There was a small silence, no one wanting to mention the inevitable suspicion. They were under the direct command of one man, General Ranier.
Lily shook her head. “I know what you’re all thinking. General Ranier has been a close friend of my family for years, but he can’t be involved.”
“Why not?” Logan asked.
Lily ducked her head. “Because if one more person I love is living a lie and betraying us, I don’t think I could live through it.”
Ryland swept his arms around her and pulled her up against his body. “We’ve got Dahlia back and now Flame. We’ll find the rest of the girls and we’ll have our own family, Lily. No matter what happens, you have us.”
“I’m scared, Rye,” she admitted. “I’m really scared this time.”
“We’re not going to jump to any conclusions about General Ranier, Lily,” Kadan assured her. “And, Logan, you’ve got your own worries with the admiral who runs your unit. If we have a line into Peter Whitney’s computer, we might get lucky and come across an indication if either the general or the admiral is in any way associated with the doctor. In the meantime, we’d all better be very careful when our orders come down.”
“To call me here, you must have found something on Jack or one of my other team members,” Logan said.
Lily took a deep breath and nodded. “For purposes of simplicity, we’re going to refer to whoever is behind this as Dr. Whitney. Most of us believe he’s alive and pulling all the strings. Dr. Whitney appears to be trying to bring the women he first experimented on together with the men he later worked on. We believe he’s doing so as part of a much larger plan. Each of the women so far has been both psychically compatible and sexually attracted to one of the men. The couples work well together as a single weapon. As a team, they’re fully functional in a combat situation as well as being able to live and function in the world, which they cannot always do alone. Dahlia, if you recall, could not be out of the sanitarium for any length of time, but with Nico, she’s able to live a seminormal life.”
“So far, that part doesn’t sound half-bad,” Logan said with a faint smile.
“There are a few perks to the job,” Gator said, waggling his eyebrows at Flame.
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t have a clue how I got into this.” She flashed a small smile at Logan. “Raoul is right, there are definite perks.”
“So the doctor wants the men to hook up with the women,” Logan said. “What’s the big deal?”
Lily frowned. “He made us all into weapons. Together, as a couple, we seem to be far more powerful, complementing or even amplifying the enhancements. Where before, a team could be sent in and the odds of success went up tenfold, imagine how much better if only two people could be sent in to clean up a mess, especially if the couple were as powerful as, or more so than, an entire team.”
Logan switched his gaze to Gator and Flame Fontenot and Nicolas and Dahlia Trevane. “Do you think it’s true? The two of you could handle a mission without the entire team and do just as well?”
The couples looked at one another, then nodded. “There’s no doubt, Logan, depending on what needed to be done,” Gator answered. “Flame and I manipulate sound, and without using Kadan-or someone else-as a shield to stop the corridor, it would get tricky, but we could definitely get the job done. Our abilities are amplified when we’re together. Both Flame and I are physically enhanced as well as psychically.”
“We are too,” Dahlia said, taking Nico’s hand. “And like Gator and Flame, we work very well together.”
Logan sighed. “This physical enhancement you’ve all mentioned… ”
“And you know perfectly well your entire team is enhanced,” Lily broke in.
Logan ran his finger around the collar of his shirt. “It’s just gene doping. Inserting our own DNA into our cells to pump them up, right?”
“That would be what most doctors are doing these days, but Dr. Whitney took it a step further,” Ryland said. “He developed a chromosome in order to insert DNA and enhance the entire body both physically as well as psychically.”
“Now I’m not understanding,” Logan admitted, frowning.
Lily tapped her pencil on the table again, the only sign that her earlier nervousness remained. “Actually, chromosomes come in pairs. Technically, he developed an extra pair of chromosomes. And that gave him eighty thousand extra genes to play with, which can encode a lot of capability. Whatever psychic attributes you already have, the experiments increased, but more were added when he inserted the extra chromosome for physical enhancement. For instance: there is a huge evolutionary distance between man and mosquito, but in spite of that, at a molecular level, both are equipped with the same chemosensory system.”
Logan whistled softly. “Whoa there. That’s a darned big jump from computers to chromosomes and mosquitoes. I’m guessing there’s a reason for that.”
“I found a file on Dr. Whitney’s computer relating to Jack Norton and one of the women he first experimented on. Apparently Jack and Ken Norton had, prior to undergoing physical and psychic enhancement, tremendous talent already in both areas. Both have extensive military training and are highly skilled.”
“They’re legendary as snipers,” Nicolas volunteered.
“Apparently Dr. Whitney believes so as well. He has been attempting for some time to manipulate Jack Norton into meeting a woman named Briony Jenkins. I want you to note Briony is a type of plant just as Lily, Dahlia, and Iris are.” She sent a faint apologetic smile to Flame for using the name Dr. Whitney had given her. “You know how he liked to dehumanize us. No real names and no birth dates.”
“Briony is one of our lost sisters,” Flame said softly, her fingers tightening around Gator’s. “I don’t remember her. Even when I try.” She rubbed her temples, frowning, trying to ease the headache that always accompanied working at remembering the girls Dr. Whitney had experimented on.
“In this case, Flame,” Lily explained, “I don’t think we’ve forgotten her just because he tried to erase our memories, it’s because she was very young when he sent her off. He actually did adopt her out.”
Flame leaned forward. “What? It’s not one of his elaborate stories to cover what he really did with her? He pretended Dahlia was adopted and he locked her up in a sanitarium. He certainly wrote a wonderful tale about my adoption when all the time I was locked in a laboratory being given cancer. Are you absolutely certain Briony was really adopted by someone?” There was a hitch in Flame’s voice.