Unholy Code

Chapter 11

Lana’s phone rang as she sped down the Beltway. She’d just finished an early morning prep session with Deputy Director Bob Holmes for their testimony tomorrow before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and was headed to her office in Bethesda. With cars and trucks ripping past the Prius at 85 to 90 mph, she pulled onto the shoulder to take the call, trailed by Agent Robin Maray in the Charger. The nation might be enduring gas and diesel shortages but drivers weren’t slowing down. Full-bore ahead, wherever that might lead them, as if what really fueled them was a general, underlying panic. There were ample reasons for it.

The flooding of coastlines continued unabated, with hundreds of thousands of refugees from shoreline communities pressing inward. The number of displaced Americans had yet to be calculated with precision but the estimates now ranged upwards of three million — on the East Coast alone. Southern California was seeing similar numbers. Communities on both coasts stood abandoned, roofs now low-lying islands in the rising seas. Long Island, with the geometry of a table top, had shrunk by twenty percent.

The news on Lana’s phone was no less disturbing. The fashionable young sandy-haired lawyer who’d briefed her and Holmes had just sent Lana what could be a preview of tomorrow’s hearing, video of a corpulent member of the Select Committee on Intelligence denouncing CyberFortress: “They’re getting massive, million-dollar contracts, letting Lana Elkins fatten on the fear that grips our great land. That money should be going straight to the fine law enforcement officers who now form the front line of our mighty nation’s defense.” Then the senior senator from Louisiana castigated Lana further for “stealing” Galina Bortnik: “Elkins not only drains our treasury, she drains our brain power, too, spending taxpayer money to hire a brilliant young Russian computer hacker who’s only here because brave members of our military saved her from the treacherous claws of Russian thugs.”

Lana winced at the memory of the SEALs who’d died on that mission, but the senator wasn’t playing fair: she and Don came close to dying as well, and both had received secret commendations from the President for their heroism. Not the first time in Lana’s case.

Will this crap never end? The political wars.

Lana had so much going on right now her head felt as if it would explode. The single most harrowing message on her phone today had come from Jeff Jensen when she’d been on her way out to Fort Meade: a Steel Fist diatribe against her daughter that included a command to his followers to kill Emma — and ended with the words “Blood is priceless” that had almost sickened Lana.

First, Tahir had threatened her daughter’s life, and now the other end of the political spectrum, Steel Fist, had openly called for his followers to “slaughter” Emma to “destroy her mother.”

Those goddamn animals.

The latest threats from Steel Fist came in the midst of a short breather from terrorism. More than seventy-two hours had passed without an attack or bombing. Commentators were claiming the relative calm reflected the “stiffening backbone of the country in a time of crisis.” Other partisans were heralding a new age in national defense as “local law enforcement steps up to the plate.”

Their chorus of clichés was joined by senators and members of Congress offering paeans to the locals while also urging the appropriation of billions of dollars for the nation’s biggest defense contractors for more fighter jets, aircraft carriers, and pricey missile defense systems that would do next to nothing to fight the asymmetric war in which America was now engaged. Fighter jets to try to stop small bands of terrorists determined to slip past the country’s flooded borders so they could create large-scale mayhem in crowded cities and rural outposts? Whoever had said you couldn’t possibly burn the candle of national defense at both ends clearly hadn’t anticipated politics and budgeting in an era of invasion. With her entire country under attack, Lana felt strongly that centralized command was the sine qua non of an effective national defense.

As for cybersecurity, amazingly enough, it had gone begging once again. Voters saw kinetic war because it showed on their video screens — bombs, blood, and broken bodies — so they supported steps to stop it. Understandable. Steps needed to be taken. Clearly. But what too many influential voices on the Hill and in the media failed to recognize was the “invisible invasion” of the country’s infrastructure that was taking place every second of every day by cybersaboteurs.

Those attacks came from carefully deployed electrons. Try selling that to a science-starved electorate. Not as sexy as a new class of fighter jets, nor as immediately powerful as next-generation smart bombs with their own visuals, but terrorists had formed a fifth column from afar by infiltrating millions of private and government devices to create botnets that hijacked the country’s own vast resources into an attack against their very hosts: jiu jitsu in the cyber age.

Lana took a breath and checked her rear-view, where Robin sat in the Charger with his aviator sunglasses fixed on her. She put the Prius in drive just as her phone went off again. She was tempted to take off, but couldn’t: a glance at a text showed tension on the home front now. Emma wanted Sufyan to come over. She couldn’t go to school. The principal had said the district didn’t have the resources to ensure the safety of its students with Emma in their midst.

