Unholy Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller) (22 page)

The woman wasn’t without smarts, of course, or extraordinary physical appeal—and she’d deployed both successfully enough to have been named Holmes’s interim replacement.

Galina had rebuffed Flowers’s recruitment efforts, but that bill was set to be introduced in Bob’s absence, and the President had said he would sign the Bortnik Aid and Comfort Act, BACA.

As in
“Back atcha
,
”
Lana thought, sensing the real target of Flowers’s insidious machinations.

In the White House Daily Briefing, the President’s press secretary had quoted him as saying, “We must all pay our dues if we want to enjoy the great benefits of living in our proud country.”

The President could have added that the country was also profoundly broken, but Lana knew that would have been asking too much of an incumbent hungering for reelection.

After texting Galina to continue to do Bob’s bidding by trying to penetrate the NSA’s defenses, Lana turned her attention to Tahir, whom she was all but certain had decapitated the man in charge of trying to abduct her. But no video of the person performing the gruesome act had appeared anywhere. How was that even possible? Every catastrophe or public act of violence was recorded these days. Why would this be any different?

The only video that had surfaced so far was the close-up taken by the man who’d put the camera on his own head before cutting off his target’s.

It made Lana wonder if Tahir was so connected to the intelligence services that video of him committing the crime had been surreptitiously vacuumed up by his superiors, which was entirely plausible. Meantime, the beheaded man had been identified as an ex-Army colonel and white supremacist. Video of his macabre death had been viewed by tens of millions of viewers.

Lana was tempted to apply her skills to finding a definitive answer about Tahir’s role in the ending of her abduction attempt, but with Bob Holmes in the ICU, she not only lacked her longtime ally at the agency, she also faced her longtime nemesis occupying his seat and likely looking for any excuse to terminate CyberFortress’s contracts. So Lana could wonder about Tahir, but she dared not wander across any inter-agency boundaries. At least for now.

Lana’s previous forays, revealing Tahir’s past in Sudan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—and his critical association with both Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula and the CIA of Langley, Virginia—had been stymied by her wounding: When she retraced her steps from her perch on the couch, Lana found that her previous penetrations had been patched up.

With no easy access to the cyber routes she’d trodden, Lana had to forego any further incursions, for they, too, might be used by Flowers to terminate CyberFortress. Only Galina, ironically enough, had the right to search the NSA for vulnerabilities. And only, Lana believed, because Flowers didn’t know that Holmes had given the Russian émigrée her secret assignment.

Lana turned her attention to the smallpox outbreak—the CDC, she’d noticed, had been careful not to call it an epidemic—in the South and New York City, where 30 Rockefeller Plaza had become ground zero for the highly contagious disease in the Big Apple.

Right from the start, Lana had been suspicious of the easy surrender of the ISIS fighters. But even she had never conceived that the terrorists had turned themselves into biological bombs.

The CDC had started issuing hourly updates on the spreading smallpox, still carefully avoiding the “e” word. But the agency’s graphics showed ample red tendrils, which represented newly identified cases, reaching out of the South and New York. The exposed now included residents of cities and suburbs in more than half the states. Only older Americans, inoculated before vaccinations against smallpox ended in 1972, had immunity. Fortunately, after 9/11, American fears of biological warfare had prompted the resurrection of smallpox vaccine production, so there were doses sufficient to inoculate every American. But the challenge of actually getting the vaccine to each of them was formidable. The CDC was rapidly deploying teams to every corner of the country to coordinate those efforts, but these tremendously difficult attempts were coming when much of the country’s coastal infrastructure was severely compromised, which had already impacted the movement of basics, such as food and fuel, throughout the nation.

Now, as Lana checked the latest news on her screen, she saw the American flag lowered on a BP oil platform in the Gulf and learned about the latest atrocities committed against her fellow citizens. In seconds, the ISIS flag was raised. A wild-eyed man with a distinctive Maine accent was pointing to a camera and shouting, “We will turn your waters black as your infidel souls.”

Sleeper cell
, she thought right away.

• • •

A thousand miles away, Jimmy McMasters watched the same angry announcement, then saw the ISIS spokesman, who looked so American he could have been brought up in a logging town, throw gas on Old Glory and light it up.

He held it over the platform railing and then dropped it. The flight of the burning flag was brief, but it was still nothing but char when it hit the water.

“Like you, America,” the man shouted. “Burning to death in your own filth.”

Not if I can help it
, Jimmy thought.
You worthless sons-of-bitches
.

He was already slipping off his hospital gown.

STEEL FIST IS HOPELESS
and, quite frankly, as good as dead.

That’s my decision as I sit here at my computer, watching the debacle that’s getting huge play online and in broadcast news for all the wrong reasons. The man he enlisted to kill Lana Elkins made a grisly mess of the whole operation. And now they’re making a hero out of Elkins and a game warden.

I gave Vinko Horvat a veritable paint-by-numbers approach to throttling that woman 
after
taking considerable personal risks to put an electronic locator on her car to make the assassination—
not
abduction—possible. Then I barely got back to the mountains of Washington before coverage exploded with Vinko’s dismal failure. Turning Lana Elkins into a larger-than-life heroine was not on my agenda.

And it’s Vinko’s fault, plain and simple, although I’m kicking myself for not having connected his public enthusiasm for show trials with the possibility that he might prove just thick enough to try that with such a high-risk prospect as Elkins. I’ll admit, a show trial would have been a coup, but all the “would have beens” that have failed in the past five years alone could provide data enough to shut down the Pentagon with a distributed denial-of-service attack.

