Extraordinary Retribution (18 page)

“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

“N
ow 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

F
rancisco 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.