Read Extraordinary Retribution Online

Authors: Erec Stebbins

Tags: #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Spies & Politics, #Espionage, #Political, #Thrillers, #muslim, #black ops, #Islam, #Terrorism, #CIA, #torture, #rendition

Extraordinary Retribution (25 page)

The doctor placed the razor on the cart and picked up a syringe. He began short injections into the exposed scalp. Miller hardly winced.

“Some anesthetic, Mr. Miller, so that you don’t go into shock from the boring. We need you conscious.”

“He’ll be able to answer questions directly?” asked the blond man.

The doctor nodded. “Nothing fancy. Conversational. You ask, and he’ll answer.”

“You’ll get nothing!” screamed Miller.

The doctor smiled. “Given all the personality and perceptual changes from drugs and brain injuries studied in the medical literature, it’s amazing it took as long as it did, but finally, people tried to manipulate the thoughts and feelings of a living mind. Pioneering studies at MIT showed that even weak, externally applied magnetic fields could change the electrochemical signaling in portions of the brain. These foundational studies showed that the application of simple magnets could completely change the
moral
judgments that people would make about identical situations! Beautiful, amazing work!”

He stared off into the distance, a childlike smile on his face. Shaking his head, he picked up a drill and plugged it in. “Of course, the intelligence community and the military have taken these studies much, much further. Less red tape and advisory committee oversight! Specialists like me are still rare, and still suspect by many in the government. Old fashioned methods, blunt, often ineffective, are still the norm. But times are changing. And with the booming privatization of all things military and intelligence related, well, let’s just say that I believe in the free market. They demand, I supply.”

He began drilling. Miller screamed, terror in his eyes, every muscle in his body tensing. But he could not move. He could only scream helplessly as the bit bored into his bone. The drilling drew a lot of blood, but the doctor was fast to staunch the bleeding and patch off the area. Three times he drilled into three different regions of the front of Miller’s head. At the end, he set the smoking drill on the cart with a clattering sound. He picked up in its place several long, gleaming needles ending in wires that he inserted into his portable power supply.

“There. Through to the soft tissue. We’ll be able to insert these deeply—you’ll feel nothing—and reach the right temporoparietal junction, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex from each of these holes. When the brain is stimulated directly with electrodes, Mr. Miller, we can do so much more than the MIT scientists did outside the body with magnetic fields. I now have access to several critical areas of your brain that control your sense of conscious will, trust, and threat evaluation. Stimulated properly, as countless animal and secret human studies have shown, it is trivial to remove all resistance to questioning, all the while leaving the rest of your higher-order cortical function intact. Basically, in the next five minutes, my paying customer will be able to ask you anything he wants, and you’ll tell him without reservations.”

“Goddamn you both!”

The doctor smiled. “There is no God, Mr. Miller. Don’t you know that?”

He inserted the needles.

The questioning was finished, and the doctor began to stow his equipment. He spoke as he worked, his attention on the items on the cart, responses from his client emanating from behind him. Miller slumped forward in the chair against the restraints, his eyes open, fixed and staring, mouthing the word “no” over and over as he sat, his body and skull still lashed to steel.

“He told you all he knows,” the doctor spoke.

“It’s not enough!” came the blond man’s voice.

The doctor continued to rack objects on the cart. He shook his head. “He gave you names, addresses. What more?”

“The names I knew. The addresses are home and work addresses. He mentioned a
farm house
.
That
is where they are, at that safe house. He gave no address for it!”

“Then he doesn’t know.” The doctor paused, his brow wrinkled. “What is this ‘safe house’?”

There was no response, only the sound of footsteps walking slowly. The doctor stood up and turned around, an anxious look in his eyes. “This term I have only heard— “ He stopped. The barrel of a gun was pointed at his head. “But it is none of my business. I only want there to be payment.”

“What you do disgusts me,
Doctor
. And there will be payment.”

Before the physician could move or protest, there was a loud explosion, and his body dropped to the floor. The wraith lowered his weapon.

