Galina fed Alexandra a bowl of her favorite cereal and tucked her into bed. Tomorrow, they would go to the oncologist, and Galina would beg.
For now, she returned to her keyboard. She logged on and typed in an elaborate code, planning to find the submarine hacker. After what she’d seen at the morgue, she’d made her decision. She couldn’t trust Oleg not to kill her. Viktor, dead. For Oleg, that was more than just money. That was a message.
She sat back and watched the screen open to something she never expected and surely had not programmed:
WHO ARE YOU? in big block letters.
Galina froze, wondering who had left the message. But what shook her up the most was the timing: she had been asking herself the same question over and over the past few days.
Who am I? What have I turned into?
CHAPTER 11
Emma had been quiet on the drive from Tanesa’s. Lana had fought morning traffic, hoping she’d eke out enough time for her daughter to wash up, change, and head off to school. Or even talk, if she needed to. Emma’s life had been a jumble of late with her mother gone so much. Lana also needed all the time she could squirrel away to brief Holmes about her findings, and certainly wasn’t comfortable committing that information to the “hackisphere,” as she’d started to think of it.
But one of the knotty challenges of raising a teen was they often didn’t appear to want your attention — and were perfectly content to study their smartphones as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls — until a light went off in their heads, instead of on their screens.
This would be one of those times.
After they arrived home, Lana toasted Emma frozen waffles, her favorite breakfast, and remembered that it was the same meal she’d fed her on the day the grid suddenly went down. Not so much coincidence as consistency, because left to her own devices Emma would have eaten frozen waffles with oodles of butter and warm syrup every day of her life. Nevertheless, she got to finish her meal this morning without the lights going dark. Success of sorts. And a smile. A teen fed and fueled and ready for the day with a load of simple carbohydrates to wreak havoc with her blood sugar levels.
“Dad gets out of the pen tomorrow,” Emma said without preamble.
The pen? How much has she been talking to him? Argot already?
“Yes, I heard,” Lana replied as neutrally as possible, which is to say that her jaw was so tight she could have ground her molars flat. Of course, Lana knew Doper Don was getting out of the… pen… tomorrow. As a matter of fact, she’d been waiting to see whether — more likely, when—the subject would rear its ugly head with Emma.
“Where’d you hear?” the girl asked.
“His parole officer.”
“So do you know where he’s going to live?” Emma asked.
“I presume somewhere close to a parole office.” So he may be remanded to the… pen… as soon as possible.
“I do. It’s a beach house near Annapolis. He’s just rented it. He said he can’t wait to walk along the shore and get his feet wet again.”
Chesapeake Bay? Lana figured he was likely to get the whole of himself wet, given what she feared was on the horizon. Besides, a single man in a beach house? Donny boy wanted to get more than his feet wet. But Lana reined herself in. This was, after all, her daughter, so she posed a question instead:
“Does he follow the news at all, Em? There’s a horrible cyberterrorist threat to the oceans. And the Union of Concerned Scientists says that the Annapolis area is already at huge risk from rising seas. After the last big hurricane up there, it cost the government $120 million to fix things up. And that was before those cybernuts said they were going to blow up the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.”
Emma offered a knowing shake of her head. “Dad says that Antarctica stuff is just a big conspiracy of bankers and real estate agents trying to drive up the price of homes that aren’t on the shore because there’s actually a whole bunch more houses behind them.”
“Do you believe that?” Please say you don’t.
“You’ve got to admit, it could be true.”
Lana replied more calmly than she felt: “That’s the nature of conspiracy theories. If they don’t sound like they could possibly be true, nobody would believe them. Those are the same terrorists killing those sailors on the submarine.”
“Dad says that’s like the moon landing, easy to fake.”
“What?” Lana was losing it. She looked at the clock. Emma was going to be late. “Let’s save this for another time.”
“You could be a little more open-minded, Mom, like you’re always telling me to be. Anyway, he’d like me to spend the weekend there. Kind of a ‘Welcome home, Dad’ thing.”
“A welcome home thing? You’re not going anywhere near Chesapeake Bay right now.”
“So do you know something about that thing on the news?”
“You mean the conspiracy?” Lana raised her eyebrows.
“Well, I’m not saying you’re part of the conspiracy. Just tell me, is that what you’ve been working on?”
“You know I can’t discuss my work ever.”
“Look, Mom, if I can’t go to Dad’s new beach house, how about if he comes here for the weekend? He’s getting out after only four years for good behavior. He should be with his family.”
“He could have been with his family fourteen years ago, Emma. But he decided to be a pot pirate instead. And to do that he emptied out all our savings so he could fill a forty-four-foot sailboat with pot and punch his ticket to prison. We never heard from him again until last week. I think he should stay the hell out of our lives.”
“I don’t. He’s my father and I want to see him, and I can’t go stay at his place because you’re worried about a little bit of water.” With that, Emma stormed toward the front door.
“Stop, Em. I’m sorry. I’ll give you a ride. He can come here,” she added with such a false note of accommodation that her daughter rightfully rolled her eyes.
“Mom, you’ve been a big success. He’s not. Show a little compassion.”
That phrase stuck firmly in Lana’s craw: more of her own words coming back boomerang style.
“You’re running late, aren’t you? First period’s gym, right?”
“I hate it.”
“I’ll give you a note. Let me shower quickly and change.”
“Maybe you’ll actually like him.”
It wasn’t Emma’s words but the sudden longing in her voice and eyes that stunned Lana. “Meaning?”
Emma shrugged. “Even you admitted he’s good-looking.”
“Not that good-looking, and he’ll never be for me, so put that impossibility right out of your mind. He’ll sleep in the basement on the pullout bed.” And I’ll bring in a surveillance team so I can monitor his every breath.
“Not even the guest room?”
Lana shook her head.
“I thought you might say that. If you’re going to make the guest room off limits for my guest, then I’ll sleep down there and he can have my room. It is my room. Why can’t you show him a little respect?”
I’d rather show him the door — as soon as possible — so I don’t want him getting comfortable.
But Lana stifled those words as she had so many others of late, figuring it was good practice for all that was likely to follow with Doper Don trying to wheedle his way back into their lives.
Within an hour Lana was back at NSA headquarters, feeling remarkably refreshed for the grudging amount of sleep she’d managed. But a shower and a smoothie — and a daunting array of supplements — had revitalized her enough to hurry down to Holmes’s office.