At least she’s asking permission. And using her encryption. Finally. Maybe she’d even remembered to keep her Mace around, though Lana had her doubts; every time she’d checked, Em had come up empty-handed.

“U can c him @ home,” Lana texted back.

Tap-tap-tap.

Robin was at her window. “Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine.” Lana glanced up. Couldn’t see his eyes behind those shades. Just as well. “I’m going to get moving here.”

But everything wasn’t fine. Her personal life was flooded, too — with confusion. Which might have explained her sudden itch to gamble, so palpable it felt like psoriasis of the psyche.

She grabbed her second phone. Her fingers stabbed the dial pad. Not for texasholdem.com: a Gamblers Anonymous meeting. Tonight at seven o’clock at the Hope Center in Bethesda.

You’re going, no matter what.

She got back on the road, pulling into CF’s underground garage fifteen minutes later.

Robin remained in her wake to the elevator where they stood silently as the security guard brought them up to her company’s reception area.

She noticed that Robin received “Good mornings” and smiles at every turn, already a fixture. Even the men, Jeff Jensen included, appeared impressed by him.

Maureen gave him a big smile and a wave. Lana could scarcely believe her youngest employee, at twenty-three, could be interested in a man about twice her age.

But fit, Lana thought.

Don’t remind me.

Maureen tugged Lana aside. “May we talk privately?”

“Sure.”

Lana led the young woman into her office, where Maureen spoke up quickly: “I found something incongruous in the most popular Steel Fist chat room.”

“Shoot.” Lana arranged herself at her desk and started up her desktop computer.

“Almost all those guys rail against you, Emma, and Sufyan. Some are now raging about your dog and Don, but you and Emma and her boyfriend are the chief recipients of their animus.”

Lana nodded, pleased by Maureen’s use of language at a time when so many others were dumbing down their speech.

“But there’s one self-proclaimed white supremacist who conspicuously, at least to my way of thinking, omits any reference to Sufyan.”

“That is odd. Does he talk about any people of color?”

“Plenty. He’s got nothing good to say about Senator Booker or a certain President, and he hates — he puts that word in caps — the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and their friends on the left, like Cornel West and Amy Goodman. He’s quite vociferous, too. I’ve compiled three pages of those comments.”

“So where do you think we should go from here?” Lana knew the route she wanted Maureen to take, but waited to see if the cyber swallows would actually land in Capistrano for the MIT grad.

“You should give me the go-ahead to hack Tahir Hijazi.”

Conspicuous, indeed, thought Lana, who quickly gave her permission.

Lana’s own effort ranged far from both Steel Fist’s chat rooms and Tahir’s efforts to stir up hatred against her family. Assuming it was Tahir, which felt like an eminently reasonable supposition.

She was far too busy digging into deeper vaults where Tahir’s quietest secrets apparently hid. And if her work and Maureen’s converged, it would give Lana a chance to observe the young woman’s skills firsthand.

Lana settled at her workstation to return to her probe of Tahir’s background, which had confirmed his strong associations with Al Qaeda and the CIA and — by extension — the NSA.

Now let’s see just how many hands that Sudanese ex-pat is playing.

She paused over her use of gambling lingo, which sometimes could infect every other thought — a sure sign of the tumult she felt. Another appeared in the next instant when she checked her watch for the third time since talking to Maureen and saw that she had seven hours and forty-three minutes until the Gamblers Anonymous meeting.

Then four hours and thirty-seven minutes.

An hour and twelve minutes.

After her least productive day in memory, it was finally time to leave. Which meant that Tim Angier, the FBI’s second-shift agent after Robin, would learn that one of the nation’s top cyberwarriors was an addict.

Lana shrugged off the concern. With five million Americans enrolled in one twelve-step program or another, high-ranking members of the intelligence community were likely represented in significant numbers.

Still, the thought of the meeting made her nervous. The anonymity she sought was also the anonymity she feared.

Emma glared so fiercely at Don he felt as if she’d reduce him to ash if she could. He’d just told Em he didn’t want Sufyan and her going to the mall. The young man was standing by her side.

“It’s less than a mile away. I’m sick of being stuck in this house all day long. It’s like a prison.”

She sounded screechy, every word a drill bit to Don’s brain. Even Jojo’s upright ears were rotating like satellite dishes. So was his head as he followed the argument, as if he understood the words.

