Extraordinary Retribution (27 page)

They would lead him where he needed to go.

44

T
he police scanners were in chaos. Lopez could not keep track of all the different conversations back and forth, coded terms, and local roadways that erupted in sound from the device. His smartphone told a grim story, as well. One after another, red cones on his traffic app indicated blocked roads. One after another, they switched roads, frantically mapping new ways around the closing net. They were running out of options.

“Oh, shit.” Houston stared ahead.

They were on a two-lane country road, surrounded by forest on each side. Lopez looked ahead and saw something in the road. As they approached, he began to make out police cars lengthwise across the concrete. The lights were flashing on the tops of the cars.

“What do we do? Turn around?” he asked.

“We can’t! This was the last open road, remember? We’ll be cut off for sure if we turn around.” She began to slow the car as they neared. “They just set this up. If we can get past this, the highway is just a few miles ahead. Right? That’s what you said?”

“Yes!” he said, confirming on the map. “But how do we get by?” A growing desperation was seizing him.

“I don’t know. They don’t know us. They might not recognize us. We bluff.” She nodded towards the scanner. “Glove compartment with that!” Lopez hid the device.

She brought the car to a full stop in front of the roadblock. Two trooper cars were pointed at each other in front of them, their bulk filling the length of the road. Lopez imagined there was likely room to make it around the vehicles, alongside the road and practically in the forest. But how they would do that and get past armed police he didn’t know.

Houston rolled down the window and smiled. “Hi, officers! What’s the problem?”

Two troopers approached the vehicle cautiously, as two others stood at attention, eyeing them suspiciously. Their hands were on their holsters.

“License and registration, please.”

Lopez nearly gasped. He hadn’t thought of this obvious problem! He tried to seem calm as he watched Houston pull out a driver’s license and hand it to him. She also reached up and removed a registration card from the sun visor. She smiled as peacefully as a Buddhist monk.

“Names don’t match, Miss...Gorden?” said the officer, eyeing the cards.

“We just bought the car last week. The new registration hasn’t come in.”

He gazed into the car and at Lopez. “Your name, sir?”

Lopez’s mind raced. He used a friend’s name. “Enrique Velazquez.”

“ID please.”

Damn.
“I’m sorry, officer, I don’t have it. I wasn’t planning on driving today. My wallet’s at the house.” Lopez felt a knot tightening in his stomach.

“Didn’t plan on any roadblocks up here, either,” said Houston, laughing easily. Lopez was amazed at her performance. “What’s going on?”

The policeman continued to stare at Lopez. “Can’t go into details, ma’am. Please wait in the car while we check out your license.”

The officer walked back to one of the patrol cars and entered, likely interfacing with a computer connected to state and federal databases. Lopez spoke softly as he stared ahead.

“You have a fake ID?”

“Yes! I have enough simulated identification to fill a trunk. But this is crunch time. If the Agency has been thorough, they will have marked the license and all the other IDs I had generated with them.”

“Marked?”

“Yes, likely flagging it badly. The reaction of the police will tell us.”

Lopez felt his adrenaline spike as he saw the trooper inside the car look startled and glance quickly in their direction.

“And if it
is
flagged?” he asked, his pitch rising.

The officer quickly got out of the car, simultaneously reaching for his belt and calling out to the other troopers.

Houston gunned the accelerator. “We smash through! Head down, Francisco!”

It all happened so quickly, Lopez could barely process it. The car leapt forward, immediately striking the front ends of the two cars parked before them. Houston had built up enough momentum, however, that the two police vehicles were rotated and knocked sideways, and their green sedan crashed through the makeshift blockade and hurtled down the road as she continued accelerating wildly. A scraping sound of metal on pavement indicated that they had smashed their front end badly. Lopez saw sparks flying up by the right-side wheel, and then a blur as a piece of the car broke off and sailed behind them.

He heard gunshots fired behind them, and a second later the back window shattered.

“Hold on!” she shouted.

Suddenly, his stomach lurched, and they were airborne. The car launched over a small but steep hill, catching air, and then landed with a bone-rattling crash back onto the roadway. His head was bounced on the seat. The glass from the broken windshield scattered across the car.

