The Woman Left Behind: A Novel

by Linda Howard

  “I’m not analyzing, I don’t have to. I’m just saying I get how tough it was for you.”

  Did he? Could he grasp how bone-deep wrenching it had been for her to come to that place where she knew she had to quit, that she couldn’t keep on?

  “It wasn’t so I could have you.” She glared at him, though he hadn’t suggested anything like that.

  “I know.”

  “It broke me.” The words were wrenched out of her. “The desert broke me.”

  “You don’t look broke. You look pissed.”

  Her scowl intensified, which she guessed verified his assessment. “I didn’t want to be on the teams,” she snapped. “I liked what I was doing, but I was assigned to the teams and once I was there, damned if I’d let you make me quit.”

  “Yeah, I wanted you to quit, from the minute I saw you. You know why.” His face was impassive but his eyes glittered with heat, going over her from head to toe and making her feel as if he’d be on top of her if she made the slightest move.

  She took the chance and gestured anyway, a wide wave that took in everything: her, the bedroom, for heaven’s sake even the TV and the beer, because of the cozy intimacy.

  “I didn’t undermine you.”

  “I know,” she grumbled. “I’d have hated you if you had. I wish you had.”

  “So you could hate me?”

  “Would have worked out better that way.”

  Her statement worked in another way. He moved like lightning striking, snagging her with one arm and dragging her onto his lap. “I like the way things are working out now,” he drawled, one eyebrow lifting.

  “They aren’t working out. We’re having sex. That’s all.”

  “For now.” He paused. “Because I have trouble giving up, too.”

  After that threat—promise?—and not giving her time to mull it over, he dragged her along to the training site. She didn’t want to go, because she couldn’t work out with the team and that loss still ached. “I thought I’d be banned from there, now that I’m not on a team,” she grumbled as she vaulted into his Vadermobile. Vaulted. Unbidden came the memory of the first time she’d ridden in his truck, and how much difficulty she’d had getting in, and despite herself she grinned.

  “Nope. There are rules, but we aren’t military. If anyone doesn’t like it they can take it up with me.”

  That wasn’t going to happen. Not many team members, tough as they were, wanted to take on Levi. They would, each and every one of them, but they wouldn’t want to.

  “Why are we going there?”

  “I’ve been away for two days. I need to work out.”

  Annoyed, incredulous, she demanded, “What am I supposed to do, bounce up and down on the sidelines and cheer?”

  He laughed. “I’d like to see that.”

  “Well, you aren’t going to. Just give me the keys so I can leave when I get bored, which will be, oh, about three seconds after we get there.”

  “You won’t be bored. The guys want to see you.”

  She wanted to see them, too. They’d been a huge part of her life for a year, to the point that she hadn’t gone more than twenty-four hours without seeing them except for the two times she’d gone home to visit.

  On the way, Levi tossed his phone into her lap. She gave it a questioning look, then turned the same look on him. It was his personal phone, not his work phone. “What?”

  “Link our phones, so I can find you and you can find me.”

  “What the hell. That’s kind of intimate, don’t you think?”

  He snorted out a laugh. “We’re just getting started, babe. And that’s babe with a little ‘b,” not a capital one.” He paused. “I’ve always had a hard time thinking of you as Babe, instead of Jina.”

  And she’d thought of him as Levi, rather than Ace. She stared straight ahead, more struck by that than she wanted to be, undermined by the uneasy sensation that this thing between them was more than she’d anticipated. After a minute she silently linked their phones, then gave his back to him.

  “What does this mean?” She shouldn’t have asked. As soon as the words were out of her mouth she screwed up her face at her inability to keep her mouth shut.

  He didn’t let her off the hook. “Exactly what you’re afraid it means.”

  Afraid? He thought she was afraid? She started to argue, then subsided into disgruntled silence, because he was right. He meant they were a couple, and couplehood implied all sorts of things she didn’t know that she was emotionally ready for, because it was such an abrupt change from what they’d been before. On the other hand, if she unlinked her phone from his, he’d get the message.

  She didn’t unlink them.

  She was still dealing with the idea that they were a couple, when they reached the training site. She started to open the door and jump down, and he said, “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t open the door.”

  She could see the other four guys walking toward them, and Levi’s order made no sense. Even better—there was Voodoo! He was very thin, he was on crutches, but he was there. “Why? There’s Voodoo! I want to—”

  “Just wait a minute,” he said impatiently. “I have my reasons.”

  “It had better be a damn good one, because I—”

  He got out of the truck and slammed the door, cutting off her irate comment. He crossed in front of the truck, came around to her side . . . and opened the door for her.

  Her mouth fell open. “What’re you doing?” she whispered furiously.

  “Making a statement.”

  When she showed no inclination to get out of the truck he reached inside, grasped her waist with both hands, and lifted her out. Then he closed the door and draped his heavy, muscled arm around her shoulders.

  The five men approaching the truck skidded to a halt, three of them with their mouths open.

  “What the hell?” Trapper said, and scrubbed his hand across his eyes as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  “She’s not on the team now,” Levi said bluntly. “And she’s mine.”