But instead, the world salutes a woman who survived a
grenade
and four killers. Granted, her victory came with the help of a game warden with a hunting rifle and a black man whose identity now intrigues millions, but who kept the camera off his own face.

Now Elkins looms larger than ever in the eyes of the public. Which does make taking her daughter a bigger prize. Steel Fist could redeem himself—if I were fool enough to give him a second chance.

That is
not
going to happen. Here’s what I mean:

Emma Elkins must be abducted to Hayden Lake, where cyber clues will lure her mother to the lair I have in mind. There are few people whom I’ll trust with that task, mostly myself. When her mother comes calling for her—and I know precisely how to manipulate her hunt so she doesn’t arrive in the company of the SEALs who have saved her in the past—I’ll dispose of mother and daughter, along with Vinko. Nobody will be the wiser about my role. Few even know I exist, and Vinko’s a complete loner. I’ve checked his communications. Never a word of a personal nature. He lives in isolation up there. But he doesn’t deserve to live any longer. I’ll remind him of that as I start to lop off his head. Just before I finish, I’ll offer him another old line: “Live by the sword, die by the sword.” Let Vinko hear that as the blade severs the last few inches of his neck.

Besides, I’m better suited to snatching Emma. I have a quality Vinko lacks. Actually, as I’ve seen of late, I have a number of them that he could use, so I’m confident Emma will find me eminently approachable, were she to need some emergency assistance. And she will. She drives a Fusion, after all. I know the exact nature of the malfunction she’ll soon experience. So does J.D. Powers and Associates.

But I do have one final task for Steel Fist, for which he’s shown supreme ability. Disgusted as I am by him, even I have to admit the man knows how to drum up hatred against Muslims. And now he’s got plenty of ammo, thanks to those ISIS fighters who have spread smallpox throughout the Southeast, though an honorable mention must go to the boat racer named Jimmy McMasters for transporting the deadly virus to New York City.

Could we have asked for a more beloved victim than Matt Lauer? Probably. But he’ll certainly do. He looks like he’s going to die. Even if he doesn’t, he’s probably going to be scarred from head to toe, and all because boat racer boy gave Lauer a nice big hug that went, well,
viral
in the original sense of the word.

As for the government’s response, the CDC is doing a splendid job of keeping the public up to date and scared to death. The venerable
New York
Times
reports on its website, right at this very moment, that the CDC has identified outbreaks of smallpox spreading from tightly knit Muslim communities in Dearborn, Michigan; Patterson, New Jersey; Los Angeles; and, of course, New York City, particularly Bay Ridge in Brooklyn. In fact, the CDC has finally called the spread of the disease an epidemic, and it’s pointing its finger right at Muslims, blaming sleeper cells of infected believers for mixing with large crowds wherever they can find them.

“It’s no coincidence,” a CDC official is quoted in the
Times
as saying, “that this is taking place as ISIS claims responsibility for the epidemic in North America. ISIS is everywhere.”

And the
Times
reports that local officials from coast to coast are cooperating with the panic by calling for the quarantining of all Muslim neighborhoods. Delightful: a whole series of our own Warsaw ghettos.

And those are the mild reactions. Others, including the men and women who cluster in Vinko’s chat rooms, are calling for the “culling of all Muslims” from their cities and suburbs. The
Times
is giving that quote and the rest of the chat room chorus lots of coverage, too.

While a handful of officials refuse to sanction such efforts, there are reports of organized groups of “red-blooded Americans,” as the
Times
puts it, attacking Muslim “cells” in five cities. Apparently, police in those communities have refused to intervene to stop the vicious assaults and murders. The tacit approval of vigilante violence has set off similar beatings and killings elsewhere. So it’s not just smallpox that’s spreading.

“There are no moderate Muslims,” the mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, said flatly after the city’s Islamic center was reduced to ash, along with fourteen of its members.

None of the coverage is true, but people who want to believe what I wrote on the 
Times
website, after hacking it, are having no trouble accepting the “news.” And by flipping their online edition’s servers to read-only I’ve made sure there have been no corrections or updating on the part of the paper’s editors. Fox News is reporting the lies as if they come from its own “reliable” sources.

This is my fourth hacking of the
Times
; my earlier efforts were all alpha runs. I’ve also hacked the
Wall Street Journal
twice, which has marginally better cyberdefenses.

When the
Times
finally regains control of its website, which I expect is still several hours away, even more violence will be underway against Muslim communities throughout the country. And when the paper’s brass tries to make its predictable claim that they were hacked, they’ll be widely accused of conspiring with, and kowtowing to, government efforts to support Muslims “in their time of need.” In the malleable minds of millions, it’ll stand as another example of the
Times
’ self-imposed
sharia
law.

So … Elkins, her daughter, Vinko, and the American public. Check, check, and check. Simple as cyber—to me. What I can’t put my finger on so easily is how that African American beheaded the colonel and vanished so completely. Whose side is he on? He’s got me wondering.

Let’s look at what he’s done. By chopping off the colonel’s noggin, he’s created yet another incitement against mainstream Muslims, or, to put it in patently American terms, the Uncle Toms of their religion who so proudly hail their moderation and patriotism. We’ll see how steadfast they remain in both regards when their fellow citizens continue to burn down their homes and slaughter them in the streets. That will certainly drive many survivors into the arms of ISIS.

So separating the colonel from his head could be part of a neat divide-and-conquer strategy—if you’re a radical Muslim. I understand and appreciate that. It will spread the violence against moderates as fast as the fear of smallpox is moving through the country at large.

But it could also serve as an incitement to Muslims to behead their neighbors in retaliation for violence visited upon them. So it could cut—please excuse the pun—both ways.