The Protector (4 page)

Everything was legal, right down to the parking space, one lot south of the one fronting the safe house.
 

“Look casual,” he said, ushering
Eryn
to an older-model Mercedes.

They passed a young mother buckling her baby into the back of a van. The rest of the parking lot stood deserted, with most residents away at work.

Ike opened the door. No alarm sounded yet. He might just pull this off.

Ten seconds left. He trundled
Eryn
into the front seat. “Head down,” he said, pressing her head to her knees.
 

He opened the back door for the dog. “In, boy,” he said, but the dog balked.

“Winston, come!”
Eryn
called, popping up in order to coax her dog into the back.

It all came down to time. He could leave the dog if he had to, but then he’d have a hysterical woman on his hands.
  

With the last precious seconds ticking off the clock, Ike muscled the dog into the back, slammed the door shut, and rounded the vehicle to slip behind the wheel.

Two minutes and five seconds had passed since he’d grabbed her. The odds were against them already.

Pulling briskly out of the parking space, he took the route out of the area suggested by the GPS device stuck to his dash. He had programmed it to guide him through a maze of back roads, avoiding Randolph Road and
Viers
Mill, where the FBI had parked their RV.

A sudden explosion shattered the morning quiet, so loud that the windows of the car reverberated.
Eryn
screamed and ducked. Ike, startled by the sound, swerved and recovered.
What the hell was that?
He increased his speed.

“It was a bomb!”
Eryn
cried. “I knew it was a bomb!”

He glanced at her sharply. “What was?
Where?”
  

“The UPS man was knocking on the front door. He had a package in his hand. I knew it was a bomb!”

No way. Terrorists had just tried killing her again?
“Did you see him? Did you recognize him?”
 

“Yes. No. I don’t know. There was a man at the door with a box. He might have been the one who killed
Itzak
. I couldn’t tell.”

The surface of Ike’s skin abruptly cooled. He increased his speed, not at all surprised to hear sirens wailing in the distance.

Eryn
, who looked like she was going to throw up, peered fearfully through the back window.
 

“Head down,” he reminded her. At least the bomb, if that’s what it was, would make it harder for the FBI to pursue them. But would they deem him responsible when they replayed the surveillance tapes?

Cued by the GPS, he swerved right, cutting through a middle-class subdivision, past a busy elementary school with kids pouring out of yellow busses.

Out the corner of his eye, he watched
Eryn
drop her face into her hands and rock herself. The shock had finally gotten to her. He braced himself for the sight of her vomiting or, worse yet, sobbing hysterically. But, with a sharp sniff, she dashed the moisture off her cheeks and turned her lowered head to look at him.

“You s-saved me, Ike,” she said in a shaky voice.

Startled to hear his nickname, he looked back at her. “Why’d you call me that?”
 

“Ike? That’s what my f-father calls you, right? I recognize you f-from pictures in his e-m-mails.” Dragging her purse closer, she started fumbling through it.

“That wasn’t me,” he said, amazed that she could talk without biting her tongue. Not that he blamed her for being shaken. Christ, if terrorists had just bombed the safe house, then that had been one hell of a close call. If she hadn’t run out to greet him, she might well have been killed.

He swallowed convulsively as he imagined telling Stanley that he’d been too late.
  

“Sure it w-was you,” she insisted. “You had a b-beard back then, and your hair was reddish gold.” She fished a prescription bottle out of her purse and wrestled with the safety lid.
 

The comment proved she knew exactly who he was. Before the
clusterfuck
that had left most of his squad dead, he’d had the coloration of a young man. Grief and guilt had turned his hair silver, practically overnight.
    

“But your eyes are the same,” she chattered on, shaking a pill into her palm. “I never forget a face. It’s a gift, I guess.”
  

He glanced at her, surprised she found his face memorable at all. He had no exceptional features, no disfiguring scars. Pretending to scan the road signs even though the GPS would tell him the way, he focused on the mission.
 

“Do you have any water?” she asked.

“No.” He glanced curiously at the pill.

She swallowed it anyway, making a face that told him it was lodged in her throat.

The GPS prompted him to turn right in fifty yards. As he swung onto a boulevard jammed with service stations and auto parts stores, the sound of sirens grew louder. Flashing blue lights bore directly down on them.

Ah, shit!
But the black and white cruiser screamed past without even slowing. Probably heading to the scene of the explosion, he figured. Something sure as hell had happened.
 

“That was close,”
Eryn
commented, clutching her purse with white-knuckled fingers.
 

He slowed, searching for the narrow entrance to the garage where his Durango was parked.