  Silence.

  Then Voodoo, leaning on his crutches, shrugged and grinned. “You’re a braver man than I am.”

  Jelly found his voice and said indignantly, “You’re not braver than me! I asked first—”

  Levi shot a rigid forefinger at him. “Don’t make me kill you.”

  Boom shoved a big shoulder into Jelly, nudging him a couple of feet. “You never had a chance, kid. Snake and I knew how it was from the beginning.”

  What? What? Jina gaped at them. “You did not! How could you?”

  “We’re both married,” Snake said. “We have experience with insanity. You two couldn’t even look at each other. Anyway—sorry you’re not on the team, Babe, but welcome to the family, Jina.”

  Twenty-Five

  The plan had failed. Ace Butcher’s team had been hit, but there were no fatalities. Drawing MacNamara in with the loss of one of his precious teams would have been so satisfying—destroying something important to him, the way he’d destroyed Dexter—but Joan Kingsley was, above all, a realist. She had to jettison that part of the plan, and move on to the most important part, baiting MacNamara into a trap and killing him.

  Almost idly she wondered what her own odds of survival were, and estimated them as not very high. For one thing, Devan, who was working his own agenda, wasn’t the most trust-worthy of allies. She suspected that as soon as MacNamara was dead, she herself would be expendable to Devan. Fine. She felt the same way about him. Let the more skilled—or the most lucky—traitor win. He had skill sets she didn’t, but she didn’t much care.

  Life was so bleak. She’d thought she could survive, for her son, for the possibility of a life afterward, but as time had ticked on she had become less and less interested. She wanted it over. One way or another, win or lose—just over.

  To up the ante, she rather thought Graeme Burger would have to be sacrificed. Nothing else than the banker�
�s presence would move the pieces into place the way she wanted. And it was time.

  “What?” Axel MacNamara’s face turned dark red. He surged to his feet, sending his chair violently backwards to crash into the credenza. “Are you certain?” he barked. “We didn’t have any intel—Fuck! Okay.” He disconnected, immediately called his contact at the FBI. “Graeme Fucking Burger just got off a plane at Dulles, facial recognition picked him up. Get someone on him before he disappears the way he did last time. The name he flew under is George Bachman.” The initials were the same, which came in handy in case there was any monogrammed luggage or key ring, anything like that.

  He disconnected from that call and paced his office, his movements choppy and agitated. He was furious on several levels—first that Burger had someone managed to get on a plane in South Africa without anyone being alerted, which meant he had a fake passport, which meant he not only had the connections to get a fake passport but that he needed one, then that he hadn’t been noticed at whatever airport where he’d made his connection to Dulles. Now at least cameras would pick him up, but he’d had time to get to the taxi line and leave the airport, and tracking him would take time.

  The last time Burger been in D.C., he’d outsmarted the best and disappeared for four hours. Not long after that, Berger had been connected to the intel that had drawn Ace’s team into an ambush, and cost him three operatives. Oh, they were all still alive, but Modell had left the team and MacNamara’s only consolation was that she’d be way more useful training drone operators than she had been in the field, and Voodoo and Crutch would never be able to do field work again. He was in the process of finding places for them that could use their expertise.

  His cell phone rang and he snatched it up, glancing at the unknown number on the screen. That in itself didn’t mean anything, not in his world, and it wasn’t as if he had to deal with spam calls. “Yeah?”

  An accented voice said, “Mr. MacNamara, this is Graeme Burger. I believe you know who I am. I desire a meeting with you.”

  Forty seconds later, Mac left his office like his hair was on fire. Tradecraft wasn’t his specialty but he knew enough not to go alone to any clandestine meeting, and he literally didn’t have enough time to contact any of his teams for backup. The ones that weren’t on missions were at the training site, almost thirty miles away. There were plenty of people in the building, but none—then he turned a corner and he saw Ace Butcher, big and dirty, talking to Modell who was consulting with the R&D department about something she wanted on the drones; for the past week, since he’d reassigned her, she’d been driving them nuts with tweaks she insisted were needed.

  “Ace! Come with me.” That couldn’t have worked out better, because he’d rather have Ace backing him up than a whole fleet of FBI agents. A lot of federal agents never fired their weapons except in practice; Ace Butcher had, and would again without hesitation. “You have a weapon with you?” he asked as he blew past.

  Butcher wheeled and fell into step beside him. “I always have a weapon. Mac, slow down. What’s going on?”

  “That son of a bitch Graeme Burger got into the country on a fake passport and he just called, wanting a meeting with me.”

  Butcher put on the brakes, grabbing his arm and pulling him to a halt. Not many people got in Mac’s way, but his team leaders were made of sterner stuff and had never minced words with him; Butcher was even less inclined than the others, in that way.

  “Hold on. The odds are good this is another ambush.”

  Mac pulled his arm free. “That’s why you’re going with me.”

  “Fuck,” Butcher said with quiet viciousness. “Where are we going?” He already had his phone out, sending a text to his team. Mac didn’t even have to ask, because he knew the way they worked. The address Mac gave him was too close for the team to provide backup in time. The D.C. police department possibly could, but they were civilian, and best kept out of things like this.

