Extraordinary Retribution

16

The CIA woman ignored the speed limit. Father Lopez unconsciously checked his seat belt again. 95mph! And she had not stopped talking the entire drive. He had at least confiscated her cell phone and offered to check the messages for her. Mother of God.

They were headed to Knoxville, following TN-71 through the mountains. After scouting several local hospitals around the Gatlinburg area, they had set off to the bigger city in hopes of striking gold at one of the larger trauma centers. Sara Houston seemed sure of herself.

“This could turn into a wild goose chase,” Lopez muttered in frustration.

Houston parried immediately. “We won’t let that happen. If we strike out in Knoxville, we go to Plan B.”

“CIA headquarters.” He couldn’t believe he’d just said that.

“That’s right,” she said. Even Houston paused as she seemed to consider the implications. “Our offices, Francisco. Something is buried there. Something that will explain this madness.”

“So you keep saying.”

“Things don’t happen without a cause! Multiple killings and coverups are always the tip of the iceberg.”

Lopez threw up his hands in frustration. “But you were there for years working next to him. If you didn’t know, how can you find out now?”

“I was a good soldier, Francisco. I did my job, and I did it well. I didn’t gossip. I ignored rumors. I believed in serving my country, not in dirtying it up.” Lopez saw a pained look on her face and decided not to press the argument.

She changed the subject. “Your bishop was cooperative?”

“Barely. This did not go down well. I’m a local priest with a parish. I am faculty at a Catholic school. Running off suddenly with poor explanations about it being related to my brother’s death raised a lot of eyebrows.” Lopez sighed. “If they weren’t going to close the school anyway, it wouldn’t have flown.”

Houston nodded. “Well, soon we’ll either have hit a wall, or discovered something that will make you take a sabbatical. We’ll find the answers, either at CIA or, just maybe, in Knoxville.”

“The hospitals.” Lopez was still skeptical.

She turned to face him, taking her eyes off the road and sending a new round of adrenaline through the priest. “Miguel was a hell of an agent. A bit of a legend at Langley, actually.” She returned her gaze ahead. “Judging from your description of the cabin, he put up one hell of a fight before he was killed. Whoever did this, they weren’t supermen. Somebody, likely several people, got hurt. I bet at least one of them seriously. They would have needed a hospital.”

“Why? Don’t these guys have some sort of secret lair or the like? Special hideouts? Paid docs who don’t talk?”

Houston laughed. It was a pleasant sound, free from the tension and cynicism of so many of her words. “Francisco, these are dirty players, so far underground that they live with worms. They clearly have resources, but not enough to staff trauma care in any old backwoods skiing resort in the South.”

“It makes about as much sense as everything else I’ve seen going on.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re totally green in all this. Jesus, you’re a damn priest. But you’re learning. I’m afraid you’re going to be learning a lot of harsh lessons, Francisco.”

“Whatever I have to do to find out what happened to my brother.”

She glanced briefly into his eyes. “We’ll check all the local emergency-room records in Knoxville, focusing on the day of Miguel’s death. There aren’t too many grenade wounds that come through the Tennessee ERs each month. Knoxville is about all they’d have left. If they needed help, they went there. And we’ll find them.”

17

“This is highly irregular.”

They sat in a pleasant if mundane office at the University of Tennessee Medical Center, confronted with the frowning face of a middle-level VP. VP of what, Lopez had lost track. The bureaucracy even in a Tennessee hospital was awe-inspiring.

It seemed that they had hardly paused for breath since Gatlinburg. Lopez wasn’t used to this. His rhythms were the Catholic school, the parish council, and religious services. He felt he had been strapped into a roller coaster. The weight in his stomach was his sense that it was only just now nearing the top of the first hill.

After the mad drive to Knoxville, they pulled up to the redbrick-and-glass trauma center, raised several sets of eyebrows flashing government ID, and demanded to see patient records in a murder investigation. One after the other, they had been transferred to higher-ranked hospital staff. The bureaucracy was all a blur to Lopez, and he shifted uneasily in his chair as he watched Houston scowl at the hospital administrator. The CIA agent recovered quickly and morphed her face into a pleasant smile.

“Ma’am,” began Houston, “we’re sorry to take so much of your time, but this is an extremely urgent matter. There have been criminal actions in the state of Tennessee that involve government employees.” She paused for effect. “Murders.”

The administrator seemed nonplused. “Yes, yes. That’s what the others said, too.” Others? Lopez and Houston exchanged glances. “You know, it’s always a murder or a mafia boss or some damned matter of national security and you Feds barge in here and think that you have access to any old thing that you want. We have other important business, you know.”

The priest leaned forward. “You said others were asking similar questions?”

The woman rolled her eyes. “FBI, CIA, KPD, whatever, I don’t know.” She looked the priest up and down. “Seems maybe Vatican too, now. No wonder all our tax money is wasted. Don’t you clowns ever talk to each other?”

Houston probed further. “This does seem wasteful, I know, but there are hundreds of investigative branches in US law enforcement, not to mention governmental agencies. This case is so important that it might have brought in unrelated groups. I’m sorry for any repetition, but a man has been murdered and we need to make sure nothing was missed. Can you tell me what they asked and what you told them?”

The woman sat in the center of a wrap-around desk. She spun around in her plush office chair, stopped when she faced a counter behind her desk, and grabbed a manila folder. She dropped it sharply on the surface in front of Lopez and Houston as she rotated back. Her tone was increasingly irritated.

“Look, it’s all in here, what we actually do have on this guy. The man came in with massive trauma injuries. Shrapnel if you can believe it — combat injuries. Former army surgeon was called in to have a look. There was no ID on him. He refused to talk to the police.” She shook her head. “He was here in the ICU, critically wounded, monitored around the clock, and then, one day, poof! He was gone. Stole a bunch of supplies, hot-wired a truck in the parking lot. Damndest thing we ever saw. Police came again and saw the file, and more of you Feds were here the other day. Maybe I should put this whole thing online and you all can just let me get back to my work.”

Houston began, “If we can just get a look—”

The woman waved them off. “First door on your right’s a conference room. Have a look in there and drop this back off with my secretary.”

“Thank you very much! We’ll be out of your hair soon.”

“Sure, honey, until the next bozo shows up.” She spun around and took a call, turning her back on them.

The two made their way to the small conference room and closed the door. The air inside was stale, and there was dust on the table. A small window overlooking the forested hills surrounding the hospital let in some light at the far end of the space, but the room was dim. Father Lopez flicked on the light, and they sat together to look over the file.

The administrator had summarized accurately; the details were stark on the page. The same day Miguel Lopez had been murdered, a John Doe had entered the ER with extensive injuries, pulling up delirious in a car, bleeding profusely, handing the medics a list of information: a summary of his wounds, his allergies to medicine, blood type. Everything the hospital staff might need to know except his name or any other personal information. The man described in the file was a combination of detailed data and gaping mystery.

“Shrapnel?” asked Lopez. “Could that be from the grenades?”

“Not much else,” said Houston. “She didn’t mention anyone else with him. How did he get here on his own?”

“She said he drove in.”

“In this condition? By himself? Why would his team allow that? How could he drive across the mountains from Gatlinburg so badly wounded?”

“Maybe they got him as far as the hospital and let him get the rest of the way. Hiding out?”

“Yeah, maybe.” She shook her head. “So many holes in this. Nothing adds up. But this is it, Francisco. No way this is a coincidence. This man was injured fighting Miguel. We found one of them.”

Lopez sighed, throwing up his hands. “And lost him.”

She ignored him, flipping through the pages. “There is some weird shit here.”

Lopez leaned closer, trying to decipher the medical jargon. There were the usual physical stats — height, weight, appearance. The staff described a physically imposing man of moderate height, bulked like a martial arts champion. Caucasian, blond hair, blue eyes. There was a description of injuries, treatment and patient response. A lot of doctor talk. Lopez paused, confused by the next section. “Skin discoloration?”

Houston nodded. “Seems they weren’t sure what to make of it. They ruled out burns or any diseases. Look, here, underlined with a question mark: pharmacological.”

“What do drugs have to do with skin?”

The CIA agent stared off into space for a moment, her eyes narrowing in focus. “Anything about his eyes?” She flipped through the pages. “Here — contacts!”

Her exclamation caught him off guard. “Contacts?” Lopez felt like a slow pupil.

Houston read from the page. “Patient was prepped for surgery. Clothes cut from his body, contacts removed.” She flipped back and forth intensely through the file. “Damn, no more on the contacts.”

“Sara, what is it? What’s so important about contact lenses?”

“You can use them for purposes other than eyesight, Francisco.”

Lopez thought about this. “You mean decorative? Colored lenses?”

“Exactly.”

“Why would this lunatic want fashion contact lenses?”

“I’m not sure, Francisco.” She began snapping photos of the pages with her smartphone camera, careful to make sure no staff looked in through the window in the door. “But I think our killer might be a chameleon.”

“Chameleon?”

“Yes, hiding his appearance, changing it depending on his mission. It’s rare, and it’s reserved for ultra-elite ciphers. It usually goes with plastic surgery and serious, black-ops-type work. James Bond material. Honestly, stuff only rumored from anything I’ve seen at the Agency.”

That word again. Black ops. “This killer can’t be governmental!”

Houston closed the folder and put her phone away. “I wouldn’t have thought so, but now, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know anyone else who would have the resources to take things this far.” She stood up, and Lopez followed her to the door, once again reeling from the revelations that arose from this search. “Miguel’s killer was here, Francisco, and he’s something very nasty. I knew this was bad, but I’m getting a chill about where this is headed. We need to get up to CIA now. Something is really being buried. I’m convinced after seeing this.”

Lopez nodded. “Yes. So am I. And it seems that some others are as well.”

The agent nodded. “You heard the woman. Inquiries were already made. I doubt they were who she thought they were.”

Lopez exhaled. “We aren’t the only ones looking.”

18

He stood at the fence and called the old soldier’s name. The second day. The desert winds were blowing harshly from the south, the sand stinging exposed skin. The ground this far out from the major centers was cracked and nearly bone dry. The heat pounded down from an evil eye staring cruelly on them.

He repeated the call. The door of the rundown ex-army cabin banged open, and a stocky form approached the barbed wire cautiously. Even in his sixties, the man was imposing, his sagging muscles still considerable, the vasculature thick and prominent. He wore a tank top, exposing his mottled and dark skin, burnt from years under the sun. Scars from battles pocked his form. He limped slightly on the left side.

“You again?”

“Train me!”

The old solider shook his head in disbelief, and pulled on the faded American baseball cap shielding his eyes. “For God’s sake, boy! Why me?”

“You are the best. I have searched.”

“You’re not army. You’re not even Israeli.”

“You are hardly Israeli.”

The old man waved his hand at the youth. “Why should I train you?”

The dust swirled around the old man’s home, forming mini-tornados. The dark-skinned boy leaned into the fence, grasping the links almost desperately in his hands. He looked deeply into the soldier’s eyes.

“For justice!”

There were crickets.

For some unquantifiable time, that is all he knew. That droning, rhythmic chirping, swirling, pounding his consciousness, rising over him like water.

He swam. Swam in a sea of insect sounds, the patterns forming shapes in his mind, colors that danced. The colors slowly bled across his vision, fading to white like a fog.

He opened his eyes. There was only blurred light and the sense of crusted glue sticking his eyelids together. He raised his arm to rub his eyes. Pain. The pain kicked him suddenly to a higher level of awareness as he inhaled sharply. The cabin walls came into focus.

In the mountains. He began to remember. Remember the hell of the last few days, and remember that this was not the first time he had awakened so disoriented. Still feverish. He summoned a burst of strength and pushed up from his chest to turn slightly to the side. The pain from his back nearly made him cry out.

He glanced through a small window on the wall parallel to his bed. The first pale daylight fell on the pines outside. He had slept dusk to dawn. He noticed the sheets were soaked with sweat and, in some places, pink with blood. But it is less. The bleeding is nearly over. He noticed that the bandages were applied well, even over his back which he could hardly reach. The sound of wood groaning under weight distracted him.

“You are finally awake,” came the voice from the dream. He glanced across the room to a shape against the wall. The soldier. Each day, his mind cleared faster, his memory returned more quickly. The rough voice spoke again. “They’re calling you the wraith.”

“Yes,” he spoke through a parched mouth, grabbing a full canteen strapped to the bedpost. “How do you know?” He drank greedily.

The old man laughed and shifted in a creaking chair by the door. “You spoke in your delirium. Sometimes, nonsense. Sometimes, cold facts. Sometimes, a mixture.” The soldier gestured beside the bed. “Fresh formula for a growing infant.”

The wraith groaned and pushed himself to a seated position. He reached over to a stained nightstand for a syringe and bottle by the edge. Inside the glass was a cocktail of three antibiotics mixed with anabolic and anti-inflammatory steroids. He inserted the needle into the bottle, drew the liquid, and plunged it into his arm. He could barely feel the shot. Compared to the hurricane in his back, it did not register.

He stood up, and the old man watched him in silence. It felt like a Herculean effort, but he knew the extreme pain and stiffness would gradually wear off. It had done so each morning, afternoon, and evening when he awakened from sleep to impose drugs, feeding, and exercise on his protesting frame. He stepped on a scale acquired from a drugstore and watched the numbers settle to one hundred and sixty-five pounds. At five foot, eleven inches, this was thin for him. Of far greater concern was that he weighed nearly thirty pounds less than before the bloody encounter with Lopez. He picked up a notebook from the floor and logged the number. Focusing intensely to do even simple math, he grunted with satisfaction as he looked at the growing list. The numbers were still low, but they had slowed their decrease dramatically. Tomorrow, he was certain, the trend would reverse.

To make sure that happened, he walked over to the sink. He pulled three different protein powders from the shelf. One canister contained egg albumin mixed with numerous branched chained amino acids and vitamins. Twenty-five grams of protein per scoop; he added two. A second was casein protein from milk — hard to digest, but providing hours of nutrients as it made its way through the digestive tract. One scoop. Finally, hydrolyzed whey protein, the most biologically available protein known. A staple in cancer wards. Used quickly, it went straight to the tissues starving for nitrogen. To the mixture, he added water, three different unsaturated oils, maltodextrin for the insulin spike to shuttle the nutrients to cells, and creatine. He punched the button on the blender and let it scream for a minute. He downed the nasty concoction and rinsed the container.

Now for the real test of will.

He began with mild stretching exercises. Excruciating, yet his continued progress encouraged him. Then, resistance training, limited at present to body weight exercises. Through a pained grimace, he smiled that he could do ten squats without holding onto the chair for support. He lowered himself for pushups, careful not to wrench his back. Sweat poured down over his body and pooled on the floor below his face. He nearly collapsed with exhaustion, holding onto the side of the bed for several minutes, unable to move.

The soldier finally spoke again. “Javed, what will be left of your body when all this is over? Steroids, growth hormone, grenades?”

The wraith did not look up, his breath coming in gasps. “Those thoughts are a weakness. There is no long term. There is only the mission, and I must be ready soon.”

The soldier nodded his head. “You sound like troops preparing to continue some war.”

“There is a war!”

“Yes, I know. Your war.”

Slowly, the wraith collected himself. The workout had gone well. Now he had to clean the wounds.

“Are you having second thoughts, Avram?” he asked the soldier.

“I began with second thoughts, you young ass. But your pain was bigger than my wisdom. Your vengeance would not be ignored.”

“Then get in here and help me wash.”

The old man laughed and rose with a grunt, his broad legs bowed but his gait sure. The wraith shuffled into the bathroom, fatigue heavy on his frame. Dark splotches of skin appeared randomly across his body like advanced vitiligo.

“You look like a burn victim,” said the soldier, gesturing across the young man’s frame. “These chemicals you had me retrieve — they will fix this?”

“They will. But it needs constant attention. Now is not the time. Appearances will come later.”

The old man nodded. “Yes. It’s the back that worries me. The shrapnel went deep in many places. I’ve seen it before. You would have died from an infection without me.”

The wraith grasped the edges of the sink as the soldier removed the bandages and worked over the wounds. The pain decreased each day as he healed, but it was still very raw.

“It is much better today. You have the health of a young ox.” He laughed sharply. “Plus the horse steroids!”

The wraith winced from the pain. He looked into the mirror, trying to catch the soldier’s eyes. “Why did you come?”

The old man did not stop working on the wounds and didn’t return the gaze. “We had an agreement. You paid me much to train you and even more for a contingency — yes, the right term?”

“So? You were halfway around the world. You knew if you got that signal I was probably dead.”

The soldier grunted. “Yes, I thought you were dead. You should be dead.”

“Then why?”

The old man sighed loudly and paused his work. “What you do is the most basic of the acts of war. And you do it against the gods themselves. This is bigger than me.”

“That’s all? Poetic nonsense?”

“No!” the soldier pressed firmly with a gauze pad on the wound, the wraith nearly gasping.

“Then what, old man?”

“Where I come from, you don’t leave a soldier to die on the battlefield alone.”

19

Several days had passed since they left the South and the horror of what had transpired. Lopez felt disoriented. Following a bizarre trip to the Knoxville trauma center, he was now far from home, absent from his school on a wild hunt for his brother’s killers: a celibate priest rooming with a female CIA agent, watching her sift through data online for hours in the dim confines of a Virginia motel.

He felt like an intern at a law firm. He brought in food, got her coffee, ran other errands as she worked, and asked her questions that she usually had no answers to. But she did work, often late into the night, her hair like a golden veil over her face and the computer, her athletic form splayed at odd angles from hours hunched over the laptop. Two or three times a day, she would stop her work, take to the middle of the floor, and perform a set of unbelievable stretches that looked to be of some martial arts origin. Lopez could only wonder how she never tore any muscles.

Perhaps she did it to release emotional tension as much as physical. Even though Houston felt that the answer lay within the CIA, without hard evidence, she didn’t think they could bring a case to her superiors. Lopez sensed that something lay underneath her reluctance, some past conflict she was not articulating. Was she pursuing Miguel’s killers without the approval of the CIA? Maybe they didn’t believe her intuition. But would they now?

He couldn’t imagine how they would present a case. They didn’t even have a clear hypothesis themselves, only a train of strange coincidences, hints in medical records, and a hunch that something much bigger was underlying it all.

It was all growing increasingly frustrating. While she used Agency devices to log in securely and comb through accessible files, he paced. Sometimes, he prayed the rosary. At others, he simply stared into space recalling the nightmare at his family house in the mountains. And he was running out of time. The deadline his bishop had given him was approaching in a week, and they seemed to be little closer to discovering the identity or location of his brother’s killer, or to understanding the mystery behind the events of the last month and a half. The hotel room was fast becoming a prison. He fiddled with the arrowhead underneath his shirt. My new nervous habit.

Lopez stood up and opened the blinds.

“Hey, can you keep those closed?” Houston sniped. “The glare, remember? Computer screen?”

Familiarity was breeding contempt. Or maybe it’s the murders and stress, he told himself. Nothing was remotely normal about what was happening.

“Sara, I’m tired of the dark. I’m tired of this dark room. There has been nothing but darkness of late. Dark deeds, shrouded mysteries we can’t penetrate. Black ops.”

“Poetic.” The CIA agent arched her back in front of the laptop, pushing her chest outward and stretching her arms over her head. Lopez tried not to stare, but he found it difficult not to. She seemed to relax a moment. “But that’s exactly what it seems to be.”

The priest raised an eyebrow. Whatever his frustrations, he had come to know Sara Houston much better, and he quickly picked up on her tone. “You think you have something?”

“I wanted to be sure, but, yes, there’s a clear pattern here. Buried, but here. I’m sorry it took me so long to find it.”

Lopez walked over to the desk. Their hotel room was claustrophobic, two twin beds and a small working desk crammed beside them. He sat down at the foot of one bed and looked at the screen. “So?”

She sighed, her fingers resting gently underneath her chin. “I looked through what files I had on all the agents who have died this last year. Gerald Stone, John Fuller, Jack Conover. And Miguel.” Again he saw the flash of pain on her face. “There is something connecting them, but the records at CIA border on incomprehensible.”

“They’re covering it up?” asked Lopez, the growing cynicism with this business directing his thoughts.

“It seems so. Look here.” She ran her finger across a list of dates and locations. “I pulled these from all their records. These days here, often several in a row, they did not report into the office. That wouldn’t be so weird except for the fact that they all shared the same windows of absence. Like a buddy trip or something.”

“Wouldn’t you have noticed?”

“Not really, Francisco.” She breathed out heavily, resting her head momentarily on her hands. “Although maybe I should have. Our staff was very active, often traveling. Some months there would be more days I didn’t see agents than those I did. I never worked directly with Miguel or any of the others. Besides, it could always have been a conference or retreat or something specific for some of their projects. They were the elite. Special. Everything top secret.”

Lopez gave her a sidelong glance. “So, you’re not one of the elite?”

