Unholy Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller)

by Thomas Waite

  That did ease a smile from her.

  “And it’s a school night,” he pleaded playfully.

  “I’m sure their hormones noticed.” Lana finished her drink with a gulp. “I’ll go.”

  She walked upstairs to Emma’s room, listening closely as she approached. She found them quiet as church mice. Or mosque mice, she thought. Lana knocked gently. “It’s me, Em. It’s getting kind of late, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” Emma squeaked.

  Definitely sex. “I think you’d better call it a night.”

  “Why, Mom?”

  More bold than breathy now. Probably the first time Emma had used the breathing exercise Lana had taught her for steadying her nerves. Now if she’d only think about that when her temper flared.

  The front doorbell chimed.

  “Don, would you get that?” she called down the stairs. A final tap on the bedroom door: “So please finish your homework and come down. Sufyan, I’m sorry but it’s time to go.”

  Homework? What a euphemism.

  “Where is he?” Lana heard in a loud, distinctly African cadence downstairs.

  “Sufyan, your uncle is here,” she said before heading back down.

  Tahir Hijazi stood erect as a soldier in the tiled entryway, a tall bald man with skin as perfectly smooth as burnished mahogany. His eyes rose to her, unblinking, intense. Hunter’s eyes. This was only their second meeting. The first had been outside the high school. He’d been curt as a bodyguard, which Lana suspected was the role he’d taken with the young man. If possible, he appeared even less pleased now.

  “Are they up there in a bedroom?” he demanded.

  “They’re coming down,” she replied evenly, doing her best to avoid his question. Her words quickly proved insufficient to that task.

  “Were you supervising them, or was your … daughter alone with my nephew?”

  Lana bristled as she stepped into the living room, having no difficulty imaging how he’d almost described Emma: Whore. Kafir. Which meant infidel.

  “I believe they were upstairs doing their homework.”

  “So Sufyan has been alone in her bedroom. How long?”

  Lana glanced at Don, who looked ready to explode at Tahir. She tried to warn him with her eyes, but Don’s were glaring at the man.

  “We’re not keeping a clock on them,” Lana replied.

  The pair started down the staircase. Emma looked flushed, hair unkempt, face moist. Christ, could she have been a little more obvious? And Sufyan looked as rumpled as a laundry basket.

  “Get in the car,” Tahir snapped at the young man, who remained by Emma’s side. “And you,” he pointed a long finger in Emma’s face. “Stay away—”

  “Put your hand down or I’ll break it,” Don said, moving toward Tahir as he spoke.

  “No, Dad!” Emma cried.

  “Please,” Sufyan said softly to his uncle.

  Tahir lowered his hand, but not his voice or eyes. “You stay away from him. You are not his kind. You are not our kind.”

  Sufyan stared at his uncle. He looked scared.

  “I love him, and he loves me,” Emma said, taking Sufyan’s hand. “So good luck with that attitude.”

  Lana, for the first time, was happy to see her daughter’s defiance. Tahir had not only insulted her, he’d come close to slandering Emma.

  “Keep her away from him,” Tahir growled at Lana. “This is dangerous.”

  Don seized Tahir’s arm as the man started for the door. “Don’t you ever come in here again and start threatening anyone.”

  Tahir looked down at Don’s grip, then gazed at both of Emma’s parents. “You really don’t know, do you?” He ripped his arm free and pulled out his phone.

  “Know what?” Lana demanded, no longer so even-keeled herself.

  Tahir raised his phone, showing them the Steel Fist website. At the top of the screen clenched fingers gripped a brutal-looking band of chrome knuckles. Right below it was a photo of Emma and Sufyan. Scrolling down, he revealed an angry command: “Ammo Up!”

  “Now they want to kill you, too,” he said to Lana. “But you are grown up. He is not. His life is ahead of him. I saved that boy when he was nine. I took him away from soldiers who were killing everyone in our village. His father was already dead. I brought him and his mother to America. I am not going to have him die for the love of her.” He stared at Emma, then pointed to the screen. “See, they show how they go to school. To school.”

