Lightning Game (GhostWalkers #17) -Christine Feehan Page 0,84

trail, but so far in and covered over that it was long forgotten. No cars or bicycles ever used it and hadn’t for years. That suited Gunthrie just fine. Edward and Rory Sawyer had just mentioned that Gunthrie had even encouraged plants to cover the road further so that it had completely disappeared. According to them, there was no evidence of it off the main road.

Gunthrie had lost his wife six years earlier. They’d never had children. Neighbors moved away and he’d been forgotten. He didn’t drive. He walked everywhere he went, even for supplies. A recluse, he had few manners, was gruff and surly to everyone, even those at the grocery store. He mainly trapped and fished for his food and had his own garden.

Rubin and Diego visited with him on their way when they were leaving the mountains, checking to make sure he was still alive. They joked he would live forever. When they would talk with him, he would squat down in a crouch and give them his faint grin, remaining in that position for hours. He had no idea how old he was, but he was strangely ageless, with thick white hair that never seemed to thin. Rubin was suddenly very afraid for him.

Behind his shack, which was made up mostly of corrugated tin, and an outhouse stretched a long, inviting meadow. With a little work, one might be able to smooth it out, and if you had a good pilot, you could land a small plane in it.

“Gunthrie’s place,” Rubin guessed, a sense of dread filling him. The man might be old and strange, but he didn’t deserve to be murdered at the hands of a bunch of strangers.

Diego nodded his head and the two began to set a fast, steady pace, not running, but a pace they could keep up for hours.

Tell me everything you learned from squirrel man, Rubin encouraged. Even as they moved fast through the forest, they maintained a ten-foot distance apart, barely disturbing the limbs or bushes as they hurried past.

This scientist, a man by the name of Oliver Chandler, who Whitney hired to develop weapons, began to study Whitney’s advanced Ghost-Walker experiments. Chandler had access to Whitney’s private notes because he would visit Whitney’s laboratories to see the experiments on a regular basis. Whitney would discuss GhostWalkers with him and the failures of the female soldiers. In particular, he discussed Jonquille. She was a little girl at the time, but Whitney wanted to use lightning as a weapon. Oliver wanted his own GhostWalker team.

Rubin leapt over a particularly large downed tree trunk. Several rabbits ran in all directions, startled by his sudden presence. Are you telling me this Chandler managed to make supersoldiers for himself better than Whitney?

Whitney makes us for his country, Diego reminded. He gives his best to his country. He continues experimenting with those he considers flawed. Oliver didn’t necessarily recruit these men from a flawed genetic pool.

Rubin let that process. Diego was right. Whitney might be insane, but he was a patriot. Everything he did, he did with the idea he was making his soldiers and his country safer. Like the girls he pulled from orphanages, the “flawed” soldiers were expendable, so Whitney performed all kinds of experiments on them. Apparently Oliver Chandler wanted superb GhostWalker soldiers for his own use.

Was Chandler just as capable as Whitney of performing the same surgeries? Enhancing psychic ability? Adding to the DNA sequencing? That’s extremely precise surgery. Not everyone can do it. I wouldn’t think that someone Whitney hired as a specialist in developing weapons would be a surgeon capable of what Whitney does.

He brought in a team from India, very advanced in this kind of thing. According to what squirrel man—and how did you start calling him that?—told me, that team was beyond excited with what little Chandler dangled in front of them to get them to come. They enhanced thirty-one soldiers. Seven died on the table. Twenty-four survived. Of those twenty-four, fifteen are in relatively good shape. Nine are … expendable. The soldiers don’t consider one another expendable. Chandler considers them that way. The one I was interrogating was one of the expendable ones.

Relatively good shape? Rubin echoed. They looked in good enough shape to me.

They continued through the forest, rushing around trees and leaping over smaller bushes, ducking low-hanging branches but never slowing their pace. They had been running for at least two hours when a low hoot came off to Rubin’s left. A great