, with what we have to do, those traits will come in handy.” He’d discuss it with her later, but right now, he wanted to put it out of his head. He did so, focusing on the equipment.

“They left in a hurry. Why, I wonder?” He crossed the room to the freezer. A case lay on top of it with the lid open. It was heavily padded with three cutouts in the dense foam. He touched the case. “Have you ever seen this before?”

She nodded. “That’s what Whitney was looking for. He showed me a picture of the outside of it. It acts like a freezer, and they carried the virus out in it.”

“The tube is very, very tiny. Only two spaces in the freezing foam. Assuming they sold one to the MSS, they most likely have the other vial.”

She shook her head and pointed to one of three hazardous waste cans. It was empty other than a single empty ampule.

“They used what they had in one vial while working with it, which meant they had a minuscule amount, but it doesn’t take much at all to wreak havoc. A drop in the air. If they’ve already perfected the virus, then they had to be looking for a way to be immune to it.” He looked around at the various hazard bags he could see into.

“Here’s the computer.” Shylah flipped the switch. “It?

?s powering up.”

He continued to look around the room at the equipment. There was a tiny freezer and refrigerator, Bunsen burner, a variety of graduated pipettes with disposable tips and conical tubes. He paced through the small space looking at everything, trying to re-create what the three virologists were doing out in the middle of a forest. Nitrile gloves, the computer, an electron microscope, glass slides, centrifuge and the all-important hood, which meant they were actively testing the virus. The suits and respirators were next to the wall where a small washing station had been set up.

“We’re up and running,” Shylah reported.

Draden immediately switched his attention to the computer. The notes were right there in plain sight. No passwords, nothing to protect their work. They’d left in such a hurry they hadn’t destroyed anything at all. Again, he didn’t have the answer for why they would do that, but he was going to figure it out. Just not this minute.

He hit up Trap Dawkins, the smartest man he knew, ringing him, uncaring of the distance. Trap answered almost immediately, his face swimming into view. He didn’t say a word but waited until he saw Draden’s face. There was no visible change of expression, but his breath hitched and his eyes lit up.

“Draden. Who did you sell your soul to in order to get online? You doing okay?”

“No signs yet, but I’m fuckin’ tired. I’m sending you all kinds of data in the hopes that you can find me a therapy to counter this thing. I think the three bastards working on it were also working on a vaccine. Their original job with Whitney was to create viruses to infect the girls Whitney needed to keep under his control. Each virus was a designer, threatening a particular woman. He then had an antiserum he could inject into them if the capsule broke open and infected them. They hadn’t perfected the last with this virus, nor had they come up with a vaccine. At least, that’s what it looks like to me.”