seemed to be limping. He almost called her back but Ian cleared his throat.
“This guy burned off his fingerprints. No ID on him at all, Gator. What the hell is going on here?”
Gator let out his breath. What was going on? Was it possible Flame was right and Whitney was still alive? No one had seen the body. Only Lily claimed he was dead. Would she lie to protect her father?
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.”
“Not if he wants to see us working with the women. If Whitney is alive and he’s conducting secret experiments by putting us into other positions using the women, that changes everything. We didn’t volunteer for that and that makes us…“ He trailed off, unable to actually voice the word without bile rising in his throat. “Damn that son of a bitch, Ian.”
“I’m not a damn victim, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Ian responded, his brilliant green eyes suddenly going flat and hard.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m getting at. Do you think we feel superior to Lily, Dahlia, Flame, and the others because we made the choice? We volunteered for psychic enhancement. Do we pity them?”
Ian opened his mouth, then snapped it shut again. “I wouldn’t say superior. But the pity might be true. Although how anyone can pity Flame is beyond me. She’s beautiful and she’s lethal. And sexy as hell.”
“Thanks. You don’t ever need to be saying that again. Or thinking it.” Gator let his breath out slowly. “We didn’t agree to physical enhancement and as cool as it has been, it also means we could get cancer just like Flame. For all I know the son of a bitch could have targeted us just like he did her. Once he realized gene enhancement could stimulate a mutant cell, he deliberately caused the mutation in order to figure out how to beat it. So he gave Flame cancer and then put her into remission a couple of times just as if she were a lab rat. Who’s to say he hasn’t done that to us?”
Ian swore softly. “Cancer? Is that for real, Gator?”
Yeah, it’s for real. Lily thinks it may recur in Flame. Whitney used viruses as the vector for the enhancement. Sometimes the enhancement stimulated a cell that it shouldn’t have been messed with and there you go. Cancer. Of course Lily explains it all a lot better, but it boils down to the fact that Whitney deliberately used Flame for medical research.”
“What about children?” Ian asked. “How do we know we’re not going to pass something on to them?”
“Exactly. Lily says the gene doping shouldn’t be on, but she’s worried.”
“She’s worried that he deliberately experimented at on the women to see if he could,” Ian guessed. “Because the question would occur to him as well. And knowing Whitney, he wouldn’t be satisfied until he had the answer.”
“And that means the women had to grow up and find a partner,” Gator said “If Whitney conducted some other kind of experiment to match us all up, he’d be in a great position to get his answers.”
“If he were still alive,” Ian added.
“Exactly. If he’s still alive.” Gator shoved a hand through his dark hair. “That sniper was too well trained to be a civilian like the others. I swear, Flame’s theory is beginning to make more sense than I want to admit.”
“How’d Flame get away from Whitney if she wasn’t adopted out? And when? How long did he have her?”
Gator shook his head. “She hasn’t confided in me yet. She thinks Whitney sent me to bring her back.”
