Unholy Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller) (23 page)

Still, I wish I could be sure of the man’s game.

I’m dipping deeper into the nether regions of the Net to try to find out. I haven’t found anything yet that would link me to him; nothing, in short, in the realm of arms dealers, terrorists, or bomb makers, all of whom have left many a head behind. And the obvious video of
him
committing the beheading is missing. How does that happen in a wealthy community like Bethesda? Even in the poorest, blackest ghettos of America a cop can’t sneeze without it showing up on someone’s smart phone. But, then again, those purveyors of instant history are primed to react, while the more affluent among us presume degrees of safety and justice not so readily accessed by those further down the food chain.

Okay, here’s the beheading proper. It’s emerging everywhere. There he is, casually sawing away, totally unhurried. Like “another day, another head.”

And there’s the colonel’s head on the move again, from his body to the front seat console, the camera focused once more on the colonel,
sans
skull. I’ve had enough. I don’t need to see any more blood spurting from his open neck. What I want to see is the guy doing the sawing, and he’s not giving us a glimpse of that.

But this … this is interesting. I’m back where I was earlier today, when I discovered Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP, trying to hack the Pentagon, NBC News, a navy shipyard, and one of the giant sump pumps trying to drain the last floodwaters from the Washington Mall. AQAP hasn’t made much headway in its intrusion attempts. I could give them a helpful nudge in the right direction—it’s obvious to me and I’ve done it before—but I won’t, not yet anyway.

I have more critical nudges in mind, so I look once more at ISIS’s social media campaign. ISIS does know how to inspire Muslim youth, and they’re at it 24/7, displaying photos and videos of testosterone-driven young warriors waving AK-47s and their black flags from the barricades and backs of trucks racing to battle. “Hear the commands of Mohammed in your heart and join us” scrolls across the screen in one language after another.

Farther down, I find them urging those “blessed with courage” to become lone wolves. “Our enemies are your enemies, and they are all around you.”

There are so many lone wolves out there they could form packs at this point, at least in cyberspace.

Maybe not only there, though.

I’ve made numerous forays into both AQAP and ISIS online. They have their individual strengths. What they’ve always needed to do was come together to form one big pack. But to accomplish that they needed a persuasive voice that could coordinate their actions to advance their effectiveness.

They’re both Sunnis, after all. They both hate Shias. And they both belong to the branch of Islam that claims eighty-five percent of all believers. They have so much in common. It was only a matter of time before ISIS and AQAP recognized that they had more to gain by cooperation than competition. And wouldn’t a reconciliation that began right here, in the heart of America, prove most fruitful?

That time is now.

I certainly can claim my role. Chainsawing Lana Elkins and her daughter to death will be a tangible demonstration of what can be accomplished when ISIS and AQAP join forces. The
khilafa
, caliphate, will grow exponentially, for if AQAP and ISIS can cooperate here in the harsh land of unbelievers, they can kill at will anywhere at all.

JIMMY MCMASTERS CRACKED OPEN
the door of his hospital room. Guards armed with automatic rifles stood at each end of the long corridor, eyes on anyone seeking access to the patients. They were there to keep the quarantined inside, but looked ready to repel an invasion.

He swore softly to himself. He was dressed and ready to roll, and they were still there. 
Don’t they ever take a damn break?
The hospital was in lockdown, a prison term that sounded painfully appropriate to Jimmy. If he could just get out, he could start rehabilitating his name, if not his health. But he wasn’t feeling too bad. No worse than some epic hangovers he’d known, and he’d managed to race
Sexy Streak
almost two hundred miles per hour during one of them.

As he eased the door shut and backed away, he glanced again at the mirror in the small bathroom. Not as bad as most of the cases he’d seen on TV, or on his now-dead roommate. But Jimmy had been a good-looking piece of work; he wasn’t so sure of himself now. Dozens of women—he was pretty certain he’d passed the half-century mark—had thought enough of him to show their appreciation. Piccolo—the one who really knew how to play a flute—had said he’d “rocked her world.” Now she’d probably like to stone him to death.

He wanted to feel like a hero again, and he had a plan, a
risky
one, admittedly, but he’d go for it—if he could just get the hell out of there.

Jimmy was on the third floor. The old bedsheets ploy wouldn’t work. By the time he tied them to a radiator—the hospital had been built in the 1930s—and ran them across the room to the window, he’d be lucky to make it to the top of the second floor. Jumping twenty feet in his condition was not a cool idea.

He thought about tackling a nurse and stealing her baggy blue clothes, but the one who breezed in and out of his room every hour outweighed him by a good eighty pounds and looked pretty frickin’ angry about having to come anywhere near him. She called him “Matt killer,” even though Lauer wasn’t dead yet, a point that Jimmy had made to her more than once.

“But he’s dyin’ and you’re lookin’ like you got nothin’ but a couple of zits,” she’d said on her last visit, shaking her head as she left. It was as if she’d just discovered there really wasn’t any justice in the world if Matt Lauer might die and Jimmy McMasters actually got to live.

He peeked out the window. Starting to get dark, for all the help that might bring him. At least he spied no guards on the hospital grounds.

Christ!

He heard the XXL nurse in the hallway just as he caught sight of a possible way down.

Jimmy rushed to his bed and in seconds had his eyes closed, gown over his pants and shirt, and the sheet over everything but his face.

A moment later she barreled in. “You dead yet?” she asked, sounding far too hopeful for Jimmy’s comfort.

He cracked an eyelid.
Yeah
,
XXL all right
. “No, but I feel like I’m dying.”

She promptly stuck a thermometer in his mouth. Pulled it out seconds later. One of those fast-acting ones.

“Don’t be such a wimp. Ninety-nine degrees. You’re no worse for wear. Not like my boy, Matt,” she humphed. “Not that you care.”

