Unholy Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller) (8 page)

VINKO’S MOST INSPIRED THINKING
came when he first awakened. Lying under the sheet, eyes still closed, he’d revisit whatever had been nagging him before going to bed. He’d grown to depend on the answers provided by the unconscious mind. But this morning brought only more questions about his mysterious guardian angel, the most grating of which was whether the creature who’d put him back online was the same person who’d taken him down.

He needed to suss that out quickly and make absolutely sure Lana Elkins was responsible. Not because he had any qualms about calling for her death, along with the murder of her daughter and her black Muslim boyfriend. Hardly. Vinko couldn’t have cared less if a prominent member of the cybersecurity state, much less her spawn, were gunned down, run over, or had their damn throats slit with a gutting knife. The sooner the better, in fact. What he cared about was whether he’d become an ox with a cyber ring in his nose to be led here, there, and everywhere at the whim of another hacker. One rule of cyberspace was you never surrender control because you never know whom you’re surrendering it to.

It had even crossed his mind that the guardian angel might have forged his path to those NSA files, acting as the cyber equivalent of a machete-wielding jungle guide. But why would anyone want to bolster his standing? If they supported his beliefs, why not come on board directly? More questions without answers.

As he opened his eyes to the daylight, all he knew was that the guardian angel had an agenda. Everybody did. And it was rarely so selfless as the heavenly name might suggest.

Vinko eyed his digital alarm clock: 10:35 a.m. He avoided using the alarm, spurning ranchers’ hours. He liked to work late and sleep in. The goats adjusted to his schedule. They weren’t like cows. At all.

Biko understood. He already had his eyes on his master, ready to obey the orders of the day. The border collie was a smart workaholic.

“Isn’t that right, Biko?”

The dog stood as soon as he heard his name and stared intently at him. Biko had a vocabulary of about four hundred words. More than a lot of humans in Vinko’s experience.

He rubbed Biko’s scruff, rose, and threw on a pair of Levi’s before letting his dog out. He watched him bolt to the barn, sniffing the door. Then Biko backed up a few steps and barked. The goats bleated. Biko began to circle the barn, checking for trouble. An uncanny animal.

Vinko headed into the bathroom for his morning ablutions before carefully combing his boot-black hair straight back.

He was back in his bedroom reaching for a shirt when Biko started barking. Vinko heard a car pulling around toward the barn.

He slipped his short-barreled .357 Ruger revolver into the back of his jeans and threw on his shirt, then headed to the back door. He couldn’t believe it: a black man and white woman in a Porsche 911 Carrera. His first impulse was to reach for his weapon so he could shoot out the rakedback windshield and the pair perched behind it. They had to be tourists. Nobody local would have dared intrude. But they weren’t tourists. He saw that with his next breath.

Is he out of his mind?

With his gun still hidden, Vinko pushed open the screen door and whistled Biko to his side.

Bones Jackson uncurled himself from the Carrera’s driver’s seat. “If it ain’t the white man’s white man. How you doin’, Stinko?”

Bones actually waved at him, as if they were old friends. Then he had the temerity to close the Porsche’s door, as though he planned to stay longer than the few seconds it would take Vinko to jam his gun into Bones’s black face and send him packing.

The white woman climbed out the other side in a skirt shorter than an old man’s memory and tighter than a drug dealer’s fist. She looked like a supermodel, with blond hair smartly cut to an inch above her distinct collarbones. Her face had a vaguely Asian cast. No, Russian, he realized a moment later.

So Bones had landed himself a beauty. Vinko figured that was one of the perks that came when you’d started for more than a decade for the San Diego Chargers and made the NFL Pro Bowl seven of those years. His career having ended four seasons ago, Bones was a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame.

“What do you want?” Vinko moved with deliberate speed toward his former tight end. Bones had lost some weight, some muscle. Vinko smiled at the man’s reduced stature. Maybe he wouldn’t shoot him. Maybe he’d just beat the shit out of him.

“I wanted to see what the white man’s white man was up to. Ludmila and I were in Coeur d’Alene, and I remembered my old QB lived within striking distance on his family’s land or compound or whatever it is. Jesus, you got more warning signs out there than a nuclear plant.”

