Krystal Scent (Krystal Vibration Series Book 2) Page 9

  Covenant, O Sister, live and fight to make their women widows and their children orphans.

  Covenant, O Sister, live and fight to make them desire death and hate appointments and prestige.

  Covenant, O Sister, live and fight to slaughter them like lambs and let the Nile, al-Asi, and Euphrates rivers flow with their blood.

  In the name of Allah, the merciful and compassionate PRESENTATION

  To those champions who avowed the truth day and night throughout their Islamic lives. And wrote with their blood and sufferings these phrases of condemnation.

  The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates of antiquity,

  Platonic ideals of the ancients, nor Aristotelian diplomacy. But it knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing, and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine-gun.

  Islamic governments have never and will never be established through peaceful solutions and cooperative councils. They are established as they have been

  by pen and gun

  by word and bullet

  by tongue and teeth

  Etheridge called Karen Krystal. “We’ve never seen this before.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It looks like a declaration of war.”

  “Against whom?”

  Etheridge hesitated.

  “Me, right?” Karen said.

  “Look, we’re going to send a car for you. We’re going to bring you in.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. I feel safe here. I know my house, and we have state-of-the-art electronic security with battery back-up in case of a power failure.”

  Etheridge was silent for a moment and then said, “Check in with me tomorrow. We’re still coordinating your trip to Nevada.”

  Karen agreed and disconnected.

  Karen turned off the fax machine but then stood still, listening, smelling, and feeling.

  She swore she heard the security system beep. A door or window had opened. She held her breath and waited for the alarm to sound. She heard the multiple beeps of it being disarmed. Her eyes narrowed.

  Her gun was downstairs. She tip toed down the back stairs, entered the kitchen and took her Smith & Wesson slowly out of her purse.

  There was a sound coming from the front room. How did they get through the gate or over it without the alarms going off? How could they have gotten through the house security system? Karen looked at the panel on the kitchen wall. The light was green. The system had been totally disarmed.

  Karen whispered, “Damn.”

  She crouched down behind the kitchen island and waited. She could hear the shuffle of feet. Up to this point, she had only shot two other people. But she was ready to shoot the trespasser whoever he was. She quietly pressed off the safety and held her finger lightly on the trigger. A shadow preceded the human. She lit her weapon’s laser.

  Karen aimed for the open doorway. She waited for the intruder.

  “Karen?”

  It was Sharon. “What are you doing here?” Karen asked, shutting off the laser and standing up from behind the island.

  “I told you I was thinking of moving home.”

  “Seriously? You’re moving in?”

  “If that’s all right with you?”

  Karen reset the safety on her double-action revolver and gave her sister a hug.

  Sharon said, “I’d feel much better if you weren’t holding a gun while you hugged me.”

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting anyone. I just got off the phone with…”

  “With who?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Karen set the firearm down on the chopping block. “I’m glad you’re here. This house is too big for one person.”

  “Are you in your old room?” Sharon asked.

  Karen told her she was.

  “Then, I’ll go to mine,” Sharon said.

  “Want some help unpacking?”

  “No. But you can decide what we should have for dinner. I haven’t eaten a healthy meal in days.”

  “I smell cat urine,” Karen said, grimacing.

  Sharon dropped her purse onto the chopping block and walked back to the door and picked up the animal cage that held Shasta. “Is it okay if Shasta stays with us?”

  Karen walked over and opened the door to the wire enclosure. She pulled out Shasta, cradled the cat in her arms, and said, “Absolutely.”

  Sharon grabbed Shasta’s litter pan and said, “I’ll place this under the washtub in the laundry room.”

  Karen voiced approval and followed Sharon. After the pan was filled with fresh kitty litter, Karen set Shasta atop the mixture. Shasta sniffed, scratched a few times at the fragments and then squatted. When done, she pawed some of the litter atop her excrement, hopped out of the pan, and off she went to explore the house.

  Sharon retrieved her purse; it had tipped over and dumped some of its contents.

  Karen saw the small, thin, blue book, and asked, “You carry your passport?”

  “It’s a habit from when I was with the airlines,” Sharon said, and stuffed the paraphernalia back into her bag and headed for the stairs.

  Karen followed Sharon to her old room. It was decorated far more modern than Karen’s. It had eclectic furniture, Andy Warhol paintings, sculptures of Greek gods, writings of Maya Angelou and many other objects; some more strange than others, along with a number of unexplained photos of Amanda Boudoir’s models in their scanty underwear showing off their svelte bodies. Some were even completely naked.

  Absentmindedly, Sharon stopped in front of a poster of one of the most famous females and lifted her top to compare her stomach to the model’s. She smiled and then continued.

  “You’re obsessed with looking like them,” Karen said.

  “You look like them, too,” Sharon said, turning and lifting up Karen’s shirt.

  Karen quickly grabbed it and pushed it back down.

  “You just don’t have photos in your room. But you’re obsessed with working out and keeping your body fit,” Sharon said.

  “I’ve done that as a habit from gymnastics and swimming. And now...”

  “And now what?” Sharon asked.

  Karen said, “And now I try to stay in shape for soccer.”