Don tried to keep his response soft. “Em,” he pleaded, “you saw the message from that madman. You know he’s got ten million racist followers. I’m not Superman—”

“That’s for sure,” she cut him off to say.

Breathe. “Which means I can’t protect you everywhere.”

“We don’t need you to. I’ve got this.” She pulled a blond wig out of her shoulder bag. “Nobody’s going to recognize me if you’re not ten feet behind me all the time. I’ll be fine.”

He sighed. “You really think that’s going to throw them off your scent?”

Long straight hair parted in the middle, it looked like it had been modeled on Gwen Stefani.

Or Stefani’s just been scalped, which Don felt would be more in the spirit of the times.

“And I’ll wear some shitty-looking shorts, totally out of style so nobody will recognize me.”

“And what’s Sufyan going to wear?” he asked patiently, wishing he hadn’t when Emma nudged her boyfriend and the young man whipped out an afro wig that he’d been holding behind his back. It looked like it had been lifted off the head of boxing promoter Don King.

Don couldn’t stifle a laugh. Bad move. Emma now glared so hard her eyes were slits.

“Look, you two won’t be going to a Halloween party for a few weeks. And in those get-ups you’re not going to fool anyone.”

“With sunglasses,” Emma protested, “I think we will.”

Interestingly enough, Sufyan hadn’t said a word. Don figured Tahir’s nephew wasn’t nearly so practiced at defiance.

“No, sorry.” Don shook his head.

“Let’s go,” Emma said to Sufyan, throwing her wig on hastily. The middle part ran at a diagonal across her own hair, which hung down and looked so bizarre it would have drawn more attention to her than the wig itself. “Put it on,” Em said to Sufyan.

The young man demurred, but scooted out the door to the garage right behind Emma.

Jojo looked back and forth, as though unsure of what to do. “Don’t look at me,” Don said to him. “I don’t know, either. But duty calls. Come.”

Don and the dog trailed the pair into the garage. The electronic door was rising. Emma fired up the Fusion. Sufyan was closing the passenger door. Em started backing up.

“Sit,” Don commanded Jojo.

He ran inside and grabbed the Glock from the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet, then bolted back into the garage, determined to try to keep them safe.

Em had closed the door.

He swore, raced to the panel and pressed the button to open it. Lana had ordered him a remote from the security company but it hadn’t arrived yet. Then he opened the door to his pickup, signaled Jojo into the cab, and backed out as daylight appeared behind him.

Emma was long gone.

Don backed onto the street fast, thankful that at least he knew their plans, unless… she wanted to dodge him completely at this point.

Swearing profusely, he gunned the old truck, which had more ponies under the hood than a lot of newer cars.

He tore through the neighborhood, watching crosswalks and corners for children, then turned onto a main boulevard to the mall, which soon loomed before him, a colossus of consumerism.

God knows what entrance they might have used.

Don turned into the first one, making a sweep of a parking area the size of FedEx Field. Lots of Fusions, but none was Emma’s. No cockamamie blond wigs or Don King lookalikes, either.

He circumnavigated the mall, which took almost forty minutes, acutely aware that his was a cursory search at best.

Don felt panic creeping up his spine. He trolled all the surrounding neighborhoods and mini-malls, even making a pass by Sufyan’s house. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Jojo sat beside him, looking back and forth from Don to the parking lot. Ninety minutes more passed by the time Don was done. Still no sign of them. He was frantic.

And then he heard the sirens.

Second-shift FBI agent Tim Angier hung back as Lana walked into a meeting room of the Hope Center in Bethesda, which hosted a number of twelve-step recovery fellowships. She’d briefed him in her office, pointing out that it was a closed meeting. “Addicts only. There won’t be any family or friends. And just so you know, nobody here knows about my addiction.”

“I understand,” he’d replied. “Am I going to have to say anything? Fake it?”

“Not at all. Some people don’t talk at all for their first few meetings. There’s no pressure to do that.”

About twenty gamblers were seated when she arrived. Only a handful were women. The meeting was to begin in three minutes. Lana helped herself to a cup of coffee, spurning the cookies.

Tim walked in a minute later, sitting at about two o’clock from her. Three other African Americans were also at the meeting. Asian Americans and Caucasians, including Latinos, formed the rest of the multicultural group.

Lana recognized seven regulars. One was the woman she’d sat next to at the last meeting. She avoided Lana’s eyes. Lana didn’t feel much like socializing, either; she wanted to get this monkey off her back. And if she couldn’t pry the tenacious beast loose, she wanted to sedate it somehow.

