Unholy Code

Chapter 1

Lana Elkins watched the surrender of the ISIS terrorists on a satellite feed. Their meekness scared her more than any of the brutal suicide bombings of the past few weeks. Gruesome as those attacks had been, there had been nothing secret about their murderous results. But this surrender made no sense.

It’s too easy.

This was a mystery. Either ISIS’s recruiting standards had softened — and there was no intelligence suggesting that — or the captured men had yet to make their real threats known. Islamists, feared for their willingness to die so they could kill others, simply did not allow themselves to be cuffed and hauled off like common criminals.

Not during the Summer of Blood.

Lana wished she were down in Oysterton to witness this firsthand, not in a large windowless room in the heart of her cybersecurity firm in Bethesda, Maryland. The secure space had been constructed with special metal cladding inside the walls and doors to prevent cyberattacks and signal snooping from others. With proprietary encryption and other cutting-edge information security for their own work — and the U.S. under siege — it had become their war room. All her senior staff were pulling eighteen-hour days at hastily assembled workstations, their mission clear: intercept jihadi communications and provide them immediately to the National Security Agency, which had contracted with Lana, once again, for the special services of CyberFortress.

Lana had also told her staff to “hack to pieces” specific targets promulgating hatred both against westerners and the moderate Muslims who formed the great majority of the faith’s followers worldwide. Islamic moderates in the U.S. and elsewhere were now in the crosshairs of the crazies as much as anyone else, if not more so.

And no country was being targeted by the most radical elements of Islam more than the U.S. The intelligence community was coordinating a wide spectrum of strategies to try to thwart the first real invasion of the States since the War of 1812.

The footage showed the bearded men in Oysterton shouting as they were led to a police van. “Can you tell what they’re saying?” she asked Jeff Jensen, her VP for security. He’d already called upon one of his former navy colleagues, who was talking to the Oysterton police chief.

“Pretty standard stuff,” Jensen replied. “Proclaiming their devotion to the caliphate. At least one of them is speaking in English. He just yelled that thousands of them are already in the U.S. Thousands more are coming.”

Bullshit, Lana thought. Maybe hundreds. Which was frightening enough.

The consensus of the intelligence community was that mid-size pleasure boats packed with ruthless Islamists had stolen past the hundreds of thousands of government and private vessels trying to escape flooded marinas and ports from Miami to Boston, San Diego to Seattle.

In short, America’s vast coastlines had devolved into chaos as owners tried to save their investments from the ravages of rising seas by fleeing to open waters, only to find shifting tides and underwater hazards setting off collisions and sinking countless ships. That created only more hazards, and thus more accidents, leaving the country with the most vulnerable coastlines in the world — and a slow-motion invasion of suicide bombers.

The U.S. Navy and Coast Guard were doing their best, but no federal agency, including the military, had ever drilled for this kind of catastrophe, and the results were apparent every time Lana linked to satellite views of the nation’s principal ports. She clicked onto a video feed of the mess in Boston Harbor, where an ocean liner had run aground on a sunken container ship late yesterday, rolling onto its port side. A submarine was cruising past it, along with four fishing trawlers, six luxury cabin cruisers, a three-masted sailboat, and what appeared to be dozens of lookie-loo kayakers, paddle boarders, and canoers. All were squeezing around the half-sunken wreck while a phalanx of tugboats ran thick chains to the fully exposed starboard side of the liner’s massive black hull. There had been numerous injuries in the grounding, but no deaths — yet.

In contrast, in the less populated Gulf of Mexico, the biggest concern had been the possibility of attacks on offshore oil platforms, not invasions. But the territory had proved too vast to cover properly. The navy hadn’t even had one of its new, heavily armed and fast-moving Mark VI patrol boats anywhere in the vicinity of Oysterton.

Despite all this, shore-dwellers around the country were making do, even managing to party during the holiday weekend. Down on the Gulf, other than in the Big Easy, which had flooded as badly as any city in the world, some folks had been so far removed from the madness that they could still plan on a fun-filled Labor Day.

Lana felt a light tap on her shoulder. Galina Bortnik handed her the phone, whispering, “Mr. Holmes.”

Galina was a brilliant young Muscovite hacker whom Lana had helped save from the man who’d been behind the nuclear attack on the Antarctic ice shelf.

“Yes, Mr. Holmes?” Lana was always formal with Bob in the presence of others.

“What do you think?” The deputy director of the NSA rarely minced words with her, especially with the country under fire.

“I’m not buying it,” she replied. “How soon is Homeland Security going to get down there and take over?”

“Forty-five minutes. Not soon enough.”

She imagined her weary, septuagenarian friend raking his steel-gray hair back, a recently acquired habit when exasperated.

“So far,” he said, “we’re just lucky there isn’t a shoe bomber in that bunch.”

“That we know of.” Lana glanced at the screen showing the police van driving toward downtown Oysterton. It did not take a hyperactive imagination to envision the vehicle exploding at any second.

“Don’t those locals know we have protocols for this sort of apprehension?” Lana asked.

“Evidently not,” Holmes replied.

“Send me down,” she said.

