She took another glance at the monitor, shaking her head at what could still prove to be a debacle down there.
Or a victory. Don’t rule that out completely, she told herself.
Galina caught Lana’s attention with a slight Slavic nod, pushing black bangs that needed trimming away from her eyes. She was cute as a cocker spaniel, but had a vicious cyber bite, which was why Lana had brought her back to the United States and a job at CyberFortress.
“These close-ups?” she began.
Lana nodded.
“I think they’re just enough for screen shots. We could use facial recognition.”
“Make it happen,” Lana replied.
The video improved measurably when the first television news crew in Oysterton showed a ground-level shot of the local police putting the seven banged-up, bloody men through a perp walk. They were so unprotected a Jack Ruby could have jumped out and killed them all. Instead, they were jostled by freelance news crews and a throng of tourists with cameras.
Jensen had been by Lana’s side long enough to read her frustration.
“It’s a mess. I keep waiting for a bomb to go off.”
“They did a quick pat-down before you came in,” said a woman with red hair and a swan-like neck from the end of the table. “That’s all,” she added, shaking her head.
Lana nodded at Maureen, her most recent hire. MIT. Jensen had been her first. He was a navy veteran, a cryptographer during the two Gulf Wars, and a Mormon with five children and a doting wife carrying number six.
There were lots of Mormons in the spy service, as true now as it had been at the height of the Cold War. Lana hadn’t known Jensen’s religious affiliation during their first interview, but she’d sensed right away that she could trust him. A panoply of deception-detection tests — polygraph, voice analysis, Facial Action Coding Systems, and pupil-size studies — had reinforced her eerily accurate gut. The man was dependable. No vices.
Not true for her. Lana had a failing that could tank her career if she ever let it get the better of her again, as it had several years ago. Of late, Lana had felt the urge to gamble recrudescing, like a tumor that refused to shrivel up and die. It had been tough enough to fight those impulses when she’d actually had to find a poker table or dealer, but with online gaming, the ability to wager any time of the day or night was never farther away than her phone.
She hadn’t been to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting in months. Hadn’t thought she needed to. She’d been too busy trying to protect the country from cyberattacks, a high-stakes proposition in and of itself. But thoughts of cards and betting had been insinuating themselves into her awareness every few minutes of late, a desire that was potentially careerending for her. The intelligence community couldn’t afford to have operatives falling deep into debt gambling.
You can bet on that.
Gambling lingo, even when she was chastising herself. Although a look at her financial assets — which she forced herself to endure once a month — was sufficient to bring back the wincing memory of her last betting binge. That was when she’d gambled away enough money to have paid for her daughter Emma’s college education.
Lana had found professional help, but the sad truth for her was the lure of gambling wasn’t only about money. The lure was the thrill that came in the teeming titillating pause that lay between hope and outcome. Not unlike the rush that came from hunting — and finding — cyberterrorists.
Which brought her back to the men claiming to be ISIS: Who are they, really? “Any facial recognition yet?”
Galina nodded. “Got it,” she said in her Russian accent. “The one who was speaking in English has been identified by NSA as Fahad Kassab. Till two years ago he was studying electrical engineering at Cal Tech. Then he disappeared after traveling to Turkey. NSA thinks he crossed into Syria at some point along the five hundred mile frontier between them. The CIA says he fought in Mosul and Saladin, Iraq.”
“So he’s a veteran,” Lana said, “which means this inept display down there really makes no sense.”
“What did Holmes say about Homeland Security?” Jeff asked Lana, who glanced at her watch.
“They’re flying in from Camp Blanding,” she answered. “North Florida,” she added for Galina’s benefit. Galina hadn’t been in the States long enough to know the location of hundreds of military bases and installations in the U.S., many now threatened by the extensive flooding. “They should be there in half an hour.”
But Lana strongly suspected that every minute the self-proclaimed ISIS crew remained in the hands of those local yokels made the country that much more vulnerable to whatever their controllers had set in motion. She didn’t like mysteries — not in books, movies, and definitely not when she was dealing with murderers who planned to die with their secrets. And in combating horrific terrorist attacks, thirty minutes could be an eternity. A lot could go wrong—no, everything could go wrong—in a half-hour. In a world that had made a mockery of geologic time by raising seas in weeks to levels that should have taken eons, days and months — even years — had been wrenched free of real meaning. Now terrorism not only killed people, it also murdered the notion that time itself could be measured on a rational human scale.
When the monitor finally showed the dark-suited men from Blanding racing up to the police station, she took a break and walked down the hall to the bathroom.
She didn’t need the facilities. She needed to look herself in the eye and say, No, don’t do it. She needed the forcefulness of those words to really register. They did not.
Reaching into her pocket, she stepped past the door and pulled out a private phone on which she’d created an encrypted connection to a private server. Then she hit the app for Texas Hold’em.
So far all Lana was holding was her cell and her breath.
Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.
She slipped into a stall, hiding herself much as she kept her addiction from everyone but those in her Gamblers Anonymous group. Nobody in the intelligence community knew about it.
Stop it, she told herself.
She’d have fired anyone, even Jeff Jensen, if she ever found such a weakness in them.
Lana drew a deep breath, assuring herself that she was okay, that she’d avoided the only pitfall that could sink her family, career, and financial well-being.
She reached for the door handle to leave. It felt cold, almost icy, a testament to how gambling could turn up her body’s thermostat. She stepped out and looked in the mirror. Several strands of wiry gray hair poked from her scalp, unruly as her addiction. She plucked each one, as if she were exorcising more than the telltales of age, but when she looked back at her face she saw blatant excitement in her eyes: exuberant expression, shaky hands — the glitter of gambling sprinkled over the whole of her. Then she felt a familiar itch in her fingers — as she had many times before — and a shock to her system as startling as adrenaline.
Lana was so well practiced at using her phone that she was back in the gambling app without having to think about her motions.
She drew a jack.