Fields nodded, holding up his gun. “Yeah, I know. But someone has to stop them, make them face justice. Fred Simon isn’t the only one who has been sickened by what you two have found.”
Lopez felt elated. For the first time in months, they were not alone. Justice was coming to a farmhouse in Virginia.
51
The drive through the rural counties was mostly silent. Conversation was limited to coordinating travel, following maps, and planning an approach that would not reveal their presence. Lopez and Houston drove together in the SUV, and Fields led the way in his black sedan. They had left late in the evening, the calculated travel time about an hour over narrow country roads. They approached the location roughly around midnight.
They found a wide shoulder on the side of the road a mile and a half before the farmhouse, and they left their vehicles there. Unsecured fields surrounded them, and they agreed that it was wiser to approach unseen through the fields and patchy forests between them than to take to the road. With cellular tower signals and modern GPS navigation, the strategy was simple to follow.
The moon was full, directly overhead, casting clear shadows to their night-adjusted eyes as they walked. Conversation continued to be minimal, task oriented, the tension building within all of them. After everything that had happened, Lopez felt a mixture of hope and dread. Ahead of them lay the lair of some of the most ruthless and desperate men he could imagine, men who had killed and destroyed the lives of so many. But they had uncovered the root of this evil program that had led to the death of his brother, the architects of which he and Houston had vowed to bring to justice for their crimes.
Justice? Or vengeance? The priest in him required that he face the need for vengeance buried inside. He knew that it was partially a transferal of blame from the man they called the wraith. These architects had not killed Miguel Lopez. The wraith had. But these men had created, and their crimes had given birth to, the vengeance that now hunted them down. Who was this wraith? What pain drove him to pursue these men to the death? Could it be that as much as he loved his brother, Miguel’s crimes demanded recompense? Perhaps his death had its own justice associated with it.
He would have to leave these conflicting emotions to the psychologists. All he knew was that now his anger, his sense of right and wrong, and his need to act were focused on a group of men that had betrayed so many and so much. Men who had gotten away with clandestine crimes against humanity and could not be let free to continue their twisted pursuit of security. Perhaps a time for the wraith would come. Tonight, it was time for others.
They had entered a narrow strip of forest between two properties, and Fields held up his hand. They consulted the GPS map. From the satellite imagery, it seemed that as soon as they crossed through these trees, they would be on the land of the farmhouse they were seeking.
“Okay, if there’s any security, which I assume there will be, it will start soon.” Fields pointed to the area just in front of them, where the trees ended. A cobblestone wall seemed to run around the perimeter of the property and hardly had the appearance of a high-tech security system. Houston walked forward to the forest’s edge, crouched down, and examined the wall.
“The stone is a facade,” she said almost immediately. “My bet is concrete behind, likely wired. If we try to go over this, they’ll know it.” She pointed to a rod sticking up from the wall 30 feet away. “That’s likely a camera, wide-angle lens. I think we’re hidden by the tree line and the wall, but if we somehow get over the wall and move beyond its edge, we’ll be visible.”
Fields walked up with a small device hooked up to his smartphone. “Swiss Army knife of signal detectors,” he said, smiling. He ran an app on his phone that opened several graphs. He pressed a switch on the device, and the graphs jumped, showing curves like an oscilloscope. “It can sense electromagnetic fields, infrared, heat emission, high-frequency sound, several other things.”
“Nice,” said Houston. “Not standard issue.”
“No,” he said, running the device along the false-stone wall. “Homemade. Friend of mine in R&D put the app together. Convenient as hell.” He backed away from the wall. “OK, this is weird. There are clearly power lines in there. That wall is juiced. Not electrified — the signal’s too low. They’re not looking to fry us. My guess is it’s power for sensors. Very mild heat signal as well.”
Lopez glanced at the graphics display as well, trying to absorb all he could. Houston nodded looking at the readouts. “So, like I said, problem.”
“Except for this,” he noted, pointing to a second page of graphs. All the graphs were flatlined. “Unless they have pressure sensors on the walls, which, hell, maybe they do, they’ll be using a form of motion detection. That means acoustic sensors, optical and infrared sensors, magnetometers, infrared laser radar, ultrasonic sensors, inductive-loop detectors, or vibration detectors.”
“Whew,” said Lopez. “Sounds like an ad for a store closing.”
“The point is that all of these technologies have a fingerprint — acoustic, electromagnetic, and so on. You know the technology, you know the fingerprint, you can design a detector to determine what’s being used.”
“A detector for the detectors,” said Lopez, fascinated with the spy-tech games these people played.
“Exactly,” said Fields. “So, unless they have some new, cutting-edge technology I don’t know about, there’s nothing here. No signals. No fingerprints.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” said Houston.
“Not much,” said Fields. “But who knows? Maybe a malfunction. Maybe they needed to disable something for a reason. But it’s our lucky night.”
Houston looked skeptical. “Too easy, Jim. Doesn’t feel right.”
He nodded. “That’s why I’ll go first. If there’s something we’re missing, they’ll train the dogs, or bullets, on me. You two scramble away from this site, and you’ll have to find another way in — to rescue me.”
Houston laughed. “Fred knows how to pick the loyal ones, let me tell you. But you forgot the camera. Once you’re over the wall, it will pick you up.”
Fields smiled. “Not if I stick close to the wall. We can slide against it, and then under the camera, and try to find a way to disable it from there.” Houston shook her head in disbelief. Fields stood up and put away his equipment. “OK, then. It’s a plan. You two hang back. I’ll call your cell number when I’m over.”
Lopez was amazed that it actually worked. Fields went over the wall without incident. No alarms, no rushing of guards, no CIA automatic robotic controlled weaponry. Only silence. A vibration on Houston’s cell phone let them know he was safely on the other side. Soon after, they scaled the wall, followed his advice to the camera, and discovered that it, too, was not functioning.
“I’m getting a very bad feeling about this,” said Lopez. “The last time we came across a dead security system, the occupants were not doing so well. Maybe the wraith discovered where they are. Maybe he’s already been here.”
“Doubt it, Francisco,” said Houston. “Miller’s system was completely shut down. The wraith must have hit his command and control center or blown the power. This one’s active; we just seem to have a weak spot here. I wouldn’t count on too many of those.”
They soon found out she was right. As they crossed through a waist-high field of grass, crouched low to the ground, Fields began to detect more signals on his scanner. He motioned again for them to stop.
“Weak, but definitely growing as we move forward. There is a grassy lawn right ahead, let’s slow down and get a sense of things before we cross that.”