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  As for the pistols, he would distribute them if the need arose, and only to his most trusted pupils.

  “This situation—” he flourished a hand to encompass the standoff at Gateway, “is an allegory, is it not?” He glanced down at the parolees then back into the eye of the camera filming him. “It symbolizes the enslavement of our people by the Devil, who has held us captive for centuries. But do not despair. Instead, be encouraged, my people. For the time is at hand for your delivery.” He paused for effect, knowing that his next words would shake the very foundations of the nation.

  “My faithful followers, your Mahdi is here. Indeed, he has been with you all this time, for I am he.” Ibrahim pressed a hand to his heart and smiled sanctimoniously. “And I have come to change you into a new and perfect People. Where the Earth is filled with wickedness, I will fill it with justice, freedom, and equality. I will make the poor-lost found and turn you into rulers of the New World Order. All this I will do for you, but first you must prove your worthiness by freeing me from the Devil’s snare.

  “Captains and Lieutenants of the Fruit of Islam, your loyalty is being put to the test, just as I foretold it would be. For the New World Order to succeed, you must rally now to my defense. Gather your soldiers and strike hard. This will be the first of many bloody battles heralding the Righteous Struggle. But in the end, the Fruit of Islam will prevail, and the Devil will be crushed like a serpent beneath our heels.”

  Satisfied that his speech would bring his followers thronging to the area to free him, Ibrahim pressed the button that would upload his message via 3G wireless to his website.

  When an error message appeared, he cursed and tried again.

  Were the walls of the mosque too thick? Why was his video not uploading?

  It dawned on him, with a temporary sense of impotence, that the vipers who’d shut off the electricity had also dismantled his website, preventing him from communicating with his followers that way. No doubt the music site listing Zakariya’s top ten picks had also been taken down. But he was not so easily thwarted. Every one of his followers had an iPhone just like his.

  Ibrahim accessed his contact list, selected every name on the list, and typed a brief text message. Watch my video. He then attached the video to the text and hit send. Within minutes, seventy seven captains and lieutenants in the Fruit of Islam would receive his summons and forward his message to their underlings.

  Savoring visions of efforts to which they would go to liberate him, Ibrahim relaxed on the uppermost step of the minbar to watch the news in his iPhone. Tonight, the nation would spin on its axis.

  Turning down the volume so the parolees were not privy to opposing views, he viewed the debates taking place on every major news station. The country stood divided over whether or not Gateway’s leaders were terrorists, as the government alleged, or whether Ibrahim and Zakariya had been profiled due to race and religion, their civil rights violated.

  “Oh, come on,” scoffed a white-haired senator, being interviewed on CNN. “These allegations are ludicrous. Have you looked at the upstanding individuals who’ve graduated from Gateway’s reintegration program? Mr. Ali Rakeem is now the principal of an esteemed Muslim boy’s school in Columbia Heights. Taimur Amir is the owner of a successful recording studio in Georgetown. Qasif al Bakir is a lawyer working for the Baltimore District Attorney’s office. These men are reputable because Gateway taught them that self-worth and hard work pay off. You are not going to tell me these men are members of a radical Muslim group that’s plotting to overthrow the government. That’s hogwash.”

  The senator’s portrayal of Gateway was flattering but it betrayed the man’s absolute ignorance. Amused, Ibrahim immersed himself in the discussion, even as the man’s next words shocked the smirk off his face.

  “But, Senator, what about the allegations that former parolees have been stockpiling propane in first floor apartments and are intending to use them as bombs?”

  Ibrahim frowned. When charging him, the Attorney General had mentioned something about stockpiling bombs. But how could the authorities and the press know of his plans to bring down apartment buildings throughout the city unless the unthinkable had happened. Had one of his followers turned traitor?

  “Ridiculous. My sources tell me that distributing propane is one of Gateway’s charitable endeavors. That propane was for heating older homes in the city. You know, I hate to allege that our government would plant evidence against American citizens, but I can assure you that the investigative agency making these claims had every opportunity to just that.”

