The Guardian

by Marliss Melton

  “Shahid, Hasan,” he heard Ibrahim call, “bring me the traitor. You will have to cut free his feet so he can walk.”

  “We got him,” Corey volunteered, speaking on just the other side of the door. In the next instant, he and Muhammed edged into the closet, and the opportunity to shoot Ibrahim was gone. Corey dropped to his knees beside him. “How you gonna do this?” he whispered anxiously.

  Jackson had to rethink his plans. “Just trust me,” he gritted, tucking the pistol under his T-shirt, beneath the elastic waistband of his shorts. “When we get to the part where I tell you to get down, just do it. Muhammed, I need you to shoot anyone who takes a pop at me.”

  Muhammed nodded, his eyes as big and bright as marbles. “A’aight.”

  “Remember, you promised we wouldn’t go to jail,” Corey reminded Jackson frantically.

  “I don’t want to die,” Muhammed blurted in falsetto.

  “I won’t let either of you die or serve time for this,” Jackson promised, hoping he wasn’t telling a lie. “Now hurry up and drag me out of here. Go ahead and treat me rough; it’ll be more convincing that way. Let’s go.”

  Keeping his arms behind his back as if they were still bound, Jackson braced himself for the agony that ripped through him as they pulled him to his feet. Then he let himself be alternately dragged and shoved toward Ibrahim, who clutched his pistol and extended it straight-armed at Jackson’s forehead.

  I could disarm him now, Jackson considered, but with the others standing so close in their haste to get out the door, the odds of a successful nab and grab were slim.

  “Unbar the door, Shahid,” Ibrahim directed. “The rest of you will surround me like body guards. Remember that I am your mahdi, and it is an honor to die for me.”

  As Shahid drew the door open, the parolees surrounded their leader like a phalanx, with Jackson positioned directly in front of the target, acting as a human shield. Moving all together, they stepped into the corridor, where the sounds of battle echoed off the tiled floor and fantastical shadows leapt on the wall. Jackson was pleased to hear the unmistakable thunder of air support drawing closer. With their tracking capabilities, aerial gunners could hone in on the fleet attack vehicles and take them out, giving the Feds an immediate advantage.

  “We wait here,” Ibrahim shouted, his voice strident with immediacy, his pistol gouging Jackson’s spine. “When my army blows the doors open, we will hurry outside and climb into the vehicles coming to collect us. Cover your ears,” he warned.

  Jackson pretended to sway. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Corey shoot him an anxious glance as he and Muhammed jerked him roughly upright. It couldn’t have been more obvious that Corey was wondering how the hell Abdul was going to save them.

  Funny, he was wondering that same thing.

  **

  When three armored ATVs whipped through the parking lot from around the back of the building, Lena gave a cry of alarm. For the past half hour she had watched the enemy circle the mosque in ever tightening rings. With spurious grenade attacks and well-aimed gunfire, they had managed to break through the National Guard’s perimeter, getting close enough to the mosque to harry those defending it.

  “Get down!” the hostage negotiator warned her, as he fired out the window of their parked car.

  Lena halfheartedly obeyed him. Peeking over the dashboard, she watched as his bullets missed the tires and bounced ineffectively off the bullet-proof hull. Despite gunfire lighting up the night sky like fireworks, it wasn’t herself she was worried about. She had heard nothing from Corey for the past half hour but silence. Jackson could be dead for all she knew. And despite the best efforts of the SWAT team, National Guard contingent, and local police, the invading force was clearly gaining the upper hand. Only the helicopters thundering closer and Douglas’s assurance that a second wave of National Guardsmen was due to arrive at any moment kept her fears from spiraling.

  But then a deafening crash startled a scream from her throat.

  “Shit!” exclaimed Special Agent Douglas, throwing his chest over her torso and shoving her cheek against the vinyl seat.

  “What happened?” she cried.

  Douglas peeked outside. “They just blew the doors off the mosque. Oh, Christ, the leader’s coming out.”

