Trident Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller)

by Thomas Waite

  CHAPTER 3

  “YOU MISSED IT!” EMMA glared at Lana with the disdain of a teenage daughter harboring a genuine grievance.

  Despite her mother’s weary appearance and late arrival home, her only child offered no greeting at the front door. Only the damning, “You missed it!” And for the life of her, Lana couldn’t recall what she’d missed, but it was clear that her fifteen-year-old—going on twenty, or so she would have liked to think—thought it warranted the full arsenal of aggressive body language: arms crossed, legs crossed, so agitated, in fact, that her eyes were almost crossed.

  “You don’t even remember, do you?” Emma shook her head. “The big rehearsal, Mother. Remember? The choir.”

  Lana worked her key out of the door lock and sloughed her bag onto an entry table, trying to keep her chin up as she walked into the living room. The literal weight on her shoulders had vanished, only to be replaced by the metaphorical heft of Emma’s vitriol.

  Lana set down her computer case and settled into a chair that let her relax while she faced her daughter. She took a breath, fortifying herself. “Listen, dear heart, something came up. I just couldn’t leave work.”

  She’d spare her daughter the grim particulars of watching those poor men and women die before her eyes on the encrypted video posted on YouTube. The decryption key had been found by a member of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

  She couldn’t share the devastating news, in any case. The whole intelligence community was in a collective lockdown: no release of any information about the events off the coast of Argentina. Also today had come the less-than-inspiring news that Admiral Wourzy, in charge of cybersecurity for the navy, had been arrested in an Indian casino in California last weekend for using counterfeit chips. How in God’s name does crap like that even happen? That had been Lana’s first thought. The admiral tried to argue that the Native American dealer had fed the phony chips into the game but casino security trumped him.

  Lana knew more than she wanted to about the impulse to gamble. She’d spent countless hours gambling on virtual poker tables before finding the strength to stop throwing money away on cheap thrills that had never paid off in the long run. Even so, the desire was still inside her, recrudescing after an especially stressful period. But even at her worst, she’d never cheated like Admiral Wourzy. She’d never even thought of doing so.

  Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Deming’s first impulse had been to demand his underling’s resignation. Which also happened to be the immediate response of the casino owner, who could scarcely believe the crook at the craps table was one of America’s highest-ranking military officials.

  But the Pentagon brass couldn’t fire the admiral. Despite his blatant idiocy in this regard—all for measly ten-dollar chips—he was a gifted cyberwarrior largely credited with bringing the navy’s old guard into the twenty-first century.

  “So whatever you do,” Emma went on, bringing Lana’s attention back to more domestic concerns, “don’t tell me you can’t come to the actual performance tomorrow night because—I hope you’ve remembered this—it’s going to be at the National Cathedral.” Emma paused and performed a dramatic toe-tap. “And I want you to be there.”

  All Lana could do was shake her head. Even before the crisis with the Delphin, she had been slated to attend a top-level briefing at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade about a newly discovered Chinese army unit of elite hackers, code-named Magic Dragon. Which was why Lana had planned to attend tonight’s rehearsal instead of the actual performance.

  “Sweetheart, please—”

  “Sweetheart, dear heart, you say all that stuff all the time, but where’s your heart? Because it sure isn’t where your home is.”

  If I could only tell her.

  But most of the information that Lana would have liked to share would never be declassified. She’d be taking it to her grave.

  A pot clattered in the kitchen, startling her. “Who’s that?” she asked Emma, who only glared at her more intensely as Tanesa stepped into the room.

  “I’m sorry, Lana. I was just getting us something to eat when you came home, and then it sounded like you guys needed some space.”

  “That was good of you, but come sit.”

  Mother and daughter took a pause while Tanesa, a fine calming influence on Emma, sat on the couch near her. The look on Emma’s face was about as ugly as it could get for a pretty young woman who, consensus held, bore a striking resemblance to her mother. They both had shiny black hair, smooth skin, cheekbones a Russian supermodel might envy, and, in Emma’s case, coltish legs that were on nearly full display under the kerchief passing for a skirt.

