Kill The President's Women (Joe The Magic Man Series Book 2)

by Allan J. Lewis

  It took most of the day to get to the dock. The Captain led Steve-e-Joe, Sergeant Jones and Jean in a brisk walk behind the carriage, while the young lad and the captain’s chosen men marched with their bows and arrows right behind them. Jean was sure all the men were looking at her and watching her hips as she walked; she was sure Tom Thomas had told them all about the night she went to his tent.

  They all had to stay on the dock until Captain Morgan handed the letter to the ship’s Captain, giving him new orders to sail on the next tide. Her Ladyship and her maid were taken on board and her two coachmen carried her luggage behind her. When she was safely in her cabin, Jean, and the rest of the men were allowed on board. As Jean walked up the gantry, the ship swayed and Jean looked down at the river. It was so beautiful, and the thought of falling into it, made her feel giddy and she lost her balance. Steve-e-Joe had to grab her to steady her and she hung on to him tight.

  Jean sat up in bed, the image of her almost falling over into the cold water still vivid in her mind. It felt so real, she clutched at Steve and woke him.

  “Are you all right?” Steve asked, half asleep.

  “Yes dear, go back to sleep it was just a bad dream.”

  At 2:10 am, it was still early so she lay back down. If she could go back to sleep immediately, Joe could still be there. She cursed herself for waking up, but the thought of falling in the water had frightened her so much.

  She wondered what direction her adventure would take now for she had finished the book she was reading and had discovered that there was never a war; King Henry had taken York without a fight.

  There had been nothing about ships in the book but it didn’t matter. She just wanted more adventures with more sex and less talk but even if Joe wanted to tell her silly sailor stories, she wouldn’t mind.

  Unknown to her, Abel had deliberately given her a scare her, knowing she would wake up. It was past 2 am and even though it was early for Jean, it was late for him. He had to stop being a dream lover in his fantasy world and start helping the FBI catch the two brothers in the real world.

  Thursday, October 10

  0230hrs

  Abel (or Joe the Magic Man) had seen Khalid through the eyes of Alice earlier on, so he kept that image in his mind as he reached out calling, Khalid Nassir, I am your friend. Joe got into Khalid’s dream with no trouble, and found him in a café drinking tea and smoking with his friends. Joe had him under his hypnotic spell as soon as he called his name, and asked him all the questions the FBI were dying to ask.

  Khalid unwittingly answered all the questions honestly and Joe let him drift back to his smoke-filled room.

  Abel felt proud that he could interrogate someone under hypnosis, and extract completely honest answers from them every single time. It was something neither the police nor any other law enforcement could do and having the means to pull it off, gladdened his heart. He felt a little guilty at finding out the secrets of some of the people, but if he could get a killer like Abdul to tell him he had killed Kahn and find out that Mr. Johnson hadn’t killed his mother and brother, well then, he guessed dream stalking was worth it.

  Abel had made notes after he questioned Khalid and he read through them before he contacted Alice. He had visited her mind so many times, he could easily pop in and out, nearly as quickly as changing channels on TV.

  Alice was dreaming she was shopping with her mother and looking in the window of shoe shop. She saw Joe’s refection in the window and turned to see him standing behind her. Joe pointed to his cell phone and Alice understood. She woke up immediately.

  “Joe, are you there?”

  “Yes, and I don’t think those shoes would look good on you.”

  Alice pretended not to hear. “Did you have any luck?” She looked at the clock. 2:55.

  “Yes and you better get your pen and paper ready.” Without waiting for her, Joe went on to give her his report. “This Khalid is not the main man, he doesn’t know a lot. He says the less he knows concerning his daughter’s actions, the less the police will get out of him. I don’t think he approves of his daughter’s involvement.”

  Alice had gotten her note pad out by now and had started writing. “So he does know that his daughter is actually involved in this plot?”