“I’m a woman, Francisco,” she said testily. “We may have come a long way, baby, but in many circles, especially government and military, there are certain kinds of missions and activities that are still thought to be the providence of men. Men especially think that, and they still tend to run things.”

“I see,” he replied. “So, these extended absences, you don’t think these are unrelated.”

She shook her head. “No, not now. The coincidences are piling up too high.”

Lopez was getting more curious. “So, what did these elite agents work on that didn’t involve you?”

Houston shrugged. “Many things, most of which were classified even from the bulk of the staff. Almost always related to the war on terror.”

Lopez grunted and stood up, pacing the small room. “How do you wage war on an emotion?”

“OK, bad name from the politicians. But the terrorists are very real. So are their organizations, and their desire to penetrate and infiltrate America.”

Lopez could hear the echo of his brother in her words. It annoyed him. “You sound paranoid.”

Her eyes flashed. “And you sound like a naive priest!” She glared at him. “I know too many good people who have risked their lives, lost their lives, because they know this threat is very real!”

Lopez stopped still in his pacing. “I’m sorry, Sara. I have a distrust of the government. Too many misguided wars and actions. Too many lies. Sometimes, hearing ‘war on terror’ sounds like another excuse to fund Halliburton and other businesses that make money on conflict.”

Houston lowered her fiery gaze. “Yeah, well, I’m not saying all that doesn’t happen. But I’m tired of seeing bleeding hearts pretend there isn’t an enemy to fight.”

Her words stung. He knew it was his ego that was hurt, but it still stirred him up. “Maybe the real enemy isn’t what we think, Sara. Maybe the true war isn’t being fought with guns or bombs, or against human armies.”

“Is it sermon time?”

Lopez planted his feet. “You can scoff, but maybe our best weapons in that war are love and forgiveness. Jesus was the ultimate bleeding heart, Sara. He was wrongly accused, unfairly tried, horrifically tortured, and did not strike back. Turn the other cheek.”

Houston laughed harshly. “I hate to say it, Francisco, but you’re gonna need retraining soon. You don’t understand what’s around you.”

“That’s my ethos. That’s where Miguel and I parted ways.”

She looked away quickly, but not before Lopez could catch tears beginning to fill her eyes. For several seconds she would not look at or speak to him, and her hurt struck him like an undefended blow to the stomach. He was usually more sensitive, more empathetic. It had been his gift as a priest. How had he missed her pain?

Because I’m fighting with Miguel, again. Because I’m seeing him in her words. Lopez felt slapped with the reality of their situation, the dim room suddenly real again, Sara Houston real, their loss all too real. The battles of his youth receded into a fog of past hurts.

“Sara, I—”

“Shut it.” She wiped her eyes almost violently and stood up, her arms folded across her chest. Her hair surrounded her face like halo of yellow, extending down to the freckled skin of her arms. “I’m tired of bottling this up. I don’t care if you’re a priest and he’s your brother.”

“Sara, you don’t have to—” he stammered, sensing the direction of her conversation.

“I was in love with your brother, Francisco,” she announced firmly. Lopez made no response, and the room was silent for a moment. Her voiced softened. “And he loved me, as much as he allowed himself to.”

Lopez lowered his head. He didn’t know if he was up for more confessions. He was tired. Please, no more transferal of sin.

“A deadly sin, I’m afraid, with married Miguel. Isn’t coveting a sin, priest?”

“Sara, look, that’s not fair. Judgment is not mine, God knows. I don’t judge you.”

“Save it. I knew he had a family. Had he let himself stray, I would have been there, with open arms.” She looked down toward the floor. Without warning, her downcast head snapped up, and she practically yelled. “Do you know what he’d been through?” The tears were back, filling her eyes, acting as distorting lenses magnifying her blue irises. “No, none of you did, because he had been taught to be strong for the family. For the community. Your football star. Soldier. Hero. Did you ever ask him if he was okay, Francisco? Did you?”

Lopez felt ashamed. Her words burned within him. His brother had come back from war. Many soldiers he had counseled never got their lives together after they returned. They turned to alcohol. Their marriages collapsed. They couldn’t hold jobs. They slept with their guns, committed crimes, committed suicide. Miguel had come back with them. What nightmares did he struggle with? Lopez knew he had not reached out to his brother. He’d been too damn busy protecting his own ego from their disagreements. He sat down on the far bed. My ethos? How could he love his enemies when he couldn’t even care enough about his own brother to ask?

“No, you know you didn’t. Don’t take it too hard; nobody else did, either. He saw things in war, Francisco. And they didn’t just bounce off him like linebackers. He saw things, did things in CIA that ate at him. No one knew. No one did so much as ask.” She tossed her hair back defiantly. “Not even his wife. He tried to talk to her, but he never got far. She ran from it. She didn’t want to see anything except the hero she had married. But I did ask, Francisco, because I could see in his eyes what no one else seemed to — pain. I was the only one who held his heart, even if only for a little while.”

Her face was pained, but her posture was erect and strong. “He would not have left his family for me. I knew that. He knew I knew that. He made that clear; he was fair. But I loved him, Francisco, and I’ve missed him terribly since he left the Agency.” She stared a moment at Lopez. He didn’t know what to say.

“Ah, fuck it.” She walked briskly over to the counter and picked up her mobile, punching in several numbers. There was a moment of stillness as she waited for someone to pick up.

“Counterproliferation Division? Yes, Fred Simon, please. Extension 3378.”

“What are you doing?” Lopez rasped out, hardly able to speak.

“Calling in a favor. A former division chief. He lives nearby.”

“Why are you calling him?”

“Because we’ve hit a wall. I know there’s something there, but they’ve buried it. We need help.” Her attention returned to the phone. “Yes, I’ll hold.”

Lopez approached her hesitantly. “You still want me around for this?”

Her shoulders slumped. “My God, Francisco, of course. Show some backbone!” She walked over and grabbed him by the hair of his beard. His eyes opened in shock. “You’d better not bail on me! You’re ivory tower material, damn ridiculous, but we share one thing: we both loved Miguel. I can see it in you. In your face when you talk about him, in your eyes.” She paused, a sad expression on her face as she stared at him. “It’s weird. You have his eyes — those dark, haunting Aztec eyes. And more of him inside you than you want to admit. Basically, that’s your main flaw.”

“What flaw?” Lopez felt disoriented.

Houston turned from him and spoke into the phone again. “All right, please take a message. No, I don’t want to use his voice mail. He never checks it. Tell him Sara Houston called. He knows my number. Tell him that it’s highest priority — urgent. Yes, that’s right. Thanks.” She hung up.

“Your problem, Francisco, is that you are trying too hard to be something you aren’t. Just like Miguel was.” She pursed her lips. “It doesn’t matter right now. If we’re going to get through this, you’ll have to figure that part of it out. Meanwhile, now that I have this confession off my chest, my head is cleared. I know what I have to do.”

She walked over to her bag and pulled out a large handgun. Lopez stood upright, a surge of anxiety running through his body at the site of the weapon. The agent pulled off the safety, checked the magazine, sighted the weapon through the window, and spoke coldly.

“We’ve got business to take care of. I want these killers. And we’re going to find them.”

20

Fred Simon walked into the IMO branch of his division. After the requisite ID checks, he was ushered to an office with a senior information management specialist. He didn’t fool himself that these bookkeepers had any special training that warranted such fancy bureaucratic titles. He mainly thought of them as a glorified records department with experienced librarians. But at least they still remembered who he was after many years and had not assigned him some rookie at a cubicle. The specialist extended his hand.

“I’m Robert Conway, Agent Simon. How can I be of service?”

Simon shook his hand, and they both sat down across from each other over Conway’s desk, the record agent’s face partially hidden behind his computer monitor.

“I need information on several agents from the Darst division over at the Counterterrorism Center.”

“Why not contact CTC directly?” asked Conway.

“It’d be out of my way, and all the databases are under the new system umbrella, anyway, so I thought I’d save myself the trouble.” He smiled innocently and hoped that would do it.

Sara Houston had sounded paranoid, talking about a cover-up in her division and the deaths of numerous agents. He usually trusted her judgment, but he had to admit that this sounded far-fetched. On the other hand, the CTC was one of the more shadowy divisions at the CIA, and rumors swirled around the place. The CTC had put into practice many extreme methods after 9/11, which had led to a near revolt in the CIA over agency ethics.

For Simon, the pain still felt fresh. The executive branch had spent eight years turning the CIA into a parody of itself. It takes so little time to destroy, and so long to build. They had dismantled the careful information vetting systems established over decades in favor of their “stove-piping” approach: where low-level information was no longer filtered through layers of analysis to ascertain its quality but could percolate straight to the top. It was part of that administration’s paranoia and distrust of the intelligence community. What it got them was egg all over their faces, phantom WMDs, and a decade-long war that had nothing to do with 9/11. Of course, the CIA was the scapegoat.

“Understandable,” smiled Conway right back. “Which agents?”

“Three in particular: Miguel Lopez, John Fuller, and Gerald Stone.”

Keys clacked as Conway entered data into the computer. Simon slipped back into his memories as the IMO searched the system records.

He fully blamed the former vice president for the disasters — the true force of personality over those eight long years. He had almost single-handedly hacked apart the US intelligence community and then rebuilt it toward the darker purposes he had in mind. Many of Simon’s colleagues had left the agency demoralized. High-level conflicts between national security administrators, even the secretary of state, had raged over the VP’s actions and the directions he was moving the US counterterrorism programs. The madman had created a CIA assassination program that reported only to him, that ran independent of any congressional or judicial oversight! He was the main architect, achieving the abandonment of the Geneva Conventions by the United States, strong-arming a vacillating president and CIA administration into the use of torture, by sheer force of personality overruling objections in the Cabinet.

What was left was a tattered and disorganized agency, one Simon and a few of the old guard were trying to piece together again — with the sole exception of the CTC. It was not disorganized. It was not in tatters. It seemed to function as an Agency unto itself, even now. Simon knew better than to go there directly.

“Just a second,” said Conway. “OK, here they are.” He looked over from his monitor at Simon. “These three are recently deceased?”

“Yes,” said Simon. “That’s partly why I’m here. I wanted to correlate their assignments with some data I have in order to determine if there’s a pattern in the deaths.”

“A pattern? You mean targeted kills?”

This one wasn’t an idiot. “Possibly with such a pattern.”

The records specialist looked troubled. He returned his attention to the screen. The clacking continued. Simon watched the man’s face transform from concern to a perplexed scowl.

“Agent Simon, I’m afraid I may not be able to help you with this.”

Simon’s stomach dropped. Is he part of this? “Why is that?”

Conway shook his head, continuing to type. “It’s just — no matter how I try, I’m locked out of the system when I try to access any of the mission reports on these agents.”

Simon breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s okay. It’s likely a security clearance issue.”

“I don’t know,” he said, looking confused. “I’m embarrassed to say this, but I’ve never seen the system behave this way before. Normally, if it were a clearance issue, it would let me know, especially so it would be clear what was required.”

Simon leaned forward. “And this doesn’t flag it as security?”

“No. It doesn’t flag it as anything. I’m just booted out of the system whenever I type in my credentials.”

“It might just be an issue with the implementation. I’ve got pretty high access — comes from having run this division a decade or so ago. Why don’t you use my clearance codes.”

“Sir, I don’t think I’m allowed to—”

“Just let me sit back there and enter the information.” Simon tried to appear calm, even as adrenaline rushed through his veins. Whatever he had said a moment ago to the man, this was not normal. Now he really wanted to see those files. But Conway was right — it was against protocol for him to enter the clearances directly. In fact, access in this manner would be against protocol altogether. He had to be careful not to spook him, or he’d lose this opportunity.

“Yes, well, okay then. I’m interested to see what happens now,” said the records agent standing to the side of the chair.

Curiosity killed the cat, thought Simon as he rose and walked around the desk, sitting in the vacated seat in front of the computer. He scanned his entry card and entered his security code. There was a pause, and then the screen disappeared, reloading the main menu.

“Exact same thing that happened to me,” said Conway.

“I’m locked out of these files?”

“Looks like it, Agent Simon. I would’ve thought someone at your level would have access.”

That makes two of us. Simon thought back to the strange phone call from Houston. Suddenly, she didn’t seem so paranoid. What are you boys hiding at CTC?

“There must be some software bug. Conway, what do you think my options are now?”

“I don’t know, sir. I think the best bet is to go to CTC itself.”

Like hell. The last thing he wanted to do now was telegraph that he was looking into this. “And if that doesn’t work?”

“There’s the more centralized records division. Maybe there is something quirky about the data sharing.” The man didn’t look like he believed in that hypothesis very much.

Simon nodded and stood up. “You’re probably right. Thanks. I’ll look into these options. You’ve been a great help. I’m sure it’s just a glitch.”

Several miles away, an office was dark except for a small desk lamp and the glow of a computer screen. An alert tone beeped, and a red icon with an exclamation point flashed in the middle of the monitor. From the shadows on the side, an arm reached out and moved the mouse pointer over the icon and clicked. A window opened on the screen enclosing a video transmission. A man’s face appeared.

“Director Darst?”

“Speaking. You realize that you are contacting me on a trigger alert.”

“Yes,” said the man, swallowing.

“And that this alert is only to be triggered under certain very specific conditions.”

“Yes, sir,” he continued, his tone slightly more confident. “Those conditions have been met. Several attempts were made to access restricted files at CTC.”

“Continue.”

“They occurred today at 5:30pm from the Counterproliferation Records terminals. One access was a top-level security clearance.”

“Whose?”

“Former director Fred Simon.” The face on the screen appeared very concerned.

“And was this access granted?”

“No. No, sir! As instructed, only Angler Security codes apply to these files. But, sir, I’m not sure this is standard—”

“That will do,” cut in the voice sharply. “You have properly followed instructions. Your reassignment will begin immediately tomorrow.”

“Reassignment, sir?” The young man’s face suddenly constricted.

“Details in the morning, to be delivered to you at Reagan Airport at zero eight-hundred. Be there on time. Good-night.”

A finger tapped the mouse again, and the video window disappeared, the confused face of the young agent contracting to a point. The hand from the shadows picked up a smartphone and entered a long series of digits. After several seconds, a beeping tone was heard. There was a click, and the shadow spoke.

“This is Loyal. We have a problem, Lophius.”

21

Disorientation. Bright lights. Strapped to the chair. A knife beneath him, impaling him. Blind agony. His own screams.

Sweat soaked his shirt and dripped into his eyes. His legs ached, blisters on his feet. He was approaching the top of the hill, the terrain uneven, the ascent steep along this direction. He had chosen it for this very reason. It was near the edge of his stamina, but he had learned to calibrate his body like a precision instrument. The physical exertion was manageable. Discipline. Of mind more than anything. The greatest threat was emotional.

As if on cue, another flashback assailed him. Visions flooded his consciousness. More disorientation. Lines of people, waiting. Tellers. Marbled columns. A gun was in his hand, a frightened woman at the other end of it, shoveling money into a sack. More lights. A computer terminal, passwords hacked, access granted, information stolen. Blood. A gloating face, floating before flames, the laughter of a tormenter beneath the sands.

Sunlight blinded him. He stumbled across the tree line, breaking into a more barren landscape. He paused a moment, doubled over more from memory than fatigue, his breath in gasps. He clicked the bottom on the stopwatch and glanced at the time. Better. I’m nearly ready for the next stage.

He removed the backpack and dropped it on the ground in front of him. Crouching down beside it, he grabbed a water canister and drank. Replacing the bottle, he turned over on his back, lying down on the rough soil and rocks. A slight intake of air was all that revealed the residual pain that this action elicited. As it faded, he closed his eyes and instantly fell into a dream. A repeating dream, one that he knew his psyche needed to relive as much as his body required the continued input of steroids and nutrients to rebuild itself. The old man waited far below, and he waited deep in memory.

“No!” the solid form corrected. “Your stance is key. It doesn’t matter how many fancy moves you have if with one quick motion I can unbalance you!”

With that, the old man showed just how deadly he was, or must have been in his youth. The youth saw the move coming and countered it, but in doing so lost his footing. Instantly, the old soldier was standing over him, the bright desert sun blinding him from above, a knife in his hand and held to the throat of his defeated student.

“Again you are dead!” The old soldier reverted to Russian, issuing a stream of curses. “We are wasting our time. You are too old to unlearn so much. We can’t go forward because your past holds you back!”

He stepped away from the youth, the exertion clearly having tired him, straining his aging body so that his step carried a more pronounced limp. The youth knew the old man by now. Knew his strength of will. He must be in great pain.

“How many have you trained?”

“What?” said the soldier, sitting on a rusted barrel.

“For the army, how many have you trained?”

The old man laughed. “Not just for the army, boy. Once they knew my value, my skills were used for more elite forces.”

“These were grown men. Like me.”

“Yes, but men with years of prior training! What you wish to do, it is crazy. I am crazy to help you. You must become superman.”

“Then why do you help me?”

The old soldier scowled. “You said it. Justice.”

“Maybe.” The youth rose and brushed the dust from his clothes. “But it’s more.”

The soldier nodded. “Yes, maybe it is.”

“You want to see if you can do it. You want to make superman.”

The man sighed. “No, it is hopeless.”

“Then you must try more. Push harder.”

The soldier eyed the youth warily. “You are mad, boy. You know this?”

“And why not? What do you know of it? I’ve seen things you can’t imagine!”

The old man stood up slowly and set his shoulders. “Don’t lecture me on the horrors of war, child. Or I will teach you a lesson you will not forget.”

The youth suppressed a smile. “Then teach it to me, old man.”

The alert tone from his smartphone broke through his meditation. He detached the phone from his belt and answered the call.

“I’m at the top.” The reception was poor here, but he could make out the old soldier’s words.

“You are progressing too fast.”

“Good. I will rest here half an hour and then return.”

There was an exhalation on the other end. “Da. If you are so determined, then we commence limited combat exercises today.”

The wraith smiled. “We already have.”

“What do you mean?”

He lay back down on the rock and closed his eyes. “Never mind. I will be ready. Were you able to arrange the shipments?”

There was a bitter-sounding laugh on the other end. “Barely. It is only your obscene money supply that greased these wheels. The Americans are so stupid, so terribly afraid of immigrants. They should not fear hard workers but fear the other things that can be smuggled across their borders.”

“As long as the arms and equipment arrive — the money is not important. I have more than enough.”

“Someday, I will need to study your investment habits.”

The wraith smiled. “Only if you are not risk averse.”

Another laugh from the phone. “Enough talk. I am waiting.”

The wraith closed the connection. Yes, much is waiting to be done.

22

Ablack Lincoln town car pulled to a stop alongside the rusted hulk of a long-abandoned John Deere harvester. Pebbles and dust rained briefly behind the tires, but silence returned quickly to the countryside, punctuated only by the cough of the engine shutdown and the intermittent pinging of metal as the car cooled. The untended wild grass and wheat behind the harvester whispered softly in the evening breeze, the shafts painted in a bright golden hue as the sun plunged behind a farmhouse across the road.

The back doors of the town car opened, and two older men in dark, pressed suits emerged from opposite sides of the car, closing the doors and walking together to a gate in front of the yard. One of the men resembled the slumping electrical posts near the house, his wiry, long frame bent slightly from age and use, a slight limp in his walk. The second was stockier, bordering on overweight, yet with an unmistakable presence of strength that belied his age. He walked upright, casting quick glances across the landscape.

Upon more careful inspection, the farmhouse appeared anomalous. The rusted wrought-iron gate was far more stable and secure than it appeared from a distance. It inserted into what appeared to be a broken-down, and yet unusually high, cobblestone wall that ran a perimeter completely around the farmhouse. At close quarters, a discerning eye could see that the stone was a facade, and that the wall was composed of reinforced concrete. A series of micro-wires connected the gate to the wall and ran along the wall, inside and above, leading to miniature cameras and motion detectors disguised as stone defects. Even at this distance from the house, like the whine of a nearby mosquito, the telltale buzz of a powerful underground generator could be heard purring.

The larger man laughed. “They don’t make country homes like they used to, Nexus.”

“It’s not perfect,” began his companion, “but it’s the best we could do given time and resources. We had to pull in a lot of favors, Bravo. A lot. I think we’ve cashed in all our chips. Close to state-of-the-art security, power. And inside it’s, shall we say, weaponized.”

“And isolated.”

“Yes,” said Nexus, removing a thumb-sized keypad from his jacket. “From hostile as well as friendly fire.” He pressed several closely spaced buttons on the device. A whirring and clicking sound followed, and the gate parted in the middle, splitting into two segments, each portion moving at opposing angles inward. The opening allowed each man to enter single file. Smiling, Nexus placed the controller back in his jacket. “Let me show you around. We’re all going to be here for a while, it seems.”

“One less now, with Phoenix gone.”

