Unholy Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller) (28 page)

“I saw you on TV, and in a
great
video. I can’t believe it. Tit Fucker just saved me. That’s so cool. But, hey, don’t get too close, okay?”

• • •

The heat woke Emma up, sun streaming through the windows of her Fusion. Last night she’d locked the doors and reclined the front seat after parking near the Planned Parenthood clinic. She’d recognized it from news reports about the protests at the facility.

She sat up as a woman unlocked the clinic’s front door. Adjusting the rear-view mirror, Em put on lipstick and brushed out her hair. Still unhappy with her rumpled appearance, she surrendered to urgency and climbed out of the car, knowing she looked half-baked, like some of her stoner friends at school.

Emma hurried across the street, glad nobody was outside the clinic wielding those graphic posters.

A nurse greeted her from behind a counter. Emma told her why she was there. The woman handed her a clipboard with a two-page form. “You understand that we’ll need to confirm the pregnancy first, but for now it would be good to answer those questions.”

After complying, Em looked up, realizing she was still the only person in the reception area.

The nurse returned, took the paperwork, and led her to a room with a small table and four chairs. Not an examining room, as Em had expected. Neither had she been asked to provide a urine sample. The nurse looked up from the form.

“I see that you’re seventeen. Is that correct?”

Emma nodded, taking a seat. The nurse stood in the doorway.

“In Maryland, we like to have at least one parent who’s aware of a minor’s decision before we perform the procedure. They don’t have to approve, but we like to know that one of them knows what you’re doing.”

“You said Maryland likes that. You didn’t say it was required.”

The nurse nodded. “That’s correct. There are exceptions. If the physician believes that you’re mature enough you may have the procedure without parental notification.”

“I’m really mature,” Emma said. “I don’t want to bother my mother with this. She’s recovering from a wound from a hand grenade last week.”

The nurse’s eyes widened with recognition. “Was that
your
mom who almost got killed in Bethesda?”

“Yes,” Emma replied, eyes flooding at once. She tried to stem her tears—not very mature to start bawling—but couldn’t stop. “She doesn’t need to be dealing with this right now. She’s in a lot of pain.” Which was true, damn it.

“What about the person who got you pregnant? Does he know?”

“Yes, but he’s Mus … ” Emma checked herself. The nurse smiled. “He doesn’t want me to end the pregnancy. Look, I’m not going to have a baby. I’m still in high school.”

“What about your father? Does he live with you?”

“He does,” Em allowed, wiping away her tears, “but that’s kind of recent. My mom basically brought me up alone till he came back.”

“Are you saying he’d have objections to your terminating your pregnancy?”

“No, I don’t think so. I mean, it may sound weird to say this, him being gone most of my life, but he’s a pretty good dad.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Emma, please call him. Let him know what you intend to do. Then we can confirm that you have a parent onboard, okay?”

“I really don’t want them to know.”

The nurse eyed her closely. “I’ll have the doctor talk to you. But at least think about your father. It’s just a call. We have a simple approach to this. He sounds like a decent guy.”

He is
. But Em had never felt a greater need for personal privacy.

The woman started to leave, then turned back to her. “The doctor will listen to whatever you have to say. Just tell the truth. It goes a long way around here.”

“Thank you.”

“Here.” She handed Emma a pamphlet. “That has answers to a lot of the questions that patients have.”

“What’s the doctor’s name?”

“Dr. Mohammed Abbas.”

Mohammed? Abbas?

Emma watched the nurse walk away—and felt an instant urge to rush out of the clinic.

• • •

The roughneck’s name was Cal. Strips of his skin had been laid aside carefully by the ISIS fighter. Jimmy stared at them, one at least ten inches long.

What a son-of-a-bitch
. Jimmy had never killed anyone. Seeing the peeled skin left him with no regrets.

“He was working his way up my body,” Cal said. “The only reason he left my foot alone was when he was all done he wanted to march me around up there for the news choppers. This hurts so fuckin’ bad.”

“We should wrap it up,” Jimmy said, stripping off his T-shirt. “You don’t want to be bleeding all over the chain. You’ll slip and fall and we’ve got work to do.”

“Don’t put that shirt near me. Man, you got smallpox, right?”

“Sorry, sorry. I wasn’t thinking,” Jimmy said. “Come on, let’s just head up.”

“Head up? We gotta get the hell out of here.”

Jimmy shook his head. “The chief engineer’s still alive, right?”

“Maybe. They’ve got him trying to disarm the blowout preventers.”

“Is he doing that?”

“He’s trying. They’re threatening him with all kinds of shit. They want to turn this place into a tar pit.”

“I heard that. Look, they’re going to kill him no matter what he does,” Jimmy said. “We’ve got to save him.”

“Listen to me. No way we’re gonna do that. They got him on the computers in the operations center, and it’s surrounded by these murdering assholes. Be easier to break into Fort Knox.”

“Why are you down here?”

“Because that dead shithead won me for cutting off the most heads the fastest when they took over this thing. I shit you not. It was a contest and I was the prize.”

“There’s really no way to save him up there?”

Cal shook his head. “I ain’t lying. You want to commit suicide, you go right ahead.”

Jimmy looked up at the platform. Saving the chief engineer did sound impossible. “Do you think you can climb down this chain?” Blood now covered Cal’s foot.

“To get off this hellhole I’d climb down razor wire.”

“I’ll lead the way, but we got one thing to do before we take off down there.”

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“We’re blowing the oil pipe so the BOPs kick in before they get disabled.”

“That’s going to really piss ’em off. We better be ready to tear ass out of here.”

“Pissing them off is the plan, and tearing ass out of here is a big part of it.”

Jimmy helped Cal to his feet.

When they looked up, a pair of eyes were staring down.