  “Yes, and he knows the main man is called Azim and he’s from a mosque across town. Azim is the one who asked Yasmina and Jamil to take the two Algerian men to two different safe houses. He doesn’t know where exactly but he’s worried stiff that they’ll get caught.”

  “This Azim seems to be an important lead.”

  “Yes, he seems to be, and Khalid has only seen this Azim once. He believes he’s in his mid-70s and is an important man in the Muslim community. I asked him if Yasmina and Jamil are together or if they’ve split up and taken one boy each. He wasn’t sure but he thinks they’ve split up.”

  “So if Frank Brubaker can find Yasmina and Jamil, then they’ll find the two bombers.”

  “Yeah, I bet the FBI is hunting them down ferociously already.”

  “Is there anything else to report?” Alice asked. She was very wide awake now and she was bursting with the information she had received; she couldn’t wait to phone Campbell.

  “I asked him if he knew who the targets were and he told me that he only knew what his daughter had told him: that two young, Algerian brothers wanted to avenge the deaths of their brothers and father by killing Western women that speak out on TV. In their eyes and the eyes of their father, it was wrong for a woman to speak in public. So these brothers intend to kill two women that have been shooting their mouths off on TV to show America and the rest of the world that it’s wrong for women to be in politics… Yeah, those were the words spoken to me by Khalid.”

  “Yeah, well we already knew all that.” Alice turned the page to review her old notes. “Did he say specifically that they were going to be congresswomen?”

  “I asked him if they wanted to kill the first lady and as far as he knows it’s going to be congresswomen. They’ve both asked for a gun and their request has been granted. Azim has got them a browning 9mm pistol each.”

  “Pistol? What about a bomb? I thought they were suicide bombers.”

  “Khalid knows the boys have been trained by al-Qaeda in the use of firearms and are willing to be suicide bombers. The two boys are Islamic fundamentalists who have embraced the Jihad but there’s no word of a bomb yet.”

  “His daughter told him this?”

  “Yes, and he’s not pleased with her. He begged her not to get involved.”

  “It sounds like the two boys have been brainwashed into being suicide bombers.”

  “Most likely. Khalid says Azim will not hesitate to use the two boys in the name of Allah against the infidels of the Western world. If and/or when a bomb comes into the picture, he doesn’t know if it’ll be a car bomb or if they’ll wear a vest full of explosives. He doesn’t know whether the two of them will be at the same place or at two different places. He doesn’t know all of that; he just prays that Allah will look after his daughter. See, he’s real worried his daughter is going to get caught after the attack is carried out and the government comes looking for the folks that helped the brothers. He saw on TV how the police went after those bombers in Boston, and he can see that happening to his daughter. Khalid isn’t a man who likes every single little thing about America but he loves the lifestyle that he has and he loves his job. He brought his daughter up as a Muslim in America hoping she could benefit from the best of both worlds but since her marriage to Jamil she’s become more fundamentalist.”

  “Let’s hope we can catch them before they get that far.” Alice tapped her pen waiting to hear more but noticed Joe was silent. “Is that it?”

  “Yeah, I don’t think we can get any more out of Khalid. I don’t even think there’s any more to get out of him. Let’s hope they find Yasmina and Jamil in time.”

  “Yeah, let’s keep our fingers crossed. I’d b
etter phone Campbell and wake him up with the good news.” As an afterthought, Alice added, “You make sure you check in with me as often as you can, okay. I have no idea what they’ll want you to do next?”

  “I’ll try. I’ll contact you about seven so after you’re done with Campbell, try to get some sleep, okay?

  “Okay.”

  “See you.”

  Abel fell back into his lonely bed and, exhausted from Jean’s recent wildness, he was fast asleep in no time.

  Alice had made her report to Campbell and went back to sleep. She had lain awake for an hour or two, wondering how the case would turn out in the end.

  When she eventually fell asleep, it must have been sometime past 5 am. She had set her alarm for 6:30 am and when it buzzed, she was too tired to lean over and knock it off seeing as she hadn’t slept much. The alarm was relentless though and she drowsily pulled herself up and turned it off.