  Sharon accepted Karen’s answer and they spent the next couple of hours catching up on what had happened in their lives since the Labyrinth. But Sharon didn’t tell Karen about her three lovers since the Labyrinth, and Karen never confessed that she was going to be trained as a counterterrorist agent. But she wanted to, and when there was a lull, she took a deep breath.

  CHAPTER 14

  Karen couldn’t bring herself to tell Sharon about Homeland Security or any of the conversation with Carl Etheridge. After eating and continuing the respective narrations of their lives, they finally parted: Karen to bed and Sharon to get ready for a late-night date.

  Karen had no sooner closed her eyes, and she fell off to sleep.

  Instantly, a nightmare began. She was back at the Labyrinth.

  Surroundings are encroaching. Can barely move. Pulling in arms. Raising them overhead. Climbing. This is the only way out. Rocks scraping legs. Air is thin. Difficult to breathe. Palms sweating. Flashlight keeps sliding. Squirts loose like a greased pig and falls.

  Bouncing from rock to boulder, to stone, to slab, to granite, to shale, to graphite, to gypsum, descending, spinning, rolling. Looking down. It’s thirty feet away. Then twice as far, then a hundred feet, a thousand, a mile, ten miles. No way to reach it. Peering down the shaft, watching the light fade. Battery weakening. Bulb extinguished. The darkness of a sealed casket.

  Going to die.

  Cooing of Grandpa Buhr’s pigeon. Very faint. Crawling toward the sound. A few inches, then stop and listen. Slow progress but moving upward.

  Sprinkles of sand hitting face. In eyes. In mouth. More fall, larger amounts. Faster. Harder. Being buried alive. Buried alive? Burie
d alive!

  Karen’s body jumped. Her eyes opened. She was sweating.

  “Son-of-a-bitchen terrorists.”

  She reached for her water glass and took a long drink, set it back down, and said, “I will find my father’s killers. I will hunt them down.”

  It took time, but she finally drifted back off to sleep.

  ***

  Alexandria, Egypt

  Atwah made a call to Cody Peyton, a radicalized American terrorist-cell leader, a member of the Khorasan, an offshoot of ISIS in the United States. Atwah told him to gather a few of the unit’s best assassins and then posed a problem.

  “We have to eliminate an American female by the name of Karen Krystal. She lives in a mansion in Middleburg, Virginia. Her schedule’s very erratic, although she consistently frequents the U.S. Homeland Security offices. She also exercises at the Homeland Security gym, but it would be very difficult to get to her there through all the security.”

  “She doesn’t go anywhere else?”

  “She used to live in a cabin in the woods but has moved back to her family home. Periodically, she shops at the Country Home Market in Middleburg,” Atwah said, picking at his ear.

  “Does she eat at any favorite restaurants?” Peyton asked.

  “She doesn’t go out to dinner anywhere. But once in a while for lunch, she stops at Logan’s on the main drag in Middleburg.”

  “Well, at least that gives us an option. What about her car?”

  “Drives a Jaguar.”

  “They’re difficult to modify quickly in order to house a bomb. But it still can be done if her car’s stationary for six hours.”

  “The only time she’s out of her car for that length of time is either at Homeland Security or at her home. We tried to hack it, but she found a way to disable our control,” Atwah said.

  “Maybe we can attach a bomb to the car when she’s sleeping.”

  “You won’t be able to get onto the property. It has multiple security mechanisms. Forget the car bomb. We need something else.”

  “Why don’t we just take her out with a rifle shot?”

  “She’s never exposed that long anywhere in the open. She and her sister are close to the President of the United States. He’s her sister’s godfather. She’s never allowed herself to be exposed in the open for too long for fear of being kidnapped. And now for her protection, we think she’s being shadowed by government operatives.”

  “So, she’s paranoid and protected. That’s the worst target.”

  “You have to find some way to get rid of her.”

  “How much time do we have?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “We’ll start watching her today.”

  “Find something, some crack in her routine that you can exploit. But don’t kill her until I say so,” Atwah said and disconnected. A smile began to spread across his face.

  “You’ll get yours soon, Karen Krystal,” he said with a sneer.

  ***

  Middleburg, Virginia

  Karen was startled awake by the sound of someone deactivating the front-gate alarm. She remembered Sharon had gone out on a date. It could be her. She rolled over in bed and looked at the clock.

  But maybe not.

  Karen reached to her nightstand and placed her hand on her weapon. She could hear a vehicle come onto the property, crushing the gravel that lay across the gate’s ramp. She disengaged the safety.

  The car was new. She could hear the engine. It was a six cylinder. She got up and carried her Smith & Wesson across the hall and the width of the guest bedroom to peer through the window that overlooked the circular driveway that arced in front of the house.

  The passenger door opened and Sharon got out. Then the car just drove away.

  A female wouldn’t walk Sharon to the door.

  The gate swung closed.

  Karen folded her arms across her chest.

  Sharon said she had a date.

  Karen turned, waited at the top of the stairs and listened. She heard Sharon disarm and then reset the house alarm and the gate. She could then hear a dish being taken from the cupboard and then the refrigerator door close.

  Sharon’s having something to eat.