“Which you ignored.”

“I figured you’d be glad to see me.”

Bones wasn’t serious, Vinko could tell, but that made him feel toyed with, teased in front of Bones’s girlfriend or wife, whore or hooker. Bones had teased him plenty back at Boise State, nicknaming him Stinko as soon as he’d found out the quarterback was chilly toward any shade of skin darker than a tan line. Pretty soon, the whole school had picked up on it, the moniker following him right through graduation.

“You figured wrong. Get back in your car and get the hell out of here. And take Lugnut with you.”

“I wasn’t planning on leaving her. Though she was a bit curious. You played ball with 
who?
”

“I could ask the same about her being with
you
. You’re nothing to me,” Vinko said. “She’s even less for being with you.”

Ludmila was standing by the front of the car. “You are fucking idiot,” she said in an unmistakable Russian accent. Vinko had been right about that much.

Vinko felt the Ruger pressing against the small of his back, luring him with its swift promise. He didn’t resist. He drew and pointed it right at Bones.

“You’re trespassing. I shoot people for less. You drove right past those signs. That’s a dangerous thing to do.” He stepped closer to Bones, only an inch or two shorter than himself. The ex-tight end had played at a rock-solid 220 pounds, but he looked forty shy of that now. Shirt hanging off him like a tent.

Cocaine
.
Of course
. Vinko would have bet the ranch on it. The guy had always partied hard. So now he’d gone to drugs. Bones sure wasn’t smiling anymore. All his cockiness had vanished. Ruger magic.

Biko started sniffing Bones’s pants leg. Vinko wished he’d taught his dog to pee on command. He gave him one he did know: “Biko, heel.”

“Biko? Did you really name him after Stephen Biko?” The black South African anti-apartheid activist had become famous after being killed in police custody. He’d also been known for coining the slogan “Black is beautiful.”

“Yeah, and I got a big fat barn cat called MLK. So what of it?” Vinko was enjoying himself immensely now. He’d resented every pass he’d ever thrown Bones, and he’d fired off hundreds in the two years they’d played together. Now he stood as close to him as he once had in the team huddle. Never next to him, though. Bad enough he had to touch the same ball.

“Fair is fair,” Bones said. “I got a hamster named Stinko. Fact is I got a whole string of them because I feed them to my boa. I always say, ‘Here comes Stinko,’ and that boa, he comes
alive
.”

“You don’t look so good, Bones. Been sucking on a crack pipe with your bros and hoes?”

“You are one sorry son-of-a-bitch,” Bones replied.

“So I guess the answer is yes. Guess what else? You’re about to be 
one dead n—”

Vinko froze at the sound of a semi-automatic racked inches from his head. Ludmila had the muzzle pointed right at his temple.

“Put it down,” she said.

Vinko realized he’d made a huge mistake by taking her for granted.

“See, she actually loves me, Stinko,” Bones said. “She’ll blow your fucking head off if you so much as blink, so why don’t you do like she says before your dog has to find a new home to go with his new name?”

Vinko glanced at her without moving his head or gun, hoping to see something that would give him the upper hand. But she’d gotten the drop on him and held a Browning with practiced ease, nice and steady. That was when he realized they would both be witnesses to his killing, should that come to pass. He also knew police would probably believe they’d shot in self-defense because Vinko had threatened Bones before millions of viewers after a bowl victory their senior year. When a post-game interview ended, a pack of photographers had wanted the quarterback and his receiver who’d caught the game-winning pass to hoist the big trophy over their heads. Not what Vinko had wanted, and as soon as the media mob had moved on, he’d turned to Bones and said quietly, “You ever touch anything I’m holding again, I’ll kill you, nigger.”

But his microphone had still been on, and his use of the n-word reached the ears of millions. It turned his name to mud. Not one team in the NFL dared to draft him. It made the gun trained on his head right now seem as predictable as death itself.

“I never forget,” Bones said, “and I’m guessing right about now you’re remembering the last time we were together, too.”

