Unholy Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller) (10 page)

“I need to talk to them privately,” she said to him.

“I’ll park myself outside,” he replied equably.

Once settled with Jeff and Galina in her office, Lana asked for an update on the ISIS men in Louisiana. “The last I heard, they were being transported to Camp Blanding by an army detachment.”

“That’s right, a big military escort,” Jeff agreed, “plus the sheriff, who insisted on going with them. Turned out he even had his picture taken with some of his prisoners.”

“Are you—”

“Nope, not kidding.”

“Otherwise, everything went okay?” Lana asked.

“One of the prisoners was sick by the time they got to Blanding. He’s on lockdown in sick bay. They’re going to hold them all there for questioning, then they’ll be taken to the supermax in Florence.”

She nodded. The supermaximum prison in Florence, Colorado, had become the detention facility of choice for terrorists awaiting trial or serving time.

“What’s the prisoner in sick bay for?” Lana asked.

“A bad sunburn,” Jeff said. “A few of them did. It sounds like he had heatstroke, too. I guess they didn’t have much cover on their boat.”

“Do they know where they sailed from?” she asked.

“They’re still working on that. Nobody’s talking.”

“What about your work?’ she asked Galina, whom she’d tasked with trying to run down Steel Fist.

“He’s not working alone.”

“What makes you say that?”

“He’s secretive, right? Never gives away a location. Could be in St. Petersburg for all we know. He has all this data uploading, but he’s the destination of streaming data, too.”

“From NSA?”

“I don’t know yet,” Galina replied. “Could be from other places but it’s hard to tell. So many people support him and they fill the Web with chatter. Ten million subscribers, and they are active. It’s like a big cyber smokescreen. Hard to run trace routes against the various streams.”

“Or he could be scattering it himself,” Jeff said. “Throwing up his own camouflage.”

“Yes, could be,” Galina agreed. “He is slippery. He is good.”

“Jeff, we’ve got a change in plans. Holmes wants Galina to try to crack NSA security, specifically anything related to files on domestic intelligence gathering.”

“I already tried, remember?”

“I do, and Holmes does, too. But he wants a fresh approach. She’s had no experience with NSA.”

As soon as she spoke, it occurred to Lana that she was making an assumption about Galina that might not be true. Galina could have gone after the agency when she was hacking in Russia. “Have you ever hacked NSA?” she asked her directly.

“No, only the professor,” she answered. A Harvard computer engineering genius, whose murder had been ordered by the man employing Galina.

“A lack of experience is supposed to be an advantage?” Jeff asked. He didn’t sound affronted, only surprised.

“He thinks it might be. Galina, I’ll take over your work on Steel Fist. You get on those NSA files. You’re free to use any attack vector you want. I’ll give you the rundown when we get back to the war room.”

As they started there, Don texted her about Tahir.

Goddamn him.

She was grateful Don had been with Em, replying to him accordingly.

When she caught up with her colleagues at the war room, Galina was talking to Robin, asking about his job, making sure her hair was in place, and smiling as she had earlier.

Flirting
. Unabashedly.

Lana filled with a most unfamiliar feeling: jealousy.

What am I turning into? What is this place turning into?

“Galina, we need to get moving here.”

The young woman appeared to snap out of a trance, wheeling around and heading toward her workstation. Lana couldn’t read Robin’s reaction, and tried to tell herself that she didn’t care, but the jealousy wouldn’t let her.

She did explain to him that he wouldn’t be permitted in the war room, either. He caught her eye as she talked. She tried to look away but was drawn right back.

No
, she told herself sternly.
A thousand times no
.

But her arm brushed against the sleeve of his navy blazer as she walked past him. Wholly unintentional
and
wholly unnerving.

Lana worked hard in the next few minutes to put aside these fleeting excitements. She contacted her liaison at the CIA to see if they’d learned anything more about Tahir’s history in Sudan.

“The jury’s still out,” the voice on the other end of the line replied.

Like Holmes said.

Lana hung up, shaking her head. The CIA strongly suspected Tahir had been Al Qaeda in Sudan. And he was behaving like a jihadist toward her daughter.
And the jury’s still out?

Wouldn’t the agency want to know everything possible about a man with that background now living so close to the nation’s capital?

Time to do her own digging. Time to go as deep as she could. As deep as she needed to. Her daughter’s life might be on the line. She doubted anybody in the CIA possessed her fear-fueled motivation.

Despite the liaison’s words, Lana strongly suspected the “jury” at the highly driven agency had heard all the staggering evidence against Tahir
and
rendered its verdict.

If so, the only question remaining was the nature of the sentence—and who would bear the full brunt of its potentially lethal burden.

THE SUN’S LOW IN
the sky. I can see it shining directly into the windows of my log home in the distance. It’s been hot up here on the ridge. Summers are getting longer and the heat lingers late into the day. Right now it’s in the mid-nineties and it’s almost six o’clock. That surprised me when I first moved to the Pacific Northwest. I expected the worst heat at midday, but it’ll last into the early evening. The climate is deceptive that way.

I can appreciate that approach. I come at people slowly, too, building up the pressure as I move in on them. Hiking clears my mind when I need to think about my latest targets. The truth is, there’s not much to distract me. The beauty of April, May, and June has paled. That’s wildflower season when the Indian paintbrush, balsamroot, lupine, and a promiscuous variety of lilies drape the hillsides with reds, yellows, purples, and blues. When a thousand feet below me the apple, pear, and cherry trees bloom. Now they’re growing heavy with fruit.

