Extraordinary Retribution (23 page)

Tom slapped the KA-BAR against one of her breasts, the handle near the nipple, the long blade running up the gland to the striated pectoral muscle in the upper portion of her chest. “Got this during my Iraq tours.” He ran his finger from the nape of her neck slowly down to her navel. Houston twitched. “One of these can open you up like a piñata.”

Lopez opened his eyes, his blood pressure mounting.
No!

“We’ll get to that, don’t worry, darling.” With his free hand, he stood up and unclasped his belt. “But first things first.” Keeping the knife near her neck, he snapped open his pants and yanked them and his underwear down to his thighs, revealing a throbbing erection.

“Jesus, Tom! We don’t have
time
for this! Just do them!” pleaded Billy, not a foot away from Lopez.

“We’ll do them, don’t worry. First, I’ll do her
right
. I’ve got to teach this bitch-whore a lesson.” Flushed in the moment, he bent forward and drew the knife quickly across each of her legs and waist, tearing her jeans and underwear away from her in seconds, nicking her thighs and drawing blood. He yanked the tape violently from her mouth, and Lopez heard her groan. “Scream for me, won’t you, bitch?”

Lopez felt himself shaking, rocking in the chair, uttering muffled screams. Houston only closed her eyes. Her powerlessness and acquiescence sent him into a frenzy.

“
Shut up
, priest, or I’ll do you
now
,” spat Billy, who quickly returned a hungry gaze toward what happening in front of him. He licked his lips.

Tom reached a muscled arm underneath Houston, and in a single fluid motion, lifted her enough against the restraints to fit himself under her, his penis slapping against her stomach and pubic hair. “You’re gonna ride this, girl!”

“
No!”
Lopez screamed the word through the tape. He felt a primitive force rushing through him like he had never felt before. Far more than anger, he was filled with a desperate sense of violated ownership and a need to protect that he had no time to analyze. Every muscle fiber in his body tensed, and he even rose up slightly against the constraints, partially standing with the chair lashed to him. Maniacally, he screamed to God in his mind, a vision of Samson struggling against the marble pillars dancing before him as he strained against the ropes.

His arm broke loose.

In the sickly sound of rotten wood cracking, the arm of the chair snapped, the rope slackened, no longer properly tied, and his hand sprang upward, suddenly released. In a split second, he watched the event, his mind racing at a superhuman rate, the glint of rusted steel flashing from an embedded nail ripped out of the chair body. In his peripheral vision, he saw Billy turning as if in slow motion toward him, reaching to pull out a weapon from his belt. Lopez did not pause but reversed the direction of his arm and swung it down with all his strength toward his captor. The nail punctured the man’s neck and drove straight into his body without resistance, the flat wood of the chair arm then smashing the man’s jaw. An artery was pierced, and blood like a geyser spurted sideways. Billy dropped like a stone, yanking his body away from the crude weapon, hard enough that Lopez—tied awkwardly to the chair by torso and legs—lost his balance and fell on top of the man. Below him, blood continued to spray out in pulses to the dying man’s heartbeat. Lopez instinctively turned to look behind.

Tom was already reacting, turning his body and lifting a leg off Houston, his large knife in a tightened grip. Lopez could hardly move. One of his legs had been freed from the impact when he crashed to the floor, but he could do little except kick it up and down. He could not stand. He could not swing it over to even try to feebly engage the man. There was no hope that he could defend himself.

Suddenly, Houston smashed her forehead into Tom’s face. A loud cracking sound followed the impact, like a branch broken over a knee. She had shattered his nose. The blow was astounding, professional, practiced. The man’s head snapped to the side, blood pouring out of his nostrils, and he fell hard against the side of a table, overturning it. Lopez instinctively looked back to Houston, half expecting to see her forehead split open from the impact, but she looked unharmed, her blue eyes wide and staring toward the floor and the figure of the man.

Lopez could hardly see Tom now. Their captor was near his feet. He strained his neck upward and looked down his body toward his legs. Tom shook his head, the blow disorienting him, his face a horror film of blood and a disfigured nose. But he was conscious enough to pull out his gun. Like a drunk, his arm weaved, and he tried to aim the firearm at Houston. The first shot blew out a window on the other side of the room. The second splintered a wooden column inches from Houston’s head. Lopez did not let him fire a third.

