Raising the gun in his grasp, Lucas gestured at the shattered window and said, “What in the hell was that thing?”

Still horrified by the sudden appearance of the creature, Tariq managed to whisper, “It comes from the word janna, meaning to hide and conceal in Arabic, but jinn are like angels, supernatural creatures created by Allah. In the Quran, Surah Al Hijr verse 27, ‘And the jinn We created before from scorching fire.’ In Surah Rahman, verse 15, ‘And He created the jinn from a smokeless flame of fire.’”

He paused, staring out through the window, shaking his head in disbelief as he said, “At the time of Prophet Mohammad, a group of jinn were turned into Muslims when they heard the recitation of Holy Quran. The jinn live in a parallel world, where the flow of time is different. The jinn are said to live around 1500 years. Jinn can see us but we normally cannot see them. The only way to keep ourselves safe from the evil beings is to pray five times, to walk on the path which Allah and His messenger has shown us, and to follow the teaching of Quran, Sunnah, and Hadith.”

Shaking his head back and forth, he warily walked over to the window, peering out through the broken shards of glass, straining to see any sign of Ahmed and the jinn pursuing him. Still aware of the gun the American kid was holding, he said, “Holy Prophet said the jinn are also asked to worship Allah. They are ordered by Allah to do good deeds as humans do. They are supposed to obey and worship Allah. In Surah Al-Dhariyat, verse 56 : ‘And I did not create the jinn and mankind except to worship Me.’”

“So,” Lucas said, “if they are supposed to be angelic beings, how come the raghead fled as if the hounds of hell were after him? It seemed more like a demon to me than an angel.”

The wail of an approaching siren caused the two boys to look at each other with the realization that they both needed to get out of the house before any of the authorities arrived. If anyone discovered them inside the place, they knew there was no way to explain themselves out of the trouble they were going to be in. Concerned as he was about Jenna, Lucas knew there was nothing he could do for her. He realized with sudden dread that she might already be dead. There was a lot of blood on the floor, and her wound was still bleeding profusely. The best he could do for her was to make sure the front door was unlocked so that paramedics had easier access to her. He had assumed by the kid’s reaction to the man’s accusation, that it had been the man who had injured Jenna, and yet the boy had broken into her house, perhaps as an accomplice. And yet, a citizen’s arrest of the Muslim boy seemed pretty lame under the circumstances.

“What were you doing here?” he said, startling Tariq.

“You would not understand,” the boy said, forlornly. “I have failed. The best I can do is die a martyr. I am not dilia as Achmed claimed. I am no coward! Doc Mac made it seem so. She stopped me. My friends died without me because of her. Just shoot me now. Shoot me and send me to meet Allah!”

The sirens grew louder. The ambulance was getting closer.

“I’m not going to shoot you,” Lucas said, flatly. “And that’s warped to lamely believe you’ll go to Allah if I do. You’re whacked, kid. Totally whacked. Get out of here! Dive out that window and get yourself gone! I’ve nothing more to do with you!”

Lucas then lowered the gun and wheeled around to run to Jenna’s front door, hoping as he did the Muslim boy would just vanish into the night as he’d instructed him to do.

Sirens began to wail some distance away. Ahmed raised his head, prepared to run. Tariq faced Lucas with a defiant sneer on his face. Raising the gun and sliding the safety off, Lucas snapped, “You did not answer me. Who stabbed her?”

Ahmed lied, “He did. With this knife that I took away from him, he buried it in her chest. He is a very bad boy.”

“Lying bastard!” Tariq. “You are a weasel, Ahmed! A hyaena!”

Snatching up his knife from the floor, Ahmed said, “Who was it that left his fellow soldiers to die in that alley? Who was such a coward that he abandoned the way of the martyr? Who wholly disappointed Allah with such a cowardly act? You are dilali! A heretic and true betrayer of the faith!”

That Tariq was going into meltdown mode, Lucas had no doubt. Having his own behavior problems and unable at times to manage his own anger and rages, he saw the telltale signs on the boy’s contorted features. He was surprised, however, when the enraged Muslim boy launched himself directly at Ahmed. He’d assumed, as mad as he was, that the kid would be wary and afraid of the man’s knife. Instead of grasping a thread of common sense, the boy’s rage took over and he outright attacked the sneering man.

Lucas heard the two solid punches Tariq landed on Ahmed’s thick chest. The sudden blows rocked the man backward. He reeled away from the boy’s savage attack. Tariq followed up with a wild jab that threw him off balance. He fell forward, his forehead taking the brutal forearm Ahmed sent smashing into his head.

Stunned, Tariq was jarred back and away from the taller man. He fell to the floor, his dark eyes fixed on the knife descending toward his upturned face. Instinctively, Lucas took aim and fired.

