Unholy Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller) (25 page)

The mystery of Tahir Hijazi commanded all of her attention as she stared at a freeze frame of his chiseled face on her screen. She was certain he’d beheaded the colonel, though she’d shared that conclusion with no one. First, she wanted to know what he was really doing in the U.S., besides watching over his nephew and—if his words the other night were true—her daughter. The revelations she’d unearthed so far about his role with Al Qaeda and his emergence as a double agent on behalf of the U.S. had been startling. But had he added “triple agent” to his portfolio by working with ISIS as well? Moreover, the very thought that Em’s welfare might at times be in the hands of a man who’d decapitated Lana’s own would-be assassin proved an unnerving prospect, no matter how much she had welcomed Tahir’s timely intervention. She would have brainstormed with Deputy Director Holmes about the Sudanese, but her boss was still in the ICU.

Maybe it was time to open an early morning line of communication with another colleague.

Using a data tunneling protocol Lana felt confident was secure, she texted Galina Bortnik on the off chance that her employee was working. Galina had reported keeping odd hours to care for her daughter Alexandra, who was ending chemo for her leukemia. The cyberspy had also been using her late nights and early mornings to shoehorn in efforts to breach NSA security, per Holmes’s assignment to her. His replacement, Marigold Winters, whom Lana found so repugnant—and a control freak of the first order—was apparently unaware of Galina’s mission. If Flowers had any knowledge of it, Lana felt her old nemesis would have stopped Galina immediately, fearful of revelations about security lapses on her newly established watch.

In these dark hours, Lana wasn’t even comfortable with the notion that she herself would be around long enough to see the results of Galina’s investigation. Just after midnight, Lana had been shot through with adrenaline when she’d found her own face plastered on a poster on an ISIS website. Modeled after the iconic ones of the American West, it read “Wanted Dead or Alive, Lana Elkins. $100 million reward.”

A hundred million?
Lana couldn’t help but feel flattered—in the worst possible way. Surely the FBI would counter by providing protection by more than one agent per shift.

Surely?
The bureau was stretched to the breaking point by domestic challenges that ranged over the rest of the country.

The ISIS site then noted what Lana had registered instantly: the reward was the biggest ever offered, more than three times the bounty paid for Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam’s brutal sons, who had made their infamous father seem puppyish by comparison; and quadruple the bucks posted for bin Laden.

ISIS was also calling for all true warriors of Islam in the States to hunt down and kill Cairo, though their financial commitment to those who achieved this goal was considerably less: $100,000.

Lana looked up, checking on the old Malinois as he rose a few feet away to begin one of his periodic patrols of the house. Then she knocked off a text to Galina: “Have you come across anything involving Tahir?”

The irony remained that Galina, whose employment at CyberFortress was tenuous—thanks to senatorial efforts to try to force the recent Russian émigrée to work for the NSA—had more power to investigate that agency than anyone else in the nation.

Within seconds of sending off the message, Lana’s private phone rang, the one she’d used for gambling. She answered it warily.

“It is me, Galina,” the younger woman said in her distinctive accent.

“I’m not sure this is a safe phone,” Lana found herself whispering.

“It is safe for me and you right now, but you should know that it took me only forty-five minutes to break the secure connection to your phone.”

Had Galina done more than figure out Lana’s encrypted connection? 
The gambling?
That was the real worry, but Lana couldn’t ask. She could only trust that Galina hadn’t come across her visits to texasholdem.com. Failing that, might she trust that Galina, hailing from the free-for-all corruption of post-Soviet Russia, would think little of her vice? At least Lana had forsworn any gambling of late.

But it still left her acutely uneasy about talking on the phone—and highly dependent on Galina’s assessment of her security.
Which she just
broke
. Lana’s sense of vulnerability was only heightened by recognizing that untold hordes would want to claim the $100 million price tag recently placed on her head, including many Americans of a distinctly non-Islamic, but highly greedy, persuasion.

“Tahir says his nephew, Sufyan, is in ‘difficulties.’ That was how he put it. He has been communicating with people in Sudan. I think he wants to get the boy out of the U.S.”

