The Woman Left Behind: A Novel

by Linda Howard

  Levi’s jaw clenched and Jina knew exactly what he was thinking, that she’d interfered on her “boyfriend’s” behalf, though she knew she’d never referred to Donnelly as her boyfriend. She switched her gaze back to Kodak. “Anyway, think about it, though there isn’t much time to do anything about it. Nice talking to you.” She nodded to him, slid between Levi and Snake, and walked away. She had to consciously keep from clenching her fists. Boy, it was a good thing Thanksgiving was coming up, because she desperately needed a break from the guys, even if it was just a couple of days.

  Sure enough, as soon as the guys rejoined her, Voodoo sniped, “You likely just made things tougher for your boyfriend.”

  “Bite me,” she shot back. “He’s a friend, not a boyfriend.”

  “He was your date Saturday night.”

  “So?”

  “So he acted like he knows you pretty well.”

  “Like I said, he’s a friend. I had a life before I was hijacked into training.” She gave him a smile that showed more teeth than necessary. “Not that you’d know anything about having friends.”

  “Can it,” Levi ordered, looking fed up with the exchange. He glared at both of them. Whatever else he might have said was cut off when his phone signaled an incoming text.

  Almost simultaneously, four other phones began buzzing, including hers. She pulled it out of her pocket, read the text, then reread it. Her mouth fell open.

  “Really? Really?” Three days before Thanksgiving, two and a half days before her flight, they were being ordered to Paris. Not even Paris, Tennessee—France. Paris, France. She groaned. “I was going home! I booked my flight this morning.”

  Snake looked unhappy, too. Levi shrugged. “Can’t be helped. Someone’s holiday is messed up no matter which team gets the call. With any luck we’ll be home in a couple of days, but we won’t know until the briefing. Come on, let’s move.”

  At least she wasn’t caught completely flat-footed, Jina thought morosely as she went to her car. She had her go-bag with her. Normally she’d be excited about her first mission, and normally she’d like to go to France—but not when it meant missing Thanksgiving and her mother’s German chocolate cake.

  Damn it all. Sometimes life just wasn’t fair.

  Thirteen

  Eighteen hours later, Jina and Crutch sat in a not-very-good hotel room in Paris while the other six team members were conducting surveillance on their target. Crutch was keeping in contact with them and coordinating. Jina wasn’t doing anything other than waiting. She hadn’t expected to be bored but she was; somehow she’d thought the teams did exciting stuff all the time, which if she’d taken the time to think she’d have known wasn’t possible, but innocent expectations were what they were—and in this case they were wrong.

  “A lot of the stuff we do is boring,” Crutch said easily when she mumbled a complaint. “Probably about seventy percent is gathering information. With you and Tweety here, maybe we can cut down on the time spent following people around and getting jack shit for our efforts. Sometimes we’re just building a file, looking for patterns, things like that. It’s not immediately important, but down the road all of it is.”

  That was one way of looking at it. Too bad the present was still just as boring. This was an object lesson: always have reading material with her. This was in fact the second object lesson she’d learned on her maiden mission; the first was that she’d packed as if they were going into the field, when most of what they did was in urban settings. Her cargo pants and boots would get her only so far; what she really needed was jeans, a pair of flats, and a warm but stylish sweater, because this was Paris. She’d developed a huge inferiority complex just driving in from the airfield and seeing the Frenchwomen on the sidewalks. Not only was she now bored, she was fighting a powerful urge to go shopping, have her hair done, and get a manicure . . . after she visited a pastry shop.

  But she was stuck here, with no downtime until Levi said so. The subject of their surveillance was a South African banker named Graeme Burger, who had triggered some flags at the National Security Agency because he’d contacted a Sudanese who had terrorist links. The Sudanese was currently in Paris, and now so was Banker Burger, whose plane had touched down at De Gaulle a couple of hours ago, and whose taxi was now being followed by Levi and the other guys using a tag-team method. They had three cars, two men to each car, and so far so good; there was no indication that they’d been burned, and the taxi driver wasn’t making any effort to evade them. Maybe Burger being in Paris at the same time as the Sudanese was a coincidence—and maybe the sun would turn blue. In the dark underworld of terrorism, there were no coincidences.

