by Thomas Waite
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.
But I do.
A religious type, a real believer, had identified him, claimed to know where he lived. Not a little ironic because Vinko didn’t share any hope for a heavenly presence. But a guardian angel? If some hacker wanted to call himself that and fight back on his behalf, Vinko wasn’t going to protest. But an urgency was now upon him. The walk had finally crystallized one major concern about the day’s disturbances: if his so-called guardian angel could put him back online, he could also have been the hacker who’d taken him down. Someone who might be toying with him for reasons Vinko could not yet imagine.
He now paused only long enough to drink a cold glass of goat milk before heading back to his office, a room that looked as sleek and pristine as any clean room in Silicon Valley.
He needed the latest and most sophisticated gear. Cyberchaos was taking down America. He’d been spared till eleven o’clock this morning, but for weeks hackers had taken aim at rescue efforts trying to save cities and coastlines from the flooding. Dams, bridges, pumping stations, and large-scale sanitation plants had been caught in the crosshairs of America’s most dedicated enemies. But one development Vinko could not accept—and never would—was that almost two months ago the government had “accidentally” released almost a thousand pages of documents online that demonstrated how simple it would be to cyberattack a long list of power and water industrial control systems. They showed that if a cybersaboteur disconnected a generator from the grid, it would immediately speed up because it no longer had any load. Then, if it were reconnected to the grid, tremendous damaging force would be exerted on the generator as it tried to bring it back into sync. A blueprint for all that had quickly followed.
We’re supposed to believe that bullshit was a mistake? When it made it easier for terrorists to come in and kill us?
You’d have to be a madman to accept that excuse at face value. Vinko had been called a lot, but never a madman. Possessed by the importance of his mission, yes. But not mad.
With his website back online, he planned to conduct a thorough disk and memory analysis to determine who his guardian angel was. Just one critical task had to take precedence: the prime-time posting of files packed with data he’d obtained from penetrating the NSA—unless he were taken offline again before he could deliver his priceless trove. He’d feared the files had been destroyed by the hacker, but the takedown had been the crudest form of cybersabotage and it left those files fully intact. Every page showing the secretive U.S. agency was still mining and amassing private information on millions of Americans.
He started uploading the files in seconds, working his keyboard like a pianist tickling the ivories, the tap-tap-tapping soothing and reassuring—with data that would enrage his followers.
With those files in motion, he began sending out teasers to his faithful: “Are you ready? Tell me you’re ready to see your government’s latest crimes.” Most of his readers had signed up for alerts when he went live.
Vinko sat back and waited, scratching Biko’s ear. The dog leaned into his master’s ranch-hardened fingers. Even the pinky that wouldn’t straighten could exert strong pressure, the sole injury that the six-foot-four-inch Vinko had sustained while quarterbacking the Boise State Broncos for four years.
Thousands, then tens of thousands of encouraging messages started pouring into Hayden Lake. Vinko’s entire operation was powered by solar panels that harvested bright mountain sunshine from every square inch of the roofs of his large home and barn. Each kilowatt counted now with power outages afflicting so many other Americans.
He checked to make sure the files were live, then turned serious: “Go ahead, look for yourself,” he told his subscribers. “You’ll probably find that you’ve been spied on, too. Ed Snowden was a creep, a criminal leftist and a turncoat, but he was right about government surveillance. That’s where the political right and left come together, folks. Not to kiss and make up, but to kick the government’s sneaky ass.”
He let those words sink in, imagining the NSA files cascading down across the country like the braided sparkling streams that ran into the lake. He felt as if he’d just thrown another touchdown pass to “Bones” Jackson, his tight end his senior year. They’d tolerated each other. Bones, a junior college transfer, had shaken his head when he’d learned the white quarterback hailed from Aryan Nations country. But business was business, and big-time college football was nothing if not business. Vinko slid his chair forward and resumed his tap-tap-tapping. “If I can access this info, America’s enemies can, too. Your government can’t protect your borders and they can’t protect your most private information. Enemies could target any one of you, and every one of you is important to them. They have your home address, where you work, the schools your children attend. The NSA has it all. Your bank records, data on your phone calls. They’ve cracked your encryption codes, scooped up your text messages, IP addresses, webcam images, and even your online games. THEY KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU. And now they’re targeting me. The NSA took me down this morning.” He hadn’t confirmed that yet, but blaming the agency was too easy to pass up. “But they couldn’t keep me down, and they can’t keep you down, either. Not if we stay strong and fight back. They have plenty to answer for.”
He uploaded more video of bombings already familiar to his followers. “Look at Liberty Square. Look at Turner Field in Atlanta, King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania. Those surveillance cameras tell the whole sorry story, don’t they?
“It’s time your friends and family and neighbors opened their eyes just like you. They’ll see that the dark-skinned hordes we’ve been trying to cull for years just keep coming.
“Ammo up, America! Ammo up!”
