Unholy Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller) (13 page)

“I know. It scares me, too.”

“Don’t let Emma out of your sight.”

“That’s hardly practical, Bob. But we’re doing all we can to try to keep her safe. Don’s on the job. Thanks for rushing through his license.”

Lana ended the call and sat back, wondering …

But not for long: Maureen, though only across the room at her workstation, sent her a screen shot from Steel Fist’s website. A photo had been posted showing Em with the dogs in front of a barn. Don’s pickup and an SUV were parked in the background.

The message below the photo read:

“Lana Elkins’s daughter, Emma, just got a guard dog from a CIA-connected breeder and trainer in northern Maryland. Look at the plates on the pickup and SUV. The pickup is registered to the girl’s father, Don Fedder, a convicted drug dealer who just got out of federal prison. He’s back living with the kid and his ex-wife, Lana Elkins. The SUV belongs to Ed Holmes, the breeder working for a government that can’t keep you safe, but is doling out thousands of dollars for a damn dog to protect the daughter of a drug pusher and her black Muslim boyfriend. Holmes is the son of Robert Holmes, a deputy director of the NSA. These people are all in bed together in every possible way.

“So the Elkinses now have a dog at your expense. Look at that kid. Don’t you want to just wipe that smile right off that rich bitch’s face? You can because we don’t need a dog that can bite. We’ve got bullets!

“Ammo up!”

VINKO STOOD UP FROM
his computer and stretched. It was true: a chain was only as strong as its weakest link. And right now Lana Elkins’s weakest link was her kid.

Emma Elkins represented everything he’d always
hated
about a certain sort of girl. Brought up rich, or nearly so, and goddamn beautiful—if he were feeling generous, which he was not—she’d already chosen at age seventeen to live in the world of mongrels.

How pathetic is that?

And from what Vinko had gleaned from intercepting her texts, she was smart, too, but not in the most important ways when you lived—and
died
—based on your online privacy. Emma was too lazy to even bother using her tight-ass OpSec—operational security—most of the time. He guessed her mother had put it on her phone because it sure wasn’t standard-issue. But guess what, Emma? It’s just like a condom: you don’t use them, you don’t have
any
protection. And that means you get seriously fucked. He figured she was realizing that right about now.

Vinko had intercepted the photo of her with their new dog as soon as she’d sent it to her boyfriend.

A photo’s low-hanging fruit in the cyber orchard, especially the way
you sent it.

Just like her texts, which he’d been hacking for weeks. The two of them were definitely sexually active—something that nauseated him every time he imagined the white girl slapping skin with the dark one. Recently he’d read an elliptical text from the boy apologizing, once more, for the “mishap” when they’d been “doing it.”

Mishap?

Not when push came to shove with a Muslim man.
Just try getting
an abortion
, 
Emma
,
if you’re pregnant
. Vinko couldn’t wait to intercept those messages, if she lived long enough to send them.

The very thought of her trying to explain to a Muslim why she had to terminate a pregnancy had Vinko shaking his head as he stepped outside. He shaded his eyes with his hand and spotted the goats in the shadow of a giant beech tree.

Time to milk them, but he relished another moment imagining Emma Elkins pregnant—and the messages he could send out with that news. The responses would be volcanic, and that was important because he wanted to move his followers to take real action, not simply brag and snort in chat rooms about their guns and who should be killed. They needed a breakthrough moment to understand their power. The assassination of the Elkins family would do it. Even murdering only Emma could accomplish that much. Nothing destroyed a family faster than the death of a child.

So he luxuriated in thinking about the aftermath, the militant mobilization that would follow, including the exterminations necessary for the building of a self-sufficient nation. He’d already seen to his own needs. Others should, too. Vinko had solar panels on his roofs, and a well drawing the purest water from a depth of four hundred feet.

He also raised his own food—chickens, turkeys, fruits, and vegetables—on three carefully tended acres. You didn’t need a thousand acres, or even a hundred. Three acres could raise it all. Add a deer or elk or bear to the larder and you were set.

“Herd ’em inside,” he commanded Biko, who’d risen from all fours as soon as he’d seen his master. Now the border collie nipped at the goats, driving them toward the barn.

Biko moved back and forth, methodically funneling them toward the open doors. The Gallas hated Biko—until they needed his protection. Then they’d do whatever the dog wanted. The perfect relationship between the herd and the one that kept them safe.

Vinko felt the same about his followers. Nitwits, by and large. But they needed milking too, for their anger and firepower. And they definitely needed direction.

Biko was still nipping the legs of the last of the nannies. They brayed in protest but ran into the barn, straight for the milking pen, leaving their kids behind. People idealized animals, Disneyfied them, believing the mothers would never abandon their young. Horseshit. Even bear sows were known to leave their cubs for lunchmeat when their own lives were threatened. And as a kid he’d personally witnessed a guinea pig mom gobble up her pink offspring as soon as they were born. Nature, red in tooth and claw.

Get used to it, America.

Biko turned his attention back to Vinko. It made his master recall the first time he’d seen a border collie work. Wasn’t in Idaho, but down in Baja, Mexico, during spring break in college. Some of the white guys from the offensive unit had caravanned down to spend a couple of weeks fishing, kayaking, and mountain biking.

