There was a rolling and bumping as Lopez felt himself turned upside down and pitched. Flashes of light and buffeting. Somewhere nearby, he heard Houston scream.
Darkness swallowed him.
30
“Now you will become beautiful! Like Michael Jackson, no?” The soldier laughed heartily as the wraith placed bottle after bottle and vial after vial on the shelves of the medicine cabinet.
“Something similar. More sophisticated. More dangerous.”
“More dangerous? Did you see his face in the end? Melted wax.”
“He spent decades modifying his appearance. The mistakes accumulated.” The bottles were labeled with different abbreviations, and he sorted them into groups. “I need to begin far enough in advance to achieve the desired effect. Lucky for me, there are armies of chemists in Asia working without sleep to make the skin whiteners for their fashion-conscious women.”
The soldier nodded. “The madness of women! In the West they wish to become brown, in the East, white! In my grandmother’s time, in old Russia, it was better to be fat to catch a man. Now, they must starve like an Ethiopian!” He thumped his chest with his thumb and grinned. “What man wants a woman with a flatter chest than his own?” The wraith did not respond. The old man frowned. “But you have no interest in lying over a woman, do you, Javed? Your concern is not on the energies of life. For you, there is only death.”
The wraith held up several vials. “The first step is the inhibition of my own natural melanin production, a cocktail of several compounds. They are inhibitors of the enzyme tyrosinase.”
“You have become a biochemist, as well.” He shook his head.
“I have to be many things. See, here: polyphenols, benzoate derivatives, kojic acid, and others. They poison a key chemical step in the production of melanin, the pigmenting compound in human skin.” For emphasis, he pointed out the contrast in the discolored regions of his arm. “They produce a gradual lightening of the pigment and maintain lightness. But it is not enough for my skin.”
“You try to cross a wide chasm.”
The wraith held up several creams and other vials. “I need depigmenting agents, bleaching agents to remove what is naturally there.”
The soldier took one in his broad hand and turned it around, staring at the scrawl on the label. “Hg. This is mercury, no?”
“Mercury.”
“Poison! This is collecting in your tissues, you fool. Someday, it will kill you.”
The wraith took the containers back. “There is only today and what must be done.”
The old man stared in silence, a troubled expression on his face. He waved his hand toward the cabinet and strode away from it. “I do not know why I help you kill yourself.”
“You saved my life.”
The soldier stopped and turned. “Da. But for what? So you can die by steel or poison another day?”
“No, so that I can purge the earth of those who would torture us like animals.”
The old man grunted and sat down on his chair by the door. He looked weary. “The rest of our program is beyond expectation. Your progress is not understandable. Dangerous progress, I have said. The human body is not meant for such changes. But you are becoming again a lethal force.”
It was true. Using extreme methods in pharmacology, training, and psychological motivation, pushed and aided by the help of one of the deadliest experts in the history of modern combat training, he was returning to form. The scars were ugly, but the tissue solid again. Seventy-five percent of his muscle strength had been regained, and flexibility was returning. He had cut the recovery to one-third the normal duration.
In addition to dramatically increased endurance training, he had instituted and pushed resistance exercises. At first, isometrics and body weight programs. Then, he moved to makeshift weight lifting, fashioning bars from thick branches, hanging heavy water jugs from them. Lower body training first: squats and dead-lifts to shore up his back — the steroids, growth hormone, and high-protein diet stimulating spectacular growth. Next, weighted dips and pull-ups, upper-body presses and rows. His strength grew miraculously by the day.
Combat training was then resumed. A lengthy practice each morning in several martial arts, culminating in an evening session with weapons drills. Blunt trauma weapons such as sticks and staves. Knife work. The old man honed his skills, corrected any weaknesses, and helped him fight around his injuries.
Finally, firearms training: handguns and rifles. He quickly learned to compensate for the damaged musculature and neurons, adapting his motions, his aim and stance, his trigger finger to the new realities of his body after injury and rehabilitation.
The old man nodded, pleased. “You are highly adaptable. There is no ego in you, only the task at hand. No student has ever shown such devotion to mastering my teachings. I believe the devil has possessed you.”
31
Francisco Lopez moaned as he opened his eyes.
Even after several days, waking up hurt like hell. While he had regained movement and lost the initial dizziness from the concussion, his body was still sore from having his butt kicked by a rogue balloon. The foot-long scabs along his legs and arms had mostly stopped oozing, the antibiotic ointment and washings by Houston preventing serious infection. The bruising had gone from the look of gangrene to an ugly purple and yellow mixture that turned his stomach. But it was fading.
Houston was mostly concerned about his head. They could not go to a hospital. Not after that night. The Feds, or worse, would be on them the second their IDs were entered into the system. Without the option for X-rays, the extent of his head injury could only be guessed at. The first day he had vomited, and he felt a wash of guilt flow over him at what the CIA woman must have had to deal with. Along with his dizziness, and the clear bruising and gash on the right side of this head, a concussion was guaranteed. The question was the severity. Any swelling inside the skull, and he could be permanently brain-damaged. She had monitored him closely. With each passing hour, it seemed the worst had been avoided.
“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.