While Vinko had been uploading, the guardian angel must have been finishing his own investigation. Lana Elkins made immediate sense to him. She was an infamous NSA contractor who hadn’t been able to keep herself out of the headlines because she’d been so deeply involved in the cyberwars—and kinetic battles — of the past two years, though he had to question her effectiveness lately, given the paltry state of the country’s defenses.
Vinko had long suspected that the reason the NSA used private contractors was they would be less constrained by government surveillance guidelines, in practice if not in law. From what he’d seen, the contractors were basically given a license to create as much cybermayhem as they wanted, much as America’s military snipers and unmanned drones were sanctioned to take out anyone deemed an enemy.
He wondered for fleeting seconds whether Elkins had taken him down and put him back up, toggling to torment him.
Or maybe setting him up somehow.
No matter. He’d fire back at her hard and fast by using the most fundamental threat of all, the one that wasn’t written into government guidelines for spying and hacking. The lone threat that always worked.
His grandfather and great-grandfather had known all about it. They had both been members of the Ustase, an organization of violent extremists who formed the backbone of the Nazi puppet state of Croatia. Both the Ustase and their German backers knew what you had to do to Serbs, Jews, Roma, and communists. You had to exterminate them like so much vermin — upwards of one hundred thousand harvested during those war years. Then they buried them in pits or on the banks of the Sava and Una Rivers, where flooding periodically still unearthed their bones to this day.
Vinko’s grandfather had been nostalgic about those years, especially the way he’d played the intelligence game to maximum advantage. Once the Ustase reign had been defeated, he’d provided information on the communists overrunning Yugoslavia to the Americans. In return, the country’s fledgling CIA had given his family safe haven in northern Idaho.
Before his grandfather died from lymphoma, he’d told his young grandson that the Muslims were worse than the Jews. “Back during the war we had to put up with those ragheads, but we hated them. We never would have put up with their shit now, not with what they’re doing.”
An angry man, even while dying, though the seven-year-old Vinko had been more confused than convinced by the old man’s words. But he’d noticed his father listening in, nodding the whole time.
Then, when Vinko was nine, his dad had walked him down to the lake, as he had many times for an afternoon of fishing. But that day was different. After casting his line, he’d gestured to the majesty of the mountains and told his son that he deeply loved their home. “The CIA knew what they were doing when they moved Grandpa to the mountains. It’s ninety-nine percent pure.”
Vinko hadn’t known what his father meant, either.
“Look at the water, boy.”
Vinko peered at its smooth surface and saw his reflection.
“Your face is white as the clouds, isn’t it? Just like everyone else you see around here.”
Vinko understood. He’d never known anybody who wasn’t white.
They’d fished until sundown. After gathering up their gear, his father told him to look at the water again. The blood-red colors had appeared, darkening the boy’s face.
“You’re no longer white. That’s what’s going to happen if we let the sun set on America. The white will disappear, and we’ll pay for it with blood.”
His father had been right. The men in his family had all known that the most important threat of all wasn’t a gun or a knife, or even the mongrel races raging to get everything that belonged to whites. But it was all about blood.
Vinko began dishing it out by posting a full-color photo of Lana Elkins. Her bio as well. Then the address for CyberFortress, along with a photo and the address of her home. Next, he offered maps of her possible routes to and from work.
“Know your enemies,” he wrote. “She attacked me today.”
But he was hardly through. Now for the final stroke. He added a picture of Emma Elkins, Lana’s daughter, and another shot, an especially incendiary one of the young woman with her boyfriend. He added their bios, too, and the name of their high school. Their routes to and from school.
Tap-tap-tapping into a mother’s greatest fear, which was also Vinko’s burning hope: that the photo of the girl and her boyfriend would galvanize his followers, even the ones with half a brain. But in case they had any doubt about his intentions, he posted his two most persuasive words right below the smiling faces of the two high school kids:
“Ammo up!”
Chapter 3
Lana left Cyberfortress at nine-thirty. With summer fading, the sky had finally darkened. Traffic was light, the norm these days, as gasoline shortages still plagued most regions of the country. While supertankers received top priority at the nation’s ports, deliveries had been significantly hampered by the flooding and maritime crisis. The Port of Long Beach in southern California was completely shut down, as were ports in Seattle, Oakland, Galveston, and Miami. In fact, most of Florida’s harbors remained an unmitigated mess.
As a contractor for the NSA, Lana received priority gas allotments at Fort Meade, where the agency had its headquarters and where she had a meeting scheduled with Deputy Director Holmes in the morning. With an economical subcompact, her fuel needs were light, but she still planned to top off her tank after the meeting.
Her ex-husband Don had texted her just before she left CF to see when she’d be home. “He’s here,” had been his parting words.
Don had abandoned Lana’s and Emma’s lives for fourteen years, reuniting with his family only after last year’s terrifying crisis in which he applied his navigating skills as a Caribbean pot pirate to saving Lana and Emma from horrific deaths. His reappearance after all that time had been a surprising but ultimately pleasing turn of events for all three.
Lana took the turnoff for home knowing that a heavy emphasis on “he” in Don’s world referred to Sufyan Hijazi, Emma’s first serious boyfriend. Lately, Don hadn’t been able to bring himself to say the young man’s name.
Lana faced her own challenges with Sufyan, who had emigrated to the U.S. with his family from the Sudan when the boy was nine years old. He’d grown into a strikingly handsome guy, but with the ever-serious mien of a devout Muslim. Emma had met him at school, where he was in the a cappella choir. She’d tried to persuade him to audition for the award-winning Capitol City Baptist Choir, which was more ecumenical than the name might suggest. Emma herself didn’t identify as a Baptist, and at this time was trending more toward Sufyan’s passionate beliefs in Islam. Which frankly worried her mother. Lana had jettisoned her Catholicism in her first year of college on her initial foray into what she viewed as intellectual freedom. She’d never looked back and would have liked her daughter to relish the same sense of open inquiry.
Sufyan had refused to consider the church choir, and after the two had been seeing each other for six weeks Emma stopped going to Sunday school and began attending services at Sufyan’s mosque. She’d also taken up Quran studies. All of this was a sharp departure from the churchy comforts the young woman had clearly enjoyed last year.
Emma still made it to weekly services at Capitol City Baptist, which was mandatory for choir members who, after all, were there to sing. But Lana wondered how long Emma would continue under the spiritual and musical direction of Pastor Barnes. Already Emma’s closest friend in the choir, Tanesa, had grown distant from her.