Nexus shook his head from side to side. “He was always weak, but I didn’t think he would so completely collapse. I hope he fitted the barrel correctly. The death is longer if you miss the brain stem. Things may be bad, but I plan on weathering this storm.”

As they passed through, the motion sensors noted their position, and soon the gate clanged shut. Walking to the middle of the lawn, Nexus gestured toward the wall.

“We can see every approach angle and several around the gate. A monitoring station is located inside. A second set of cameras tracks with the motion sensors, covering eighty percent of the surface area within the perimeter. Pressure sensors underneath the fake lawn cover the rest. No one gets in without us knowing.”

Bravo grunted. “All the King’s horses and men didn’t help Lopez. You saw the paranoid safe house he had. The wraith walks through security walls, Nexus.”

The taller man sighed. “We’ll see. If he finds us.”

“He’ll find us.”

“If he’s still alive.”

“He walked out of that hospital, Nexus. He’s alive.”

“Yes, likely alive.” Nexus looked up into the night sky. As the daylight faded utterly, the stars began to filter through. “He’s a shape-shifter.”

Bravo turned toward his companion and arched an eyebrow. “From the medical reports?”

Nexus lowered his gaze and nodded. “It looks like his ancestry is not quite so Northern European as we had assumed from the initial descriptions.”

“Extreme measures,” began Bravo, “but this begins to complete the puzzle.”

“Indeed. It’s becoming all the more certain that this is connected to the removal units.”

“Certain?” came the irritated response from Bravo. “There’s more you’re not telling me.”

“We have the confirmation about the Syrian black site.”

“Gone?”

“It is nearly impossible to get anything out of that tinderbox now. All connections are cut. Well, nearly all.” Nexus sighed. “But yes, it’s gone. Burned to the ground. I saw the photos. No survivors that we can locate, although we can’t locate much in that nation right now.”

There was a long silence and a soft moan as the wind gathered strength. Bravo looked east, as if gazing across the world to the sands of the Middle East.

“That’s where it began.”

“No, Bravo, it began before that, in the plans we made after 9/11, in the choices we made and the actions we took. It began with contracts to Boeing, flights out of North Carolina. It began when we crossed lines.”

“Don’t lecture me, Nexus. I don’t hold your insecurities. I’d do it again in a moment.”

Nexus laughed, shaking his head. “It was always helpful to have your unwavering presence during those years, Bravo. But I expected nothing less from the man that practically ran Guantanamo for half a decade.”

The large man turned to face his companion, a hard expression on his face. “What this new information means is that we have a route to identifying this wraith. There can only be a limited number of candidates who would match the missions and personnel. The teams are identified by the body trail. The black site by its destruction.”

“Yes, yes,” Nexus said, waving away the stern stare. “The research is underway.”

“What about our meddlers? The woman?”

“She and the priest were at the hospital. Presumably, they got a look at the records.”

Bravo exhaled. “This should have been prevented!”

“Too many assets were already involved! Those present were concentrating on finding the wraith.” Nexus drew himself up to his full height. He seemed to regain his authority. “There is little reason to suspect that either Houston or the priest could understand the significance of the records.”

“That is not the only thing that worries me,” said the large man, yielding no ground. “Now they will know others are also looking.”

“Perhaps they already knew, Bravo. The Houston woman is considered a good agent.”

Bravo stared briefly at the taller man and then looked away. “Yes, perhaps.”

“But I believe their usefulness is now outweighed by the dangers to us that they pose.”

“I agree.”

“We’ll encourage them to abandon this effort.”

“And if they do not take to encouragement?”

Nexus sighed. He was tiring of this verbal chess game. He pulled out the small device, turned his back on Bravo, and walked to the farmhouse.

Let him figure it out.

23

The pounding on the door startled them both.

Houston checked the spy hole and opened the door quickly, and a heavyset man stumbled into the room panting. “Jesus, Fred, what the hell happened? You look like shit.”

Lopez had to agree with Houston. Fred Simon looked like he had been through a forced march. In his mid-sixties, overweight, and sporting an ill-fitting and disheveled suit, his full shock of gray hair appeared violently windswept, as did his loosened tie.

“Fred, what’s going on?” Houston asked, her initial shock transitioning to an analytical concern.

“Quiet, Sara! Close the door!” Simon whispered harshly. He sprang to the window and looked outside for several seconds, his eyes scanning the parking lot outside their room. Lopez was suddenly aware that a gun was in his right hand, and he glanced nervously over to Houston who was bolting the door, never taking her eyes off Simon. Finally, satisfied, the CIA man placed his gun inside his suit and wiped beads of sweat from his forehead.

“I think I’ve lost them.”

Houston brought him a bottle of water, which he accepted thankfully. “You’re too old to be playing cops and robbers, Fred.”

“Tell me about it.” He sat down on a chair across the room from the desk and exhaled deeply. “What the hell have you gotten me into, Sara?”

Houston shook her head. “I don’t know, Fred. You got my messages and the encrypted emails. You know as much as I do now. Can you tell us what happened?”

Simon nodded and glanced at Lopez. “I guess you’d be the priest. Forgive me, Father, if I sin and don’t properly introduce myself. Jesus, I’ve had a hell of a day.”

Lopez nodded. “I understand. Things seem to be getting crazier by the day.”

Simon turned back to Houston. “Well, it happened quickly. The timing was unsettling. I had just pushed for access to some of the files from Sara’s division. I’m not a director anymore, but I’ve got residual clout and a lot of favors owed. Despite all that, I was stonewalled and punted from office to office.”

“That’s incredible,” blurted Houston.

“Yeah, real slap in the face. No way the CTC was going to bend any rules, even for me. I don’t know what your boys were involved with, but they don’t want those details out. So, just as I was getting a handle on my new position in the food chain, things got real interesting. About five minutes after pulling out of the CIA parking lot for home, there’s a gray Honda Civic in my rearview. One of the most common cars on the road. Asphalt-gray Civic — hard to notice in general, and if I weren’t already primed from the shock earlier, maybe I wouldn’t have. But I did. It was mirroring my moves, speed, turns. Subtle at first, then as I did stupider things, the driver was forced to be more obvious.”

“A tail?” asked Lopez.

“Yes,” answered the CIA agent. “But these guys weren’t fooling around. They realized I was on to them, and suddenly the car accelerated and was drawing up on my side of the car.”

“Oh, my God,” whispered Houston.

Lopez was confused. Simon noticed and explained.

“Might be paranoia, Father, but there are only two reasons to tail someone and then pull up violently along the driver’s side — to positively ID the driver and, upon positive ID, to execute an action related to that person.”

“Execute?” Lopez sat down.

“Not necessarily a hit, Francisco,” said Houston. “Sometimes, as with the paparazzi, to get photographs.”

“But, as you can see, I’m not paparazzi material,” said Simon. “They weren’t looking for photographs.”

There was a brief silence. Simon gulped down more of the water. He continued.

“So, there I was on the G.W. Parkway doing near one hundred, dodging cars and looking for an exit. That crazy Civic was on my ass the whole time, and it’s damn lucky we didn’t get ourselves or someone else killed in that madness. I honestly don’t remember how I got here. Once off the highway, it was fifty different roads, wild turns, lights run, and the suspension on my Taurus banged to hell and back. They were better drivers. I could see that. But I had a lifetime of driving through Virginia on my side. Thank God. They didn’t know the roads. If they had, well, I don’t want to think about what might have happened.”

“But this is insane!” exclaimed Lopez, standing up. “We aren’t in a movie! We’re less than an hour from the White House! Shadowy men don’t chase a high-ranking CIA official through suburban Virginia because he asked some questions about a group at another division!”

“They didn’t use to.” Simon coughed a tired laugh. “Could’ve handled them maybe in my younger days.”

“This doesn’t make sense!” Lopez looked over to Houston for some sort of clarification. She didn’t have any.

“Did you get a look at the occupants?” she asked.

Simon shook his head. “Too busy practicing for the Indy 500.”

“I think Francisco is right, Fred. You get a hit put on you for asking questions? No way. CIA’s done stupid stuff, but this doesn’t add up.”

“Maybe it’s not CIA.” Simon’s words hung in the air.

Lopez furrowed his brows. “Then who?”

The CIA man eyed the priest and turned his attention back to Houston. “You said it yourself in what you wrote me, Sara. We have possibly linked assassinations of connected members of your division. The killers are highly trained and bent on some crazed mission. Maybe they didn’t want anyone getting in the way of their plans.”

Houston shook her head. “How would they know who you were? That you were investigating? How could they have a team on you that fast? The response time, the knowledge of events, suggests CIA involvement.”

“Well, they sure do their research,” said Lopez, who was staring off into space. “They do their damned research.” His entire body seemed flexed, his broad back and shoulders stretching the fabric of his vestments.

Houston stood up and walked toward the priest. “What do you mean, Francisco?”

Lopez clenched his fists. “Nobody knew about our family home in Gatlinburg. I barely remembered. Yet within days of his arrival, they were on Miguel. They defeated his security systems. They found out, planned, and executed their…mission. Executed my brother.” Lopez whirled around to face the agents, nearly striking Houston as he spun recklessly. “If they can do that, they can get to you.”

“Francisco,” began Houston softly, “They might have followed Miguel from Madison to the mountain home.”

“No way. He was too careful.”

Simon interrupted, standing up. “These are professionals, Francisco.”

“So was Miguel! I don’t think they had him followed. Think about it! All your best agents, downed one by one. Maybe the reason these killers know so much is that they have the information to start with.”

“So, now you believe it is the CIA?” asked Simon.

“No, I don’t think our government is that crazy, whatever I’ve thought about its actions over the years.”

“Then what?” asked Simon, his arms raised in the air.

“I don’t know. Bad agents, rogue agents, who have a grudge or want to bury the past by removing all involved.”

Simon nodded. “Maybe.”

“Or someone who has covertly gained access to CIA information: records, names, locations,” broke in Houston.

Simon sighed. “A lot of possibilities. Basically, we have potential killers out there looking for us, and we don’t have the faintest clue who they are, where they are, why they’re hunting us, or when they’ll show up on our doorstep.” He seemed to make a decision. “Too little information, too much heat. I’m going to phone in a vacation month, and I’m going to disappear for a little while. I don’t think I’m the main target. After what I’ve seen today, I would assume these hostiles are looking for the both of you. Sara, you’ve worked out of this room, from that connection, for much too long. I know you’re careful, but anyone can hack their way to the information given enough time. You need to move, and move now.”

Houston nodded. “You’re right.”

“I’ll be in touch, Sara,” said the CIA man. “I’m down, but not out. Let me hole up, circle some wagons, and call in some favors that will be repaid. Meanwhile, be very careful.”

With that, he opened the door and exited the hotel room, and was soon out of sight in the failing light. Houston bolted the door shut again and looked through the curtains for several minutes.

“OK, he’s gone. Doesn’t look like anyone followed him or took note.” She turned back to face Lopez and crossed her arms across her chest.

Uh-oh. Lopez didn’t like that stance.

“Good thing you got that extension from your Bishop today, Francisco.”

He’d almost forgotten. In all the insanity of Simon’s story, the one good piece of news had seemed insignificant. But her tone spoke to something else.

“What do you mean?”

“Because we need the extra time to plan a mission.”

Mother of God. “What mission?”

Houston flashed him a wicked smile. “We’re going to break into the CIA. We’re going to steal those files.”

Father Lopez crossed himself. “Lord, have mercy.”

24

It was nearly forty-five minutes of driving through early-morning rush-hour traffic to reach the CIA building. Unconsciously, he looked across the car and stared down at her left leg. This morning she had bought a large air cast from a local pharmacy and strapped it on. When he had asked what she was doing, she had dismissed his question: “It will take too long to explain, Francisco. If things go like I predict, you’ll find out soon enough.” More secrets. He was tiring of them but becoming accustomed to accepting deliberate unknowns in this new world that he had entered.

All along the way, Houston had explained that the building was a very high-tech experiment. She went on and on about it, describing its top-secret ring-decoder setup, designed by a new contractor specializing in ultra-high security for government installations. A “fourth-generation building, with two extra toppings of paranoia” she had added. Lopez had not listened very carefully. He had always been skeptical about the spy business idol worship in American culture. He’d seen enough American screw-ups at home and abroad to be forever jaded about the myth of the omniscient and omnipotent Intelligence Machinery of the United States. He wondered why she was going on so much about it.

He didn’t have to wait long to find out. The building was set several miles into the Virginia countryside, isolated within an undeveloped rural landscape. Houston informed him that the US government held the deeds to all the land around the building and leased it to large agribusiness companies. The nice contracts meant the businesses asked no questions and kept to themselves. The government stranglehold on the land meant that the CIA building would remain relatively isolated.

His first impressions of the location were of a sudden and jarring contrast. With little transition, they exited the shaded, tree-lined, two-lane road they had been on for twenty minutes and entered a bright, open area devoid of trees, the forest forming a broad perimeter around the entire complex like a tall, green belt. Several hundred feet from the trees was a solid wall of concrete perhaps twelve to sixteen feet high. Lopez nearly laughed out loud — it was like a castle wall! Only less scalable.

An unusually large band of razor wire was spiraling across the top of the wall, giving the CIA building the look of a maximum-security prison. As they drew near the gate, Lopez was shocked to see how far they had taken the idea of sharp metal and walls: embedded like a lattice into the concrete itself were steel blades as long as his hand, thousands of them covering the wall and turning it into a giant cheese grater. Or human grater, he thought grimly. It was insane. Nobody was ever going to climb that wall, he was sure of that. What a giant slab of complete paranoia. Did Congress see how the taxpayers’ money was being spent?

At the gate, Houston handled the most significant problem facing them today: Lopez himself. As an unannounced visitor, without security clearance or federal ID outside of his social security number, there were a lot of problems. He estimated that it took them thirty minutes outside the gate as Houston negotiated his entrance. In the end she managed, but Lopez was forced to go through a series of high- and very low-tech screenings. He had done TSA screenings before, but he had seen nothing like this. In size, the “gatehouse” was more like a starter home in Alabama. Two different body scanners stripped him with electromagnetic radiation. A man roughly cavity-searched him as well. Then the really weird stuff started. He was asked to provide several voice samples, to undergo a thermal body scan, and — strangest of all — he was asked to walk four times down a carpeted strip lined with cameras and what he guessed were motion sensors.

At the end of it, he was forced to leave all electronics behind, especially his smartphone. He signed paperwork linking his name to the serial number and a barcode, and the phone was taken away and placed in storage. At least they let him keep the cross around his neck! Finally, he met up with Houston, and they returned to her car. She limped with her fake cast the entire way.

“So, I don’t even get a fancy Visitor ID badge?” Lopez asked ironically.

“No need here,” she answered, unlocking the car.

Lopez opened the door and ducked his head in. “So how will they know I’m a visitor, or who I am? This is your fourth-generation security?”

“They’ll know,” she said. The car rocked slightly as they closed their doors, and Houston started the engine and shifted into reverse. “And not just because you’re wearing a collar. It’s a smart building, Francisco. A very smart one, actually. All that silly stuff they had you do that you were complaining about — they were taking your biometric ID.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Lopez’s smile faded as she evened the car with the road to the gate, shaking her head. “Biometric ID?”

“Short version: your height, weight, temperature distribution, face, and voice all are highly specific to your person, like a fingerprint. They took scans of your face for facial recognition, weighed you, measured you in three dimensions, recorded your voice and breathing patterns. They had you walk up and down a pressure-sensitive carpet that recorded information about your gait, the way you walk.”

“Seriously?”

“It gets better.” Houston idled in front of the thick steel gate as it slowly opened to let them through. “The individual measurements are nice, but the power comes in the integration of them all. It’s like when you surf the web — any individual website or search term, online purchase or download, they tell you something. But the privacy advocates are worried about the so-called “aggregators,” the sites that have access to multiple aspects of your behavior online. When they can create multidimensional databases of your behavior, they develop a highly precise portrait of your virtual self. And they sell it to advertisers, of course.”

The gate had opened, and Houston shifted and accelerated through it. “Of course,” said Lopez, fascinated.

“It’s similar with biometrics identification. Combine your body measurements, face recognition, temperature patterns, and patterns of motion, and, really, they can ID you better than your mother could. The entire main building is carpeted in this pressure-sensitive material — one big sensor, essentially, measuring every step taken. Motion sensors, cameras, and direction mics crisscross every cubic inch of the place. All of them feed into highly optimized pattern-recognition software. Now that your biometric ID is uploaded, once inside, they know everything about you.”

“Scary.”

“Well, Francisco, this is the CIA. We deal routinely in classified material, often of a significant national-security concern. You can’t be too careful.”

“How’d they let me in, then?”

“Walk-ins. Despite all the high-tech magic, some of our biggest hooks come from people who literally just walk into CIA offices and tell us something they couldn’t bring themselves to tell anyone else. You’ve got to keep that channel open. Always.”

And suddenly, he saw it.

As they pulled through the gate and out from under the shadow of the wall, a pyramid rose out of the ground. As inaccessible and hostile as the outer razor-studded concrete wall had been, the main offices were inviting. Combining the old and very new, the building was shaped like a pyramid yet constructed of steel and glass. Perhaps three-fourths of the outer walls were glass, supported by steel grids. The tip of the structure reached about five stories high; reflecting the morning sunlight, it looked like something out of Star Trek. A parking lot surrounded the square base.

“Wow,” was all he could think to say.

“Yeah, I tried to warn you about this. All that contractor money seeded by 9/11 has done a lot for the intelligence services over the last decade. But don’t be wide-eyed too long. We’ve got to see my boss, Jesse Darst. I’m going to tell him what I’ve found, and what I’ve concluded. He’s not going to like it.”

Lopez sighed as Houston pulled to a stop in a free parking spot. “And then you’ll ask him for the complete mission records?”

She nodded. “And believe me, he’s really not going to like that. We’ll give it a try, before we do anything else.” She undid her seat belt and looked over at Lopez seriously. “Just so you know Francisco, everything we say is picked up by mics in that building. Likely, everything we say in this car. No privacy debates here.”

Lopez raised his brows unconsciously.

“I just thought you should keep that in mind.”

25

The new CIA building was everything she said it would be and more. Lopez felt like he had stepped into a scene from a science-fiction film depicting the American future. The funds from the War on Terror may have been wasted in many instances — the giant razor wall outside came to mind. But whoever ran this show — the design, building, implementation of security, modern office spaces, communications — had been gifted.

Because she had prepped him, he was able to notice the unusual spring in the carpets that revealed the presence of pressure sensors, devices also integrated into a mechanical system that converted the force of impact into electrical energy, charging batteries. Many of the “windows” he had seen coming in were actually large solar panels, the entire building functioning as an extended photovoltaic array. It was a spy building that was also a cutting-edge green building.

He looked carefully around and was able to pick up clues about the placement of cameras and motion detectors, but the mental rethink in the design was startling. Instead of the usual small collection of cameras, or line of sensors at various heights, the walls and ceiling were like the compound eyes of an insect. An array of very small embedded cameras and sensors, likely thousands, covered the surfaces. Whether they were hardline or wireless, how they were powered, and what software ran and integrated it all, he didn’t dare guess. It seemed like overkill, until he remembered what Houston said they could do: track and identify every person in every location in the building in an automated fashion. In this structure devoted to preserving the secrets of America and uncovering those of hostile nations, there would be no secrets. After a second round of milder security checks, including one to recalibrate the system for Houston and her limp, they were off to the third floor of the pyramid and the office of her supervisor.

Associate Director Jesse Darst was a thin and angled man, suit immaculately pressed, thinning hair shorn close to the scalp, the large bald spot gleaming under the bright lights overhead. He fidgeted constantly, appearing to Lopez like some stretched rubber band ready to snap. It was obvious immediately that things were not going to be friendly. After very brief introductions, they took a seat, and Darst launched into an interrogation.

“No disrespect to you, Mr. Lopez,” he began with a nod in the direction of the priest, his eyes focused on Houston, “but Sara, where the hell do you get off bringing in a civilian without prior authorization or contact?”

“Jesse, there are damn good reasons.”

Darst waved her away dismissively. “There had better be. Unless the civilian has mission-critical information, value to bring to our operations, they bring only a security risk. Basic agent training 101, Sara. You should know better than this.”

“Jesse, we have multiple dead agents who were parts of your operations. The agents here might not talk to you openly, but people are scared. For a reason, Jesse. Something organized is going on.”

“Jesus,” whispered Darst. He leaned back in his chair, his expression incredulous. “I let you have your little paid vacation, Sara, because you started talking like this before. I thought with some time off you’d clear your head. Instead, you’ve double-down with this conspiracy theory! The kicker is that you then involve outsiders!”

“He’s involved because his brother was killed only days after I took that leave! Before I could warn him! You remember Miguel, don’t you Jesse?”

