Unholy Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller) (14 page)

LANA’S PHONE RANG AS
she sped down the Beltway. She’d just finished an early morning prep session with Deputy Director Bob Holmes for their testimony tomorrow before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and was headed to her office in Bethesda. With cars and trucks ripping past the Prius at 85 to 90 mph, she pulled onto the shoulder to take the call, trailed by Agent Robin Maray in the Charger. The nation might be enduring gas and diesel shortages but drivers weren’t slowing down. Full-bore ahead, wherever that might lead them, as if what really fueled them was a general, underlying panic. There were ample reasons for it.

The flooding of coastlines continued unabated, with hundreds of thousands of refugees from shoreline communities pressing inward. The number of displaced Americans had yet to be calculated with precision but the estimates now ranged upwards of three million—on the East Coast alone. Southern California was seeing similar numbers. Communities on both coasts stood abandoned, roofs now low-lying islands in the rising seas. Long Island, with the geometry of a table top, had shrunk by twenty percent.

The news on Lana’s phone was no less disturbing. The fashionable young sandy-haired lawyer who’d briefed her and Holmes had just sent Lana what could be a preview of tomorrow’s hearing, video of a corpulent member of the Select Committee on Intelligence denouncing CyberFortress: “They’re getting massive, million-dollar contracts, letting Lana Elkins fatten on the fear that grips our great land. That money should be going straight to the fine law enforcement officers who now form the front line of our mighty nation’s defense.” Then the senior senator from Louisiana castigated Lana further for “stealing” Galina Bortnik: “Elkins not only drains our treasury, she drains our brain power, too, spending taxpayer money to hire a brilliant young Russian computer hacker who’s only here because brave members of our military saved her from the treacherous claws of Russian thugs.”

Lana winced at the memory of the SEALs who’d died on that mission, but the senator wasn’t playing fair: she and Don came close to dying as well, and both had received secret commendations from the President for their heroism. Not the first time in Lana’s case.

Will this crap never end?
The political wars.

Lana had so much going on right now her head felt as if it would explode. The single most harrowing message on her phone today had come from Jeff Jensen when she’d been on her way out to Fort Meade: a Steel Fist diatribe against her daughter that included a command to his followers to kill Emma—and ended with the words “Blood is priceless” that had almost sickened Lana.

First, Tahir had threatened her daughter’s life, and now the other end of the political spectrum, Steel Fist, had openly called for his followers to “slaughter” Emma to “destroy her mother.”

Those goddamn animals.

The latest threats from Steel Fist came in the midst of a short breather from terrorism. More than seventy-two hours had passed without an attack or bombing. Commentators were claiming the relative calm reflected the “stiffening backbone of the country in a time of crisis.” Other partisans were heralding a new age in national defense as “local law enforcement steps up to the plate.”

Their chorus of clichés was joined by senators and members of Congress offering paeans to the locals while also urging the appropriation of billions of dollars for the nation’s biggest defense contractors for more fighter jets, aircraft carriers, and pricey missile defense systems that would do next to nothing to fight the asymmetric war in which America was now engaged. Fighter jets to try to stop small bands of terrorists determined to slip past the country’s flooded borders so they could create large-scale mayhem in crowded cities and rural outposts? Whoever had said you couldn’t possibly burn the candle of national defense at both ends clearly hadn’t anticipated politics and budgeting in an era of invasion. With her entire country under attack, Lana felt strongly that centralized command was the
sine qua
non
of an effective
national
defense.

As for cybersecurity, amazingly enough, it had gone begging once again. Voters saw kinetic war because it showed on their video screens—bombs, blood, and broken bodies—so they supported steps to stop it. Understandable. Steps needed to be taken. Clearly. But what too many influential voices on the Hill and in the media failed to recognize was the “invisible invasion” of the country’s infrastructure that was taking place every second of every day by cybersaboteurs.

Those attacks came from carefully deployed electrons. Try selling that to a science-starved electorate. Not as sexy as a new class of fighter jets, nor as immediately powerful as next-generation smart bombs with their own visuals, but terrorists had formed a fifth column from afar by infiltrating millions of private and government devices to create botnets that hijacked the country’s own vast resources into an attack against their very hosts: jiu jitsu in the cyber age.

