The Protector

by Marliss Melton

  Fine? She wanted to scream at the agent for using such a vague, insubstantial word. Fine? Her student Itzak had been found with his throat slit the very night he’d changed his mind about abducting her. She’d been removed from everything that was safe and familiar and brought to this sterile environment, where communication with the outside world was strictly forbidden. And she hadn’t been allowed any communication with her father since the day of the incident. How in hell did that make her fine?

  Fifteen days! She’d been at this safe house for over two weeks and all the FBI had learned was that Itzak had ties to the Brotherhood of Islam, a local Muslim group with an extremist element. They hadn’t arrested anybody.

  Somewhere out there lurking in the shadows, sat a killer, mocking the Bureau’s attempts to identify him, while Eryn wasted away behind locked doors and cameras, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  Oh, no. She was far from fine, but if she opened her mouth to admit it, she was certain she would burst into tears.

  “You okay, ma’am?” Jackson’s blue-green eyes, so startling against his dusky complexion, reflected sympathy.

  Given the lump in her throat, all she could do was nod at him.

  “Dial one if you need me,” he reminded her.

  Hugging herself against the tremors that had started up again, she trailed him toward the door, wishing desperately that she could just walk out into the world like he did each morning. She missed her freedom almost as much as she missed talking to her father. It made so little sense that they refused her that harmless concession.

  “Try to sleep,” Jackson added, stepping outside. Fresh, spring air taunted her as it wafted in.

  Thanks to the prescription the FBI’s psychologist had given her, sleeping was about all she had been doing. It left her feeling more isolated, more cut off than ever. What she would rather do was to slip quietly away from here, just disappear, to someplace where neither Itzak’s killer nor the FBI could find her, ever again.

  Jackson shut the door between them, waiting for Eryn to bolt all three locks behind him, just as she’d done from day one. Moving toward the window, which she’d been told never to approach, she tabbed the blinds to watch jealously as Jackson slipped into a dark green car and pulled away.

  The sudden stillness in the townhouse plucked at her tautly strung nerves. The downy hair on her forearms prickled.

  Why was it that whenever he left, she felt suddenly like prey?

  A wet nose bumped her hand, and she looked down to see her Golden Shepherd gazing mournfully up at her.

  “I know, Winston.” She stroked the dark ears inherited from his German Shepherd sire. His mother, a Golden Retriever, had contributed to Winston’s blond undercoat, as well as to his docile personality. Turning to the nondescript kitchen, she went to feed her loyal dog.

  **

  “Why the hell is UPS at our door?” demanded Jackson’s boss, Supervisory Special Agent Brad Caine.

  The two men sat three feet apart, watching live video feed of the safe house on split-screen monitors that occupied most of the back wall of their Mobile Command Center. The giant silver RV stood at the far end of a shopping center one mile from the safe house.

  Jackson barely heard his supervisor’s muttered question. He was busy studying the feed from cameras three and four at the back of the safe house. Camera three showed an empty, fenced-in yard, where nothing of interest was happening. Camera four showed the yards of the condos backing up to theirs. In one such yard sat a man Jackson had tentatively identified as National Guardsman Hal Houston, only he wore no markings on his military-issue jacket to confirm it. More curious still, he was sporting gloves on a fine, spring day with temperatures already in the fifties.

  “Maddox,” Caine called again, and Jackson dragged his attention to his supervisor’s monitor, where the split screen showed two different angles of a man in a UPS uniform standing at the front door of the safe house.

  Jackson sprang from his seat for a closer look. “Is that a terrorist?” he exclaimed. The man looked more Indian than Afghani, though it was hard to tell for certain.

  “Nah, it’s the UPS guy. I’ve seen him before. But why’s he bringing us a package?”

  “How do you know it’s not a bomb?” Jackson asked. After so many tours in Iraq, every mysterious object tended to look like a bomb.

  Caine snatched up the phone to contact the agent watching the safe house from across the street. “Ringo, what’s up with UPS?” he said.

  “Don’t know.” Jackson could hear Ringo’s tinny voice through the speaker. “I’ve seen him around before. Did we ask for a package?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “So, what do we do?”

  “Go tell him no one’s home and you’ll hold the package for them,” Caine suggested.

  “What if it’s a bomb?” Jackson repeated.

  Caine sent him a scowl. “We’re not in Iraq, Rookie.”

  Jackson glanced back at his own monitor. Nothing had changed. The back yard still stood empty. The neighbor was still sitting in his own yard, wearing gloves. Something didn’t feel right. “One of us should stay with Eryn,” he asserted, and not for the first time.

  As usual, Brad Caine just ignored him.

  Chapter Two

  Eryn snatched her head up, startled. Winston pushed to all fours, his ears twitching. Who on earth would be ringing the doorbell? she wondered as the chime faded.

  Her imagination supplied an immediate answer. The taxi driver! He had tracked her down, and now he would finish what he’d started.

  That can’t be. How would he know where to find me?

  There was only one way to know for sure, and that was to go to the door and take a look.

  Rising on jittery knees, Eryn traversed the short hallway from the kitchen. Her breath rasped in the silence as she tiptoed toward the solid panel door and put an eye to the peep hole.

  She drew back uncertainly. The familiar-looking uniform was reassuring, but the man wearing it was as foreign as all of her students. And why would UPS bring a package to a safe house? It had to be a trick, a way to get her to open the door.

  Retreating to the kitchen, she snatched up the phone and pushed one for Jackson. “There’s a man at the door with a box,” she whispered when he answered.

  “It’s just UPS.” While his words were encouraging, the thread of tension underlying them was not. “Don’t answer, Eryn. Stay right where you are.”

