Jimmy told him.
Burr smiled. “Glad to oblige. How much you need? And don’t go gettin’ greedy.”
“Six would be perfect.”
Burr opened the steel case, grabbed the red sticks, and handed them over to Jimmy. “You ever let on I did this, I really will fry your testicles. My brother’s the sheriff. He survives, he’ll help me.”
“I won’t say a word, but since you’re helping me this much, you got a gun you could spare?”
“Now that could be traced to me—”
“I’ll throw it in the Gulf when I’m done. I swear.”
“—if I hadn’t already filed off the numbers.”
Burr reached down and pulled a .38 Saturday night special from an ankle holster. “I always keep a drop gun on me, case I need to shoot some loser and say he drew on me.”
“You are a first-rate thinker, Burr.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Jimmy. Take the sticks and blow them shitheads to bits.”
“You got it, man.” Jimmy tried to shake Burr’s hand, but the old guy backed up farther.
“Do I look like Matt fucking Lauer? Get outta here.”
Jimmy didn’t breathe till he was beyond the reach of that stun gun. Then he rushed across the loading dock and jumped down to the pavement.
Seconds later he was back behind the wheel of the 4x4 and heading to the home of Sexy Streak, asking himself if he really wanted to do this. That platform was more than 140 miles out in the Gulf. He wasn’t sure he could even carry enough fuel to get out there and back. Be right on the margins of the boat’s range.
It’s a goddamn suicide mission, he thought, swampy Gulf air thickening as he drove up to the boat garage.
But facing down that boatload of terrorists could have got him killed, too. And you did that. You got the hero in you, Jimmy.
Janey had told him that over and over, panting those very words into his ear.
She could be right. And “hero” would sure sound better than being remembered as “Tit Fucker.”
He unlocked the garage and opened the big wide door. Sexy Streak still had bullet holes high on her starboard hull. Otherwise, she looked sweet as ever. Hell, Jimmy had a few holes in his own face now. Pull off this caper, though, and they’d look different. Heroes had scars, sometimes lots of them.
If they survive.
He started the engines, their rumble music to his ears as he slipped into the Gulf and left Oysterton behind, maybe for the last time.
Chapter 20
A thousand miles north of Jimmy’s bold incursion into the Gulf, Lana sat on the couch with her laptop as the blackest hours of morning arrived. Typically, she would have succumbed to weariness long before two a.m., but pain had subverted the best intentions of sleep. That was the price of refusing the powerful palliatives prescribed for her leg wound. She needed mental clarity, and the drugs had made her not only drowsy but, in a word, stupid. She could not afford stupid. Neither could her family nor the country. So her leg throbbed. How could a goddamn piece of Prius plastic hurt so much?
“It cut through a nerve,” Dr. Rivera had told her. “I did microsurgery, and it should heal nicely, but nerves are, shall we say, touchy? You’re going to be uncomfortable. Take your meds. Don’t be a hero.”
Hero? She’d never cast herself as one. But Lana did see a confluence of her own interests with those of her family and nation, so she was doing everything she could to keep her mental resources as sharp as the fury she felt toward the forces intent on destroying her country.
The mystery of Tahir Hijazi commanded all of her attention as she stared at a freeze frame of his chiseled face on her screen. She was certain he’d beheaded the colonel, though she’d shared that conclusion with no one. First, she wanted to know what he was really doing in the U.S., besides watching over his nephew and — if his words the other night were true — her daughter. The revelations she’d unearthed so far about his role with Al Qaeda and his emergence as a double agent on behalf of the U.S. had been startling. But had he added “triple agent” to his portfolio by working with ISIS as well? Moreover, the very thought that Em’s welfare might at times be in the hands of a man who’d decapitated Lana’s own would-be assassin proved an unnerving prospect, no matter how much she had welcomed Tahir’s timely intervention. She would have brainstormed with Deputy Director Holmes about the Sudanese, but her boss was still in the ICU.
Maybe it was time to open an early morning line of communication with another colleague.
Using a data tunneling protocol Lana felt confident was secure, she texted Galina Bortnik on the off chance that her employee was working. Galina had reported keeping odd hours to care for her daughter Alexandra, who was ending chemo for her leukemia. The cyberspy had also been using her late nights and early mornings to shoehorn in efforts to breach NSA security, per Holmes’s assignment to her. His replacement, Marigold Winters, whom Lana found so repugnant — and a control freak of the first order — was apparently unaware of Galina’s mission. If Flowers had any knowledge of it, Lana felt her old nemesis would have stopped Galina immediately, fearful of revelations about security lapses on her newly established watch.
In these dark hours, Lana wasn’t even comfortable with the notion that she herself would be around long enough to see the results of Galina’s investigation. Just after midnight, Lana had been shot through with adrenaline when she’d found her own face plastered on a poster on an ISIS website. Modeled after the iconic ones of the American West, it read “Wanted Dead or Alive, Lana Elkins. $100 million reward.”
A hundred million? Lana couldn’t help but feel flattered — in the worst possible way. Surely the FBI would counter by providing protection by more than one agent per shift.
Surely? The bureau was stretched to the breaking point by domestic challenges that ranged over the rest of the country.
The ISIS site then noted what Lana had registered instantly: the reward was the biggest ever offered, more than three times the bounty paid for Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam’s brutal sons, who had made their infamous father seem puppyish by comparison; and quadruple the bucks posted for bin Laden.
ISIS was also calling for all true warriors of Islam in the States to hunt down and kill Cairo, though their financial commitment to those who achieved this goal was considerably less: $100,000.
Lana looked up, checking on the old Malinois as he rose a few feet away to begin one of his periodic patrols of the house. Then she knocked off a text to Galina: “Have you come across anything involving Tahir?”
The irony remained that Galina, whose employment at CyberFortress was tenuous — thanks to senatorial efforts to try to force the recent Russian émigrée to work for the NSA — had more power to investigate that agency than anyone else in the nation.
Within seconds of sending off the message, Lana’s private phone rang, the one she’d used for gambling. She answered it warily.
“It is me, Galina,” the younger woman said in her distinctive accent.
“I’m not sure this is a safe phone,” Lana found herself whispering.
“It is safe for me and you right now, but you should know that it took me only forty-five minutes to break the secure connection to your phone.”
Had Galina done more than figure out Lana’s encrypted connection? The gambling? That was the real worry, but Lana couldn’t ask. She could only trust that Galina hadn’t come across her visits to texasholdem.com. Failing that, might she trust that Galina, hailing from the free-for-all corruption of post-Soviet Russia, would think little of her vice? At least Lana had forsworn any gambling of late.