  By the time she had managed to get to the toilet and have a wash, Joe was back in her mind for an update. Alice didn’t have nothing to report, other than Campbell was excited that Khalid had given up the name of the head man, Azim. Campbell had told her they’d call her later to let her know what was going on.

  “Okay,” Joe said and left her.

  Alice watched TV in her room patiently waiting for the call and just when she was beginning to feel restless, her cell phone beeped.

  “Hello,” she said, tired and eager at the same time.

  “Sorry I haven’t called all this while,” Burrows said, walking into an unoccupied office. “It’s bedlam down here.”

  “Where are you?” Alice had a good idea where she was but the question was out before she thought about it.

  “I’m at HQ right now and we’ve got CIA, Homeland and the Secret Service all working with us to find out where Fareed Azim is. We got all our agents working the streets.”

  Alice knew HQ was on Pennsylvania Avenue, and that Frank Brubaker would most likely be in charge at the moment. “Wow, so are they pleased with Joe for getting the name, Azim?”

  “You bet! His name is Fareed Azim and he’s well known to the counter-terrorism division. He speaks out frequently about the way Muslims are mistreated and profiled in America. Our informer tells us Azim hasn’t been seen in the last few days, not at home, not at the mosque or even the neighborhood. He reportedly told someone he was going to visit a friend for a couple of days.”

  “A couple of days,” Alice said. “Same kind of excuse as the others but they said they were going for a week or two.”

  “I know. That’s why we’re desperate to find Yasmina or Jamil as well as Fareed Azim. We’re concentrating on DC because we think that’s where they’re hiding, but the truth is, it could be further afield. And what’s got us in a bit of a panic is, you said they asked for pistols. It’s only been a couple of years ago since that gunman opened fire on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. These boys could simply branch out like lone wolves and pick different days to take out their targets. Or one day to take different targets, in different locations! Lone wolves are much hard to pick out; they could be anyone in the crowd.”

  Alice shuddered as she pictured one of the boys walking up to a congress woman and shooting her at close range.

  “Is that what you think they’ll do? Just pick the women out and shoot them with guns? Not blow themselves up?”

  “I wish I knew the answer to that one,” Burrows said, stealing a look at the control room. She was eager to get back in the action. “There are about 90 congress women in the US, but lucky us, only a few are in Washington DC and we are monitoring their every move. Round the clock.”

  “So what’s next for me?”

  “Sorry Alice, I don’t know exactly but I’ll phone you as soon as I find out. The undercover informer we’ve got is trying to find out if Fareed Azim has told any one of his friends where he has gone. There is one man of low intelligence at the mosque. He runs errands for Azim and the other worshipers. In essence, he’s available for the odd job as long as he gets paid. He goes by the name of Idir, no other name. Just Idir. Our informer thinks he might know something because he gets jumpy when the other Muslim brothers ask him about Fareed Azim. So we’re watching him closely and we’ve succeeded in getting his phone tapped, hoping he leads us to Azim. We’re trying to work it from all angles so we’re all occupied right now. But I’ll call you, Alice, trust me. I’ve got to go now.

  Alice dropped her phone after Burrows hung up, wondering if Joe could get into the undercover informer’s mind, (if he was willing), and as the informer mingled in the mosque Joe could jump into the minds of others and find out a lot more than anyone else could. Alice wanted to be there with Burrows and Campbell and get more involved, but she knew that most likely wouldn’t happen. If she ever got into the FBI control room, even only to watch things develop, everyone would know she was an outsider. She would stick out like a nudist at a winter ski resort.

  Alice thought hard, her mind tried to come up with different plans concerning how to get Joe into Idir’s mind. From there, Joe could go through the errand boy, Idir’s mind, and find out whether he knew the whereabouts of Azim. She wished she could contact Joe telepathically like he could contact her, by just jumping into her mind. Alice was begging Joe to come into her mind; there was a time she had told him to get out of her dreams, now she wanted him to jump back in her mind. Ten-minutes later and her wishes were answered.”