Darst leaned forward and pointed a finger at Houston. Father Lopez tensed instinctively, sensing a hostility in the CIA man. Houston looked vulnerable in this place.

“Don’t you patronize me, Sara!” Her boss relaxed momentarily and ran his palm across his sparse hair. “You don’t think I’ve gotten enough heat with the deaths of so many agents? A conspiracy to hunt down and kill CIA agents has a nice, satisfactory Jason Bourne feel to it. It gives meaning and makes sense out of what are, from all the facts, unrelated, coincidental deaths.”

“Coincidental?” Houston laughed bitterly. “Two brutally murdered. Others dead in mysterious accidents. What are the odds on that?”

“That’s what coincidences are, Sara, low-odds events together without a pattern.”

“That they all worked here under you?”

“That’s the low odds, that’s not a pattern.”

“That they all were involved in covert missions together, hidden from the rest of us, going on for years? That this topic is so hot-button that information on these missions is denied to most CIA employees?”

“It was you that brought in Simon?” He looked outraged.

Lopez was stunned. How did he know about Simon?

Houston did not pause for breath. “And that his going to records led to his pursuit by unidentified persons as soon as he left CIA headquarters?”

Lopez watched the eyes of her boss seem to frost over. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Houston held his gaze. “Simon was nearly run down on the highway after being stonewalled on these missions. He came to see me. He’s scared, Jesse. Something really bad is going down around here.”

Darst stood up, his hands resting stiffly on his desk. “Sara, you have really gone too far on this. Let’s get everything very clear. There were no secret missions. This is no conspiracy to murder CIA agents. And I am sure that no one chased down an ex-division director on the highways of Virginia. There is nothing here!”

“Jesse, don’t play dumb with me. You think they’re all buried, but it doesn’t take a genius to comb through records and notice patterns.”

“You’ve taken to covertly investigating your own division?”

“Damn it, Jesse, it’s not covert! I’m here telling you! And there is a damn good reason I’m checking things — agents are dying! Agents I care about! And if you don’t want more heat, then you’d better stop covering this up and get to the bottom of it. Because from what I’ve seen, this is not close to over!”

“That’s enough, Sara. I’m warning you.”

“I want the records, Jesse.” Lopez held his breath. She was playing this full to the end.

“What records?” His expression was cold.

“The records of those missions. Agents Lopez, Fuller, Conover, and Miller — more than twenty times were traveling off-site—simultaneously. Always these same agents. Always together. The same agents who are being killed. God. . only Miller is still alive.”

Lopez cut in without intending to. “If he’s still alive.”

Houston nodded. “I want the records of the missions they were running, Jesse. I want you to open this up to me, let me be part of an investigation into this mess. I’m good, Jesse. You know that. I care deeply about these men. Give me the records and let me work with you.”

Darst appeared to hesitate for a moment, a flash of indecision blinking across his features. But it was gone so fast, Lopez wondered if he had imagined it.

“You have lost perspective, Sara. And that is a danger to everyone here.” His expression turned very hard. “I’m recommending indefinite leave for you pending the results of a battery of psychiatric tests that will begin tomorrow, or as soon as I can have this arranged.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Darst slammed his fist down on the table, startling them both. “I’ve had enough of this! You will be evaluated, and then we will reconsider your role within the agency.”

Her face was frozen in disbelief. “I’ll be God-damned. You’re going to terminate my position.”

“Based on what I’ve heard today, I would not be surprised if that is the conclusion of the Agency on this. But we’ll do this by the book. When you arrive in the morning, you will surrender your ID, firearms, and any other Agency property. You’ll surrender yourself to agents from Division Six. I can’t get this through today, or I’d have you there now.”

Darst looked at Lopez for the first time, acknowledging his existence. His words were full of scorn.

“Now, get this civilian out of my office. I never want to see him here again.”

Houston was shell-shocked on the way to the car. She hardly seemed to notice the wind blowing blonde strands across her face like a net. “I knew this would go badly, but, Francisco, I promise you, I never suspected it would go this badly.” She reached over instinctively and grabbed his arm, staring straight ahead. “I think for the first time I’m really scared about what’s going on.” She reached into her purse, pulled out the little scrambling device she had used in the diner in Tennessee, and switched it on. “They could fire me for using this here, but, well, that’d be redundant now, wouldn’t it?”

“So we can talk freely?” She nodded as they walked. Lopez continued. “What do we do now? We’re completely locked out.”

She shook her head. “I need to think right now, Francisco. Hell will freeze over before I abandon this investigation, abandon Miguel and the others because that prick gets my ass booted out of the Agency. That jerk should have taken my ID and revoked my clearance right then and there.”

Lopez felt her hand tighten on his arm. “Why didn’t he?” he asked.

“He’s a chicken-shit bureaucrat at heart, that’s why. He’ll do this stepwise according to the manual, so that I’ll have no recourse. The psych-eval will be just what he needs, I’m sure. He’ll make it so I see the right people. That’s all you need in this business. The last thing anyone wants is a mentally unstable agent with access to the nation’s secrets.”

“But what does it matter if he confiscates your stuff and revokes your status today or tomorrow? Either way, we’re still out. I don’t know how we’ll get to the bottom of this when we’re shut out by the CIA. We need those records!”

They reached the car, and Houston nodded. “We’ll get them. But I need some time to think.” Lopez was startled as she jingled her keys in his face. “You drive, Francisco.”

“Me? Why?” Would he ever keep up with her?

She held her arm out toward him, the keys dangling in front of his nose. “I need to get inside my head, plan things fast. I can’t do that while driving. We’ll hit a tree, or worse.”

Lopez had the unsettling feeling in his gut again, but he took the keys and unlocked the doors. “Plan what, Sara?”

“Tonight’s break-in, of course.” He froze outside the open door as she jumped in, slamming hers shut. “Let’s go, we’re running out of time. We’ve got a lot to do.”

Feeling dizzy, he got in the car, reset the seat and mirrors, and pulled out toward the gate, leaving the pyramid behind. Tonight’s break-in? The roller coaster was cresting at the top of the hill.

As they passed the high walls, several cars were entering in the other direction, and he steered clear of a few parked along their side of the road. With a sharp intake of breath, Houston suddenly stiffened on his right.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered.

He followed her gaze behind them. He felt his heart race as cold adrenaline poured through his veins. One car pulled out behind them as they passed.

It was a gray Civic.

26

Lopez instinctively pressed the accelerator, and the car lurched forward. He continued to increase speed down the two-lane road, and soon the trees on either side were a blur. Glances in the rearview mirror told him a grim story: the Civic was gaining on them. Houston drove a deep-blue, 3.6-liter, 280-horsepower VW Passat. Lopez had never driven a Passat, but he knew it should easily out-muscle a Civic.

Houston interrupted his thoughts. “No time to be a daydreaming priest, Francisco! Faster! Don’t let them pull up beside you!”

“I’m already at sixty!”

“Forget the damn speedometer! Increase the distance, now!”

He hammered the pedal, and the German car screamed into overdrive with a kick. Still the Honda kept pace. What the hell?

“We have to make it to the highway,” yelled Houston over the din of the engine. “There we have a real chance to lose them.”

As if hearing her voice, the Civic appeared to accelerate even more, and the distance closed to less than thirty feet between the cars as Lopez pushed the Passat beyond eighty.

“This is insane!” he cried.

“Francisco, the car ahead!”

A white Ford Taurus rapidly approached in front of them. Lopez checked the opposite lane — another car was coming! He had to hurry.

“Hold on!” he cried, bringing the car to over ninety and swerving into the left lane. The Passat tore past the Ford. With several seconds to spare the priest cut back into the right lane as a red blur and Doppler-shifted horn blared from the oncoming car.

“That was close!” cried Houston.

“Yes, it was! What do I do now?” He checked the mirror, and the gray of the Civic swept back into view as it passed the Taurus behind them. They had gained a little distance on their pursuers in the maneuver.

“Reach the turnoff. Don’t slow down! Whatever happens.”

“What do you mean, ‘whatever happens’?”

He was about to ask again, but Houston blurted out. “Hold tight to the wheel!” His hands instinctively gripped harder, and there was a jolt to the car as the Civic smashed into their back end. Lopez fought roughly to stabilize the machine. At one hundred miles an hour, even minor nudges could send a car spinning out of control.

“Jesus!” cried Houston.

Staccato bursts of sound erupted from behind, and metal on metal pinged as a barrage of bullets impacted the trunk and right side of their vehicle. It was unbelievable. They’re shooting at us! With machine guns!

“Faster, Francisco! Faster, damn it!” screamed Houston. She reached down into her bag.

He gunned the car harder. They were at one hundred and twenty, and everything not directly ahead was a blur. Another hit from behind at this speed, and he doubted he could hold it straight. He felt the engine strain as they began to ask heavily of it. How far to the damn turnoff?

Again the eruption of bullets. The first few embedded in metal again. Then the back windshield exploded. Mother of God! Fragments of supposedly shatter-proof material sprayed over them from the back. Dear God, help us! Francisco could see in the rearview mirror that an entire middle portion of the glass was gone.

Without warning, Houston released her belt and spun backward toward the Civic. Loud explosions burst near Lopez’s ear as she fired several shots. He glanced behind. Bullets were embedded in the front windshield of the Civic but did not seem to penetrate. The impacts momentarily slowed the pursuing car. Lopez accelerated to gain ground.

One hundred and forty! Nothing seemed real now. They would both die instantly if he lost control.

“Look out, Francisco. Ahead!” she cried.

“I see them!” To his dismay, there was a line of three cars in front, and they were rocketing toward them at reckless speed.

“You can’t slow down, Francisco,” she said, swinging back to look behind them. “They’re almost on us again!”

Lopez didn’t have to be told. His reflexes were amplified, his senses, sharper. He noticed everything and yet it was all unreal. The Civic was gaining again. Gaining! And he had only seconds until they crashed into the cars that approached.

“Oh, shit!” cursed Houston.

Approaching in the opposite lane was the long form of an eighteen-wheeler. The timing was perfect. There was no way to pass now. It was too close. But there was no way to slow down either with these madmen behind them. As if to emphasize the point, the machine gun fired again.

“Hold on!” he cried.

He pressed the accelerator all the way to the floor. The engine screamed maniacally.

“Hail Mary, full of grace,” he whispered.

The booming horn of the eighteen-wheeler flooded his ears as the angry grillwork approached faster than he could measure. The cars to his right blurred past.

“Blessed art thou amongst women.”

A head-on collision with the truck was seconds away. A second to finish passing. Which fraction of a second would be the lesser?

“And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”

Houston screamed. He ripped the wheel clockwise, and the car swerved rightward violently. They felt the air pressure pound them as the rushing blur of the truck blasted past on the left. A loud impact could be heard from behind.

Lopez looked in the mirror. The truck had begun to swerve at the last minute, the cabin twisting slightly, clipping the back bumper of the Civic as it passed. The Civic was knocked sideways, the momentum causing the car to enter a death tumble. In horror, he watched the vehicle roll end-to-end and then flip up violently. He returned his gaze to the road in front of him, bringing the car to a less crazed speed. An orange light bathed them from behind. A moment later, the sound of an explosion.

It was over! Dear Lord, it was over.

Lopez felt a soft touch on his hands. Houston stroked the snow-white tops of his knuckles on the wheel. “Calm down, Francisco. Ease up. We made it.” She touched his arm. “You did good.”

Lopez tried to relax his fingers. As soon as he did, he felt his entire body begin to shake.

27

They checked into a hotel under assumed names, paying cash. He dropped on the bed and felt the room spin above him. Houston commandeered the desk and opened her laptop, typing in the Wi-Fi password given to her by the motel staff. Lopez didn’t know how she was still functioning. He decided he needed to raise his game. But so much had happened.

After they had left the scene of the accident and reached the highway, Houston had them pull over at a gas station. The first reason was to get Lopez out of the driver’s seat. He didn’t stop shaking for half an hour. The second was so that she could monitor police bandwidth. “I need to know if they ID’d us, Francisco.” Reports of the accident and eyewitness accounts about a blue sedan filled the police airways. Fire trucks, ambulances, and possible CIA involvement were mixed into the chatter. Everything was well described, except the mysterious blue sedan.

“Thank God,” she whispered, once satisfied that she had heard enough. “It all happened so fast. We got lucky.”

Lopez could only agree. Lucky they were not charred bones right now in the place of their pursuers.

She had put them back on the road, and for some time Lopez had drifted in thought and lost track of time and place. I’m in shock. Suddenly, they were pulling to a stop in a driveway of a suburban home. He had no idea where they were.

“Wait here,” she ordered. He was happy to wait.

After some time, Houston returned from the house accompanied by a large man. They went into his garage and several minutes later were wheeling out on a dolly a large object wrapped in an olive-green canvas bag. For whatever reason, this odd site helped snap him out of his delirium, and he exited the car to offer help. And ask questions.

“Julio, this is Father Francisco Lopez, the priest I told you about.”

The heavily muscled man smiled. “Your blessings, Father.” Lopez instinctively made the sign of the cross over him as he bowed to the priest.

“Julio has been a close friend and an asset hired by the Agency for certain needs.” Houston said nothing more.

Lopez indicated the large object on the dolly. “So, what is this?”

Julio looked over at Houston. She smiled. “He’s got some extreme hobbies that will come in very handy for us. I’ll tell you later. We need to go.”

And so they had returned to the road, eventually finding the motel. Along the drive, Houston began to outline the plan she had been developing for obtaining the hidden records. With each mile, Lopez found himself increasingly in disbelief. Now, as he lay on the bed, the thoughts returned to his mind. He sat up, focusing.

“Sara, this isn’t going to work. This is nuts. That pyramid is insane. You can’t hope to succeed!”

She laughed. “Yes. And it’s worse than what I had time to tell you on the drive. Come here and look. I’ve got the rough schematics of the building here. Feast on the over-design!”

Lopez looked at the screen. It was an aerial type view of the CIA compound. How she had gotten it, he didn’t ask. The pyramid looked like a square from above, and the parking lot, high wall, and gate were drawn to scale.

“OK. I see it. How in the world are we going to get in?”

“You see difficulties?” she asked mockingly.

The priest glanced sideways at her. “To start, at night — tonight, the gate will be closed. There is no way we’re going to get in that place by scaling the walls, unless we want to be filleted first.” He shuddered thinking about the embedded blades.

“That’s right. No climbing.”

“And no way you’re going to pick the lock to that gate.”

“No lock to pick. It’s all controlled mechanically. Pressure-sensitive alarms will ring if we so much as lean on it. Coded sequences, changed hourly, are required to activate it.”

“It’s impossible,” he concluded.

“Let’s say, hypothetically, that you get past the gate.”

“Let me guess, killer-dogs?”

“Low tech, Francisco. You can do better.”

“Twelve-foot-tall robots with plasma rifles.”

Houston laughed. A pure laugh devoid of sarcasm or bitterness. It seemed out of place in the demented amusement park they had entered. “Francisco, I wish I had known you as a little boy. Bet you were cute.” He smiled and Houston continued. “Not quite right, but it’s bad. More of the bee-eyed camera setup, but not near as dense, so they can’t ID us outside. But plenty to coordinate a series of automatic weapons systems that engage. If you’re within fifteen feet of the gate or walls at night, you’ll be swiss cheese from three or four weapons that will triangulate on your position with automatic fire.”

“God in heaven.”

“More like hell on campus.” She pointed to the schematics. “So, you have to pole vault over the wall and land at least twenty feet away from the walls.”

“Pole vault? Is that what the green bag’s about?”

“No!” she laughed again. “But close. We’ll get to that.”

“So, you get past the auto-weapons fire, and then what? Land mines?”

“No, that’s all there is for external security. Then it’s straight to the building. The problem is, ID cards don’t work after ten o’clock unless specifically activated.”

“So, wait — your ID’s no good? I thought you said he was dumb not to take it earlier!”

“Not good to get in, but useful inside. We’ll get to that later, too.”

Lopez frowned. He didn’t like how many things were piling up to be considered later. Come to think of it, he didn’t like the things they were considering now. “Then, how do we get in the building?”

“This will sound ridiculous.” She walked over to her bag and removed a tablet computer. “They have recently been testing a new facial-recognition security system. It’s pretty slick, actually. With that system, you don’t need ID cards. Kind of cool — great security and there is no risk of someone stealing a card and trying to use it to break in.”

“Break in after getting filleted and blown apart by ammo.”

“Right. This new system takes a 3D scan of your face and stores it. Then a series of three cameras mounted above the door scans people seeking entrance. If you match, and you have clearance, the doors open. One of these is located in the back entrance. We’ve been testing it for a few months.”

“I see, so you’ll walk up, it will open for you, and then I rush in behind you.”

“Sorry, no.” She shook her head. “It’s a tall turnstile embedded in a fence, not a door. One at a time.” She picked up the tablet. “That’s where this comes in. Look!”

He looked at the screen of the device. Houston had loaded a very blurry photo of herself.

“So, I’m supposed to believe that this system that has a 3D scan of your face and multiple cameras will be fooled by a lousy 2D photo?”

Houston eyed him approvingly. “You said you taught math, right? Not too dumb.”

“Thanks.”

“This is not a normal photo. Look again. It’s several photos together at slightly different angles. A friend of mine who works to defeat embassy security worked out a hack for the face-recognition system. He couldn’t resist. I don’t understand it — some sort superposition of eigenfaces or other technobabble. Point is that it fools the camera system. He played with it a little until his concocted images could be processed as my face — any face — by the software. I’ve tried it. It actually works.”

Lopez was amazed. “So, you go in with your real face. Then I walk by holding this up like the Book of the Gospels, and it lets me in?”

“Yes! It will think I simply tried to get access again. Sometimes the turnstile catches, whatever. You have to go through again. It’s designed not to freak out at that.”

Lopez pulled up a chair and sat down. She followed suit. “Now the real crazy begins. You know the system inside. It will ID us instantly or within a few seconds. For tonight, at least, I still have clearance. You don’t.”

“Sara,” began Lopez, “I’m starting to wonder why I need to be there at all.”

She sighed. “It’s a two-person operation, Francisco. There’s too much heavy lifting and too much material we’ll need to bring with us if there is going to be a prayer of this working. I can’t fly this ship mono.”

“Really? You’re the secret agent woman. You fire the guns. You should have been driving today. I’ll just get in the way.”

“You did a hell of a lot better than most would today.” She looked down at the ground. “Francisco, I appreciate your confidence in me. But not everything is strategic, either.” He eyed her with confusion. “Some things are emotional, Francisco. I need you there.”

Startled, he didn’t know what to say. She continued. “I need someone there, okay? You might think of me as some super-agent. I’m not. Right now, I’m really damn tired, and I’m feeling anything but super. I’ve lost people I loved. My career is over, and to send it off in style, I’m about to break into my own government building and steal information. I could end up in jail until I’m old and gray. You’re the brother of someone I cared for deeply, and you want to find justice for him as much as I do. Besides you, I’ve got no one. You’re coming.”

Lopez nodded in accord, but he was again surprised. Her vulnerability seemed to lurk inside of a shell of adamant and catch him unprepared.

“Okay, Sara, but what happens when this system sees I’m not supposed to be there?”

“All hell breaks loose.” She pointed to the building plans. “The doors lock so that no ID will get them open until an external command code is given.”

“Great.”

“Even better. They electrify. Lethal voltage. No lock picking or control panel hacking. Touch anything around the door and you’re dead.”

Lopez just stared at her.

“Once the alarm triggers, security is called, as well. And, to make sure you’re docile when they deactivate things and enter, they gas the building.”

“Gas the building? Nerve gas? Poison?”

“Non-lethal incapacitating agent. Some derivative of BZ that has better clean up and more drowsiness.”

“BZ?”

“Ever heard of Agent 15? No? Well, Saddam Hussein used to love using that stuff. The walls of the building are filled with a much more sophisticated version.”

Lopez shook his head. “So they make it as hard to get out as to get in.”

“Maybe harder. They don’t think anyone is dumb enough to break in. But if they do, then they want to prevent anything getting out. No bodies out. No information, either — so once the alarms go off, Wi-Fi dies, extra-strong cellular jamming goes into effect. You’re gassed and left for pickup.”

“Sara, then we are back to me staying. This is crazy.”

“Or,” she said, interrupting, “you outwit it.”

“How?”

“We don’t have time for everything here. It’s already eight o’clock, and we need supplies. I’ll explain on the way. Besides, if I tell you now, you won’t come.”

That’s encouraging. It was suddenly too real. Talking and planning had a certain safe abstraction to it. Lopez watched Houston as she packed a duffle bag with numerous items. He noted that among these items were several firearms.

She paused staring at the weapons. “Don’t have time to train you with these, or I’d give you several.”

Give me several guns? He played over what was coming. Razored walls. Robotic machine guns. Intelligent buildings with electrified doors and spy-film knockout gas. A priest with guns.

