Unholy Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller) (3 page)

Which brought her back to the men claiming to be ISIS:
Who are 
they
,
really?
“Any facial recognition yet?”

Galina nodded. “Got it,” she said in her Russian accent. “The one who was speaking in English has been identified by NSA as Fahad Kassab. Till two years ago he was studying electrical engineering at Cal Tech. Then he disappeared after traveling to Turkey. NSA thinks he crossed into Syria at some point along the five hundred mile frontier between them. The CIA says he fought in Mosul and Saladin, Iraq.”

“So he’s a veteran,” Lana said, “which means this inept display down there
really
makes no sense.”

“What did Holmes say about Homeland Security?” Jeff asked Lana, who glanced at her watch.

“They’re flying in from Camp Blanding,” she answered. “North Florida,” she added for Galina’s benefit. Galina hadn’t been in the States long enough to know the location of hundreds of military bases and installations in the U.S., many now threatened by the extensive flooding. “They should be there in half an hour.”

But Lana strongly suspected that every minute the self-proclaimed ISIS crew remained in the hands of those local yokels made the country that much more vulnerable to whatever their controllers had set in motion. She didn’t like mysteries—not in books, movies, and definitely not when she was dealing with murderers who planned to die with their secrets. And in combating horrific terrorist attacks, thirty minutes could be an eternity. A lot could go wrong—
no
,
everything could go wrong
—in a half-hour. In a world that had made a mockery of geologic time by raising seas in weeks to levels that should have taken eons, days and months—even years—had been wrenched free of real meaning. Now terrorism not only killed people, it also murdered the notion that time itself could be measured on a rational human scale.

When the monitor finally showed the dark-suited men from Blanding racing up to the police station, she took a break and walked down the hall to the bathroom.

She didn’t need the facilities. She needed to look herself in the eye and say,
No
,
don’t do it
. She needed the forcefulness of those words to really register. They did not.

Reaching into her pocket, she stepped past the door and pulled out a private phone on which she’d created an encrypted connection to a private server. Then she hit the app for
Texas Hold’em
.

So far all Lana was holding was her cell and her breath.

Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.

She slipped into a stall, hiding herself much as she kept her addiction from everyone but those in her Gamblers Anonymous group. Nobody in the intelligence community knew about it.

Stop it
, she told herself.

She’d have fired anyone, even Jeff Jensen, if she ever found such a weakness in them.

Lana drew a deep breath, assuring herself that she was okay, that she’d avoided the only pitfall that could sink her family, career, and financial well-being.

She reached for the door handle to leave. It felt cold, almost icy, a testament to how gambling could turn up her body’s thermostat. She stepped out and looked in the mirror. Several strands of wiry gray hair poked from her scalp, unruly as her addiction. She plucked each one, as if she were exorcising more than the telltales of age, but when she looked back at her face she saw blatant excitement in her eyes: exuberant expression, shaky hands—the glitter of gambling sprinkled over the whole of her. Then she felt a familiar itch in her fingers—as she had many times before—and a shock to her system as startling as adrenaline.

Lana was so well practiced at using her phone that she was back in the gambling app without having to think about her motions.

She drew a jack.

She drew another jack.

She won.

But it felt like the fear she’d known with the arrest of those terrorists, a keen sense that winning the first round was the worst thing that could possibly happen.

Get out of here. Quit while you’re ahead. You’ve got a kid up to her
neck in trouble.

Which was the unerring truth. Her seventeen-year-old daughter’s life had taken an edgy turn, and Lana’s ex-husband, so recently reunited with his family, was hopeless in dealing with his daughter’s recent decisions.

You’re not doing much better with her. Or yourself.

Seconds ago Lana’s life hadn’t simply veered off course. She’d taken a dive, like a bribed boxer, and had hit the mat so hard she was still shaking as she dragged herself back to the conference room.

Jeff caught her eye immediately and waved her over. “Take a look at this. Hey, you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Lana replied, pressing her hands to her sides to steady them.

Jeff nodded at a large screen. Steel Fist, the online identity of a notorious neo-Nazi and hacker, was operational once again on his website, 
For the Homeland—Ready!

Steel Fist was not only back but he’d also managed to intercept the satellite video of the arrests at the Oysterton beach. Less than an hour ago, Jensen had exploited the neo-Nazi’s server and encrypted all of his data, per Lana’s instructions, but Steel Fist had resurrected
For the
Homeland—Ready!
from the Dark Web so swiftly that the speed of recovery itself was frightening.

These hidden realms of the Internet remained a cyber netherworld whose denizens included gun runners, drug dealers, despots, sex slavers, and all manner of hackers and haters—along with whistleblowers and others with high-minded ambitions. Almost all the mayhem for money was conducted anonymously with encrypted currencies that caused huge headaches for intelligence communities around the world.

The Dark Web was also the redoubt of Steel Fist. Whoever he was, wherever he was based, the demagogue was a supremely gifted purveyor of hate with a huge following in the U.S. and Europe.

As Lana watched, his home page filled with flashing freeze frames of each terrorist now in the Oysterton jail. Below the photos ran this message: “Look at the face of America’s future. Sharia law is coming to kill you, your wife, your kids, your life. Grab your guns. It’s time to turn your targets into corpses. You know who needs to die. Kill them now. Spare none.”

The pace of the flashing photos accelerated till they blurred and turned in an instant to grinding surveillance footage of the bombing in Liberty Square, showing only the white victims. “ISIS’s brothers and sisters are killing you. More are pouring across our pathetic borders every day. This is their Summer of Blood.” Video appeared of the high-school kids with their instruments jumping from the bandstand as the boats crashed into it. “You know who needs to die” rolled across the screen again. “Kill them all.”