  Despite the NSA’s all-encompassing record gathering, so far the reason for the connection between Burger and Nawal Daw was murky. South Africa wasn’t a terrorist hot spot, and although the Foreign Service Institute scored the S.A. banking industry as a possible safe haven for tax evaders, again, it wasn’t a hot spot. Sudan, however, was a terrorist cesspool, and Nawal Daw was involved up to his skinny neck, with ties to Hezbollah, ISIS, and several domestic Sudanese groups. Why a country needed more than one terrorist organization, Jina couldn’t fathom, but from the briefing they’d received, Sudan had quite a collection. Nawal Daw wasn’t one of the leaders, but he had connections to the leaders.

  Of particular interest was that Graeme Burger had applied for a visa to travel to the States for a vacation. The visa had been approved, and a watch on Mr. Burger had been put in place so whatever plans he made could be monitored. If a terrorist group in Sudan wanted to use Mr. Burger in an attack on the States, the GO-Teams had been put in action to find out exactly what was being planned.

  And she would miss out on her mom’s German chocolate cake. And Mom would be mad at her for missing Thanksgiving.

  Jina sighed. She couldn’t even play games on the heavy-duty, field-tested, encrypted, top-secret laptop with which she controlled Tweety, because the government evidently didn’t want her playing games on their equipment—which was really crappy of them, because playing games on their equipment was what had gotten her this assignment in the first place.

  On the other hand, playing more games might end up getting her launched into space, so she supposed she should leave well enough alone. “Why can’t I be helping with following the goonie, since I can’t do anything else?”

  Crutch said, “You aren’t qualified.”

  “I have eyes, and I can drive.”

  “You might be needed here at any time, and trust me, you can’t drive in Paris. It’s a nightmare. You don’t speak French, you don’t know anything about the streets, you’d get lost, and you’d likely cause an accident that would get you killed.” He grinned at her. “We’re looking out for you.”

  And boring her to death at the same time. “Does everyone speak French except for me?”

  “Some, at any rate. Voodoo’s fluent, Ace and Trapper not quite as good. The others get by, but the French sneer at them. You should take some language courses.”

  “In my spare time.” But that was an idea. She’d see which languages were most useful now, and at least get some rudimentary language skills going. Overseas flights were long, and that would be something to pass the time because sleep was hard to come by. She’d been too excited, quarters had been cramped, and she hadn’t acquired the guys’ ability to nap on a moment’s notice whether they were lying, sitting, or propped against a wall. Not only that, Jelly and Crutch were such practical jokers she didn’t think she’d ever feel comfortable sleeping in their presence.

  Her work cell phone buzzed. She jumped, and her heart rate picked up. Part of the protocol was that anything relating to the drone would be sent by text, instead of a phone call that might be picked up by an audio recording bug. The text was from Levi:

  get tweety ready

  Adrenaline shot through her system, making her feel almost dizzy. She jumped to her feet and got Tweety ready to fly. Guidance systems for drones originally required line-
of-sight communication with the controller, but they were so far beyond that now she could operate him from just about anywhere; the military’s Predator drones could be controlled by people sitting in front of a screen thousands of miles away. But that much distance had the built-in lag time that MacNamara had wanted eliminated, so Tweety didn’t need that kind of capability. Paris was a big city, with innumerable obstacles, but with Tweety’s 360-degree cameras, sensors, and pinpoint GPS, she could zip him around the city as easily as if he were a real bird.

  The next text was the coordinates where Levi wanted the drone to be positioned.

  Swiftly Jina pulled the coordinates up on the computer and surveyed the area, while the computer plotted the best path. Paris was an old, overcrowded, jumbled city, with almost no straightforward route to anywhere. There were so many variables that had to be considered: wind, pedestrians, buildings, streetlamps; Tweety had been designed to attract minimum attention—he was silent and had awesome battery power—but keeping him unnoticed with so many people around was a priority. The last thing they wanted was to have an incident that resulted in the drone being knocked from the sky and captured. That wouldn’t be as bad as the software in the laptop falling into the wrong hands, but still.