She’s insane.

28

Houston parked next to a darkened light pole, the large parking lot of the discount warehouse shut down and empty. Although it was one in the morning, Lopez had never felt more awake in his life. He buzzed from some sort of electric charge running through him, the looming madness they were planning just a few steps away. Their ticket awaited in the trunk of her car.

“Help me get this out of here,” she grunted, pulling on the green canvas. The incredible weight of it shocked Lopez as he helped her heave it onto the asphalt. She began unlacing the sides. He shook his head. This was completely mad.

“Newest model of the Bervedine Cloud-hopper,” she smiled as the canvas dropped away. “We’ll need the inflation fan from the back seat. Julio could manage it; I can’t lift the thing by myself.” She eyed his frame mischievously. “But I bet you can, Francisco.”

As she set up the metal harness and propane tank, Lopez headed to the backseat. The inflation fan would sit outside of the nylon envelope, which when unfolded would be much larger. He glanced back toward Houston — she was unfolding it now. The fan was big and heavy, but he managed to extract it without too much trouble. Fortunately, it was built with an attached set of wheels. He lowered it with a grunt onto the ground and wheeled it forward. Soon he had the device alongside the burner.

“Julio had this one specially designed. He’s a big guy, as you saw.” She spoke through clenched teeth, pulling hard on the straps and ropes tying the envelope to the seat.

Lopez noticed that the gas-tank was bolted into the back of the makeshift chair. “Have you ever done this before?” he asked, expecting a negative.

“Of course!” she said, finishing off the assembly and firing the flame. The blast of air from the heat hit Lopez in the face, and he instinctively backed off. “Twice, for your information. Julio had several of us out once. The Agency loves to have everyone tightly knit. Friends, lovers. One big paranoid family.”

“Twice.”

“With one unassisted landing!” She positioned the fan behind the flame and started the engine. It sputtered once, then took, and a loud humming filled his ears, followed by the white noise of rushing air. The balloon slowly began to inflate. “These small one-man balloons are actually kind of fun. Better than parasailing, unless you like the greater risk of that. These guys are very maneuverable, relatively cheap, and, important for tonight, allow you to take off and land in very small areas.”

Lopez shook his head. “You know, after all this high-tech biometric auto-fire face-recognition spook-talk, you’d think you’d have a less primitive way to defeat their security.”

Houston laughed. “See, Francisco, that’s why it’s going to work. They planned for all kinds of brutal and sophisticated assaults on their security system. But it was all two-dimensional thinking. All we need is a tank of propane, a metal harness, a big patch of nylon, and a fan, and we’re in!” She smiled broadly. Lopez thought she looked like an excited little girl about to get on a roller coaster.

He took several steps back. The balloon was nearly inflated. Personal balloon or not, it was big. “We aren’t in there yet, Sara,” he said grimly, looking at the towering shape. He hoped no random police patrol car would pass by. “And you said one-man balloon — will it support one man and one woman?”

“Like I said,” she began, strapping herself into the harness and motioning Francisco over. “Julio had it made for him. Two hundred and seventy-five pounds of former linebacker, with over-design for safety. You’re about one hundred and eighty pounds, if I can guess. I’m one hundred forty. Should work.” That smile again.

Already she was beginning to lift off the ground. He stood next to her, and she strapped a second harness onto him. This was not going to be comfortable.

“The only issue is navigation with all this priest deadweight underneath me,” she said musingly as she fired the tank, driving hot air into the balloon. Lopez felt his weight lessen dramatically, and he rose up without effort on his toes. “And, of course, landing.”

Landing. Landing with him underneath. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Sara.”

Instead of replying, she burned the flame harder, and instantly his feet were no longer on the ground. The balloon gained altitude at a frightening rate, and within seconds the food warehouse and her car were small below them, twisting out of his field of vision as she piloted the cloud-hopper over the forest nearby. As they increased their altitude, Lopez gained a greater eye-line to the horizon, the orange necklaces of street lights radiating outward underneath them, a reflection of the full moon shining back at him from a small lake on his left. The wind rushed over his face.

He surprised himself with a laugh as the euphoria of the moment swept over him.

I’m flying.

29

The landing was rough, and he skinned his right leg enough to draw blood. Fortunately, nothing seemed to be broken, and after a split-second look, Houston anchored the balloon to a drain grating and unhitched the two backpacks she had brought. They hoisted one apiece.

They left the balloon “parked,” fully inflated, right in the middle of the CIA lot. She had landed in what she called a security camera blind spot, the largest of four around the property. Even so, “largest” meant that they had a very narrow landing pad in which they could work, but somehow, she had done it, even with him underneath to complicate the touchdown. He assumed that the tradeoff was bouncing him off the asphalt.

Lopez carried the tablet, checking once more that the app was running correctly, displaying the strangely out-of-focus image of Houston that was supposed to defeat the face-recognition algorithms. Houston pulled out four small containers marked with several warning labels: ultrahigh pressure, explosive, extremely cold gas. She had briefly explained that it was highly compressed nitrogen that when released in the small spaces they would enter, would momentarily lower the temperature in the room by tens of degrees. While not much, it was enough to decrease the sensitivity of the tracking equipment. Exactly why this was the case, he didn’t have time to pursue. Because of this, they were to don oxygen-supplied gas masks immediately after entry, both for the volume of released nitrogen, and for the moment the security system would detect Lopez as an intruder and release the neuro-suppressant sleeping gas.

In addition, she had packed electronic equipment, several small firearms, and a bag full of gray bricks, which he assumed were plastic explosives. As they ran from the balloon toward the glass pyramid, he suppressed a bitter laugh as he gazed toward the razor walls and robotic weaponry they had skipped over. Down the rabbit hole, I go. A parish priest only recently teaching bored students was now sprinting through what should have been an adolescent’s video game. Except that the deaths are real. The bullets real. The pain real. My brother’s death, real. His smile faded, and he focused ahead as they approached the entrance.

At the facial-recognition device, there was the turnstile she had mentioned, after which was a short ten-foot walk to a stairway leading downward, ending at a heavy-looking door. Houston indicated that through the door was a short tunnel, embedded in the ground next to the building, which would lead upward to the main floor.

She motioned for him to keep at a distance. “Don’t get close enough for it to scan you until you have the tablet positioned right against your face.”

“How will I see to walk?” Lopez had not thought of this until now.

“You won’t. Eyeball a line, look down at your feet, and walk straight. When you get close to the turnstile, quickly align yourself — it spins counterclockwise — and just push your way in. You should be able to lower the tablet once it engages.”

Lopez nodded, and she turned and walked toward the turnstile and invisible camera system. “Walk slowly to this spot,” she said, coming to a stop, “and stand still until you hear the mechanism.”

At that moment, a green light appeared next to the door, and he heard a metallic clanking sound. Houston walked forward and pushed her way through the turnstile. As she did so, a loud click came from the far door, and it opened automatically, pivoting on its hinges slowly. She motioned for him to approach.

Taking a deep breath, he verified again that the image was showing, and walked forward with the device pressed closely to his face. As he neared the location she had indicated, she called out, “Stop!” Lopez halted. There was a pause. He was sure that it was longer than it had been for her. He felt sweat trickle down the side of his face, but he did not move the tablet or change position. Just when he began to panic, he heard the same metallic sound he had a moment ago. “Francisco, move!” He lowered the tablet. Houston was motioning animatedly. He walked forward quickly, pressing against the turnstile bars. They moved! He pushed through and felt his knees nearly buckle.

“Damn it, Francisco! Don’t get shaky on me now! This is just starting.” As she spoke, she removed one of the slabs of gray plastique and attached it to the turnstile. Embedded in the putty was an electronic device. Radio receiver? He didn’t ask.

Lopez placed the tablet back into the backpack and followed her through the second door. He had hardly entered a foot when she held up her hand and stopped him again.

“Okay, beyond this point and we’re in the range of the tracking system. Help me with these.” She removed her pack and knelt down, yanking on the large zipper. She reached in and removed four small gas tanks. “Get the masks.”

Lopez mirrored her position and opened his pack. He removed the two masks with their small oxygen canister. Houston grabbed one and strapped it on. “Like this.” She showed him how. Clumsily, he mimicked her motions, and with some help, soon had his on.

“Wow, this is heavy.” His voice sounded strangely resonant.

“Bad for the neck, but it beats having to lug a back-mounted cylinder. Especially if you’re traveling by personal balloon.” She didn’t smile. Her voice was substantially muffled, but she spoke loudly enough for him to understand easily. “Second drawback is that the small tank means we only have clean air for twenty minutes. Enough time for us to get to where we need to go before the nitrogen will have dispersed. I don’t think we’ll get close to fooling the system that long. We’ll be lucky to make it to Jesse’s office before all hell breaks loose.”

Houston transferred most of the remaining items to one pack and indicated that Francisco should take it. She kept the two guns, strapping them tightly to her waist with a utility belt, and then reached up and touched Lopez’s mask on the side. It was nearly as if she had placed her hand on his cheek, and it felt like an oddly intimate gesture. He felt and heard a click.

“Opening your supply.”

He felt a pressure change in his ears, and there was a strange taste in the air suddenly. Houston affixed another large charge to the doors and then handed him two of the canisters.

“Do what I do.”

With a firm motion, she twisted a valve-like object at the top of the canister, and like the pin in a grenade, it came off. She then rolled the canister along the floor, and it immediately started spewing a dense cloud of white vapor into the air, spinning in circles as it did so. Together they repeated the procedure with the other canisters. Soon the room was noticeably colder, the air becoming slightly foggy.

“Care to dance?”

Lopez frowned. Here was perhaps the craziest part of the entire plan, and he felt that this was saying a lot. He stepped up to her, and she grasped him around the waist and pulled him closely in. She placed a leg along each of his, and as instructed, he crouched down slightly to match her height. His body was charged with an old instinctual reaction. He had not been so close to a woman since high school. Before seminary. But the body had a program of its own, independent of a priest’s vows. I am not going to have an erection…

“Why, Francisco,” she said coyly, “I didn’t know you cared.”

Damn.

“We walk to my count, down the hallway, up the elevator, third floor. If the alarms go off, we break off and move as fast as we can.”

The entire idea was based on an attempt to fool the tracking system. Now her strange behavior the day before was to bear fruit. She had worn a cast, faked a strange and lumbering walk, all so that she and Lopez could walk as one person to the rhythms she had reprogrammed the system for. There is no way this is going to work.

It worked. Whether because of the cold gas or the strange walk that simulated a single person with a limp, they made it all the way down the hallway to the elevators without incident. Lopez couldn’t believe it.

“Okay, pushing the elevator button.” She reached across him, brushing his chest and shoulder, his body now primed to react to her touch. He was having trouble concentrating on the break-in. It was ridiculous! “Blind spot in the elevators.” She smiled.

The doors opened. They entered. She pressed the button for the third floor, and they remained in their odd embrace for five or six seconds as the elevator climbed and then stopped. The doors opened.

“Second door on the right.”

They lumbered out, and suddenly their luck ended. Houston’s phone began to issue a repeating electronic tone.

“Shit! We’re blown.”

At that moment, Lopez heard metallic sounds from several floors down, and the elevator lights went dark. Then total silence. A hissing sound filled his ears, along with a high-frequency buzz. Gas and electricity.

She let go of him and scanned her phone briefly before stowing it. “The Wi-Fi cut. The building alarms have tripped. The place is locked down now. Don’t take off your mask and don’t touch the exit doors! We’ll need to work fast.”

She sprinted down the hall and stopped in front of the office door. Removing two charges from her bag, she placed a small amount of gray putty capped with a tiny circuit board on each door hinge. She waved Lopez back. “Don’t have time to play lock picker.” She pressed a button on the cap, rushed back, and turned her face away from the charge. Lopez did the same. A second later, a small explosion blasted the door. Houston sprinted back down the hallway and kicked the door inward. It was ripped out of the frame and crashed onto the floor.

By the time Lopez had caught up, she was already inside, crouched down by a computer. It was the office of Jesse Darst. He remembered its layout clearly, the hostile encounter seared in his mind. Houston had already removed the casing, and was disconnecting the hard drive.

“We don’t have time for much of a search, damn it,” she cursed, lifting the drive and dropping it into the backpack. “Security is already en route. I hope to God that what we need is on this damn drive.”

Houston strapped on the pack and walked past Lopez to the doors. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” They sprinted down the hallway. Surprising Lopez, the doors to the stairs were not locked. Didn’t think of everything, did they? They flew down the spiraling stairway, leaping multiple steps at a time. When they reached the bottom floor, Houston stopped him with her arm. “Wait!” She removed a transmitter and pressed one of the four buttons on it.

The explosion was enormous. At the far end of the hall, there was a small fireball and a blast of dust and metal that nearly reached them. Lopez looked at her quizzically. “Another.” She pressed the second button. Outside, a more muffled explosion could be heard. The turnstile. “Let’s go!”

They sprinted down the hallway, leaping over debris. Lopez heard his own breath like a thundering elephant in his ears, the gas mask amplifying the sounds. Plunging through a thick cloud of smoke from the blast, they were soon outside the building. What remained of the twisted wreck of the turnstile smoldered in front of them. They leapt across the passage through the mangled security door and began racing to the looming mass of the balloon. Lopez felt a great swell of relief to see the thing, however strange a mode of transportation it was. It was their only way out. They pulled off their masks as they reached the cloud-hopper, Houston strapping the backpack to the metal harness.

Suddenly, the sounds of screeching tires pulled their attention to the gate. Four black cars had come to a sharp stop by the entrance. Several men leaped out of the vehicles. Even at this distance, Lopez could see that they were armed.

“Francisco!” screamed Houston. “Get over here!” He snapped himself out of his stare and turned to the balloon. Houston had already strapped herself in, released the anchor, and was triggering the flame. The balloon had begun to rise. Lopez darted over and strapped on his own harness, hardly buckling the straps when he felt his feet lifted off the ground. He glanced up at Houston. She was staring like a hawk toward the gate while working the balloon.

Lopez looked back over at the CIA security forces. They had already activated the gate and were streaming in through a narrow opening. They had, of course, seen the balloon. Two of the agents sprinted toward the climbing cloud-hopper, weapons upraised.

“Hold on, Francisco!”

Already the building and trees were receding beneath them, but Lopez could not accurately gauge the height. Can they shoot us from this far?

The CIA agents began firing, and it took a moment for Lopez to understand their intent. Several shots were close enough that he heard a bullet whiz, but he and Houston were unscathed. The balloon! It was so obvious. They were small targets, hard to hit at their increasing altitude in the dark. The balloon was huge.

Oh, my God.

Two shots fell against the fabric above him, and he could see the envelope dent inward from the impact. It was too high and too dark for him to see the damage.

“Sara?” he yelled upward.

“I know!” she responded, directing the balloon away from the CIA compound and over the trees. “I just hope it holds together long enough for us to get to the car!” Her words were shouted out loudly over the din of the wind and flame.

It was perhaps five minutes into their escape flight that Francisco knew they were in trouble. The envelope began to flap broadly near the location of the shots. He could almost make out what appeared to be a line across the balloon, a tear that was growing by the minute.

“Francisco, I’ve got to put it down! We’ll lose envelope integrity any second now!”

Houston yanked at the cord to the parachute valve, and Lopez thought he could hear the hot air escaping from the top. Or is that the air rushing out of the gaping tear? The balloon was now definitely careening downward, and Houston fought as if with a maniacal puppet, yanking on the burn, the valve cord, back and forth, trying to stabilize their trajectory. The wild movements started to nauseate him.

Then he saw it. The parking lot! They were nearly clear of the trees! He roughly gauged the distance and their angle of descent. They could make it!

“Francisco! Brace yourself! This is going to be a crash landing!”

And he was on the bottom.

Lopez looked down and drew his legs up, cupping them with his arms. His feet clipped the tops of the last trees as the pavement of the parking lot suddenly appeared below them. Oh, God, too fast. The parking lanes were a blur, and the ground was rushing up like a rocket. He pulled up his legs as much as he could, balled up, and closed his eyes.

The impact was jarring. His right leg slammed into the cement, and instantly they were up again, the harness launched this way and that. Then again, a crash into the hard concrete, and suddenly he felt the harness detach and a terrible lightness.

There was a rolling and bumping as Lopez felt himself turned upside down and pitched. Flashes of light and buffeting. Somewhere nearby, he heard Houston scream.

Darkness swallowed him.

30

“Now you will become beautiful! Like Michael Jackson, no?” The soldier laughed heartily as the wraith placed bottle after bottle and vial after vial on the shelves of the medicine cabinet.

“Something similar. More sophisticated. More dangerous.”

“More dangerous? Did you see his face in the end? Melted wax.”

“He spent decades modifying his appearance. The mistakes accumulated.” The bottles were labeled with different abbreviations, and he sorted them into groups. “I need to begin far enough in advance to achieve the desired effect. Lucky for me, there are armies of chemists in Asia working without sleep to make the skin whiteners for their fashion-conscious women.”

The soldier nodded. “The madness of women! In the West they wish to become brown, in the East, white! In my grandmother’s time, in old Russia, it was better to be fat to catch a man. Now, they must starve like an Ethiopian!” He thumped his chest with his thumb and grinned. “What man wants a woman with a flatter chest than his own?” The wraith did not respond. The old man frowned. “But you have no interest in lying over a woman, do you, Javed? Your concern is not on the energies of life. For you, there is only death.”

The wraith held up several vials. “The first step is the inhibition of my own natural melanin production, a cocktail of several compounds. They are inhibitors of the enzyme tyrosinase.”

“You have become a biochemist, as well.” He shook his head.

“I have to be many things. See, here: polyphenols, benzoate derivatives, kojic acid, and others. They poison a key chemical step in the production of melanin, the pigmenting compound in human skin.” For emphasis, he pointed out the contrast in the discolored regions of his arm. “They produce a gradual lightening of the pigment and maintain lightness. But it is not enough for my skin.”

“You try to cross a wide chasm.”

The wraith held up several creams and other vials. “I need depigmenting agents, bleaching agents to remove what is naturally there.”

The soldier took one in his broad hand and turned it around, staring at the scrawl on the label. “Hg. This is mercury, no?”

“Mercury.”

“Poison! This is collecting in your tissues, you fool. Someday, it will kill you.”

The wraith took the containers back. “There is only today and what must be done.”

The old man stared in silence, a troubled expression on his face. He waved his hand toward the cabinet and strode away from it. “I do not know why I help you kill yourself.”

“You saved my life.”

The soldier stopped and turned. “Da. But for what? So you can die by steel or poison another day?”

“No, so that I can purge the earth of those who would torture us like animals.”

The old man grunted and sat down on his chair by the door. He looked weary. “The rest of our program is beyond expectation. Your progress is not understandable. Dangerous progress, I have said. The human body is not meant for such changes. But you are becoming again a lethal force.”

It was true. Using extreme methods in pharmacology, training, and psychological motivation, pushed and aided by the help of one of the deadliest experts in the history of modern combat training, he was returning to form. The scars were ugly, but the tissue solid again. Seventy-five percent of his muscle strength had been regained, and flexibility was returning. He had cut the recovery to one-third the normal duration.

In addition to dramatically increased endurance training, he had instituted and pushed resistance exercises. At first, isometrics and body weight programs. Then, he moved to makeshift weight lifting, fashioning bars from thick branches, hanging heavy water jugs from them. Lower body training first: squats and dead-lifts to shore up his back — the steroids, growth hormone, and high-protein diet stimulating spectacular growth. Next, weighted dips and pull-ups, upper-body presses and rows. His strength grew miraculously by the day.

Combat training was then resumed. A lengthy practice each morning in several martial arts, culminating in an evening session with weapons drills. Blunt trauma weapons such as sticks and staves. Knife work. The old man honed his skills, corrected any weaknesses, and helped him fight around his injuries.

Finally, firearms training: handguns and rifles. He quickly learned to compensate for the damaged musculature and neurons, adapting his motions, his aim and stance, his trigger finger to the new realities of his body after injury and rehabilitation.

The old man nodded, pleased. “You are highly adaptable. There is no ego in you, only the task at hand. No student has ever shown such devotion to mastering my teachings. I believe the devil has possessed you.”

31

Francisco Lopez moaned as he opened his eyes.

Even after several days, waking up hurt like hell. While he had regained movement and lost the initial dizziness from the concussion, his body was still sore from having his butt kicked by a rogue balloon. The foot-long scabs along his legs and arms had mostly stopped oozing, the antibiotic ointment and washings by Houston preventing serious infection. The bruising had gone from the look of gangrene to an ugly purple and yellow mixture that turned his stomach. But it was fading.