Lopez leaned back up, sure that for the moment they were beyond the range of the officers’ pistols. “What now?”

“I-87!” she said, screaming over the road and air noise. “We can get lost on the interstate, pull off quickly, ditch this car, and steal another one.”

Lord have mercy.

“How far to the turnoff, Francisco?”

Lopez frantically tried to call up the mapping app on his phone. His fingers darted over the touchscreen, the sounds of sirens growing behind them.

“Mile and a half,” he yelled over the roaring of the car’s engines. The speedometer read one hundred and twenty.

Houston glanced in the mirror. “We’ll make it, if there are no more surprises.”

They made it. Flying past cars at outrageous speeds, they caught the turnoff, Houston nearly losing control of the vehicle on the curve, and then plunged headlong into the traffic of the New York State Thruway. She quickly accelerated and began weaving in and out of lanes passing cars.

“We don’t have much time,” she said. “They’ll have all of the New York State police pouring out of their holes in minutes. Everything will be shut down and we’ll be trapped in molasses. Find me an exit!”

Lopez mapped out their current location. “The GPS is lost!”

“Fix it!”

“I’m trying! It’s back. Damn!”

The car swerved back and forth, horns blared, and Lopez began to feel sick. “OK! Ten miles, nearest exit!”

“Ten miles?!”

“Don’t blame me! It’s ten miles!”

Houston thought quickly as she maneuvered. “I can’t do much more than one hundred in this traffic,” she said, narrowly missing the backend of an eighteen-wheeler as she threaded a needle into the left lane. “So, a little more than five minutes. Say a prayer for good traffic, Francisco.”

Lopez felt too stunned to pray. But what else could save them now? He looked out the window, up to the sky, recalling the words of a psalm.

That’s when he saw the helicopter.

“Sara....”

“I know, I know! I hear it!” she said as the beating of the blades became thunderous. “He’s flying really low!”

Outside the window, swooping down to less than thirty feet above the ground, the police helicopter shadowed their movements. For the third time today, they heard the words of law enforcement blasted out of a loudspeaker, this time from the sky.

“Green Camry: slow your speed and pull over to the shoulder! I repeat, pull over to the shoulder or lethal force will be used!”

“Police cars are gaining on us, Sara!”

“I know! I see them!” she yelled, glancing briefly in the rearview mirror. “They’ve got too much horsepower!”

Lopez realized that the road directly in front of them was clearing. It looked like the chase was spooking everyone off to the side in the slow lane. The flashing lights and sirens grew stronger. Patrol cars were nearly tailing them now.

“I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this one, Francisco.”

Suddenly, one of the police vehicles accelerated dramatically, revealing even more power under the hood. It approached alongside Houston on the right, almost carefully.

“Shit!” She gunned the accelerator and swerved to the left.

“Will they shoot?”

“That’s not their plan.”

Now there were two police cars behind them, one on each side. Houston gripped the wheel tightly. “Hang on, Francisco. They’ve boxed us in.”

“The exit is half a mile ahead!”

“We might not make it!”

The car on the left was suddenly alongside them, just as the rightward car dropped back. Houston tried to move into the right lane, but she was too slow. The police vehicle nudged their car near the trunk, the impact not even loud, but the results chaotic. They began to spin. The back end of the car rotated counterclockwise, and the momentum accrued from their speed made it impossible for Houston to stop the motion. Soon they were spinning like a top, and before he could figure out what happened, the car began to roll.

The world inverted and crashed, and he felt himself thrown several directions at once. It ended just as quickly, the car righting itself, airbags deploying, and his face smashing into one. He blacked out.

When he came to, there was the sound of sirens and wind. He opened his eyes, glanced over at Houston, who was awake, her nose bleeding, the airbag smeared red, crimson over her face and white shirt. He checked his face—he was uninjured. Glass from the windows lay like a tossed jigsaw puzzle over them. A loud voice came from his right.

“Sara Houston and Francisco Lopez, you have the right to remain silent!”

His mind blocked out the remainder of the words. Outside his window was a highway patrol officer, aiming a black pump-action shotgun two feet from his face. He stared straight into the barrel.

45

A
cell phone rang.

