by Thomas Waite
“Fine. Do you need anything?”
“No, nothing. I’ll leave.”
She didn’t mean to be curt, but realized that must have been how she’d sounded. As he exited the front door, Ed, Emma, Don, and Cairo returned through the kitchen.
“I brought along special senior dog food for him,” the breeder said. “You can pick it up at Whole Pet Central in Rockville when you run out. Or from us if you happen to be up in our neck of the woods. Thing is, don’t ever let anyone else try to feed him but you two and Emma.” He went on to brief her about the importance of Cairo’s rigid feeding regimen. “Now, if you’re going on vacation—”
“We won’t be taking any vacations for the foreseeable future,” Lana interrupted.
“I hear you,” Ed said. “Nobody is. Not even the President’s taking any time at Camp David. I’ll go get that dog food from my truck. Just remember, Cairo does not cuddle.”
Lana didn’t need a reminder. Cairo looked all business to her, like most of the SEALs whom she’d gone into battle with.
• • •
Lana’s leg wounds paled in comparison to the shocking medical nightmare unfolding down south. The ISIS fighters who’d surrendered so readily in Oysterton, Louisiana, at the End of Summer Jamboree had apparently infected themselves with smallpox well ahead of the attack. So they had, in fact, carried ashore suicide bombs—their own bodies—and spread the deadly contagion to more than a hundred of the men, women, and children who’d crowded around them during the perp walk to take photos, including tons of selfies and videos. Also infected the same day were the news crews, reporters, and sheriff’s deputies who’d proudly paraded their prisoners past all the lookie-loos.
The sheriff himself was stricken with the disfiguring disease; his exposure came after he’d insisted on taking selfies with the handcuffed and ankle-chained men en route to Camp Blanding in central Florida. Now the terrorists he’d treated like trophies he’d bagged on a big-game-hunting expedition were on the verge of killing him. In turn, the sheriff had infected countless others by glad-handing constituents in his boisterous bid for November reelection. The polls were unlikely ever to open for the incumbent sheriff: His voter-ready smile on the campaign trail had been replaced by deeply scarred features on what now appeared to be his deathbed.
All the stricken were housed in isolation units in poorly equipped and vastly overwhelmed rural hospitals in Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama. Parts of east Texas had also drawn close scrutiny from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
The sheriff was in the same hospital as Jimmy McMasters and the pert piccolo player rescued by the boat racer in the early moments of the beachside invasion. The eighteen-year-old band member had spent many hours smacking skin with Jimmy and exchanging vital bodily fluids, ensuring her own infection and that of five family members, including two older brothers who now promised to tear Jimmy “limb from limb for violating our sister.”
In the past twenty-four hours, she had broken out with the mouth sores that presaged the full onslaught of the disease. She was also running a 104-degree fever.
Jimmy was doing better—so far. His doctors described him as having the constitution of a rhino. Considering what the girl’s brothers wanted to do to him, he wished he had the hide of that creature as well, though it might not be needed: The furious pair now appeared unlikely to last long enough to fulfill their heartfelt vow. But Jimmy wasn’t past the disease’s danger zone yet, and his Kato Kaelin physical charms were succumbing to more pustules with each passing day.
Jimmy sat up in bed and watched a cute nurse exit the room now occupied only by him; a young man had died at sunrise, only an hour ago.
Jimmy could hardly believe how fast his downfall had come. Not only the smallpox and death threats from piccolo’s thuggy brothers, but also his descent from national hero to national goat in a matter of days. Masochistic though it always proved to be, he tuned into the Today Show, where much of the viewing audience was now fixed on Matt Lauer’s battle against smallpox, for which millions blamed Jimmy. NBC’s executives stoked the audience’s anger by replaying, at least once a show, the moment when Lauer had introduced Jimmy, only to have the sturdy good ol’ boy pull the sharply dressed host to his feet for a Louisiana-style bear hug.
Why’d I do that? Jimmy shook his head in regret. He really liked Matt the man. And then he’d gone and fucked him over but good.
The video came right up, as if on cue.
Sheeeee-it.
“Right there,” Lauer’s excited female co-host gushed. “That was when poor Matt got infected, according to his doctors. Right when that boat guy grabbed him.”
Boat guy? I don’t even have a name anymore?
“Doctors say that was point of contact,” the co-host added, shaking her head as she looked directly into the camera.
The beautiful woman could not have sounded more disgusted if she’d been describing the vivisection of a pregnant pig.
