Extraordinary Retribution (19 page)

“How do you feel today?” he heard her ask from across the hotel room.

Lopez grunted. “Next time, you fly the low harness for any balloon break-ins.”

Houston laughed. He welcomed it, despite the headache that even moderate noise induced. Her voice raised his spirits. “Well, your humor is back, and I’m glad.” Her tone turned more serious. “You were going zombie on me the first few days. It was scary, Francisco.”

“I’m better, Sara. It’s just that every morning I wake up feeling like I just got out of a boxing ring.”

Lopez stumbled into the bathroom and showered. By now, he was growing used to the sting on his injured flesh, and his limp was improving. It was a miracle that he hadn’t broken anything. After he dried off and dressed, he walked back into the room and approached Houston, who was working at the desk.

The computer was on, as always. Her access to CIA networks was disabled; her one and only attempt at a login triggered an alert, and the attempted Trojan malware from CIA inserted onto her computer. She had barely stopped the process and cleaned things up. It was a clear sign that the Agency had ID’d them from the break-in and were in pursuit. Because of this, after he had stabilized, they had moved motels on a nightly basis.

All her Internet work was run through a nested web of proxy servers to camouflage her presence from governmental tracking. She had wiped and then tossed her cell phone to avoid being tracked by it. But they would need the functionality of a smartphone, so she bought a new one anonymously at a retail location. She paid for the service with cash on a pay-as-you-go plan. As long as they used web services anonymously, it would be nearly impossible for the government web monitors to identify and track them. She also relied on online voice-over IP run through her anonymizing protocol to communicate. Even with all these precautions, she contacted others rarely, and only when it was necessary.

“Did you write to Fred?” he asked, pulling up a chair and sipping coffee from the small pot provided by the motel.

“Yes,” she said, turning to face him. “Haven’t heard anything.”

“You told him what we came across last night?”

“Yes, Francisco. And while you were sleeping this morning, I found a little more.”

“Oh?” Lopez was intrigued. “More than their visiting a half-dozen Islamic countries three to four times a year? I’d love to know what secret little deals Uncle Sam was running with these guys.”

“No, you wouldn’t, Francisco,” she said, frowning. “At least if it were just more money and guns for friendly dictators, I could digest it as part of a long-term geopolitical strategy. That depersonalizes things. Makes it more academic.”

Lopez saw the hurt look in her eyes. “And this isn’t? This gets personal somehow?”

Houston sighed. “They had really encrypted this stuff. Nothing I had, no codes were going to crack it and let me get a peek at those last files.” She shook her head, as if surprised “Funny what you can’t get from your CIA training you can find some arrogant sixteen-year-old on the right message board to do.”

“Sorry?” Lopez felt lost.

“I started lurking on a bunch of hacker groups, online. They’re slippery as fish to get hold of, and I don’t trust any of them. But I was desperate. I basically followed my intuition to a group calling themselves ‘FKAN’—maturely for
fuck anonymous
to display their dismissive attitude towards other hacker groups like Anonymous.”

“Nice.”

“Well, their Emotional Quotient is low, but they seem to be the feared group of late. FKAN this, FKAN that. Break-ins, especially into governmental sites, showing some serious cryptological muscle.”

“That’s what we need.”

“Right. But it’s a huge risk dealing with these wildcards. Basically, I tried to entice them to do it without much direct interaction. I dared them to hack one of the files.”

“You released the files to these anarchists?”

Houston looked crestfallen, but her tone was firm. “Awful, I know. Just one, and I hoped it wouldn’t reveal much to the world. Because believe me, when these guys get hold of it, nothing will stop them from sharing it and bragging.”

Lopez whistled. “So, they did it, I assume?”

“Less than two hours, Francisco. It was scary. They wouldn’t tell me how if I asked, but to show they did it, they had to release the file contents on the board. Hang the animal’s head on the wall for all to see. That was my ticket. I could compare the encrypted file to the unlocked file with some software I have on my computer from the CIA, and reverse-compute the encryption. It worked. I got access to all the files.”

“So what did these hackers also get access to?”

