Unholy Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller) (2 page)

Nobody fell into the cruiser, but its occupants looked every bit as battered as Jimmy felt. Most of the men were cut and bleeding. Then Jimmy realized that he was, too.

Jimmy hoisted up the piccolo player and rolled over the port rail with her onto the sand.

“Stay low,” he warned, still fearing the gunmen.

For the first time, Jimmy heard sirens. The local police department appeared to have just arrived. Several officers ran through the rubble, guns drawn.

Still expecting a blast, Jimmy instinctively covered the young woman with his body. A moment later, though, he was shocked to hear one of the bearded men shout, “We surrender.” He peeked over the gunwale and saw all but one of them had their hands up. The exception was gripping an arm with a bone sticking out of his skin just below the elbow, red as a gutted gator.

Jimmy’s eyes darted back and forth between the terrorists, looking in vain for a suicide bomber or a backpack with a bomb, anything that could hide deadly explosives like the ones that had killed seventy-three men, women, and children in Liberty Square in Philly last weekend, and destroyed the cracked bell that had once rung out for liberty.

He saw nothing suspicious, yet everything was … even the way the bearded men offered their bloody hands to be cuffed as they shouted their allegiance to ISIS.

Hundreds of celebrants watched the arrested men in mute shock; others were rushing to attend to their children on the beach. A few used their cellphones to shoot video of the aftermath. Jimmy figured he was already on YouTube, or destined to debut in minutes.

In short order the EMTs had patched up the piccolo player and escorted her and other injured band members to an ambulance. Two police officers shook Jimmy’s hand. “We got damn lucky ’cause of you,” the huskier one said as they led him to their patrol car. “Could have been a massacre. They had enough ammo for a war. Crashing them onto the beach bought us some time. Way to go, Jimmy.”

“I got lucky, too,” he replied, still feeling a little numb as he climbed into the cruiser’s backseat.

The cops whisked Jimmy over to Oysterton General Hospital, where the nurses and doctors made a big fuss over him. At this point he was catching on: he’d become a local hero.

At no great cost, it seemed. He wasn’t too beat up. A few contusions, cuts, but that was it. Bandaged, he headed down to the Shady Lady Lounge that very afternoon, pursued by journalists and camera crews, of course.

He danced with half the house over the next few hours, changing partners so fast their faces blurred as much as the derricks in the mist had earlier, while the drinks—courtesy of friends and strangers alike—provided their own special haze.

Jimmy found the attention of a young gal in a sleeveless LSU tee and short red skirt particularly alluring. By closing time they were hee-hawing in the back of the bar.

Stepping out of the men’s a few minutes later, he got an “open invitation”—that was how she put it—from an old girlfriend. He figured the invites would last all summer, if his luck held out.

It didn’t. Neither did the nation’s.

LANA ELKINS WATCHED THE
surrender of the ISIS terrorists on a satellite feed. Their meekness scared her more than any of the brutal suicide bombings of the past few weeks. Gruesome as those attacks had been, there had been nothing secret about their murderous results. But this surrender made no sense.

It’s too easy.

This was a mystery. Either ISIS’s recruiting standards had softened—and there was no intelligence suggesting that—or the captured men had yet to make their real threats known. Islamists, feared for their willingness to die so they could kill others, simply did not allow themselves to be cuffed and hauled off like common criminals.

Not during the Summer of Blood.

Lana wished she were down in Oysterton to witness this firsthand, not in a large windowless room in the heart of her cybersecurity firm in Bethesda, Maryland. The secure space had been constructed with special metal cladding inside the walls and doors to prevent cyberattacks and signal snooping from others. With proprietary encryption and other cutting-edge information security for their own work—and the U.S. under siege—it had become their war room. All her senior staff were pulling eighteen-hour days at hastily assembled workstations, their mission clear: intercept jihadi communications and provide them immediately to the National Security Agency, which had contracted with Lana, once again, for the special services of CyberFortress.

Lana had also told her staff to “hack to pieces” specific targets promulgating hatred both against westerners and the moderate Muslims who formed the great majority of the faith’s followers worldwide. Islamic moderates in the U.S. and elsewhere were now in the crosshairs of the crazies as much as anyone else, if not more so.

And no country was being targeted by the most radical elements of Islam more than the U.S. The intelligence community was coordinating a wide spectrum of strategies to try to thwart the first real invasion of the States since the War of 1812.

The footage showed the bearded men in Oysterton shouting as they were led to a police van. “Can you tell what they’re saying?” she asked Jeff Jensen, her VP for security. He’d already called upon one of his former navy colleagues, who was talking to the Oysterton police chief.

“Pretty standard stuff,” Jensen replied. “Proclaiming their devotion to the caliphate. At least one of them is speaking in English. He just yelled that thousands of them are already in the U.S. Thousands more are coming.”

Bullshit
, Lana thought.
Maybe hundreds
. Which was frightening enough.

The consensus of the intelligence community was that mid-size pleasure boats packed with ruthless Islamists had stolen past the hundreds of thousands of government and private vessels trying to escape flooded marinas and ports from Miami to Boston, San Diego to Seattle.

In short, America’s vast coastlines had devolved into chaos as owners tried to save their investments from the ravages of rising seas by fleeing to open waters, only to find shifting tides and underwater hazards setting off collisions and sinking countless ships. That created only more hazards, and thus more accidents, leaving the country with the most vulnerable coastlines in the world—and a slow-motion invasion of suicide bombers.

