But he’s reneging on that now, Lana thought. He’s backing away from whatever he once agreed to. No CIA asset threatens the life of a young woman who’s the daughter of a major player in the country’s intelligence community, not if he’s trying to become a good citizen of his newly adopted land.
Maybe there were other motivations for Tahir’s desire to return to the Sudan. And maybe because of her personal link to him, she’d glimpsed a whole lot more of what he was really up to than the CIA operatives who were running him now.
Lana wondered if Bob Holmes knew. If he did and had hidden it from her, it would only reinforce the veracity of what she just read because it would strongly indicate that Tahir was known only to the highest echelon of the intelligence community.
And if that’s the case, he’s not going to confirm anything.
But Lana had known Bob for more than two decades. She might be able to read the old spymaster’s reaction.
Donna Warnes put her right through to her boss. Bob sounded as tired as he’d appeared when she’d seen him yesterday.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Fine, fine,” he replied quickly, always dismissing any interest in his health. “Do you have Galina trying to hack into this place?”
“I do.”
“Good. Don just picked up my son’s best family-security dog. I told Ed to send the bill to us.”
“I appreciate that.” A fully trained adult Malinois could easily cost more than $25,000.
“They’re on the way home now, in case you’re wondering. Ed sent me a photo of Emma with her new dog. She looks really happy. What’s up on your end?”
“It’s Tahir Hijazi. Do you know anything about him being a CIA asset?”
“Only that it sounds possible. Why do you ask?”
“Because given where he’s from, and where he’s ended up, it makes sense that he could have been, or still is, on the payroll.”
“I could look into it.”
“Would you? I’d also like to know if it was ever confirmed that he was Al Qaeda.”
“I’ll see what I can find out.”
She wondered if Bob were phrasing his answers carefully, or just as casually curious as he sounded. “It’s important,” she went on, “because he threatened to kill Emma yesterday afternoon if she keeps seeing his nephew.”
Bob groaned. To Lana he sounded like a man who’d just learned that someone he’d had on a short leash had just bolted away. But she couldn’t challenge him further without heightening the risk that he would figure out what she’d found. Besides, if the deputy director were dancing around his replies, pressing him harder would achieve nothing. So she tried to sound concerned, but companionable:
“I know. It scares me, too.”
“Don’t let Emma out of your sight.”
“That’s hardly practical, Bob. But we’re doing all we can to try to keep her safe. Don’s on the job. Thanks for rushing through his license.”
Lana ended the call and sat back, wondering…
But not for long: Maureen, though only across the room at her workstation, sent her a screen shot from Steel Fist’s website. A photo had been posted showing Em with the dogs in front of a barn. Don’s pickup and an SUV were parked in the background.
The message below the photo read:
“Lana Elkins’s daughter, Emma, just got a guard dog from a CIA-connected breeder and trainer in northern Maryland. Look at the plates on the pickup and SUV. The pickup is registered to the girl’s father, Don Fedder, a convicted drug dealer who just got out of federal prison. He’s back living with the kid and his ex-wife, Lana Elkins. The SUV belongs to Ed Holmes, the breeder working for a government that can’t keep you safe, but is doling out thousands of dollars for a damn dog to protect the daughter of a drug pusher and her black Muslim boyfriend. Holmes is the son of Robert Holmes, a deputy director of the NSA. These people are all in bed together in every possible way.
“So the Elkinses now have a dog at your expense. Look at that kid. Don’t you want to just wipe that smile right off that rich bitch’s face? You can because we don’t need a dog that can bite. We’ve got bullets!
“Ammo up!”
Chapter 10
Vinko stood up from his computer and stretched. It was true: a chain was only as strong as its weakest link. And right now Lana Elkins’s weakest link was her kid.
Emma Elkins represented everything he’d always hated about a certain sort of girl. Brought up rich, or nearly so, and goddamn beautiful — if he were feeling generous, which he was not — she’d already chosen at age seventeen to live in the world of mongrels.
How pathetic is that?
And from what Vinko had gleaned from intercepting her texts, she was smart, too, but not in the most important ways when you lived — and died—based on your online privacy. Emma was too lazy to even bother using her tight-ass OpSec — operational security — most of the time. He guessed her mother had put it on her phone because it sure wasn’t standard-issue. But guess what, Emma? It’s just like a condom: you don’t use them, you don’t have any protection. And that means you get seriously fucked. He figured she was realizing that right about now.
Vinko had intercepted the photo of her with their new dog as soon as she’d sent it to her boyfriend.
A photo’s low-hanging fruit in the cyber orchard, especially the way you sent it.
Just like her texts, which he’d been hacking for weeks. The two of them were definitely sexually active — something that nauseated him every time he imagined the white girl slapping skin with the dark one. Recently he’d read an elliptical text from the boy apologizing, once more, for the “mishap” when they’d been “doing it.”
Mishap?
Not when push came to shove with a Muslim man. Just try getting an abortion, Emma, if you’re pregnant. Vinko couldn’t wait to intercept those messages, if she lived long enough to send them.
The very thought of her trying to explain to a Muslim why she had to terminate a pregnancy had Vinko shaking his head as he stepped outside. He shaded his eyes with his hand and spotted the goats in the shadow of a giant beech tree.
Time to milk them, but he relished another moment imagining Emma Elkins pregnant — and the messages he could send out with that news. The responses would be volcanic, and that was important because he wanted to move his followers to take real action, not simply brag and snort in chat rooms about their guns and who should be killed. They needed a breakthrough moment to understand their power. The assassination of the Elkins family would do it. Even murdering only Emma could accomplish that much. Nothing destroyed a family faster than the death of a child.
So he luxuriated in thinking about the aftermath, the militant mobilization that would follow, including the exterminations necessary for the building of a self-sufficient nation. He’d already seen to his own needs. Others should, too. Vinko had solar panels on his roofs, and a well drawing the purest water from a depth of four hundred feet.
He also raised his own food — chickens, turkeys, fruits, and vegetables — on three carefully tended acres. You didn’t need a thousand acres, or even a hundred. Three acres could raise it all. Add a deer or elk or bear to the larder and you were set.
“Herd ’em inside,” he commanded Biko, who’d risen from all fours as soon as he’d seen his master. Now the border collie nipped at the goats, driving them toward the barn.