The room was dark, shadowed, lit only by the rows of computer monitors along the walls displaying the security system readouts. A group of older men sat around a table in the middle, matched in number by a group of younger men busy in front of the terminals, monitoring the system. The guards were heavily armed with submachine guns.

A thin man pulled a blinking mobile phone out of his shirt pocket. He spoke.

“Nexus.”

The other men turned and strained to hear a garbled voice spilling out from the speaker.

“That is very good news,” said Nexus, holding up a finger as one of the men at the table motioned to speak. “Yes, of course. We will move quickly. What assets do we have in the area? Only Lars? How far? Good. Then we use what we have. We can’t wait—they could be transferred to a higher-security location. Activate him. Now. Termination with extreme prejudice.” He closed the phone.

Bravo spoke. “State or federal?”

“State,” said Nexus. “Highway patrol, New York. They are in a pen upstate, near the Catskills. We don’t have many resources there, except for the German. But we need to move on this. It won’t be long before they move them somewhere much tighter, complicating our efforts. This is a national hunt, they’re marked as dangerous fugitives. We need to target them now, while the security is poor.”

“Agreed,” said Bravo.

“This is very good news!” said Zulu, nearly shouting. Several heads turned from the monitors at the sound of his voice. “It gives us a breather, some space.”

“Hardly,” growled Bravo. He turned to Nexus. “You have more complete reports on Miller?” asked Bravo.

“Not yet, only what our sources in the state police could transfer to us. But it wasn’t pretty.”

“Even if Miller broke, he didn’t know this location.”

“No,” said Nexus. “But he could have all our names and home addresses, as well as contacts who
do
know where we are. It might just be a matter of time now.”

Bravo nodded. “Maybe it’s always been. Whatever influence we could have still, Lophius is right: it’s time to shut the program down. Things are out of control.”

“But first we have to put out this fire,” said Nexus. “Then, we don’t just clean house. We burn it to the ground.”

Three hundred miles away, a shadow sat in front of a laptop screen. Several juxtaposed photos appeared and disappeared as keys were struck. The figure sat back and sighed.

The images matched.

They had gone to a lot of effort to change their appearances, that was certain, and the blond man smiled in approval. Of course, all efforts were relative, and theirs paled next to his. With some image enhancement and facial-recognition software, it was only a few minutes to reveal a very high-probability association.

Sara Katherine Houston. 33. Former CIA operative, now a national fugitive, FBI most wanted. Suspicion of treasonous activities. Considered armed and extremely dangerous.

The wraith smiled. The smear job was admirable. The architects were exploiting whatever resources and influence they had left to ensure this cover-up. Perhaps only rivaled with the extreme hatchet job done on the priest.

The Reverend Father Francisco Morales Lopez. 43. M.Div. from St. Vincent de Paul Seminary. Ordained 2002, Diocese of Birmingham, Alabama. Teacher of mathematics, Holy Spirit Regional Catholic School, pastor of the Church of Saint Joseph.

He was also the brother of Miguel Lopez, who now lay under the soil in Madison, Alabama. Lopez—a black-ops agent who had run the mission that sent a young and confused Pakistani-American to a hellhole in Syria, never to see his family again. Never to find himself again.

He had no fight with this brother, the priest, or the CIA woman. She was clean. He had combed the CIA databases again. From what he could tell from the data and from his own recordings, they were actually outraged. That was good. Let them be outraged. He needed them, this agent and priest.

Former
priest. The wraith looked over the news reports online. From out of nowhere, horrific accusations of child abuse, church records surfacing over a decade old. A bishop was attacked and wounded, the weapon traced to the registered firearm of Sara Houston, the assault pinned to the woman. The photo on the screen was a splice of the priest in formal wear, serving mass, alongside a bikini shot of the Houston woman, dredged up from unknown sources.

The priest and the whore
. The tabloids had enjoyed a lot of traffic with this. They couldn’t resist the usual temptation to sully a woman with sexuality, nor to combine that with the person of a former celibate clergyman. Making them fugitives from the law, a danger to national security—it was big money. And a highly professional character assassination job by ruthless parties, a prelude to the coming physical assassinations no doubt authorized and set in motion.