She ate her food, tasting little of it. “Levi, about last night—” she said as she brought her dishes around to him.
He looked over at her. “Forget it. Won’t happen again.”
“What if I want it to?”
His brows lifted. She actually stepped back. Still, he closed the space between them. “Next time we’re in our skivvies together, I will bury myself in you. Have no doubt about it. There won’t be another time when we come close but stop. You strip in front of me again, you’re mine.”
Zaida stared at the hard lines of his mouth. “You’re the one who told me to strip.”
He caught her hands and lifted them against the wall, spread-eagled. “And if I told you to now, would you?”
Zaida felt heat all through her core. She knew her breathing was ragged, but there was little she could do to calm it. Yes. Yes, she would. But she didn’t want a fast coupling. She wanted a long interlude. She wanted to be sated, mindless and numb after their time together, something they simply couldn’t achieve now when they had the meeting with her translators.
He took her silence for a negative and let her go. Her legs were like noodles. She doubted she could stand on her own if she tried to move away from the wall before gathering her composure.
No man had ever made her feel this way. He busied himself doing some things with Beau, which gave her a few precious seconds to pretend her entire body hadn’t just betrayed her. She left the kitchen and went to her purse to check that she had everything she might need for a day away from the house. She wasn’t bringing her computer, so she didn’t need her messenger bag.
“Ready?” he asked, standing by the front door, keys in hand.
She followed him out the door and down the steps to his Jeep. It was nice that he held the car door for her.
“If you get thirsty, there are some water bottles in the cooler behind my seat,” he said as he got settled in the driver side.
They drove in silence for a while, then Levi started asking her questions. “Tell me about your translators. What do they do for you? What do you do with their translations?”
“My books are available in English in dozens of countries, some of them in the Middle East. In the more conservative countries, the stories that I tell here don’t resonate with readers because they don’t reflect the morals and traditions of those countries. So I write a line of romances geared toward Islamic readers. Those stories deal with issues that matter to the women reading them—finding love, of course, but sometimes in the framework of a polygamist society, women finding employment, contributing to the economics of their households, pressures of new and old world cultures, globalization, war. My stories can make readers question things in their lives. For their environment, they are edgy because they give women a voice. Many women have to hide the fact that they read them.” She looked at him. “Did you know that some libraries in Afghanistan won’t loan books to women? These books have an entirely different distribution channel—but still all through legal channels.”
“You speak Arabic yourself. Why don’t you do your own translations?”
“Because I work through a handful of women’s foundations that do work like this for hire. The women who work for me are technically employed by one of those groups using a grant I fund. The work helps them with their language skills, gives them employment outside the home, a safe place to work, the tools to do their own writing when they have no translations to do. They are an important part of the ecosystem. It helps them have a voice. It helps them realize their own value.”
“Your freedom code again.”
“Exactly. As they develop their language skills, their comfort expressing and supporting themselves grows. They in turn reach out to the community to help other women who don’t have voice…or don’t have a safe way of expressing themselves.”
Zaida looked over at Levi. “The first part of healing a society is giving it a voice. Silence is the language of the disenfranchised. It translates easily to fear and anger, fists and guns. When we feel heard, then we feel we have value. That doesn’t only apply to immigrants, but also to under-educated and forgotten pockets of American society—and there are more of them than you think. The women you’ll meet today are at risk in their community. They are allowed to work because it’s known I’ll provide them a safe environment where they can work in tandem with their religious beliefs. We have a room dedicated to prayer.”
“What if one of them was secular and doesn’t pray?”
She smiled at him. “Like me?”
“Do you do the prayers?”
“Sometimes. It’s peaceful. Most times, no. Sometimes I use the prayer room for meditation or just a quiet space.”
“You know, this office space of yours was not in your dossier.”
“You have a dossier on me?”
“Of course. You’re at the center of this investigation.”
“I’m not doing anything illegal. Writing romance and helping women is not shady stuff.”
“True enough. I’m not here because of either of those activities. I’m here because of your role in a stream of international terrorism.”
“Which I’m also not a part of. Nor would I be.”
“Perhaps not knowingly.”
She huffed a frustrated breath and turned to face her passenger window.
“It’s why we’re checking out every possibility,” Levi said.
“I’m telling you, the women you’ll meet will be terrified of you. Your very presence in my office puts them at risk. It will bring suspicion upon them and their families. If their men find out you were investigating them—or me—they will be forced to quit. So please, go easy with them.”
“I will be respectful, but I will not pretend women are incapable of dastardly deeds.”
Zaida held his hard gaze as long as she could before he returned his focus to the road. He said that as if he had personal experience in the matter. Had a woman betrayed him?
“So back to your offices…how is it that it didn’t show on the info we have for you?” Levi asked.
“I’m subletting them until the end of the year. Having an office was an experiment the sublet let me explore.”
“And after the new year?”