Poof ! the sound echoed throughout the bedroom.

With his target only six feet away, Lucas cursed as the gun kicked in his two-handed grasp. The hot lead slug erupted from tip of the silencer. It entered the tender flesh on the back of Ahmed’s hand, passed through to his palm, striking the ivory hilt of the knife. A geyser of black smoke shot like a speeding zephyr from the shattered hilt, and with a wet-sounding splatt, a glob of luminous muck struck the wall beside the open bedroom door.

At once, the glistening mud expanded in a two-foot circumference, materializing as a hideous face, resembling a baboon with long incisors and a bat with pointed ears. Ahmed cried out, “Allah, save me! Let this jinn do no evil to me! I did not know I carried it across the sea to these shores! I had no idea I was removing the spirit of fire from our homeland!”

A silent snarl contorted the luminescent face the splattered muck had transformed into on the wall. The creature’s red eyes glowed angrily. It snarled again, and with an airy poof! a thick tendril of black smoke passed through the phosphorescent mire, creating a scattering of fiery embers that appeared in the spirit-creature of smoke and fire. In mid-air, it turned into a long-armed, long-legged humanoid with the shaggy head of a baboon. It stood upright for several seconds, trying to gain its balance. It then took two tentative steps forward, its rage-filled eyes fixed on the splintered hilt of the knife. It then locked gazes with Ahmed, harshly whispering,“Trapped. Bound. Imprisoned. Tricked by one of your kind. Freed. Released. Out of Bondage. Wrath! Anger! Rage! Seeking revenge! Your soul will appease me!”

The jinn lunged toward Ahmed. He gave a strangled scream, wheeled around, and went crashing through the window leading to her backyard. Shattered glass rained down on him as his head and shoulders created a furrow in the screen and wooden frame of the window. He frantically plowed through it to escape the house. The desperate Muslim man landed heavily from his six-foot fall to the lawn beyond. Slightly stunned by his impact, he scrambled up and raced madly away into the darkness.

Disregarding the two boys staring wide-eyed in terror at it, the jinn took two long strides and sprang up and out through the ruined window, swiftly pursuing the Muslim man fleeing toward the alley beyond the yard.

Jenna wanted to speak. She wanted to tell Lucas how badly she’d been wounded. To tell him her life hung in the balance. If she did not get help soon, she would be gone. She also wanted to tell him to shoot Ahmed before it was too late. He was a dangerous, devious man who twisted the thoughts of otherwise innocent Muslim boys to fit his twisted agenda. Ahmed was taking up space.

Only the effort to even open her mouth caused her to swoon and sink back into a comatose state. Through a filmy cloud, she saw once again Razz and Lady Summer running across a meadow before her. Jenna had been a military covert operative in the Mind Over Martyr deradicalization program. Although she served the US military, she had trained in Saudi Arabia to counteract terrorists’ radicalization. Dozens of other governments in the Middle East and Europe initiated similar efforts aimed at groups associated with Al Qaeda. When she’d started her training to play mental Chess games with those terrorists, the big question had been: “Is it possible to counter-radicalize them and prevent the recruitment of radical Muslims?”

In her early stages as a deprogrammer, deradicalization referred to programs aimed at detainees suspected of terrorist crimes; prevention referred to programs aimed at individuals vulnerable to recruitment; and counterradicalization referred to both efforts to reduce the appeal of terrorist ideologies. The U.S. government now led the charge in regards to successes and failures of counter-radicalization efforts that target Islamist terrorists.

Jenna played an essential part of the worldwide strategy against Islamist terrorists. In her role, she’d discovered that terrorists live in places where they can be singled out and hunted down. She’d learned that terrorists don’t fight on traditional battlefields: they live and fight among civilians, making it difficult to avoid civilian casualties. Their goal is to frighten the enemy into launching attacks that harm Muslim civilians. While her immediate task was to remove terrorist leaders from the battlefield, her long-term goal was to stop the movement from growing.

At times, her work was daunting. Ali al-Shihri, who was repatriat-ed to Saudi Arabia in 2007, graduated from the Saudi deradicalization program. After al-Shihri’s release, he became the deputy leader of Al Qaeda in Yemen. The Saudi government reported that eleven of the graduates of its rehabilitation program returned to terror, and are now on the Saudi list of most-wanted terrorists. Despite the failure of the terrorism-prevention program, Jenna knew how important it was to U.S. national security. Terrorists were being recruited in Europe. The presence of homegrown terrorists in Europe could directly affect the security of Americans. In her eyes, the Mind over Martyr program would serve as a model for future prevention programs in the US.

As far as homegrown terrorists went, one area of concern to the U.S. government was the Somali community in Minnesota, from which some young men have been recruited by al Shabab, the radical Islamist organization aligned with Al Qaeda. It was important to inte-grate Somalis into American society in order to reduce the chances that they would carry out attacks in the US.

