Extraordinary Retribution (29 page)

The American people demand it, and come November, this president may find a rude awakening at the ballot box.

48

T
hree days!

The one called Zulu pressed his fingertips tightly to his temple. Three days had passed since the pair had escaped the New York State police station, blowing the entire thing up in the process, creating a national sensation unparalleled since Bonnie and Clyde. The ever-rising toll was astonishing. Twenty dead cops, millions in damages, and a nightly news bonanza. Calls for the use of the National Guard. The president on national TV calming the country.

Meanwhile, their asset had never surfaced from the wreckage and was presumed dead.
The two had been trapped!
And they had let them escape. Houston and Lopez had disappeared, carrying deadly information about them all, doing who knows what with it.
By now, anything could have happened.

He had been a fool to let this simmer so long. Now his mistake was courting disaster. He had to act, he had to destroy the files before they were discovered. He did not think to broach the topic with the others. He did not have to guess their reaction. He did not want to face it. He would do this alone.

The one called Zulu walked down to the control room. It was late, and only one man was monitoring the security system. The guard glanced up at him and nodded, and Zulu moved behind him, turning quietly to the unmanned monitor directly across on the opposite side of the room.

“Everything looks clean?” he asked, sitting down in front of the screen, speaking over his shoulder to the other guard. His presence did not arouse any suspicion. On many occasions, each of the occupants had wandered the hallways of the converted country home. Sleep was frequently denied to anxious minds.

“Yeah, quiet as a baby,” came the fatigued words. Zulu softly pressed a series of keys, opening windows to the security system. The monitor in front of him jumped from camera image to camera image. He pressed another key, and the image locked, a camera ceasing its back-and-forth panning. He then opened a control panel window for the motion detectors and quietly entered a series of commands. He cleared the screen of windows. Satisfied, he stood up.

“OK, good. Stay alert. Things could happen when we least expect. Scratch that. They
will
happen when we least expect.” The guard nodded, straightening in his seat slightly.

Zulu walked to an unused portion of the large farmhouse and approached a door leading to the outside. Hesitantly, he placed his hand on the doorknob, turned it, and pushed outward, closing his eyes. He waited. There were no alarms. He had done it right.

He walked outside, pulled out a remote control, and deactivated the gate security. He checked the inside of his suit jacket, felt the weight of the weapon, and walked toward the car parked by the road.

It was dangerous.
Crazy
. But he had to do it, whatever the risk. He’d screwed up, he knew that. A sign that he was getting old, probably, or that things were happening too quickly, too insanely for anyone to do everything right. It would have taken him only five minutes to start the erasure of the hard drive! But he’d been too busy running out of the house.

Cowardice
. It wasn’t age. Or carelessness. That was the truth, and he knew it. He had simply been
afraid
. He’d bolted to the safe house. He’d left the secrets on the drive.

Well, he’d fix that now.

49

I
t was midnight, and Lopez found himself summoning the stamina to once again plow his energies through another long night of breaking and entering. But compared to the more recent activities he had been involved with, this seemed almost saintly.

They had left the black SUV parked alongside the other large and luxurious vehicles in this upscale neighborhood. Quickly exiting the vehicle, they moved across the back lots, out of the streetlights to approach the target residence of the evening.

This was their last chance. It was the fourth break-in over the three days since their insane escape from the police station in the Catskill Mountains. They had tried to lay as low as possible, and fortunately, the destruction of the police station had prevented the distribution of any photographs of their new appearances. These they maintained, enhanced, even as they were always careful never to stay in one place too long or expose any form of real identification in anything they did.

They still could not reach Fred Simon, but the man he had sent to free them from capture had provided a set of useful items. ATM cards linked to unknown bank accounts. Credit cards with false names that issued no alerts. Firearms and ammunition. It was nearly a fugitive survival kit.

At an out-of-the-way motel in New Jersey the first night after their escape, they had begun a systematic search through the names they found in the documents on Miller’s computer. One after another, they had held stakeouts of the residences. When no one showed, they would break into the houses, canvas every square inch for panic rooms, information, anything they could find.

