Fatal Truth: Shadow Force International (18 page)

“The president got to him.”

“Well, dammit. You think so? God, I detest that man.” She shook her head. “But I’m not giving in. I refuse to be intimidated, and besides, the Hopland story isn’t ready and I won’t air anything until I’ve fully done my homework on it.”

Except apparently when it came to him.

Trace kept that thought to himself.

Lindsey’s file was next. Beatrice had red-flagged her college attendance with a note in the margin. Trace didn’t like coincidences. “Did you know Lindsey attended Vassar at the same time Parker did?”

“No.”

“She majored in Russian Studies. What did your sister study? Something about brains, wasn’t it?”

Savanna nodded. “Cognitive Science with a double major in Behavioral Science.”

Trace glanced at her. “Doubtful the two of them ran in the same circles.”

“You think Lindsey is in on this?” Savanna chuckled. “I can’t see her being a spy for the president. She’s extremely organized and efficient, but doesn’t strike me as someone you would trust with government secrets.”

“Why would someone with a degree in Russian Studies work at a cable news station?”

“She’s the niece of Executive Producer, Mariah Olsen. Mariah took pity on her when she couldn’t find a job. I’m sure there aren’t many that require a Russian Studies degree.”

“Except maybe at the CIA.”

Savanna’s face blanched. “Oh, crap. I hadn’t thought of that. Do you think she’s in on this with Linc Norman?”

He scanned the rest of the notes. “There’s nothing else here that suggests she’s anything but what she says she is. No travel to foreign countries, no other jobs except for some waitressing in college. She has two cats, no car, and hasn’t dated since a long-term relationship with her high school sweetheart ended six months ago.”

“She was seeing someone? I didn’t even know she had cats, much less a boyfriend.” Savanna glanced out the window, still fingering the phone as if she regretted being curt with the gal a moment before. “I haven’t been very nice to her. I should make her brownies or something. She likes chocolate. That I
do
know.”

Trace smiled down at the papers in his hand. Savanna was this big superstar who didn’t even realize her fame. She tipped the doorman twice the going rate and fixed meals for near complete strangers who showed up on her doorstep two hours late. “I’m surprised you haven’t already. Why is it you don’t like her?”

“I do like her. Well, sort of. I
try
to like her. She’s just so…”

“Over the top?”

“In this business, that’s status quo. I’m not sure what it is exactly. Just a feeling. We don’t click, you know?”

He nodded. “The 80/20 rule.”

“The what rule?”

“Eighty percent of the people you meet you click with. They like you, you like them. The other twenty percent, you don’t click with. No matter what you do to change or do things their way, they will never like you and vice versa.”

“Now you sound like Parker. She’s always got some scientific reason for why people don’t get along. Why criminals do what they do and the best ways to prevent that behavior.”

Sounded like he and Parker had a few things in common. Except his job was to stop the criminals
after
they’d done the crime. “Has Lindsey ever done anything to make you suspicious?”

Savanna thought for a moment. “No.”

Trace moved onto the next file. “Let me know if you think of anything.”

She was still staring out the window, her countenance clouded. “I can’t really trust anyone, can I?”

You can trust me
. But he didn’t say it out loud.

Because, really, the truth was, he was the biggest liar of them all.

S
IX BLOCKS FROM
the studio, Parker pulled the limo over.

The drivers of the cars tailing her were good, but she’d spotted them. They probably didn’t expect the limo driver to be acutely aware of every car in the three block radius.

But she was.

“I told her she couldn’t do the Westmeyer segment,” Savanna’s assistant said into her phone. “She insisted she is, so be prepared.”

Westmeyer. The name made Parker sick to her stomach. She had to stop her sister from stepping her toes into that murky sludge of quicksand. Parker knew all too well there was no coming back from it.

The assistant’s head came up and she looked around. “Driver? This isn’t the studio.” She returned to her phone. “I know, I know. She’s stubborn, but maybe if the big guns all talk…” A pause ensued. “Fire her? You can’t fire her. The network’s ratings—”

Parker kept the black chauffeur’s cap low on her forehead. They would fire her sister without blinking an eye. They—the ones behind all of this—would do worse than that. If only the man with Savanna hadn’t screwed up Parker’s plans to talk to her.

“She’s coming by a different car,” Lindsey said to the person on the other end of the phone conversation. “Her bodyguard didn’t want to take chances on a repeat from earlier. You’ll have to intercept her once she’s in the lot.”

Parker grabbed her gun from under the seat and flicked off the safety.

The assistant hung up and leaned forward. “Driver, what are you doing?”

Parker had seen the news about Savanna’s accident. The wolves were closing in. “The man with Ms. Bunkett. What was his name?”

“Her bodyguard? Total stud, right? He doesn’t have a name.” Lindsey started tapping her phone’s screen. “You’re going to make me late. We need to go.”

Parker wanted to rub her tired eyes. Or maybe bang her head on the steering wheel.

Savanna was about to get hit with a hailstone, especially if she did the Westmeyer story, but the bodyguard…he might not be who he seemed. “The man has to have a name.”

“What?”

“I said, the man has to have a name. What is it?”

“Why do you care?”

“Just answer the question. What is his name and what security firm does he work for?”

“I don’t think that’s any of your business and if you don’t put this car in gear and get me to the studio in the next five minutes, I’m going to call your boss and report you.”

Parker turned in the seat, leveling her small, black handgun at the assistant’s face. “His name. Please.”

The girl went rigid, the cell phone in her hand dropping into her lap. “Coldplay.”

“What?”

