But then Jimmy realized that knowing just enough to be dangerous might be just enough, indeed.
Lana checked on Holmes’s condition almost hourly. The deputy director was still in the ICU, still not permitted visitors. His longtime executive assistant Donna Warnes said his condition was grave. She’d sounded weepy when Lana had spoken to her by phone. That Donna was upset worried Lana, and not just for deep personal reasons. The interim deputy director sitting in for Holmes, Marigold Winters, was clearly vying to remain his replacement and had already made strong efforts to coerce Galina to leave CyberFortress and come to work for the NSA.
Winters, dubbed “Flowers” by her many male friends at the agency, hadn’t even had the decency to consult with Lana before telling Galina that Louisiana Senator Bob Ray Willens was prepared to introduce a bill that would force Galina to work for the NSA for seven years from the time she was granted political asylum by the U.S. The legislation already had twenty-five co-sponsors in the Senate, 151 in the House.
Flowers’s move didn’t shock Lana. The pair had started at NSA the same year, but while Lana’s cyberskills had moved her up the agency command quickly, her envious antagonist had refined a different set of talents: she’d become a consummate in-house backstabber and power grabber, and a demagogue of the first order, casting aspersions on some of the most talented Arabic-speaking experts in the intelligence community. She’d drummed up enough suspicion on the “questionables”—her term — to drive them out of government work.
The woman wasn’t without smarts, of course, or extraordinary physical appeal — and she’d deployed both successfully enough to have been named Holmes’s interim replacement.
Galina had rebuffed Flowers’s recruitment efforts, but that bill was set to be introduced in Bob’s absence, and the President had said he would sign the Bortnik Aid and Comfort Act, BACA.
As in “Back atcha,” Lana thought, sensing the real target of Flowers’s insidious machinations.
In the White House Daily Briefing, the President’s press secretary had quoted him as saying, “We must all pay our dues if we want to enjoy the great benefits of living in our proud country.”
The President could have added that the country was also profoundly broken, but Lana knew that would have been asking too much of an incumbent hungering for reelection.
After texting Galina to continue to do Bob’s bidding by trying to penetrate the NSA’s defenses, Lana turned her attention to Tahir, whom she was all but certain had decapitated the man in charge of trying to abduct her. But no video of the person performing the gruesome act had appeared anywhere. How was that even possible? Every catastrophe or public act of violence was recorded these days. Why would this be any different?
The only video that had surfaced so far was the close-up taken by the man who’d put the camera on his own head before cutting off his target’s.
It made Lana wonder if Tahir was so connected to the intelligence services that video of him committing the crime had been surreptitiously vacuumed up by his superiors, which was entirely plausible. Meantime, the beheaded man had been identified as an ex-Army colonel and white supremacist. Video of his macabre death had been viewed by tens of millions of viewers.
Lana was tempted to apply her skills to finding a definitive answer about Tahir’s role in the ending of her abduction attempt, but with Bob Holmes in the ICU, she not only lacked her longtime ally at the agency, she also faced her longtime nemesis occupying his seat and likely looking for any excuse to terminate CyberFortress’s contracts. So Lana could wonder about Tahir, but she dared not wander across any inter-agency boundaries. At least for now.
Lana’s previous forays, revealing Tahir’s past in Sudan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan — and his critical association with both Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula and the CIA of Langley, Virginia — had been stymied by her wounding: When she retraced her steps from her perch on the couch, Lana found that her previous penetrations had been patched up.
With no easy access to the cyber routes she’d trodden, Lana had to forego any further incursions, for they, too, might be used by Flowers to terminate CyberFortress. Only Galina, ironically enough, had the right to search the NSA for vulnerabilities. And only, Lana believed, because Flowers didn’t know that Holmes had given the Russian émigrée her secret assignment.
Lana turned her attention to the smallpox outbreak — the CDC, she’d noticed, had been careful not to call it an epidemic — in the South and New York City, where 30 Rockefeller Plaza had become ground zero for the highly contagious disease in the Big Apple.
Right from the start, Lana had been suspicious of the easy surrender of the ISIS fighters. But even she had never conceived that the terrorists had turned themselves into biological bombs.
The CDC had started issuing hourly updates on the spreading smallpox, still carefully avoiding the “e” word. But the agency’s graphics showed ample red tendrils, which represented newly identified cases, reaching out of the South and New York. The exposed now included residents of cities and suburbs in more than half the states. Only older Americans, inoculated before vaccinations against smallpox ended in 1972, had immunity. Fortunately, after 9/11, American fears of biological warfare had prompted the resurrection of smallpox vaccine production, so there were doses sufficient to inoculate every American. But the challenge of actually getting the vaccine to each of them was formidable. The CDC was rapidly deploying teams to every corner of the country to coordinate those efforts, but these tremendously difficult attempts were coming when much of the country’s coastal infrastructure was severely compromised, which had already impacted the movement of basics, such as food and fuel, throughout the nation.
Now, as Lana checked the latest news on her screen, she saw the American flag lowered on a BP oil platform in the Gulf and learned about the latest atrocities committed against her fellow citizens. In seconds, the ISIS flag was raised. A wild-eyed man with a distinctive Maine accent was pointing to a camera and shouting, “We will turn your waters black as your infidel souls.”
Sleeper cell, she thought right away.
A thousand miles away, Jimmy McMasters watched the same angry announcement, then saw the ISIS spokesman, who looked so American he could have been brought up in a logging town, throw gas on Old Glory and light it up.
He held it over the platform railing and then dropped it. The flight of the burning flag was brief, but it was still nothing but char when it hit the water.
“Like you, America,” the man shouted. “Burning to death in your own filth.”
Not if I can help it, Jimmy thought. You worthless sons-of-bitches.
He was already slipping off his hospital gown.
Chapter 18
Steel Fist is hopeless and, quite frankly, as good as dead.
That’s my decision as I sit here at my computer, watching the debacle that’s getting huge play online and in broadcast news for all the wrong reasons. The man he enlisted to kill Lana Elkins made a grisly mess of the whole operation. And now they’re making a hero out of Elkins and a game warden.
I gave Vinko Horvat a veritable paint-by-numbers approach to throttling that woman after taking considerable personal risks to put an electronic locator on her car to make the assassination—not abduction — possible. Then I barely got back to the mountains of Washington before coverage exploded with Vinko’s dismal failure. Turning Lana Elkins into a larger-than-life heroine was not on my agenda.