“We can’t do that. I was calling to let you know that they’re happy about this in Congress.”

“They must really be hungry for heroes.”

“Or money. I think they’ll be using this capture to push for more local control of our national defense. Anyway, you’ve been warned about the mountebanks on the Hill.”

Lana knew that even small shifts toward decentralizing defense would mean additional federal funding for the locals, which in turn would mean more political support for incumbents who were bringing the pork home. All at a time when the nation desperately needed follow-through on existing national directives. Just look at the shoddy police procedures in Oysterton. The cops had run up like they were rushing to an open bar at a barbecue, instead of keeping a safe distance from men who had already fired weapons and might well have bombs.

She took another glance at the monitor, shaking her head at what could still prove to be a debacle down there.

Or a victory. Don’t rule that out completely, she told herself.

Galina caught Lana’s attention with a slight Slavic nod, pushing black bangs that needed trimming away from her eyes. She was cute as a cocker spaniel, but had a vicious cyber bite, which was why Lana had brought her back to the United States and a job at CyberFortress.

“These close-ups?” she began.

Lana nodded.

“I think they’re just enough for screen shots. We could use facial recognition.”

“Make it happen,” Lana replied.

The video improved measurably when the first television news crew in Oysterton showed a ground-level shot of the local police putting the seven banged-up, bloody men through a perp walk. They were so unprotected a Jack Ruby could have jumped out and killed them all. Instead, they were jostled by freelance news crews and a throng of tourists with cameras.

Jensen had been by Lana’s side long enough to read her frustration.

“It’s a mess. I keep waiting for a bomb to go off.”

“They did a quick pat-down before you came in,” said a woman with red hair and a swan-like neck from the end of the table. “That’s all,” she added, shaking her head.

Lana nodded at Maureen, her most recent hire. MIT. Jensen had been her first. He was a navy veteran, a cryptographer during the two Gulf Wars, and a Mormon with five children and a doting wife carrying number six.

There were lots of Mormons in the spy service, as true now as it had been at the height of the Cold War. Lana hadn’t known Jensen’s religious affiliation during their first interview, but she’d sensed right away that she could trust him. A panoply of deception-detection tests — polygraph, voice analysis, Facial Action Coding Systems, and pupil-size studies — had reinforced her eerily accurate gut. The man was dependable. No vices.

Not true for her. Lana had a failing that could tank her career if she ever let it get the better of her again, as it had several years ago. Of late, Lana had felt the urge to gamble recrudescing, like a tumor that refused to shrivel up and die. It had been tough enough to fight those impulses when she’d actually had to find a poker table or dealer, but with online gaming, the ability to wager any time of the day or night was never farther away than her phone.

She hadn’t been to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting in months. Hadn’t thought she needed to. She’d been too busy trying to protect the country from cyberattacks, a high-stakes proposition in and of itself. But thoughts of cards and betting had been insinuating themselves into her awareness every few minutes of late, a desire that was potentially careerending for her. The intelligence community couldn’t afford to have operatives falling deep into debt gambling.

You can bet on that.

Gambling lingo, even when she was chastising herself. Although a look at her financial assets — which she forced herself to endure once a month — was sufficient to bring back the wincing memory of her last betting binge. That was when she’d gambled away enough money to have paid for her daughter Emma’s college education.

Lana had found professional help, but the sad truth for her was the lure of gambling wasn’t only about money. The lure was the thrill that came in the teeming titillating pause that lay between hope and outcome. Not unlike the rush that came from hunting — and finding — cyberterrorists.

Which brought her back to the men claiming to be ISIS: Who are they, really? “Any facial recognition yet?”

Galina nodded. “Got it,” she said in her Russian accent. “The one who was speaking in English has been identified by NSA as Fahad Kassab. Till two years ago he was studying electrical engineering at Cal Tech. Then he disappeared after traveling to Turkey. NSA thinks he crossed into Syria at some point along the five hundred mile frontier between them. The CIA says he fought in Mosul and Saladin, Iraq.”

“So he’s a veteran,” Lana said, “which means this inept display down there really makes no sense.”

“What did Holmes say about Homeland Security?” Jeff asked Lana, who glanced at her watch.

“They’re flying in from Camp Blanding,” she answered. “North Florida,” she added for Galina’s benefit. Galina hadn’t been in the States long enough to know the location of hundreds of military bases and installations in the U.S., many now threatened by the extensive flooding. “They should be there in half an hour.”

But Lana strongly suspected that every minute the self-proclaimed ISIS crew remained in the hands of those local yokels made the country that much more vulnerable to whatever their controllers had set in motion. She didn’t like mysteries — not in books, movies, and definitely not when she was dealing with murderers who planned to die with their secrets. And in combating horrific terrorist attacks, thirty minutes could be an eternity. A lot could go wrong—no, everything could go wrong—in a half-hour. In a world that had made a mockery of geologic time by raising seas in weeks to levels that should have taken eons, days and months — even years — had been wrenched free of real meaning. Now terrorism not only killed people, it also murdered the notion that time itself could be measured on a rational human scale.