  “Your mom has a really important job,” Tanesa said to Emma. “You’re not even supposed to know that, but you do.”

  “She couldn’t exactly hide it from me after last year.”

  More resentment over more secrecy, even when it wasn’t secret anymore.

  But Emma did think the world of Tanesa, so whenever she spoke up in Lana’s defense, Lana felt grateful.

  Tanesa was three years older than Emma and had been the girl’s nanny; odd as that might sound, it made sense in the way that life often mangled the logic of chronological age. Tanesa still watched over Emma, for which Lana paid a handsome wage, but in truth they had become close friends, much to Emma’s benefit. The strikingly attractive young African American woman had also recruited Emma into the Capitol Baptist Church Choir, an award-winning ensemble. Emma’s first solo was set for tomorrow night in Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion.

  “Please don’t do that, Tanesa,” Emma said.

  “Do what?”

  “Sound so reasonable: ‘Your mom has a really important job.’”

  Emma wasn’t being tart. Sadly, she was serious. As if to underscore this, she added, “This is emotional truth for me.”

  Another notable influence in Emma’s life of late: her therapist. After enduring a harrowing abduction during last year’s cyberattack, and the second-by-second threat of nuclear annihilation, Emma had suffered nightmares and anxiety. Those were classic PTSD symptoms, so Lana had gotten her daughter professional help.

  And it had eased Emma’s condition considerably, as well as provided her with a newly charged arsenal of emotionally laden language for skewering her mother. Which had proved painful only to the extent that Emma used her psychobabble accurately.

  No denying her daughter’s deadeye now. Lana was flinching internally over the truth of much of what Emma had said, but not over what she now added:

  “It can’t be as bad as last year, Mom, and anything short of that is a shitty excuse.”

  “Emma!” Tanesa, a devout Christian, had no tolerance for profanity, and—miracle of miracles!—had managed to clean up Emma’s potty mouth, for the most part.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Emma instantly allowed, “but I’m so sick of ‘dear heart’ and ‘sweetheart’ when I want to see my mother in the front row looking up at me in the National Cathedral!” Suddenly, she burst into tears, sobbing, “I don’t have a dad. I’ve only got you.”

  Lana choked up and rushed to her side, holding Emma as tightly as she had in many months, feeling her daughter shake with disappointment. Yet Lana also knew that she desperately needed to get back on her computer as soon as possible. Torn, once more, by her deeply conflicting obligations.

  “Mom,” she said softly. “I’ve been tracking him down.”

  “Who?”

  “My father.”

  Lana stepped back and looked closely at Emma. You mean that good-for-nothing deadbeat who walked out on me—us—when you were two years old?

  That, of course, was what Lana wanted more than anything to say. Instead, she choked it all down before speaking: “That won’t be easy. I don’t know where he is.”

  “I do, Mom. It’s not that far away.”

  Oh, great.

 
Emma peered right into her mother’s eyes as she continued: “I found him through the Bureau of Prisons.”

  “What?” Prison? Even for ne’er-do-well Donald, that was shocking.

  “They caught him sailing four thousand pounds of marijuana up from Colombia on his sailboat. That’s two tons of pot, Mom.”

  “Please don’t sound so impressed. When was this?”

  “A few years ago. He’s in the jail in Cumberland. It’s a medium-security place. It’s not like he’s dangerous or anything.”

  Oh, yes he is. But she couldn’t expect her daughter to grasp that truth so soon after locating him. Suddenly, a hacked and hijacked nuclear-armed submarine full of dead sailors, and the murders of a genius and his wife in Cambridge—and an admiral’s gambling addiction—all seemed far away. But Lana knew none of it would remain removed for long. And as a respite from a national security crisis, Donald Fedder’s imprisonment on federal drug charges left a great deal to be desired.

