Predatory Game (38 page)

He and Logan had tried to recover the data on the recorder and hadn’t been successful, but Neil should have been able to do something with it. There were a few GhostWalkers who were very good with sound and Neil should have managed the recovery. Hopefully there was a message waiting from him.

More importantly, for the first time, he had a positive direction in which to take his investigation. The men who had come after him were definitely army. Ryland Miller and his team would want to know. They were conducting the investigation into their handler, General Rainer. Once they all had the same direction, Jess was positive, they’d make progress.

And he had to do something about the bionics. If he couldn’t get his legs moving, he would have to consider the idea of wearing the external pack. Even if he could walk part of the time, he couldn’t ever rely on his legs, so they were useless to him in their current state.

“Jesse.” Saber turned over, her lashes lifting, her gaze meeting his.

“I’m here, baby. Go back to sleep, I’m going to work for a little while. You’re exhausted.” And the bruise on her face stood out starkly against her pale skin. He had discovered a few others on her body as well, one particularly bad one on her hip from where she’d been kicked. Every time he thought about the jeopardy he’d inadvertently placed his sister and Saber in, he felt sick inside.

She pulled the sheet closer around her shoulders and smiled at him. “I love the way you look, Jesse.”

Her voice was so drowsy and sexy, he felt it vibrate through his body, heating his blood, stirring his senses.

“Go to sleep. I’ll come wake you in a few hours.”

“You’d better. I have to go to work tonight.” She yawned and then smiled at him, her lashes already drifting down. “Or my boss might fire me.”

Her boss was already thinking about firing her. He was altogether certain he could not survive her going to work, not after what had been done to Patsy. “A couple of the guys will be over, so don’t come walking out in my shirt and nothing else.”

“Good tip.” Amusement tinged her voice, a slight smile curved her mouth, but she didn’t open her eyes.

Jess left her to sleep, showering and dressing, using his racing chair rather than the heavier electric one to take him into the office. It took twenty minutes for Logan and Neil to show up, and he could tell by their faces Neil had managed to extract something from the recorder.

“You’re going to hate this,” Neil greeted.

Logan glanced around. “Where is she?”

“She?” Jess frowned at him. “You mean Saber? Do you really want to piss me off, Max? Because I just spent a couple of hours looking at the bruises on her face and body. I saw her lying in the fetal position on the ground, from the psychic backlash after firing a gun and killing a man—for me, for Patsy. I wasn’t close enough to draw the energy away and you and I both know without an anchor, even a shield won’t help. She knew it too, but she still did it.”

Logan poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot on the desk. “I’m going to look out for you whether you like it or not.”

“Then let’s get this over. Tell me how she’s different. Eric Lambert has the same objection to her, but he isn’t a GhostWalker. You can kill. I can. All of us do kill. Does it really make a difference how we do it? You have no problems with Mari or Briony.”

Logan sighed. “Mari is a soldier and Briony doesn’t have a mean bone in her body.”

Neil cleared his throat. “What about the other women? Flame and Dahlia?”

Logan swept a hand through his hair. “I know Dahlia. That’s different. To be honest, I didn’t trust her at first. And Flame—she can kill with sound. So yeah, she makes me a little nervous too.”

“
I
can kill with sound,” Neil pointed out.

“It isn’t the same thing.”

“Why?”

“Because women don’t belong in combat. They shouldn’t be running around killing people. They’re supposed to be the gentle sex.
We
take care of
them
. They should be having babies and cooking dinner not killing people. What the hell is going on in the world when we think it’s okay for women to have guns?”

“Flame, Dahlia, and Saber don’t need nor want guns, bro,” Neil pointed out.

“Well that’s just a fucking great relief to me,” Logan snapped.

There was a stunned silence and then both Neil and Jess burst out laughing.

“I suppose they shouldn’t be allowed to vote either,” Neil said.

“Would you like her better if I told you she can cook?” Jess asked.

Logan glared at them. “Go ahead and laugh. It isn’t right.”

“Good God, Max. You’re a fuckin’ male chauvinist,” Jess said.

“So what if I am? What about you? Don’t pretend it doesn’t freak you out just a little that that woman can kill with one touch. What if she’s on her period? You ever see a woman with full-blown PMS? My mom used to lose her mind. I’d go to a friend’s house for a week until she’d call and say it was safe to come home.”