The U.S. Navy and Coast Guard were doing their best, but no federal agency, including the military, had ever drilled for this kind of catastrophe, and the results were apparent every time Lana linked to satellite views of the nation’s principal ports. She clicked onto a video feed of the mess in Boston Harbor, where an ocean liner had run aground on a sunken container ship late yesterday, rolling onto its port side. A submarine was cruising past it, along with four fishing trawlers, six luxury cabin cruisers, a three-masted sailboat, and what appeared to be dozens of lookie-loo kayakers, paddle boarders, and canoers. All were squeezing around the half-sunken wreck while a phalanx of tugboats ran thick chains to the fully exposed starboard side of the liner’s massive black hull. There had been numerous injuries in the grounding, but no deaths—yet.

In contrast, in the less populated Gulf of Mexico, the biggest concern had been the possibility of attacks on offshore oil platforms, not invasions. But the territory had proved too vast to cover properly. The navy hadn’t even had one of its new, heavily armed and fast-moving Mark VI patrol boats anywhere in the vicinity of Oysterton.

Despite all this, shore-dwellers around the country were making do, even managing to party during the holiday weekend. Down on the Gulf, other than in the Big Easy, which had flooded as badly as any city in the world, some folks had been so far removed from the madness that they could still plan on a fun-filled Labor Day.

Lana felt a light tap on her shoulder. Galina Bortnik handed her the phone, whispering, “Mr. Holmes.”

Galina was a brilliant young Muscovite hacker whom Lana had helped save from the man who’d been behind the nuclear attack on the Antarctic ice shelf.

“Yes, Mr. Holmes?” Lana was always formal with Bob in the presence of others.

“What do you think?” The deputy director of the NSA rarely minced words with her, especially with the country under fire.

“I’m not buying it,” she replied. “How soon is Homeland Security going to get down there and take over?”

“Forty-five minutes. Not soon enough.”

She imagined her weary, septuagenarian friend raking his steel-gray hair back, a recently acquired habit when exasperated.

“So far,” he said, “we’re just lucky there isn’t a shoe bomber in that bunch.”

“That we know of.” Lana glanced at the screen showing the police van driving toward downtown Oysterton. It did not take a hyperactive imagination to envision the vehicle exploding at any second.

“Don’t those locals know we have protocols for this sort of apprehension?” Lana asked.

“Evidently not,” Holmes replied.

“Send me down,” she said.

“We can’t do that. I was calling to let you know that they’re happy about this in Congress.”

“They must really be hungry for heroes.”

“Or money. I think they’ll be using this capture to push for more local control of our national defense. Anyway, you’ve been warned about the mountebanks on the Hill.”

Lana knew that even small shifts toward decentralizing defense would mean additional federal funding for the locals, which in turn would mean more political support for incumbents who were bringing the pork home. All at a time when the nation desperately needed follow-through on existing
national
directives. Just look at the shoddy police procedures in Oysterton. The cops had run up like they were rushing to an open bar at a barbecue, instead of keeping a safe distance from men who had already fired weapons and might well have bombs.

She took another glance at the monitor, shaking her head at what could still prove to be a debacle down there.

Or a victory. Don’t rule that out completely
, she told herself.

Galina caught Lana’s attention with a slight Slavic nod, pushing black bangs that needed trimming away from her eyes. She was cute as a cocker spaniel, but had a vicious cyber bite, which was why Lana had brought her back to the United States and a job at CyberFortress.

“These close-ups?” she began.

Lana nodded.

“I think they’re just enough for screen shots. We could use facial recognition.”

“Make it happen,” Lana replied.

The video improved measurably when the first television news crew in Oysterton showed a ground-level shot of the local police putting the seven banged-up, bloody men through a perp walk. They were so unprotected a Jack Ruby could have jumped out and killed them all. Instead, they were jostled by freelance news crews and a throng of tourists with cameras.

Jensen had been by Lana’s side long enough to read her frustration.

“It’s a mess. I keep waiting for a bomb to go off.”

“They did a quick pat-down before you came in,” said a woman with red hair and a swan-like neck from the end of the table. “That’s all,” she added, shaking her head.

Lana nodded at Maureen, her most recent hire. MIT. Jensen had been her first. He was a navy veteran, a cryptographer during the two Gulf Wars, and a Mormon with five children and a doting wife carrying number six.

There were lots of Mormons in the spy service, as true now as it had been at the height of the Cold War. Lana hadn’t known Jensen’s religious affiliation during their first interview, but she’d sensed right away that she could trust him. A panoply of deception-detection tests—polygraph, voice analysis, Facial Action Coding Systems, and pupil-size studies—had reinforced her eerily accurate gut. The man was dependable. No vices.

Not true for her. Lana had a failing that could tank her career if she ever let it get the better of her again, as it had several years ago. Of late, Lana had felt the urge to gamble recrudescing, like a tumor that refused to shrivel up and die. It had been tough enough to fight those impulses when she’d actually had to find a poker table or dealer, but with online gaming, the ability to wager any time of the day or night was never farther away than her phone.

She hadn’t been to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting in months. Hadn’t thought she needed to. She’d been too busy trying to protect the country from cyberattacks, a high-stakes proposition in and of itself. But thoughts of cards and betting had been insinuating themselves into her awareness every few minutes of late, a desire that was potentially careerending for her. The intelligence community couldn’t afford to have operatives falling deep into debt gambling.

You can bet on that.

Gambling lingo, even when she was chastising herself. Although a look at her financial assets—which she forced herself to endure once a month—was sufficient to bring back the wincing memory of her last betting binge. That was when she’d gambled away enough money to have paid for her daughter Emma’s college education.

Lana had found professional help, but the sad truth for her was the lure of gambling wasn’t only about money. The lure was the thrill that came in the teeming titillating pause that lay between hope and outcome. Not unlike the rush that came from hunting—and finding—cyberterrorists.