Extraordinary Retribution (34 page)

The wraith understood. “And then I came.”

He nodded. “Yes. There you were, a child victim of the horrors of war. An innocent. I remembered this movie. I remembered this scene. It was like God had brought you to me. And I hoped perhaps there was a way out of hell.” He spoke almost to himself, staring down at his hands. “You see, hell is not a thing that comes when we die. What mankind has failed to understand is that we are always there.”

“And have you been freed?”

The old man walked back to his car. “I have done what I could, but tonight your journey will end.”

The wraith set his jaw. “You fear that I will fail.”

The soldier stared long at the wraith and shook his head. “No, Javed, what I fear for you most is that you will succeed.”

56

L
opez drove as fast as he could through the night. In the beginning, Houston had helped with the directions, finding the fastest routes to the Maryland home of the former vice president. They disregarded the back roads, took to the main arteries, casting aside caution. The wraith had a large head start on them, and there was little chance they could catch him. But they had to try.

“Still no answer?” cried Lopez, speeding down the highway, praying no police were along their path.

“No,” said Houston, her voice barely audible over the sounds of the engine and the roadway speeding underneath.

She was weakening. The blood loss had slowed but had not stopped.
She needs a doctor
. Every minute that went by was a trial by fire for Lopez, every exit a temptation to turn the car around and head to the nearest emergency room. If it were not for her own powerful will, her absolute desire that they intervene in the coming attempted assassination, Lopez knew that he would have succumbed and let the wraith do whatever he would.

“I tried all the numbers he gave me,” she continued, “even others for his residence, office. Too long on the phone, too many unsecured numbers. The CIA is likely tracking us by now. If the wraith doesn’t get us tonight, they likely will.”

“Messages?”

“You heard the voicemails. Text and emails: left them, too. If he’s out there, if he’s still alive, he’ll get them.”

“
If
he’s still alive?” Lopez had never considered this possibility.

Houston was seized by another coughing fit. Her entire body heaved, her face turned red. It was terrible to see and hear. The fit drained her significantly, and she rested a full minute before responding. “After seeing Farnell,” she gasped out, her voice rough, “I don’t think anything is too low for those guys. They knew about Fred, that’s how they used this Judas against us. Fitting name.” She sighed. “So, they knew he was helping us. The logical step is to remove that help. I hope he’s okay.”

Lopez felt the weight on them increase. Without Simon, they literally had no one in the world to turn to. He pushed that out of his mind for the time being.
Compartmentalize.

“It’s up to us anyway, Sara, whatever happened to Fred. He couldn’t get help to us in time. But that raises the question: what do we do when we get there? If the wraith’s not there yet, how do we convince them to listen to us and not throw us in jail, or worse?”

“I don’t know, Francisco. The one thing we have going for us is that the VP is a paranoid motherfucker. We might be able to spook him enough so that,
after
they throw us to the wolves, he’ll take precautions.”

“And we’re going to risk our lives, our freedom, for the guy some say masterminded all of this? We’ve got to be the world’s dumbest idealists!”

“Coming from you, Francisco, that’s something,” she said, starting to laugh but falling into another protracted coughing fit. She leaned against the window, pressing her face to the glass. “Cold. That feels wonderful. I’m not sure I’ll even make it as far as all that.”

“Sara, then we turn around and let fate take its course with him!”

“No, Francisco! Whatever he might or might not have done, he has rights, to life, liberty, and all that shit. After all this, I need to know that there is something that separates us from them. Courage of our convictions.” Her breathing was ragged. “That’s why we’re going.”

“Okay, shut up then, before you kill yourself talking. I need you.”

Houston smiled and reached for his hand on the wheel. “To help you with the wraith or more generally?”

“Both, damn it! And you know it. Now shut up.”

Her smiled broadened, and she closed her eyes for a time. The roadway blurred in Lopez’s mind, the speed high and reckless, features along the way lost in the motion. Her words reached deeply inside him.