Three minutes later, just as he was about to begin his forensic study of this morning’s cyberattack, his guardian angel hacked into a highly encrypted communications channel that Vinko reserved for a select few and left him a message: “Lana Elkins took you down.”
While Vinko had been uploading, the guardian angel must have been finishing his own investigation. Lana Elkins made immediate sense to him. She was an infamous NSA contractor who hadn’t been able to keep herself out of the headlines because she’d been so deeply involved in the cyberwars—and kinetic battles—of the past two years, though he had to question her effectiveness lately, given the paltry state of the country’s defenses.
Vinko had long suspected that the reason the NSA used private contractors was they would be less constrained by government surveillance guidelines, in practice if not in law. From what he’d seen, the contractors were basically given a license to create as much cybermayhem as they wanted, much as America’s military snipers and unmanned drones were sanctioned to take out anyone deemed an enemy.
He wondered for fleeting seconds whether Elkins had taken him down and put him back up, toggling to torment him.
Or maybe setting him up somehow.
No matter. He’d fire back at her hard and fast by using the most fundamental threat of all, the one that wasn’t written into government guidelines for spying and hacking. The lone threat that always worked.
His grandfather and great-grandfather had known all about it. They had both been members of the Ustase, an organization of violent extremists who formed the backbone of the Nazi puppet state of Croatia. Both the Ustase and their German backers knew what you had to do
to Serbs, Jews, Roma, and communists. You had to exterminate them like so much vermin—upwards of one hundred thousand harvested during those war years. Then they buried them in pits or on the banks of the Sava and Una Rivers, where flooding periodically still unearthed their bones to this day.
Vinko’s grandfather had been nostalgic about those years, especially the way he’d played the intelligence game to maximum advantage. Once the Ustase reign had been defeated, he’d provided information on the communists overrunning Yugoslavia to the Americans. In return, the country’s fledgling CIA had given his family safe haven in northern Idaho.
Before his grandfather died from lymphoma, he’d told his young grandson that the Muslims were worse than the Jews. “Back during the war we had to put up with those ragheads, but we hated them. We never would have put up with their shit now, not with what they’re doing.”
An angry man, even while dying, though the seven-year-old Vinko had been more confused than convinced by the old man’s words. But he’d noticed his father listening in, nodding the whole time.
Then, when Vinko was nine, his dad had walked him down to the lake, as he had many times for an afternoon of fishing. But that day was different. After casting his line, he’d gestured to the majesty of the mountains and told his son that he deeply loved their home. “The CIA knew what they were doing when they moved Grandpa to the mountains. It’s ninety-nine percent pure.”
Vinko hadn’t known what his father meant, either.
“Look at the water, boy.”
Vinko peered at its smooth surface and saw his reflection.
“Your face is white as the clouds, isn’t it? Just like everyone else you see around here.”
Vinko understood. He’d never known anybody who wasn’t white.
They’d fished until sundown. After gathering up their gear, his father told him to look at the water again. The blood-red colors had appeared, darkening the boy’s face.
“You’re no longer white. That’s what’s going to happen if we let the sun set on America. The white will disappear, and we’ll pay for it with blood.”
His father had been right. The men in his family had all known that the most important threat of all wasn’t a gun or a knife, or even the mongrel races raging to get everything that belonged to whites. But it was all about blood.
Vinko began dishing it out by posting a full-color photo of Lana Elkins. Her bio as well. Then the address for CyberFortress, along with a photo and the address of her home. Next, he offered maps of her possible routes to and from work.
“Know your enemies,” he wrote. “She attacked me today.”
But he was hardly through. Now for the final stroke. He added a picture of Emma Elkins, Lana’s daughter, and another shot, an especially incendiary one of the young woman with her boyfriend. He added their bios, too, and the name of their high school. Their routes to and from school.
Tap-tap-tapping into a mother’s greatest fear, which was also Vinko’s burning hope: that the photo of the girl and her boyfriend would galvanize his followers, even the ones with half a brain. But in case they had any doubt about his intentions, he posted his two most persuasive words right below the smiling faces of the two high school kids:
“Ammo up!”
LANA LEFT CYBERFORTRESS AT nine-thirty. With summer fading, the sky had finally darkened. Traffic was light, the norm these days, as gasoline shortages still plagued most regions of the country. While supertankers received top priority at the nation’s ports, deliveries had been significantly hampered by the flooding and maritime crisis. The Port of Long Beach in southern California was completely shut down, as were ports in Seattle, Oakland, Galveston, and Miami. In fact, most of Florida’s harbors remained an unmitigated mess.
As a contractor for the NSA, Lana received priority gas allotments at Fort Meade, where the agency had its headquarters and where she had a meeting scheduled with Deputy Director Holmes in the morning. With an economical subcompact, her fuel needs were light, but she still planned to top off her tank after the meeting.
Her ex-husband Don had texted her just before she left CF to see when she’d be home. “He’s here,” had been his parting words.
