Conspiracy Game (GhostWalkers, #4)(34)

Kadan tapped his finger on the map. “Ekabela is on the move. He isn’t going to take any chances with Jack. What the hell was that senator thinking, flying over the Congo in the no-fly zone? And what was some hotshot military scientist doing in a region as hot as the Congo?”

“That’s just the thing,” Dr. Lily Whitney-Miller said. She stepped out of the corner where she’d been observing the GhostWalker team as they met together for the briefing. “The small jet that was shot down in the Congo is the same plane that landed at the airport outside of New Orleans when Dahlia’s home was attacked.”

“What’s even more interesting,” Ryland said, “is that Ekabela didn’t kill the pilot or the scientific team. And when Ken Norton’s squad went into the Congo to rescue the senator, Ekabela was waiting for him.”

Kadan held up his hand. “You think Ekabela was tipped off that the GhostWalker team was conducting a rescue? How would that be possible?”

Ryland nodded. “I’m sure of it. Ken was able to get the senator, the research team, and the pilot out. Why would Ekabela keep the pilot alive? He wasn’t worth anything at all.”

“Of more significance,” Lily added, “the plane went down with supposed engine trouble, yet no one was injured, and Ekabela didn’t have the pilot and research team tortured and killed as he normally does with anyone not of monetary or political use to him. The rebels were waiting to ambush the rescue team. Even with that, the GhostWalkers were able to pull out the senator, and everyone else, although in the process, Ken Norton was captured. Ekabela didn’t waste any time torturing Ken.”

“Even of more significance is the fact that the rebels went for Ken—singled him out. That’s how he was cut off,” Logan Maxwell added. He was the only member of the SEAL GhostWalker squad present. Ken and Jack Norton were both members of his team. “They were waiting for him. I was there. They could have fought to keep their prisoners, but they were more interested in acquiring Ken.”

“Specifically Ken? Not just any GhostWalker?” Lily asked.

“Specifically Ken,” Logan reiterated. There was sudden silence in the briefing room. Members of the GhostWalker team sank into chairs around the table. “Who could have tipped Ekabela off?”

“I don’t know how much you know about Dr. Whitney’s original experiment, when he first began to use human subjects for physical and psychic enhancement,” Lily said to Logan.

“Jesse informed us, ma’am,” Logan Maxwell admitted. “We know he took orphans from overseas, all girls, and enhanced them first. After perfecting his technique, he enhanced the first team.” He gestured around the room to encompass the men and women. “And then ours.”

“Everyone, including me, believed my father, Dr. Whitney, was murdered. We no longer are certain that’s true. We suspect not only that he is alive, but that he has enhanced his own personal army and is conducting experiments with the sanction of someone in the military and someone very high up in the government. We believe there is a conspiracy to engineer the perfect human weapons and that conspiracy involves my father, perhaps the senator you rescued, and definitely members of the military and/or other covert government agencies.”

Logan looked around him. “This place is a fortress. How could Whitney, or anyone else, get ahold of your plans? Or our plans, for that matter. It was my team that came up with the plan to rescue first the senator and, then again, Ken Norton. They were waiting for us when we went in after Ken. Jack provided covering fire, took a hit, and went down. He signaled us to get out of there, and frankly, if we hadn’t, we’d all be dead. Ekabela wasn’t playing games; he wanted us dead. And they wanted Jack. We’ve tried twice to rescue him or recover his body, but they’re moving camps so fast our information is always hours late. General Ekabela definitely tried to kill all of us, and he’s had traps in every camp we’ve hit. Fortunately we’ve managed to avoid them.”

“Which just reinforces the idea that Ekabela should have killed everyone but the senator. So why didn’t he?” Ryland asked.

“We’ve known all along that all of the computers we use here at the house and at the Donovans Corporation belonged to my father. Most of the software programs were either written or modified by him. The datastores use a proprietary, encrypted format. There’s no way to even access data except by using the program he wrote—although the raw data could be manually transferred from his programs to another by pulling it up on the terminal and transcribing it into another terminal… but that wouldn’t get you whatever evaluation formulas were written into his software codes. Obviously if he were alive, and had planned to disappear but wanted to see what we were doing, he would have left himself a back door to monitor the computers. There are fifteen computers here in this house, counting mine, the ones in the lab, and the ones in his office, as well as his personal one in his room. There are over a hundred at the Donovans Corporation, where both of us worked. Dad was the majority shareholder and now Whitney Trust is.”

“And you need his data so you can’t very well wipe everything clean, can you?” Logan asked.

“Exactly.” Lily tapped the end of her pencil on the tabletop. “If someone could access our computers, they would know every move we make. And they could certainly make educated guesses based on data collected on any given move we make.” She glanced at the woman sitting quietly in the back of the room. “Flame brought it to our attention and we all owe her a lot. We’ve been working on the natural assumption that my father planted back doors in the software programs. We assumed he used the main Internet connection.”