They consistently found nothing. No one was ever home. No secret rooms concealed frightened men. No information on computers or in filing cabinets. The houses showed all the appearance of being abandoned. Dust collected on the furniture, food rotted in the refrigerators, and mail piled in the boxes. The occupants had fled and were not coming back. Lopez couldn’t blame them. They were being hunted by a fierce creature that showed no mercy.

Houston broke their enforced silence as they approached an iron fence ringing the property they sought. “This is it, Francisco. We’ve done the alphabet.
Zulu.
”

Lopez found it ridiculous, these spy codes. Once an enemy had obtained the key, it was all for nothing. Miller’s computer had been compromised. Now all the players and their little codes were open to them.
Assuming you can find them.

He raised the pistol she had given him from the SUV stash and checked the safety as she had instructed. Houston watched him with disapproval. “You need proper firearms training. One of these nights you’re going to trip and shoot me in the back.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” said Lopez. “Have you identified the security system yet?” It was their pattern. Houston would spend some time finding and then disabling the home security systems, while Lopez kept watch.
And I try not to shoot her in the back.

“No, let’s move along the fence to the front of the house.”

“We’ll be exposed.”

“I know that!” she snapped. “But I’m guessing that the main circuitry runs through the gate up there in this place. I don’t know where else it could be. We’ve nearly been around the entire perimeter.”

Lopez nodded and followed her forward as they crouched low along the six-foot-high fencing. The fatigue and stress were draining their patience. Houston always found some clever way to bypass security systems—he didn’t doubt her tonight. But he remembered the past failures. They would spend hours searching through the home, only to decide half an hour before sunrise that it was for nothing. Then they would steal out, careful not to alert any neighbors, and drive back to whatever motel they were staying at for the day. There they would crash, sleeping off the long hours, to rise the following evening for the next house.

The sudden appearance of a pair of headlights signaled that tonight would be different. A lone car pulled into the cul-de-sac and stopped almost violently in front of the gate. Lopez and Houston instinctively crouched lower, their dark clothing and the black of the metal fencing camouflaging them. A lithe, middle-aged man exited the vehicle, quietly closing the door. He looked around anxiously but did not spot them. Satisfied, he held up a remote control, tapped a code into it, and the gate began to open slowly.

“Jackpot,” whispered Houston, the first smile in days flashing across her face. They watched him enter and then quickly sprinted to the front of the property. Just as they reached the entrance and stepped through the gate, they saw him push open the front door and move quickly inside. The gate had not even completely opened yet.

Near the entrance, Houston located a signal box for the security system inside the fencing. Within seconds, she had the casing off and was inspecting the circuit board with a set of makeshift tools. “Careless,” she said, smiling. “He deactivated it when he entered and hasn’t toggled back. He must be in a hurry.”

“And anxious,” said Lopez. Their eyes locked.

“Zulu,” said Houston, turning her attention back to the box. “It’s a brittle serial architecture. Now that I’m inside, I can kill the entire thing from here.”

“Well, do it! We’re in the stage lights here!” said Lopez, feeling like the eyes of the community were boring down on them.

“It’s done,” she said, her eyes darting toward the house. “Let’s find another way in.”

They raced around house and found a back door. Without the security system to contend with, Houston simply picked the lock, and they were inside in seconds. Drawing her weapon, she moved carefully and quietly through a large kitchen. A bluish light could be seen faintly emanating from a room down a hallway on the right. Frantic sounds of objects moving and a clacking on a computer keyboard broke through the stillness of the home. Houston nodded toward the hall and the door, and Lopez nodded back. They moved slowly toward the sounds, Houston sliding with her back along the wall until she came to a stop beside the door. Lopez copied her movements and followed.

With a sudden spin and jump, Houston was straddling the doorway, her firearm aimed inwardly. There was a scream from inside and the sound of glass shattering. Lopez leapt into the room behind her.

