Deadly Game (GhostWalkers, #5)(46)

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.