  She texted Levi that Tweety was on the way and suited actions to words.

  It was a rush, watching on her computer screen, seeing what Tweety saw, deftly guiding him over or around obstacles, sending him flying to Levi’s location. This was what she’d trained for months to do, though not exactly this; she’d thought there would be more of a “hot mission” feel to it, rather than these rather prosaic conditions. The sky was overcast, the day cold and windy but not drastically so, with the possibility of rain at any time. Paris might be called the “city of lights,” but it looked dreary on a cold, late November day, and Jina was just as glad to be inside their cramped, run-down hotel room, exploring Paris from the all-seeing eyes of her Tweety.

  There was an art to the flight, choosing ways that allowed her to blend the drone in with the background. She had practiced making his motions look like those of a bird, sometimes darting and swooping, sometimes flying straight, sometimes pretending to “roost” by hovering close to a ledge or anything else appropriate. Now she opted for more speed, because the faster she got to Levi’s coordinates, the better.

  Getting him there on surface streets would have taken over an hour. Flying him there, she had him close in fifteen minutes and texted Levi for further instructions.

  Crutch was quietly talking on his headset, coordinating the six guys on the ground, making sure everyone knew what everyone else was doing and no piece of information went by unnoticed. Jina half listened to him while she mostly concentrated on her eyes and fingers, seeing what Tweety saw, immersing herself in the program the way she did when she played computer games.

  Tweety’s software was programmed to recognize the team members, and one of his cameras immediately locked in on Levi, showing him standing under an awning that protected him from the light rain that had started falling. Even from Tweety’s viewpoint, Levi’s physical presence was like a punch in her sternum, making her feel breathless and dizzy. He was so tall and powerful that people instinctively glanced at him, which wasn’t the best thing for covert work but perversely made others in the same field disregard him because he was so noticeable. His features, though, blended in with the native French; his hair and eyes were dark, his facial bone structure was chiseled enough that he could belong to any number of nationalities.

  She didn’t want to notice, didn’t want to think about what had happened between them Sunday afternoon. Staying busy was the best antidote to depression and frustration.

  She sent a text that Tweety was in position. Levi took out his phone and read the message, but was too professional to look around for the drone. Instead his thumb moved over the keypad, and her phone buzzed again. Across street in cafe, get photo of file was followed by a brief description of the men in question. Then Levi pocketed his phone and walked off down the street, not once glancing at the café or his quarry.

  Okay, it was up to her now. She positioned Tweety and located her target. The two men were sitting at a table against the window, protected from the elements but able to watch their surroundings. With Tweety’s fast, high-resolution camera recording, she flew him past the window, high enough to look down. From what she saw on the laptop, the file was an actual file folder, which struck her as ridiculous. If they were up to something nefarious, shouldn’t they be sneakier about it, rather than meeting in the open with a real file folder? She gave a mental shrug. Maybe being so open and acting innocent was the new thing with terrorists. She’d been told to get photos, so she got photos.

  The two men talked. Graeme Burger opened the file, turned it around, and with the expertise of someone who often dealt with upside-down paperwork, pointed out several things to Nawal Daw. For all the world, it looked as if he was making a presentation, or trying to close a deal, maybe convince the Sudanese to move some money to his bank. Well, at the base of it, terrorism needed money to exist. But what did this have to do with Burger’s planned visit to the United States? Maybe something, maybe nothing.

  She took Tweety on another pass, photographing the open file. Then she took him to a roosting position on a streetlight, looking down and waiting for another page to be turned. The two men often looked at the foot traffic on the sidewalks, and around them in the café, but neither of them noticed Tweety’s roughly bird shape.