Houston smiled wanly. “I was lucky. A series of flight manifests from a CIA hangar in North Carolina that means nothing to them without the other files. Of course, they were happy as clams, as the document clearly showed CIA fingerprints all over it, and they get another notch in their belt. This will be out everywhere soon, and the Agency will know it came from me.”

“You’re going to be very unpopular,” he said, the sense of her vulnerability stabbing at him.

“I don’t want to think about that right now, Francisco,” she said, swiping the air with her hand, as if pushing the topic to the side. “Let me tell you what I found out.”

She opened several documents, and Lopez began to scan them. Along with the flight manifests, all to nations of ill-repute that they had discovered through other, more accessible documents, the highly protected files also had lists of names and locations, sets of dates in pairs, along with brief descriptions that seemed to be of a criminal nature.

“What are these dates? Who are these people?”

“Terrorist suspects,” she began. “All the descriptions are of links to known networks inside and outside the US. A kind of
threat-score
is listed, and all the ones with the paired dates have scores over 100.”

Lopez shook his head. “What does all this mean?”

“Their snatch dates, Francisco.” She sighed when he shrugged his shoulders in confusion. “The first date is when the CIA teams grabbed these guys, and the second, the delivery.
Drop off
.”

An awareness dawned over Lopez. He felt cold. “Let me guess, the dates in between correspond to the absences of the CIA personnel who have been dying. To the dates Miguel was gone.”

“Yes, Francisco.” Her expression was anguished.

“Extraordinary rendition,” he said flatly. The term felt heavy, like
cancer
. “It was in the papers. Secret CIA teams snatch terrorist suspects, literally
bag
them, dope them, wrap a diaper on them, and ship them in the dead of night to torture chambers around the world. They even made a couple of movies about it. One had Meryl Streep. Nice bleeding heart, Hollywood script.”

Houston nodded. “But these acts went further, much further than anything I’ve ever known about. All the targets they rendered were US
citizens
. Every one of them. This was a special operation that was under the radar. Outside of congressional oversight. Unknown to the judiciary. It seems it was known only to a small group at the CTC.”

“CTC?”

“Counterterrorism center.”

“Right.” Lopez felt an old cynicism. “What would it matter? In the end, the Obama administration okays not only snatching American citizens, but
killing
them on the mere
suspicion
of terrorist links. Without trial. Remember the Attorney General, Holder? He said it
publicly
. No due process. Secret decisions.
Baseball cards.
Bang, bang. You’re gone.”

She shook her head. “That was much later, years after these missions. Initially, there was some strong pushback. Even talk of legal action. Remember Khalid El-Masri and Maher Arar? These were rendered and tortured innocents who stirred up what public outrage there was. There was genuine disquiet inside of the CIA, too, Francisco. It was a house divided.”

Lopez gazed out, lost in the past. “My father, Ricardo Lopez, was a real genius. Cold war—everybody wanted him. But Cuba or Russia wasn’t for him, whatever they offered. He always spoke so passionately about American liberties. He could quote the founders of the nation better than a historian. He was so proud to become a citizen, that his sons would be Americans. I wonder what he would think now.”

She sighed. “We all fall on different sides of this divide, Francisco. And there is a hell of a lot of gray. I mean, we are talking about protecting our people!” Her intensity drew his gaze, and she looked into his eyes. “But if we surrender our deepest values to win this war, we’ve already lost before a single shot’s been fired.”

The earnest flame in her blue eyes told him something he needed to know. Whatever his prejudices about government intelligence, the covert work of the CIA and others, whatever they might have done that turned his stomach, Sara Houston’s hands were clean. No wonder they kept her and others like her in the dark.

She continued. “And these cases were scandalous at the time. Obama’s attorney general may have justified assassination of suspects, even US citizens, but it was a long time, over ten years in the making. Whatever you think of those policies, they came stepwise, piece by piece.”

“Yeah, the old slippery slope,” he added.

Houston soldiered on. “Before things were legitimized, this was all
illegal
. Ethics is one thing, and many in the CIA don’t care whether you
approve
of what they do. But
legal
is another story, because it can get your ass tossed in jail. That’s why this elaborate cover-up. That’s why they buried it so deep.”

