Unholy Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller) (38 page)

Em doesn’t reply. Her eyes are fixed on the whirling teeth of the saw.

“I’m not playing games, Emma. If you don’t come out right now, this time I’ll throw your mother’s foot in there, then her hands. I’ll throw her head in, if I have to. I promised her you’d live if she came out. I keep my promises.”

“Come out, Emma.” Lana finds herself praying softly for Emma’s survival. As a confirmed non-believer, she’d never do that for herself. But as a mother, those words come swiftly and with the most desperate hope.

Emma steps out, lies next to her mother. In seconds she’s fully clamped.

The woman lets the chainsaw idle while she pauses by Lana’s side. “You don’t remember me yet, do you?”

Lana shakes her head.

The woman leans over her, the back of her head to the camera above them. She peels up Obama’s features. “Flowers had me thrown out of the agency after 9/11. She said I couldn’t be trusted. Not just me, but other Muslims, too.”

Lana winces in recognition. “Fayah Kouri. I remember you now.”

Fayah nods, keeps the mask up. “Fay, that’s what Flowers called me. She wouldn’t even use my real name. She had to Americanize it. You didn’t do that, Lana. You tried to keep so many of the ‘questionables’ in the agency. Did you know that’s what Flowers called us?”

“Yes. It was despicable.”

“Here’s the irony: If you’d succeeded in keeping us around, I would’ve stayed by your side the whole time. But you didn’t. We were forced out with lies and smears.”

“It was wrong. I wasn’t party to that. You know it.”

“But you were party to it. You didn’t resign. You didn’t speak out. You did what you were told. You were a good little moderate.”

“I
did
try to stop it.”

“You risked
nothing
. I risked my life to help the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq. I lost a brother, a sister and my mother when they were accused of being traitors because of me. But I
still
believed in America. I believed you would help my homeland. I even came here to work for the NSA. They milked every last drop of information I could give them, every last hacking technique I’d ever developed and used over there, and then they put me on a plane back to Baghdad where monsters were waiting to torture and kill me.”

She puts aside the idling chainsaw and opens her shirt, revealing her bare chest. The mutilation is breathtaking.

“That’s right, they’re gone.” Fayah’s nipples. “And they used acid for the burns. They didn’t stop there. I’ll never have children.”

“How did you survive?” Lana wants to keep her talking, wants to remind Fayah that she’d never joined the agency’s pack of xenophobic jackals.

“Men who knew I’d worked for U.S. intelligence bought my freedom. They knew I could be useful. I’ve been happy to pay them back
and
the U.S. Once, I was for the same things you wanted. I was a moderate. I was for freedom. I believed all the lies. And what did your country do? It supported the worst people our countries could produce, tyrants who terrorized men, women, and children. They forced millions into the arms of the faithful, the believers who could make sense of a crazy world. And now we’re here, Lana. All of us. The chickens have come home to roost.”

She pulls the mask back down.

“Flowers is
still
horrible. Go after
her
.”
Not me
.
Not my kid
.

Fayah stands. “First, I’m going to cut your daughter right up the middle for all the world to see.”

“But you promised—”

“You Americans say an eye for an eye. This is a lie for a lie. But I will only kill
her
.” She looks at Emma, then her watch. “In minutes the martyrs will be here, and then we’ll all take a piece of you.”

Emma is seized by spasms, shrieking “No-no-no-no … ” Her arms and legs, head, torso, all drum the floor with fear.

Fayah revs the chainsaw and steps between Emma’s spread legs. The young woman lies naked below her, shaking uncontrollably. Lana screams, “No, take me. Take me!”

Fayah ignores her.

Emma’s cries and the saw are so loud Lana can’t hear the gunshot that strikes Fayah, but she sees her arm jerk when it’s hit and the saw fall from her hands. The tip hits the concrete inches from Emma’s torso and kicks back so fast it’s only a flash as the roaring blade rips into Fayah’s upper body, chewing through her sternum in a blink.