On an early morning solo ride Vinko had come barreling over a rise and almost plunged straight down into a large herd of sheep. He’d locked his disc brakes and skidded wildly to a stop.

The sheep scattered like snowflakes in a storm, white fleece swirling left, right, and center, revealing a border collie at the very heart of the chaos. The dog had been a portrait of calm, staring Vinko right in the eye. The QB had taken a good guess at what the canine was thinking:
I
got this, asshole
.

And then the dog went straight to work on those crazed sheep.

Vinko, off his bike, had figured he could sneak by while the herd dog spent the next hour or so chasing down the flock.

Wrong as wrong could be. Vinko had made it only about halfway past where the herd had been congregating before that dog had rounded up every last sheep, and there were at least two hundred of them. Astonishing to watch. It couldn’t have taken the hound more than two minutes.

Then the border collie started back for him. He hadn’t run toward Vinko. He’d trod like a stalker, deliberate, eyes blazing. No more than forty pounds of animal but he’d looked loaded for bear—or Vinko.

Vinko had placed his mango-colored full-suspension bike between the dog and him—and kept moving along. But every step he took was matched in the next instant by the border collie.

Curiously, the animal never drew within six feet of him. When he’d stumbled over a small boulder, the herder had barked, as much as saying, “No excuses. Move!”

Vinko had recovered his balance and hurried away faster, wishing like hell he’d had a can of pepper spray. Just in case.

But “just in case” never happened. After ten minutes of their step-by-step, the dog stopped and watched him leave.

Vinko knew he’d always remember that border collie. He’d
respected
that canine. The animal had exercised his proper authority and power with great care, doing no damage to Vinko but sending him on his way. That was all Vinko wanted to do to the mongrels in his nation. He wasn’t out for blood, not at all, though he recognized, as any reasonable white man would, that spilling a lot of it was probably inevitable because mongrels were by nature stupid and understood only the power of pain. There was nothing to be done about their limited aptitude but nip at their heels—
hard
. After all, even goats and sheep had to feel the bite if they refused their masters’ wishes.

Look at them
. The nannies were compliant, yielding to his ministrations with the milking machine, though it challenged Vinko at a time like this to be patient with the demands of husbandry when, more than anything, he wanted to get back on his computer and rally his followers.

But Vinko also needed to visit the gun shop in town. That bastard Bones had taken a very valuable Ruger from him. If Vinko had had any faith in the sheriff, he would have reported the theft at gunpoint. But the sheriff hated Vinko and the dozens of other white supremacists still hanging around Hayden Lake. The lawman made no secret of his disgust for their beliefs. But there were ways other than running to the sheriff to deal with Bones. And, regardless, he needed to replace the .357 because he wanted to have a killer weapon on hand at all times.

Right now he carried his dead father’s Pony .380. But he just didn’t trust the Pony’s action as much as the Ruger magic he loved so much.

He’d get his gun back, and it wouldn’t be hard. Bones had glioblastoma, GBM, the most devastating form of brain tumor. He was on a downward path with no way back. And when Vinko once more had his Ruger in hand, he might even do Bones a favor. Or maybe he’d just let him waste away to nothing.

The
Idaho Statesman
in Boise had published a story about Bones just a week before he’d rolled up in his Porsche. Vinko had missed the tear-jerker when it was published because he hated American newspapers. They all obeyed
sharia
self-censorship when they should be telling the real story of the country’s undermining from within.

But he’d endured a few minutes with the
Statesman
report, which of course included an obligatory resurrection of the ESPN interview with Bones and Vinko, and a line that had made the former QB curdle with anger: “While Bones Jackson went on to the NFL Hall of Fame, and has raised millions for charities ranging from childhood nutrition to Alzheimer’s research, his former quarterback, Vinko Horvat, is now an all-but-forgotten goat farmer in Hayden Lake.”

All-but-forgotten.

No question that the line stung. But being considered all-but-forgotten was good. It was better to have people think he had settled wholly into the hick life. That wouldn’t add up to a man who was also a computer mastermind with ten million followers. They’d find out the truth soon enough. He’d emerge more triumphant than he’d ever been on the gridiron.

Vinko gathered up the milk canisters and poured them into a vat for pasteurization. Then he released the nannies. The kids ran up, sure to be disappointed by the empty teats.

He saw to the cleaning of the milking machine, turned on the drip irrigation for a half-acre of greens and a row of rhubarb, then hurried inside to settle in his office. The shades were drawn. They always were. Nobody would ever get a glimpse in there.

Now it was time to up the ante:

“You saw my words last night. You saw Emma Elkins’s photo earlier today. You saw her guard dog. And I know you’ve seen the photo of her black Muslim boyfriend. You’ve seen Emma’s father, too. And you know who her mother is and where they all live. Even the routes they take to school and work. What are you waiting for?

“You’ve told
me
time and again that you’re organized into cells. You’ve told me you’re armed. You’ve told me you’re all ammoed up, too.

“Now
show
the world what you can do to a rich bitch and her guard dog. Take down the father and mother if you can, but KILL THE GIRL. Slaughter her and you’ll destroy her mother. Destroy her mother and you’ll puncture the armor of the police state we still call America.

“Talk is cheap.

“Blood is priceless.”