  “Have you contacted him?” she asked.

  Emma nodded. “He’s actually pretty handsome, Mom.”

  “He’s an asshole,” Lana said, regretting her outburst even before she received Tanesa’s censorious gaze. “And looks aren’t everything.”

  Which is exactly why you went to bed with Donald so quickly, right?

  Lana groaned out loud at the memory. Now Emma took her mother in her arms and said, “It’ll be okay, Mom. He’s got a furlough for good behavior. He’s a model prisoner. As long as you agree, they’ll let him come to the concert tomorrow night in one of those ankle bracelets . . .”

  Oh, my God.

  “So . . . maybe it’s for the best that you’re not coming.”

  No, it’s definitely not for the best.

  Minutes later, in between checking grim status reports about the Delphin, Lana confirmed every detail of her Google-loving girl’s words. And it was all spelled out in the form that Emma had forwarded to her from the Bureau of Prisons, ready for her signature: “Request granted by daughter’s mother and legal guardian.”

  Lana signed it electronically, groaning again when she sent it on.

  What choice did she have? She was in a corner. If she denied Emma’s request—when she couldn’t make it to the concert herself—she would appear an emotional scrooge. But what made it worse, was after attending the concert, “Doper Don,” as Lana had already dubbed him, would be permitted fifteen minutes of supervised time to visit with his “long-lost” daughter.

  She was never lost. He was.

  Never had her profession cost her so much personally. She could see no good coming out of this, particularly after Emma had changed her life in such positive ways since meeting Tanesa.

  After reviewing another status update, Lana received a call from Deputy Director Holmes.

  “It’s very strange,” he said, eschewing all small talk, “because the hackers, whoever they are, wherever they are, aren’t making any demands.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not a thing,” Holmes said. “They just keep showing the bodies of those sailors.”

  “Are they surfacing to do that?”

  Holmes shook his head, saying that the sub had probably deployed a radio buoy. The electronic device had small antennas that protruded just above the water line and were all but invisible on the vast reaches of ocean.

  “Is there anyone alive?” Lana asked.

  “Admiral Deming is certain there are. You couldn’t operate a sub without some crew, but we haven’t seen them yet. The video feed is still horrible to watch but you should study it, see if anything jumps out at you. Wait, get on it right now.”

  “Sure.” She worked her keyboard. “Why?”

  “There’s someone in a protective suit and breathing mask in front of the camera.”

  Lana’s screen came alive with the eerie appearance of the man, who punched numbers into a box and began to speak.

  “Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. This is First Class Petty Officer Hector Gomez of the U.S.S. Delphin.” His words were garbled with that mask on, making him sound like he was shouting from the bottom of a well. “We’ve been attacked with poison gas. It’s killed a lot of sailors. I grabbed an anti-contamination suit and an OBA before it could get me,” he said, pointing to his oxygen breathing apparatus. “I found a bottle of cyanogen chloride. It must have been put into one of the burners.” Part of the sub’s atmosphere control system.

  “That would do it,” Holmes said in Lana’s ear. “You know about CK?”

  “No.”

  “It stops your body’s ability to use the oxygen carried by your hemoglobin. It’s like walking through a desert with a glass of water with your mouth sewed up.”

  “I got the cyanogen chloride out of there,” Gomez went on, “but I don’t know if it’s dissipated yet. If you can hear me, please respond. Over.”

  “But communication is cut off to the sub, right?” Lana asked Holmes.

  “That was the last I heard,” he replied.

  “I am out of air!” Gomez shouted.

  Lana could see Gomez’s panic in his eyes and rigid body language. Then he started shaking and ripped off his mask. His face was covered in sweat. He took deep breaths, looking around frantically. Neither Lana nor Holmes said a word. She knew they were both waiting to see whether Gomez keeled over.

  Seconds passed like hours.

  Gomez nodded. “I can breathe.” Then he looked at the dead bodies on the floor all around him. “Where are they? The people that did this?”

