Extraordinary Retribution (16 page)

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

T
hey 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.”