risk for him.
“We’re done here, son,” the general said and pushed back his chair.
“You would never allow a fellow teammate to go in your place and put his life on the line, possibly blow a mission. You just wouldn’t, sir. Are you really expecting me to do less? I’m a soldier first and always. These men are mine, my family, my friends, my team. You know exactly what that means.” Sam shook his head. “You know I can’t live with myself if someone takes my place and dies.”
The general suddenly looked old. “You’re all we have, Sam,” he said quietly.
“Tucker Addison is not a sacrificial lamb just because he’s not your son,” Sam pointed out. “He’s every bit as valuable to this team as I am. This one is mine. You know I have to go.”
Did he have to be so eloquent? A part of Azami was bursting with pride. She would have done exactly the same thing. He wasn’t about to allow Tucker Addison to take his place and put his life in jeopardy. Sam was a soldier. He wouldn’t hide behind a powerful foster father. She had to be honest with herself. She couldn’t have respected Sam if he hadn’t acted with honor, at least trying to state his case. She loved him all the more for his insistence, even though she was frightened for him. She had no qualms about death; it was merely a part of life. But now she had Sam to lose, and that wasn’t quite so easy to live with.
“You’re wounded, Sam. I can’t, in good conscience, send you out in the field.”
She knew the general was going to capitulate. He wouldn’t have even discussed the issue with Sam, he simply would have given the order firmly and left. No, he was listening and admiring Sam, understanding who and what he was, just as she was-and both of them might lose him.
“I had a couple of second-generation Zenith patches slapped on my wounds immediately and I’m nearly completely healed,” Sam continued in that same low, persuasive tone. “I’m in no way impaired and certain Lily will approve me for work. I know you received the report on the second-generation drug and have read the miracle reports on it.”
Azami’s heart jumped. That was it, the link to Whitney. All along she’d suspected Whitney had tapped into Lily’s private computer, but there was no other evidence of it other than that study on second-generation Zenith. It wasn’t Lily’s compound or computers compromised, it was the general’s. Her mind instantly connected the dots. General Ranier had gone to school with the senior Freeman, Scheffield, and Whitney. He’d been friends with all of them.
She wanted to reach out to Sam with her revelation, but she needed to wait. Ranier had gone into the military and served with distinction, moving him up the ranks fast. He was a brilliant strategist. Whitney would admire him and count on his support. Scheffield had become an advocate of diplomacy. She’d been so wrong about Whitney’s reasons for choosing Sam. Completely, utterly wrong. She’d thought it had something to do with her-with pairing them in some way, but Whitney hadn’t thought about her after he dumped her. She was garbage to him and he’d gotten rid of her.
She let her breath out slowly. There was another reason he chose Sam and that reason was in the war room. General Ranier had remained loyal to the president and his chief of staff. He hadn’t cooperated with Whitney. He hadn’t fed him information nor done his bidding to try to work behind the scenes to forward Whitney’s agenda. Peter Whitney would consider Ranier’s conduct the worst betrayal of all. The general was in charge of a team of GhostWalkers. They were highly skilled, elite men and women with special psychic gifts the rest of the world knew nothing about.
Azami knew Whitney inside and out. She’d made it her mission in life to study everything about him. His genius was undisputed, but there was no doubt in her mind that over the years, too many privileges and his very genius had eaten away at his sanity. Somewhere along the line he’d lost all perspective and believed himself to be omnipotent. Anyone not agreeing with him or siding with him was his enemy. Ranier would be despised for not adhering to Whitney’s code of conduct-complete servitude to him and his ideology.
Sam was not a pawn or a sacrifice; he was Whitney’s hand of justice. Sam would be murdered to punish Ranier. That would make perfect sense to Whitney. He would feel as if Ranier deserved the pain and suffering of losing a child. Sam meant nothing to Whitney. He’d already dismissed him.
Azami took a deep breath and let it out slowly between her teeth, turning her attention back to the war room and Sam. Before she could stop herself, her hand went to the screen, fingers drifting over his face. Her pulse hammered hard in her temples, and her throat threatened to close. Sam, her beloved Sam was nothing more than garbage to Whitney, just as she had been. He didn’t see Sam’s brilliance-or maybe he did and he feared it. Whitney wouldn’t want anyone with an IQ to rival his enormous ego.
For the very first time, it occurred to her that if Whitney could devalue a man like Sam, he made a huge mistake by getting rid of her. Whitney wasn’t quite as smart as he thought he was. One didn’t throw away valuable pieces of experiments to get back at other people. The other mistake he’d clearly made was in not keeping an eye on what happened to her. He had no idea that little useless Thorn was in fact the brilliant Azami Yoshiie and that she was coming after him.
She kept her hand over Sam’s face on the screen as the general replied gruffly, shoving his emotion away with a quick, impatient shrug as he gripped Sam’s shoulder.
“If Ryland wants you on that team, it’s his decision.”
“Transport?” Ryland asked.
“It’s all in there,” General Ranier said, his tone dripping with disgust. “But I wouldn’t trust any of it. Not a single person involved in this. And Ryland, don’t trust your transport out if things go to hell. Not even your escape route.”
“I understand, sir.”
Azami closed her eyes briefly. It was easy enough for the general to
“Be ready to leave at oh-five-hundred. We’ll have an unmarked Learjet standing by to take you. Did you read the directive, Ryland?” General Ranier asked. “They’re questioning why a captain is going into the field with his team on a mission like this. They’d like you to sit this one out.”
“You know the reason, sir. Not all the members of my team are anchors. We’re not like other covert forces and you know that. Some of my men wouldn’t survive without an anchor. Lily’s working with those that aren’t, but the psychic overload is still too much.” His eyes met the general’s. “We count on you to keep them off of us, sir, and allow us to operate in the way that we can. We can’t live with other people, and our unit is tight-knit because it has to be. I think the good we do outweighs any negative. We have never failed in a mission.”
“I’ll keep them off of you,” the general replied, a bulldog expression settling on his face. “And I’ll find out who’s behind these orders.”
“I think we both know who’s behind the order,” Ryland said.
The general shrugged. “I need to find who his puppet is and bring him down.”
Azami smiled with satisfaction. At last. Someone thought the way she did. Cut Whitney off from his power source. He was bound to grow desperate and make a mistake. His ego was far too large to go long without wanting to lead the military and country in the direction he believed it should go.
Azami couldn’t allow Sam to continue to have his foster father under suspicion. They had to find the traitor and cut him off from Whitney. She could at least take care of that problem.
Sam cleared his throat. “Whitney has the study Lily did on second-generation Zenith. We’ve gone over her computer with experts and it’s clean. The only other person who had that information was you. We’ve known for some time that there’s been someone feeding Whitney information, and we suspected that information was coming from your office. He knew too much about our orders, things that could only come from a source close to you.”