Houston was mostly concerned about his head. They could not go to a hospital. Not after that night. The Feds, or worse, would be on them the second their IDs were entered into the system. Without the option for X-rays, the extent of his head injury could only be guessed at. The first day he had vomited, and he felt a wash of guilt flow over him at what the CIA woman must have had to deal with. Along with his dizziness, and the clear bruising and gash on the right side of this head, a concussion was guaranteed. The question was the severity. Any swelling inside the skull, and he could be permanently brain-damaged. She had monitored him closely. With each passing hour, it seemed the worst had been avoided.

“How do you feel today?” he heard her ask from across the hotel room.

Lopez grunted. “Next time, you fly the low harness for any balloon break-ins.”

Houston laughed. He welcomed it, despite the headache that even moderate noise induced. Her voice raised his spirits. “Well, your humor is back, and I’m glad.” Her tone turned more serious. “You were going zombie on me the first few days. It was scary, Francisco.”

“I’m better, Sara. It’s just that every morning I wake up feeling like I just got out of a boxing ring.”

Lopez stumbled into the bathroom and showered. By now, he was growing used to the sting on his injured flesh, and his limp was improving. It was a miracle that he hadn’t broken anything. After he dried off and dressed, he walked back into the room and approached Houston, who was working at the desk.

The computer was on, as always. Her access to CIA networks was disabled; her one and only attempt at a login triggered an alert, and the attempted Trojan malware from CIA inserted onto her computer. She had barely stopped the process and cleaned things up. It was a clear sign that the Agency had ID’d them from the break-in and were in pursuit. Because of this, after he had stabilized, they had moved motels on a nightly basis.

All her Internet work was run through a nested web of proxy servers to camouflage her presence from governmental tracking. She had wiped and then tossed her cell phone to avoid being tracked by it. But they would need the functionality of a smartphone, so she bought a new one anonymously at a retail location. She paid for the service with cash on a pay-as-you-go plan. As long as they used web services anonymously, it would be nearly impossible for the government web monitors to identify and track them. She also relied on online voice-over IP run through her anonymizing protocol to communicate. Even with all these precautions, she contacted others rarely, and only when it was necessary.

“Did you write to Fred?” he asked, pulling up a chair and sipping coffee from the small pot provided by the motel.

“Yes,” she said, turning to face him. “Haven’t heard anything.”

“You told him what we came across last night?”

“Yes, Francisco. And while you were sleeping this morning, I found a little more.”

“Oh?” Lopez was intrigued. “More than their visiting a half-dozen Islamic countries three to four times a year? I’d love to know what secret little deals Uncle Sam was running with these guys.”

“No, you wouldn’t, Francisco,” she said, frowning. “At least if it were just more money and guns for friendly dictators, I could digest it as part of a long-term geopolitical strategy. That depersonalizes things. Makes it more academic.”

Lopez saw the hurt look in her eyes. “And this isn’t? This gets personal somehow?”

Houston sighed. “They had really encrypted this stuff. Nothing I had, no codes were going to crack it and let me get a peek at those last files.” She shook her head, as if surprised “Funny what you can’t get from your CIA training you can find some arrogant sixteen-year-old on the right message board to do.”

“Sorry?” Lopez felt lost.

“I started lurking on a bunch of hacker groups, online. They’re slippery as fish to get hold of, and I don’t trust any of them. But I was desperate. I basically followed my intuition to a group calling themselves ‘FKAN’ — maturely for fuck anonymous to display their dismissive attitude towards other hacker groups like Anonymous.”

“Nice.”

“Well, their Emotional Quotient is low, but they seem to be the feared group of late. FKAN this, FKAN that. Break-ins, especially into governmental sites, showing some serious cryptological muscle.”

“That’s what we need.”

“Right. But it’s a huge risk dealing with these wildcards. Basically, I tried to entice them to do it without much direct interaction. I dared them to hack one of the files.”

“You released the files to these anarchists?”

Houston looked crestfallen, but her tone was firm. “Awful, I know. Just one, and I hoped it wouldn’t reveal much to the world. Because believe me, when these guys get hold of it, nothing will stop them from sharing it and bragging.”

Lopez whistled. “So, they did it, I assume?”

“Less than two hours, Francisco. It was scary. They wouldn’t tell me how if I asked, but to show they did it, they had to release the file contents on the board. Hang the animal’s head on the wall for all to see. That was my ticket. I could compare the encrypted file to the unlocked file with some software I have on my computer from the CIA, and reverse-compute the encryption. It worked. I got access to all the files.”

“So what did these hackers also get access to?”

Houston smiled wanly. “I was lucky. A series of flight manifests from a CIA hangar in North Carolina that means nothing to them without the other files. Of course, they were happy as clams, as the document clearly showed CIA fingerprints all over it, and they get another notch in their belt. This will be out everywhere soon, and the Agency will know it came from me.”

“You’re going to be very unpopular,” he said, the sense of her vulnerability stabbing at him.

“I don’t want to think about that right now, Francisco,” she said, swiping the air with her hand, as if pushing the topic to the side. “Let me tell you what I found out.”

She opened several documents, and Lopez began to scan them. Along with the flight manifests, all to nations of ill-repute that they had discovered through other, more accessible documents, the highly protected files also had lists of names and locations, sets of dates in pairs, along with brief descriptions that seemed to be of a criminal nature.

“What are these dates? Who are these people?”

“Terrorist suspects,” she began. “All the descriptions are of links to known networks inside and outside the US. A kind of threat-score is listed, and all the ones with the paired dates have scores over 100.”

Lopez shook his head. “What does all this mean?”

“Their snatch dates, Francisco.” She sighed when he shrugged his shoulders in confusion. “The first date is when the CIA teams grabbed these guys, and the second, the delivery. Drop off.”

An awareness dawned over Lopez. He felt cold. “Let me guess, the dates in between correspond to the absences of the CIA personnel who have been dying. To the dates Miguel was gone.”

“Yes, Francisco.” Her expression was anguished.

“Extraordinary rendition,” he said flatly. The term felt heavy, like cancer. “It was in the papers. Secret CIA teams snatch terrorist suspects, literally bag them, dope them, wrap a diaper on them, and ship them in the dead of night to torture chambers around the world. They even made a couple of movies about it. One had Meryl Streep. Nice bleeding heart, Hollywood script.”

Houston nodded. “But these acts went further, much further than anything I’ve ever known about. All the targets they rendered were US citizens. Every one of them. This was a special operation that was under the radar. Outside of congressional oversight. Unknown to the judiciary. It seems it was known only to a small group at the CTC.”

“CTC?”

“Counterterrorism center.”

“Right.” Lopez felt an old cynicism. “What would it matter? In the end, the Obama administration okays not only snatching American citizens, but killing them on the mere suspicion of terrorist links. Without trial. Remember the Attorney General, Holder? He said it publicly. No due process. Secret decisions. Baseball cards. Bang, bang. You’re gone.”

She shook her head. “That was much later, years after these missions. Initially, there was some strong pushback. Even talk of legal action. Remember Khalid El-Masri and Maher Arar? These were rendered and tortured innocents who stirred up what public outrage there was. There was genuine disquiet inside of the CIA, too, Francisco. It was a house divided.”

Lopez gazed out, lost in the past. “My father, Ricardo Lopez, was a real genius. Cold war — everybody wanted him. But Cuba or Russia wasn’t for him, whatever they offered. He always spoke so passionately about American liberties. He could quote the founders of the nation better than a historian. He was so proud to become a citizen, that his sons would be Americans. I wonder what he would think now.”

She sighed. “We all fall on different sides of this divide, Francisco. And there is a hell of a lot of gray. I mean, we are talking about protecting our people!” Her intensity drew his gaze, and she looked into his eyes. “But if we surrender our deepest values to win this war, we’ve already lost before a single shot’s been fired.”

The earnest flame in her blue eyes told him something he needed to know. Whatever his prejudices about government intelligence, the covert work of the CIA and others, whatever they might have done that turned his stomach, Sara Houston’s hands were clean. No wonder they kept her and others like her in the dark.

She continued. “And these cases were scandalous at the time. Obama’s attorney general may have justified assassination of suspects, even US citizens, but it was a long time, over ten years in the making. Whatever you think of those policies, they came stepwise, piece by piece.”

“Yeah, the old slippery slope,” he added.

Houston soldiered on. “Before things were legitimized, this was all illegal. Ethics is one thing, and many in the CIA don’t care whether you approve of what they do. But legal is another story, because it can get your ass tossed in jail. That’s why this elaborate cover-up. That’s why they buried it so deep.”

Lopez stood up, suppressing a groan. When he stopped moving or stretching, even for a few minutes, the next movement was always stiff, painful. He stared outside the window into the drab parking lot. “I don’t know, Sara. I think I’m falling on the side of things where you don’t deliver people without trial into the hands of butchers, whatever safety you think it buys you.” He reached his hand through the opening of his shirt and pulled out the arrowhead. With his other hand, he looped the leather strip holding it over his head, and held the artifact in his palm. “It’s a pact with the Devil.”

Houston stood up and walked over toward him, stopping behind his right shoulder and staring down at the pendant. “I’ve been meaning to ask you since you were hurt, Francisco. What is that? You were a little delirious, I think, but you wouldn’t let me take it off you, even for a sponge bath.” Lopez grimaced. “I’m sorry for the breach of privacy, but you needed a nurse.”

“No, it’s not that.” He held up the pendant as if it were some magical amulet. “Miguel and I found this in the Tennessee mountains as kids. A bunch of other things, too — some pottery, bones, things we couldn’t identify. A crime to keep it from the archeologists, but it was our secret. Indian mojo. We didn’t have many links to our ancestors. The North American Indians, well, they were the closest we could get. We imagined ourselves warriors.”

Houston moved closer to him. “Yes, that was almost my thought when I was tending to you.” He arched an eyebrow. “Well, Francisco, you’re a solid man. If I didn’t know you were a priest, I would have guessed heavyweight boxer. You didn’t wake for hours, and you lay there like some statue of an ancient warrior, strong, with this war pendant resting on your chest.” Her eyes seemed to look him over. “Made me wonder about it.”

Lopez felt his breathing deepen. He had never felt the admiration of a woman like this, so close, so real. He wasn’t sure how to respond.

He returned his attention to the arrowhead. “When I found his body, found Miguel, it was lying on the ground close by.”

“And you’ve been wearing it since then?”

Lopez nodded. “Seemed like a sign to me. Now I feel like throwing it out the window. Sara, how could he have done these things?” I’m a priest! Miguel, how do I forgive you?

Houston reached over his arm, her skin brushing against his. It felt warm and alive, the milky whiteness contrasting strongly with his dark copper. She touched the arrowhead with her fingertips but said nothing. Tears were in her eyes, and seeing them, he felt an overwhelming need to comfort her. They had both lost Miguel and now, in some less tangible way, had lost something else of him with these revelations.

But he saw that her pain was deeper. She was losing part of the America that she had devoted herself to, that she loved and served with all her heart. Her agency directed these atrocities. Her entire belief system was collapsing.

“I’m sorry, Sara,” he said, reaching over to put a hand on her shoulder.

Suddenly, her arms were around him. She embraced him tightly, holding on for dear life, like a shipwreck victim to a life preserver. The arrowhead was pressed between them, Lopez still clutching the leather loop and unsure how to react. Her body shook with silent sobs. She seemed to be suppressing as much as she could, trying to stay in control. Lopez simply held her. Her pain seemed to burn inside of him as well, tearing at his heart, and he wished he could pour himself into her, fill the terrible emptiness her tears revealed.

After half a minute, an alert tone rang on her computer. She suddenly let go, wiped her eyes, and turned away from him to stare at the screen.

“Finally, Fred deigns to reply,” she said hoarsely. Lopez could see her scanning the message, communicated, he knew, through a labyrinth of security walls and cloaked identities. Fred Simon was no rookie, and he took his own precautions. “He wants to set up a video conference call. In an hour.”

“That’s great!” said Lopez. Finally, they could involve someone else in this awful discovery. And we need some help. It was obvious to Lopez that they were getting in way over their heads.

Houston grunted. “Not all is great. According to Fred, the CIA now has me listed as a top-priority catch. And if you can believe it, I’m coded ‘GADAHN.’ You’re listed as a possible accomplice, if that makes you feel less left out.”

“What’s ‘Gadahn’? Accomplice to what?”

“Adam Gadahn, the first American indicted for treason in more than half a century.”

Lopez was stunned. “Accomplice to treason?”

Houston shook her head bitterly. “Fred says we’re fucked.”

32

“Basically, you’re fucked,” said the floating head of Fred Simon on the monitor.

His pixelated image showed little emotion. Lopez and Houston sat close together in front of the screen listening to the parade of bad news. It was worse than Lopez could ever have imagined, even given what they had done. Their theft of CIA documents had crossed a line in the Agency neither Houston nor Simon knew existed.

“They’ve mobilized a manhunt locally and internationally. Civilian law enforcement has been involved, and APBs are out for both of you in the area. Meanwhile, they’ve labeled you radioactive, Sara. It’s a hell of a smear job — basically you’re a double agent who slept her way across one hundred bedrooms at CIA, grabbing a stash of secrets each time. They’ve released a bunch of compromising photos and recordings. The story is starting to pop up on the national news and online rags. It’s damn ugly.”

“Jesus,” said Houston, her face tightening. “I’ll check them out. I’ve been focused on other things.”

“They can’t make a charge of treason stick, of course, but that won’t matter for the manhunt. That charge has multiple government agencies prowling around for you. My sources even sounded frightened. The Agency wants you locked up and silenced.”

“What are our options, Fred? Realistically.”

Simon laughed bitterly. “Surrender.”

“Like hell,” barked Houston.

“Sara, these guys aren’t playing around. You can’t expect to evade this dragnet for long. Turn yourself in before some wild chase ends up with both of you dead.”

Lopez leaned forward and spoke into the camera. “We aren’t going to give up, Fred. We’ve come too far in this search for my brother’s killers, the killers of many of those in your organization. Sara and I now know what the CIA has been hiding. Secretive missions of an illegal nature that connect all the murders.”

Simon looked concerned. “Sara, what is he talking about?”

“Rendition, Fred,” she answered.

“Rendition? So the hell what? That’s not news.”

“Rendition of American citizens. Snatched over the last ten years in multiple missions. Snatched on American soil.”

“You’re shitting me.”

Lopez interrupted. “No, we’re not! The records we got from the CIA computers — that have us now in hot water — prove it without any doubts. My brother was part of more than twenty of those missions.”

“Black-ops snatch missions targeting citizens? Grabbed here? Oh, Lordy, what a toxic barrel of waste that is. Who the hell was crazy enough to authorize this?”

Houston shook her head. “I don’t know. The superiors are only identified with code words: Bravo, Phoenix, Nexus, and the like. It was all set up post-9/11, extreme measures. After 2007, all references to the program disappear.”

Simon nodded. “They killed it, I guess. Still, though, evidence of numerous such events — toxic waste, Sara. No wonder they’re trying to quarantine you two.” He waved his hands at the screen, lecturing them. “From what you’ve told me, I think all the more you need to go in ASAP. Cut a deal with them. Promise to shut the hell up. You can’t change the past. Justice in this business is a pipe dream. Cut your losses, Sara. Turn yourself in.”

“I don’t think you’re paying attention!” said Lopez, his voice rising in volume. “The killers are still out there. They aren’t going to turn themselves in. We now have information that can begin to tie everything together. Whatever these murders are about, they have something to do with these missions. We’ve picked up a trail!”

Houston finished for him. “This could lead us to the identity of the killers, Fred. Besides, who says they are finished? How many more agents will die? We’re not going to surrender and duct tape our mouths shut! We’re going to find them.”

“Before the Agency finds you? It’s just a matter of time!”

“Then we’ll use our time as best we can,” said Houston defiantly.

Simon stared at the screen in silence for a few seconds. He sighed. “It’s a fool’s quest, Sara, but if you’re determined to do this, I’ll do what I can to help. But my hands are mostly tied.” Simon ran his fingers roughly through his white hair. “We’ve been connected long enough. We have to be careful or we’ll end up leading them straight to you. My advice is to lay low, move constantly, don’t do anything that can lead to identification through any databases. All communications must be proxy and anonymous. Your banks, credit cards, online accounts are all off limits.”

“We know all this.”

Simon continued, ignoring her. “If you were just going to disappear, you just might be able to pull it off. But you want to push to reveal the killers. You want to investigate. You will have to make yourselves visible and vulnerable to do this.”

“We know, Fred. But it’s something we have to do.”

Simon shook his head in resignation. “You Scottish girls are always so damn stubborn! Fine. I’ll reach you again within the week. I’m not idle, Sara. You do have friends left in the Agency. More friends than that, even. There is a network of some like-minded old farts like me not only at CIA, but at FBI, NSA, some others. We’re our own secret society, but we’re sadly outgunned. We’ve been pushing since after 9/11 to change the course internally, but we’re trying to stay honorable. It’s hard to compete with dishonorable, let me tell you.”

Houston looked stunned. “How can we reach this group, Fred?”

Simon smiled shyly. “Watchmen. That’s our name for ourselves, from the comic. Sorry, graphic novel. It wasn’t my idea.”

“How do we reach these Watchmen, then?”

“Right now, through me. That may change, we’ll see. Things are moving quickly, you’ve made sure of that. We’re doing all we can, but the machine is bigger than us. We’ll talk soon. Be smart. Be safe.”

The connection was broken, and the screen went dark. Neither Lopez nor Houston moved or spoke for a moment. The silence seemed to weigh a ton.

Lopez spoke first. “At least there is a team fighting on our side.”

“The Watchmen,” chuckled Houston. “I always wondered why Fred seemed so determined to keep up these interagency meetings. I thought it was for better intelligence coordination. But maybe it was more.”

“I don’t think they were preparing for this.”

“No. I don’t think they were either. And it sounds like there aren’t many of them. Still, any help is welcome right now.” Houston turned toward Lopez and looked deeply into his eyes. “Thanks for risking so much with me, Francisco. I know it’s not just about Miguel for you either. I’ve seen it in your face. Whatever happens, it means a lot to me to have a friend in this.” She placed her hand on his.

Lopez was moved and embarrassed at the same time. Or am I afraid of her? Sometimes she seemed like a powerful force that might just consume him in ten different ways. What unnerved him the most was how attractive that idea had become.

He tried to redirect the conversation. “I have an idea, Sara.” She looked at him quizzically. “The Church,” he said. “We’re surrounded on all sides by powerful forces, numbers and reach we can’t fight or can’t control. But the Catholic Church is a big organization, as well. With deep pockets and a reach that goes around the world. And it is a moral organization, whatever its faults and the tarnishing by the press. It is based on the teachings of Jesus Christ. Lies, shadows, torture, murder — these are the works of the Devil and must be opposed.”

Houston looked doubtful. “Francisco, what can the Church do?”

Lopez stood up, feeling empowered for the first time in this madness that had descended on them. “I don’t know, Sara. But I know they have the power to shelter us, shield us. Once upon a time, often in history, the Church would shelter those persecuted by the governments of nations. Maybe it’s time to call on that again.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Go see my bishop in Alabama. He’s the first point of contact, the doorway to the ecclesiastical power structure. I’ll tell him what we have found out. I’ll show him the evil that is stirring.”

“And if he refuses to help?”

Lopez’s eyes flashed, and he stood up straight. “I believe in my Church, Sara. The bishop won’t refuse to help. God cannot abandon us at this hour.”

33

The lights were dim in the farmhouse, the only illumination the flat computer screens lining the faux stone walls. The bluish hue cast a death mask on the shadowy figures seated around a table in the middle of the room, their features pale, ghostly, and inhuman. Even their speech seemed to take on whispered tones, as if spoken by the wind.

They stared at a computer monitor, the face of CIA Agent Jesse Darst filling it. He spoke in a grave voice, his face lined and strained.

“They got my hard drive, and through it, access to a lot of stuff before we could shut it down, lock them out completely. All the files were there, the entire program!”

“This was unexpected,” said Nexus, “and we need to move fast to contain it. That will do for now. You weren’t directly involved in the operations. You shouldn’t be overly concerned.”

“Indirectly will destroy me too, if this ever gets out!”

Nexus held up his hand. “I know that, but you must not panic. We need you to stay focused and continue to report to us. We need your information. We’ll be in contact soon.” Darst nodded, and the screen went black.

“Then they know.” It was the baritone voice of Bravo.

“There is no doubt,” answered Nexus. “It was unthinkable that they would dare such a thing. That they could accomplish such a thing. Building 448 was considered impregnable; its security unassailable. The documents were hyper-encrypted, NSA-certified algorithms.”

“That a pimply hacker online could crack in an hour!” spat Zulu.

Bravo laughed and gestured around them. “Nothing is impregnable, gentlemen. Nowhere is completely safe. It’s best we keep that in mind.”

Nexus interrupted. “The wraith we’ll consider soon, but we must deal with the pair. Even at this juncture, they have begun to destabilize things beyond acceptability. We thought to use them to solve our problems, but they have created new ones. Their raid on CIA, their cracking of the code is beginning to set in motion our worst nightmares.”