Pumping his leg like a piston, he kicked the man in the head. The impact was solid, and Tom slumped forward. Lopez did not hesitate to examine his foe. The piston pumped again and again, impact after impact, blow after blow making extreme contact with the man’s skull. He lost himself, the rage, the purging of primal anger and fear overcoming his consciousness. He only knew reaction, action, destruction and striking back. Again and again and again.

Finally, in complete exhaustion, he went limp and stopped kicking, his breath bursting from his nostrils. Underneath him, the form of Billy had stopped twitching, the blood no longer spurting. The entire cabin was suddenly still and quiet.

After what seemed like an eon, he became aware of his surroundings once more. He lay on his side, strapped to a chair, on top of a dead man he had just killed with a nail. At his feet was another victim of his violence. In front of that corpse was a beautiful woman, violated, nearly raped and murdered. Lopez felt tears in his eyes. Everything was a horrible nightmare.

“Holy shit, Francisco,” she said, staring at him. “I knew when you held that ox of a bishop up in the air you were strong, but
what the fuck
? What do they put in that communion wine?”

She looked down at her restraints, back at him, and then around the room, frowning. “
Jesus
. Okay, now what?”

39

“H
ail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee.
”

A mournful light bled through the window of the motel room, the darkness of the thunderstorm drinking the last of the day’s light. A subsonic rumbling shook through the air as a heavy rain rushed madly against the glass.

“
Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
”

Former priest Francisco Lopez rocked back and forth on his knees beside a radiator, his left hand on the metal stabilizing himself, clutching a wooden rosary. In his right hand was an ornate wooden cross, its designs obscured and buried in the tight grip. Tears fell down his face, and sobs shook his body.

“
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
”

Through the flashes of lightning and rolls of thunder, he continued the prayer. He rocked like an institutionalized patient, interspersing the motion with full prostrations to the floor, pressing his forehead firmly against the rough carpet, an abrasion beginning to form beneath his hairline. In several places, patches of hair were missing from his beard, torn in fits of emotion.

“Francisco.”

The muttering continued, the sobs and rocking. Houston stepped closer to Lopez and put her hand on his shoulder.

“Francisco.”

The words ceased, but the sobs increased, and she bent forward and embraced the weeping man from behind. Her hair was wet, hanging very low and taking a rich, honeyed hue from the moisture, the strands splayed over a white bathrobe. Her skin glistened with water.

“It’s OK, Francisco.”

Lopez shook his head. “I’ve betrayed everything I vowed to be today.”

She did not argue with him but walked around to face him, kneeling down beside the radiator. Lopez watched her in disbelief. She began to unbutton his shirt, looking up to his face and staring into his eyes.

“I’m glad you did, because if you vowed to let a woman get raped by murderers in front of you, those were bad vows.”

“Sara, please...”

Houston sighed and smiled sadly. “You
do
have his eyes. Miguel’s eyes. But something he didn’t have. A gentleness. A deep decency.”

Lopez felt sick. “I killed two men today, Sara. I butchered one and kicked the other to death.”

“And saved my life.” She reached her hand up to his face, her touch sending involuntary shudders through his body. Lopez could not keep track of the emotions or the physiological reactions. The anger, violence, fear, shame, sadness, physical attraction. Love.

Lopez clasped her hand and kissed it, and then pushed it away from him.

“Sara, please. There are so many things right now that I would like to say to you. I don’t want you to misunderstand. Thank you for what you are offering me. You don’t know what it means to me when I am this broken, how much I want it. But right now, I can’t. They’ve taken everything from me. But whatever the bishop said, whatever the Church decrees now about me, I’m still a priest in my heart. I’m not ready to lose that, too.” He felt new tears rolling down his cheeks. “I’m not ready to give up my vow to God. Don’t take that from me now, because if you insist, you can. I can’t stop you. I’m not sure I want to. But it’s all I have left.”

Houston stared at him silently for a moment, her expression unreadable. She cocked her head to one side.

