Toxic Game (GhostWalkers #15) - Christine Feehan Page 0,29

show it to you. You’ll be able to see it from the roof of this cabin. That’s why I was so excited to find a ranger cabin here. They put their makeshift lab where they did because it gave them access to the Internet via satellite. Don’t get too excited. They had already developed the virus in the laboratory Whitney supplied for them. Whitney became aware of what they were doing, and they had to make a run for it.”

He nearly came up off the bed. He could communicate with Trap and Wyatt directly. “I want you to show me their lab.” He knew Joe would never abandon him and sooner or later a satellite would be put in place for him to communicate, but if there was one already there, he needed to speed things up. The faster the military—and Trap and Wyatt—had data, the more the odds lengthened in their favor.

“Are you going in your towel? Don’t be crazy, Draden, you’re going to have to pace yourself. You really are injured. I’ll fix some food, and then you rest. Your clothes will be dry, and we can go. Give it a couple of hours.”

Draden was used to going his own way. His team consisted of a group of mavericks. They were cohesive when they needed to be, but their strength was their individual thinking. Many of their enhancements enabled them to do their jobs better alone than in a group. The idea had been that the GhostWalkers easily could do teamwork or perform alone. It was clear Shylah had those same skills because she worked seamlessly with him yet could strike out on her own.

“That makes sense,” he conceded, mostly because there was worry in her voice. He hadn’t experienced that in a very long time, but he hated losing a single minute. His head needed to stop pounding, and he was exhausted. If he closed his eyes for a couple of hours, it couldn’t hurt anything. “Talk to me while you fix food,” he ordered. “Tell me about these men.”

“Two are brothers, Tyler and Cameron Williams. They’re from the United States. Mississippi to be exact. The third man, Agus Orucov, is from Sumatra. They met in college and became friends. Whitney recruited them with the promise of big money. Their purpose, as far as I could make out, was solely to develop the viruses that would kill each of us.”

Draden was never surprised that like-minded people always found one another. He’d learned that lesson at a very early age. He slid down on the bed and closed his eyes against the morning light, all the better to concentrate on the magic of her voice. He found her soothing. She reminded him of Wyatt’s grandmother, Grace Fontenot. She was no-nonsense, but still all woman with that ability to nurture that he seemed to have been born without.

“I’m listening.”

She pulled out a cooking pot and went to the gas stove. It was hooked up to a large canister the rangers must truck in after the rainy season when a vehicle could get back in the area. Within minutes, the aroma of food was tantalizing. He hadn’t realized he was hungry.

“I don’t know what went wrong between them. Maybe Whitney wasn’t paying them what they thought they were worth or something else. It wouldn’t surprise me, the way they argued, that it had to do with money. In any event, the three virologists wanted to go in a different direction with the viruses than what Whitney wanted. At least that’s what he claimed. Whitney could very well have decided he wanted a weapon once they’d created it. Or he could have had them working on it all along. Who knows? He always had them develop an antiserum to what he put inside us …”

“Wait.” Draden’s eyes flew open and he waited until she half spun around to look at him. “Shylah, there has to be a therapy, antibodies that work against it. They wouldn’t have worked on a virus like this one in what amounts to primitive conditions unless they believed they were immune.”

She frowned and shook her head. “They definitely developed the virus in Whitney’s lab, but they weren’t completely finished or why have a lab here? More, Whitney was convinced they hadn’t come up with a vaccine or antiserum.”

“Could it be this is where they were trying to develop the therapies to counter it? Or the vaccine?”

She stared down into the small cooking pot, seeming mesmerized by stirring