THE GUARDIAN (Taskforce Series) (5 page)

Supreme 120 Lessons: for the Nation of Gods & Earths
.

The strange title strummed a chord of recognition, as did the logo under the title:  a crescent moon, a star and the number seven, all circumscribed by a sun. He’d seen that somewhere else, but where? 

“We’ll talk,” Toby said, hindering
Jackson
’s memory as he recalled that
We’ll talk
was code for
Call Headquarters
. Ike must have tracked down the bombshell
.
Hot damn!

“A’right. Night, sir,” he answered, conveying that he would call HQ that very night.

As he lowered the receiver into the handset, he saw Ibrahim jot himself a note. Concern clamped down on
Jackson
’s shoulders. Had the cleric caught him staring at the book? “Thank you, Imam.” He started backing toward the door
.

“Just a minute, Abdul.” Ibrahim waved him closer to the desk, where he sat beneath matching tribal tapestries
.

Jackson
’s pulse spiked as he retraced his footsteps.

“Your file says you are from
Baltimore
,” the imam noted, “yet I hear something peculiar in your speech. What is your heritage?” He looked up, his dark eyes bright with interest
.

“My mother was from
Grand Cayman
Island
,”
Jackson
answered, relieved that Ike had layered that detail into the original Abdul Ibn Wasi’s file
.
  

“I see. And you never knew your father,” the imam added with a grimace of compassion
.
  

That detail was true of the real Abdul Ibn Wasi, but not of
Jackson
, whose father was a judge in
Rockville
. “Allah is my father now,” he answered simply
.
       

The imam’s expression turned thoughtful. “It gladdens my heart to hear so, Abdul.” He switched topics abruptly. “I noticed you have memorized the recitations already. You obviously have a strong mind.”

“Thank you.”
Jackson
looked down at the desk. Maybe he should have pretended to struggle with the Arabic like the others, but having served three tours in
Iraq
, the passages flowed from him without effort. He shifted on his feet
.

“I can use a man of your intelligence,” Ibrahim admitted, snatching
Jackson
’s gaze upward.

Pretending to be pleased,
Jackson
grinned. “Okay. How?” Wouldn’t it be nice if the imam dumped incriminating information in his lap, sparing him from having to endure all four weeks of the program? 

Ibrahim winked. “In good time,” he answered, disappointing
Jackson
. “You may return to the dining hall.” He looked down at his paperwork. “Kindly send in Yusuf Ibn Ismail.”

Heaving an inward sigh,
Jackson
ducked into the hall and went in search of his roommate, Corey, who rarely went by his conversion name, Yusuf. He found him in the dining hall finishing his dessert. “Imam Ibrahim is waitin’ for you,” he conveyed.

Scraping back his chair, Corey sent him a hopeful look through his glasses. “You gonna play ball with us tonight?” When it wasn’t raining, the parolees had taken to shooting hoops on the blacktop during their free evenings
.

“No, man. I gotta run.”
Jackson
patted his stomach. “I’m gettin’ fat.”

Shaking his head at the exaggeration, Corey scooped up his tray and went to report to the imam. In the same instance, Imam Zakariya, who was small and spry and reminded
Jackson
of an African witch doctor with his eternally youthful face, dismissed them for their free time.

“Peace and blessings,” he called as all the men but Corey bolted for the exit.

Jackson
pushed out of the sandstone mosque into a sultry August evening. It was not yet dark but the lights over the basketball cage blinked on in anticipation of nightfall. Turning his back on his peers, he darted to his dorm to don his running shoes.

The parolees had been granted freedom to roam within a two mile radius of the campus from six to nine in the evening, starting from their first night here. Given their isolation in the country, the two-mile limit restricted them from visiting Mechanicsville proper.
Jackson
had made a habit of going running during that time, in a circuit that put him a mile up Highway 235 and another mile down an access road that ran deep into a deciduous forest. There, beneath the power lines, he touched base with Ike Calhoun via his tiny cell phone. Toby, who stayed in a motel in town, had met him deep in the woods once, so
Jackson
could describe the imams’ patterns in a more detailed way than texting permitted
.

Leaving the campus at an easy lope, he arrived at the lush, isolated spot where he usually placed his calls. Slowing to a walk, he swept the shadowed undergrowth before sticking in his ear bud and dialing his team lead. “Hey, Pops. You got news for me?” he huffed
.

“The girl you asked about, was she driving a 2010 Jeep Wrangler?” Ike sounded as dour as he had that afternoon
.