It’s even warmer to the east because the ridge forms the border between the lush western part of the state and the drier expanses to the east, where ranching and wheat farming prevail. Within a mile or two I can move from one climate to another, though the differences at this time of year are minimal. The danger from wildfires is severe everywhere.

It’s been that way since mid-July. By then it gets so dry that I have to have everything cut down to the nubs—natural grasses, wilting wildflowers, bushes—in a three-hundred-foot swath around my house. It’s my first line of defense against fire. If I had Vinko’s goats I wouldn’t need to hire a guy to do it for me, but I can’t bear those creatures, their sour odors and noisy rutting. And I can’t abide goat milk.

I prefer to simply relish the solitude and slow flow of seasons up here. I’m completely off the grid. I have solar panels on my roof and a Powerwall from Tesla to store all that precious electricity. A well supplies my water, hikes give me a great deal of time to think.

I am an island.

And I’m concerned about Lana Elkins. She hasn’t placed a single bet since her $137 win. She’s installed an ad blocker to stop the targeted casino ads I’d been sending her. I looked for any indication that she’s been going to Gamblers Anonymous to avoid inflaming her relapse, but she appears to be doing nothing but working and sleeping, though clearly she could be slipping away to meetings. Maybe
she’s
focused on that ISIS brigade now held at Camp Blanding.

I’m sure the intelligence services are putting enormous resources into trying to figure out just what was going on down Louisiana way. Let them try-try-try. I’ve researched those men completely. Other than ISIS’s Fahad Kassab, they are a blank slate, the
tabula rasa
of terrorism. But Tahir Hijazi is not. Even if I knew nothing of him, his nephew’s and Emma Elkins’s many texts would tell me much about his role in their Romeo and Juliet playlet. The pair are fast and loose with their communications, as you’d expect from a couple of teens. That gives me ample insight not only into their movements and plans but also, by extension, into those of their caregivers, including Tahir. It’s another dimension of a most curious man.

Interesting, isn’t it, that he landed in Bethesda, Maryland? Doesn’t anybody wonder why an immigrant of severely modest means from a war-torn nation eventually ends up in a pricy suburb that’s home to so many spies and other government officials, including Lana Elkins?
And
that his nephew then starts seeing her daughter? Apparently not. He’s certainly active online, though even by my strict standards he has sophisticated encryption.

If I were Lana, I’d be wary of what he could put under my car, like a bomb or electronic locator. But I’m not her. I’m better at this game. And I’ve been playing it as long as she has. We have what you might call common roots. Which is to say that if I were her, I’d suspect there’s more at play here than Tahir’s objections to Sufyan’s love interest. In fact, wouldn’t the smart money—and Lana would certainly know about that—say the conflict over the teens could be nothing but a means for Tahir to draw attention from his real goals? Not that Tahir, a bona fide Muslim fundamentalist, doesn’t truly loathe the young white woman. But hate is rarely exclusive, and I rather like my confluences of interest with him. He certainly has some with Vinko in their genuine distaste, to put it mildly, for Lana Elkins.

My stomach tightens as I now walk up to my second defense against wildfires. It’s an emergency water tank sunk into the earth—eight feet across, fifteen feet deep, and lined with heavy black plastic. The nearest fire district ends twelve miles from here, so I’m glad I have the means of holding a lot of water, along with an engine to pump it through a hundred feet of thick fire hose.

Lately, the tank has also been holding a lot of dead rats. And … it’s no different today as I lift the heavy wooden cover.

The odor is abominable. The heat must be drying up every source of water for miles. My tank has become the Golden Gate Bridge for rats because once they take the plunge, they’re dead.

I’ve taken to keeping a long-handled fishing net nearby to pull out their rotting bodies. I count as I net them and throw them far from the tank. There, the seventeenth and last one—for today.

My task complete, I lower the cover and walk around it. I still can’t see how the rats can get inside this thing.

Too bad Vinko’s subscribers don’t avail themselves of drowning. It would be good to see his mindless millions similarly bloated. They’ve been chatting up a storm about his call-to-arms, along with vows to murder Lana Elkins, her daughter, and Tahir’s nephew. In yet another intriguing twist, I found Tahir himself mouthing off in chat rooms devoted to Steel Fist, doing a credible job of impersonating a white racist. He was actively joining the calls for violence against Lana and Emma, though even in his guise he said nothing of Sufyan. He certainly had the vernacular down, saying it was time to “take names and kick ass.” Does that sound like a Sudanese immigrant to you?

Tahir
is
intriguing. Not so much to me, but I would think Elkins would be playing catch-up as fast as she can. That he appears to be operating without any concentrated attention by Vinko or her speaks of blinkered obsession as much as anything else. But when a project consumes you, it’s easy to get blindsided. Both Lana and Vinko, from what I can see, are preoccupied with terrorists slipping across the country’s borders.

I have my own interests to consider. Some, as I said, could be served by Tahir, some only by Vinko. I find myself moving back and forth between those two political climates, much as I move between two real climates when I hike the acreage I call my own. On the western flank, fir trees common to coastal forests grow, while Ponderosa pines flourish in the warmer drier reaches to the east. But both political climates are moist with hate, arid of feeling.

Just the way I like them.