Unholy Code

Chapter 32

Don’s frantic. He hasn’t heard from Lana since yesterday. Can’t reach her. He’s tried over and over. Not a word from Emma, either. Wife and daughter have vanished.

He paces the kitchen, pulling out his phone—again—this time to call Jeff Jensen.

“Is she in Idaho?” Don demands.

“Idaho?”

“Don’t get coy with me,” Don says. “She texted me last night saying she was going after Emma out there. Has she found her? Are they okay?”

There’s a pause. In Don’s experience, that’s never a good thing.

Jensen clears his throat. “She’s in Idaho. We can’t say where right now.”

“Can’t or won’t? And don’t dance around this. We’re talking about my wife and kid.”

“Can’t. We’re waiting to hear from her.”

“I’m not hearing from her, either.” Don feels like putting his fist through a wall.

Sufyan rushes into the kitchen, holding his own phone, shaking his head and mouthing, “Nothing.” He’s been trying to reach Emma.

Jensen, a Mormon, swears, startling Don.

“What is it?” Don shouts.

“Something’s just come up on a website we’re monitoring.”

“Which one?” Don stops pacing at the cooking island and flips open a laptop.

“Steel Fist,” Jensen replies.

Don squeezes the edge of the island, then starts typing.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Jensen says.

Hearing Jensen this upset freaks Don out in a serious way. Lana always said he was the coolest cucumber in the garden, no matter how hot it got.

“Shit-shit-shit!” Don’s staring at a live feed from the neo-Nazi’s website. Now he understands Jensen’s reaction. He looks away from the screen almost as fast as he glanced at it.

Sufyan is at his shoulder. They hear a woman screaming.

“That’s Emma!” Sufyan shouts.

“Is that your daughter?” Jensen asks Don.

“Absolutely.” Don forces himself to look once more. He can’t see her, but Em’s clearly out of her mind with pain or fear — and for good reason: a decapitated body lies in a blanket-size pool of blood on the floor of a shadowy room. Male? Female? Don can’t tell. God, he hopes to Christ it isn’t Lana, which would explain Emma’s hysteria. There’s blood everywhere. All over the victim’s clothing.

With Emma still screaming, Don can’t help believing his wife is dead or dying. He looks up, dizzy, as Sufyan darts away, racing into the half-bath off the kitchen. Don hears him vomit. He can’t look at the screen anymore himself. This is sheer butchery. And whomever’s wielding the chainsaw is about to start again. No horror he’s ever seen rivals this. But he has to know if he’s staring at the remains of his wife, so he looks back. That’s when he sees some poor guy’s head sitting like a stump to the side.

Sufyan walks out of the bathroom, face wet from rinsing. His eyes are damp, too. “Is she going to be okay?”

Don can’t speak. Not a word in the world can make this better.

Cairo remains on the ground in the forest. But his head turns back, though not as far as it used to; he has arthritis in his cervical spine. He sees a border collie running toward him.

The elderly Malinois soldier stands, as if to say, “Enough’s enough. ”

The border collie is not alone. A stately blonde in camouflage pants and jacket with a short-barreled .357 Ruger is close behind. She stares at Cairo, who’s exchanging sniffs with the gray and white dog.

The border collie moves on, leading the woman to where his herding instincts may be telling him his master has gone. A scent seems to have him excited.

The Malinois trots along, not as fast as the smaller dog, but quicker than the woman, who ignores him. She has eyes only for the border collie.

Vinko Horvat told the woman to come back when her husband Bones Jackson died. He said he’d show her a good time. She’s determined to take him up on his offer — on her own terms.

And she has Horvat’s gun to return.

On her own terms.

With her hands cuffed behind her back, Lana can’t hold Emma. But she keeps warning her daughter not to look. Em’s eyes are buried in her mother’s shoulder, though they both hear the woman revving the chainsaw as she cuts off Horvat’s right arm, the last of his limbs. The body shows no signs of life.

The woman shuts off the saw and grabs his head from a rising pool of blood. When she sets it down on dry concrete, it makes a nauseating splat.

She walks to the console and speaks into the computer: “You have just watched me torture and kill the Nazi-lover and kafir Steel Fist.

“I openly declare war on the United States of America on behalf of all ISIS and Al Qaeda fighters who have joined together and authorized me to speak on their behalf today. Allah Himself has moved these great forces. Now we fight side by side against infidels and apostates and will soon declare victory over all non-believers. The caliphate must spread across all oceans.”

Lana startles. The woman is announcing precisely the nightmare the intelligence community has feared for so long: that the two Sunni factions would recognize they have far more in common than the differences that have kept them apart. For more than a year, Al Qaeda’s top leadership has been publicly extending an olive branch to the upstarts in ISIS, urging all jihadists to act together against their common enemy. Now they are, and the results, as Lana can see at a glance, are terrifying.