  How did Jackson know who was at the door? “What’s in the box?” she asked, even as her mind supplied an answer: a pipe bomb, of course. Wasn’t that what terrorists always put in boxes?

  Suddenly, the caller gave a forceful knock. Panic flooded Eryn’s arteries. He had overheard her whispering! He knew she was in here!

  “I have to go!”

  “Eryn, wait! Stay on the phone with me—”

  She hung up on him abruptly. Her father had promised her that the FBI would keep her safe. But she didn’t feel safe here, not at all.

  Snatching her purse from off the kitchen counter, she whirled toward the basement stairs. “Winston, come!”

  He shot past her on the narrow steps, knocking her off her feet so that she skidded down the last six treads on her bottom. Leaping up, she raced him to the door. “Quiet!” she hissed when he barked with excitement.

  The rear exit was as heavily bolted as the front. No doubt there were cameras guarding it, as well. Ignoring the frantic voice that whispered that it wasn’t safe to leave, Eryn twisted the locks and yanked the stubborn door open.

  It wasn’t safe to stay, either. Another day of this uncertainty and she’d lose her mind. Besides, she’d been assured she was a guest here, not a prisoner. She could call it quits whenever she felt like it.

  And today she desperately wanted to call it quits.

  Winston bounded past her as she stepped into the fenced yard and drew up short.

  Now what? There was no gate or exit out of the enclosure, only a section of
the fence that looked like it was propped in place.

  Crossing over to it, she gave a push and, to her astonishment, a six-foot partition keeled right over. Grabbing her dog’s collar, she waded cautiously into the grassy alley that divided the rows of condominiums.

  She sensed the stranger before she actually saw him; he blended with the shrubbery so well that she would have looked right through him if his green stare hadn’t drawn her gaze.

  He stood up slowly, never breaking eye contact. Too tall.Too broad. Eryn stepped back, her heart jumping.

  She wheeled and ran the other way. The muscles in her legs, weak from inactivity, strained to carry her as fast and as far away as possible. She should have listened to her spidy-sense days ago.

  Well, I’ll be damned, thought Ike. He’d been studying the back of the safe-house waiting for Cougar to show up when the part of the fence he’d compromised keeled over and out stepped the woman he was supposed to recover, all blue eyes and wild hair.

  Up till then he’d had no idea how Cougar had planned to retrieve her without the FBI agents’ knowledge. He stood up, relieved. She’d saved them a hell of a lot of trouble.

  Or not.

  To his incredulity, she took one look at him, clutched her handbag to her chest, and sprinted the other way, up the grassy alley with the dog at her side, heading in the opposite direction from his getaway vehicle.

  Sonofabitch.

  The other camera, tucked under the rear eaves was filming her exodus. It would film him, too, if he went after her, but the odds of snagging her were better now than they’d ever be, especially if the FBI caught her first.

  So Ike took off after her.

  The girl was surprisingly fleet-footed. She had almost made it to the tree line before he curled a gloved hand around her elbow and swung her around. Lunging for the dog’s collar at the same time, he pulled them both to a jarring halt. “Wrong way,” he grated.

  “Let go of me!” Her voice came out high and thin. “I’m not going back.” She struggled against his grasp, proving more difficult than the dog, who eyed him warily.

  The odds of a successful nab and grab depended significantly on the amount of time it took to seize the recovery target and disappear. Ike had two minutes, tops, to make them disappear.

  Ignoring Eryn’s shriek, he banded an arm around her waist and plucked her off her feet. “Come,” he said, relying on the dog to follow his mistress. He carried the squirming woman into a fenceless back yard where he hid them all behind a utility shed.

  She was a wriggling bundle of resistance. “Let me go!”

  He had to pin her to the shed’s wall. “Quiet,” he ordered, covering her mouth with a gloved hand. Her face went waxen; her pupils dilated. Christ, she was terrified of him, and he had mere seconds in which to reassure her.

  “Look, I’m not with the FBI and I’m not a terrorist,” he said, peering around the corner of the shed for any sign of pursuit. “Your father sent me.”

  She sucked a startled breath through her nose.

  That’s right, princess. “The safe word is Lancaster. He said you’d understand that.” Not that he did.

  Looking back into her eyes, he was relieved to see her fear fade. Suddenly, she looked more like the teenager in the photo on Stanley’s desk at HQ, all freckles and periwinkle eyes. Except the lithe body crushed under his most definitely belonged to a woman.

  Easing his hand off her mouth, he saw that her jaw now bore the imprint of his glove.

  “Lancaster,” she whispered, touching the tip of her tongue to her full upper lip.

  She was too beautiful. Aware that his right thigh was wedged between hers, Ike eased his weight off of her. They needed to get moving. “I’m here to take you somewhere safe,” he added, measuring the distance to his car as she took stock of him.

  “Do I know you?” she asked.

  “Isaac Calhoun.” He glanced at his watch. No more time to chat.

  But then she gave a cry of relief and threw her arms around him, hugging him tightly. “Thank you!” she cried, leaving an impression of soft breasts and fragrant hair.

  Ike disguised his sudden befuddlement by tying a short rope to the dog’s collar in a makeshift leash. “We need to go. Can you run?”

  “Of course.” She seemed more than eager, looping the strap of her purse over her head.

  He swept the area one more time. “Now.” Seizing her hand, he tugged her back into the grassy alley toward the condo he’d been using.

  Sliding open the rear entrance, he pulled her and the dog inside and locked it behind them. In seconds, they were stepping out the front door. The man who owned the place happened to be in the service, making him compliant to the Commander’s strange request for a house key.

  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 throug
h 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.