Fayah falls backward onto the floor as the buried blade stops moving and the engine dies.

A woman on the stairs jumps down. She’s blond, full camo, and armed with a short-barreled handgun.

Only then does Lana notice a border collie at the bottom of the stairs. Cairo follows gingerly, then heads straight for Lana. He sniffs her, then tries to open the clamp on her right hand with his teeth and claws.

“Who are you?” Lana asks.

“No, who are you?” the woman demands in a Russian accent.

“My name’s Lana. That’s my daughter Emma.”

Em’s eyes are closed, face awash in tears.

The Russian woman eyes the body on the floor.

“Is Vinko Horvat?”

Lana doesn’t know what to say, horribly afraid the answer will enrage another armed woman.

“Please let me go and I can tell you.”

“You tell me now. Maybe live later.”

Lana nods and points to the head, realizing when she moves her hand that Cairo has just freed it. The dog rushes to her feet.

“Vinko die like that?” The Russian’s eyes move back and forth between Vinko’s remains and Fayah’s motionless body.

“Yes,” Lana says as neutrally as possible.

“Good. Horrible man.”

Cairo opens the clamp on Lana’s foot. She frees her left hand. She stands moments later and unclamps Emma.

“You son-of-bitch,” the woman sneers at the head.

“He was that,” Lana says. “Her, too.”

“That I see,” the Russian replies. “Do that to young girl.” She shakes her head. “Get clothes.”

Lana and Emma rush upstairs and find Fayah’s bureau and walk-in closet. They dress quickly. Then Lana searches for guns, weapons of any kind. ISIS and Al Qaeda, the “martyrs,” would be there in minutes.

She fails to find any firepower until she notices a wood-trimmed opening in the closet ceiling. She pulls on the handle, unfolding a sectional ladder.

“Em, can you help me?”

Her daughter looks like she’s in shock. Numbly, she comes over. Lana hands down three M16s, rounds of ammunition, and three Glock pistols with extra magazines, then leads Emma from the bedroom.

Seconds later, she hears a barrage of bullets outside the house and knows it’s only beginning.

BULLETS RIP THROUGH THE
front walls of Fayah’s house, shattering windows and shredding sheetrock. Spirals of white dust swirl in the air above Lana and Emma as they dive to the entryway floor.

Cairo drops beside them, as though trained to belly down when the ammo starts to fly.

The shooting stops abruptly after tearing a line of holes across ten feet of wall and windows.

Lana springs to her feet with one of the M16s she grabbed from upstairs. “Stay down,” she orders her daughter and dog, peering through one of three small squares of glass in the upper part of the door.

She sees nothing but trees and thick brush. Lana has no doubt that Fayah’s allies want to reclaim the house and their reputation as fighters: the ceiling cams showed a woman thwart their gruesome plan to chainsaw Emma and Lana to death.

The Russian woman and the border collie scale the stairs. So much has transpired in so few seconds. She sees Fayah’s armory of rifles and Glocks.

“Who are you?” Lana asks, keeping her eyes on the area in front of the house.

“Ludmila Migunov.” She grabs an M16.

“You know how to use that?” Lana asks.

“Russian army five years. Private security U.S., pro football. Do you?” she asks, checking her magazine.

Before Lana can respond, she spots two men sprinting toward the door. She smashes a pane with the butt of her rifle and cuts them down as they barrel within twenty feet of it.

“Answer is yes,” Ludmila says, patting Lana’s shoulder.

Lana keeps looking for the enemy, wondering how many more are out there. Without looking back, she asks Ludmila why she’s there.

But the Russian’s already sprinting with the M16 and her dog to the far side of the great room that runs the length of the house and opens to the kitchen. The vantage point gives her views of the side and back of the bungalow.

“Husband Bones Jackson,” she calls out. “Met on goodwill tour, Russia. Horvat bastard to him. I come back to kill him. Day late, dollar short. But hate these bastards, too. Kill father in Kabul. Who they killing now?” she asks as shooting resumes, but farther from the house. She looks out a window and answers her own question: “Helicopter.”