A man with short, oily curls sitting to her right did nod at her. In a leather vest, he was the only one who looked like he could have come from central casting.

The troubled-looking woman was the first to speak, revealing that she’d taken her maximum out of her ATM. “Then I went straight to the MGM Casino.” A new one that had opened near DC. “I promised to limit myself.” Lana had sung that tune too many times herself. “I sure didn’t plan on going back to the ATM every day last week. By the time I was done, I’d lost all the money I’d saved to fly out and visit my mom in San Leandro. She’s dying. That was going to be my last visit.” The woman began to cry. “I can’t take this anymore.”

No one said a word. They watched to see if the woman wanted to go on. A moment later she did: “I felt sick every second and I just kept doing it.”

“We’ve all got the sickness,” Oily Curls said. “I hear you.”

The woman nodded. She was finished. Her sponsor reiterated her support for her.

Lana talked about her own disturbed state over the past several days, telling them how she’d rushed into a stall in a restroom, pulled out her phone, brought up texasholdem.com, and placed a bet before she’d even let herself think about what she was doing. “But I stopped after playing one hand and winning $137. Only the desire hasn’t stopped. It’s like it’s feeding on that win every minute. I’m having a hard time getting it out of my head. It’s as real as this room. I just want it to go away.”

“It will,” said a distinguished-looking man Lana happened to know worked at the Federal Trade Commission. His white beard looked bleached against his dark skin. “First step is the one you took. You put the phone away. You walked out of that bathroom. You walked the walk.”

“Amen,” said Oily Curls.

When Oily Curls said that, Lana looked at him and felt the gambling sickness slip away. But what replaced it wasn’t calm. Nothing so soothing. What replaced it was fear. Her sixth sense was screaming, Who is he?

Emma and Sufyan had decided not to go to the mall because she was sure her father would have found them and made a huge mortifying scene, so they snuck into a dimly lit video arcade nearby that Sufyan favored.

Emma had more than a video game in mind.

Snuggling together, she felt confident they’d drawn no attention. Both had made sure their wigs fit properly. Emma liked her look so much she had her compact mirror out and was flirting with the idea of dyeing her hair.

“Come on,” Sufyan said. “Put that away and let’s play.”

He brought up a Jurassic World game on a large screen a few feet away, then clobbered her in short order. A second time as well. Emma wasn’t really into gaming, mostly indulging him. But she enjoyed taking a break to make out, vigorously enough that Sufyan’s hairpiece came off as three guys barged in to see if the station was available. One of them did a double take and looked away so fast that Emma knew they’d just been made.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she whispered to Sufyan, spying the guy who’d eyed them; he’d stepped away and was on his phone. Coincidence? Possibly — everybody Emma knew was on their phones most of the time — but she couldn’t take any chances.

As casually as they could they headed toward the entrance, the sounds of games — guns, explosions, and angry commandos — dogging their every step. Even so, the guy on the phone shouted above the din and clicked his fingers like a waiter calling for a bus boy. His two friends rushed up. The larger one stepped in front of Em and Sufyan. “Where you guys think you’re going? Stick around.”

When he grabbed Emma’s arm and yanked off her wig, Sufyan clocked him and kicked the legs out from under his buddy, then took Emma’s hand and raced toward the rear exit.

Bursting from the shadowy arcade, they were almost blinded by the light of late afternoon.

Running hard, they jumped into her car. Out of breath, Emma drove away, making it to a four-way intersection where a windowless van screeched to a stop, blocking them.

The van doors flew open. Four guys spilled out, including the one at the arcade who’d been on his phone as soon as he’d spotted Emma and Sufyan.

The Sudanese started to open his door and was halfway out when Emma screamed “No,” grabbed his belt, and jerked him back onto the passenger seat. She floored the Fusion in reverse. The guys chased her for a few feet before sprinting back to their vehicle. As the van started to turn toward them, an old white Corolla plowed into the front bumper.

“Stop!” Sufyan yelled at Emma as his uncle climbed out of the subcompact.

Sufyan was opening his door again. Em still had the car careening in reverse. She braked, fearing he would hurl himself out while they were still speeding.

He sprinted to the intersection as Tahir ducked a bat swung by the driver. The much younger man was twice as wide as Tahir, but his attack proved half as fast: Tahir landed blows to the man’s throat and crotch, leaving him gasping and doubled over. His aluminum bat clanged on the asphalt.

But two other lunks piled on the bone-stitched older man from behind and started dragging him to the open side of the van, as though to abduct him.

Sufyan launched himself into the fray, freeing one of his uncle’s arms.

