Deadly Silence (Blood Brothers #1)(49)

“Saying all this is true, how did you get free?” Heath asked.

“I didn’t. I went on a mission, failed, and Madison left me on my own overseas. Said I could get back myself or just die.” Greg hunched into himself. “I made it back, but the place was already destroyed. I have to find my brothers.”

“How many brothers do you have?” Heath asked, kicking back in his chair when his vibe was anything but relaxed.

“Three.” Greg’s voice cracked.

Are your brothers also looking for you?” Ryker asked. If they’d set up searches on the Internet, he may be able to create a trap for them to find and then he could backtrack and locate them.

“No.” Greg swallowed.

“Why not?” Heath asked softly.

The kid breathed out. “They think I’m dead.”





Chapter





17




Dr. Isobel Madison leaned over the desk, her perfectly manicured nails clicking rhythmically across the keyboard. She had more traps set on the Internet than Lewis and Clark could’ve dreamed about, but her prey, unfortunately, was as brilliant as she’d made her traps. So far, she’d been unable to find the men she sought.

But they wouldn’t be able to hide from her forever.

They were hers and hers only. Oh, she’d shared other creations with her one true love, the commander, and he’d trained them, but the Lost boys from the home were all hers. She missed them, truth be told.

The air-conditioning kicked on in her small office, and she stopped typing. “I thought you had that fixed,” she said, turning away from the computer.

Todd Polk looked up from the stack of papers in his hands. At about fifty years old, the survivalist was getting a little soft around the middle and would soon outgrow his usefulness. Isobel had convinced him to shave his buzz cut a month previous, and now he looked more the part of a soldier, at least. His jaw was square, and his eyes were blue and rather blank. But he had a fighting force, and that she needed.

She smiled at the man who’d get her what she wanted, and then she’d throw him away. “It’s November, darling. We live in Colorado, and it’s snowing outside.” For the love of all that was holy. “The A/C?”

He nodded, his gaze dropping to her chest. “I’ll take care of it.”

Good. “You do take such good care of me.” She allowed her voice to lower to a purr even as her mind went elsewhere.

His eyes flared. “My soldiers are getting restless. We need to make a strike or conduct a mission soon.”

A mission. How silly. The home-trained militia wouldn’t know a true mission if it rode in on prized ponies and whinnied a bit while spitting caviar.

For the moment, she needed the survivalist, and it was almost too easy to manipulate him. “There’s a lab in Denver conducting experiments dealing with stem cell research. If your men would like to blow up the facility, that would make a statement.” Not that his cause interested her in the slightest.

Todd rubbed his smoothly shaven jaw. “How did you find that out?”

“I hacked their systems,” she said smoothly. It had taken less than five minutes, actually. While Todd’s pseudo-military group had a nice cache of weapons, they lacked computer resources. For now, she needed their might, not their brains. “Our Protect group must continue the mission and purify this land, right?”

“Of course.” He studied her. As the leader of the Protect group, he felt it his duty to end all scientific genetic experimentation and purify the world, especially the men she’d created in test tubes to be…more. “Though that’s not your only mission, is it?”

Sometimes he seemed smarter than he looked. “You know I want to find the anomalies I helped to create and set things right.” Her life’s work had been to create supersoldiers, super beings, in labs and see how they functioned in the world.

“By ending them?”

“Of course,” she lied. Only a couple of the men she’d created in test tubes and helped train through the years needed to die. The rest could go back to working for her and being studied by her. It was time for the next generation to be born and trained. She might not be God, but she was damn close, and she needed their genetic material to keep her experiments going. “As soon as I find the men we made, you can take them all out.” She wondered if she’d have to kill him. While she’d ordered deaths, she’d never actually killed anybody personally.

“What about the three boys you told me about? The murderers?” Todd asked.

She glanced back at her computer. “I’ve been trying to find them for years, as has the sheriff from that town. At some point they’ll make a mistake.”

“You’ll let me kill them?”

She forced a smile. “Of course. I’m with you to atone for my mistakes, as you know. I believe in your mission, Todd.” The second she no longer needed his forces, she’d forget he ever existed. After she found her boys and got back to work. The boys from the home had been created with different genetic material, mostly, than her other experiments. Maybe they could have children, and she needed their genetic material to find out.

It was time for the next generation to be tested. Someday she’d have the perfect soldier.