  “Let me see.” Struggling free of his protective encasement, Lena peered outside. A cloud of dust flickered from blue to red thanks to the lights of the emergency vehicles. For a moment, the firefight died down. Then, out of the gaping hole emerged the familiar faces of the parolees she’d befriended—Muhammed, Corey, Jamal, Hasan, Shahid, and Nadim. When the man in front straightened, and Lena recognized Jackson, she could have sworn a host of angels burst into song. His thigh glistened with what was obviously matted blood, and he stumbled before a bearded man wearing a flowing robe, but he was still alive, and that was all Lena cared about—until she realized the imam held a pistol to his back and was using Jackson to protect his own person.

  Fear twisted through her anew as the leader urged his small troop toward the idling ATVs. Oh God, if Jackson was stuffed into one of those vehicles, would she ever see him again?

  Weaving unsteadily on his feet, he started to collapse.

  “No!” Lena screamed.

  But then, in a move as fluid as it was unexpected, he knocked the pistol from Ibrahim’s grasp as he spun around and came up behind his captor, twisting his arm behind his back and pressing a gun that had come out of nowhere to his head. “Everyone down on the ground!” she overheard him shout. As Hasan and Shahid swung around with their own pistols, Muhammed, who had fallen to a crouch, shot Shahid in the shoulder and Hasan in the thigh, and both men dropped their weapons in shocked agony.

  The whop-whop-whop of approaching helicopters grew louder, drowning out Jackson’s words as Corey and Muhammed fell prostrate to the ground, prompting those still standing to do the same. They all ignored Ibrahim who vociferated loudly and gesticulated at the ATV drivers, no doubted ordering them to come to his defense.

  In the next instant the very ground seemed to shake as two ominous silhouettes swooped down from the clouds overhead. Instead of obliging Ibrahim, the ATV’s scattered, and the helicopters banked sharply, in hot pursuit. The sound of gunfire abruptly abated.

  “Finally,” Special Agent Douglas muttered, smiling grimly at Ibrahim’s obvious dismay. “It’ll be over soon,” he predicted.

  Lena took her eyes off Jackson just long enough to assess that the SWAT team on the ground was coming out of hiding with their weapons trained on the parolees. From what she could tell, it was already over. With only one thought in mind, she shoved her way out of Douglas’s vehicle.

  “Hey, come back here!” the negotiator shouted.

  By then Lena was halfway across the parking lot, just behind Ike Calhoun and the dozen black figures now wrestling Ibrahim to the ground, pouncing on the parolees, and snatching up their weapons.

  “Jackson!” In her haste to get to him, Lena hurtled the crouching figures in her way.

  By the time she elbowed her way to the center of the crowd, Calhoun was kneeing Ibrahim in the spine and muttering dark promises into his ear as he cuffed him. Jackson clutched the railing, which appeared to be the only object keeping him upright. Throwing steadying arms around him, Lena gazed up into his beautifully familiar face.

  “I’ve got you,” she vowed. “Hang in there, baby.”

  His pain-glazed eyes abruptly cleared as he stared down at her, clearly horrified. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  But the danger was clearly diminishing. The only things exploding now were the ATV’s, which were falling prey, one by one, to the gunners on the helicopters. Ibrahim’s army was fragmenting and disbanding. She could hear one of the semis parked on the highway starting to pull away. They wouldn’t get far with the second wave of National Guardsmen bearing down on the scene.

  “I need a paramedic here!” she shouted. Spying a line of ambulances hovering at the periphery of the campu
s, she waved her arms frantically to get their attention.

  At last, they deemed it safe enough to enter the ravaged parking lot, so they could tend the wounded.

  “You, bring a stretcher!” Lena ordered the first paramedic to open his door.

  “I’m all right, Lena,” Jackson assured her, but he leaned on her heavily, and his speech was slurred.

  “Like hell you’re all right,” Calhoun growled, standing up to join Lena in barking at the first responders. “Treat this man for a gunshot wound, pronto.”

  Responding to the authority in Calhoun’s voice, the paramedic and his assistant hurried over with a gurney.