Lana sees the chopper now. No,
two
choppers. They’re taking fire from the woods about one hundred feet away. The birds fly almost directly overhead. The house shudders from the backwash and loud
whup-whup-whup
of the rotors.

“Killer Egg. Delta Force,” Ludmila calls out.

“Killer what?” The choppers wheel toward the lake.

“MH-6 helicopter. Good news.”

It appears to be stupendously good news to Lana—on both birds heavily armed soldiers sit on platforms on each side of the cabin.

What a relief.

Or would have been if a heat-seeking missile didn’t rip out of the woods that very second and blow up the one in the lead, incinerating it in a microsecond. The other chopper starts evasive maneuvers. Too late. A second missile takes it out. Two fireballs drop below trees far from the house.

Lana hopes they fell into the lake, which might spare lives. 

She nudges Emma with her foot. “I want you in the basement. They’ve got missiles. It’s all concrete down there. Take a gun.”

“I don’t know how to use that kind,” Em says, standing slowly.

She’s fired revolvers at a gun range with her mother, but not semi-automatics. They were next in her weapons training, which had been upended by the swiftly escalating violence of recent events.

Lana glances, sees it’s clear, and grabs a Glock. She racks it, inserting a round into the chamber, and hands it to her daughter. “It’s all ready. Remember, two hands, point and shoot. Go!”

Emma scampers toward the cellar door, watched closely by Cairo. Lana hopes Em can handle being around the remains of the bloodbath down there.
Better than dying up here
.

• • •

Em freezes at the sight of Fayah’s chainsawed chest. The blade is still buried in her body. She hears more shooting and forces herself to go down the last few steps.

The door slams behind her. She figures that’s her mother’s doing. All Em’s really worried about is the woman who tried to cut her in half for all the world to see.

She looks down at her captor again.

What if she’s still alive?

Em tells herself that’s not possible. Rationally, she knows this is true, but her skin feels like it’s crinkling from her groin to her upper back, as if she’s made of tinfoil. The brute fear also shallows her breath.

She tries to step around the blood. That’s hard, it’s everywhere. And then it’s impossible—because the lights go out.

• • •

Ludmila tosses Lana a phone as shots tear into the house again. Cairo flattens on the floor. Glass shatters in the kitchen. Lana looks up, drops the device and fires toward the back door three times. A bearded body crashes into a counter and onto the floor.

Lana sprints forward and looks over a half-wall divide into the kitchen. The man’s hand grasps his abdomen. She sees a wire and shoots him twice in the head, yelling to Ludmila, “Suicide vests.”

Black smoke billows into the sky more than 150 yards away from the crash of one of the choppers; the other must have fallen into the lake. She retrieves the phone and backs up till she can keep an eye on the front of the house. Then she keys in a code for a Department of Defense command center. It’s so secret she’s never known where it’s located or even if it’s ground-based.

“Identify yourself,” a man says.

Lana reels off a digital code, then a series of letters in Alpha-Bravo- Charley style before reporting the Delta Force choppers down at Hayden Lake. “Heat-seekers hit them.”

“We have it on satellite.”

“We need help. We’ve got two adults and a seventeen-year-old. We don’t know how many we’re facing.”

“Our count is eighteen. You have some dead inside, correct?”

“Yes. But eighteen more? Can’t you get us help? We’re way outgunned. One of them had a vest.” Shots ring out in front of the house and behind it. “You hear that?” Lana yells as Ludmila takes cover behind a blue enamel wood stove and forces the border collie into the down position.

“We’ve alerted the county sheriff and local police. The chief is on his way.”

“Please tell me you’re deploying forces from Fairchild Air Force Base.” Lana recalls her planned testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about the mistake of relying too heavily on local law enforcement during national emergencies. Then a national emergency—a terrorist attack on the Capitol—claimed scores of lives and shut down the hearing.