“Okay, I’ve gotta go with Max on that one,” Neil agreed. “Think about it, Jess. The ability to kill with a touch and a woman with PMS. You gotta have some big balls to live with a threat like that.”

Jess let out his breath. “I have to admit, I never thought about it.”

“It could be ugly,” Logan said. “Really ugly.”

“I’ll just have to keep her pregnant.”

“Yeah. That’ll work,” Logan rolled his eyes. “Don’t you watch movies? Ever see a woman in labor? Or having a baby? One hard contraction, my man, and you are toast. The husband’s life is already at risk without the woman knowing how to kill. Seriously, Jess, you’ve got to think about this long and hard, and think with your brain, not with other portions of your anatomy.”

“You’re just trying to scare me,” Jess said, glaring at them.

Logan and Neil burst out laughing.

“Go to hell, both of you.” Jess poured a cup of coffee. “You’re a couple of boneheads. Are we working here or what?”

“I brought this for you.” Neil pulled a disk from his pocket, the smile fading from his face. “I’m going to let you listen. It took a while to clean it up and get the conversation. There’s still some background noise, but I think you’ll recognize a couple of voices.” He pushed the disk into the computer. “I’m saving the original and you’ll see why.”

There was a moment of silence and then the sound of footsteps. “We can’t afford to let any of them live, Senator, not one. I don’t care if they’re out of it or not. You’ve got to shut that program down. The biggest danger to us right now is that megalomaniac, Whitney, and the abominations he creates.” The voice was muffled, and a little distorted, but Neil had managed to amplify the sound enough to catch the words.

“I’m trying.”

“Try harder. Whitney knows about us. He’s going to find a way to bring us down and you’ll go down with the rest of us, Senator. We’ll all be charged with treason and my guess is, some of us will be taken out and shot before we ever go to trial. Do you think the president is going to want anyone to know that we’ve been selling secrets to terrorists and funding them for years on his watch? No one is going to want that information made public. They’ll kill us all, and Whitney’s supersoldiers will be the ones pulling the triggers. The man’s mad as a hatter but they won’t terminate him. We’ve got a few people in key places who feed us information, but it isn’t enough. You have to find a way to take him down.”

“I’m doing my best.” The voice was clearer, as if perhaps he was the one with the voice-activated recorder nearest him.

Jess leaned in to pause the recording. “That’s Senator Ed Freeman. This had to be made before he was shot. Who’s the other man?”

Neil shook his head. “I have no idea. I’ve been trying to match the voice with voice prints I have, but so far, no luck.”

“The senator sounds almost as if he’s afraid.”

“Listen to the rest of it,” Neil suggested and once more activated the sound.

“Whitney’s going to keep going until he’s killed. There’s no other way to stop him. You’ve got to kill all the women in his breeding program—
all
of them. We can’t have them adding to this mess.”

“He doesn’t trust me. I think he’s trying to have me killed.”

“He must know you were instrumental in sending out a couple of his GhostWalkers to the Congo. Get it done. And when I say all the women have to die, I mean
all
of them.”

“Violet is helping us,” the senator hissed.

“She’s the one who told him about Higgens. If she hadn’t tipped him off we would have gotten the bastard then. Instead, Higgens is dead and Whitney is in the wind.”

“She didn’t…”

There was the sound of a knock on a door, hinges creaking, and then more footsteps. Both men went silent instantly. Chairs scraped.

“No, no, keep your seats.”

The recorder went off abruptly. Jess and Logan looked at each other. The tension in the office rose.

“Was that who I thought it was?” Logan asked.

“That was the vice president,” Jess said. “He has a very distinctive voice. He just walked into that room. You don’t think whoever was talking to the senator is in the White House, do you?”

“Could the rot really go that high up?” Logan took a deep breath. “They’re talking about selling out our country from the White House.”

“We’re dead men,” Neil said, “if we don’t find these people.”

“They’re traitors,” Jess snapped. “Fucking traitors and we’re going to find them. Isn’t Higgens the man Ryland had to kill?”