  “Can you tell us how and when, Senator?”

  “How do you think? They put one of their own agents through the program.”

  Ibrahim blinked. Wait, what? One of his parolees was a government agent?

  “When was this, Senator? Is the undercover agent still in the program and could you identify him?”

  Ibrahim’s heart pounded as he waited for the senator’s reply.

  “Of course I could, and yes he is. But I’m not going to jeopardize a man’s well-being just because I have a different opinion on how American Muslims ought to be treated. I will say this, though. This situation at Gateway defines the reason why we need a new President in the Oval Office.”

  Fury exploded in Ibrahim’s chest. Had he actually been duped by one of his current parolees? Which one?

  Turning off his phone, he plunged the prayer hall into darkness. Only the feeblest of moonlight coming through the windows under the domed ceiling illuminated his followers.

  Was one of them the traitor? Or had that man been one of the cowards who’d escaped at start of the siege? Picturing Mansoor and Omar, he could not envision either one as a spy. They were both too old and not in good physical condition.

  On knees that trembled, Ibrahim slowly rose to consider the men who remained. Was Muhammed the traitor? Not likely; he was as dumb as a rock. Jamal? Ditto there. Hasan? That man could barely speak English. Corey? Too soft. Shahid? Too mean. Abdul? Ah, yes, Abdul.

  A shiver of certainty wracked his spine.

  In retrospect, it seemed so obvious. Abdul had memorized the recitations in one week flat. Ibrahim had assumed his many questions were an indication of his quick mind, but he’d been scrutinizing Gateway and its leaders from the start, hadn’t he?

  And earlier this week, it was Abdul who’d remained inside the mosque when everyone else went to witness the fire marshal’s inspection. No doubt he had seized the opportunity to continue his search that had been cut short the night the alarm had been breached and the mosque broken into.

  Ibrahim slipped a hand into his pocket. With a tremor in his fingers, he withdrew the pistol there and released the safety.

  There was only one good thing that could come of his discovery. The parolees were less apt to rebel against him when they had a scapegoat to blame for their misery.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Lena stuck as close to Toby as the wicked-looking pistol holstered to his hip. He introduced her first to Ike Calhoun, the Taskforce lead, and then to the Attorney General. When Wilkes called the Taskforce into his plush RV for a conference, he gave her an appreciative once-over and invited her to join them, as well—much to Ike Calhoun’s obvious annoyance.

  The AG’s aid made her a steaming cup of coffee. Thanking him, she told herself just to watch and listen and not stick her nose into matters she didn’t understand. But when Ike Calhoun and Wilkes started wrangling over whether or not to storm the mosque, she found she wanted to strangle the latter with her bare hands. Didn’t he care about Jackson’s safety?

  “Time is on our side,” the AG insisted, looking relaxed in a cushy captain’s chair. “The men in the mosque will soon be out of food, and they have no power. They’re going to have to capitulate eventually. All we have to do is to wait them out.”

  “You’re wrong.” The Taskforce lead’s burning eyes could have blistered leather but that didn’t seem to faze the AG. “The longer we wait, the wor
se this situation is going to get. We can see that the imam’s got an iPhone and that he’s been using it, but we can’t trace the number. How long do you think it’s going to take the Fruit of Islam Army to mobilize and ride to his defense?”

  Wilkes shrugged. “What are you worried about? The National Guard has barricaded every road in and out of the area.”

  Calhoun’s voice got softer, which made him all the more intimidating in Lena’s opinion. “The National Guard isn’t equipped to take on twelve thousand men. The more we monkey around, the more time the enemy has to plan their strategy.”

  Lena gulped her coffee. Fear coagulated like cold grease in her belly.

  “What strategy? These men aren’t real soldiers, are they? Have they ever been at war?” The AG clearly wasn’t worried.