“Not our worst,” interrupted Zulu.

Bravo spoke. “The release of the document to the hacker community is an embarrassment to the CIA and will further isolate us in their panic to prevent discovery of this program. However, in and of itself, the document is benign.”

“That document, yes,” finished Nexus. “But there are more, and our assets have intercepted several of their communications, as mentioned. There is no doubt that they have discovered the truth. If they have all the documents on the missions — and we must assume that they do, or will soon — it is only a matter of time before they have the proof in hand.”

“And the connection to us?” asked Zulu.

“There for all to see,” spat out Nexus.

Bravo leaned forward, his thick brow prominent in the ghostly light. “The black-ops snatches are damaging enough and with the connection to our names, will mean we will be wanted men. But they are bright. They will dig deeper. They will connect the other names.”

Nexus nodded. “It is inevitable.”

Zulu looked panicked. “If they see how we used the program, who we targeted, even a few — it will be ruin!”

“It will destabilize the entire political structure,” said Bravo.

A red light flashed on a conference call system in the middle of the table. All eyes settled uncomfortably on the blinking LCD, and Bravo’s words hung in the air. Nexus sighed and reached over to the device.

“He’s been listening in, of course.” Nexus pressed a button. “Lophius?”

“You fools have nearly brought everything down on us.” The voice was imperial. Several around the table sat up in their chairs instinctively. “Bravo is correct. Everything we have done is at risk now. The future of our cause is at risk! Extreme measures are required.”

“Your plan?” asked Nexus.

The voice spoke harshly over the speakers. “When your quarry attempts to go to ground, render the ground inhospitable. I promise you, gentlemen, we will have them between a hammer and an anvil. There will be no escape.”

34

The old soldier had left for the US-Mexico border. He would be gone for several weeks, his mission to acquire the illegal items bought and paid for, shipped and delivered through networks of international arms dealers and smugglers. It was a task not without its own danger, but the wraith knew criminals would sense their peril in dealing with the former special forces officer. Thirty seconds in his presence was enough to sense the possibility of death.

The mad program of rehabilitation was nearly complete. His training approached the minimum goals required to continue his mission. The time had come for the external guise to be fine-tuned.

The creams brought back painful memories. Perhaps it was the high mercury content in the whiteners. Neurotoxins that shook loose the thoughts. Perhaps it was simply the process of camouflage, the psychological discipline and pain it required that stimulated recall.

First to return and torment him were the surgeries. Most were for injuries sustained in his often violent quest: bullet wounds, knife damage, shrapnel. But the worst were the cosmetic surgeries. At least battle wounds made sense. Erasing his natural appearance bordered on mutilation.

As he applied the cream to his face, part of his mind was transported to an operating room table, his head locked in a metallic cage. His eyes were held open by hard rings. He saw the nurse on the left, her gown filthy in this makeshift ward in forgotten alleyways. The doctor was a disbarred and disgraced plastic surgeon, whose crimes were matched only by his skills. The underground said he was the best, if you had the money. If you would brave the risk.

He had found the money. He had hacked his way into the Dubai banking computers and created a well-filled coffer of an account. He had found the black market arms dealers, passport distributors, and medical practitioners. He had paid them all well for their services, always promising a large cash reward as a bonus for a job well done.

Murder. Now he remembered. The surgeon had a propensity for killing certain patients after torturing them on the operating table. The cutter was on death row when given a new lease on life from a riot and prison break. He rarely indulged in such behavior now, however, knowing that the death of some of the criminal elements he saw might bring a hellish retribution from organizations who were as depraved as he was.

In the present, high in the Tennessee mountains, the splotched-skinned man continued to apply a white cream to his body, rubbing it in circular patterns over every square inch of skin. It burned like an acid. Trapped in the visions from the past, his mind flinched at the operating room light, the knife blade that descended, the fire of the blade ripping into his face.

The old monster rarely indulged. But sometimes, it was too hard to restrain his impulses. Sometimes, when the patient seemed less connected to an organized outfit, there was the hope of escaping retribution. Sometimes, he would only torture and not kill. Perform the job yet extract his pleasure from the pain of another. All it took was an operation on an immobilized patient without anesthetic. He could then disappear for a time, hide from immediate revenge, and then resurface in another location. It would not be the first time.

In the present, the man in front of the mirror suddenly screamed. The birds outside were silent in confusion. After his cry, he grasped the sink, his arms shaking, his breath in wheezes.

I must control my emotions. He was angry with himself. Such losses of control would doom his efforts. He brought his heart rate down and slowed his breathing. He reached back in his mind and confronted the horror.

There was the surgeon, helpless on the floor. Bullet wounds in his legs and shoulder. His death near. The surgeon had made two mistakes. The first was believing that the boy’s isolation reduced any threat. The second, that he had not killed the boy on the table. The price was his life.

That death had been a detour, the killing of this doctor, but his quest was nothing less than to erase monsters such as this. He finished applying the last of the cream, the enormous surface area of skin covering him like a raw wound. He would take all the pain. More monsters awaited his judgment. There would be no failure.

35

They were exhausted from the last few days of travel. It had taken them nearly three times any reasonable travel time by car. But they had not traveled reasonably.

Houston had discovered that their hotel room was bugged, and as if this were not shocking enough for Lopez, she had immediately concluded that the CIA was not involved.

“If not the CIA, then who?” he had asked. “It has to be the CIA! What are you talking about, Sara?”

“Francisco, we’re targeted fugitives at the CIA. The Agency has me especially marked for extreme containment. If they knew we were here, if they had bugged our room, they would be on us already. Whoever did this has been following us for days, perhaps weeks. We have moved constantly. We have been careful. They would have known our whereabouts and behaviors so well — which only comes from extended observation — that they could get in under our noses and wire this place up.”

“This is crazy!” But he couldn’t find any holes in her logic.

“Francisco, we know there are other forces out there in this thing. I don’t know if it’s the group of killers or if it’s something else, but it’s not the CIA. But whoever they are, they may just as easily turn us over to the law or try to kill us themselves.”

“The gray Civic?”

“If it’s the same group.” She shook her head, and Lopez thought he’d never seen her so tired looking. “The farther we go on in this, the deeper the swamp seems to get.”

So, they had run. Houston had insisted on a headache-inducing, convoluted path out of the area and toward the South. Although he knew she was skeptical about his plan to meet the bishop, she agreed to give it a try. What other recourse did they have at this point? The long trip, constant driving, doubling back, sleeping in the car — it all had left them spent. Finally, they had traversed the distance from Virginia to Alabama, their fractaled route a mockery of efficient driving, their journey hidden from the eyes of pursuers.

Lopez rested his head against the steering wheel in front of Maria Lopez’s house in Madison, Alabama. It was crazy to come here. He knew that, and Houston had argued against it. While the manhunt was concentrated in the Northeast, their pursuers would begin to stake out any place they might head to. Family, even his dead brother’s wife, could be a watched site. On the other hand, he had to tell Maria something, and since they were in Madison to see the bishop, he felt he had to do it in person. It was a risk, but one he had to take.

My brother’s house. He raised his head from the steering wheel. Houston was splayed out against the passenger-side door, breathing deeply. She had fallen asleep only thirty minutes ago after sleeping less than five hours a day for nearly a week. Lopez was struck by how peaceful she looked. Beautiful. Her waterfall of blonde hair in disarray, yet shrouding her head like an aura. Looking at her was stirring and at the same time calming. He needed that calm to quench the acid burning inside.

He closed his eyes. Now he had to face his brother’s wife again after so long, after disappearing for months on a quest to find the truth. What would she say? Would she believe what he had to say? He steeled himself and opened the door, closing it softly so as not to wake Houston. He walked toward the front door of the house.

“How dare you come back here?”

Lopez stood shocked and unmoving on the porch in the early-morning light, his tired legs nearly buckling from fatigue. Not understanding, he stared at the horrified face of Maria Lopez.

“After everything I’ve been through!” she choked, reaching her hand up to her mouth, a sob suppressed. “I trusted you, Francisco. I trusted you with my family. To be there, to help us and put Miguel to rest!” She screamed out the last words like a sword thrust. Lopez was deeply pieced by her anger yet remained uncomprehending. Maria, have I failed you so badly?

Instinctively, he reached toward her. “Maria, please, I’ve been looking for the answers. You have to hear what we’ve found.”

“We?” she stared at the car. “My God, Francisco, you brought that whore with you?” Her words slapped him in the face. Too many thoughts and questions flooded his mind for him to know how to respond. “Have you no shame?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t understand? You monster! All those young boys, Francisco. How could you? How could you?”

To his amazement, she began hysterically flailing at him, pummeling his chest and face with her fists, screaming and crying out words Lopez could not understand. He pushed her back reflexively and stumbled toward the steps.

“Maria, what is this about? Please, stop! Let me come in and explain.”

“Explain? How could you possibly explain this?” Maria Lopez reached to the side and grabbed something, wound her arm behind her, and threw it at him. A thick wad of newsprint struck him in the face. As he looked down at the day’s paper, he felt a warm run of liquid from inside his nostrils spill down, red droplets sprinkling the front page.

“It’s all over the news today. TV! Papers!” She shook her head with unfocused eyes. “First this, this abuse! Then, you and this….woman. This traitor! Soldiers dead because of missions compromised! How could you? Miguel was a soldier!” Her arms were flailing outward, her body nearly spasming, bent at the waist as she yelled. “Betraying your own brother! And the sleaze! Photographs. I never, ever imagined. The phone calls I’ve gotten! Do you know what it’s been like?” She started at him with a wildness in her eyes. “Get out of here, Francisco! Go! Never come back!” She screamed the last words with an intensity he flinched more from than the impact of the paper.

The door slammed shut with a terrible finality. Lopez raised his sleeve to his nose and tried to stem the flow of blood. He reached down and scooped up the paper, his eye drawn to the headline. That’s my name.

His peripheral vision caught a movement, and he glanced up to see a child’s face in the window. His youngest niece, Miranda. She was five. She waved simply at Father Francisco, seeming to reckon nothing of the mad events around. Lopez waved dumbly back, blood staining his hands and shirt, a newspaper tucked under his arm. Suddenly, an adult arm appeared and jerked the child away from the window, and the shutters slammed shut.

Lopez heard a car door open as he stumbled into the yard, one arm stemming the flow of blood, the other holding up the paper. He read in astonishment. Unbelieving. In horror.

Houston approached him anxiously. “Francisco, what happened? Are you OK?”

He simply handed her the paper and walked as a dazed man into the street, staring into empty space. Houston looked between him and the paper, and then began to read out loud, her tone incredulous.

“Local dragnet begun to locate priest accused of raping parish boys,” she trailed off, her eyes darting over toward Lopez. “Oh, my God.”

36

37

“Frankly, Father Lopez, I did not expect to ever see you again.”

The bishop looked distinctly unhappy. He had always been a large man, even in his youth, but now in middle age he had become profoundly stout. Lopez had only interacted with his bishop on few occasions, one of those being the blessing for his ordination. The power structure of his church was very hierarchical and linear, and the bishop surrounded himself with a set of loyal assistants who blocked most efforts toward direct contact. Today had been different. When Lopez and Houston had walked into the office of the regional archdiocese, conversation had come to a standstill. Heads had turned and locked. It seemed that the Red Sea had parted in the room, opening up a pathway for the two fugitives. Lopez did not have the time or the concern for protocol today. He had marched straight into the bishop’s office.

“Why not?” asked Lopez, frustrated. “I have been in contact. I asked for additional time that you granted personally. You knew my schedule and activities.”

The bishop’s eyes widened. “I daresay I have not known of your activities.” He glanced disapprovingly at Houston. “I reluctantly granted you extra time to pursue matters that, frankly, this office considered to be unwise and a sign of emotional instability.”

“What?” Lopez asked incredulously.

“After which you not only find yourself in criminal matters threatening national security but risk your vows in a carnal relationship with this rogue governmental agent.”

“Risk my vows? What are you talking about?”

“As if your past transgressions were not enough!” The bishop threw a newspaper toward him. He instinctively flinched, remembering the morning’s events. On the front page were photos of him and Houston in an embrace, kissing beside a vehicle. The likenesses were perfect. Whoever had doctored the images was a professional. The headline read, “Bond or Lopez? Priest and CIA fugitive spotted in Tennessee.”

“These are fakes,” he said flatly.

“Yes, we assumed you would deny them. Deny what you have done. Just as you have denied the abuse we have too long hidden from the world.”

Lopez sat upright. “What are you talking about? Those charges are utterly false, and you know it!”

The bishop shook his head sadly. “You need help, Lopez. If you can come in here so incensed and deny before me and this Office the truth we are all familiar with, you have become completely delusional.” The bishop reached to the side, picked up a large folder, and dropped it in front of the priest. “Your file. One we have with great sadness been filling over the years with accusation after accusation. Ten years of sewage!”

Lopez flipped through several pages in a daze. “No, this is not possible.”

The bishop seemed to speak from a great distance. “We once held hope for you, Lopez, that you could find through the grace of God and the Church a cure for your perversions. But the demon of lust has you. After your criminal and sinful escapades with this whore from CIA, we woke up to the reality. No more little boys will be harmed, Lopez!”

The bishop stood up behind his desk, his ponderous mass lending an authority to his tone. “As of today, you are by degree of the Office of the Bishop, laicized — defrocked.” Lopez inhaled sharply. The bishop continued without pause. “You are forbidden to exercise ministerial functions of any kind, debarred from celebrating the Sacraments. Formal inquiry into these events, as an inquisition for excommunication, are underway, and I can say with some confidence that the result of this inquiry is not difficult to predict. Your vile actions, dishonoring the Bride of Christ, which is His Church, have rendered you anathema! Take yourself and your whore elsewhere!” He practically spat out the last words.

It was too much. Lopez felt the room spinning, his entire sense of reality becoming unglued. Defrocked? Excommunicated? Accused of child molestation, with evidence over a decade? He felt he was going mad.

There was a metallic click to his right. The sharp reality of that sound broke him out of his mental spiral, and he jerked his head toward the sound. Houston sat with a stern expression on her face, her eyes like glowing sapphires in her head. Her elbow rested on the arm of a chair, the forearm extended in front of her. In her hand was a large gun, the barrel pointed directly at the hulking form of the bishop.

“Bishop Ivy, do you know what this is?” she asked in a hard voice.

The bishop’s eyes were wide, but his tone was still authoritative. “A gun of some kind. Don’t think that you can threaten me! The police are already on their way, a phone call made the minute you arrived.”

Lopez felt his pulse quicken. It was a trap!

“A gun?” she asked derisively. “You are so dismissive. Because of firearms like this, you and the rest of the people in this nation are still free to act like assholes. This gun is a Browning 1911, single-action, 45-caliber semiautomatic. This one was issued to my father in the Korean War. Powerful son of a bitch.”

There was an ear-rupturing explosion, and the bishop screamed. Behind him, to his left, a portion of the wall had been blasted away, dust and flakes falling from the air around them. Sweat began to bead on the bishop’s forehead, and his hands shook. He looked back at Houston and the Browning. Smoke trailed upward from the barrel. Screams, followed seconds later by doors slamming, could be heard from elsewhere in the building.

“See what I mean?” she said. “Halfway through your little monologue I figured you’d called the police. But this is Madison, Alabama. We’re at least thirty minutes from the nearest station or likely patrol car. If they aren’t engaged at the moment. Plenty of time to find out what you’re up to.”

“What I’m up to?” The bishop sat down slowly, his eyes terrified.

“The second time you called me a whore, I thought to shoot you then and there, you pig. But I realized that, as much as I would like to put a hole in you, I’d be losing out on some important information. So, let’s get to the point.” She leaned forward, pointing the gun right at the bishop’s face. “Who got to you?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he sputtered, his words sounding false even to Lopez.

Houston sighed and pulled the trigger. The loud blast was followed by a howl of pain from the bishop, as blood splattered the wall behind his shoulder.

“You spawn of Satan!” he gasped angrily, his eyes then turning desperate. He grasped his injured arm, sobbing. “Please. Leave me be. Torment me not for my sins.”

Houston grunted. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Your sins. No doubt that was the key, no?” The flash of his eyes, even in the mask of pain on his face, answered her question. “I don’t care what sins you or your church think you’ve committed. For all I care, this entire place can burn down. Right now, we’ve got the CIA, likely now the FBI, and something even worse hunting us down like animals, cutting off all our paths. I need some answers.” The gun was pointed back at him.

“No, I can’t,” he moaned, his hand sticky and red.

Lopez winced seeing the quantity of blood. Did she hit an artery? He knew Houston was a trained agent and had seen her toughness before. But he was frightened by what he now saw. She was predatory. Cruel. Or in a corner and fighting for her life.

“The next shot is going hurt more,” she said, her tone ominous.

The bishop wept openly now. It was a pathetic sight. His huge mass shook as he pleaded for mercy. “Please, I can’t! You don’t know, don’t understand. They are everywhere. They know everything! It’s not just me! Even if you kill me, they have cornered too many in the Church, in law enforcement. Please! I don’t know who they are. They come from nowhere, like shadows. They speak terrible things, reveal terrible knowledge!” His breaths came in gasps, his face pale. “Whatever you do, you cannot do worse than to reveal that knowledge. Some of us will die before we allow that to happen.”

Lopez saw the truth in the frightened man’s eyes. Whatever “they” had on him, it was bad. So bad he would accept death rather than the shame of revelation. It turned his stomach. Dark forces had reached the Church and turned the Church against him. His last hope! The one source of truth and trust he had left in the world.

They have taken everything from us. Lopez felt a wild anger erupting from inside him, born of hurt and pain and betrayal. It rose like a solar flare. Before he realized what he was doing, he had stood up, grabbed the bishop’s collar, and was screaming at him.

“Why? How could you do this, you coward? How could you destroy my name, turn my family and friends against me? Bring down a false judgment on me for your own sins!”

“I’m sorry, I’m— “

Lopez struck him across the jaw with his fist. It hurt his hand, but that pain was a minor flash in the inferno of torment searing his mind. “Shut up! Tell me now, damn you! Where did you contact these people? How can we reach them?”

“Francisco.” It was Houston, but he ignored her.

“I told you, I don’t know,” said the bishop, blood dripping from his mouth, his eyes groggy.

“You liar!” Lopez swept his arm like a hatchet swinging and smashed his fist across the bishop’s face again. The large man crumpled downward, but Lopez miraculously held the three hundred pounds upright with one arm, again striking the man in the face, his rage completely consuming him. As he was to hit him again, he felt his arm restrained from behind and heard a shout from Houston.

“Francisco! Enough! He’s out!”

Her shout shook him out of his madness, and he dropped the form. The body of the bishop crashed onto his desk and then bounced and rolled to the side and out of the chair. The entire building shook from the impact as he hit the floor.

She sighed. “It doesn’t matter anyway. He doesn’t know any facts that will help us. He was a blind, manipulated without information. He wouldn’t clear your name anyway. He’d die before he risks the skeletons coming out of his closet.”

Lopez stared at her blankly. She grabbed his shoulders and looked into his eyes.

“Francisco, look at me! I didn’t shoot him for fun. I had to find out what he knew. We’re one step away from jail, or worse, and we don’t know who’s chasing us. This man’s lies are part of the noose tightening around our necks. I had to push him! But we need to back off now, cool down, use our heads. We don’t have much time. The police are coming.”

Lopez tried to slow his breathing. He felt a dull pain radiating from his knuckles.

“Better,” she said. “Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

They ran. Houston led the way. Keeping her gun on display, she darted down the hallway, through the now-empty lobby of the building, and into the parking lot. Most of the cars were gone, and there were no signs of police. The workers had fled at the gunshot, Lopez assumed. Houston ran straight for their car, and he followed, the wind whipping his face helping to bring him back into the moment. But things were only going from bad to worse.

“The tires are slashed,” she said, squatting down near one of the rear wheels. Lopez crouched and looked with her. The tire was completely flat, a long, thin gash running along the rubber. “Someone didn’t want us going too far.”

“Indeed, we didn’t!” came a male voice directly behind them.

Houston spun around, but was too late. As Lopez turned to look, a blur rushed past his head, and a foot kicked the gun out of her hand, the body continuing a rotation that ended in the other leg striking Houston in the face. She flew backward, smashing into the car, her head striking the edge of the door. Knocked unconscious by the impact, she sank straight to the ground.

Lopez began to rise but felt metal against his temple.

“No, no, priest,” said another male voice. “Best that you don’t try anything. I’m not a fat and clumsy bishop.”

There was laughter as Lopez felt his stomach turn. He looked down at Houston, who lay sprawled on the asphalt of the parking lot. He tightened and instinctively wished to reach down and see if she was okay.