  Groaning in a way that tore at Lena’s heartstrings, Jackson lay down at their urging. Blood glistened wetly on his thigh. When he closed his eyes, his face was etched in agony. Lena caught it in her hands and leaned over him. “Don’t you go and die on me, Jackson,” she warned in a voice that quavered uncontrollably. “Now that you made me fall in love with you, you had better pull through, you hear me?”

  A smile chased the suffering from his face and made his dimple flicker. “I’m not going anywhere, sweetheart,” he assured her, with an undercurrent that warmed her heart. He even managed to slit his eyes. “And for the record, I’m in love with you too.”

  With a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob, Lena pressed her lips to his cold ones. By degrees, she became aware of the T.V. crews converging on the scene. Concerned that they would immortalize him as the agent who’d gone undercover to deter the fanatical leader, she sought to wheel him away.

  Only, it became evident that the media was focused for the moment on Attorney General Wilkes, who’d emerged from his palace on wheels to take in the battle’s aftermath. With a dazed look on his face, he climbed the steps of the mosque and stood amidst the rubble like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Behind him, the cuffed, cursing imam was being read his Miranda rights.

  “Sir, can you give us a comment?” pressed a bold member of the press, pushing to the forefront of the chaotic scene.

  Lena glanced at Wilkes to see what he could possibly say in his own defense. In her opinion, it would have saved both lives and valuable property if he had just used force to arrest Ibrahim like Ike Calhoun had suggested. Jackson might not have been injured in the fall out.

  “Well, you know, we’re all shaken by what’s transpired here in the last twelve hours,” the AG stammered, for once at a loss for words.

  Jackson squeezed her hand, recapturing her attention. “Look, it’s Toby,” he whispered.

  Following the direction of his gaze, Lena saw Toby mount the steps while sticking a fake moustache to his upper lip. Sending her and Jackson a wink, he tugged the brim of his black cap over his eyes, sidled closer to the AG and started unbuttoning his flack jacket. He wouldn’t, Lena thought, as Wilkes launched reluctantly into a press conference.

  Toby still wore the same T-shirt she had noticed him wearing the previous evening. As the AG defended his reasons for not storming the mosque at the outset, he positioned himself on the man’s left side so that the arrow on his T-shirt under I’M WITH STUPID pointed directly at the supreme head of the Department of Justice. By all appearances, Toby was listening attentively.

  Lena shook her head and marveled at his gall. Every news station in the country was airing the AG’s comments live. Toby was just asking to get sacked.

  Quickly, before the press realized the hero of the hour was lying immediately behind them on a stretcher, Lena gestured to the paramedic to evacuate Jackson from the scene. The love of her life deserved to be honored as a hero, but reprisal by the crazy imam’s followers was definitely something he could live without.

  **

  Resisting the tug of drug-induced lethargy, Jackson forced his sticky eyelids open, only to flinch at the bright sunlight shining through the window.

  Disoriented, he took a moment to gather his bearings. He found himself propped up in a hospital bed, an IV in his left arm and a blanket up to his chest. He couldn’t feel even a pinch of pain. The lime-green walls were enhanced by an enormous bouquet of wild flowers set in a vase on the bureau to his left. Yet the most uplifting vision of all was that of Lena curled up in the recliner under a small hospital blanket, fast asleep.

  With his heart stuck in his throat, Jackson feasted his eyes on her. For several hours there, back in the mosque, he’d honestly thought he’d never live to see Lena again, or Naomi, for that matter. What Colleen had warned him about—his penchant for putting service to country over his obligation to those he loved—had finally bitten him in the ass, literally. It had seemed like fate. If he’d died, his punishment would have been never getting to tell Lena that he loved her.

  To think that she’d been right outside, on the scene, the entire time. He shuddered to imagine it. Nor would he have believed, in his urgency to tell her what she meant to him, that she would blurt out the words first. Now that you made me fall in love with you, you had better pull through, you hear me?

  The echo of her belligerent confession made him smile. It was just like Lena to beat him to the finish line. He was going to have to get used to being on the losing end, he supposed.

  Regarding her dark curls and the childlike way that she clutched the blanket to her chest, he could have cared less. He had learned that her tough, competitive spirit disguised a heart as vulnerable and breakable as glass. And that truth made him love her all the more.