“I’ll take over the lease. The income I make from the stories I’ve had translated funds my translators and other things. It’s working, so far. One of my translators has started at the university. That’s huge.”
Levi nodded, but said nothing more. They’d reached Fort Collins, so Zaida directed him to the building where her suite was. It was on the third floor of the building. Access to the building was done via a security card. Outside the actual suite, Zaida entered a code into a keypad.
He was glad she had some security, but either was pretty easy to crack…or share. Looked as if she hadn’t been there in a while. There were a couple packages outside waiting for her to bring in. A stack of mail was spread out over the floor from the mail slot in the door. While she went through her mail, he looked at the boxes.
“Anything about these boxes look suspicious to you?” he asked.
She gave him a scolding look as she reached for one of them. He caught her wrist. “Zaida, now is not the time to be overly comfortable. I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t in the middle of this—in some way we don’t yet understand. And because we don’t, we have no idea how progressed things are. Those who are using you—or who are after you—may well have reached the end of their need for you. A bomb in a package could be an easy way of eliminating you.”
Zaida’s eyes got big. “Let me see them. If I don’t know who sent them, I won’t open them.”
“Good. Make that a habit.”
“These are fine. They’re from my printer. I frequently order print copies of my books.”
Levi nodded, leaving her to her mail as he checked the space for bugs. Besides the front reception area, there were two more offices in the suite along with a smaller east-facing prayer room. One of the
offices was small with a single desk and two side chairs, the other larger with four desks. The smaller office had only a single, narrow window. The back office had several large windows that let in lots of light. There was a steel door that exited the back office and led to fire escape stairs.
Levi went to the front reception area where Zaida was still going through mail. The outer walls in the office were exposed brick. And because the suite was on the top floor, it had cathedral ceilings. It was a nice place to do some quiet, creative work.
“Zaida, when I asked if you had other computers, you didn’t tell me about the ones your employees use.”
“They aren’t my computers. Well, technically. I bought them, but then donated them to the foundation. And I’m not exactly the employer of these women. More like their client.”
Levi shrugged. “That’s all semantics.”
“These women aren’t guilty of any illegal activity.”
“We’ll see. Give me their full names and home addresses.”
“What are you going to say to them?” Zaida asked as she began writing down the info he requested.
“Only that you’ve asked me to help you find someone who is stalking you. That’s not far from the truth. And, hopefully, it will make them want to help you.”
“Okay. We’ll go with that.”
Levi grinned. “What’s harder to accept…that I’m your friend or that we’re trying to resolve a mystery?”
One of her beautiful raven brows lifted. “Can you be friends with someone you might have to shoot?”
As soon as she said that, it was clear she wished she could unsay it. Her face flushed a warm rose—a color that, apparently, his groin understood too well. His smile widened. “I’ve never made friends of a known enemy, so I can’t answer that.”
Zaida returned her attention to her mail, once again ignoring him. He leaned against the wall behind the door and waited for her staff to join them. He didn’t have long to wait. He soon heard a handful of women coming up the stairs, talking quietly among themselves in Arabic.
Zaida sent him a nervous glance, then stood as the women entered. One look at her face, and they all fell silent. Fortunately, they made it all the way into the room. When the door shut, they saw him. He regretted the fear that entered their eyes as he moved to stand between them and the door.
Zaida introduced him as a friend who was helping resolve a problem, that someone had been threatening her, and she feared they might themselves become targets of this stalker. She told them not to fear him, that he would not harm them or trouble their families. He got all of this from following her lilting Arabic. He could speak it fairly well, but couldn’t read or write it worth shit. He realized how much he admired her bilingual capabilities.
“Is he the Fed you warned us about?” one of the women asked, sending him a sidelong glance.
“Yes, but I now know he’s here to help not harm us,” Zaida answered.
Zaida led them back to their offices. Levi texted Max in Wyoming that he had the contents of a few more computers headed his way. When he went into the back office, he realized one woman was missing.
“Who uses the fourth desk?” he asked. Zaida had listed four women on the paper she gave him.
Zaida frowned. She asked the others about the missing girl. They passed a nervous glance between them, then one of them said that she was home with a sick brother and couldn’t come in.
Yeah, that fired off all Levi’s well-honed alerts.
“Ask them to open their computers and sign-in, please,” Levi directed Zaida. He knew the women could speak English, since their jobs were to translate Zaida’s English manuscripts, but it seemed they preferred to talk to her directly.
Zaida did as requested.
“What is he looking for?” one of the women asked, still in Arabic.
Zaida translated that for him. He didn’t tell her he’d understood the question. He had little enough edge in this investigation. If there was a chance that something would slip, since they believed he couldn’t understand them, it was a benefit to him.
“I’m checking to see if their computers have been hacked, since your stalker seems to know a lot about you and your movements through the day. If so, that info could endanger your team here.”
After he’d finished using the flash drive he’d been given on each of their computers, he asked, “Are these the only computers they use for work?”
