Night Game (GhostWalkers, #3)(54)

When he was certain Flame was out of earshot, Gator turned to Ian. “There may be something to Flame’s suspicions. I couldn’t even hear him breathe, Ian. You know I can hear just about anything.”

“You think he was one of us? One of the other team?” Ian asked.

Gator shrugged. “I have no idea. Is there the slightest chance Peter Whitney is still alive?”

Ian swallowed his first instinctive answer and thought about it. “How the hell would I know? There was no body. He disappeared and Lily told Rye she connected with him as he was being murdered. I suppose it’s possible.”

“Do you think Lily would help him disappear?”

Ian scratched his head. “No. No way. She’s torn up over the things he did. If he’s alive, she doesn’t know it.”

Gator frowned. “Lily’s psychic, Ian. How could he fool her? She ‘saw’ his death.”

Ian shrugged his massive shoulders. “Whitney was on the cutting edge of experimentation. No one knew more about psychic enhancement than he did. He experimented on children, on us and on at least one other team we know of. What’s to say he didn’t do a few experiments on himself?”

“Why? Why would he just disappear?”

“Higgens wanted him dead. The service was bound to be closing in on him. Most of his experiments were illegal. Even his money wasn’t going to keep him out of harm’s way. What better way to get out of it than to ‘die’? He had more money than he knew what to do with. It wouldn’t have been that difficult to bleed off a few million to a secret account and establish another residence and lab outside the States.”

“Flame thinks he’s alive. She even thinks this might have been some kind of field operation to see how we work together.”

Ian’s eyebrow shot up.

Gator nodded his head. “Flame, Iris, has this idea that Peter Whitney is alive and directing everything from be hind the scenes. I thought she was crazy at first, but now little things are bothering me. For one, I’m so damned attracted to her I can’t think straight. It isn’t just lust or emotional, it’s a powerful combination of both and it borders on obsession. When I’m with her, I would do almost anything to have her, and I feel like killing any man who comes near her. That isn’t me, Ian, and I don’t trust it. She doesn’t trust it. She feels the same way and she thinks Whitney managed to pair us somehow.”

“That’s a little far-fetched, don’t you think? How could he do something like that?” Ian stepped away from Gator, putting a small distance between them in an unconscious effort to deny what he was saying.

“Is it? I’m acting out of character. Even more, out of training. I knew she was dangerous, but led her straight back to my house. To my family. Wyatt and Nonny. To you. Why would I do that when every instinct I possess would lead me to do just the opposite? I make illogical decisions around her. Why? Because I have to see her. The need is as strong as any drug. Look at Ryland and Lily and Nico and Dahlia, It’s the same with them. And if that isn’t enough our psychic gifts complement each other. My psychic talent matches hers. I can even amplify her. As a weapon, the two of us are probably unstoppable in an environment where we could destroy a large number of targets with no risk to civilians. Flame thinks Whitney did that on purpose and now he’s sitting back testing us.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know what the hell to think. There was a military sniper in this group—one with a very questionable background. He didn’t belong with the others, he was light-years ahead of them in training. None of them carried IDs. His fingerprints are burned off. That’s a hell of lot of trouble to go to just to kill a retired riverboat captain.” He cocked his head to one side, listening. “The helicopter is on the way. Who do we trust, Ian?”

“Each other. Just the way it’s always been.”

“Do we warn the others? We don’t have any facts, just pure conjecture.”

“It really doesn’t matter if this was a field operation or whether it was something altogether different,” Ian said. The others need to know there’s a possibility Whitney is still alive.”

“Then they ought to know we were physically enhanced as well as psychically.”

Ian nodded. “I suspected as much. I didn’t think being able to see through walls was going to help me jump over them. The physical enhancement just seemed a bonus.”

“He infected Flame with cancer more than once when she was a child. Enhancement can sometimes produce cancer and he wanted to find ways to avoid that. She was used as his lab rat. And Ian…“ Gator waited until his friend looked at him. “She was never adopted out any more than Dahlia was. She says if any of the girls were, it was only one or two of them, which means Whitney planted false stories for Lily to find. Lily is very suspicious already.”

Ian whistled. “It never occurred to me that Peter Whitney might be alive.”

“Do you realize what that would mean? He’s yanking on our strings. Setting us up. Still using us for experiments, only this time we don’t know it.”

“We’re in the service, Gator. It isn’t like we don’t expect to conduct field operations. It’s why we agreed to the enhancement in the first place. We all thought we’d cut down on casualties and better serve our country. He could just have someone following us on assignment and document what we do. Going to this kind of trouble seems overkill.”