  If he could spend the rest of his life on the receiving end of her sassy tongue and her passionate devotion, he’d be the luckiest man in the world—a man who’d learned the hard way what counted most in his life.

  Sucking in a deep breath, he realized he’d forgotten to breathe. At the sound of his gasp, she lurched awake, threw off the blanket, and rocketed out of the chair like a cat off a hot, tin roof. “Jackson! What’s wrong. Are you hurting?”

  He realized he had tears in his eyes. “No.”

  She clearly didn’t believe him. “I’ll go get the nurse.”

  “Whoa, slow down.” He caught her wrist and tugged her back. “I’m fine, sweetheart.” He twined his fingers through hers, keeping her locked by his side. “Don’t go anywhere. I was enjoying looking at you.”

  The blush that streaked across her cheekbones warmed the cockles of his heart.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked him with a worried, searching look.

  “Excellent. I must be on some good pain meds.” He dared a peek under the blanket and groaned. It wasn’t so much the sight of his bandaged hip as the catheter tube coming out from under his hospital gown that dismayed him.

  “They had to dig the bullet out.” She grimaced to convey her empathy. “You were lucky that it didn’t hit any major arteries, but it damaged some ligaments. You’ll need some time to heal.”

  “I feel as good as new,” he assured her. “How about you?” His gaze slid to the wrinkled, formfitting blouse she wore. For a woman who’d been up all night witnessing terrorism at its finest and standing by her man while he underwent emergency surgery, she looked pretty damn sexy.

  “Great,” she assured him, but her smile struck him as forced.

  “I think we both could both use a vacation,” he declared, suddenly inspired. He could see it now: Lena in a floral bikini walking through a warm rush of turquoise water. His body tingled in anticipation, making him feel good enough to jump up and run a mile.

  Lena’s sherry colored eyes filled with unmistakable longing. “That sounds so good,” she agreed. “To where?”

  “Grand Cayman Island,” he answered with confidence. “That’s where I grew up. I’d like to take you there.”

  To his surprise, she seemed at a loss for words.

  She was just opening her mouth to supply an answer when a young voice squealed in the hallway and the door flew open. Naomi rushed into the room with wide, worried eyes, followed by a harried-looking Silvia and then Toby, who’d swapped out yesterday’s T-shirt for a new one.

  “Dad
!” Naomi flung herself over the bedrail, heedless of Jackson’s healing wound, to hang on his neck.

  He flinched automatically but felt no pain as he gathered her more securely against him and returned her fierce hug. “There’s my princess. I feel better already.” And that was no exaggeration. The feel of her warm skin against his and the smell of her fragrant hair made every agony he’d endured worthwhile.

  She pulled away just far enough to run an assessing eye over him. “Mr. Burke says you were shot in the butt,” she announced.

  “Actually, I was shot in the hip, but I’m going to be fine,” he assured her, shooting his colleague a warning glare. “Good morning, Silvia,” he added, countering her look of concern with a reassuring smile. “It’s nice to have you both here.”

  “We brought you a card,” Silvia said, moving to place it by the flowers. “Oh, aren’t these lovely? Did you see who they’re from?” She passed the small envelope to Jackson, who had to let go of Lena’s hand to read the note inside.

  Naomi strained to read it, too.

  “They’re from Ike’s wife,” he said, scanning the message. “She says he had to return to D.C. for a debriefing but he sends his love.”

  Toby snorted. Setting the card aside, Jackson looked over at him.

  Lena was eyeing him, too. “Haven’t you been fired yet for that stunt you pulled last night?” she inquired.

  Toby folded his arms over his chest. “If you’re talking about that clown with the T-shirt who was standing next to the AG, no one has managed to identify him.” Toby’s face could’ve been carved from stone. “Nope, the only guy who’s been fired is Wilkes himself. The President declared the showdown a fiasco and promptly replaced him.”

  Jackson was stunned. “Seriously? With whom?”

  “One of the justices on the Supreme Court. Richardson, I think.”

  As Toby dropped his arms, Jackson took note of the message across his chest. SHIT HAPPENS. “What’s with the pessimistic attitude?” he inquired.