“Hey, I liked him, too.”

“Yeah? With friends like you, Matt sure don’t need no enemies. And don’t be talkin’ like he’s already dead. That’s disrespectin’ him even more. Makes me wonder if you’ve been workin’ with those terrorists the whole time.”

“If I was working with them, I wouldn’t have let myself get sick.”

She humphed again. “They got sick and now they’re dyin’, so it seems if you was workin’ with them, you’d be sick, too. And there you are, a waste of space and fresh as some damn peaches and cream … for a supposedly
sick
man. Tell you what, though, we’re bringin’ in someone in a few minutes who’s sweatin’ blood he’s so gone. See how you’re doin’ with him around.”

“That sucks.”

She looked at her watch. “Ten minutes. Sendin’ up the orderlies. Be seein’ you soon.” She smiled at him for the first time, then slammed the door.

Jimmy swore to himself again, burst from the bed, and raced back to the window. What he’d spotted before XXL showed up was a drainage pipe about five feet from the edge of a six-inch-deep windowsill.

He cranked the handle for the window and watched it open sideways. Might give him just enough room to squeeze by.

Nope.

His pecs wouldn’t compress enough. All those incline presses and drop-sets had left him a little too pumped, even after days of sickness.

He scraped himself, seeing if he could fit through the window, but no one saw him. Tore open a pustule right through his favorite Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt, the Greenville show, Ronnie Van Zant’s last before the band’s fatal crash on the way to Baton Rouge. The tee was a collector’s item—and Jimmy only had five more of them. That was when he remembered the salve XXL had applied to his worst sores. She’d grimaced applying it.

He found the tube in the bathroom and smothered his bare chest with the greasy ointment. Hated to leave the tee behind, but he had no choice. He was giving someone a real fine gift, even if it did have some of the ooze that came out of those sticky sores.

Now he squeezed right through the open window and found himself thirty seconds later perched near the edge of the sill, a good leap from the drainage pipe.

One more step, dude, and you’re free!

But when he pressed his foot down to get ready to launch himself from the last brick, a chunk of the outer sill broke and the brain buster flew loose. Almost took Jimmy with it, landing and bouncing on brown grass that looked hard as concrete.

He steadied his nerves, tested his footing one more time, and reassured himself all he needed was one good jump and he could slide away to freedom, just as he’d done as a kid after climbing light poles.

But you never were Spider-Man
, a meek voice inside him said.

He nodded in agreement and studied the pipe, shadowy now under the ever-darkening sky.
Oh
,
no
. He’d spotted rust on the length of it. Hadn’t been painted in forever and a day.

His palms felt sweaty as he shifted his weight back to help propel himself over the gap. Not just sweaty, he realized when he rubbed them against the gown: greasy. Really greasy.

“Shit.”

He did his best to wipe off the salve but the reason it proved so soothing was the ointment had been designed to penetrate the deepest layers of skin.

Voices arose in the hallway outside his room. He wasn’t sure if it was XXL, the orderlies, soldiers, or someone else.

Just go!

He hurled himself at the drainage pipe, regret throbbing through him the moment he felt himself falling short.

But no. With a desperate reach he grabbed it and jammed his fingers between the rusty metal and the brick wall, skinning his knuckles. Then he started slipping.
Good God!
And the rusty metal strips holding the pipe to the brick wall began to break loose.

The whole apparatus fell backward. The only blessing—if you could call it that—was Jimmy could now wrap his arms and legs around the pipe and hold on, no longer hampered by greasy hands.

Down he went, faster and faster in gravity’s sure grip, a nail stuck to the mighty head of a magnetized hammer.

• • •

Emma was pregnant. No doubt about it. She’d used up five test sticks. Every one came up pink. She had no idea what she was going to do.

Here she was waltzing down the stairs with Sufyan to have dinner with her folks
and 
Tahir—this was happening way too often—and she hadn’t even told her boyfriend the nightmare news. Even so, for all her casual airs, she feared he sensed her doom already. He’d sure been asking her a lot of questions: “What’s the matter?” “You feel all right?” “You sure?” No surprise why: she’d vomited in his presence four times. Morning sickness. Except not always in the morning; the fourth time had come five minutes ago.

“Stomach flu,” she’d lied.

“You have got to tell your mom. You should see a doctor.”

“No!” she’d snapped. “She’s got too much to worry about. Don’t say anything. Promise?”

Sufyan might not have figured it out but she knew her mom would put two and two together.

He wasn’t promising. He’d stopped on the stairs and was staring at Em as her dad called them down to dinner again.

Em knew Sufyan was going to have to own up because it was the condom that broke, not that that excuse would wash with her mother who’d been telling her the same message since she’d first shown interest in boys: “The pill is to stop pregnancy, and the condom’s not a bad backup but it’s also good to stop STDs.” Always reminding her that even a condom could fail to protect her from herpes.

Em had got something a whole lot worse than an STD: she’d gotten pregnant.

“The last of the halibut,” her dad announced as they walked into the dining room. “Cooked it in a creamy dill sauce. Your favorite,” he said to Em, who felt like hurling all over again. It really was her favorite fish dish, so why did it smell worse than a septic tank?

“Great. Thanks.” He was always trying to fix foods she liked, but she’d been eating less and less because of morning sickness. Maybe he’d noticed; her portion tonight was smaller.

Thank God.

Em urged herself to eat. She felt a hint of her gag reflex when she flaked off a forkful of the white fish, but managed to swallow it.

Tahir’s eyes were on her. He rarely said much but his gaze felt penetrating. She and Sufyan had talked about that. Her boyfriend said there had been times when he would have sworn his uncle could read his mind.

What else could he read?
Em wondered.
My body?

“So what have you been up to?” Don asked Tahir.