LANA WAS UP AND
performing her morning rituals by five-thirty, though greatly hampered by her crutches, cumbersome fixtures since the surgery on her calf. She had a six-thirty video teleconference scheduled with the President’s Chief of Staff William Evanson. She presumed the marginal, break-of-day appointment time reflected Evanson’s lack of priority on their meeting. But Lana found awakening so early a welcome change, even after her middle-of-the-night phone call with Galina. She liked the peace and quiet and trusted it would continue for at least a couple of hours.

With Don and Emma safely tucked away—and no hint of the mayhem at large in the world—Bethesda could seem like an oasis; one purchased, she understood, at the cost of bulletproof glass and steel doors. Recognizing this tempted Lana to check on Emma upstairs; but her daughter, once the proverbial log in bed, had become such a light sleeper that she didn’t want to disturb her. Em was, after all, fighting a stomach bug. And Lana didn’t relish navigating the stairs on one good foot and two clumsy crutches.

After arranging her hair carefully and applying lipstick and a bit of blush, she donned a blue blouse that she kept fully buttoned. For a videoconference, she only needed to look professional from the middle up—“table date acceptable,” as she and her friends had once joked about pear-shaped men. So her shorts would do fine and spare her the ordeal of putting slacks on over her wound.

Lana made short shrift of her first espresso before hobbling into her home office. She was adjusting the lighting for the computer camera to avoid freak-show shadows when she heard the front door burst open. She assumed it was Agent Robin Maray, but switched on the screen that showed her home’s entry points. Robin, indeed, was slamming the door behind him and yelling “Go to the safe room, I’ve got it opening right now.”

The panic room?

“What about Emma and Don?” Lana yelled, jamming her Sig Sauer into her shorts, grabbing her crutches, and starting down the hallway.

“I’ll get them. You get in there
now
.”

The steel cubicle had been placed off the living room behind a bookcase that swung open at the touch of a switch, a location central to the home’s traffic patterns.

“Emma,” Lana yelled as she limped along. “Emma!”

When Em didn’t reply, Lana launched herself toward the stairs. As quickly, Robin swept her up into his arms and carried her toward the door to the secure room.

“Sorry,” he said as he deposited her into the steel-reinforced confines, “but I said I’d get them, and I’ve got my orders.”

“What’s going on?” she asked, but Robin was already closing the panic room door.

Lana flipped on the room’s monitor and switched to her home’s exterior cameras as two men in black ski masks set off a charge by the big front window. She felt the violent vibration in the one foot she had on the floor and sheer panic at the sight of the pair piling into the house.

Switching quickly to a living room cam, she saw swirls of dust and Robin staggering across the floor toward the safe room with a long shard of glass sunk in his shoulder, blood already soaking his white shirt and darkening his suit jacket. She called 911 as he tripped on a length of mangled window frame and spilled to the debris-ridden floor, not far from where Cairo lay unmoving on more rubble. Wincing in pain, Robin tried to lift himself up and draw his gun. Too wounded and too late: before he could even raise it, the men ripped the gun from Robin’s hand and dragged him toward the safe room, visible through the broken remains of the bookcase. Volumes lay strewn on the floor. The men kicked them out of their way and stuck their guns to Robin’s head right in front of the cam that framed all three of them.

“We will kill him, if you don’t open up right now,” said a man who sounded like he was trying to affect a Middle Eastern accent—and failing miserably.

He pounded the door with the butt of his gun. Lana saw this on the screen, but barely heard the impact through the thick steel. She studied the features beneath the ski masks, searching for any evidence of beards. No billowing at all.

“Don’t open it,” Robin said in a barely audible voice.

Lana wouldn’t have, regardless. You never negotiated someone else’s release by offering yourself, but she didn’t recall from security briefings that a terrorist or money-grubbing criminal would—without further warning—shoot an FBI agent in the foot to demonstrate his viciousness.

Excruciating pain twisted Robin’s face. Lana saw him grinding his teeth but he didn’t make a sound. The gunman who’d shot him in the foot now offered a warning: “His knee is next. Then his balls.”

In his excitement, he’d abandoned any attempt at an accent. Which made her sick with worry about Emma.

Where is she?
They’d do the same to her daughter if they got their hands on her.
And where’s Don?

She hoped Emma was climbing out a window, running away as fast as she could. Lana could do nothing to protect her, not from in here, although she knew without question—or hesitation—that she’d give herself up for her daughter, no matter how fruitless the move might be.

But there was absolutely nothing she could do for Robin. Open the door and the gunmen would sell her to ISIS as fast as possible, and then those killers would do whatever they found necessary to drain every last secret of U.S. intelligence to which she’d ever been privy—along with her last pint of blood.

Good to his word, the eager gunman blew Robin’s knee apart on screen. Robin now howled and writhed in agony, still held tightly by the men.

The high-caliber bullet left a gaping wound in the agent’s leg.

And the gunman now pressed his weapon to Robin’s crotch.

With $100 million on the line, Lana couldn’t believe they’d shoot off his scrotum. Blood loss would likely kill him in minutes—and their chance at a monstrous payday. But the intruders were agitated, screaming for her to open the door: “We know you’re in there, bitch!”

She stared at the screen. The gunman had his eyes on his pistol, jamming it harder into Robin’s crotch. Then Lana glimpsed Don’s shadow fall on the rubble in the living room. His arms rose into view, a two-handed stance with the semi-automatic that Deputy Director Holmes had finessed for him. Don fired two fast head shots, spilling both gunmen to the floor, their last dying move.

Robin fell against the door to the safe room, barely holding himself up. Lana pulled out her phone again and called back 911: “FBI agent’s down. Shot in the foot and knee. Major blood loss.”

Don helped Robin from the door. Lana threw it open as a Bethesda police officer ran into the living room.

“Put down your gun!” he yelled at Don.