Unholy Code

Chapter 12

Lana rushed through the living room to her home office and grabbed her Sig Sauer 9 millimeter, racking the slide and jamming the barrel into the back of her pants. She draped the tail of her shirt over it as Tahir pounded on her door again.

She approached it without a word. He might not have heard her anyway; the door weighed almost fifteen hundred pounds and was made of reinforced steel, the kind used most often for panic rooms in homes. She figured her whole house qualified for panic status with all the security upgrades. She’d had them added when the seas rose and domestic “disturbances” escalated.

Lana looked at the screen of her digital door peephole. Tahir’s angry face loomed close; in the background she saw that the small blue car he’d driven was not the smashed-up Corolla he’d used to save Emma and Sufyan. She also noticed that he hadn’t drawn a weapon, though on the video she’d watched minutes ago online he’d acquitted himself handsomely with nothing more than his fists and feet.

She unlocked the door, and stepped back quickly, keeping her distance from Tahir. He moved past her without saying a word in greeting. He smelled of sun and sweat.

“Where are they?” he demanded in a hoarse voice.

“They’re coming. Don’s with them.” She mentioned him, lest Tahir assume he’d be facing only the teens and her.

Tahir didn’t respond. He looked around as if he still might find Sufyan lurking in the living room.

“Can I get you something to drink?”

“Water.”

He sounded dry. But at least he’d answered her.

When she turned her back on him to go to the kitchen, she listened for his footfalls. If he’d taken one step to follow her she would have wheeled around with her weapon. But he remained by a bay window and stared at the street.

Lana filled a plastic cup with water, unwilling to give the apparently unarmed man a weapon of any kind; she knew the damage you could do to someone’s face with a simple glass because she’d been trained to do it. She suspected the maiming and blinding potential of a glass wouldn’t have been lost on a fighter like Tahir, either.

So be it. She offered it to him with her left hand to keep the right free for drawing her gun.

For a man who’d sounded parched, he sipped slowly. Maybe if you were born and bred in a desert, you always savored every drop.

“Do you want to sit?”

He turned his wide unblinking gaze on her, the whites as unblemished as any she’d ever seen. That was all the answer he gave her.

She perched eight feet away on the armrest of a chair, keeping her body free of cushions or anything else that could impede her reach.

“Thank you for what you did earlier.” She couldn’t leave that unsaid, even with malevolency alive in every moment since he’d stepped inside.

He shook his head, as if she’d just piled annoyance onto his fury. But after several seconds passed, he said, “Your daughter is not the problem.”

“I know that, but you’re the one who threatened her life right in this living room.”

“I hoped that would stop them.”

“Stop them?”

“Stop the two of them with all this”—he threw his hands outward—“this love.” Spoken like an epithet.

“You’ve also been trying to incite people to attack her, me, Don, our dog.” He stared at her. Didn’t disagree. “That’s right,” Lana went on. “I know it’s you. You’re in those chat rooms trying to whip those fools into a froth.”

“That will stop. My threats were part of my cover… ”

My cover?

He surprised Lana by revealing that he was anything more than an immigrant, although he might have suspected his appearance on the video would soon have reporters digging into his background.

Or he’s found my cybertrail and knows I’m already looking into him.

“I’m watched, too, not just by you. We’re all watched, even when they say we’re not. Eyes are everywhere.”

His gaze roamed the room, as though for cameras that weren’t there.

“You almost got them killed.”

“You think I do not know that. But I saved them,” he pointed to his chest. “If I wanted you or your daughter dead, or Don, you would not be sitting there.”

They both turned as Emma pulled into the driveway with Sufyan. “And she would not be with my nephew.”

Don drove in behind them in his pickup.

Neither Lana nor Tahir spoke. It seemed an hour had passed before the door from the garage opened. Don led Emma and Sufyan into the house. Jojo came up and sniffed Tahir, who ignored the Malinois.

“Hello, Tahir,” Don said.

The Sudanese didn’t respond. He stared at Sufyan, who quickly bowed his head.

That can’t be good, thought Lana. Not if he’s that cowed already. He knows his uncle a lot better than we do.

“Sit down,” Tahir said to him. “You, too.” He pointed to Emma.

Lana saw Don bristle and eyed him to be silent.

Tahir took a deep breath. “Do you love my nephew?” he asked Emma. “I mean really love him. No games now.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Sufyan, do you love Emma?” The first time he’d ever used her name.

“I do, Uncle.”

“Enough to die for her?”

“Yes.” Sufyan answered without pause.

“And you,” he turned back to Em. “Would you die for my nephew?”

“I would,” Emma said, eyes pooling.

Tahir looked at the ceiling. Perhaps he was seeing more than the smooth white surface. Perhaps he had his eyes on whatever he viewed as Paradise. The very possibility had Lana reaching back and placing her hand on her gun.

He shook his head at her, as if he knew what she’d just done, then sat across from the young couple. “I ask you these questions because today you almost died. I know killers. I know your mother and father have killed for their country, Emma. They have not told me that, but I know.” His fist thumped his chest to punctuate the last word. “And I know those men in the van were killers. But I will tell you both something: neither of you is a killer yet. You were both fine fighters out there, but I do not want Sufyan to have to kill. That is not why I came to America. And your parents do not want you to have to kill,” he told Emma.

He looked at Lana and Don. “Do you?”

“No, we don’t,” Lana said. Don shook his head.

“Each generation wants peace for its children,” Tahir said to Emma and Sufyan. “But you two have chosen love in a country that is having difficult times and won’t let you know peace with your kind of love. That is why I ask if you are ready to die, because if you are ready to die for love, then you must be ready to kill for it, or you will surely perish. Can you do that?”

Sufyan said yes immediately. Emma paused. Tears ran down her face. “I don’t want to have to kill.”

Lana wondered if her daughter was remembering the bloodshed on a bus about a year and a half ago, when Emma had tried to murder a madman, and the nightmares she had suffered in the aftermath of that sickening violence. Emma had been so young to learn — with such vicious visceral force — that sometimes you had to try to kill someone or be killed. Em had failed to slay that jihadist, but she’d injured him and saved countless lives with her courage. Now she was learning another side of that macabre equation: sometimes you have to kill for love.

“If you stay with Sufyan,” Tahir went on, “the decision to kill might be made for you. It is better to make that decision now. Your father and I are running around trying to keep you two safe. I am watching you while I am watching him, and he is probably watching me while he is watching you. It is likely that you will get yourselves killed doing this, and you might get us killed, too.

“We cannot keep doing this. You cannot be children running around like this is a game. If you choose love, you must grow up now. If you are willing to die for love, you must be willing to kill for it. That was how it was in Sudan, and that is how it is in America now. Do not try to fool yourselves. Do not play childish games. Or you will die and so will the people you love most.” Tahir settled his eyes on Emma. “You are welcome in my home. My nephew loves you and I will protect you with my life as I would protect him.”

Lana swallowed hard at his apparent sincerity.

He turned to Lana and Don. “We are in this together. I did not want this,” he looked at the young couple, “for their sakes. And I know you did not. But it is life.” He stepped over to Lana. “Now we must survive. All of us. Together.”

She couldn’t have said it better or more honestly.

Tahir took her hand in both of his and bowed his head. He repeated the gestures with Don.

“We three are strong,” he said, “because of those two.” He looked at Emma and Sufyan. “We have such powerful reasons.”

Forty minutes later, they sat at the dining room table and ate their first meal together.