“Does he say that specifically?”

“No. I am saying what you call the ‘tone’ of his words.”

Galina was being modest. Her English was excellent, other than her reluctance to use contractions, which was not unusual for those for whom English was a second or third language. Better than Lana’s Russian, which she considered fair at best.

“I followed Tahir to ISIS and AQAP sites,” Galina went on. “Access logs. I have not cracked their actual messages yet. But there are so many of them to ISIS and another one from him to AQAP. A lot of men go between those two, like they are trying to decide which one to join, but Tahir’s back-and-forth is much more sophisticated. I do not know if he is communicating with them or trying to hack them. He might be working with both of them.”

Lana agreed, having done that kind of double duty herself on numerous occasions.

“But he seems to know his way around the websites. He does not hesitate. He enters them easily. Then he disappears into them in ways I have not been able to follow. Like he finds black holes in their security, or already knows their keys. I am working on it.”

“Are you finding any evidence of him compromising NSA’s perimeter?”

“Yes, but I am not sure he got very far.”

Doesn’t matter
. That was great news, as far as Lana was concerned. It would give Galina ample justification, beyond Holmes’s order, for targeting Tahir, a legal resident, should a Senate committee ever threaten to crucify her for investigating him. Lana wouldn’t put it past those senators to use any tool in their box to try to pressure Galina into working for the NSA.

“I wonder if he detected me watching him,” Galina said. “He is very good, so he could have given me a trail to follow to the NSA. It was like he wanted me to see what he was up to—or anyone else doing online surveillance of him. Sending a signal even. But I do not know why he would want to do that.”

To alert us?
Lana wondered.
To key us in?
Was he another spectral presence leaving cyber breadcrumbs behind?
In case something happened to him?

“You said he didn’t get very far?”

“That was strange. He hacked five upper-level operatives with the highest security clearances. But once in their domains, he vanished.”

“Meaning you lost him?”

“No, he left the agency.”

“That is strange.”

“Show and tell, maybe.” Galina appeared to like her newfound Americanisms. “He might be as good as Oleg.”

Oleg Dernov, for whom Galina had been hacking at the time she and Lana first encountered each other last year. Dernov was as vicious—and talented—a cyberterrorist as Lana had ever met.

Until Tahir?
Possibly
. Lana still couldn’t figure out the Sudanese’s game. “So his nephew is supposed to be having ‘difficulties,’” she said. “Did he give any indication of what they might be?”

“No, that was the only reference.”

“Did he mention my daughter, Emma?”

“No.”

“How’s Alexandra?” Galina’s seven-year-old.

“Maybe good. We have to wait to see if the cancer stays gone. She is starting to sleep better. I am not. The doctor says she has a good chance.”

“I’m so glad to hear that.”

“I pray it is good enough.”

“I hope so,” Lana replied.

“She must see the doctor in a month.”

Cairo lumbered back into the living room, completing another of his nightly patrols. She called him over and rubbed his head. She had the urge to pull him close, but remembered Ed Holmes’s warning: “Cairo doesn’t cuddle.”

“I should tell you about something I found about Alexandra in the NSA files,” Galina said, as if she’d been mulling it over.

“Really?”
What the devil?
“Whose?”

“Marigold Winters.”

“Did Tahir break into hers? Did you follow him there?”

“No. I went there because she replaced the deputy director. I thought I should check her security. I found emails from Flowers to Senator Bob Ray Willens of Louisiana telling him to threaten me with the loss of Alexandra’s medical care if I did not go to work for the NSA.” Through Lana’s efforts, Alexandra had been receiving cancer treatments at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, one of the highest ranking pediatric facilities in the U.S. “Can they take that away?”

“No.” Lana felt her blood pressure shoot so high so quickly the roots of her hair burned. It was as if someone—Flowers, perhaps—had grabbed a fistful of it. “Are you thinking of going to the NSA?” She had to ask. If anything could compel a parent to surrender to threats, it would be one to their child’s health.