  His voice shook, no longer with anger but agonized fear, and in that moment Lana understood how much he loved his nephew.

  “You, too,” he said to her, regaining his composure. “They show how you get to work and come home.” But he wasn’t through with Emma. “Wrong skin,” he said to her. “Wrong religion. Wrong.”

  He threw open the door. A single glance at Sufyan drove the young man out the door.

  “What was that picture?” Emma asked as soon as her dad locked up, pulling out her own phone. “Why was he showing you that? And what’s Steel Fist? You’re going to stop them, right?”

  “Yes, we’ll stop them,” Lana said, putting her arm around Emma. “Come on, let’s get some sleep.”

  Her daughter pulled away. “I’m not going to stop seeing him. No way.”

  “Can we talk about all of this in the morning?”

  “No,” Emma said, bolting toward the stairs. “Not if any part of the discussion involves my not seeing him.” She pounded up the stairs and disappeared behind her door, no doubt to grab her phone and find out about those photos.

  Lana turned to Don. “From now on, we need to start double-checking all the locks and the alarm system. I’ll talk to Holmes about getting you licensed to carry. Meantime, we’ll keep the 12 gauge on your side of the bed. I’ll hold onto my Sig Sauer.”

  Lana had taken firearms training at the FBI Academy at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. Don’s martial tactics had been honed less formally among dope dealers and armed guerillas in the jungles of South America. Over the summer, they’d upgraded their home security with steel doors and polymer-coated windows to stop bullets. Don had yet another idea to up their defenses:

  “We need a protection dog. It’s too easy to short-circuit alarms.”

  “I’m all for it,” she said. “Can you look into it?”

  “I’m on it,” he replied. “Who’s Steel Fist?”

  “The worst,” Lana replied, pulling out her laptop. “The worst.”

  I’M THE GUARDIAN ANGEL.

  It’s such a Christian idea—and so at odds with my own beliefs—that I take particular delight in using it. But it’s true: I’ve been looking over Steel Fist’s shoulder for almost four years. Actually, let’s use his real name—Vinko Horvat—and dispense with the juvenile theatrics of his macho nom de guerre. I have one, too: Golden Voice. But it’s a tool to me, nothing more, whereas Vinko takes his pseudonym seriously. He believes he’s penetrated CyberFortress and the NSA, and he did, but only after I left him a trail of cyber breadcrumbs. Without me, Vinko would be nothing but another American demagogue shouting into the vast echo chamber of the Internet.

  Instead, he’s championed by millions because he—I—give them what they want most in a time of devastation and deprivation: an eager outlet for their grievances against their government. And let us not overlook the importance that naturally underlies their most vociferous complaint—the legitimate fear that the U.S. military can’t protect them from the forces now killing citizens with abandon.

  To put it yet another way, the people Vinko reaches and enrages really do have reason to hate their leaders, and he plays off their anger with the mordant skill of a born Machiavellian.

  Their loathing grows daily, and hatred is a great galvanizing force. It not only brings angry, frustrated people together, it sticks to everyone it touches—just like the blood it spills, which is as red as the fires I stoke every night.

  I built this home on a mountain ridge in central Washington state nine y
ears ago, carefully crafting wood forms for the fireplace and chimney. Hard work was better than grabbing an automatic rifle and finding a bell tower, though that impulse—born of good reason—haunted me long enough to buy the weapon and search out possible locations.

  But I stuck to homebuilding, at least for awhile, pouring a ton and a half of cement to make that chimney rise up. The wood grain is visible on the concrete that faces me now. I never covered it with tiles or metal cladding. I like the bald utilitarian appearance. It’s at one with the Douglas-fir logs I used for the home itself, eight hundred square feet. But don’t go confusing me with the Unabomber because this is no shack, and I cared nothing for his anarchism. By comparison to his hovel, my home is like living in a finely constructed armoire with cedar walls, fir floors, cherry wood cabinets, and a three-hundred-foot sleeping loft.