“You are a filthy hypocrite,” came the hoarse voice of CIA agent Miller. His eyes glanced to the side at his tormenter, his expression hateful. The blond man turned slowly to the chair, his expression neutral. “You want justice, but you torture me, rape my mind and body, the same way they did you! Now you kill that Nazi doctor because his methods
offend
you? You should be on that floor. If there were any justice, I would have that gun, and your time would come!” The grown man wept again, his head limp against the steel cage around his head.

“Of course, I deserve to be there,” said the wraith flatly. “I have no delusions of purity. And I will be there, or somewhere similar, when my mission is complete.”

At the last phrase, Miller looked up quizzically, a dawning understanding on his ravaged face. “You’re not going to stop with the Agency.”

The blond man smiled and raised the weapon. “I want the
Grail
, Agent Miller. An
unholy
Grail. And I will have it. Then it will be my time.” He aimed. “But now, it is yours.”

He pulled the trigger.

42

“W
e can leave the car here, hidden under these trees,” said Houston, parking and undoing her seatbelt.

Lopez rubbed his eyes. He was exhausted. He was dirty. He stank. They had traveled another two thousand miles by a frustratingly circuitous path, constantly monitoring the police transmissions, using GPS navigation and traffic updates on their smartphones to find any hints of roadblocks or increased police surveillance, limiting their travel to late hours when law enforcement numbers were lower on the roadways.

It seemed to him that they had left the world he knew before and entered something surreal and dark. Gone was the simple and necessary circadian rhythm of sleeping at night and waking in the daylight. Human interaction had to be shunned. Anxiety was a constant emotion as every turn, every stoplight, every new town became another chance for them to be identified and caught. They maintained their disguises. They used the accounts provided by Fred Simon. They spent only cash. The accounts on their smartphones were aliases. They could confide in no one, not even the friends and family who had rejected them. They were erasing themselves from society.
From existence
.

“This should be fine,” said Lopez, eyeing the GPS map on his smartphone. “It’s about a mile up the road. If we can come in through the forest, he might not see us.”

She laughed. “I wouldn’t count on that. These guys tend to be a paranoid lot. Miller will have cameras, likely motion detectors, too. We’ll look out for them, of course, but we might take fire. I just hope he hasn’t laid a minefield anywhere.” She did not smile.

Those sobering thoughts settled heavily on Lopez. They were going from one danger to the next, each subsequent encounter seemingly worse than the last.
Land mines? Motion detectors in the Catskills?
Perhaps it was nothing more than par for the course.
My new normal.

They left the Tennessee car well hidden, its dark-green paint blending well with the greens and browns of the forest, roughly half of it obscured completely by the broad ditch on the roadside Houston had navigated the vehicle into. They added to the camouflage with broken branches, pine needles, and leaves.

They oriented with the smartphone, then stowed it and jogged across the road and into the forest. Houston led the way, her pace brisk, but her motions cautious. She constantly scanned in front of her, often pausing and holding up a hand to stop Lopez, then waving him forward as she picked up her pace again. Her pattern was not straight, he noticed, but a strange zigzag that was very deliberate.

“Stop!” she hissed curtly, holding up her hand. “Look.
There!
” At first Lopez saw nothing. He scanned the area in front of her hand but saw only a thick cluster of trees and wild shrubs. “The middle tree. Near the
ground
.”

He saw it. A manmade object, plastic or metallic, embedded in the tree trunk. Houston sprinted forward, keeping to one side of the tree line, giving the impression that she was sneaking up on the object. Lopez followed anxiously.

As they neared the tree, she knelt down. “Motion detector. It cuts a line across there,” she indicated, waving her arm in an imaginary plane across the forest. She began to examine the object. “The question is how many there are, where they are positioned. This one was easy, but others?”

“Are they all at ground level?”

“Doubtful. Many will be at human height, to avoid animal alerts. Well, he might score a bear or two, but it might be interesting to know when they’re around,” she said in an amused tone.

“Right.”

After a minute, she stood up, her expression perplexed. “Sloppy. This one’s dead. The electronics seem fine. It’s routed to a main power line, buried under the ground. No batteries to replace.”

