Ghostwalker 05 - Deadly Game

her husband. "Not that – not for any of you. No matter what he's done, he's still my father. I want to get him help." Even as she said it, she pressed a hand to her rounded belly and shook her head. It was clear she knew what had to be done; she just couldn't accept it yet.
    Ryland held out his hand to her. "There is no us or them, Lily. There is only we . We're all in this together. We're GhostWalkers; we're what your father made us and we stick together.
    We can only trust each other. That's it. We can't even trust the men who send us out on missions."
    Lily opened her mouth to protest, and then closed it again. It was well known that her family had been very close with General Ranier, the man in charge of the special ops team Ryland Miller was responsible for. Whitney and Ranier had been good friends. Lily had grown up practically in Ranier's house. He too had believed Peter Whitney had been murdered, and he seemed to be on the side of the GhostWalkers.
    "Someone attempted to have General Ranier murdered," Lily pointed out. "He isn't part of all this."
    "His wife wasn't in the house, Lily," Ryland said gently, "and you and I both know she is almost always there. Odd coincidence."
    "You don't trust the general, Ryland? We've had dinner at his house several times. How can you sit at his table and at the same time suspect him of conspiring with my father to do these horrible things?"
    "What horrible things, Lily?" Jack asked. "Peter Whitney has worked for the government in one capacity or another for years. He's got the highest security clearance, has provided weapons and defense systems as well as drugs and genetic enhancement far before the rest of the world even knew it existed. He's been invaluable. He came up with an idea for supersoldiers, enhancing both physical and psychic abilities, and he has provided both of those things. As far as the people he answers to are concerned, Whitney has delivered."
    Ryland nodded. "Colonel Higgens tried to highjack his program and sell the information to other countries, and he was stopped. If Whitney told his people he needed to fake his own murder and disappear, well, it was one more sacrifice for his country. Ranier would view it that way. He would fake grief, promise to look after you, assume command of all of us, and be thankful a man such as Peter Whitney existed in the world."
    Lily leaned against the bed as if her legs couldn't hold her up. "Why didn't you tell me this before? You've mentioned it in passing, but no one ever has just come right out and explained why you believe it is a possibility. Put like that, there's every possibility, because that makes my father look a hero, rather than a traitor."
    Jack glanced at Ken. Lily is a brilliant woman when it comes to academics, but she's so blind when it comes to people. It was a small warning to keep Ken's anger from boiling over. She's struggling to accept that Whitney needs to die, but she needs more time. The pregnancy also probably makes her more emotional when it comes to her father.
    When the hell did you get so smart? Ken demanded.
    I've been reading all the pregnancy books. Jack sounded a little smug.
    "He isn't selling his work to a foreign country. He turns over his work to the government, and as long as no one knows how he got his results, they're all happy," Jack said aloud.
    "They don't want to know how he does it, only that he gets the job done. And Whitney has a track record of providing results."
    "We can screw all that up by exposing him, and that means exposing the government, at least a very elite group of men in the know," Ken said, trying to gentle his voice when he really wanted to yell at her.
    "The president?" Lily asked.
    "Probably not. My guess is he knows he has supersoldiers and a few special ops teams called GhostWalkers, but I doubt he knows anything more than how we can be used," Ken added. "Someone goes before the committee and gets funding for some of these projects.
    He has to report the results and sugarcoat it so Whitney's extremes are never brought to the light. I'll bet the breeding program is called something altogether different. The president and the committee of senators are certainly not going to approve anything with the word breeding in it."
    "Everything we do is classified," Ryland said. "No one knows we do it, and no one is going to admit it. If we take out a drug lord in Colombia, or tip the scales of power in the Congo, the last thing the government wants is for