Tahir raised his phone, showing them the Steel Fist website. At the top of the screen clenched fingers gripped a brutal-looking band of chrome knuckles. Right below it was a photo of Emma and Sufyan. Scrolling down, he revealed an angry command: “Ammo Up!”
“Now they want to kill you, too,” he said to Lana. “But you are grown up. He is not. His life is ahead of him. I saved that boy when he was nine. I took him away from soldiers who were killing everyone in our village. His father was already dead. I brought him and his mother to America. I am not going to have him die for the love of her.” He stared at Emma, then pointed to the screen. “See, they show how they go to school. To school.”
His voice shook, no longer with anger but agonized fear, and in that moment Lana understood how much he loved his nephew.
“You, too,” he said to her, regaining his composure. “They show how you get to work and come home.” But he wasn’t through with Emma. “Wrong skin,” he said to her. “Wrong religion. Wrong.”
He threw open the door. A single glance at Sufyan drove the young man out the door.
“What was that picture?” Emma asked as soon as her dad locked up, pulling out her own phone. “Why was he showing you that? And what’s Steel Fist? You’re going to stop them, right?”
“Yes, we’ll stop them,” Lana said, putting her arm around Emma. “Come on, let’s get some sleep.”
Her daughter pulled away. “I’m not going to stop seeing him. No way.”
“Can we talk about all of this in the morning?”
“No,” Emma said, bolting toward the stairs. “Not if any part of the discussion involves my not seeing him.” She pounded up the stairs and disappeared behind her door, no doubt to grab her phone and find out about those photos.
Lana turned to Don. “From now on, we need to start double-checking all the locks and the alarm system. I’ll talk to Holmes about getting you licensed to carry. Meantime, we’ll keep the 12 gauge on your side of the bed. I’ll hold onto my Sig Sauer.”
Lana had taken firearms training at the FBI Academy at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. Don’s martial tactics had been honed less formally among dope dealers and armed guerillas in the jungles of South America. Over the summer, they’d upgraded their home security with steel doors and polymer-coated windows to stop bullets. Don had yet another idea to up their defenses:
“We need a protection dog. It’s too easy to short-circuit alarms.”
“I’m all for it,” she said. “Can you look into it?”
“I’m on it,” he replied. “Who’s Steel Fist?”
“The worst,” Lana replied, pulling out her laptop. “The worst.”
Chapter 4
I’m the guardian angel.
It’s such a Christian idea — and so at odds with my own beliefs — that I take particular delight in using it. But it’s true: I’ve been looking over Steel Fist’s shoulder for almost four years. Actually, let’s use his real name — Vinko Horvat — and dispense with the juvenile theatrics of his macho nom de guerre. I have one, too: Golden Voice. But it’s a tool to me, nothing more, whereas Vinko takes his pseudonym seriously. He believes he’s penetrated CyberFortress and the NSA, and he did, but only after I left him a trail of cyber breadcrumbs. Without me, Vinko would be nothing but another American demagogue shouting into the vast echo chamber of the Internet.
Instead, he’s championed by millions because he—I—give them what they want most in a time of devastation and deprivation: an eager outlet for their grievances against their government. And let us not overlook the importance that naturally underlies their most vociferous complaint — the legitimate fear that the U.S. military can’t protect them from the forces now killing citizens with abandon.
To put it yet another way, the people Vinko reaches and enrages really do have reason to hate their leaders, and he plays off their anger with the mordant skill of a born Machiavellian.
Their loathing grows daily, and hatred is a great galvanizing force. It not only brings angry, frustrated people together, it sticks to everyone it touches — just like the blood it spills, which is as red as the fires I stoke every night.
I built this home on a mountain ridge in central Washington state nine years ago, carefully crafting wood forms for the fireplace and chimney. Hard work was better than grabbing an automatic rifle and finding a bell tower, though that impulse — born of good reason — haunted me long enough to buy the weapon and search out possible locations.
But I stuck to homebuilding, at least for awhile, pouring a ton and a half of cement to make that chimney rise up. The wood grain is visible on the concrete that faces me now. I never covered it with tiles or metal cladding. I like the bald utilitarian appearance. It’s at one with the Douglas-fir logs I used for the home itself, eight hundred square feet. But don’t go confusing me with the Unabomber because this is no shack, and I cared nothing for his anarchism. By comparison to his hovel, my home is like living in a finely constructed armoire with cedar walls, fir floors, cherry wood cabinets, and a three-hundred-foot sleeping loft.
The chimney draws smoke smoothly. Nevertheless, I prod the logs every now and then with a wrought-iron poker just to see sparks fly. They might have inspired me because it didn’t take me long after settling in here to realize that I could also prod Americans every day by stoking their fears, and that my best weapon wouldn’t be an Army-issue automatic rifle but an even deadlier weapon: the computer. And I’d been well-trained to use it.
So every day I stoke the panic of Americans. But they’re not fools. Fools fear ghosts in the attic and voodoo at their back door. Americans face real terror. And Vinko? He’s the accelerant I throw onto their fire.
I’ve done a lot to make his threats blaze even brighter. You must have figured out by now, for instance, that the government did not inadvertently release those thousand pages detailing the weak links in America’s most vital infrastructure, along with fanciful methods for how they could be hacked. You don’t really believe that pap, do you?
I hacked those files and released them on the Homeland Security website. But the Department of Defense could hardly stand before the American people and say, “We gave away the keys to the kingdom.” Of course not. They fell on the sword of “inadvertence,” preferring to look vaguely incompetent than definably weak, failing to realize that in cyberwar those two words are synonymous. That was why they offered such a dense technical explanation when they announced the “penetration.” (Well, they had been royally fucked, now hadn’t they?) Their exegesis was so bewildering that it made no sense, especially to me. But I was hardly going to point out that the emperor had no clothes. Besides, Vinko did exactly what I expected of him. He pounced on the government’s purported failure like a cougar on a hare.
I play the long game. I always have. Vinko believes he does, too, because he’s been hacking government sites for six years without getting caught. But the long game is the length of your life and what you pass on to those who will carry your flame.
I’ve come to know Vinko better than he knows himself. I’ve sensed the excitement in his fingertips when he’s gained access to Defense Department secrets. And when he released those NSA files last night I remembered how he used to smile with every success. But that was years ago, before he discovered that someone had turned on his computer camera. He immediately ended my surveillance by sealing the lens and has remained far too stealthy for that kind of exposure now.
And his shrewdness came through, once again, when he dispatched those photos of Lana Elkins, her daughter, and the girl’s black Muslim beau. Red meat for that crowd. And the maps of their daily commute? Vinko’s very own cyber crumbs.