  He headed toward his car, but Butcher said, “We’ll use my truck, it’ll take more damage if things go sideways.”

  There was truth in that, because the damn thing looked like a tank.

  “This is a bad idea,” Butcher said.

  Mac knew it was; not planning was always a bad idea, as was not being in control of the meeting. But Graeme Burger had mentioned a name that Mac couldn’t resist, because he’d been hunting for the son of a bitch for almost two years now. Devan Hubbert was the alias of the Russian operative who had infiltrated the GO-Team organization and was helping Joan Kingsley and her husband feed info to the Russians. He’d escaped, and no whiff of him had surfaced in those two years; Mac had assumed he’d gone back to Russia. Maybe he had, maybe he hadn’t, but what Mac wanted more than anything was solid info on the son of a bitch.

  Butcher’s phone dinged and he looked at the incoming text. “My guys are on the way but they can’t get there in time, unless we stop and wait for them.”

  “Can’t do that. Burger said he’d wait fifteen minutes, no more.”

  “Cutting it close, given what D.C. traffic can do.”

  Mac didn’t reply. Butcher then sent other text, forget about all the safety concerns about driving and texting at the same time.

  “Who are you texting now?”

  “Jina.”

  “Who?” Mac scowled. Shit was going down fast and Butcher was texting some girl?

  “Jina Modell. Babe,” he elaborated briefly, because Mac might not know their given names but he knew every damn one of their nicknames.

  “Fuck’s sake, why? Cut through there,” he said abruptly, pointing, because the traffic in front of them looked as if it was snarling and a parkling lot looked like the better option.

  Butcher wheeled the truck one-handed, shot across the parking lot, avoided both a pedestrian and a car backing out of a lot, and two-wheeled it into the cross street.

  “Because she’s a trained team member,” Butcher said. “She’s close, can get there right behind us, and she’s armed.”

  Jina didn’t bother excusing herself, explaining, or anything else that would take even a second. Levi needed her and the situation sounded dire, because he’d told her to bring her weapon, which was easy because it was in her car. He had re-armed her almost immediately after arriving back in the states from the disastrous Syrian mission. She bolted from the building, her heart hammering. What was going on? Mac had come running out of nowhere, commandeered Levi, and they were gone. Now just minutes later Levi was shooting her an address and telling her to come armed, and be on high alert.

  “This isn’t my gig!” she yelled furiously when she was in the car and no one could hear her and think she was crazy. She had no idea where the stupid address was. Quickly she put the info into her traffic app, asking for turn-by-turn instructions. “Shit!”

  She knew why he’d texted her. The rest of the team was at the training site, and couldn’t get to this address as fast as he needed. GO-Teams didn’t call the local cops, because the repercussions could be splashed all over public media and they were very much dark and off-the-books.

  Okay. Okay. Whatever situation she was walking into, she could handle this. Levi wouldn’t have texted her if she couldn’t. He and the guys had trained her, she knew how to use her weapon—not as well as they could, but she was competent.

  If this was some kind of stupid surprise party, for whatever moron reason, she’d kill them all.

  To her surprise, the address was a house in a not-very-good neighborhood. Levi’s truck was parked at the curb, but neither he nor Mac were in sight. There were no other vehicles parked at the house, which might mean something and might mean nothing. She drove past, neither fast nor slow, and pulled her Corolla into the first open space she came to. There were bound to be some people around, in the other going-downhill houses, but she didn’t see a single soul. The sticky, hard-to-breathe heat and humidity didn’t lend itself to outside activities, but surely there should be a kid or two around? But maybe not. Maybe the ne
ighborhood housed mostly elderly people, a formerly neat place going downhill as the residents aged and were no longer able to take care of their properties.

  She got her weapon from the console and slipped it inside her waistband, pulled her shirt down over it; that was the best she could do, looked around, then got out of the car and closed the door as quietly as she could.

  The neighborhood even had a slightly decayed scent to it, a sign that it was dying. Once most of the driveways had been concrete, but now huge patches were missing and weeds were taking over. She moved quietly around the house beside the one where Levi was parked, darted a quick look around the corner, didn’t see anyone. No one poked a head out and asked her what she was doing. Maybe this house was deserted; no, there was a coiled water pipe beside the minuscule back porch, and a bedraggled potted plant, wilting in the heat.

  She slipped across to the target house, planted her back against the wall, checked around her for anything that might trip her, then darted her head around the window frame to see what she could see.

  Nothing. It was a small bedroom, empty.

  Okay, that made sense. She was on the back corner of the house, where a bedroom would normally be. Disappointing, but logical.

  She moved on around the back, where she found the same tiny porch like that at the neighboring house. There was no plant, no water hose, but other than that basically the same. A tattered screened door hung halfway open. Silently she stepped up on the porch and leaned over to look in the kitchen window. The kitchen too was empty, but through a short, cluttered hallway into what looked like the living room she thought she saw part of a foot.