I do need her
. This foul-mouthed, highly skilled, intelligent, resourceful, unbelieving, at times brutal woman had become what no one else had been allowed to be in his life: the object of his love.

I love her.
The words in his mind flowed over him with energy and warmth. He had finally let himself admit the truth. He knew it must be the crazed and traumatic experiences they had shared, the near-death escapes, the horrors and salvations. But the
reasons
didn’t change the
reality
. That he could explain it away with a Psychology 101 model didn’t undo what had happened. He loved her, and he needed her, and nothing was going to change that.

And I don’t want to go back to what was.

The thought struck him like a blow, and his hands grabbed the steering wheel tightly. He had never once since his ordination considered breaking his vows, leaving the Church, deserting his position. He simply could not have done it. Now, in one moment of clarity, he knew that he could. That he had been stripped of all position, been dishonored unjustly, and been rejected in his greatest moment of need by the Church did not assuage his pain at this truth. God had left Christ alone at the hour of his Passion:
Eli Eli lama sabachthani?
His current sufferings were nothing in comparison!
Where is your faith, Francisco?

But what should be and what was were two different things. As Houston slept and the dark evening flashed by incomprehensibly alongside his racing vehicle, the new world he had entered,
been forced into
, crystallized before Francisco Lopez. Suddenly, he understood that his former life was over. Born from its ashes a new life would begin in the next few hours—or it would be tragically cut short.

Whichever way, he was
Father
Lopez no more.

57

T
he Secret Service guard at the gate struck a match, the flash partly blinding him in the blackness of the night. He brought the flame to a cigarette pinched between his lips and repositioned himself in the chair. Sucking on the filter, he ensured that the tobacco had caught, then shook the match out. He dropped it to the floor and crushed it beneath his shoe. Suppressing a yawn, he rubbed his eyes.

I’m too damn old to be doing this anymore.
Images of Baton Rouge came back to him, and his days on the LSU basketball team.
College girls
. He’d been a star. After school, military service, and too many decades putting his ass on the line for others, it was time to quit.

His six-foot-eight-inch frame hardly fit in the little hut they had built for the gate guards, and his back was stiff from bending. He was tired, and it was another long night at an assignment that seemed too easy to pass up but that had turned out to be a real pain in his ass. First, there was the boredom. Night shift after night shift, in rain, cold, summer heat—for two years he had manned this small gatehouse. He was sick of it and of the growing feeling that he was wasting his life away. Then there was the man he protected. The vice president was insanely demanding, moody, and liable to fire anyone for reasons only his paranoia could justify. He’d seen too many decent agents sent packing, always with the rumors of poor recommendation letters that followed them for years. The guard didn’t want to get fired, but he sure as hell needed to get another assignment.

He took a long drag on the cancer stick, holding the smoke deep in his lungs, and exhaled toward the moonless sky. Even the stars were hidden by a low blanket of clouds. With hardly any streetlights around this isolated property, it was about as dark as ink.

A deep rumbling from an engine focused his attention. Now,
that
was something new. He turned his gaze up the road, following its path up the small hill that sat in front of the property. Two o’clock in the morning didn’t bring too much traffic around these parts. His eyes squinted slightly—the motor sounded powerful, large, likely diesel. A shadow seemed to congeal at the top of the hill, the broad outlines of what almost appeared to be a military-issue truck just discernible in the darkness. It almost looked like an old Humvee.
What the hell?

The agent stood up and walked out of his small enclosure on the right of the thick metal gate. He called out to the symmetrically placed gatehouse on the other side. “Yo! Johnson! Get your ass over here right now!”

There was a crashing sound, and a young man stumbled out of the other gatehouse looking half asleep. “Bridges? What is it? Damn! It’s two in the morning!”

“And that’s our
shift
, Johnson. Can’t you stay awake just one night?”

The younger man looked up the hill. He’d heard the sounds of the vehicle. “What’s going on?”