Lopez stood up, suppressing a groan. When he stopped moving or stretching, even for a few minutes, the next movement was always stiff, painful. He stared outside the window into the drab parking lot. “I don’t know, Sara. I think I’m falling on the side of things where you don’t deliver people without trial into the hands of butchers, whatever safety you think it buys you.” He reached his hand through the opening of his shirt and pulled out the arrowhead. With his other hand, he looped the leather strip holding it over his head, and held the artifact in his palm. “It’s a pact with the Devil.”

Houston stood up and walked over toward him, stopping behind his right shoulder and staring down at the pendant. “I’ve been meaning to ask you since you were hurt, Francisco. What is that? You were a little delirious, I think, but you wouldn’t let me take it off you, even for a sponge bath.” Lopez grimaced. “I’m sorry for the breach of privacy, but you needed a nurse.”

“No, it’s not that.” He held up the pendant as if it were some magical amulet. “Miguel and I found this in the Tennessee mountains as kids. A bunch of other things, too—some pottery, bones, things we couldn’t identify. A crime to keep it from the archeologists, but it was our secret. Indian
mojo
. We didn’t have many links to our ancestors. The North American Indians, well, they were the closest we could get. We imagined ourselves warriors.”

Houston moved closer to him. “Yes, that was almost my thought when I was tending to you.” He arched an eyebrow. “Well, Francisco, you’re a
solid
man. If I didn’t know you were a priest, I would have guessed heavyweight boxer. You didn’t wake for hours, and you lay there like some statue of an ancient warrior, strong, with this war pendant resting on your chest.” Her eyes seemed to look him over. “Made me wonder about it.”

Lopez felt his breathing deepen. He had never felt the admiration of a woman like this, so close, so real. He wasn’t sure how to respond.

He returned his attention to the arrowhead. “When I found his body, found Miguel, it was lying on the ground close by.”

“And you’ve been wearing it since then?”

Lopez nodded. “Seemed like a sign to me. Now I feel like throwing it out the window. Sara, how could he have done these things?”
I’m a priest! Miguel, how do I forgive you?

Houston reached over his arm, her skin brushing against his. It felt warm and alive, the milky whiteness contrasting strongly with his dark copper. She touched the arrowhead with her fingertips but said nothing. Tears were in her eyes, and seeing them, he felt an overwhelming need to comfort her. They had both lost Miguel and now, in some less tangible way, had lost something else of him with these revelations.

But he saw that her pain was deeper. She was losing part of the America that she had devoted herself to, that she loved and served with all her heart. Her agency directed these atrocities. Her entire belief system was collapsing.

“I’m sorry, Sara,” he said, reaching over to put a hand on her shoulder.

Suddenly, her arms were around him. She embraced him tightly, holding on for dear life, like a shipwreck victim to a life preserver. The arrowhead was pressed between them, Lopez still clutching the leather loop and unsure how to react. Her body shook with silent sobs. She seemed to be suppressing as much as she could, trying to stay in control. Lopez simply held her. Her pain seemed to burn inside of him as well, tearing at his heart, and he wished he could pour himself into her, fill the terrible emptiness her tears revealed.

After half a minute, an alert tone rang on her computer. She suddenly let go, wiped her eyes, and turned away from him to stare at the screen.

“Finally, Fred deigns to reply,” she said hoarsely. Lopez could see her scanning the message, communicated, he knew, through a labyrinth of security walls and cloaked identities. Fred Simon was no rookie, and he took his own precautions. “He wants to set up a video conference call. In an hour.”

“That’s great!” said Lopez. Finally, they could involve someone else in this awful discovery.
And we need some help.
It was obvious to Lopez that they were getting in way over their heads.

Houston grunted. “Not all is great. According to Fred, the CIA now has me listed as a top-priority catch. And if you can believe it, I’m coded ‘GADAHN.’ You’re listed as a possible accomplice, if that makes you feel less left out.”

“What’s ‘Gadahn’? Accomplice to what?”