  “What do we know about this guy?” Lana asked.

  “I’m pulling that up right now,” Holmes answered.

  Lana watched Gomez, who looked shocked to be alive, still taking in the grisly evidence that surrounded him.

  “A mom and dad in San Pedro in LA,” Holmes reported.

  “The port.”

  “Correct. At a glance here, everything looks right. He has two brothers and three sisters, all living in LA, all upstanding citizens. Nothing noted about them.”

  “So does Admiral Deming think he’s in on the takeover?”

  “He doesn’t know yet,” Holmes said. “Gomez is the only able-bodied one we’ve seen. But as the admiral said, no one can possibly run that sub on his own. Whoever it is has got to have at least a half dozen, maybe more, qualified officers and senior enlisted missile operators. And it’s possible, not likely, mind you, but possible that Gomez isn’t even guilty, that whoever’s doing this isn’t showing up on camera yet. Maybe they never will. Look, I think you should plan on being out here all day tomorrow.” He meant NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. “I need you for a seven o’clock meeting in the morning.”

  “All right, I’ll be there.”

  Lana didn’t expect to sleep easily with her mind abuzz from the dire events of the day, and she was right. She dozed on and off, haunted for hours by those dead bodies.

  Finally, at four thirty she arose, scrubbed her face with cold water, and logged on again.

  What she saw was wrenching. Gomez, or someone, had propped the dead body of the sub’s commander, Captain Hueller, against a chair in full view of the camera. Gomez, she presumed—no, hoped—was scouring the sub for survivors.

  Keeping a cap on this “incident” would be very difficult with so many service members dead. But they had to try to maintain the silence. The hackers had yet to make their demands known.

  She began to imagine what they might be, each one more dreadful than the one that proceeded it. Many harkened back to last year’s horrors.

  Lana told herself to stop, that no matter what she came up with, reality could turn out to be so much worse.

  And she was right about that.

  Unimaginably worse.

  CHAPTER 4

  MOSCOW, SO OLD AND so new. And so beautiful. Onion domes and brand-new skyscrapers. Gorgeous
cars, like Oleg’s Maserati. Purring like a pussycat as he drove from the heart of the city. Exciting like Pussy Riot punk rock. Like Galina when she took the money from him under the table.

  He passed his favorite onion domes of all, the ones with so many colors they looked like frozen yogurt swirls at Creamery Dreamery. Thank you, crazy Orthodox Church. I pray to Virgin, too. But I promise you, Vladimir, not like Pussy Riot.

  Could a country be any greater than the new Russia, with its venerable traditions and history? No, not possible. That was what most of Oleg’s friends would have said. His father, Papa Plutocrat, would have shaken his head very slowly, looking very wise, or so PP would have thought, and said that it was true, he and his friends—crony capitalists all—brought Russia to its apogee. Yes, “apogee,” because a wise man would use such a word, and PP had an English-language word-a-day calendar in his private bathroom so he could sound wise and say those three syllables—ap-o-gee—like he was blessing them under an onion dome.

  But Oleg knew better. Russia was not so great as it would soon become. In just days. Because he would generate the greatest wealth the world had ever known. So much money his fellow citizens would have untold rubles showering down on them.

  He smiled at himself in the Maserati’s rearview mirror. Everything was falling into place. Engineers had reassembled the professor’s prototype, and when they turned it on and saw it sucking those heat-absorbing molecules out of the air in vast quantities, their tongues hung out. And so they had to be killed. Just a joke! Oleg laughed to himself. No, but they did have to be properly rewarded and left in isolated wonder. But better than death.

  The days of fossil-fuel haters would soon be over. Conservation was never much fun anyway. Burn all the fuel you want. Drive a Maserati—as fast as you want. AAC will suck out the carbon and combine it with hydrogen and we’ll have—Voilà!—hydrocarbons. More gas. More oil. More money!