  It must have been a date with a male.

  Sharon never ate in the presence of her dates, she just picked at her food. But she always drank any alcohol served.

  Karen shivered, tiptoed back to her room and quietly shut the door. She engaged the safety on her Smith & Wesson, set it on the nightstand, and slipped beneath the sheets.

  ***

  The next morning, while Sharon left to run some errands, Karen spent the day working around the house and cleaning her share of the rooms. She was undressing to take a shower when Sharon came home and walked in on her. “I can’t believe you still wear that ‘old-lady’ underwear.”

  Karen stopped before she took off her bra and panties and said, “You’d rather I dress in the slutty pieces you put on that barely cover you?”

  “You know, ever since you left college and began working for Dad, you’ve become extremely conservative in your wardrobe. You never used to be. We dressed almost the same. You’ll never attract anyone that way.”

  “I’ve never dressed as provocatively as you. Besides, no male interested in me has ever cared about the way I dressed.” “You know why I keep after you to loosen up? You have a great body. You should show it more.”

  “Like you.”

  “I know you’ve always disapproved of my style of dress.”

  Karen placed her hands on her hips and said, “Even back in high school everything you wore came from Amanda’s Boudoir. I don’t know how Mom let you get away with it.”

  “She didn’t know.”

  “How could she not know?”

  “Come with me for a minute, I want to show you something,” Sharon said, heading for her room. Karen grabbed a robe and followed.

  Sharon stepped into the closet and pushed a group of clothes aside exposing a blank wall. She pressed on the partition and it opened. She reached in and flicked on the lights. Beyond the regular closet was a huge, walk-in dressing room with numerous racks of clothes with a chair and a floor-to-ceiling three-sided mirror.

  “Oh, my gosh,” Karen said, stepping inside. “Did Mom know about this?”

  “No. Dad didn’t either.”

  “How did you find it?”

  “I was trying to hide my newly-purchased, mail-order clothes behind the regular racks when I fell against the wall and it opened.”

  “I don’t remember packages—”

  “I had them delivered to a friend’s”

  Karen walked around the room inspecting the multitude of skirts, blouses, dresses, slacks, jeans, etc. hanging neatly from the metal poles. “How did you afford all this?”

  “Dad gave me money for lunch. Mom didn’t know. Apparently, they didn’t ever speak about it, and Mom gave me money, too. And anyone I dated gave me money for clothes.”

  “Why didn’t Aunt Edna discover it?”

  “Whenever I left the house, I locked this section of the closet.”

  “You installed a lock on the door?”

  “It was there when Dad bought the house.”

  “Didn’t he have a key?” Karen asked, shaking her head and raising her eyebrows.

  “There was no key. I found it one day when I was trying to find an earring I had dropped. It was in the crack between the floor and the baseboard.”

  Karen shook her head and said, “And all this time, you’ve hid these clothes from Mom, Dad and Aunt Edna. But how did you get out of the house dressed in them?”

  “I dressed at a friend’s. I always wanted to be dropped off there. The driver did as I asked. I’d change there and then return to redress before I came home. I told the driver to pick me up there. It was almost right across from the school.”

  “I can’t believe how many years you deceived us.”

  “Only four,” Sharon said and brushed her hand
across some of the blouses hanging perfectly in rows. “I haven’t worn these since I lived home. They’re out of date. Not all. Some I’ve never worn. Anytime you want to borrow any of this, just help yourself.”

  Karen looked at a label of a skirt. The red letters AB were stitched in cursive. She reached for a blouse, then a dress, then jeans. They all had AB on the label. “Are they all from Amanda’s Boudoir?”

  “Not all. But her clothes are great, and when I wear them, I feel great. And I look—”

  “I know. You look great,” Karen said and stared for a moment at the variety of styles and colors and then abruptly turned on her heals and said, “No thank you,” and walked back to her room to continue with her shower.

  Sharon stayed in the closet to choose what she would wear for tonight’s date.

  ***

  Alexandria, Egypt

  Atwah made another call to the states. “You have to find a way to get a microphone into that residence,” he said.

  “You were right, it’s got fucking tight security,” Cody Peyton said. “The house has double-locked doors. Every window and opening’s wired. Cameras rotating over the grounds. Motion detectors.”

  “Keep trying,” Atwah said. “Although we have other sources working on it, we need to find out all we can about what she’s doing for Homeland Security. Retrace every place she’s visited in the last month. Make visits. See if you can infiltrate. We need to plant someone in every business and facility she visits. We need to be ready when the opportunity presents itself.”

  “I thought you wanted her dead.”

  “I do, but not until we find out all we can about what Homeland Security wants with her, and what they know about what we’re doing, and what she knows.”

  ***

  Middleburg, Virginia

  Karen’s cellphone rang. She looked at the screen; it was Homeland Security. She took the call.

  Carl Etheridge said, “Karen, we’re going to accelerate your training schedule. And as soon as you’re ready, we’re going to send you out.”

  “Where?” Karen asked, knowing full well there would be no definitive answer except for what Etheridge had said before.

  “I can’t divulge that yet. Just know that in a couple of days, you’ll be going to Nevada.”