He didn’t have time to tell me. He died. That was the weird thing. He kept bleeding. That wound shouldn’t have killed him, but it just wouldn’t stop bleeding.
You didn’t load your bullets with something to make him bleed out, did you? Rubin poured suspicion into his voice.
You’re so funny, although that’s not a bad idea.
It wasn’t the wound, but something else. Could he have been using first-generation Zenith? By now, everyone knows not to use it. Whitney had to have warned all his colleagues that it does give any soldier in the field using it the necessary clotting to stop bleeding and the adrenaline to keep going, and then it does the exact opposite and kills them. That’s common knowledge.
Diego’s sigh was in his mind. I saw no evidence of a Zenith patch, first or second generation. Whitney might not have warned Chandler because he wouldn’t have known Chandler was creating his own personal army of elite soldiers. Whitney wouldn’t have liked that, and he would have put a stop to it. I don’t think he bled out because of Zenith. It was something else. Another reason.
These men could be experiencing problems in the same way some of the other GhostWalkers do, Rubin guessed. The squirrel man you interrogated said nine were expendable. Maybe that meant they weren’t perfect. They had flaws like the orphans. Like Jonquille.
The last thing he wanted was for Chandler to use Jonquille in more experiments. She’d been adamant that she wasn’t going back to Whitney ever again. She’d rather be dead. No doubt she felt the same way if Chandler was going to experiment on her.
You said Jonquille was doing research in laboratories. What kind of research? Rubin asked. He wasn’t going to get into a discussion with his brother on how to load his own bullets with some kind of chemical that might make a flesh wound bleed more, nor did he want to think about what kind of experiment they might perform on Jonquille instead of on one of their soldiers.
I would think it would have to be something to do with lightning. You’re the lightning expert. They’re developing weapons, right? That’s Chandler’s thing. She’s the lightning bug, so to speak.
Rubin considered Jonquille his lightning bug, not the government’s. Or Whitney’s. Certainly not Oliver Chandler’s. Or his team of elite soldiers. What did this team want with her, and what research was she doing? He shouldn’t have treated her like an experiment. Diego was right, he didn’t have any real social skills. He hadn’t considered he might need them if he found the right woman. He’d never bothered. He didn’t stay very long in anyone’s company.
Did squirrel man mention which weapons they were developing?
Just about everything. The ball lightning—they have the use of that as a weapon. It isn’t known. The project was stopped supposedly for a variety of reasons, but they found the answers they needed for a delivery system and shut down funding to all other research, leaving everyone else without a means to complete them. They can create ball lightning and shoot it at a target.
Rubin thought about that. He wasn’t surprised by it. Several of the laboratories had been able to create ball lightning and shoot it at a target in the lab. He knew the military had the resources already sewn up in that area for weapons.
They also can do exactly what you did using Jonquille, although not quite as efficiently. Their ability to target using the real thing is not very effective because the split-second trajectory and timing even for a computer is not accurate.
Rubin believed that. Every experiment that he knew of had run into the same problem, other than the ones he’d personally conducted.
Why are you accurate when a computer isn’t? Diego asked.
I’m accurate with Jonquille. Not with every lightning storm. I’m already tuned to her. I can feel the lightning just the way she can. Without her, I think I’d hit the same percentage as the computer, but with her, I’m going to be one hundred percent accurate every time.
A prickle of awareness went through his body, just as it did every time an enemy was close. He’s here. Coming closer. Not as fast as his partner.
He hadn’t heard the buzz of the radio in the partner’s ear, so there was no contact between the two men. They definitely had confidence when they moved through the forest that they could track their prey. Like both Rubin and Diego, they used their enhancements—sight, smell, the senses of animals—to tell them what was happening in the forest around them.
Rubin and Diego gave off the scent of the woods. They blended in. They were accepted. The mountains were their domain and had been since they were born. Most of the creatures, like the raptors had at one time or another, hunted with them and benefited from it. They were conservators of the forest and its inhabitants. Both were careful of the fragile ecosystem, but they did their best to preserve their part of the Appalachian Mountains.
Once more, Rubin stayed very still, his body blending in with the thick tree trunk of the old oak. The assassin landed in a spruce about forty feet away, causing a brief little shiver of the branches. The tree went still and stayed that way for a good three minutes. Squirrel man didn’t launch himself as expected into the next tree. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to catch up with his partner.
Rubin focused on him now that he knew where he was. Squirrel man took a small envelope out of the tight vest he had zipped around him, slit it open with a long fingernail and emptied the contents into his mouth. He returned the envelope to the inside of the vest and zipped the vest again. Once zipped, the vest seemed to glue itself to him. The clothing was exceptional. Whitney was always working on camouflage clothing for the soldiers, wanting to ensure whatever they wore would allow them to fade completely into the background of whatever environment they were in. The clothes the squirrel men wore were very sophisticated.
The man turned to face the next large tree. There were several smaller ones in his way. Rubin wanted to see how he maneuvered through the branches of all the trees to get to the one he wanted. He realized the squirrel men didn’t fly. It wasn’t as if they could be in the air for long distances. They didn’t have air packs. They literally were jumping from tree to tree.
He watched as the assassin took two steps on the branch and threw his body into the air, arms out and then in, out again, and then in, like a diver, moving with that amazing speed, just like one of the birds flying around the branches to get to the next tree. Rubin could see he’d already chosen his course. He knew where he was going, had mapped it out in his mind and had followed that path. He’d chosen the branch he was going to land on as well as the exact spot.
Again, the assassin took his time, settling on the limb, giving himself a little break before the next leap. Why? Rubin studied him carefully. As a doctor he was quick to see the elevation in breathing. The squirrel man’s chest was heaving. He was taking deep, slow breaths to get his breathing back under control. The moment he did, he looked to the next tree—the large oak. This time the assassin didn’t waste time. Again, he took the two steps and launched himself.
Rubin could have admired the speed and precision if it weren’t for the need to move quickly to get to Gunthrie’s place ahead of the team with Jonquille. Hopefully, the old-timer was alive. The old man had even survived his still blowing up once. Fortunately, he hadn’t been around when it happened, but that just went to show you the luck the old man had. Rubin hoped his luck was still holding.