“Whoever this guy is, he just declared war on America’s Muslims,” Jeff said. “He’s putting the moderates of their faith in the crosshairs.”

“Which means he’s declaring war on everyone who stands for basic decency.” Lana realized that her hands had stopped shaking. She’d dodged the bullet in the bathroom—
maybe
—only to find an arsenal of threats on-screen. Steel Fist wasn’t merely another Internet thug with a big mouth. He had more than ten million followers, hundreds of thousands of hits a day. Never had the aggressive tone of that term sounded more ominous to her.

When Steel Fist called for death, body counts rose.

Civil war in America?

She swore softly to herself, respecting Jeff’s devoutly held religious beliefs. Lana also left unsaid her rising fear that the nation was about to become as divided as she was—between its best impulses and its worst.

One of the firm’s receptionists opened the door to the conference room and motioned to her.

“I’m sorry, but it’s an emergency,” the young woman said. “Someone from the Senate wants to see you.”

The Senate?

A stately woman waited for her by the front desk. “Lana Elkins?”

“Yes?”

She handed Lana an envelope. “You’ve been summoned by the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.”

THERE WAS BLOOD ON
 the water. You’d swear that was true. Crimson streaks from the northern Idaho sunset. Vinko Horvat stood on the shoreline with his border collie Biko, studying the shifting colors, red as the anger that once defined Hayden Lake, blurred as the region’s memory. Two decades ago it had been home to the Aryan Nations until a lawsuit left the white supremacists broke and homeless. They’d lost their compound after their idiot guards shot up a local’s car—with locals in it. That was not how you conducted yourself if you were keeping your eyes on the prize.

But Hayden Lake had a proud white heritage, even if many in the mountain town wanted to set it aside once and for all. And Vinko Horvat knew the little town’s legacy was more important than ever, now with the country’s borders wide open as a beer cooler at a biker picnic. His own heritage was no less vital to him, extending back many decades and three generations of Horvat men to the Nazi-created Independent State of Croatia.

He lifted his eyes from the lake as the sun settled behind a distant mountain, then headed back toward his barn, snapping his fingers to bring Biko to heel. As he approached the large looming structure he heard his goats bleating inside. Gallas from Africa, of all places. “Super goats.” That’s what the breeders called them. Gallas had tough teeth, produced a ton of milk, and could take African heat. It had been getting plenty hot in Idaho, too.

Horvat threw open a wide barn door. Biko backed up the goats, kids chasing their nannies’ teats. Gallas matured twice as fast as other breeds and reproduced as fast as Muslims.

Muslims.

He forced himself to use the proper noun, not the many epithets that came so easily to the tongue. He’d trained himself never to use such words, never to appear as vigorously stupid as his Aryan Nations predecessors. But he wrote about Muslims, posted about them nearly every day. Long ago he’d said hordes of them would be coming, and now they were. Didn’t take a prophet to see something that obvious, just a good listener.

Muslims—all of them, no matter what they said—never made a secret of their plans. The only time they’d ever confused him was with their easy surrender, down in Louisiana. Probably had the same effect on anyone with more than half a brain, but that’s all those southern cops seemed to have—half a brain and not one cell more.
And those cretins are protecting our borders?
People should think about that
.

To Vinko, the biggest wonder of all was that there wasn’t a turban in the White House by now, other than the man who’d been in disguise the whole time he’d occupied the presidency.
Hussein?
Are you kidding me?
 There was no figuring the American people, except to conclude the obvious: half a brain.

But Vinko knew you worked with what you had. And he’d been making significant inroads with his fellow citizens. They were starting to see the truth. It had gotten a lot easier since the bombing of Antarctica and the surging of the seas. Terrible, to be sure, but it might just wake America up, and if it did that, well, a man could argue—
privately
, of course—that the bombing was a good thing, especially if he’d had the foresight to stay inland where there were fish and fresh water and a blood-red sunset to remind you of why you’d never left your family’s land.

Biko kept the goats at bay while Vinko drove his tractor into the barn, though the Gallas were smarter than most people when it came to surviving. They did not wander at night. This was cougar country. A big cat could devour one of those floppy-eared creations in a single sitting. Plenty of coyotes around, too, running in packs. Cougars could start doing that as well. Animals adapt, man included. Right now “adapting”—surviving—meant guns and ammunition. On his website,
For the Homeland—Ready!
, he’d been repeating a simple message for years: “Ammo up!”

They’re sure listening now.

Trouble was, they weren’t the only ones. Some hacker had taken him down exactly at 11:00 a.m. this morning.
The eleventh hour
. Were they sending him a warning? Had they identified him? The hacking had sure shocked the shit out of Vinko. Four years of computer engineering at Boise State, another sixteen studying the Dark Web’s deepest secrets, then setting up alternating proxy servers and running the most sophisticated cyberdefenses—only to have some son-of-a-bitch knock him down like he was no more formidable than a bowling pin.

But that wasn’t the real shocker. Before he could even begin a digital forensics operation, his website had come back to life. He would have liked to take credit for the quick comeback, but he couldn’t. The help had come from elsewhere. A powerful force had put him back in business with a private message that had been haunting his evening walk with Biko:

You have a guardian angel, Steel Fist. I am here to keep your message
online. You are doing the Lord’s work. Your enemies are crude. They don’t
know who you are or where you’re based. But I do.

Those words still gnawed at him as he closed the barn door and strode back to his big log house and stepped inside.