“I might as well shoot you,” Vinko replied. “I’m a dead man anyway. Isn’t that what you’re saying?”

“Nope, not what I’m saying. You’re the one who threatened to kill me. Ludmila just wanted me to have some closure with the worst man I’ve ever known. She thought it would be good to give you another chance. ‘People change,’ she said. And the truth is she couldn’t believe anybody could be as foul as you. So I said, ‘Sweetheart, you want to meet Stinko, you better bring your gun.’ Aren’t you glad, hon?”

She nodded. “Not waiting one second more,” she said evenly. “Put it down or I put bullet in your stupid brain.”

Vinko lowered his pistol.

“Better put that on the ground and step away,” Bones said.

Vinko complied. The late morning sun glinted off the stainless steel chamber.

Biko growled at Bones.

“Keep him by your side or get ready to bury him.”

“Quiet,” Vinko said. The dog stopped growling.

“Why do you hate me?” said Bones. “I just have to ask.” He’d picked up the Ruger and held it by his side. Ludmila, however, maintained her easy aim at Vinko’s head. “I never really got that. All I ever did was make you look good.”

“I never needed you for that.”

“Yeah, you did. You needed someone to catch the crap you threw, Stinko.”

“There were plenty of white guys who could’ve done that.”

“Not on that team, there wasn’t.”

“The team still would’ve been better without you.”

“And seventeen other blacks? Are you delusional?”

Bones stared at him. He looked like he was earnestly trying to figure Vinko out. He also looked exhausted, as if no amount of effort could ever make sense of Vinko’s hate. Or maybe Bones had just driven too far for too little.

“Come on, let’s go,” he said to Ludmila. Then he turned his attention back to Vinko. “I’d hoped you changed. I really did. We did a lot together. You were a loose end in my life. I thought maybe I could tie it up. It wasn’t really her. She didn’t care if she met you. She thought I was crazy to even come.”

That was when Vinko knew the real reason Bones had driven hours to see him: Bones must be dying. It’s what a man does when the end is near—if he’s weak and sentimental.

“What is it?” he asked his old teammate. “Cancer? What kind you got?” Vinko was smiling now. “How much time you got left? I’ll bet not much.”

Ludmila pressed the barrel against his face.

“Don’t,” Bones said to her. He locked eyes with Vinko. “I got time. I just don’t have any more for you. No regrets.”

He got back behind the wheel, but Ludmila didn’t move. Vinko wondered whether she’d actually shoot him. Two witnesses and a history of white pride that would be used against him. But the worst part would be dying at the hands of a race traitor.

“He’s a good man,” she said in his ear. “He just wanted to make peace with the one asshole in his life. You are scum.”

“And you sleep with filth,” Vinko dared. He shook his head in genuine disgust, pressing hard against the muzzle. Yes, daring her to shoot him, because now he knew she wouldn’t. She loved Bones too much to fuck up their last weeks or months together.

She backed away, relaxing her aim.

“Come back when he finally dries up and dies. I’ll show you some real fun.”

Ludmila fired right above his head. Vinko never flinched and, to his credit, neither did Biko, though the dog’s haunches began to shake.

Bones yelled for Ludmila to get in the car, and Vinko watched them drive away with his Ruger, kicking up dust that hung in the air like a bad odor.

He let out the goats and put Biko back to work. Then he walked back inside, trying to put aside the unpleasant encounter.

This was the greatest reward in life, he told himself: outliving the ones you loathed. Some died all on their own. Others had to be taken down.

He headed straight to his office with Lana Elkins foremost in mind.

FBI AGENT ROBIN MARAY
trailed Lana silently into the office she used at NSA headquarters. He settled across the room from her, checked his phone, and studiously avoided all eye contact. It was as if they had no past. But they’d packed plenty of history into a lone night two years ago, potent enough that Lana now struggled to focus on her work. She had to. The security of the nation might be at stake, though fortunately there had been no bombs or other terrorist activity in the past twenty-four hours. Noting an absence of gruesome violence for a single sweep of the clock actually said reams about the otherwise miserable status of the country.