When the monitor finally showed the dark-suited men from Blanding racing up to the police station, she took a break and walked down the hall to the bathroom.

She didn’t need the facilities. She needed to look herself in the eye and say, No, don’t do it. She needed the forcefulness of those words to really register. They did not.

Reaching into her pocket, she stepped past the door and pulled out a private phone on which she’d created an encrypted connection to a private server. Then she hit the app for Texas Hold’em.

So far all Lana was holding was her cell and her breath.

Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.

She slipped into a stall, hiding herself much as she kept her addiction from everyone but those in her Gamblers Anonymous group. Nobody in the intelligence community knew about it.

Stop it, she told herself.

She’d have fired anyone, even Jeff Jensen, if she ever found such a weakness in them.

Lana drew a deep breath, assuring herself that she was okay, that she’d avoided the only pitfall that could sink her family, career, and financial well-being.

She reached for the door handle to leave. It felt cold, almost icy, a testament to how gambling could turn up her body’s thermostat. She stepped out and looked in the mirror. Several strands of wiry gray hair poked from her scalp, unruly as her addiction. She plucked each one, as if she were exorcising more than the telltales of age, but when she looked back at her face she saw blatant excitement in her eyes: exuberant expression, shaky hands — the glitter of gambling sprinkled over the whole of her. Then she felt a familiar itch in her fingers — as she had many times before — and a shock to her system as startling as adrenaline.

Lana was so well practiced at using her phone that she was back in the gambling app without having to think about her motions.

She drew a jack.

She drew another jack.

She won.

But it felt like the fear she’d known with the arrest of those terrorists, a keen sense that winning the first round was the worst thing that could possibly happen.

Get out of here. Quit while you’re ahead. You’ve got a kid up to her neck in trouble.

Which was the unerring truth. Her seventeen-year-old daughter’s life had taken an edgy turn, and Lana’s ex-husband, so recently reunited with his family, was hopeless in dealing with his daughter’s recent decisions.

You’re not doing much better with her. Or yourself.

Seconds ago Lana’s life hadn’t simply veered off course. She’d taken a dive, like a bribed boxer, and had hit the mat so hard she was still shaking as she dragged herself back to the conference room.

Jeff caught her eye immediately and waved her over. “Take a look at this. Hey, you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Lana replied, pressing her hands to her sides to steady them.

Jeff nodded at a large screen. Steel Fist, the online identity of a notorious neo-Nazi and hacker, was operational once again on his website, For the Homeland — Ready!

Steel Fist was not only back but he’d also managed to intercept the satellite video of the arrests at the Oysterton beach. Less than an hour ago, Jensen had exploited the neo-Nazi’s server and encrypted all of his data, per Lana’s instructions, but Steel Fist had resurrected For the Homeland — Ready! from the Dark Web so swiftly that the speed of recovery itself was frightening.

These hidden realms of the Internet remained a cyber netherworld whose denizens included gun runners, drug dealers, despots, sex slavers, and all manner of hackers and haters — along with whistleblowers and others with high-minded ambitions. Almost all the mayhem for money was conducted anonymously with encrypted currencies that caused huge headaches for intelligence communities around the world.

The Dark Web was also the redoubt of Steel Fist. Whoever he was, wherever he was based, the demagogue was a supremely gifted purveyor of hate with a huge following in the U.S. and Europe.

As Lana watched, his home page filled with flashing freeze frames of each terrorist now in the Oysterton jail. Below the photos ran this message: “Look at the face of America’s future. Sharia law is coming to kill you, your wife, your kids, your life. Grab your guns. It’s time to turn your targets into corpses. You know who needs to die. Kill them now. Spare none.”

The pace of the flashing photos accelerated till they blurred and turned in an instant to grinding surveillance footage of the bombing in Liberty Square, showing only the white victims. “ISIS’s brothers and sisters are killing you. More are pouring across our pathetic borders every day. This is their Summer of Blood.” Video appeared of the high-school kids with their instruments jumping from the bandstand as the boats crashed into it. “You know who needs to die” rolled across the screen again. “Kill them all.”

“Whoever this guy is, he just declared war on America’s Muslims,” Jeff said. “He’s putting the moderates of their faith in the crosshairs.”

“Which means he’s declaring war on everyone who stands for basic decency.” Lana realized that her hands had stopped shaking. She’d dodged the bullet in the bathroom—maybe—only to find an arsenal of threats on-screen. Steel Fist wasn’t merely another Internet thug with a big mouth. He had more than ten million followers, hundreds of thousands of hits a day. Never had the aggressive tone of that term sounded more ominous to her.

When Steel Fist called for death, body counts rose.

Civil war in America?

She swore softly to herself, respecting Jeff’s devoutly held religious beliefs. Lana also left unsaid her rising fear that the nation was about to become as divided as she was — between its best impulses and its worst.

One of the firm’s receptionists opened the door to the conference room and motioned to her.

“I’m sorry, but it’s an emergency,” the young woman said. “Someone from the Senate wants to see you.”

The Senate?

A stately woman waited for her by the front desk. “Lana Elkins?”

“Yes?”

She handed Lana an envelope. “You’ve been summoned by the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.”