The ceiling cameras rotate from the vivisected body to the cage, a chilling sign of shifting interest, as the woman continues:

“I have captured Lana Elkins, one of our greatest enemies. The young woman holding onto her is her daughter, Emma. They, too, must die to advance the caliphate and stop the cyberattacks on our noble fighters.”

Lana realizes in a horrifying flash that the woman wants to incite neo-Nazis to attack and murder American Muslims to drive them into the arms of extremists. That was the same strategy jihadists, regardless of affiliation, used to bait the United States into launching wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, invasions that destroyed much of those regions and radicalized millions of Muslims. If the radical Islamists’ vicious strategy succeeds here at home, Lana knows it could spell the same kind of disaster for her own country.

If what the woman said were true.

It’s true.

On a hilltop less than a mile away, Tahir Hijazi looks up from his phone at twenty bearded men who have rendezvoused with him. They are ISIS’s and Al Qaeda’s top lieutenants, each carefully vetted for this mission by their commanders in Iraq and Syria and the U.S. They form the martial heart of their reconciliation movement.

Golden Voice has their admiration. Using her extraordinary hacking skills she’s made possible the final steps leading to the imminent slaughter of the Elkinses, a momentous victory struck in the very heart of satanic America. History is replete with examples of single, spirited actions triggering widespread revolt. In joining their forces together, the twenty know they are establishing a new and powerful fighting paradigm for the Americas, the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This has been approved by the highest councils of the two factions. Now the twenty know it’s their job to demonstrate the inability of America’s corrupt and failing government to protect Lana Elkins and her daughter. Torturing and murdering them will symbolize the pervasive weakness that lies at the fallow heart of the United States. Sleeper cells in cities across the land are waiting to witness this victory: then they will rise as well.

“I know this country,” Tahir assures them as they look at a bungalow in the distance. “Every drop of blood we spill will bring backlash, and that will drive millions of our weaker brothers into our ranks.”

The men on this hilltop have ample reason to believe this, for those dynamics have come into play time and again throughout the Middle East, where the middle ground was squeezed to death in every sense.

They look to Tahir Hijazi, who has performed well. For years now, he’s been insinuating himself into the darkest realms of Washington power on their behalf. He’s a legendary mujahid.

“Golden Voice has taken our first step,” Tahir says to the men around him.

“And we are the second,” an ISIS commander says.

Nods follow all around.

“But we must win here,” Tahir emphasizes.

Not a man of easy geniality, he offers a broad smile now. A great war for him is almost over. He keys in a required code.

They move out.

“You’ve got to say you’re Muslim,” Lana whispers to Emma as the woman wipes down the chainsaw. “You’ve got to tell her about Sufyan and Tahir and your daily prayers. You can claim conversion. Horvat ran photos of you and Sufyan. He threatened to kill you because you were with him. Throw it back at her, get it out there for the world to hear and you might survive. You’ve got to do it, Em, now while she’s going live. Scream it. Put her in a position where’s she’s got to let you live.” Maybe, Lana says to herself.

But Emma won’t let go of Lana, much less stand up to the woman. Em’s trembling horribly and clearly in shock from what she’s witnessed. Lana isn’t even sure Em heard a word of what she just told her.

“She’s going to kill me, Em. Don’t let me die without hope for you. Please.”

Pleading with all her heart, all her love, which is all Lana has left for her child at this moment — the worst she’s ever known.

The woman points her gun at Emma. “Lana Elkins, I will cut her to pieces if you don’t come out.”

Emma clings fiercely to her mother. Her strength is astonishing.

“I mean it — let me go!” Lana shouts at Em.

When she still holds on, Lana shoves her into the metal bars on the side of the cage. Emma loses her grip and Lana darts to the gate as the woman opens it.

“My daughter is Muslim,” Lana shouts to the cameras. “Her boyfriend is a young Muslim who helped convert her.” She looks at the killer in the mask.

“Say another word and she dies,” the woman says softly, wielding the same gun she used to destroy Horvat’s crotch before she cut him slowly to pieces. “I’ll shove it right up inside her and pull the trigger.”

The threat sickens Lana.

“Lie down.”

Lana obeys in the hope Emma will survive. Horvat’s blood has run across the concrete. It seeps into the back of her shirt.

First her feet are clamped, then her hands.

“I turned the mikes off,” the woman says to her. “Nobody heard a word you said.”

She walks over and pulls four more stakes from a cabinet and slides them into slots in the floor next to Lana, right below the third camera.

She was always going to kill us both. Lana tries to think of something she can do, then tries to imagine what she could have done. She fails on both counts.

The woman picks up the blood-streaked chainsaw and starts it, sending a warm red mist into the air that settles on Lana’s face.

When she walks to the cage, Emma backs away.

“Do you remember how close I came to cutting off your foot?”

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.