“He must have been part of a much larger ring and we thought we got it, but we didn’t even get the tip of the iceberg. When you’re talking senators and someone working in the White House…”

“Or the Pentagon. The recording could have been made there as well.”

“We know the conversation takes place somewhere the vice president would visit. Neil, can you isolate any background noises?”

“I tried. The recording was damaged. I don’t know who could have put the recorder into Louise’s private safe.”

“The senator’s wife? She’s a GhostWalker. But she also had made some kind of deal with Whitney to save her husband’s life. Whitney put out a hit on him. When she made the deal, she sold out the girls in the breeding program.”

“It was one of Whitney’s soldiers who put a bullet in his head,” Jess confirmed, “although any of us would have been happy to. The senator is responsible for Jack and Ken’s capture and torture. He handed them over to Ekabela in the Congo. Prior to that, Whitney had targeted the senator for assassination using Saber. She escaped instead of carrying out the order.”

Jess took another drink of coffee, his frown deepening as he tried to puzzle it out. “So we’ve got two factions. We have Whitney who is a madman, making weapons for his country and thinking he’s as patriotic as all get out.”

Logan nodded. “And we’ve got some group, small or large—I’m guessing large—selling our secrets to the highest bidder. They’re in top government positions and we know they’re also in the military—at least some of them.”

“The bastards who went after my sister were army,” Jess confirmed. “We need to talk to Ryland Miller as soon as possible and get this information to his team.”

“Whoever was talking to the senator is the one giving orders to the admiral and the general, sending our teams out on suicide runs. It has to be him. We’ve got his voice now. We should be able to nail the bastard,” Neil said. “I’ll keep working to clean it up and see if I can enhance it even more.”

“And try again to get something on the background noises, see if we can maybe figure out exactly where the conversation is taking place, which building,” Logan added.

Neil nodded. “I doubt I’ll get too much more. It wasn’t easy cleaning it and pulling up what I did get.”

“Was there any more of the conversation?”

“Not that wasn’t damaged beyond my abilities to recover. I can ask Flame, she’s a genius with this kind of thing, but I wouldn’t count on getting much more. I think the man must have been standing a distance from the recorder.”

“He couldn’t have known the conversation was being recorded,” Logan said.

Jess snapped his fingers. “But the senator might have. Listen to the things he said. Short answers. Nothing too incriminating. He might have been the one recording it. Violet would be likely to urge him to get some insurance. I don’t know how the senator got involved with them, but I’ll bet he wanted out.”

“Then he tries to bargain with Whitney, an exchange of information—especially if the senator’s wife is targeted to be killed,” Logan filled in. “Whitney didn’t sell out those women, nor was the senator going to rescue them, he was trying to show Whitney what he knew, that he’d keep quiet in exchange.”

“Then why did Whitney have him killed?” Neil asked.

“We don’t know if he’s dead.”

“It was a confirmed head shot. I doubt if he survived, and if he did, he’s a vegetable.”

“Then Violet is going to want revenge. She can’t go home to Whitney and she can’t come to us. She’s out there alone with everyone wanting her dead,” Jess said. “So what’s she going to do? She plants the recorder in Louise’s office, because she’s heard the rumor that I’m conducting some kind of investigation.”

“We’re making a big jump here,” Neil said.

“Maybe,” Jess agreed, “but it fits.”

“Talk about a pissed-off woman,” Logan said. “See, I have a point. She’s a loose cannon and no one knows whose side she’s going to come down on. In the meantime, everyone had better watch their backs. Now you see what I’m talking about with these women. Gun or no, she’s dangerous as hell.”

“At least she’s got good cause, and you ought to be happy, Logan, she was protecting her man,” Jess said.

“Too bad she had the wrong man. What a waste.”

Jess burst out laughing. “You’re such a hypocrite, Logan. You say the women shouldn’t be enhanced, but if they are, you don’t want to share them with anyone.”

Logan shrugged. “I’m a complicated man.”

“You’re a nutcase.”

The smile faded from Jess’s face. “You’re a smart nutcase, Max. Before Saber escaped, she was in Whitney’s office and she found two files out. One was on the senator. She didn’t talk much about it, but when I ask her tonight, I’m going to bet she’ll tell me it documented treasonous acts.”