The talent of psychic healing that Amaryllis and Joe possessed was a very rare gift and if Whitney knew they possessed it, he would want them back, but Rubin had the one talent that was prized above all else. He was a psychic surgeon. His talent was protected by every member of the team. No one would ever let it be known what he could do. Whitney would move heaven and earth to acquire him and, most likely, would take his brain apart in order to figure out how he could do surgery on physical bones with his brain.
In the beginning, when it first came out that Malichai would need him, Ezekiel and Joe had protested Amaryllis knowing his identity, but that had since become a moot point. Malichai planned to marry her. She was a GhostWalker. They either had to trust her enough to make her a part of them, or he would be walking away with her. She would be subject to the same rules all of them were.
Malichai tried to breathe normally, to keep his heartbeat under control as Rubin approached his bed. His hand nearly crushed Amaryllis’s.
“It’s interesting Owen found you, Amaryllis,” Rubin said as he pushed back the thin sheet covering Malichai’s leg. Malichai wore shorts that left his leg mostly bare. Rubin ran his hands along the leg but looked at Amaryllis. “Malichai told us how carefully you planned your escape. He admired you greatly for that. I thought your plan was brilliant. You outwitted Whitney and got two of the other women out as well, which actually helped you because they weren’t as adept or as certain they wanted to escape, which gave you more time.”
Amaryllis nodded. “Sadly, I took that factor into account.”
“Not sadly,” Rubin corrected. “You were surviving. That’s what we do. But Owen found you when he shouldn’t have.” He closed his eyes, his hands hovering close to the bruising and swelling where Owen had concentrated his punches. “You dealt with Whitney’s tracking devices?”
“Yes, of course.”
“How did Owen know how to find you? And how did Owen know about Malichai’s leg? Malichai assured me he was careful. He hadn’t so much as flinched, yet Owen knew.”
He fell silent. The room went silent with him. There was no expression on his face, so Malichai couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but his gut was churning. Then Rubin’s eyes opened, and he was looking at Amaryllis again.
“Owen was so obsessed with you, had he known where you were earlier, he would have come right away. That would lead me to believe he found out recently. Someone contacted him, and they also told him about Malichai and the fact that he’d been shot recently in the leg.”
“Who would know about Owen?” Amaryllis asked. “No one knows about him. I only told Malichai. That time in your room, remember? You woke up and thought something was off. Tag had found Lorrie and you wondered how.”
“Shit, Malichai,” Ezekiel said, for the first time breaking the silence. “That little snake Billy had bugged your room. You started using a jammer and sweeping it. Callendine tipped off Owen. He probably is on a need-to-know basis and when he sent the information higher up the chain, rather than get Whitney involved, they chose to send in Owen. That would shake things up here and hopefully get rid of the GhostWalker in residence.”
Amaryllis avoided his eyes. If Billy had listened to them, he’d heard a lot more than her encounters with Owens. Malichai sent her a wicked little grin, hoping to lighten her mood. Hell, he needed to lighten his mood. He tried to think back. He’d used the jammer because it was ingrained in him, but he always took it with him just in case someone got into his room. He’d slipped it into his pocket. He’d had sex with Amaryllis and then talked about Owen.
“I was at the beach today, minding my own business, reading, when I was contacted by one of Callendine’s men,” Rubin announced as he continued to assess Malichai’s leg. He was at his calf now. “He clearly was a soldier. Army. I sent his photo to Joe to have him identified. He came back under Callendine’s command. A man by the name of Sergeant Kolt Michigan. He offered me the job of burning down the bed-and-breakfast. This time, he didn’t include Amaryllis or Marie. They switched it to two of the guests. Men by the names of Jay Carpenter and Burnell Strathom. Art dealers out of LA. They wanted them murdered first and their bodies found inside. I was to anonymously call it in. While the police are inside examining the bodies, they’d like the entire bed-and-breakfast to go up in flames.”
“Rubin,” Amaryllis said softly. “What is wrong with those people? Billy had to have told them that there’s two babies in the basement.”