“So?”

“Just strange. He went through all the trouble to wire this thing up solidly, then let it fall into disrepair? Doesn’t fit.”

“He can’t possibly be on top of all of them. Especially now. He will be holed up, no?”

She nodded. “Maybe. Let’s go, and keep your eyes open for more.”

There were many more. As they picked their way through the woods, they came across one sensor after another. Each time Houston navigated around them, examined them. Each time, the sensor was dead. Soon, they came across cameras, even some trip mines she identified. All were controlled by connections to a central location, wired through lines unseen underground. All were dead. Miller’s high-tech security system was completely inoperative.

Houston rose from her crouch to a standing position, looking ahead, a troubled expression on her face. “Francisco, we better get to that cabin.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I think we’re too late.”

Houston sprinted. After the revelation of land mines, the haste was unnerving to Lopez, but he followed. They didn’t have to go very much farther. Soon, he saw why she rushed.

It was like a replay of the nightmare in Gatlinburg. Acrid smoke from an incompletely doused gasoline fire hung like a filmy cloud over the clearing they entered. A pickup truck lay on its side, the vehicle literally blown apart by some force. The cabin itself also smoldered, the fire extinguished, but the charred portions vented a last remnant of combustion into the atmosphere. The door was exploded inward.

Houston had her gun out, and she tossed a second one to Lopez. “I’ve really got to teach you how to shoot one of these. Flick the safety—good. Don’t hesitate, Francisco. I mean it.” She turned to the cabin and walked through the shattered entrance.

Keeping the weapon pointed at the ground, afraid he might accidentally shoot Houston, Lopez followed her into the structure. It was like entering some level of hell in Dante’s
Inferno
. Carnage, destruction of material objects. The smell of gunpowder and burning plastic. Shells. But the true horror was in the center of the room.

“Mother of God.”

Two corpses were before them. One lay sprawled on the ground, blood pooled around his head. He wore the white coat of a doctor. The second was strapped to a chair. Lopez barely managed to recognize him from photos he had been shown: it was Jason Miller. Houston approach his body slowly.

He was naked and disfigured. Signs of torment visible in his flesh. A gunshot wound opened his face like some macabre medical school display. The blood had hardly clotted.

Houston whispered. “Be careful. This is recent. The killers could still be here.” She circled the body, examining the scene, yet she seemed acutely aware of her surroundings.

Lopez glanced around the cabin but could see no signs of others. His gaze returned compulsively to the horror scene in the center. Houston approached the corpse and began to examine a strange helmet-like steel cap into which the head was locked.

“They drilled into his skull.” Her voice was expressionless.

Lopez was sure he had misheard. He came closer and followed her gesture toward the scalp of the victim. Through openings in the head cap, he saw the shaved scalp and blood. And the holes.

He looked at Houston. “In the name of God, why?”

She shook her head, a sad disgust on her face. “I don’t know, Francisco. I’ve never seen anything like this before.
Jesus
, look what they did to him.”

Lopez stopped looking. It was too much. Beyond the physical horror, it was the sadistic evil that ate at him the most when he stared at that figure. Houston seemed to feel the same.

“He was the last,” she whispered hoarsely. “The last of the rendition teams. They’re all dead now.” She walked away from the body, having spotted a computer at the side of the room. “Let’s see if we can find anything useful here.”

Lopez accompanied her to a desk. Houston sat down and moved the mouse, activating the screen. “So, it’s over now?” he asked hopefully, against his better judgment.

Houston was silent for a moment, scanning an open file on the screen. “I don’t think so, Francisco,” she said. “I definitely don’t think so. Look at this.”

He pulled up a chair. “What is it?”

“Judging from the numerical key codes, these are CIA records. Looks like from the black-ops teams. The codes match those on the document we stole from the hard drive.”

Lopez looked at the list of names on the monitor. All were men who by now he knew too well. Stone. Miller. Fuller. Conover. The secret rendition teams. CIA agents who had taken suspects illegally, without trial, without due process, and transported them to torture chambers around the world.
Where are you on this list, Miguel?

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