  “Trust me, with twelve thousand members, you can bet hundreds of them have had military training. Plus they’ve planned for contingencies like this. Why do you think the glass in the mosque’s windows is bulletproof and the windows are welded shut? This building is their fortress. And as long as Ibrahim can communicate with his followers, he can draw them all to the area in droves. Let’s at least knock out the cell tower and suspend his communications.”

  “Can’t do that,” Wilkes countered stubbornly. “Too many people around here rely on the cell towers—merchants, law enforcement, and doctors. Imagine how many folk’s will die when they can’t call 911. I shudder to think of the law suits.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Ike Calhoun flushed to the roots of his short silver hair. “If we don’t take decisive action now, more people are going to get hurt in the destruction and mayhem about to take place. Do this my way and the only person who’ll get hurt is Ibrahim. Say the word and my sniper can take him out right now. Done. Finished.”

  “Good God, we can’t kill the imam! What happens when his followers hear that we’ve executed him? Don’t you think that’ll incite them even more? You think the country is divided now? We’ll have a full-blown revolution on our hands!”

  “I disagree. You’ll be disbanding revolutionaries that are already—”

  Lena’s cell phone buzzed unexpectedly, distracting her from Calhoun’s terse argument. Pulling it from her purse, she realized she had a message from Peter. Senator Huxley just stated in an interview with CNN that there’s an undercover agent in the program, but he didn’t name him.

  “Oh, no.” Her cry of alarm prompted Toby to wrest her phone from her limp grasp and scan the message. At the same time, the team lead’s radio crackled.

  “Sir?”

  He answered it with a single syllable. “Speak.”

  “Our insider’s identity has just been compromised by Senator Huxley in an interview with CNN.”

  Ike’s green eyes jumped up and intercepted Toby’s worried stare. He turned to the AG. “We need to get our man out, now.”

  “No.” Wilkes shook his head so hard his jowls jiggled. “We are not going to storm the mosque and that’s final.”

  Lena’s empty coffee cup crumpled without warning in her tense grip. Dear God, Jackson was going to be butchered by the parolees when they realized that he’d betrayed them!

  **

  The soft click click of a round being advanced into a chamber was often the only warning a Marine got before all hell broke loose. When that sound rattled down from the minbar where Ibrahim was starting down the steps, Jackson instinctively knew his number was up.

  Pushing stealthily to his feet, he stumbled over the dark forms that strewed the floor as he sought desperately to find a hiding place.

  “Ow!”

  “Man, watch it!”

  In this large, echoing space, there were few places to take cover, a fact he had been aware of since Ibrahim forbade anyone else to leave.

  Ducking behind one of the thick, sandstone columns that supported the domed ceiling, Jackson prayed his intuition was wrong and that Ibrahim wasn’t after him. But the deafening crack of a pistol accompanied by a burst of light and plaster showering his head confirmed his bleak suspicions.

  “Traitor!” Ibrahim thundered in the astonished silence that followed.

  Confused by their leader’s actions, the rest of the men started scrambling out of his path. Traitor? The blood-freezing accusation led Jackson to assume that Schlesser had gone public with his exposé. Maybe he’d warned Lena first, maybe he hadn’t. Either way, what could Ike or Toby do for him now? Jackson had placed duty over his obligations to his family, just like Colleen accused him of doing, and now he was going to pay the piper for it.

  Short of the SWAT team breaching the building right now, there was no getting out of the situation he was in. He’d done it to himself, and his own personal nightmare was going to play out to the end. Unless he could arm himself and fight back, Ibrahim was going to shoot him and make an example out of him.

  “What the hell?” he cried in the voice he used as Abdul. “Why you shootin’ me, Imam? I ain’t done nothin’ wrong.”

  “Nothin’, he says.” Ibrahim’s voice took on the sing-song quality of a madman. “I just found out that Abdul is an undercover agent for the government that oppresses and imprisons us,” he announced. “He has betrayed you and me and every black man in America with his deceit.”