Lana took a breath and checked her rear-view, where Robin sat in the Charger with his aviator sunglasses fixed on her. She put the Prius in drive just as her phone went off again. She was tempted to take off, but couldn’t: a glance at a text showed tension on the home front now. Emma wanted Sufyan to come over. She couldn’t go to school. The principal had said the district didn’t have the resources to ensure the safety of its students with Emma in their midst.

At least she’s asking permission
.
And using her encryption
.
Finally
. Maybe she’d even remembered to keep her Mace around, though Lana had her doubts; every time she’d checked, Em had come up empty-handed.

“U can c him @ home,” Lana texted back.

Tap-tap-tap.

Robin was at her window. “Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine.” Lana glanced up. Couldn’t see his eyes behind those shades.
Just as well
. “I’m going to get moving here.”

But everything wasn’t fine. Her personal life was flooded, too—with confusion. Which might have explained her sudden itch to gamble, so palpable it felt like psoriasis of the psyche.

She grabbed her second phone. Her fingers stabbed the dial pad. Not for texasholdem.com: a Gamblers Anonymous meeting. Tonight at seven o’clock at the Hope Center in Bethesda.

You’re going, no matter what.

She got back on the road, pulling into CF’s underground garage fifteen minutes later.

Robin remained in her wake to the elevator where they stood silently as the security guard brought them up to her company’s reception area.

She noticed that Robin received “Good mornings” and smiles at every turn, already a fixture. Even the men, Jeff Jensen included, appeared impressed by him.

Maureen gave him a big smile
and
a wave. Lana could scarcely believe her youngest employee, at twenty-three, could be interested in a man about twice her age.

But fit
, Lana thought.

Don’t remind me.

Maureen tugged Lana aside. “May we talk privately?”

“Sure.”

Lana led the young woman into her office, where Maureen spoke up quickly: “I found something incongruous in the most popular Steel Fist chat room.”

“Shoot.” Lana arranged herself at her desk and started up her desktop computer.

“Almost all those guys rail against you, Emma, and Sufyan. Some are now raging about your dog and Don, but you and Emma and her boyfriend are the chief recipients of their animus.”

Lana nodded, pleased by Maureen’s use of language at a time when so many others were dumbing down their speech.

“But there’s one self-proclaimed white supremacist who conspicuously, at least to my way of thinking, omits any reference to Sufyan.”

“That is odd. Does he talk about any people of color?”

“Plenty. He’s got nothing good to say about Senator Booker or a certain President, and he hates—he puts that word in caps—the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and their friends on the left, like Cornel West and Amy Goodman. He’s quite vociferous, too. I’ve compiled three pages of those comments.”

“So where do you think we should go from here?” Lana knew the route she wanted Maureen to take, but waited to see if the cyber swallows would actually land in Capistrano for the MIT grad.

“You should give me the go-ahead to hack Tahir Hijazi.”

Conspicuous, indeed
, thought Lana, who quickly gave her permission.

Lana’s own effort ranged far from both Steel Fist’s chat rooms and Tahir’s efforts to stir up hatred against her family. Assuming it was Tahir, which felt like an eminently reasonable supposition.

She was far too busy digging into deeper vaults where Tahir’s quietest secrets apparently hid. And if her work and Maureen’s converged, it would give Lana a chance to observe the young woman’s skills firsthand.

Lana settled at her workstation to return to her probe of Tahir’s background, which had confirmed his strong associations with Al Qaeda and the CIA and—by extension—the NSA.

Now let’s see just how many hands that Sudanese ex-pat is playing.

She paused over her use of gambling lingo, which sometimes could infect every other thought—a sure sign of the tumult she felt. Another appeared in the next instant when she checked her watch for the third time since talking to Maureen and saw that she had seven hours and forty-three minutes until the Gamblers Anonymous meeting.

Then four hours and thirty-seven minutes.

An hour and twelve minutes.

After her least productive day in memory, it was finally time to leave. Which meant that Tim Angier, the FBI’s second-shift agent after Robin, would learn that one of the nation’s top cyberwarriors was an addict.

