Lopez shook his head again, more strongly. “But your dark program wasn’t just born inside the CIA, was it, Nexus? You’ve been so worried about your own hides that you haven’t thought through things completely. You aren’t the last point, and that maniac will have figured that out. I’m just an outcast priest, and I have. Your little death squads are the product of a much greater mind.” Bravo turned around, his expression alarmed. “Just look how obsessive this is. How complete in its tortured fury. He wants to cut out this cancer all the way to the root. He wants total vengeance!”
Nexus stood frozen in thought. “Total vengeance?” repeated the leader. His eyes widened. “Oh, my God.”
The lights went off, and the background hum of a generator ceased. The farmhouse was plunged into an eerie silence and shadow. The guards stiffened, their weapons trained off Houston and himself. They turned them to the doors and window. Lopez could feel their panic. The time is now!
Bravo rumbled. “He saved them from the police to use them. You fools, you’ve led him straight to us.”
Lopez lunged at Nexus and saw Houston leap out of her chair. The guards shouted, and the two leaders reached for their weapons.
Simultaneously, the room exploded.
53
There was a bright orange and yellow light, a thunderous sound and wind, and Lopez felt himself thrown against the wooden table and bounced onto the floor. He was vaguely aware of shards of glass and stone hurtling over his head and the screams of people around him. He lay there stunned for a moment, in shock, and he began to choke on the dust and smoke that filled the air. The sounds of automatic gunfire erupted around him.
Opening his eyes, he saw the bright flashes from a weapon. A shape was in the smoke, standing where the door had been, now a giant smoldering hole in the wall. Two bodies fell next to him, one inches from his face. It was the guard who had stood next to Houston. Groaning from a sharp pain in his shoulder, he rolled off his stomach to his side to be presented with a gruesome sight: the man called Bravo was hanging against the empty frame of the shattered window, the rebar from the wall eviscerating him and holding him in the air like a fishhook. Blood was everywhere, and his eyes were blank. He was dead.
A scuffle broke out behind him. Slowly, he raised himself to his knees and turned around. In a series of lightning-fast moves, he saw a shadow disarm one of the guards, strike him with several blows to the face and neck. The assailant then reached to his leg and pulled up a knife. The blade flew along a horizontal plane propelled by the arm and sliced open the guard’s throat. A drowning scream was the last sound the dying man made as he fell to the floor.
Lopez felt dizzy, his head throbbed from the impact he received in the explosion, and the smoke was making it hard to breathe. He tried to rise to his feet, but his knees buckled. He fought to steady himself as he sank back to the floor, catching himself with his hands. Taking several breaths of acrid air, he regained his sense of balance and looked up again.
He saw a shadow bend down across from him. Showing incredible strength, the wraith raised the bloodied form of Nexus from the floor and slammed him against the wall. Lopez could see that the former Counterterrorism Center chief was mortally wounded. His face and chest were embedded with shards of glass. A huge wound was visible along his right side, bleeding profusely. His eyes swam.
“Look at me, Farnell!” The wraith screamed like a banshee, his voice wild and harsh. The eyes of Nexus slowly focused. They morphed from delirium to fear.
“You…”
“Now you will taste justice. With my own hand, I will avenge a young boy that you sent to hell. Now I will send you along with all your djinn to the fire of hell to burn for all eternity.”
Nexus writhed feebly, trying to escape the powerful grasp of his executioner. “No, no…”
“Yes,” spat the wraith, his voice as much of a weapon as anything else. Nexus flinched and moaned, his body too broken to scream. The wraith brought up his knife. “Know pain, and then death!”
Now Nexus did scream. It was blood-curdling. The knife ripped into him, across his stomach, cutting through his abdominal wall. His body spasmed but was held fast to the wall by a powerful left arm. The wraith continued to drive the knife upward, slashing violently through the chest cavity, sawing through the sternum as Nexus’s eyes rolled into his head. His body slid slowly to the floor, and the wraith like a panther leapt on top of it, sawing and sawing toward the heart. Blood spurted everywhere as the wraith drew the knife back and forth maniacally.
Lopez stared transfixed, unable to move, the sheer horror almost beyond the ability of his mind to absorb in his weakened state. Then the body of Nexus shuddered violently and stopped moving. This only seemed to infuriate the wraith, and he violently threw down the knife, the hard bone too great an obstacle for the tool. Finally, he uttered a wild sound that ended in crazed laughter. Standing abruptly, he grabbed the automatic weapon slung across his shoulder, opening fire at the floor. For nearly ten seconds of cacophony, he unloaded a hailstorm of bullets into a dead body.
Lopez stood up, the madness overwhelming. He had to find Houston. He looked over the room and spotted her on the floor. Her eyes were closed, and her shirt was soaked in crimson. He couldn’t tell if she was breathing.
“Sara!” he shouted and moved toward her.
A blur approached him from the right. Before he could respond, a forearm struck him in the chin, driving him downward onto the coffee table. The impact nearly knocked the wind out of him. He stared up into the eyes of madness. Lopez prepared to die.
“You are the priest.” The eyes were still wild, but the voice was controlled.
“Yes,” came his weak answer, hoarse from the smoke and exhaustion.
“I have no fight with you. Your brother deserved to die. I think you know that,” he said, eyeing Lopez carefully. “If you interfere with what I have to do, I will kill you.” To emphasize his point, he pressed the barrel of the gun to Lopez’s forehead.
The pain was intense. The barrel was still smoking from the flood of shots the wraith had put into the dead body of Nexus. There was a sizzling sound, and Lopez nearly screamed, a half-moan, half-scream still escaping his mouth despite his efforts to control it. He smelled his own burnt flesh.
Lopez hissed through the pain. “If you hurt her, killing me won’t save you. I’ll climb out of the mouth of hell to drag you down.”
“Unnecessary,” said the wraith. He removed the gun, tearing a thin circle of flesh from Lopez’s forehead, the skin stuck to the rim of the barrel. “I know she’s clean. You both are alive only because you are clean.”
Lopez closed his eyes and prayed that this crazed monster meant what he said. There was the sound of someone moving through the room, and then the voice of the wraith came from a distance.
“If you wish her to live, take her to a hospital, soon.”
Lopez tensed and opened his eyes. He looked around the room. The wraith had vanished.
54
Lopez rushed over to Houston. She was still unconscious, but she was breathing. He cradled her head in his arms and tapped her cheeks with his palm, calling her name.
“Sara. Sara! Please, it’s Francisco. Wake up, Sara. Please, wake up.”
She began to breathe faster, and her eyelids fluttered open. Lopez felt tears in his eyes. He kissed her forehead, drops spilling onto her face.
“Francisco,” she said weakly, staring at his face. “You’re hurt. What happened?”