“That’s why Billy tried warning us to get out, Amaryllis,” Malichai reminded her. “He wanted Trap and his family gone, and me to take you out. He didn’t want us to be harmed.”
“Just everyone else,” she said. “I just don’t understand.”
Frankly, neither did he. Growing up on the streets, Malichai had seen a lot of things that didn’t make sense to him, choices made by people who didn’t need to make those choices. He understood fear, hunger, desperation, fighting to stay alive, but throwing away homes and families, children, and wives or husbands, intolerance, none of that made sense to him. Not as a child, and not as an adult. He fought for his country, but mostly he fought for the people in his country so they had freedom to make choices. He just hoped they’d be good ones. Murdering the innocent wasn’t a good choice any way you looked at it.
“I did offer my services to Cayenne and Trap,” Rubin admitted, sounding somewhat embarrassed. As always, his voice was very low and soft, yet those in the room could easily hear him. There was something about the velvet voice that was soothing. Maybe it was the healer in him. Malichai could never quite figure it out. Rubin was both extremely lethal and yet a miracle worker when it came to saving lives.
“They took me up on it. I was able to help Drusilla, the little girl, develop her lungs faster. I just managed to speed things up, they were already well on their way to being ready to go. I wanted them to be able to take those babies and get out of here. Trap is going to move them tonight.”
Malichai was relieved to hear it. He could see that same relief on Amaryllis’s face. He didn’t make the mistake of suggesting she go with Trap and Cayenne, although the urge to do so was strong.
“What about Cayenne?” Joe asked. “Did she allow you to heal her?”
Rubin sighed. “She did, but Trap all but forced her. I don’t feel comfortable in those situations. Cayenne needs to come to us on her terms. She feels safer in the swamp and she’s more apt to cooperate when she’s there. She has Nonny and Pepper there and she knows they’ll have her back. She hasn’t quite secured those same bonds with everyone else the way she has with the two of them. It will happen eventually. She’s trying to be open to it. I think the babies will help. She definitely wants to go home and be with Nonny, but it wouldn’t be wise for the little ones to fly yet.”
“Where will they go?” Amaryllis asked.
“Shylah and Draden will escort the family to the safe house and then come back here to help us with Callendine. Trap and Cayenne will stay there until the babies are old enough to fly,” Ezekiel said.
“When are you supposed to kill Burnell and Jay?” Malichai asked.
“Day after tomorrow is the big day, the opening of the Ideas for Peace convention. This attack here seems to coincide nicely with it,” Rubin said. His hands were still moving up Malichai’s thigh with infinite slowness.
Malichai tried to read his expression, but Rubin was impossible to read. He always had been, even when he’d been a young teenager and he’d first joined the Fortunes brothers on the street, so long ago. He’d been equally as quiet then, and nearly as skilled with a weapon.
“I’ve been going over the plans for the convention center with Zeke,” Joe said. “We’re going to have to make more assumptions than we’d like. They’ll want to take out the support beams to bring down the buildings. If they can collapse them at the same time, they’ll get what they want—the maximum amount of people killed.”
“We’ve got help with this one,” Ezekiel assured. “Team Two has arrived from Montana, and the SEALs will be helping us as well. The convention center is huge. It isn’t like we can handle this on our own. And given that we expect the attack to happen in two days’ time, we don’t have a lot of time to prepare.”
“Is there a way to stop the conference?” Amaryllis asked.
Ezekiel shook his head. “I’m afraid not. We have no concrete evidence that the conference is actually the target. We’ve got others looking at some of the political targets around the city that would be more likely. Even the base would be a better target. It’s confirmed that there are no political figures invited or appearing even on opening day.”
“We can only hope we’re wrong,” Joe said, “but if we’re not, we’ll be prepared.”
“Rubin,” Ezekiel said. “What’s going on with Malichai’s leg?”