“Don’t move!” she yelled, walking slowly forward.

Lopez saw a frightened-looking man standing awkwardly next to a computer terminal. A gun was on the desktop a few feet from him, and a shattered picture frame lay between his outstretched hand and the weapon. He looked back and forth between the two intruders and gasped.

“
You!
”

Houston motioned with her weapon for him to step away from the desk. “Who were you expecting?” The man didn’t answer, but he moved as she commanded. “Oh, I know! The
killers
. The wolves hunting you and your dirty little program down.”

Lopez stared in shock. He
knew
that man, that face. He had seen it on too many television reports, in too many magazines.
Mark Blobel
. The director of the CIA Renditions Branch for a number of years. It was surreal that he stood in the same room with this man, even stranger that they were pointing a gun at him.

“You don’t understand!” yelled the former branch director.

“Oh, but we do,
Zulu
,” she said, smiling at his second gasp.

“How do you know that name?”

“Sit down!” she barked, and Zulu sat on a faded brown couch. His hands twitched as she moved in front of him. “Not to sound too dramatic,
Zulu
, but you might say we know almost everything.”

“You think you know everything,” he said with a sneer. “But you don’t. Who do you think you
are
?”

Houston waved Lopez over. “Francisco, see what’s on that monitor. He came back here for something on that machine. I’ll keep my eyes on the little panther here. What were you in your younger days, Zulu? Some sort of martial arts legend, right?”

Zulu seemed to grind his teeth, his entire body tensed, but he said nothing. Lopez wedged the pistol into the space between his belt and pants and walked to the computer. The screen was empty but for standard program icons. As he had learned from Houston, Lopez opened a terminal window and entered system commands displaying recent activity. It was as he feared.

“We’re too late, Sara,” he said resting his knuckles in frustration on the desk. “He’s run a broad system erasure of all documents. It’s an encrypted hard-erase. I don’t think the information’s recoverable.”

Zulu seemed to suppress a smile.

Houston didn’t remove her gaze from the man. “We’ll just have to use what we have, then. We have
you
, Zulu. And we have a lot on you. We know about the black-ops rendition operations. We know that the agents and leaders of those are being hunted down, killed one after the other. We also know you used these snatch teams on
American
suspects, right here in this country, Zulu.”

“You’ll never prove it,” he spat bitterly.

“Maybe not. But what else we know will make that irrelevant,” she said, stepping between him and the computer, aiming the weapon at his face.

Lopez stepped out from behind Houston to the other side of the room nearer the door. He wanted to have his eyes on this Zulu. There was something unsettling about the man.

Houston continued. “You turned the special powers you were given right back on your own people. You killed American terrorist suspects with your private little renditions squad.” Zulu stiffened sharply. “You actually began to kill the opponents of your politics, Zulu! You killed
Americans
who fought the tactics you and other groups at the Agency were employing. You murdered our
citizens
on our soil!” Zulu’s eyes widened, and his lip began to curl. “We have the names. The mission leaders.
Your
name linked directly to them. They’re going to burn you all at the stake for this.”

Zulu roared. He leapt forward suddenly, with a frightening and unexpected speed for a man his age, like a wild and cornered beast. Houston fired, the shot blasting his left shoulder, but his momentum carried him through the air. He crashed into her violently. They tumbled onto the desk, the computer monitor smashed against the wall, a loud pop and sparks bursting into the air. Before Lopez could react, they fell hard to the floor. Zulu landed on top of Houston, the impact knocking the wind out of her, her gun rattling across the floor and hitting the wall. Lopez rushed forward.

“Stop! Or she’s dead!” yelled Zulu. A small gun was in his hand, pointed directly at her face, inches from her forehead. Lopez was close, but not close enough.
I’m so stupid! Why didn’t I take my gun back out?
If he risked an attack, he could probably disarm Zulu, but not before he had killed Houston. He couldn’t think of an option. He froze.