“I really am going to shoot you both.” Kadan shook his head.
They’d never let him live it down. By tomorrow both of the clowns were going to buy him a Neil Young album with the song “Cinnamon Girl” on it. He shook his head and kept his grin to himself. He’d probably play it too, but hell if he’d ever tell either of them that.
He gave a small salute to Tucker, who was making the rounds and emerged out of the bushes as if he’d just materialized.
“Everything’s quiet. Gator ditched the Humvee on the other side of town. He’ll be back in a while,” Tucker said.
Ryland nudged him. “You smell love in the air, Tucker?”
Tucker inhaled. “Kadan. Man. High-five me, bro.”
“I’m going to make every one of you eat those smiles,” Kadan groused and pushed through them to stalk around to the side of the house, ignoring the soft, taunting laughter that followed him.
He crouched just below the window of the bedroom they’d given Don and Sharon Meadows. It was time to pay the man a little visit. They’d told him the window was wired, but there was no alarm on, not until Kadan knew exactly what he was dealing with. Just in case Don had his own method of alarms, he checked all around the window and listened for the telltale hum of a live wire. It was silent, other than a few soft snores from Tansy’s father.
Kadan slipped his blade along the windowsill before levering the window up. He’d made certain there would be no noise when he opened the window before he’d ever put the couple in the room to begin with. He went headfirst into the room, creeping down the wall to the carpeted floor, knife in his teeth, Ryland right behind him.
They split up, one on either side of the large double bed. Ryland pulled out the air syringe and made certain Sharon would stay asleep. When he was certain she was out, he signaled Kadan and slipped into the shadows where Don wouldn’t detect him. Nico took up a position just outside the window where he could train a gun on the man at all times.
Kadan crept up the wall at the head of the bed and slipped behind Don to settle his weight carefully. He didn’t bother with a knife; if he had to kill Don, he would do it with his bare hands. He didn’t want blood for Sharon to wake up and find.
He placed his hand carefully on the man’s throat and pressed hard enough to wake him.
Don’s eyes snapped open and he stiffened.
Kadan’s fingers dug deeper, letting him feel his enormous strength. “I wouldn’t move if I were you,” he said quietly. “I’m a patient man, Mr. Meadows, but I’m tired tonight, and I’ve got a long day ahead of me tomorrow. I’m going to ask a couple of questions, and whether you live or die in the next few minutes depends on your answers.”
Don flicked a quick glance at his wife, his lips compressing tightly.
“She’s fine. I can read minds, and hers was fairly open. She loves you and Tansy. The two of you are her world. She despises Peter Whitney and can’t understand why you insist on having him in your lives when you know he’s a monster.” Kadan leaned close. “I can’t understand why you would ever risk your daughter with that man. You know she’s one of his experiments.”
Don jerked, his eyes widening in shock.
“You think the government doesn’t know about all the little girls whose heads he fucked up? He did the same thing to a bunch of Special Forces men. I’m one of those men. I don’t have a lot of love for Whitney and you shouldn’t either.”
“I don’t,” Don snarled. “I despise the man.”
Kadan stared down into the defiant, angry eyes and read guilt. He didn’t let up on the pressure at all. “You despise him, yet you force your daughter to see him even when she says he makes her uncomfortable.”
“It was part of the adoption agreement.”
“You knew what he’d done when you adopted her.” Kadan made it a statement.
Don’s gaze shifted. “Damn it, this isn’t any of your business.”
Kadan leaned down, staring into the man’s eyes. He wanted no mistakes, because this time, Meadows had better understand fully what and whom he was dealing with. “Tansy’s mine now, and I take care of my own. I will kill you and never look back, Meadows. Give me a reason not to. I don’t much like you and you sure as hell don’t have to like me, but if you want to live, you’d better answer my questions. I can smell lies and deceit all over your sorry ass.”
Don pressed his lips together harder.
Kadan gave him one last chance. “Do you know what he’s doing with those girls now? Do you know why he wants Tansy back? He has a breeding program. The women don’t have to be cooperative, just get pregnant by the men he chooses for them. He wants the babies. That’s the man you’re protecting. That’s the man you’re giving your daughter to.”