“Wow, when they get you boys, they really get you.” She rocked back to sit on her heels, never taking her eyes off him. “I’ve seen a lot of shit in this job, Francisco, so it may seem strange to you when I say that there
are
some sacred things to me. So when that monster was going to violate me, it was the worst thing I could imagine. Worse than him simply killing me, because with death, it’s over at least. With rape, I get the hell of reliving that violation until the day I finally do die.”

Lopez shook his head, not understanding. “Then why...”

“Why did I come on to you? Because, you dolt, I
know
that you have feelings for me. And after nearly having that fuck violate me like that, the thing I wanted most was to erase it, to have a man I trusted and who loved me share his body with me in a sacred way.”

Understanding finally dawned on Lopez. He nodded his head.
Had he hurt her by pushing her away?

She smiled, reading his thoughts. “It’s OK. I can see where you’re coming from too, even if I think it’s a bit messed up. Seriously, after the Church betrayed you, what loyalty do you have to them?”

Lopez didn’t have the energy, or the words, to explain. “It’s complicated.”

Houston stood up. “Yeah, I see that. So, for both our sakes, let’s turn to other things, like how the hell we’re going to get out of this alive.”

Lopez pocketed his rosary. He felt childish. She was right—while he was crying in a corner, sinister forces were sweeping the area looking for them. They had barely escaped with their lives today.

“We still don’t know who these killers are,” he wondered out loud.

“There’s more than one set, Francisco. The men today—they were former Agency operatives. Trust me on that one. One had combat experience, the other, I don’t know. But their methods, their talk, their connection to this process as it has spun out of control—I’d bet on it.”

“But there was no ID. No papers. Nothing to mark them as CIA.”

“I don’t think they’re CIA anymore.” She crossed her arms over her chest and fiddled with her hair. Lopez noticed that it had begun to form curled locks again as it dried. “They’re too cut off and working so blatantly inside the US like this. Whatever program they had, whatever is officially legal now, this was pushing it. And they were sloppy, not the best agents I’ve ever seen. We’ve been vulnerable as hell, Francisco, and that should have been enough to end us. They had us, but they fucked it up.”

“Then what are they?”

Houston flashed him a confident look. “Rogue. There’s a rogue group playing dark games. My guess is that it’s the architects of these black-ops snatches in the US. I think they’re hiding and trying to shred the documents.”

“Except we aren’t paper, Sara.”

“It’s the same to them.” She whirled around toward the desk. “I’m going to contact Fred.”

Lopez stood up and walked beside her as she flipped open her laptop. “Wait. So, we have this rogue group of CIA agents trying to kill us, but we’re also chasing Miguel’s killers. They’re different, but how do we know who is who?”

Running through the usual gamut of anonymous servers to disguise her digital identity and location, she was soon checking for messages in an encrypted email account. She seemed distracted by the effort, responding in a distant way.

“Yeah, Miguel’s killers are something else, something different. I think they’re the reason this rogue group has gone as far as it has.” She stopped typing and looked up at him. Her blue eyes were sharp and nearly sparkling. “Miguel’s killers are hunting
them
, Francisco. They’re panicking and fighting for more than just their reputations and avoiding jail time. They’re fighting to stay alive.”

A computer tone startled him, and Houston spun around. “Seems that Fred already left a message.” She opened a new window on the screen, and it filled quickly with text. Lopez read silently beside her.

Hope that you can get this, girl. They’ve released the Kraken on you two, if you haven’t noticed yet. You’re beyond salvage now, toxic. You’re cut off, and they’re tightening the screws on all of us here that would try to help you. But they’re royally pissing me off. I don’t think I’ve been this mad in decades. This stinks to high heaven. Something very dirty is at the bottom of it. Hang in there, baby. I’ve got some loyal assets, and they’re on the lookout. You fell off all the maps today, or I’d have them down to you tomorrow. I hope you’re ok. When you surface—and you better—we’ll get them to you. Attached is an encrypted file: codes to several bank accounts they don’t know about. You’ll need the resources. Might not be enough, but it’s all I can do at this juncture. But they’ll have me pushing up daisies before I let this one go. Cancer’s got to be cut out. —FS