Lana shrugged off the concern. With five million Americans enrolled in one twelve-step program or another, high-ranking members of the intelligence community were likely represented in significant numbers.

Still, the thought of the meeting made her nervous. The anonymity she sought was also the anonymity she feared.

• • •

Emma glared so fiercely at Don he felt as if she’d reduce him to ash if she could. He’d just told Em he didn’t want Sufyan and her going to the mall. The young man was standing by her side.

“It’s less than a mile away. I’m sick of being stuck in this house all day long. It’s like a prison.”

She sounded screechy, every word a drill bit to Don’s brain. Even Jojo’s upright ears were rotating like satellite dishes. So was his head as he followed the argument, as if he understood the words.

Don tried to keep his response soft. “Em,” he pleaded, “you saw the message from that madman. You know he’s got ten million racist followers. I’m not Superman—”

“That’s for sure,” she cut him off to say.

Breathe
. “Which means I can’t protect you everywhere.”

“We don’t need you to. I’ve got this.” She pulled a blond wig out of her shoulder bag. “Nobody’s going to recognize me if you’re not ten feet behind me all the time. I’ll be fine.”

He sighed. “You really think that’s going to throw them off your scent?”

Long straight hair parted in the middle, it looked like it had been modeled on Gwen Stefani.

Or Stefani’s just been scalped
, which Don felt would be more in the spirit of the times.

“And I’ll wear some shitty-looking shorts, totally out of style so nobody will recognize me.”

“And what’s Sufyan going to wear?” he asked patiently, wishing he hadn’t when Emma nudged her boyfriend and the young man whipped out an afro wig that he’d been holding behind his back. It looked like it had been lifted off the head of boxing promoter Don King.

Don couldn’t stifle a laugh.
Bad
move. Emma now glared so hard her eyes were slits.

“Look, you two won’t be going to a Halloween party for a few weeks. And in those get-ups you’re not going to fool anyone.”

“With sunglasses,” Emma protested, “I think we will.”

Interestingly enough, Sufyan hadn’t said a word. Don figured Tahir’s nephew wasn’t nearly so practiced at defiance.

“No, sorry.” Don shook his head.

“Let’s go,” Emma said to Sufyan, throwing her wig on hastily. The middle part ran at a diagonal across her own hair, which hung down and looked so bizarre it would have drawn more attention to her than the wig itself. “Put it on,” Em said to Sufyan.

The young man demurred, but scooted out the door to the garage right behind Emma.

Jojo looked back and forth, as though unsure of what to do. “Don’t look at me,” Don said to him. “I don’t know, either. But duty calls. Come.”

Don and the dog trailed the pair into the garage. The electronic door was rising. Emma fired up the Fusion. Sufyan was closing the passenger door. Em started backing up.

“Sit,” Don commanded Jojo.

He ran inside and grabbed the Glock from the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet, then bolted back into the garage, determined to try to keep them safe.

Em had closed the door.

He swore, raced to the panel and pressed the button to open it. Lana had ordered him a remote from the security company but it hadn’t arrived yet. Then he opened the door to his pickup, signaled Jojo into the cab, and backed out as daylight appeared behind him.

Emma was long gone.

Don backed onto the street fast, thankful that at least he knew their plans, unless … she wanted to dodge him completely at this point.

Swearing profusely, he gunned the old truck, which had more ponies under the hood than a lot of newer cars.

He tore through the neighborhood, watching crosswalks and corners for children, then turned onto a main boulevard to the mall, which soon loomed before him, a colossus of consumerism.

God knows what entrance they might have used.

Don turned into the first one, making a sweep of a parking area the size of FedEx Field. Lots of Fusions, but none was Emma’s. No cockamamie blond wigs or Don King lookalikes, either.

He circumnavigated the mall, which took almost forty minutes, acutely aware that his was a cursory search at best.

Don felt panic creeping up his spine. He trolled all the surrounding neighborhoods and mini-malls, even making a pass by Sufyan’s house. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Jojo sat beside him, looking back and forth from Don to the parking lot. Ninety minutes more passed by the time Don was done. Still no sign of them. He was frantic.