Malichai’s heart gave another hard jerk in his chest. He knew the answer was going to be bad. The leg hurt like a mother all the time. All the time. Joe and Amaryllis had worked on it continually and it hadn’t stopped forming the tiny cracks in the bone. In fact, he was certain the damage was happening at a much faster rate. He knew this was going to be bad, and he dreaded the answer.
He took a deep breath and tried to keep all expression off his face. It took effort not to crush Amaryllis’s hand in his.
Rubin glanced up at him, meeting his eyes. There was compassion there. Understanding. Things Malichai didn’t want to see. Then Rubin was all business. He didn’t speak to Ezekiel or the others in the room, only Malichai.
“I’m going in and repairing the bone again. But I’m only able to repair the damage to the bone itself that is happening at this moment. Whatever the Zenith is doing to the bone is beyond my ability to help. Perhaps Lily has ideas. We just need to keep the bone from fragmenting until we can figure out how to stop that process. You have to baby the leg, Malichai. No more hero stuff. No running. No kicking the crap out of someone. You’re in the control room, not in the field. One more stunt like this one and you’ll lose the leg. There will be no going back.”
The thing about Rubin was he always spoke in a low, velvet-soft southern drawl. He never raised his voice, and by doing that, Malichai knew he meant every word he said. The room went absolutely silent and Malichai’s heart dropped. He knew that everyone else would be hopeful, but Rubin wasn’t. He had essentially grown up with Rubin. He knew him, all the subtleties of him, and Rubin knew him. Sidelining him when his team was in trouble was asking the impossible of him.
Malichai closed his eyes and just let himself think about Amaryllis while Rubin performed the impossible—psychic surgery. She’d chosen him. She could have chosen anyone with her looks and her intelligence, but she had thrown her lot in with him. Right now, she wore his ring. He put his thumb on the ring he’d given her and rubbed back and forth over the top of it as if it could magically transform his life and what was happening to him.
He thought about the house he’d been building. Had he considered what his woman would want in the house? He had looked at it from every conceivable line of defense. Even the windows. He liked the outdoors and often felt cooped up inside a house, so he needed a ton of windows. Bulletproof windows. Tinted windows. Windows he could see out of, but few could see into.
“If we talk, is that going to disturb him?” Amaryllis whispered.
He shook his head. “Everyone just likes to observe him.”
“Observe him?” she echoed. “I can’t tell that he’s doing anything. Every now and then there’s this flash of light and then nothing at all. When Joe heals it’s so cool because you can see everything so vividly.”
Malichai caught Rubin’s small flash of a smile. It was rare to catch a Rubin smile. Malichai had once asked him why there was so little light or heat when he worked. Rubin said he conserved as much energy as possible in case he had to perform multiple surgeries on several patients or just on one. That made sense but it wasn’t as flashy. Rubin explained it wasn’t about flash, it was about control. The healer had to get a handle on the gift.
“Should I give everyone the day off that day?” Amaryllis whispered. “All my workers. If they are here, cleaning rooms, or working in the kitchen, they’ll be at risk, won’t they?”
It was mesmerizing to watch the colors burst out from under Rubin’s palms from time to time. It was dark in the room and the color would flash momentarily and then be gone. Because it was impossible to know when the phenomenon was going to occur, Malichai couldn’t take his eyes from Rubin and the way he inched his palms over the leg. It felt like laser points moving along in a crooked, almost drunken pattern.
Ezekiel answered Amaryllis. “Honey, Rubin isn’t actually going to set the bed-and-breakfast on fire or kill your guests. We might decide it’s necessary to fake their deaths, just to draw out Callendine and his crew, but we’re not going to set this place on fire. The workers aren’t going to be in danger.”
Amaryllis laughed nervously. “I didn’t think that through. Of course no one is going to set the place on fire.”
Malichai brought the ring to his mouth and kissed her knuckles. “This has been your home for the last year and it’s Marie and Jacy’s livelihood. Naturally, you’d be worried about it and all those here.”
“What do we have on this aide to the vice president?” Mordichai asked.