Emma raced up. The guy who’d been on the phone came around the rear of the Corolla, charging her. She backed up, then Maced him at the last second. He reeled away, blinded.

She looked over as Tahir pummeled the man still clinging stubbornly to his arm. Then the assailant let go and tried to throw himself into the van.

Tahir grabbed his foot and dragged him halfway out before stomping his knee so hard Emma heard bones crack and the man scream. It took less than three seconds, the leg now bent as nature had never intended.

Sufyan’s arm was bleeding. The guy he’d been fighting had used a knife on him and was charging Sufyan again, as though to finish him off. Emma shouted. As soon as the man looked over, she Maced him too.

Tahir grabbed Sufyan’s arm, looked at the stab wound, and said, “Hospital.” He pointed to Emma, his expression furious. “Take him. Get out of here.”

Neighbors were staring out their windows. More than looking; in several cases they were shooting video with their phones.

Emma and Sufyan rushed to her car. Her legs felt rubbery. They hadn’t till now. The fight had happened so quickly.

Shaking, she piled herself behind the wheel and headed to Suburban Hospital with Sufyan.

“Did he cut an artery?” she asked, near tears.

“No, but he stuck it deep. It hurts. Thanks. You were great.”

Only then did Emma realize she still gripped the Mace in her hand. Only then did she hear the sirens in the distance.

By the time Don found his way to the four-way, police, ambulances, and a growing crowd had converged on the intersection. There was ample chatter about two white cars that had fled the scene.

“A skinny old black guy put the crazy on them,” an impressed young man said.

A detective immediately took him aside. Don tried to listen in and was told to back away.

With Jojo in the heel, he walked over to a fellow using his phone camera to shoot two white guys on stretchers getting loaded into an ambulance.

“You see much?” he asked him.

“I saw it all,” the guy said.

“I heard there were two white cars.”

“Yeah, an old Corolla and a Fusion. Everybody was fighting, man. A chick with pepper spray took two of ’em out. One of them had a damn knife he used on a young black dude. But it was the old guy who waled on those honkies. No offense,” he added as if he’d just registered Don’s race.

“None taken. Where’d they go, the ones in the white cars?”

“Different places. I think the old guy told the white chick to take the brother to a hospital, then he was out of there, too, in the opposite direction. No plates on his car. He knew his business.”

Don left Jojo in the pickup and rushed into the emergency room at Suburban, finding Emma in the waiting area.

“I’m so sorry, Dad.”

“Put it aside, Em.” He figured natural consequences spoke far more loudly than he ever could. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“How about Sufyan?”

“Fifteen stitches. He wouldn’t let them use an anesthetic. I thought I was going to throw up. He’s finishing up in there. But Tahir’s out for blood.”

“From what I heard, he already got some. And so did you.”

“I mean Tahir’s freaking angry, Dad. I could see it in his eyes. At me.”

“Can you blame him?”

“No.” Em shook her head.

Sufyan walked out, gauze wrapped around his right arm from his elbow to his wrist. He had a pill bottle in his uninjured hand.

“Did you call home?” Don asked as he pulled out his own phone.

“I left a message,” Sufyan said. “I hope he’s okay.”

“Your mom didn’t answer.”

“His mom never does,” Em said in a way that suggested that Don should leave that subject alone.

“I expect the police will be here any time,” Don said, calling Lana.

“A detective already came and went,” Emma said. “He took statements from us and gave us his card.” She handed it to Don. “Those guys attacked us and then they tried to blame us. But the detective said five people got video of it, all from different angles. Can you believe that?”

Easily, Don thought as he heard his phone ringing Lana’s. “So you guys are in the clear?”

They both nodded. “The cop made sure we were all right, and he said he’d be back in touch. We’re probably going to have to testify and stuff.”

Don nodded, knowing that as much as the video might have exonerated his daughter and Sufyan, it would also make them absolutely notorious to those who would drag them from cars and beat them to death.

Lana answered on the fifth ring: “Don, where are you?”

“I’m with them. Emma’s fine. Sufyan’s fine. They’re safe. I can tell you what happened when we get—”

“Hold on,” Lana said quickly. “Tahir’s pulling up in front of our place. And—”

“I think he’s going to be pissed.”

“He’s definitely pissed. He just slammed his car door. I saw him on the news. Now he’s running up here. Where’s Jojo?”

“Sorry. I’ve got him, too.”

“Got to go. He’s here.”

In the background, Don heard thunderous pounding.

Lana hung up.