  Crutch murmured, “Everyone has pulled back, waiting to resume surveillance.” His phone dinged, and he looked at the message. “Burger has booked himself on a flight leaving De Gaulle this evening, back to Johannesburg. Given the flight schedule, he should be leaving here and going straight to the airport.”

  Levi said, “Snake, Voodoo, you’re on airport duty. Boom and Trapper, swap out with them. Jelly and I are on Daw.”

  Two acknowledgments.

  Another page was turned in the thin stack contained in the file folder. Jina sent Tweety by the window again. Burger caught a glimpse of movement and glanced up, and smoothly Jina swung the drone higher, out of his view.

  The file contained five pages. After each page had been examined, the two men shook hands and parted company.

  “That doesn’t seem very interesting,” she said to Crutch.

  He shrugged. “Never can tell.”

  She sent the intel to GO-Teams headquarters for analyzing. She could have read what was on the papers herself, by enlarging, but she didn’t have any way of putting what she read into global context.

  On Levi’s command, she began bringing Tweety home. The rain was falling more heavily now, and wind gusts kept her busy finessing the drone’s balance and direction. Umbrellas popped open on the sidewalks, where pedestrians were rapidly finding dry places to be, meaning she didn’t have to be as careful about disguising Tweety’s movements. Still, it was nerve-racking. At one point a gust blew it against the side of a building and she hastily recovered its balance, swearing under her breath—or not so under her breath, because Crutch looked up with eyebrows raised—and praying there was no damage. She’d become fond of Tweety. Never mind the drones were all the same, and never mind it was a miniaturized machine/computer; this particular drone was hers. She’d named him. And once things had a name, they developed personalities, even if the personality was wholly in the mind of the operator. Tweety was her bird.

  She was sweating when she brought him safely in through the open window. Quickly she closed the window against the wind and rain, shutting out the gloomy day, and checked the drone for damage. There were some scraped places, but the powerful cameras and sensors were all working when she ran the diagnostics. The drone was sturdy; it had to be, to function in all sorts of conditions. Granted, some rainy weather in Paris didn’t equal a sandstorm in wherever, but rain and electronics were notoriously unhappy together.

  Three hours later, they were on a plane returning to the State
s. Jina couldn’t believe it. Just like that, her first mission was over, having been as dramatic as doing her laundry. She was exhausted from lack of sleep, disappointed by the boredom, by Paris in general, by missing Thanksgiving for basically nothing—though “nothing” might change to “something” when the photographs were analyzed—and . . . “Wait a minute,” she said aloud. She wasn’t sure of her math, because she was so jet-lagged, but she was gaining back six hours, right? They would land in D.C. about three hours local time after they left Paris, because they gained back six hours. She scrubbed her face and poked Snake, who was the one sitting beside her this time. “What day will we get back?”

  He’d already dozed off in that annoying way they had, but he woke up and scrubbed his face much the way she had. “Ah . . . Tuesday. Maybe early Wednesday.”

  “So I can still go home.”

  He grinned at that. “Yeah. We’ll be back for Thanksgiving.” He gave a rumbling sigh and closed his eyes again. “Grab some sleep, or you’ll be worthless for two days.”

  Grab some sleep, he said. He had already dozed off again. Looking around the plane, the others she could see had already done the same thing. Okay, this was a talent she needed to master, as of right now. She was certainly tired enough, so tired that her brain, which felt slightly buzzed, had separated itself from her heavy-as-lead body. Even if she couldn’t sleep, at least she could close her eyes and rest. Wadding her jacket into a ball to use as a pillow, she hugged her arms around herself to ward off the chilly air, curled into herself as much as possible given the constraint of the seat belt, and determinedly closed her eyes without any real hope of catching some sleep.

  She was wrong.

  Jina stumbled bleary-eyed off the plane and stood staring at the signs directing passengers to the luggage claim area, to the exit area, to public transport, to parking . . . they might as well have all said “to hell” for all the sense her sluggish brain was making of them. The guys all seemed to be coping with jet lag better than she was, but this was her first time out of the country, period, and she felt as if she’d been body-slammed.