Don stared up at him with shrewd eyes. The man had an enormous IQ. He was successful in a highly secretive world, quite brilliant and much respected in his chosen field. He might be arrogant, but he had some cause to be. Kadan remained silent under the close scrutiny. There was no doubt in his mind that Don was making up his mind about his future son-in-law. Kadan knew what he was seeing. Rough, cold lines etched deep. The picture wasn’t pretty and it shouldn’t be. Kadan would kill him if it was necessary and he wouldn’t lose sleep over it. If Don Meadows saw nothing else, Kadan wanted him to see that.
“I went to school with him. He was elite. Tons of money. His parents were billionaires, you know. The school was full of people with money, but few in his class. I was there on a scholarship. It was a private boarding school and I was young, wanting to fit in without a hope in hell of doing so. I was homesick, but this was a chance of a lifetime and my parents were so proud that I’d been chosen for the honor of attending such an elite school.”
Don sighed and shifted slightly, glanced at his wife and then back up at Kadan. “If I’m going to tell you this, can I at least sit up?”
Kadan held his gaze. “You’ve got a sniper who never misses pointing a gun at your head. You have one of my team sitting across the room from you holding another gun in his hands and he doesn’t miss either. And just so you know, I’d kill you before either of them got off a shot.” He pulled his hand away from the man’s throat and backed up a few steps, completely confident in his speed and ability to carry out his threat if Don made a wrong move.
Don rubbed his throat, sliding his body cautiously forward and folding into a sitting position. He reached for Sharon’s hand and checked her pulse. “My wife has nothing to do with any of this. If you kill me, give me your word you won’t harm her.”
Kadan’s eyebrow shot up. “You’d believe me?”
“You’re a hired killer, Mr. Montague, but you’re not a liar.”
Kadan kept his expression blank. That wasn’t exactly the truth. He’d do whatever it took to complete a mission, but he shrugged his shoulders. “Your wife won’t be harmed.”
For a moment relief showed in Don’s eyes, then his gaze flickered away. Yeah. There was guilt there. The man was knee-deep in dirt.
“Peter Whitney is an incredibly intelligent man. I admire intelligence. We gravitated toward one another. I was younger, and in a school where everyone has money—and degrees of it—it’s difficult to fit in. I wanted what they all had.”
Kadan remained silent. He might understand it, but he had a bad feeling, and a part of him was already mourning for Tansy. As he watched Don talk, taking in the shape of his eyes and the silver hair, things began to click.
“Whitney has this built-in radar for psychic ability. He can pass someone in the street, and even if they don’t know it, he does. He can shield his brain and he can spot psychics, but that’s the extent of it. He’s many things, Mr. Montague, but he’s a patriot as twisted as his visions for the country are. Of course in the early days, I didn’t see him as twisted. He was older, smart, which few people were, and he had more money than anyone else on the planet. Everything he said sounded golden.”
Kadan stayed patient when he wanted to shake the man. His revelations were going to hurt Tansy—and she’d have to be told. Damn this man for his childish greed.
“Whitney envisioned a world without men dying in battle. He said we could create supersoldiers. I honestly didn’t think the psychic abilities were strong enough in people. Mine weren’t. I feel things sometimes. When I see a helicopter or an airplane, I can redesign it for better function and speed and maneuverability because I ‘see’ the flaws.”
“And you have a natural shield.”
Don nodded. “I didn’t know it for a long time. How many people can read minds? I met Sharon while I was in graduate school. She was so small and fragile, with a weak heart. I fell like a ton of bricks, but she comes from the same kind of money as Whitney, and although I was making a name for myself, I was nowhere in her league. I didn’t think she’d look twice at me.”
Kadan was beginning to put the pieces together. Don Meadows was a fool. This was all about his wife.
“I managed to get her to go out with me, and in the end, she married me. Her family was furious and threatened to cut her out of her inheritance, but she married me anyway. Eventually her father backed me in my business, and we’ve been lucky and have established enough government contacts to be more than successful.”
“But . . . ,” Kadan prompted. Don Meadows was circling the subject, hoping it would be enough without disclosing his ties to Whitney. Kadan wasn’t about to let him get away with it.