“Yeah, that’s her.”
Jackson
’s heart pumped with confidence. The Taskforce would send out some discreet soul to bargain for the release of those photos. His cover would be safe again.

“The vehicle belongs to a Peter Schlesser,” the Taskforce lead added, “forty-eight-year-old single male living in
Columbia Heights
.”

At the unexpected news,
Jackson
listened more intently. So, maybe the bombshell had borrowed the car, only Ike’s terse tone assured him that her connection to Peter Schlesser wasn’t good news
.
  

“He’s the Editor-in-Chief of
Crime and Liberty
, which is a fairly reputable tabloid,” Ike bit out
.

Oh, hell, no.
Jackson
was well acquainted with
Crime and
Liberty
.
The tabloid took a strong civil rights stance, putting it in the same category as
Libertarian News
. While it enjoyed national circulation, most of its readers lived in
Northern Virginia
.

He pinched the ridge of his nose. The bombshell had looked him right in the eye and
lied
to him! And now his photo might show up in a publication read by college professors and human rights activists nationwide, but most especially in the capital where he lived and worked. Hundreds of people would recognize him—his neighbors, folks from church, members of the PTA. . .

“We have to find her,” he grated.

“We’re working on it. I need a physical description.”

“Late twenties, with dark, wavy hair, and kind of exotic-looking. Greek, I think,” he guessed
.

“There are a couple women on his payroll who fit that description.”

“Why don’t we just ask Schlesser?”

Their encrypted speech was slipping, but here in the woods that wasn’t too critical
.
    

“Schlesser’s on vacation. Office is closed. And he’s not answering the cell number I tracked down.”

Jackson
turned full circle under a darkening sky. “There has to be a way.”

“There is. We track down the couple of women who fit your description. I should be able to reclaim those pictures by tomorrow.”

Tomorrow wasn’t soon enough. “What if she uploads them to their website tonight?”  

“She can’t. We crashed their server. Nothing can get in or out.” 

Jackson
’s temples throbbed. It looked like a waiting game no matter what they did. “Text me when you have more news,” he requested
.

“Will do.” The call ended abruptly.

Jackson
realized he hadn’t even mentioned the book in Ibrahim’s office, the one with the familiar logo on the spine. It was probably nothing, even though his gut told him it might be something.

Putting away his ear bud, he eyed the dark track ahead of him. Twelve miles away, in a riverside rental on the
Patuxent
River
, his daughter Naomi and her grandmother awaited his first visit “home.” Rather than waste time driving back to
Northern Virginia
, he’d installed them at a nearby waterfront rental. He couldn’t wait to see them this weekend.

But, hell, by then the Taskforce’s efforts could be blown out of the water by one slippery, hot-as-hell tabloid journalist. They needed to find her fast.
Jackson
couldn’t risk his cover being blown, not before he learned whether Gateway had ties to terrorism.

Chapter Three

With a gasp of horror,
Lena
lurched awake and found herself in the four-poster bed in her rental cottage. Her heart still raced. Plumbing the unfamiliar shadows, she was relieved to find herself alone. Rupert Davis, who had been choking her to death in her dream, was nowhere to be seen
.

Just a dream,
she assured herself, though her sweat-soaked nightshirt suggested it was actually a full-blown nightmare. Snatching up her cell phone, she checked the time—3 A.M.—before swinging out of bed and crossing to the door to flip the light switch.

As the lamp blinked on, her gaze went to the curtains fluttering at the open window. No wonder she hadn’t slept well. Open windows left a city girl feeling exposed. But, as it turned out, the cottage didn’t come with central air. She should have checked that out, too, before signing the lease.

Slipping into the adjacent bathroom,
Lena
tried emptying her mind with a cool, cleansing shower. But it didn’t work. Had the dream been a warning? she wondered as she soaped herself. Like most Greeks, she believed in signs and portents. This one suggested she should throw her clothes back in her suitcase and head straight for home tonight
.

Only, she’d gone too far to turn back now. Everything she had done for the past ten years from majoring in journalism, to monitoring
Davis
’s incarceration, to hiring detectives in the hopes of finding the missing Curtis—it would all be for nothing if she gave up now
.

Wrapped in a towel, she returned to her room, snapping off the light so she could dress with no one outside watching. When daylight came, she would toss her line into the water and see if
Davis
took the bait.

If his ego was bigger than his brain, she’d have him right where she wanted him.