  The chimney draws smoke smoothly. Nevertheless, I prod the logs every now and then with a wrought-iron poker just to see sparks fly. They might have inspired me because it didn’t take me long after settling in here to realize that I could also prod Americans every day by stoking their fears, and that my best weapon wouldn’t be an Army-issue automatic rifle but an even deadlier weapon: the computer. And I’d been well-trained to use it.

  So every day I stoke the panic of Americans. But they’re not fools. Fools fear ghosts in the attic and voodoo at their back door. Americans face real terror. And Vinko? He’s the accelerant I throw onto their fire.

  I’ve done a lot to make his threats blaze even brighter. You must have figured out by now, for instance, that the government did not inadvertently release those thousand pages detailing the weak links in America’s most vital infrastructure, along with fanciful methods for how they could be hacked. You don’t really believe that pap, do you?

  I hacked those files and released them on the Homeland Security website. But the Department of Defense could hardly stand before the American people and say, “We gave away the keys to the kingdom.” Of course not. They fell on the sword of “inadvertence,” preferring to look vaguely incompetent than definably weak, failing to realize that in cyberwar those two words are synonymous. That was why they offered such a dense technical explanation when they announced the “penetration.” (Well, they had been royally fucked, now hadn’t they?) Their exegesis was so bewildering that it made no sense, especially to me. But I was hardly going to point out that the emperor had no clothes. Besides, Vinko did exactly what I expected of him. He pounced on the government’s purported failure like a cougar on a hare.

  I play the long game. I always have. Vinko believes he does, too, because he’s been hacking government sites for six years without getting caught. But the long game is the length of your life and what you pass on to those who will carry your flame.

  I’ve come to know Vinko better than he knows himself. I’ve sensed the excitement in his fingertips when he’s gained access to Defense Department secrets. And when he released those NSA files last night I remembered how he used to smile with every success. But that was years ago, before he discovered that someone had turned on his computer camera. He immediately ended my surveillance by sealing the lens and has remained far too stealthy for that kind of exposure now.

  And his shrewdness came through, once again, when he dispatched those photos of Lana Elkins, her daughter, and the girl’s black Muslim beau. Red meat for that crowd. And the maps of their daily commute? Vinko’s very own cyber crumbs.

  He knows how to pander to his subscribers. That’s where he excels. My effectiveness with him lies in giving him the truth. It’s taken a long time but I sense that he’s beginning to trust me. I noticed that he blamed his takedown on Lana Elkins before he made any attempt to confirm what I’d told him. The confirmation will come easily enough—I’ve made sure of that—but taking my word for what happened to him was a critical step.

  When he does his own digging, he’ll also find that while the attack originated at CyberFortress, it was not from Lana Elkins exactly. It hailed from Jeff Jensen. When he discovers that, it will make him feel smarter than his anonymous helper. I want him to feel smarter than me.

  Eventually, I’ll even let him find that Elkins has a weakness for gambling. I know she won a hand of Texas Hold’em online yesterday by drawing a second jack. After compromising that gambling site and installing a back door, I’d waited months for the alert that Elkins had returned to it. And it was I who made sure she got her second jack. I’d have happily dealt her a third, if she’d needed it.

  I’m luring her in much the same way I lured Vinko, by playing to what might prove her greatest weakness. Her $137 win will twitch in the back of her mind. That’s the seductive nature of addiction. The desire burns softly, invisibly, until it bursts into flame with the sudden onslaught of irrepressible need. Elkins and those like her can turn the flame back down, but the memory of pleasure doesn’t die quickly; its dissolution is slow and inversely related to the speed of a quickening pulse.

  So the heat lingers for the Lanas of the world, wrapping them in temptation until they succumb, blinding themselves to everything but pure want. Until that delicious tipping point comes, Lana will tell herself that she can beat her addiction, but I will do my best not to let that happen. I’ll replace the ads on her phone with ever more enticing ones. Cards will appear on her screen with jingle-jangle casino sounds, and when she sees them landing on green felt they’ll whisper of the silent thrills she’s known so many times before.

  She’ll submit.

