Unholy Code

Chapter 31

Lana listens intensely to the phone and follows the directions scrupulously. She has little doubt that Emma is nearby. Hayden Lake makes so much sense. Although the original, infamous group of neo-Nazis was bankrupted and forced to sell its compound, the region’s reputation had been well established and continued to attract like-minded zealots.

The phone’s voice draws her closer and closer to the town. Cairo, in the passenger seat next to her, senses her tension. The Malinois watches everything, even looking behind them. He’s shifting his weight, as if he’s getting ready to spring out of the old Toyota 4x4 van. He’s got the heart, but the legs? At his age?

The phone never leads her into the town proper. Instead, it directs her to country roads, flanked by trees that crowd the land all the way to the lakeshore. Lana notices a compass hanging from the dash like a pocket watch. She’s heading northeast, passing large properties hidden by stone walls, steel gates, and nature’s beauty, though pine beetles have been sowing the death of the forest that veils them from public view.

The phone tells her to turn “at your next right,” but doesn’t offer a street name. The voice sounds different. Lana can’t put her finger on why. Not a change in tone. Maybe cadence.

She drives onto a single-lane road. But it’s not leading her to a house, not immediately in any case. It’s taking her deeper into thick woods with dark shadows. The branches look stark, skeletal, and scratch against the van, making harsh sounds, as if they’re reaching out to grab her.

Don’t be ridiculous.

But the enveloping trees do look eerie, like woodcuts from a macabre fairy tale.

And now she sees why she was given this ragged old beast of a van: the paved road vanishes. There’s nothing ahead or to the sides but trees and bushes and rough, uneven terrain.

“Keep driving east,” the voice says.

She must be able to see me, or she’s got a locator or tracker. On the phone or van.

Lana moves on, as commanded. She hears forest debris crushed by the tires. The visibility is horrible. She can’t see five feet ahead. She slows to a crawl, but still drops the front of the van into a gully.

She tries to drive forward. Can’t. Backward. Can’t.

“Get out and walk east.”

She manages to open the door just enough to squeeze out. Cairo follows her, landing gingerly, but upright.

Lana carries the compass in one hand, the Glock in the other. She feels observed, though she doesn’t know how. Maybe from the racket she makes as she forces herself forward.

She smells the freshwater pungency of the lake, the dead fish that wash ashore, but can’t see water through all the foliage.

Cairo has his nose in the air. “Good boy,” she says softly.

They keep trudging east. The phone has fallen silent. Lana’s more scared than she’s ever been. Scared for Emma, scared for herself. For having to go it alone — or forgo the life of the one person she’d defy anybody to save.

The quiet around them is unnerving. She wonders what Cairo can hear with ears more sensitive than a human’s. The forest darkens, making her feel as if a giant cloak is settling over them. She feels vulnerable to Steel Fist and wants to kill the son-of-a-bitch as soon as she lays eyes on him.

“Freeze!”

She hears feedback on the phone and a different voice, realizing that it comes from both the device and a real person. Someone who must be nearby. And a woman, which surprises Lana most of all.

She looks around, trying not to appear panicky. Then she lifts her gaze and spots a camouflaged deer blind about fifteen feet up in a thickly limbed oak tree. The muzzle of a rifle is trained on her from the elevated platform.

“Kneel on the ground,” the unseen woman yells.

“Where’s Steel Fist?” Lana asks as she lowers herself. Cairo stands beside her. “Down,” she says softly to the dog; she doesn’t want him shot. He settles by her side, still staring up at the blind.

“What makes you think I’m not Steel Fist?”

“I profile online subjects. That’s what I do. He’s a man.”

“Good answer, Elkins. I’m not Steel Fist yet. But I will be.”

What the hell does that mean?

“Toss your gun and the phone onto that pile of leaves.” They’re bunched against the base of a tree. “Nowhere else.”

They land softly. No accidental discharge. She’s thought of everything. Lana looks again at the tree. Maybe not. She has to get down from there.

But the woman’s planned for that, too. A plastic handcuff flies out of the blind and falls in front of Lana.

“Put that around your ankles. Do it tightly. If you don’t, I’ll shoot out your legs. One way or the other, you’re not going to be running away. You choose. I’m watching you through a scope.”

Lana pauses, wishing she had a derringer to whip out the moment the woman starts down.

She picks up the cuff, feeling meek. She hates herself for that. She sees the muzzle follow her every moment, a murderous shadow.

She doesn’t want to kill you… yet.

Trying to find hope when her mind keeps racing away to the worst that can happen.

“Stand and roll up your pants. I want to see that plastic squeezing your skin.”

Lana cinches herself.

“Tighter. Don’t mess with me.”

She hears a metallic click. She pulls the cuff hard enough to hurt.

“That dog’s trained, right? I saw him obey you.”

“Yes.”

“Good. I don’t want to kill him. I’d much rather kill you, but if you can’t back him way off and have him lie down again and stay, I’ll shoot him.”

Lana hand signals Cairo into the forest. He backs away, as though grudgingly, keeping his eyes on her. “Down,” she says.