  With every word, the imam came closer. Jackson darted out of his hiding place, heading for the next column over. When a bullet hit the wall to his left, he wheeled right toward the minbar, hoping to arm himself with one of the six pistols still in the strong box, if the damn thing was even open.

  Only, he never even made it up the steps. Ibrahim’s pistol barked again, and a burning pain exploded in Jackson’s right hip, just like in his dream the other night, only a thousand times more agonizing.

  Slipping and collapsing onto the runner, he fought to catch his breath while expecting another shot to peg him in the back and end his life at any moment.

  A glance over his shoulder showed Ibrahim approaching, his robes made incandescent by the light reflecting off the clouds and shining through the windows overhead. Parolees gathered in a semicircle at the foot of the minbar, eyeing Jackson as if he’d grown horns.

  “This man,” Ibrahim declared, “is not one of us. It is due to him that you are stuck behind these walls like fugitives.”

  Through a haze of agony, Jackson spotted Corey shaking his head at him. It didn’t take a psychic to read Corey’s thoughts. You lied to me, Abdul?

  “He betrayed our righteous struggle to the Devil who now persecutes us,” Ibrahim continued.

  With dread, Jackson surmised what was coming next: that he’d either be severely punished, possibly killed, as an example of what happened to those who resisted Ibrahim’s rule or used as a hostage to secure Ibrahim’s release. In spite of his agony, he pushed to his feet, clinging to the rails on either side of the steps. “I am not a traitor,” he insisted, as blood streamed warmly down his leg. “If I was, I would’ve left with Omar and Mansoor. Why would I still be here witchu if I was some kinda spy?”

  “You told me you worked for Ibrahim,” Corey spoke up suddenly, his tone accusing. “That’s why you went out sometimes at night, to report to the imam.”

  “I was with Maggie, okay? I’m in love with her.” Jackson’s confession, infused with the despair that he might never get to realize his dreams for him and Lena, was met with thoughtful silence on the part of the parolees, especially Corey, whose expression shifted to one of compassion.

  “He lies,” Ibrahim insisted. “He’ll say anything to save himself. He certainly never worked for me. I tell you, he is the reason we are cornered like rats. Hasan and Shahid, seize him before he defiles our sanctuary with his tainted blood. Take him into the closet, there, where we keep the prayer rugs. You will find a roll of electrical tape and scissor on the shelf. Bind his hands and feet. Then beat him if you like, but do not kill him. We may need a hostage to barter for our release.”

  Jackson made a last valiant effort to dash up the minbar and arm himself.
Hampered by the bullet in his hip, he had nearly made it to the top where he would have still have had to open the box and pull out a gun, when he was tackled from behind and dragged back down to floor level. There, all of the parolees seemed to jump him at once.

  Jackson put up a valiant resistance. Jamal sustained a black eye. Nadim was kicked in the stomach and never came back. If he could have gotten back up on his feet, he might have held off all of them. But fighting from a prone position eventually tired him out. And when Shahid clocked him in the side of the head with his foot, his vision blurred and he could no longer see well enough to deflect the blows.

  Four men dragged him into the walk-in closet, currently emptied of prayer rugs. Hasan pinned him to the hardwood floor on his stomach while Corey made light with his cell phone and two others bound his hands and feet with electrical tape. Spitting blood, Jackson kept quiet and hoped they wouldn’t stick tape over his mouth.

  Once they had him tightly bound, they flipped him over. Then Shahid, Hasan, and Jamal egged each other on to kick and punch him while calling him every vile name under the sun.

  As the blows came raining down, Jackson fell back on his military training and retreated into the citadel in his mind, where Naomi and Lena greeted him with loving embraces.

  **

  When the sound of gunfire penetrated the hull of the RV, Lena saw Toby cut a startled look at his boss, who tabbed the mike on his headset. Oh, God, Jackson.

  “Eagle One, status report.” Calhoun was still listening to the report when another shot rent the tense quiet.

  Lena gave a moan of terror and dropped her face into her hands. When a third shot rang out, tears of misery filled her eyes. This can’t be happening.