“Liam Hamilton is the vice president’s go-to man. He served with distinction in the Army and has medals and commendations up the wazoo,” Gino said. “He was known to be friends with Billy Leven and more than once pulled him out of a bad situation after Billy’s wife died of cancer. The vice president in particular thought highly of him for helping his friend.”
“You know this how?” Mordichai challenged.
“I’m reading it right out of the newspaper article that was leaked to the press a few years back,” Gino said. “Unlike you, I actually do read.”
There was a snicker from the back of the room and Malichai managed a smile. They were trying to distract him. He was grateful, but he knew the leg wasn’t going to hold and his team needed him. Amaryllis needed him. Rubin might as well have told him to stay in bed. The control room wasn’t a place he was comfortable in. He was a soldier. A man of action. He wouldn’t know what to do just sitting on his ass.
“Did the vice president issue the order for Callendine to go into the field and take down terrorists?” Ezekiel asked. “Is that how this was sanctioned?”
“Major General was able to get an emergency meeting with the VP and he doesn’t believe that any such order was given verbally, but there is a signed order in existence,” said Joe. “The VP claims many papers are put in front of him dozens of times a day to sign by his aides and he signs them.”
“Without looking at them?” There was both derision and disbelief in Gino’s voice.
“It’s possible,” Ezekiel speculated. “You work with a man long enough, you trust him to have your back. You’re in a hurry, you just start signing fast.”
“This is the security of our country we’re talking about,” Gino snapped. “The VP can take time to glance at a paper and see what the hell he’s signing, especially if it means sending some of our men to kill innocent citizens.”
“I suspect those men are handpicked by Callendine,” Joe said. “Just as Violet Smythe despised any female GhostWalker Whitney had spliced insect or snake DNA into, and was determined to stamp them out, I think there is a faction that views anyone opposed to a strong military as treasonous.”
Malichai thought Joe could be onto something. Billy had been very disparaging when he talked about anyone who had anything to do with the peace conference. It was simply a way to bring people together to share ideas, and he was opposed to it. On the other hand, he felt very strongly about those in the military. While Callendine hadn’t hesitated in issuing the order to kill him, Malichai
knew that for a fleeting moment he’d regretted that he had to.
“That’s a big leap, Joe,” Ezekiel said. “To think the solution is to bring down a convention for ideas on peace and kill hundreds, possibly over a thousand, to make what kind of point?”
“The military goes in, cleans it up, declares it a terrorist attack, we need more money, hell if I know what they’re looking for,” Joe said. “We all know the military could use money, but that’s not the way. That’s not the way any of us want to up the budget.”
“After talking to Billy,” Malichai said, hoping to distract himself from the grimness creeping around Rubin’s mouth, “I’d say he practically idolized those in the service. He might do anything to make their lives easier. If his friend at the White House told him they were trying to expand the budget for military families and get equipment that would save the lives of soldiers, but these—he called them hippie-dippie people—were taking that away, I can see Billy deciding that it would be worthwhile to help. Callendine could be persuasive. And this Liam had helped Billy numerous times when he needed it.”
“I can’t see Callendine buying into that reasoning,” Ezekiel said.
“You’re right, Zeke. I don’t think money for anyone is Callendine’s motivation. He isn’t all that sympathetic even toward soldiers. He was willing to torture me for information if he had to. He was also willing to kill me. This, for him, isn’t about money. I think he despises those people and he wants them dead. He’s happy to kill them, and the men with him are like-minded thinkers. Mills had zero hesitation in kicking the shit out of my leg when he knew I’d injured it rescuing soldiers. Callendine and most likely those with him have served their country and taken hits for people for too many years and they feel unappreciated or whatever. I don’t know what the hell they want, but the disdain for anyone talking peace is apparent.”
“How many men does he have with him?” Gino asked. “Did Major General get that out of the VP?”
“They’re looking into it,” Joe said. “I would imagine it’s a small group. They wouldn’t need too many. The less, the better. They wouldn’t want anyone talking.”
Lethal Game Page 36