  “Is this the office of Alice Timberlake, freelance journalist?” Joe joked, as he jumped into her mind.

  Alice sighed; she had been so worried he wouldn’t show up until much later. “Oh Joe. I’ve been freaking out over here waiting for you to reach me.”

  “Why, what’s happened?”

  Alice gave him an update on what Agent Burrows had told her, and then she told Joe about the private plan she had which could possibly speed things up.

  “Joe, what if I was to go down to that mosque and wait until the men go to prayer, and ask one of them directions to someplace like I did before? You could then jump into his mind and when he goes into the mosque you could go with him and look for that Idir guy. After that, well you could pick Idir’s brains.”

  “I don’t pick brains, Alice. I read the thoughts of the people that are awake, and I can suggest things to them through their subconscious or ask them questions and hopefully they’ll think they’re talking to their subconscious and not get spooked. It’s only when they’re dreaming that I can safely put them under hypnosis and have them do or tell me what I want.”

  “Oh, sorry about the mislabeling, Joe but do you think you could do that on Idir?”

  “It sounds like a good plan but first, we’ve got to cover my tracks. Frank Brubaker has more than likely been thinking along the lines of me getting into Idir’s dream but he knows it takes time. He thinks that you’ve got to make contact with this Idir first and then wait until night time for me to come to you in your dreams, then go visit Idir in his before reporting back to you. All of that takes time. I want the FBI to keep thinking that that’s the only way we talk to each other. If they knew we could talk like this…” He left the statement hanging and Alice understood, perfectly.

  She said to him, “Yeah, it takes 24 hours, more or less, but what if I tell them that you came up here because you thought you could help out quicker if you did some investigation of your own?”

  “I don’t think they’d like that.”

  “Screw them! They need your help and they don’t even know how much.”

  “Okay, let’s say you go down there and bump into one of the worshippers and I manage to make contact with this Idir and find out something important concerning the case. How do we explain it?”

  “We’ll think of something Joe, and if the FBI thinks you’ve flown or driven up and want to waste their time looking for you, then that’s their problem. Only both of us will know you’re still in your office or home or wherever you are, and not up he
re in person.”

  There was an unnerving pause as Joe thought about it. Alice began to fidget because Joe never took this long to make up his mind.

  He finally spoke. “Well, if we’re going to do this, then I’ve got to find a place where I won’t be disturbed. This is going to be some major work.” Abel was at work on a construction site, sitting in a portable office cabin and someone could come in at any moment, forcing him to cut Alice off or break off his mind-hopping. “I’m sure the firm can manage the rest of the day without me.”

  “So you think it’s a good idea?”

  “No, I never said that! I just think it’s worth a try. Could you find out what time the next prayers are being held and get yourself down to that mosque? I’ll sneak away somewhere private and contact you in about an hour.”

  Without any difficulty at all, Alice found out the address and prayer times of the mosque and then sat to go over her plan in her mind a couple of times. It might not work, she had to admit, but she didn’t see any danger in trying, especially when there was practically no chance of it backfiring. She changed clothes and called a cab.

  Abel told the site foreman that he had a belly bug and had to go home. If the boss called, he was to be told that Abel had gone home to bed. And that’s exactly what Abel did; he went home, lay in his bed, and closed his eyes to think of Alice. He found her sitting stiffly in a cab and he could feel her anxiety.

  “Are we there yet?” he asked, imitating an impatient child on a road trip.

  “Christ, Joe!” Alice’s mind had been miles away and so she jumped yet again at Joe’s sudden entrance. “You’ve got to find a better way of contacting me or I’ll have a heart attack before I’m 30.”

  “Wow, look at your face… Sure you’re not 30 yet?