“Yes,” Zaida said. “I needed to provide them with laptops because they didn’t have access to ones at home, and I didn’t want them doing my translations on library computers.”
Levi nodded. “Then we’re finished here. I’ll wait for you out front.” Once there, he did a search on his phone for the girl who didn’t show. There was nothing of note to be found about Hidaya Baqri. Her social media was almost nonexistent. But there was a link to her brother on Facebook, and what Levi saw there caused every warning system he knew to sound off.
The women came out of the back, ignoring him as they left. Zaida stopped beside the receptionist’s desk. “Are we finished here?”
“Look at this.” Levi handed her his phone. Her face went pale as she looked at the Facebook post of her friend’s brother, which included a jihadist manifesto, and post after post of hate and death wishes to America and its people.
Zaida’s hand shook as she handed the phone back to Levi. “I saw that a while ago. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to get Mike’s help.”
“Unless he was hacked, he made those posts himself.”
“He was hacked. They locked him out of his accounts. It’s on all of his social media. But you don’t know Abdul. He is the gentlest, kindest man I’ve ever met. He’s curious about life and people and open to all philosophies. He is not a terrorist. I know him. You don’t. He’s a pacifist.”
Levi scoffed at that. “A pacifist who wants to terminate our country and all of its sinners, which is just about every fucking adult in it. Maybe pacifist doesn’t mean the same thing to you as it does to me.”
“Levi, I’m not kidding. Something is very not right. I’m scared for Hidaya and Abdul. Neither of them are ever sick. She never misses work.”
Levi took his phone back, but didn’t take his eyes from Zaida. If he were to believe her, and he was seriously leaning in that direction, an innocent kid was being framed as a jihadist. Why? And by whom?
They needed to get to him fast…before any other faction did. “Where does he live?”
“He and Hidaya share an apartment on the west side of town.”
“Let’s go. Can you call her? Maybe if you can talk to her, we can stop this before it goes too far.”
“I texted her while we were in the back office. She didn’t answer. I’ll try again.”
They locked up the office and hurried down the stairs. Levi was glad the university wasn’t in session. That was at least one positive in a string of bad breaks they’d faced. If this progressed to an explosive situation, then it was good a large percentage of the population wasn’t yet back in the area.
It took less than ten minutes to get across town. The apartment the kid and his sister shared was in an older unit. Children were riding bikes around the parking lot. Levi followed Zaida to the stairs, but stopped her so he could go up first. “I’d really rather you waited in the Jeep,” he said.
“I can’t. They know me. They won’t answer the door for you, if they’re even still there. The others will have warned them by now. Hidaya hasn’t answered my texts or calls.”
Levi frowned. Nothing looked untoward…yet. If she could get them into the apartment with the least amount of fuss, great. “You follow my lead. For all we know, he’s rigged his place with bombs. I go in first. And if I tell you to get your ass back to the car, you do it. Read me?”
“Yes. Yes. Just let’s go.”
On Abdul’s floor, the apartment doors were closed; no one had come out to stare at them. Levi took a set of lock picks out of his wallet. He fitted them to the l
ocks and tinkered with them just a second until the lock clicked open.
“What are you doing?” Zaida hissed.
“Giving us options. Knock on the door. Call out to your friend.”
She did as he ordered. He moved in front of her, waiting briefly to hear sounds from inside the apartment. There weren’t any. “Wait here, Zaida. Don’t come in until I’m sure it’s safe.”
He looked over his shoulder at her. Her eyes were big and scared and searched his. Damn it all, he wished he could give her some assurance, some promise that her world wasn’t crumbling at her feet.
Then he did the most illogical thing he could have done…he kissed her. He turned just slightly and caught her chin in his hand and pressed his lips to hers. His jaw opened, as did hers, letting him inside. His tongue stroked along hers. When he broke the kiss, he stared into her eyes and said, “We’ll figure this out. I promise that. Wait here.” He gave her his keys. “Hold on to these for me.”
Levi cautiously cracked the door, checking it over for trip wires. Seeing none, he stepped inside. The apartment was trashed. Someone had ransacked it. Everything had been turned over, slashed, trampled. Levi made his way through the entire apartment. There was no laptop or desktop or tablet to be found. And given the state of the apartment, it was also impossible to tell what might have been taken.
Zaida waited outside Hidaya’s apartment, trying not to call attention to herself. A neighbor across the way had spotted her with Levi. Zaida had seen the neighbor’s door open a sliver as Levi had gone inside. When the neighbor caught Zaida watching her, she slammed the door shut.
Great. Zaida hoped the woman didn’t call the cops. What was taking Levi so long? It seemed like long minutes passed. He didn’t come back to tell her it was safe to go in. Maybe she should wait in the car. She looked toward the stairs and saw a face that shot dread straight through her: Jamal.
Freedom Code Page 11