The Somali refugee program was red-flagged when a Muslim picked up a five-year-old American boy and tossed him from the third story balcony at the Mall of America. More red flags were raised a few months later, when a Somali Muslim man stalked two ten-year-old American boys riding their bicycles, and ran them over in his truck. It was just after these two attacks on American soil that Jenna became involved in the ongoing investigation which ironically landed in the middle of her own community of Lincoln, Nebraska, when a Somali Muslim viciously attacked an elderly man simply mowing his lawn. The Somali punched him over one hundred times and sent the man to the hospital in serious condition. Despite her superiors strict warnings to keep the findings of her investigation hushed, Jenna wrote an article about it entitled, “Death by a Thousand Cuts,” which she had planned to submit to a national magazine.

She scrapped the idea, however, when several Somali refugees gave her pertinent information on al Shabab that led to her deploy-ment in Afghanistan. If she had gone off half-cocked with her submission of her article, her words might have traveled over seas and left her vulnerable to vicious terrorists who became offended by her information. In Minneapolis, where she obtained her information, it is home to the country’s largest Somali refugee population at about 40,000. The community has been a target for terror recruiters in recent years. More than 20 young men have left the state since 2007 to join al-Shabab in Somalia, and a dozen people have left in recent years to join militants in Syria.

In her goal to stop them, Jenna followed the trail of several recruits who ended up in Afghanistan. She never imagined that one of those militants would end up here in her bedroom, with all intents and purposes to kill her.

Jessie Dalton came to a sudden stop, startled by the large Rottweiler facing him. He fully expected to be attacked in the next second as the dog gained his feet and charged him in a maniacal fury destined for intruders trespassing into his homeland. And Jessie could not blame the big brute. He was only doing what his owner expected of him. He had two choices. One, he could spin around and run, hoping to make it to the chain-link fence bordering the backyard he had trespassed into. Hopping that fence would be no problem as the monster dog closed on him. He just didn’t know if the flimsy barrier would be enough to place between the charging dog and himself. That one-hundred and forty-five-pound brutus might tear through the fencing to get to him.

Under normal circumstances, he would not have cut through a resident’s backyard, especially going through the trouble of scaling the chainlink fence that clearly defined this yard was off limits. But this one tonight was personal. Lucas Holland broke into his house and stole a gun that could land the snot-nosed little kid in a lot of trouble if he was forced to use it. Lucas not only broke into his house, but also removed the pistol, a box of shells, and an expensive silencer. It pissed Jessie off. He had refused to work with the troubled kid over a dozen times in the past year. His lifelong friendship with a certain detective on the LPD force had him feeling obligated to step up to the plate when the man asked him to be a Big Brother to the teen-age kid. The fact that he and the detective had former ties to a biker club during their own turbulent past, had a lot to do with Jessie’s show of compassion for the wild-child, son of a president of a club known for their ties to the world of drugs and dog fighting.

And after accepting the task of becoming the boy’s volunteer mentor, Jessie had allowed the kid into his circle, a world very few were allowed in. After serving as vice president of the Outlaws for five early years of his life, Jessie Dalton broke away from the biker world as a lone wolf and a nomad. He started his investigating agency on his own and he rarely trusted anyone to get close to him. He had let down his guard with this kid. Bought him a dirt bike. Bought him his own racing leathers. His own black leather jacket. Entered him into a local do jo. Sponsored him in boxing competitions. Taught him how to shoot the many guns in his personal arsenal, shooting his nine, his .45, his .357, his .30-30, and even his .50 caliber Sharps. This is how the kid repaid him? By stealing his pistol?

A voice came from behind him. Jessie glanced over one shoulder to see a tall, broad-shouldered Hispanic man on the other side of the chainlink fence. Like Jessie, the man had dark hair and a neatly-trim-med goatee, speckled with salt and pepper shades. Where Jessie wore his long strands in finely-braided tail, the man wore his hair short, yet parted down the center as though at one time, he, too, might have been a long-hair. White teeth showed as the large Mexican smiled.

“You will find,” he said, “three more drugged and sleeping hounds on your path if you keep heading to the east.”

Looking back at the snoring Rott, Jessie asked, “Drugged?”

“Not by me,” he said. “I like dogs. I would do them no harm.”

Cautiously, Jessie walked up to the sleeping dog. He kneeled beside him, carefully examining the ground around his feed bowl. He found nothing to indicate the man was right about the dog being drugged, but he did gently lift the Rott’s large head, then even more gently settled it back down. The dog did not wake up. “Yes,” the Hispanic man said, leaning against the fence with both hands resting on it, “it made me quite curious, too. And three more zoned out with drugs in their systems. Someone did not want to have every dog in the area alerting others to his presence. He fed them dopey meat.”