He drops to the position.

“I want you to kneel again. Hands in the air. Let them drop and I’ll belly shoot you.”

Lana goes back on her knees and raises her arms, the look of a worshipper.

Here she comes.

The woman lowers herself in a climbing harness, now wielding a handgun with her rifle strapped across her back. Her descent is as smooth as a paratrooper’s, the pistol never shifting from her target. She’s pretty, too. Her appearance doesn’t add up. Has Vinko found a woman to do his dirty work?

She sheds the harness and advances past Lana, pressing a semi-automatic to the back of her head. Lana’s skin tingles, her stomach clenching. She’s been a total fool. She’s on her knees all ready for an execution-style murder.

But before she can beg for her life — and Emma’s — the woman tells her to put her hands behind her back.

Lana’s relieved, for surely she wouldn’t bother to cuff her if she were about to bury a bullet in her brain.

The cuffs tighten on her wrists, then the woman comes around to help her stand. She has flawless skin. Youthful. She looks familiar. “I know you,” Lana says. “Where do I know you from?”

“It’ll come to you,” she replies. “Don’t move.”

She gets behind Lana and cuts off the ankle cuffs. “Walk in front of me. Don’t do anything stupid. And if that dog breaks your command, he’s dead.”

Lana walks through the forest, trying to see everything around her, to remember trees that have fallen or tilt precariously so she can find her way back to the van, if she can escape with Emma. She searches so intently she spots tiny cameras mounted in the trees. A dozen of them at least.

“Are you going live with this?”

“Not yet. But I’m documenting everything so the world will see exactly what happens here.”

“Isn’t that stupid? Documenting your own crimes?” Wanting to get a rise out of her, some hint of who she is.

“Not in the world I come from.”

The world I come from? Lana’s heard those very words before. Who is she? What world would celebrate this?

Islamist radicals, yes. Russian oligarchs, indeed. North Koreans, them, too. Lana could go on with her list of people who want her dead. The successes she’s known, both in cyberspace and in ferocious combat, have created enemies around the world. And to think some stupid neo-Nazi and his gal Friday, or whoever she is, have caught up with her.

They find your weak spot, the way you love your kid, and they control you.

The woman nudges her with the gun, accelerating their pace. Within minutes they come to a bungalow. Lana still can’t see the lake. The woman opens the back door and tells her to go down to the basement. It’s lit, and the moment she descends Emma yells, “Mom!”

Her daughter stands clinging to the bars of a cage, naked. A man whose hands are cuffed behind his back and whose mouth is duct taped looks over, too.

Oh, God. His bloodied penis hangs from his fly.

Lana has never seen this much fear on her child’s face. Her mother has come not in rescue but as a prisoner, too. The woman opens the cage, telling Emma to stay back. The man simply stares. If possible, he’s even more frightened than Em.

Lana notices metal posts sunk into the floor with snap clamps attacked to each one. The next second brings an even more wrenching sight: chainsaw.

Pushed from behind, Lana stumbles into the cage. Emma, who remains unbound, catches her. She holds her mother, hugging her fiercely, crying loudly.

“That’s the great Steel Fist,” the woman says over Emma’s sobs. “His name is Vinko Horvat. Okay, Stinko, you’re coming out.”

He backs up.

She picks up small pruning shears. “I will come in and cut it off completely if you don’t come out of there.”

Vinko Horvat, looking wretched, steps out of the cage.

She grabs his penis with her free hand. He twists away, which only stretches his organ, making it an easier target.

“I really don’t want your dick, Stinko. Just do what I say and you’ll get to keep it the rest of your life.”

Lana doubts that will be more than a few more minutes. She’s just spotted three more cameras in the cellar above the metal posts.

As ordered, Horvat lies on his back, the look of terror deepening in his eyes.

Always holding the gun on him, the woman clamps his hands with two quick snaps, then one leg as efficiently before Horvat explodes in panic.

He rears back with his free leg, kicking her hard enough to spill her across the floor. Rolling to his side, Horvat pounds the post holding his other leg with his foot. It doesn’t budge.

The woman stands and watches him exhaust himself, then seizes his leg and clamps it with practiced ease.

When he turns his horrified gaze on her, she leans forward, smiles, and shoots him in the crotch.

His muffled agony sounds like an earthquake is ripping him apart from the inside out. Gouts of blood spill onto the floor. He twists and yanks on the metal clamps, bloodying his hands and ankles down to the bone.

An Obama mask covers her face and hair. Waving away gun smoke, she ties on a full-length white splatter apron, then opens a wall console with a computer and works the keyboard. She stares at the screen for a few seconds before pulling on thick black rubber gloves. She looks Felliniesque, but for the chainsaw she quickly hoists. She jerks the starter rope. The saw’s roar fills the cellar, obliterating Horvat’s tortured moans.

She walks toward him, blade screaming, as though she’s committed this horror a hundred times before. She points the saw at the camera above him, then nods to Lana and yells, “Now we’re going live.”