Instead, he felt a wet cloth placed over his mouth and inhaled a strange, burning smell. Everything went dark.

38

The room smelled like dust and mold.

As Lopez came to, the room spun around him, his sense of smell overpowering his mind. His head felt swollen, and he felt heavy, unable to move. The hotel room? No. That was before. But the same sickness in his stomach. The crushing headache. The spinning slowed, the dim browns and blacks of blurry shapes wobbled, and like a coin finishing a spin on a table, everything dropped suddenly into place.

It was a cabin. Some nineteenth-century log structure that had rotted nearly beyond usefulness. Bright light streamed in from a filthy window, and it appeared that they were in some forested area. Turning his head was painful, and the right side felt huge, like a massive tumor had grown out of his brain. His bleary vision began to clear.

Houston was on his right, tied to an old, rickety chair, her mouth covered with duct tape. Her eyes were open and they locked with his. Lopez tried to speak, but there were only muffled sounds, and he realized that his mouth was taped, as well. There was laughter to the left and behind them, its source out of sight.

“Missed talking to your squeeze, priest?” came the male voice. Lopez recognized it as speaking the last words he had heard before blacking out. “Too bad. You’re not ever going to get the chance to say anything else to her. But you’ll get to watch her scream. Oh, you’re gonna get to watch a lot.” The voice sounded demonic.

Lopez instinctively tried to raise his arms but was unable to move. He understood at last the heaviness he felt: he was also tied to a chair. He looked down, saw the rotten wood and moldy rope lashed around his arms and legs. The smell of mildew and decay reached his nostrils and turned his stomach. The knots were well formed, tight, painful to press against.

The voice laughed again, and a second male spoke through it. “Come on, Tom. Let’s get this over with.”

The one called Tom stepped from behind Lopez into his field of vision, his face a mask of hatred. “Like hell I will, Billy. Because of these two, Ryan and Marshall are fucking grilled meat.”

“They’re marked for immediate termination, Tom. No fucking around!”

“Shut up!” Tom shouted behind them as the figure of Billy came alongside.

Billy shook his head. “You’re goddamned crazy, Tom. I always said it.”

“I said, shut up!” But Tom grinned. He pulled out a large KA-BAR knife and twirled the blade around its long axis as he approached Lopez. “I’ll get to you in a minute, altar boy. But first!” he jumped and landed hard on Houston’s lap, the chair underneath nearly buckling, groaning horribly under the sudden impact. Her eyes widened, and Lopez could see her attempt to struggle out of her constraints. The wood groaned in anguish, but the ropes didn’t budge.

He placed the knife between her legs, the tip pressed against her groin. “See, Billy, I’m going to teach this traitor a lesson, what happens to you when you betray your country.” Lopez could hear Houston breathing quickly, a panicked look on her face. Tom seemed very happy to see it. “See, I hate betrayal. Hate it. When my wife betrayed me, when she started fucking that lawyer up the road every mission I was sent on, that made the bitch a whore. When you betray your country, whore, it’s worse!”

Keeping the knife where it was, he placed his hand up her shirt from below and felt up her breasts. Lopez saw Houston close her eyes and tighten her face. He felt a charged coldness run through him. This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening. He pulled harder on the ropes but only managed to make the chair squeak more loudly.

“Oh, yeah, baby, you have a nice rack. I’m gonna have me all of this,” he said, suddenly pressing his left hand against her sternum and flicking the knife upward in a flash with his right. The duct tape muffled a scream from Houston, but she was uninjured. The knife work was highly skilled, her shirt and bra severed in a single stroke, her large breasts springing forward from the released tension. Lopez stared at them, pale like her skin, the nipples bright red and taut. He closed his eyes and felt ashamed.

Tom slapped the KA-BAR against one of her breasts, the handle near the nipple, the long blade running up the gland to the striated pectoral muscle in the upper portion of her chest. “Got this during my Iraq tours.” He ran his finger from the nape of her neck slowly down to her navel. Houston twitched. “One of these can open you up like a piñata.”

Lopez opened his eyes, his blood pressure mounting. No!

“We’ll get to that, don’t worry, darling.” With his free hand, he stood up and unclasped his belt. “But first things first.” Keeping the knife near her neck, he snapped open his pants and yanked them and his underwear down to his thighs, revealing a throbbing erection.

“Jesus, Tom! We don’t have time for this! Just do them!” pleaded Billy, not a foot away from Lopez.

“We’ll do them, don’t worry. First, I’ll do her right. I’ve got to teach this bitch-whore a lesson.” Flushed in the moment, he bent forward and drew the knife quickly across each of her legs and waist, tearing her jeans and underwear away from her in seconds, nicking her thighs and drawing blood. He yanked the tape violently from her mouth, and Lopez heard her groan. “Scream for me, won’t you, bitch?”

Lopez felt himself shaking, rocking in the chair, uttering muffled screams. Houston only closed her eyes. Her powerlessness and acquiescence sent him into a frenzy.

“Shut up, priest, or I’ll do you now,” spat Billy, who quickly returned a hungry gaze toward what happening in front of him. He licked his lips.

Tom reached a muscled arm underneath Houston, and in a single fluid motion, lifted her enough against the restraints to fit himself under her, his penis slapping against her stomach and pubic hair. “You’re gonna ride this, girl!”

“No!” Lopez screamed the word through the tape. He felt a primitive force rushing through him like he had never felt before. Far more than anger, he was filled with a desperate sense of violated ownership and a need to protect that he had no time to analyze. Every muscle fiber in his body tensed, and he even rose up slightly against the constraints, partially standing with the chair lashed to him. Maniacally, he screamed to God in his mind, a vision of Samson struggling against the marble pillars dancing before him as he strained against the ropes.

His arm broke loose.

In the sickly sound of rotten wood cracking, the arm of the chair snapped, the rope slackened, no longer properly tied, and his hand sprang upward, suddenly released. In a split second, he watched the event, his mind racing at a superhuman rate, the glint of rusted steel flashing from an embedded nail ripped out of the chair body. In his peripheral vision, he saw Billy turning as if in slow motion toward him, reaching to pull out a weapon from his belt. Lopez did not pause but reversed the direction of his arm and swung it down with all his strength toward his captor. The nail punctured the man’s neck and drove straight into his body without resistance, the flat wood of the chair arm then smashing the man’s jaw. An artery was pierced, and blood like a geyser spurted sideways. Billy dropped like a stone, yanking his body away from the crude weapon, hard enough that Lopez — tied awkwardly to the chair by torso and legs — lost his balance and fell on top of the man. Below him, blood continued to spray out in pulses to the dying man’s heartbeat. Lopez instinctively turned to look behind.

Tom was already reacting, turning his body and lifting a leg off Houston, his large knife in a tightened grip. Lopez could hardly move. One of his legs had been freed from the impact when he crashed to the floor, but he could do little except kick it up and down. He could not stand. He could not swing it over to even try to feebly engage the man. There was no hope that he could defend himself.

Suddenly, Houston smashed her forehead into Tom’s face. A loud cracking sound followed the impact, like a branch broken over a knee. She had shattered his nose. The blow was astounding, professional, practiced. The man’s head snapped to the side, blood pouring out of his nostrils, and he fell hard against the side of a table, overturning it. Lopez instinctively looked back to Houston, half expecting to see her forehead split open from the impact, but she looked unharmed, her blue eyes wide and staring toward the floor and the figure of the man.

Lopez could hardly see Tom now. Their captor was near his feet. He strained his neck upward and looked down his body toward his legs. Tom shook his head, the blow disorienting him, his face a horror film of blood and a disfigured nose. But he was conscious enough to pull out his gun. Like a drunk, his arm weaved, and he tried to aim the firearm at Houston. The first shot blew out a window on the other side of the room. The second splintered a wooden column inches from Houston’s head. Lopez did not let him fire a third.

Pumping his leg like a piston, he kicked the man in the head. The impact was solid, and Tom slumped forward. Lopez did not hesitate to examine his foe. The piston pumped again and again, impact after impact, blow after blow making extreme contact with the man’s skull. He lost himself, the rage, the purging of primal anger and fear overcoming his consciousness. He only knew reaction, action, destruction and striking back. Again and again and again.

Finally, in complete exhaustion, he went limp and stopped kicking, his breath bursting from his nostrils. Underneath him, the form of Billy had stopped twitching, the blood no longer spurting. The entire cabin was suddenly still and quiet.

After what seemed like an eon, he became aware of his surroundings once more. He lay on his side, strapped to a chair, on top of a dead man he had just killed with a nail. At his feet was another victim of his violence. In front of that corpse was a beautiful woman, violated, nearly raped and murdered. Lopez felt tears in his eyes. Everything was a horrible nightmare.

“Holy shit, Francisco,” she said, staring at him. “I knew when you held that ox of a bishop up in the air you were strong, but what the fuck? What do they put in that communion wine?”

She looked down at her restraints, back at him, and then around the room, frowning. “Jesus. Okay, now what?”

39

“Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee.”

A mournful light bled through the window of the motel room, the darkness of the thunderstorm drinking the last of the day’s light. A subsonic rumbling shook through the air as a heavy rain rushed madly against the glass.

“Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”

Former priest Francisco Lopez rocked back and forth on his knees beside a radiator, his left hand on the metal stabilizing himself, clutching a wooden rosary. In his right hand was an ornate wooden cross, its designs obscured and buried in the tight grip. Tears fell down his face, and sobs shook his body.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

Through the flashes of lightning and rolls of thunder, he continued the prayer. He rocked like an institutionalized patient, interspersing the motion with full prostrations to the floor, pressing his forehead firmly against the rough carpet, an abrasion beginning to form beneath his hairline. In several places, patches of hair were missing from his beard, torn in fits of emotion.

“Francisco.”

The muttering continued, the sobs and rocking. Houston stepped closer to Lopez and put her hand on his shoulder.

“Francisco.”

The words ceased, but the sobs increased, and she bent forward and embraced the weeping man from behind. Her hair was wet, hanging very low and taking a rich, honeyed hue from the moisture, the strands splayed over a white bathrobe. Her skin glistened with water.

“It’s OK, Francisco.”

Lopez shook his head. “I’ve betrayed everything I vowed to be today.”

She did not argue with him but walked around to face him, kneeling down beside the radiator. Lopez watched her in disbelief. She began to unbutton his shirt, looking up to his face and staring into his eyes.

“I’m glad you did, because if you vowed to let a woman get raped by murderers in front of you, those were bad vows.”

“Sara, please…”

Houston sighed and smiled sadly. “You do have his eyes. Miguel’s eyes. But something he didn’t have. A gentleness. A deep decency.”

Lopez felt sick. “I killed two men today, Sara. I butchered one and kicked the other to death.”

“And saved my life.” She reached her hand up to his face, her touch sending involuntary shudders through his body. Lopez could not keep track of the emotions or the physiological reactions. The anger, violence, fear, shame, sadness, physical attraction. Love.

Lopez clasped her hand and kissed it, and then pushed it away from him.

“Sara, please. There are so many things right now that I would like to say to you. I don’t want you to misunderstand. Thank you for what you are offering me. You don’t know what it means to me when I am this broken, how much I want it. But right now, I can’t. They’ve taken everything from me. But whatever the bishop said, whatever the Church decrees now about me, I’m still a priest in my heart. I’m not ready to lose that, too.” He felt new tears rolling down his cheeks. “I’m not ready to give up my vow to God. Don’t take that from me now, because if you insist, you can. I can’t stop you. I’m not sure I want to. But it’s all I have left.”

Houston stared at him silently for a moment, her expression unreadable. She cocked her head to one side.

“Wow, when they get you boys, they really get you.” She rocked back to sit on her heels, never taking her eyes off him. “I’ve seen a lot of shit in this job, Francisco, so it may seem strange to you when I say that there are some sacred things to me. So when that monster was going to violate me, it was the worst thing I could imagine. Worse than him simply killing me, because with death, it’s over at least. With rape, I get the hell of reliving that violation until the day I finally do die.”

Lopez shook his head, not understanding. “Then why…”

“Why did I come on to you? Because, you dolt, I know that you have feelings for me. And after nearly having that fuck violate me like that, the thing I wanted most was to erase it, to have a man I trusted and who loved me share his body with me in a sacred way.”

Understanding finally dawned on Lopez. He nodded his head. Had he hurt her by pushing her away?

She smiled, reading his thoughts. “It’s OK. I can see where you’re coming from too, even if I think it’s a bit messed up. Seriously, after the Church betrayed you, what loyalty do you have to them?”

Lopez didn’t have the energy, or the words, to explain. “It’s complicated.”

Houston stood up. “Yeah, I see that. So, for both our sakes, let’s turn to other things, like how the hell we’re going to get out of this alive.”

Lopez pocketed his rosary. He felt childish. She was right — while he was crying in a corner, sinister forces were sweeping the area looking for them. They had barely escaped with their lives today.

“We still don’t know who these killers are,” he wondered out loud.

“There’s more than one set, Francisco. The men today — they were former Agency operatives. Trust me on that one. One had combat experience, the other, I don’t know. But their methods, their talk, their connection to this process as it has spun out of control — I’d bet on it.”

“But there was no ID. No papers. Nothing to mark them as CIA.”

“I don’t think they’re CIA anymore.” She crossed her arms over her chest and fiddled with her hair. Lopez noticed that it had begun to form curled locks again as it dried. “They’re too cut off and working so blatantly inside the US like this. Whatever program they had, whatever is officially legal now, this was pushing it. And they were sloppy, not the best agents I’ve ever seen. We’ve been vulnerable as hell, Francisco, and that should have been enough to end us. They had us, but they fucked it up.”

“Then what are they?”

Houston flashed him a confident look. “Rogue. There’s a rogue group playing dark games. My guess is that it’s the architects of these black-ops snatches in the US. I think they’re hiding and trying to shred the documents.”

“Except we aren’t paper, Sara.”

“It’s the same to them.” She whirled around toward the desk. “I’m going to contact Fred.”

Lopez stood up and walked beside her as she flipped open her laptop. “Wait. So, we have this rogue group of CIA agents trying to kill us, but we’re also chasing Miguel’s killers. They’re different, but how do we know who is who?”

Running through the usual gamut of anonymous servers to disguise her digital identity and location, she was soon checking for messages in an encrypted email account. She seemed distracted by the effort, responding in a distant way.

“Yeah, Miguel’s killers are something else, something different. I think they’re the reason this rogue group has gone as far as it has.” She stopped typing and looked up at him. Her blue eyes were sharp and nearly sparkling. “Miguel’s killers are hunting them, Francisco. They’re panicking and fighting for more than just their reputations and avoiding jail time. They’re fighting to stay alive.”

A computer tone startled him, and Houston spun around. “Seems that Fred already left a message.” She opened a new window on the screen, and it filled quickly with text. Lopez read silently beside her.

“He really cares about you,” Lopez said.

“Yeah. He’s got a daughter complex. Always wants to protect us young girls in the Agency.”

“Well, I’m glad for that. Someone on our side.”

Houston turned away from her computer and stared at Lopez. Her face was lined, tense, today’s trauma still breaking through. “We’re totally isolated. Radioactive. Moral support, even material support, is nice. But I don’t know if it’s going to be enough on this one, Francisco.”

Lopez nodded and walked to the window, staring out at the storm. The rain was angry, beating wildly against the glass, the blurred forms of swaying trees lit like dancers at a rave to a strobe light. The events of the last few months raced through his mind, ending violently today in the Alabama woods.

The bastards. How dare they ruin so many lives, break so many laws, and seek in the end only to protect their own hides? He burned to do more than merely survive. These monsters had to be stopped, and the world had to know what crimes had been committed. Fred Simon was right: the cancer had to be cut out. In an instant, a firm resolution seemed to settle deep within him.

He spun around and faced Houston, a cold tone in his voice. “I’m sick of running. Let’s take the fight to them.”

Her left eyebrow arched. “What are you thinking?”

Lopez strode over purposefully to the laptop and gestured at the screen. “The names. We know who was involved now.”

“We only have the agent’s names, remember, Francisco? The other names are codes. From the agents, only Jason Miller was listed as still living. He could be dead by now.”

“Then Miller! The records list an address. We go there first.”

“Good plan, I agree. Only we’ll have to get to upstate New York through a national dragnet with our names on it.”

Lopez tugged at his beard, the skin in the ripped patches painful. Unlike his brother’s masculine jaw, he had never developed a mature face, a man’s face. Without the beard, he looked ten years younger. That was why he had grown it in the first place more than a decade ago. To gain authority and respect. He shook his head. It was simple vanity.

Wait a minute! Without the beard! “You said he was a chameleon, this killer,” Lopez mused, his tone leading.

Houston stood up and stretched like a yoga instructor, her curved form seductive in the dim light. “So it seems. Surgery, contact lenses to alter eye color, perhaps even skin color alteration. Paranoid.”

“Well, I’m feeling pretty paranoid right now, after all this.”

“Ah,” she said, smiling. “So, time to play them at the same game?”

“Time to change our colors.”

40

They woke up together in the same bed.

The breaking light of dawn streamed over her ivory skin, and Lopez listened to the soft rise and fall of her breath. He was surprised to find her hand in his, to feel the warmth of her body pressed close to his own; it rose as an ache inside him. He knew his body longed for greater intimacy than he allowed, and it was a form of torture to be so close to her and yet refrain.

He turned his head to see her more clearly and was momentarily shocked by her appearance. The long locks of gold were gone, shorn the evening before, decorating the bathroom tiles like curled necklaces. Instead, she had a short mop of black hair, the smell of the dye still lingering in the room. The remodeling of her features with this simple change was stunning. The addition of sunglasses and a wardrobe switch literally made her look like a different woman.

He realized that his appearance had drastically altered as well. Without the beard, he had lost a decade, his youthful face dominating any impression of his features. He had cut his longish hair nearly military style, the combination making him seem better suited for a recruitment poster than a confessional. They had thrown out his priestly garments — modern-style black pants, shirts, and the collars. He now would sport unremarkable clothes from second-hand stores. Side by side in the mirror last night, they appeared to be anything except the CIA agent and priest the country was now looking for.

“Well, we slept together after all.” Her voice lilted.

Lopez snapped out of his daydream and focused on her across from him on the bed. Houston was smiling softly, her sapphire eyes staring into his own. He felt her hand tighten on his.

“Well, it’s a good thing we wore protection,” she said, gesturing to their fully clothed forms. “You never know what you priests might have caught.”

For a moment, her banter was like a warm light, but a tension ran back into his body as thoughts rushed forward. “So now what, Sara?”

Houston leaned up and scratched her fingers energetically through her short hair. “God, this feels weird.” She hopped out of bed and began packing. Lopez noticed that her collection of firearms had tripled since yesterday: she had picked their captors clean on the way out. “What now? We use Fred’s accounts at several banks, load up on cash. Then we buy a car from someone around here — smartphone will map us some ‘for-sales.’ Then some local gun stores and express our Second Amendment rights to arm ourselves to the teeth. Find ourselves some loose dealers to get us all the good stuff, including police scanners and the like. Next, map out the most convoluted way to get back northeast, monitor every police band known to man, coordinate with Fred if possible, and find Jason Miller.”

Lopez chuckled. “Sounds simple. When do we get food in all this?”

Houston laughed. “What do you need food for when you’ve got bullets? They’re high in iron. Some in uranium.”

“Some grits on the way?” he offered.

“Sounds good.” Her expression turned serious. “But what are grits, exactly?”

They packed quickly and were out of the motel within thirty minutes, the air still cool near daybreak. They couldn’t keep the dead agents’ car for long, but they’d need it to find another one. Houston drove again, the speedometer spinning clockwise. Lopez noticed that it didn’t unnerve him anymore. The roads were poorly patched, and they rocked back and forth as they sped toward the Tennessee border. His stomach lurched.

Maybe better to wait for food.

The wraith steered the pickup truck roughly as it rattled down the mountain road in Tennessee. His back still hurt, and it was especially noticeable on such a rough route that pounded the vehicle mercilessly. After another fifteen miles, he would leave the mountains and cross onto the interstate. He needed to make up time. He needed to plan the next mission. His quarry had been given months to prepare, to flee, to investigate. How much did they know? What precautions had they taken? How much harder would it be to dig them out of their holes?

A large wooden case bounced up and down next to him, metallic clanks sounding. He reached over and repositioned the box. It was a minor arsenal, and he would equip himself better in the coming days. He panned the GPS system out from the state of Tennessee, revealing the entire eastern shore line up to Maine. A bright line indicating his route ran from his current location into the Catskill Mountains of New York State.

A man was waiting for him there. A man he would see and force to talk. Jason Miller. Miller would be broken, the key information that only he held taken from him. Then, Jason Miller would die.

After that, the last stage. The architects. The masters of war that hid behind their desks, pushing paper, and men’s lives, into the fire. When men play with fire too long, eventually they are burned.