  But … if she manages somehow not to compromise herself with gaming, then in all likelihood she’ll be at those Gamblers Anonymous meetings to rendezvous with others who share her weakness, a move that will expose her mercilessly.

  Fascinating, the way the holders of the nation’s secrets unburden themselves to complete strangers in a church or civic meeting hall. Not everyone who attends those sessions is of good will. That was how I observed Lana firsthand. Once I even sat next to her. We exchanged knowing, empathic nods when a man spoke of emptying his family’s nest egg to bet on the “ponies,” as he referred to them affectionately. When he finished, Elkins rose to admit that she had also squandered unconscionable sums. I nodded at her again, lying once more. Gaming does not appeal to me in the least, not when I double down on my life every day. But my hatred of Lana Elkins is so strong I could kill her.

  But I might not have to. Vinko has made it demonstrably clear that he wants her dead, too, now that I’ve linked Elkins to the hacking of his site.

  He and I share so much more than our dislike of that woman. We both despise moderate Muslims. Vinko’s absolutely correct when he says they are really wolves in sheep’s clothing. He must be greatly encouraged right now because federal authorities blamed his previous provocations for vicious attacks on Muslims in St. Paul, Dearborn, Oakland, Omaha, even in the liberal bastion of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The FBI is asking anyone who might know his real identity to step forward. Fat chance. Vinko’s secrets are safe with me. A few dead here, a few maimed there … the list of attacks will only grow longer and more welcome.

  And I will make sure Vinko’s fire burns brighter.

  LANA DIDN’T SLEEP WELL. Too much unfinished business loomed in the darkness. Emma had stormed upstairs last night, more upset over Tahir’s threat to her relationship with Sufyan than a neo-Nazi’s online threat to her life. Steel Fist isn’t real to her, but her boyfriend’s uncle is, Lana thought, swinging her feet out from under the covers and easing on her slippers.

  Don lay on his back, still sleeping, arms flung wide. She let him grab a few extra winks and headed downstairs, knowing she’d have to drive home the gravity of Steel Fist’s words to Emma before she went to school. Lana wished she could just lock the girl up for the duration. Of what? Lana asked herself immediately. Because this is our life now.

  She pushed a button on the automatic espresso machine and heard the grinder go to work. Sitting on a stool, she glanced at a wall clock: 6:36 a.m.

  The steam hisse
d and the beans gave off their enticing aroma. The last drips dimpled the dark surface.

  Lana cradled the cup, blowing softly over the steamy brew. She remembered the windswept waters of the Black Sea and Don sailing her to a perilous rendezvous with Galina Bortnik. Lana and Don had been forced to work together after having had no contact for most of Emma’s life. And to think they’d not only survived that mission but been reunited. A potent brew of danger, physical chemistry, and rekindled love had brought them back together. Lana still couldn’t parse the appeal. She just knew it was as real as the rings they’d slipped back onto their fingers. They’d already talked about making it formal—again.

  “’Morning, Mom.”

  Emma glided past, putting the espresso machine back into service.

  “How’d you sleep?”

  “So-so.”

  “Same here. We need to talk.”

  “I’m pretty sure I made my position clear last night.”

  “This is not about saying you can’t see Sufyan. I wouldn’t do that, Em. That’s not on my agenda.”

  “It’s sure on Dad’s,” Emma shot back.

  “Your father’s been worried about the whole religious thing with Sufyan’s family, and after last night I think we both have to admit there were grounds for that.”

  “He’s never liked Sufyan.”

  “I honestly don’t think that’s true, Em. They’ve talked plenty about basketball and—”

  “They’ve talked plenty about everything but Islam. He won’t say a word about that to him.”

  “He’s not comfortable with it. Give your father—”

  “Neither are you. Admit it.”

  Emma’s arms and legs were crossed, her coffee mug pressed against her shoulders hard enough to whiten her fingers. Closed up like a bank vault.

  “I’m a skeptic about all religions. That’s no bulletin. But I’ve never tried to sway your beliefs. Who drove you to church for choir practice and Sunday services? And if you become a Muslim, I’ll be driving you to a mosque.”