Looking ahead to the next yard, Jessie could make out the forms of two Golden retrievers sleeping side by side next to a large kennel area. “Why would someone be this thorough in covering his tracks?”

The large man raised both hands in a gesture of puzzlement. “A man who slipped over your southern border two days ago.”

Jessie took a longer look at the man standing no more than six feet from him. “How is it you know this?” he asked.

The man grinned. “Crossing the border is my business. Your ICE agents name me a coyote. My name is Hector. I have been escorting questionable people from Mexico into the States for many years now. This hadji came on the radar of my boss, Don Miguel Francisco. He asked that I follow him and find out what he is up to. But perhaps, I have said too much.”

Hector pointed at the bulge at Jessie’s right hip. “You are armed, correct?”

Nodding, Jessie said, “And you are perceptive.”

“You are no police man, right?” Hector said. “Creeping around out here in the dark is not the way of your law enforcement. And so?”

“Private investigator,” Jessie said.

“Investigating this hadji?” Hector asked, curiously.

“You’re saying a Muslim, right?”

“A very dangerous one who holds much animosity for America.”

“Well, I am looking for one who is slightly less dangerous, although he tends to cause his own share of troubles.”

“A juvenile? One with shaggy blond hair? A kid who would blow away in the breeze if it blew too strong?”

Shifting his stance to fully fact Hector, Jessie said, “Yes. You have seen him?”

“Yes,” Hector said, “just follow the sleeping dogs.”

Part Five of Dogs and Diamonds:

Click! sounded so loudly in the confines of her bedroom that even in her subconscious state, Jenna struggled to open her eyes. Through slitted vision, she saw a golden-haired angel standing between her and the two Muslims who had invaded her home. The angel was holding a gun, complete with silencer attached. “What in hell have you done?” the slender, blond-haired kid snapped.

14-year-old Lucas Holland gestured with the 9 mil Glock pistol he held before him in both hands. Tears sprang to his eyes, making it difficult to see through his blurred vision. He blinked rapidly, tempted to shoot the perpetrators as he emerged from the shadows of the hall-way. The two at once placed their hands above their heads.

Three months past, Jenna, as his probation officer, had broken protocol and allowed him into her home. She had at first kept a professional distance, seeing Lucas at her downtown office, but when he’d shown up at her house after a violent altercation with his uncle, vice president of the Elder’s Den, she had involved the police. The second visit by him concerned a dog fight that his Uncle Nate insti-gated. Lucas had reported the incident to her, knowing she would do what he refused to do, break biker protocol by involving the police. On that occasion, Jenna’s phone call to the police resulted in the rescue of twenty dogs destined for the fight ring. On his third visit, he ended up at her house for the next three hours, locked in an intensive game of Chess with her. It was while trying to put her in check that he’d made an offer to buy her Lord of the Rings Chess set. In his eyes, a prized item. In hers, a reminder of the long hours she’d spent in downtime in Afghanistan, playing Chess with her team of operatives. Two months after she’d returned from service, Bear from Delta had shipped it overseas to her. She had had it on display for the past six months, and those finely-painted plastic pieces had caught Lucas’s eye. Jenna, however, would not part with the detailed board and its painted pieces resembling the characters from the JRR Tolkien books.

It was another altercation with his Uncle Nate earlier that evening that set Lucas on a course to Jenna’s house. Nate had stolen his much loved dog with the intention of forcing the grizzled old pit bull into a fight. After spending so many of his former years in the fight ring, winning fifty-some fights, Grunge deserved to live out the remainder of his days without the savage fights involved. In a desperate move to stop Nate from placing his dog in such danger, Lucas had stolen a gun, yet instead of chasing Nate down and shooting him as he’d first wanted to do, he’d calmed down enough to seek help from his probation officer. It was just as he’d approached her backyard that he’d witnessed the skinny, dark-haired kid climbing into her back window.

He then knew exactly what he needed to do. After all, due to biker protocol, calling the cops was out of the question. “You!” Lucas snarled, jabbing his gun at Tariq. “Drop the tazer! Pick up the phone and dial 911! Tell them to get here in a hurry! Now! Move!”

Hesitantly, Tariq stepped toward the phone, tossing his tazer aside. Any sudden movement, he knew the seething boy would shoot him. He could see it in his rage-filled eyes. Slowly lowering his one hand, he picked up the phone and slowly lowered his other hand to dial the numbers as ordered. A female voice came over the other end of the line and Tariq stammered, “There has been a terrible . . . accident! Send someone to help her!”

He then looked up at Lucas to ask, “What is the location?”

Simmering with anger, Lucas snapped, “6211 Logan! It’s Jenna MacGuire’s house! Just get an ambulance here or she is going to die!”