The tall black man rubbed his chin. “I don’t know. Truck just pulled up. Just
sitting
there. I don’t like this. I’m going to call it in, you keep your eyes open and holler if anything happens.”

The older guard walked back to the enclosure.
First time I’ve called in anything in two years!
He didn’t even remember the number. He flicked on a desk light and scanned the list taped to the side of the wall.

“Bridges?” came the young man’s call from outside. “Hey, somebody’s moving around up there. Looks like he’s on top of the truck.”

Holding the phone in one hand, he glanced up through the window. Sure enough, it looked like someone had climbed onto the roof. He pulled out his binoculars from a drawer and rushed back outside.

“Some drunk kids?” he said, planting his feet near the gate opening.

“Dunno, man. Weird.”

He trained the binoculars on the blurred shaped and focused. It was a man, not standing on top of the truck but
inside
with half his torso visible above the roof.
Like in Desert Storm.
He found his mind momentarily frozen, images flooding back and paralyzing his thoughts. The man shouldered something large and tubular. A bright orange light flashed.

“Johnson! Get down! Get—”

From the hilltop, the wraith reloaded the missile launcher. The left-side gatehouse and wall were gone, bright flames licking the remaining structures. A cloud of smoke, backlit from the fire underneath, rose aggressively, blending quickly into the dark sky. He aimed the Predator toward the right side, engaged the targeting electronics, locked onto the structure, and fired.

The result was similarly devastating. The warhead detonated on impact, the explosion thunderous. Stone, glass, and wood from the wall and houses mixed into a short-lived fireball and rained onto the earth beneath. He lifted a high-powered sniper rifle and looked through the scope toward the gate. The gate was gone, the metal warped and broken, the bars torn from the sides of the wall by the explosion. Two burning bodies lay on the ground in front of the gate.

He placed the weapon back inside the vehicle and then dropped into the driver’s seat, shifting forward and barreling down the hill. His frequency scanner buzzed around several common bands, indicating significant activity. Others in the compound or residence were aware that something had happened. Guards would be mobilized. Soon, video transmissions would show the damage, and the vice president would be moved to his underground bunker.
That won’t protect you.

The Humvee roared past the burning entrance, crushing underneath it the bodies he had seen from the hill. He did not slow. The house was about one hundred yards from the gate. Already he could see Secret Service agents streaming out of the home and an adjacent guesthouse. At this speed, they would intercept the Humvee in about thirty seconds. But he would not slow down. He would drive straight in front of the building, just feet from the porch and entrance, running down anyone who tried to get in his way. Then he would have to engage them. They likely didn’t have the firepower to pierce the reinforced plating. But individually, they could enter the vehicle and go hand to hand. He couldn’t let them get that close. Their single advantage was in numbers.

Bullets began striking the armor plating from several directions. He could now see about twenty agents converging on him rapidly. It was the perfect lure to the trap.

Just as it seemed that he would crash headfirst into the building, he braked hard and flipped a switch. The front headlights shot their beams outward, but several bright spotlights he had installed around the sides of the vehicle also engaged. Suddenly the men rushing him were blinded, and they were revealed to him in harsh beams.
Deer in the headlights.

He leapt through the roof opening and grabbed the M2. It was affixed to a ring mount, allowing him to spin nearly three hundred and sixty degrees, the barrel extending through a slot cut into the thick cylindrical plating that surrounded him. He could fire at will against those outside. They saw only the end of his weapon protruding from the wall of steel. He opened fire.

It was a shooting gallery. The M2 rounds were devastating and were pouring quickly from the machine gun. The agents fired wildly, bullets flying past the truck, some hitting it, one shattering a spotlight, others careening off the protective armor plating surrounding him atop the Humvee. It was bloody carnage below. He slowly rotated the gun, men dropping as if under a weed-whacker, screams and dust and blood overwhelming the senses. The remaining agents began to run, realizing they could not overcome the assault. He showed no mercy and gunned them down from behind. The gunfire stopped. None were left standing.