There.
He braked abruptly, grabbing
Eryn’s
shoulder to keep her head from plowing into the dashboard. As he swerved into the alleyway between two buildings to a lot in the rear, she glanced up. “Why are we here?” she asked.

The yard behind the mechanic’s shop was crammed with dilapidated European cars. “Changing vehicles,” he said.
 

Cougar could tell her the whole story once he finally checked in. What the hell was keeping him, anyway? As Ike saw it, he had done his part. Cougar could do the rest. He never wanted to see
Eryn
McClellan again. She made him think about the past. She brought urgency and agitation to the present. He would rather just exist in limbo, wanting nothing for himself.

**

Farshad
of Helmand province chuckled. The eruption of brick and mortar, human limbs and glass, had sent the agent who’d burst out of the opposite building flying backward through the air and crashing into a parked car.
 
He had filmed it all on his digital camera to share with his students later.

Inhaling the stimulating stench of black powder,
Farshad
filmed the injured agent as he slowly recovered. Like a startled owl, he blinked,
then
crawled toward the dismembered body of the UPS employee, whose death he had unwittingly instigated.
Farshad
hadn’t intended to kill him but with the agent interfering, he’d been forced to detonate the bomb. Ah, well. Americans called such casualties “collateral damage.”

Through the lens of his digital camera, he savored the heat of the blast, the roar and crackle of destruction. Peace filled his heart. It was finally over. After three long years, his son,
Osman
, had been avenged.
 
Oh, marvelous day, for Allah had prevailed over the Great Satan!

Of course,
Farshad
would have preferred cutting off his target’s head. But there was justice in blowing her up, he comforted himself. After all,
Osman
had died similarly, having been crushed under rubble in the airstrike ordered by his victim’s father.
  

Of course, if
Itzak
had not been corrupted by the West, Farshad’s revenge would have happened the way he’d envisioned it. Itzak’s cowardice had resulted in the target being moved to this complex in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Farshad
had found her by following the agent who came to her house to collect her dog.
Stupid Americans.
They had underestimated his ability to blend in, to watch and to wait, assessing the enemy while searching for vulnerabilities. But the safe house had made it next to impossible to execute her as he had planned.

That was when the patience he preached to his students back in Helmand paid off. He had come up with another plan, and it had born fruit.
 

Hearing a car approach,
Farshad
lowered his camera in time to see two agents leap out of their green sedan. These were the two who left every morning to observe the safe house from a mobile unit parked nearby.
Farshad
had followed them to it, one day, using his cousin’s taxi. As they rushed pell-mell into the smoking hole left by the blast, his pulse quickened. Any moment now, they would emerge bearing his victim’s maimed body, lamenting her death.

Hidden within the shadows on the north side of the complex, he readied his camera.
   

But they did not appear again for many minutes. And when they did, they were covered in soot and empty-handed.

A cold sweat breached Farshad’s pores. His hands grew slippery.
 

“Where is she?” the blond agent raged at one still outside.
  

The agent with the glasses looked stricken. He got up and joined the other two.
  

Inept Americans.
Did they not know how to search the rubble?

All three went back into the building.
Farshad
loosed the collar about his neck. His heart thumped; sweat coursed down his face. They ought to have found her by now.
    

An ambulance barreled into the complex, followed by fire trucks and police cars. It was dangerous to remain, but
Farshad
stayed in his hiding place, rooted by disbelief.

When minutes turned to hours and there was still no body, he was forced to consider the impossible: His victim had escaped.
But how?

Allah’s will?

Never.
He knew what Allah wanted. If the Commander’s daughter had survived the blast, then there was only one reason: His enemy had taken action, as usual, to conspire against him.

I will find her,
Farshad
swore, dropping his camera into his suit pocket. He slipped from his hiding place as agents dispersed to search the area. I will find her and I will have my vengeance, yet.

Chapter Three

Eryn
let Ike Calhoun whisk her from the Mercedes and into the back seat of a burgundy Dodge Durango. Shutting Winston into the cargo area, he jumped behind the wheel and sped them away from Silver Spring with efficiency that had her groping for her seatbelt. Within minutes, they were leaving the city’s limits, headed toward the rolling hills of the Maryland countryside.

Seated behind tinted glass,
Eryn
took comfort from the fact that she couldn’t be seen by anyone else on the road. Only Ike and maybe her father knew where she was right now. The knowledge helped to soothe her frayed nerves. With relief, she felt her medication taking effect. Her trembling had subsided. Her muscles relaxed and her breathing deepened.

I’m not going to die today.
The realization slowed her heart to an acceptable tempo.