Meadows sighed heavily and stroked Sharon’s limp hand. “Long before Sharon’s father would take a chance on me, I worked for Peter. He had a huge research center and I was given my own department. I had visions of maybe becoming partners with him one day and showing Sharon’s family that we didn’t need them. Peter and I took a business trip to Europe. I was twenty-six. Sharon was ill and couldn’t come with me.” He shook his head, his expression rippling with pain. “Her health is very fragile.”
Kadan nodded. He already knew what was coming.
“I don’t know what happened.” Don rubbed at the lines in his brow. “I think about it all the time. I was drinking and there was this girl. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen.” He looked up at Kadan, pain in his eyes. “Thirteen. She was thirteen.” He shook his head again. “I don’t remember much about that night. Only that I must have gone crazy. The sex wasn’t consensual. I know because I’ve seen the videotape a hundred times and it’s ugly. It’s damned ugly to know that you’re capable of something like that when it’s so repugnant to you.”
There was bitterness in his voice, even self-loathing. Don brought his wife’s hand to his mouth. “Peter cleaned up the mess—his money, of course—and we came home. He swore no one would ever know.”
“And you trusted him? You weren’t suspicious that he might have had something to do with you acting so out of character?”
“I had to trust him. He was my friend. It didn’t occur to me until a long time after, and by then, I had so much to lose. Sharon couldn’t have children. She knew I wanted them. I was afraid if she found out I’d not only cheated on her, but that I was capable of rape, of animal brutality, she’d leave me. She’d think I married her for her money. There was a part of me that wanted the money and I had forced a child.
God!
” He dropped his head into his hands. “You have no idea what it feels like to know a monster lives inside of you.”
“Have you ever done it since?”
Don’s head jerked up, eyes flashing with anger—with denial. “No! I’d shoot myself first if I ever had such an inclination. I don’t know what happened that night, but I saw myself. It was me raping that child. The video wasn’t tampered with.”
“But someone set the camera up in the first place.”
Don nodded. “Yeah. But I didn’t know there was a video until five years later.”
“When Whitney brought Tansy to you. She’s your biological daughter, isn’t she?”
Don swallowed hard and ducked his head again, shaking it from side to side. “Whitney called me into his private lab and brought Tansy out. You should have seen her. All white hair and those eyes. She had the same mouth her mother had. I knew she was mine the moment I laid eyes on her. Whitney showed me the tape. And he had tapes of the girl in what looked like a hospital during her pregnancy. She sold the baby to Whitney. Later, he claimed she died in a car accident, and maybe she did; I searched for her, but couldn’t find her.”
“And Whitney had Tansy for five years.”
Don nodded. “He’d enhanced her psychic abilities. Apparently the girl, her mother, was psychic and Peter wanted to see what he could do with the baby. She wasn’t the only one he had. He told me they were orphans he’d collected, unwanted children. He had nurses for them and said he was getting rid of them, adopting them out. He told me I could take Tansy on the condition he continued to be her doctor so he could see her progression.”
“And you balked.”
“Hell yes. The son of a bitch. He had my daughter. He’d set me up. And when he produced the video, I realized he had to have been the one behind the camera, that all those years earlier, he’d been a party to what I’d done.” He sighed heavily and leaned back against the headboard, still stroking Sharon’s hand. “He wasn’t always a madman. I saw the signs, but didn’t want to. He was my friend and I didn’t have too many of them.”
“And he opened doors for you,” Kadan wasn’t going to let him off the hook. Don Meadows was an intelligent man. He also was ambitious. He wanted the respect, contacts, and money that came from his association with Whitney.
“I can’t deny that.”
“So he came to you with his proposal. He wanted you to adopt your own daughter. And if you didn’t play ball with him, he was going to destroy the life you’d so carefully built.”
“He would show the video to Sharon and her family. He said he’d go public with it. That video is sick,” Don said. “It would have destroyed all of us.”
“And the other children he had in his laboratory. He was experimenting on them and you knew it.”
“He was adopting them out. They all had problems, just as Tansy did. He promised he’d give anyone who took them enough money to take care of their special needs.”
“And you wanted to believe that.”
“I had to believe it, for my own sanity. She was my daughter. My own child. I wanted her living with us any way I could get her. And I knew Sharon would take a damaged child, no matter how bad she was. Sharon desperately wanted children.”