The entire news division of the Peacock Network—from multi-million-dollar anchor monsters to the lowliest interns—was now isolated on three floors of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, scrutinized daily by roving teams of medical professionals looking for any signs of sickness—just like the audiences for the NBC’s news shows.
Jimmy glared at the screen. Hugging Matt had been such a great moment for him. How was he to know he’d been contagious?
He’d sent an email apology to Lauer. Jimmy hadn’t heard back. Didn’t expect to. Lauer was said to be running a high fever with pustules weeping pus all over his body. Jimmy figured a simple “I’m sorry” wasn’t going to cut it with Lauer. He wondered if he should go to Lauer’s funeral … if it came to that. Maybe even speak as a great admirer and newfound friend.
He wished he could do something to make amends, anything that would make people stop comparing him to Typhoid Mary. One guy on TV even called him “Smallpox McMasters.” Jimmy swore he’d go to the caliphate himself and spit in the furry faces of ISIS leaders if he had half a chance. But he was unlikely to slip past the end of the corridor, where armed guards kept patients in and visitors out.
You’re not going anywhere. You’re sick, dude.
As if to confirm his status, he walked into the bathroom to check himself in the mirror. Yup, still got it. Not too bad … considering. Like a bad case of acne. His fever this morning had even dropped to ninety-nine, which by smallpox standards was nothing. Staring at his reflection, he knew that getting laid night after night by hero groupies had ended. He was contemplating that dark, lonely future when he heard a Today Show report that fifteen ISIS fighters were battling right at that moment to take control of a poorly defended BP oil rig platform a couple hundred miles off the Mississippi coast.
Jimmy stumbled back to his bed to see helicopter footage of the heavily armed fighters seizing weapons from BP’s defeated security force. Out came the big knives.
Oh, Christ.
No, the network would never show … But they did, and then another head rolled. Those ISIS monsters were tossing them into the Gulf like coconuts. Bodies, too. What the fuck!
And they were hoisting their big black flag with the white circle and weird writing.
Three men on the BP crew had been spared. The reporter in the helicopter said the man in the middle—bald, portly, and wearing nothing but his undershorts—was the platform’s chief engineer. The other two were oil workers. A statement from the attackers, just received in news centers around the world, said the terrorists intended to blow up the well. “We will make the five million gallons from BP Horizon look like a puddle. We will sabotage every emergency device that could cap the well. The Gulf will be poisoned forever.”
To underscore their point, a crew of ISIS suicide bombers had taken the chief engineer’s family captive and threatened to cut off the heads of his three children if he didn’t comply with their wishes in the next seventy-two hours.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Jimmy said to the TV. “Everything’
s going from bad to worse.”
He stared at BP’s three men standing under the Gulf’s brutal sun. They looked shiny from sweat. He knew how hot it got out there. He’d even worked on a BP offshore oil rig for three weeks before he’d been fired for partying in the rec room with a pair of exotic dancers he’d smuggled aboard. BP’s execs were very touchy about regulations after the Horizon fiasco. So Jimmy did know something about their operations. Probably just enough to be dangerous, he thought.
But then Jimmy realized that knowing just enough to be dangerous might be just enough, indeed.
• • •
Lana checked on Holmes’s condition almost hourly. The deputy director was still in the ICU, still not permitted visitors. His longtime executive assistant Donna Warnes said his condition was grave. She’d sounded weepy when Lana had spoken to her by phone. That Donna was upset worried Lana, and not just for deep personal reasons. The interim deputy director sitting in for Holmes, Marigold Winters, was clearly vying to remain his replacement and had already made strong efforts to coerce Galina to leave CyberFortress and come to work for the NSA.
Winters, dubbed “Flowers” by her many male friends at the agency, hadn’t even had the decency to consult with Lana before telling Galina that Louisiana Senator Bob Ray Willens was prepared to introduce a bill that would force Galina to work for the NSA for seven years from the time she was granted political asylum by the U.S. The legislation already had twenty-five co-sponsors in the Senate, 151 in the House.
Flowers’s move didn’t shock Lana. The pair had started at NSA the same year, but while Lana’s cyberskills had moved her up the agency command quickly, her envious antagonist had refined a different set of talents: she’d become a consummate in-house backstabber and power grabber, and a demagogue of the first order, casting aspersions on some of the most talented Arabic-speaking experts in the intelligence community. She’d drummed up enough suspicion on the “questionables”—her term—to drive them out of government work.
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, alth
ough 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.