No, not health. Her life.

“No. This Flowers woman must be a bully. I know you can take care of her, right?”

“I will. Absolutely.”

But how to fight back flummoxed Lana, although she had a chit or two she could cash in at the White House that might get her a few minutes with the President. Whether she could work her way past the palace guard to actually make her way into the Oval Office was another matter entirely. But Flowers was engaging in a grotesque abuse of power. She needed to be reined in—or exposed. Threatening a child’s health care might even be sufficient to send her packing for good.

“I’ll need a copy of what you found,” she told Galina.

“It could be traced to me.”

“Not after I launder it.”

Lana signed off, sitting back with the phone by her side. The one she’d always used for gambling. The one Galina had found all on her own. The Russian was an amazing digital analyst.

And then it hit her again: the itch to gamble. Lana found herself imagining face cards, then a pair of aces, on her phone, with “YOU WIN! YOU WIN!” flashing in red. She noticed the time, almost three-thirty.

You can’t.

For so many reasons. Without question, someone else would now know. And that someone had a cancer-stricken child who needed Lana’s support and strength, not her weakness.

Buck up.

Cairo rose quickly from his resting place. He must have heard something. He might be older and slower, but his ears were as alert as radar dishes.

Lana had her Sig Sauer under a cushion by her right hand, racked and ready, though she couldn’t fathom anyone slipping past her door without the security system signaling her.

What she hadn’t planned on was a person close to her slipping out a door with her own deep secrets.

• • •

Jimmy ran
Sexy Streak
without lights till he was far from Oysterton. Then he set the GPS for the oil platform on the electronic navigation charts and watched a white dot blink alive on the blue screen. It looked so harmless it was hard to imagine the horror of the beheadings that had taken place 140 miles ahead of him.

They’re crazy
, he thought.

“Maybe as crazy as you are for going after them,” he said aloud.

He turned on a bow light, keeping the beam on low for another mile, then switched on the big headlights and pushed the chrome throttle forward.

The race boat responded with a bolt, racing up to 80 mph in seconds. It felt like the Lamborghini one of his rich clients had loaned him for a weekend.

The onrush of speed thrilled Jimmy, as it always had, but it also brought alive a deep fear of the industrial refuse floating in the Gulf. Hard enough to avoid at times in daylight. In darkness it could prove deadly.

Without looking away from the water, Jimmy put in ear buds and switched to CNN on the boat’s communications console. The network was reporting that widespread inoculations of Americans with smallpox vaccine had been scuttled after a suicide bomber blew himself up in a line in Rockville Center, New York. ISIS then pumped up the terror exponentially by announcing that infected Muslims were in lines across the U.S. “They will infect everyone who tries to defy Allah’s will.”

That announcement, according to the news network, was leading to widespread panic and fighting, with attacks on anyone perceived as Middle Eastern or Muslim. The CDC had advised health authorities in all fifty states to suspend the vaccination program, “pending the full restoration of civil order.”

“Good luck with that,” Jimmy said to himself.

He feared he’d done nothing but help those ISIS terrorists from the time he’d forced them ashore from these very waters.

All you can do now is what you’re doing.

Jimmy felt like he was in the middle of a war movie in which a soldier goes off on a solo mission to save the day. But he heard no stirring music in the background, only the powerful rumble of those twin outboards pushing him ever closer to the oil platform.

To destiny
, he thought.

Or to die.

Or to save someone worth saving. Maybe a whole lot of someones called Americans.

• • •

Lana finally dozed on the couch, waking ninety minutes later to Cairo’s nails clicking on the hardwood floor. His dark eyes stared at her from above his white muzzle, as if to say, “You okay?”

She nodded at him, just to see his reaction. He turned away and continued his umpteenth tour of her house. She realized she admired his ingrained sense of purpose—protection—and shared it fully.

Aware once more of her throbbing leg wound, she went back online, shocked to find video of an attack on Long Island that had targeted people who’d been waiting half the night to get their families vaccinated. She saw shredded children’s clothing and shoes and copious quantities of blood.