Don had abandoned Lana’s and Emma’s lives for fourteen years, reuniting with his family only after last year’s terrifying crisis in which he applied his navigating skills as a Caribbean pot pirate to saving Lana and Emma from horrific deaths. His reappearance after all that time had been a surprising but ultimately pleasing turn of events for all three.
Lana took the turnoff for home knowing that a heavy emphasis on “he” in Don’s world referred to Sufyan Hijazi, Emma’s first serious boyfriend. Lately, Don hadn’t been able to bring himself to say the young man’s name.
Lana faced her own challenges with Sufyan, who had emigrated to the U.S. with his family from the Sudan when the boy was nine years old. He’d grown into a strikingly handsome guy, but with the ever-serious mien of a devout Muslim. Emma had met him at school, where he was in the a cappella choir. She’d tried to persuade him to audition for the award-winning Capitol City Baptist Choir, which was more ecumenical than the name might suggest. Emma herself didn’t identify as a Baptist, and at this time was trending more toward Sufyan’s passionate beliefs in Islam. Which frankly worried her mother. Lana had jettisoned her Catholicism in her first year of college on her initial foray into what she viewed as intellectual freedom. She’d never looked back and would have liked her daughter to relish the same sense of open inquiry.
Sufyan had refused to consider the church choir, and after the two had been seeing each other for six weeks Emma stopped going to Sunday school and began attending services at Sufyan’s mosque. She’d also taken up Quran studies. All of this was a sharp departure from the churchy comforts the young woman had clearly enjoyed last year.
Emma still made it to weekly services at Capitol City Baptist, which was mandatory for choir members who, after all, were there to sing. But Lana wondered how long Emma would continue under the spiritual and musical direction of Pastor Barnes. Already Emma’s closest friend in the choir, Tanesa, had grown distant from her.
Lana pulled into the garage and watched the double door shut behind her, always conscious of her personal security—she was now licensed to carry a concealed weapon in Maryland and DC—and walked into her gracious home, steeling herself for whatever might follow.
Don was standing by the kitchen island, mixing himself a coconut rum drink, maybe reminding himself of his high life in the Caribbean. Since last year’s high-seas adventure, Don had been assessing flood damage in harbors on Chesapeake Bay. Pretty sedate for a man who’d been accustomed to flight-or-fight gigs, first by moving tons of bud from Colombia and Mexico, then, following his arrest, as a DEA informant.
He smiled at her and held up the Bacardi. She shook her head. “Scotch, straight up.”
“Oh, one of them days, I see.”
“Yup, one of them days. You?”
“Don’t ask.”
Even as he’d settled into domestic life he maintained the pleasantly shaggy appearance and sun-bleached strands of a boatman. Brackish scents of the sea still rose from his skin and collar when she kissed him. She wouldn’t mind if he’d shave every day but he did wield a soap brush and razor when it counted, and it counted often enough that she had no cause for complaint in their bedroom.
She set her computer case on a counter and glanced at her phone, trying to put aside the winning pair of jacks that still tugged at her attention. She settled on a stool at the island. “So what’s our spawn up to? Or dare I ask?”
“My guess,” Don lowered his voice, “is they’re rutting like crazed weasels, no matter what his religion thinks they should be doing.” He made an unseemly gesture and grimaced.
“She’s seventeen. She’s responsible about birth control.”
Don shook his head.
“Don’t be such a dad,” Lana said. “You weren’t a virgin at that age either.”
�
��But at least I had the decency not to do it with my father twenty feet away.”
“You’re not twenty feet away. They’re upstairs and I don’t hear a thing.”
“I’d rather Sufi,” Don’s pointed nickname for Sufyan, “took his sex drive and religion elsewhere.”
“The more you push her on that stuff, the more she’ll push back.”
“It’s not me I’m worried about, it’s his father, or uncle, or whatever he is.”
“Uncle.” Which Don knew; he was just being difficult. Sufyan’s father had been killed in the Sudanese civil war, which spurred the family’s emigration to America. Amazing what Don could try to forget, which was just about everything when it came to the Hijazi clan—except that they were Muslims.
Lana lifted the tumbler and let the Scotch warm her chest and belly before going on: “You’ve got to be careful, Don. You’re starting to sound like a bigot. It’s not appealing.”
“I don’t care about his skin color—”
“I know, but it’s still—”
“You can’t tell me you’re happy she’s going to a mosque. Studying the Quran.”
“I’m working on my attitude, okay? I’d rather have a good relationship with a Muslim daughter, if it comes to that, than no relationship. I want her to have the life she wants, not what you or I might want. And moderate Muslims are getting it from all sides these days. I don’t want any part of that. Not from you, not from anyone.”
Lana looked him in the eye. No sense dancing around the subject any longer. She’d been warming up to Don. Well, more than warming up, but his attitude toward Sufyan was starting to harden. Don was better than that, or at least she hoped he was. Bigotry was a deal-breaker for Lana. “How long have they been up there?” she asked, changing the subject.
He looked at his watch. “Ninety-four minutes. But who’s counting?”