“He goes by Coldplay. Savanna isn’t allowed to know his real name or ask him any personal stuff.”

Coldplay. “So he works for the Rock Stars?”

The gal nodded. “Are you going to shoot me?”

Parker hit the unlock button on the door and motioned with her gun. “Get out.”

“But…”

“Get. Out.”

“It’s freezing out there!”

God. She didn’t want to shoot this pain in the ass but… Parker gave the assistant a dead serious look and put both hands back on the gun. “Are you right-handed?”

The woman swallowed and nodded.

“You like walking?”

“I don’t have a car so I bike when the weather is decent. Better for the environment, too.”

Kill me now
. “Well, I’m going to count to three. If you’re not out of this car, I will shoot you in your right shoulder. If you don’t get out then, I’ll shoot you in your left knee. Your right hand will be useless and you won’t be able to walk or bike for a long time. One…two…”

The woman bailed, fumbling with her phone on the way out.

Parker didn’t even wait for her to shut the door. She peeled away and headed south. Trace Hunter had disappeared and Savanna’s safety was at risk. Staying in hiding was no longer an option. Parker had to do something.

Two options and only two. Do the job Linc Norman had commanded her to do or expose the nation’s leader for the scumbag he was.

She couldn’t kill her fellow scientists, regardless of what the president threatened to do to her and her family. But no one would believe her about Project 24 unless she had proof. Proof that the program had gone too far, created more problems than it had solved. All but one file had been destroyed; the soldiers selected for the experiment were all dead.

Except Hunter.

Parker drove on, the White House an imposing figure off to her left as orange rays of the setting sun made it look like it was glowing from some internal fire.

The fires of hell.
If Parker wanted Savanna and her parents to live, she had to kill the three scientists who had been on her team. None of them knew all the details about Project 24—they thought it was just another experiment with soldiers to see if they could train their cognitive responses the way the armed forces trained their physical responses. Each scientist had handled one section of the experiment, but put them all together and they knew enough to be dangerous. A dangerous group Linc Norman didn’t want falling into the wrong hands.

The experiment, funded by Westmeyer, Inc., hadn’t worked except for Navy SEAL Trace Hunter. His reflexes had been off the charts and he hadn’t experienced negative side effects. His ability to out think the enemy was staggering. He’d been her brightest star, her best pupil, and yet, she’d never met him face to face. Like any good scientist, she’d stayed objective, only reading about his outcomes from the comfort of her desk.

She’d given the okay to turn him loose. He was going to secretly make history by eliminating threats to America with the speed and efficiency of a one-man army.

The experiment was initially deemed a success as Hunter took out more than thirty threats in the span of six months. Each looked like an accident, a suicide, a natural death.

And then he’d refused a direct order. That’s when Parker learned that the other participants, the ones who’d experienced negative outcomes, had all been terminated. On orders of the president himself.

She wasn’t supposed to know. No one was.

Parker didn’t know what order Lt. Hunter had refused to carry out, but something in Hunter’s psychological makeup made him defy the president, defy the elusive and ominous Command & Control. He didn’t go AWOL, just came back from the mission and met with Norman behind closed doors. Whatever happened in there, the president emerged and ordered Hunter’s incarceration. The next thing Parker knew, Norman had her hand Savanna the file on Hunter exposing him as a traitor, and Parker was being told to quietly eliminate the scientists on her team.

Or else.

Like Hunter, she’d been trained to kill, but unlike him, she’d never expected to have to do it. She was an analyst, a scientist. Yes, she’d done undercover ops, extracting sensitive information from specific targets, but only from men and women like herself—scientists developing programs for their countries to increase the value of soldiers in the field. Every major country in the world was working on similar experiments, but none had the pharmaceutical drug cocktails Westmeyer did.

At first, Parker had resisted using the drugs, but her outcomes were dismal. She knew the experiment would work, but time was of the essence if she was going to prove that every man and woman in the armed services had value. Not just as a warm body but as an incredible resource of brainpower. If Parker could develop a program that enhanced their mental prowess, their decision making and combat readiness by rewiring the neural pathways, she could decrease the number of casualties, decrease the number of soldiers returning with PTSD.

So she’d used the drugs to speed up the results.

She knew better. The whole thing backfired and now she had nothing. Her life’s best work had failed, her sister and parents were in danger. She’d voted for Linc Norman and not because he’d offered her a place by his side in the war on terror. He’d been the next great president, she was sure of it.

And then something had changed in the man’s psychological profile. The power, or the pressure, or something else had reared its ugly head and turned him into a monster. Secretly, Parker wondered if Linc had been helping himself to some of Westmeyer’s drugs.

In a not-so-nice neighborhood, Parker ditched the limo and the cap, found a corner drug store where she bought a prepaid phone and a new hat. It was fully dark now and she stole an old, rusty Cutlass from behind a bar and drove to the nearest library.

The library’s bank of computers was near the front desk and she didn’t have a library card. The evening clerk was a young college kid busy putting books away and didn’t even notice her slip into a seat.

The password was easy to guess and she was on the Internet in seconds. Less than a minute later, she stepped back outside and dialed the number for Rock Star Security.

Chapter Twelve

_____________________

______________________________________________________

“L
INDSEY?”
S
AVANNA PULLED
up short. The girl was in her chair at the stylist booth. “What are you doing?”

Gone were the headphones normally around her neck. Gone were the skinny jeans and cheesy T-shirt. “I, um…” she sputtered, running a hand down the green power suit she was wearing. Her face was made-up, the stylist in mid-tease with a lock of Lindsey’s hair. Both women stared at Savanna, frozen.