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she would be helpless against him.    
     
    Edging toward the far side of her seat, away from the trajectory of his gaze, she clutched Winston’s collar and hung on tight. She felt like she’d gone from one scary situation straight to another. What was her father thinking?
     
     
     
    **
     
     
     
    SSA Caine ended his phone call with a satisfied smirk. “ The Washington Post says the Brotherhood of Islam just took credit for the bombing.”
     
    “Just like we expected,” Ringo replied. He had returned from the UPS store with a packing slip, cash in a Ziploc baggie, and a copy of their surveillance tape. Somewhere along the way, he’d produced a new pair of glasses.
     
    To Jackson, the news still came as a surprise. Targeting McClellan’s daughter was an ambitious step up from detonating C-4 explosives in a trashcan by the Washington Monument, which the Brotherhood had done last year, injuring no one.
     
    “Why didn’t our asset warn us?” Jackson demanded. Since the C-4 incident, the FBI had kept close tabs on the Brotherhood, recruiting an active member to be their eyes and ears.    
     
    “Mustafa says the bombing was never discussed online,” Caine retorted.    
     
    “If it was never discussed, then how was it coordinated?”
     
    “If I knew that, Jackson, I’d be arresting someone,” his supervisor answered irritably. Caine looked back at the monitors in front of them. “Damn it, we have to be missing something!”
     
    Whoever had mailed the bomb had to have stood within 300 meters of the safe house to detonate it. The perp had probably gotten even closer than that in order to assess the building’s security. At some point, his image might have been picked up by their cameras, providing they could tell him apart from neighbors or passersby.
     
    But nothing from the last forty-eight hours had helped to narrow their search. “Keep going back,” Caine ordered.
     
    They reviewed seventy two hours of footage. Still, there seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary, just neighbors going through day-to-day motions; the same stuff they’d been watching live for two weeks. In fact, the only person besides themselves and the UPS man to come within five yards of the safe house was Pedro, the groundskeeper for the condominium complex.
     
    Jackson remembered watching him live as he spread mulch around each of the buildings. The same question popped into his head now. “Why the baseball cap?”
     
    Caine lunged toward Jackson’s monitor. He toggled the keys, zooming in on Pedro’s face just as the gardener glanced discreetly at the camera. The hat concealed his eyes, but they could tell right away he wasn’t Pedro.
     
    “Got you, you sonofabitch!” Caine exclaimed, freezing the man’s image. “Jackson, go see if you can find Pedro in his shed. Bring him here for questioning.”  
     
    “Yes, sir.” Jackson rolled out of his seat, heading swiftly for the exit. He had a pretty good hunch Pedro was history.
     
     
     
    **
     
     
     
    Turning between the pillars that flanked the head of his driveway, Ike went to silence his watch as it signaled their intrusion. A glance over his shoulder revealed that Eryn McClellan had finally succumbed to exhaustion. She lay in an ungainly sprawl across the seat behind him. Her seatbelt looked like it was strangling her.  
     
    Over the last half hour he’d watched her fight the effects of the drug she’d taken. She had obviously wanted to stay awake, just in case he had abducted her himself. While he admired her tenacity, the fact that she’d popped that pill in the first place really worried him.
     
    It’d be just his luck for Stanley’s daughter to have turned into a prescription pill abuser. Given his zero-tolerance for drugs, this was going to make her stay at his cabin a living nightmare. He shuddered at the thought of her going through DT’s. Hell if he would carry her into his house, either. A girl who popped pills wouldn’t think