Ghostwalker 02 - Mind Game

black-haired child on the screen. “What else do you have on her, Lily?”

    “I’ve found more tapes. These are of a young woman being given advanced training as some kind of field operative. I’m convinced it’s Dahlia. My father’s code is different in these books, and the subject under training is referred to as Novelty White . I didn’t understand it at first, but my father called each of the missing girls he experimented on by the name of a flower. Dahlia is often referred to as a novelty. I think he interchanges the name Dahlia with Novelty in these experiments. These tapes cover preteen and teen years.
    She’s an exceptional young woman, high IQ, very talented, tremendous psychic ability, but the tapes are difficult to watch because she is wide open to assault from the outside world and no one has taught her how to protect herself.”

    “How could she possibly exist in the outside world without being taught shields?” one of the men sitting in the shadows asked. Lily turned her head to look at him, sighing as she did so. Nicolas Trevane always seemed to be in the shadows, and he was one of the GhostWalkers who made her nervous. He sat in such stillness he seemed to blend in with his surroundings, yet when he went into action, he exploded, moving so fast he seemed to blur. For part of his childhood he was raised on a reservation with his father’s people, and then he spent ten years in Japan with his mother’s relatives. His face never seemed to give anything away. His black eyes were flat and cold and frightened her almost as much as the fact that he was a sniper, a renowned marksman capable of the most deadly and secret of missions.

    Lily bowed her head to avoid looking into his icy eyes. “I don’t know, Nico. I have fewer answers now than I did a few months ago. I’m still having trouble making myself understand how my father could have experimented on children and then again on all of you. As for this poor girl, this child he virtually tortured, if I’m reading these notes correctly, she was eventually trained as a government operative, and I think it’s possible they’re still using her.”

    “That’s not possible, Lily,” Ryland objected. “You saw what happened to us when we tried to operate without an anchor. You said your father had tried using pulses of electricity on all of you. You know the results of that. Brain bleeds, acute pain. Strokes. It just isn’t possible. She’d go insane. The experiment Dr. Whitney conducted opened all our brains, leaving us without barriers or our natural filters.

    We’re grown men, already trained, yet you’re talking about a child trying to cope with impossible demands.“

    “It should have driven her over the edge,” Lily agreed. She held up the notebook. “I’ve discovered a private sanitarium in Louisiana that the Whitney Trust owns. It is run by the Sisters of Mercy. And it has one patient—a young woman.” She looked at her husband.
    “Her name is Dahlia Le Blanc.”

    “You aren’t going to tell me your father bought out a religious organization,” Raoul
    “Gator” Fontenot protested. He hastily crossed himself. “I won’t believe nuns could possibly be a part of Whitney’s cover-up.”

    Lily smiled at him. “Actually, Gator, I think the nuns are fictitious, as is the sanitarium. I think it’s really a front to hide Dahlia from the world. As the sole director of all the trusts, I was able to dig fairly deep and it seems she’s really the only patient, and aside from the Trust picking up all her bills, she has a sizable trust in her own name with regular deposits. The deposits coincide with entries seemingly indicating my father had become suspicious she was being used as an operative for the United States government.
    Apparently he allowed her to be trained and then when he realized it was too difficult for her, he moved her to the sanitarium and, as always, when things went wrong, he left her without following up.” There was an edge of bitterness to her voice. “I think my father tried to create a safe place for her there, just as he created this house for me.”

    Ryland bent his head to Lily’s, his chin rubbing the top of her sable hair. “Your father was a brilliant man, Lily. He had to learn about love, it wasn’t shown to him as a child.”
    It was a refrain he reminded her of often since it had come to light that not only had Dr.
    Whitney experimented on Lily, removing the filters from her brain