Whispers in the Dark - Maya Banks [119]
Garrett turned to Resnick, his eyes so cold they’d freeze a polar bear. “It’s time for you to start talking. We need every piece of information you have on this lab where you and Shea were conceived or created or whatever the fuck you want to call it. We need names, organizations, and we need to know who’d have an interest in them now. Or who would even know about them.”
“Do you have their abilities?” Sam asked as he took a step closer to Resnick.
Resnick shook his head. His nostrils flared and his lips flattened into a thin line. “I was a…failure. A dropped experiment. Disappointing results. They went back to the drawing board after I was born. It wasn’t until many years later that Grace and then Shea were born.”
“So what, you just hung around the lab? I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around this,” Ethan said. “It doesn’t add up and it damn sure doesn’t make sense.”
Resnick lit another cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke. “There wasn’t anything else to do with me. I was the first. They didn’t have a plan for what happened if I didn’t yield the results they were looking for. After me, they adopted out babies that didn’t work out. But they kept me.”
“Who is they?” Nathan asked impatiently. “We’re wasting time here. I’m not interested in your life story.”
“The project was started during the Cold War. At first the U.S. was primarily interested in psychic and telepathic powers. They wanted a way into the heads of people in positions of power. They wanted their secrets. It sounds far-fetched, yes, but then a whole lot of secret research is pretty damn unbelievable.
“There wasn’t any solid success until after the Cold War ended. That’s when Grace and Shea were born. At first there was a lot of excitement that the two girls could communicate telepathically with each other. But then when their ability to heal and take on pain was discovered, it marked a complete one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn in the possibilities.”
“Okay, so who do we like for this?” Nathan demanded. “The government? Some unheard-of, nonexistent shadow group of the CIA who want to keep experimenting on Shea and Grace?”
“Where did they get the donors?” Donovan cut in. “Shea said that according to her mother’s journal they paired egg and sperm from donors who had remarkable abilities. That doesn’t explain how they laid hands on these people. Hardly something you can advertise for.”
“I don’t know the answer to your question, Nathan,” Resnick said in a low voice. “But we’ll use whatever resources I have to find out. I swear it.” He turned to Donovan. “That’s exactly what they did. They studied each and every case of special abilities. Some turned out to be hoaxes, but there were others who clearly displayed unique talents. Years went into cataloging and searching out men and women with psychic or paranormal gifts. They were tested extensively and then semen samples were taken from the men and the females had eggs removed. Then began an experimentation on mixing and matching certain profiles to see what the result would be.”
“It all sounds fucking unreal,” Ethan muttered.
“I was a failure. As were many of the offspring that were created in the lab,” Resnick continued. “In fact, Grace and Shea were the only two who displayed marked abilities. You can imagine the excitement they caused when it was discovered what they could do. There were others with questionable abilities but nothing that was tangible, that was there in black and white, that could be proven, and most important, controlled and reproduced at will. That is what they were looking for, and that’s why Grace and Shea aren’t safe. They want them not only for what they can do, but for the possibilities their offspring would provide.”
A chill went up Nathan’s spine, and fury gripped him all over again. There was no fucking way Shea was going to spend her life being tortured and have her eggs taken to produce mass offspring in hopes of having one or two who shared her remarkable ability. The mere thought made him sick to his stomach.
A sudden thought occurred