The Woman Left Behind: A Novel Read online

  Instead she took her bag upstairs to her spacious walk-in closet and unpacked it right then instead of putting the chore off until later. The afternoon was fading away and she was tired from traveling; she wanted a shower first, then she would take her laundry downstairs. Waiting was both difficult and amusing, knowing the bugs were picking up the sounds of her moving around her house.

  She showered, changed into her nightgown and a robe, gave her distinctive silver hair a good brushing, moisturized her skin. Then she took her dirty laundry downstairs and dumped it in the hamper for Helen to deal with; as she left the laundry room she noticed the note on the floor and her heart thumped. Going over to the door she ostensibly checked the lock, though she knew good and well it was secured, and while she was there glanced down to see the words “Bait taken. One.”

  So the lure had been a success. “One” designated which GO-Team had been sent to cover Graeme Burger’s visit to Paris. She and Devan had devised a simple code, listing the teams in alphabetical order by the team leader’s last name, and “Butcher” was number one. She was vaguely disappointed; she’d have preferred that Tyler Gordon’s team be the one because that had originally been the team led by Morgan Yancy, the man who had killed Dexter. That would have been poetic justice, but in the end which team didn’t matter. All she and Devan needed to do was slowly lure them into a trap. Nothing would hurt MacNamara more, and bait him into the trap she had planned at the end, than the destruction of one of his beloved teams.

  The missions weren’t always boring.

  Over the next three months, Jina learned to treasure the ones that were. Likewise, the missions seldom went as smoothly as her first one. There were hiccups in timing, unforeseen circumstances that interrupted whatever they were doing—such as an auto accident happening in front of them and bringing traffic to a halt—minor injuries in training or on the job that interfered with the fluidity of the team, or a glitch in communication. The one time they were in the field with no cell service, the equipment malfunctioned. Tweety worked perfectly; she could hear the guys perfectly. The glitch came with her own communication back to the guys, with breaks in their ability to hear what she was saying. They were lucky in that nothing bad happened because they couldn’t hear her, and the whole point of her being on the team was her being able to alert the guys to any approaching trouble. If her throat mic didn’t work, then there was no point to her even being there.

  Just after Christmas—which they got to spend with their families, hallelujah, but they had to leave the day after—they spent almost three solid weeks in Colombia establishing pattern of life on a bad actor. They had cell service, so the throat mics weren’t needed. From Colombia they went back to Paris and she damn near froze to death, partly because she’d just spent those three weeks in a warm clime and her system had no time to adjust. Then it snowed twice, nothing more than a dusting each time, but still—insult, meet injury. From Paris they went to Egypt, spent a grand total of eighteen hours there, then on to the Philippines to fetch a defector. That was the first time Jina got to use Tweety for his designated job, with no cell service out in the boonies, watching the guys’ backs for them—and her throat mic wouldn’t work half the time.

  By the time they got home from that particular mission—having hitched a ride in the belly of a cargo plane, which was not comfortable—they’d crossed so many time zones going back and forth that she had no idea what day it was. She assumed it was still January, but she wouldn’t swear to it. She was grouchy, sleepy, hungry, had a massive headache, and she was completely pissed off about the throat mic. She grabbed her stuff and stomped off in the direction where she thought she’d parked her car maybe a month ago, though maybe not. No matter that she needed a shower, a cup of coffee, twenty-four hours of sleep, and food, in any order whatsoever because she was beyond caring. No, she did care. She’d last had a shower . . . she wasn’t certain. It had been in Paris, though—whenever they’d been there. Didn’t matter. She was taking the faulty throat mic to headquarters to start raising hell, and some shit was going to start rolling uphill until whoever was in charge of R&D got this POS fixed.

  She couldn’t find her car. There was snow on the ground, covering the vehicles. And she was brain-dead. She stomped up and down a couple of aisles, because she had a vague memory of parking close by the fence . . . maybe. Maybe that had been the first Paris trip. None of the snow-covered lumps looked familiar. Snow crunched under her sneaks, spilled over the tops and down into her shoes. Yeah, she’d paid attention on that first mission and this time wore something other than boots, and now look.

  There were sounds coming from different aisles of the parking lot as the guys found their vehicles and started them. No one moved, though, because they all had to deal with the snow on their windshields. Several of them got out and began scraping the snow off. Yeah, she had a snow-scraper in her car, too, a foreign piece of equipment to someone from south Georgia, but she’d learned her first winter in D.C. that the gadget was necessary. All she had to do was find her car and she could scrape with the best of them.

  Or maybe she’d just stand right here in the middle of the parking lot and sleep, and worry about her car tomorrow.

  A truck door slammed, and she heard footsteps crunching toward her. She turned and saw Levi, big and imposing in his heavy jacket, a black knit cap covering his hair. “Something wrong?” he asked, coming to a stop beside her.

  She had spent the long weeks since Thanksgiving ignoring him as much as possible, which wasn’t as much as she’d have liked because he was the team leader and she had to pay attention to him. But she tried not to look at him, to keep her head down and acknowledge him only when he directly addressed her, which didn’t happen that often because he was doing his part to ignore her, too. Damn him. He was better at this ignoring crap than she was, and every night she went to sleep resenting him for ever letting her know he wanted her. Her equilibrium hadn’t been the same since.

  “I can’t find my car,” she muttered.

  He rubbed his eyes. He didn’t look as tired as she felt, adding to her resentment, but he wasn’t brimming with energy, either. “I’ll take you home,” he said, and turned away, the matter settled as far as he was concerned.

  Take her home? She was tired, not crazy. “No,” she said bluntly. “I need my car.”

  He turned back and eyed her. “I don’t think you’re okay to drive,” he finally said.

  “If the guys are okay, I’m okay. Besides, I need to take this piece of shit throat mic to headquarters and ram it down someone’s throat.”

  His lips twitched. He looked up at the sky, then back at her. Finally he pulled out his phone and looked at it. His lips twitched again, and she got the feeling he was trying not to smile. If he smiled, she’d punch him in the nose. “Uh-huh. What day do you think this is?”

  She knew a trap when she saw one, but she couldn’t pull out her own phone to check without proving that she didn’t know. She thought she’d kept track of the days, despite all the time-zone hopping. “Friday afternoon.” She looked at the sky, too. “Latish.” Maybe that was wrong, because something didn’t look right.

  “How about Sunday morning, earlyish.”

  Oh. That was what didn’t look right; the sun was in the wrong place. She shrugged. “I’m just a day and a half off. Not bad.”

  “Not too bad. But I’ll take the piece of shit mic and shove it up someone’s ass, not you.”

  “I said down someone’s throat, not up his ass.”

  “Whatever. I’ll be the one who does it.”

  “It’s my mic.”

  “It’s my team.”

  She wanted to argue but there was no refuting that point, so she pressed her lips together. He was the boss. A complaint coming from him would carry a lot more weight. She dug in her equipment bag and pulled out the offending item, thrust it at him. “Have at it.”

  He took the throat mic and shoved it in his pocket. Deprived of the prospect of unloading