The Woman Left Behind: A Novel Read online

  Ten minutes after Levi’s call, she gingerly made her way downstairs. She couldn’t flex her toes because of the bandaging, so she had to go down sideways, like a toddler, clinging to the banister for balance. The car Mac had sent pulled to the curb just as she went outside, and the driver, a burly guy in dress pants and a polo shirt, gave her a perturbed look. “I was coming up to get you,” he said.

  “How? Wheelchairs don’t work on stairs,” she pointed out.

  “My orders were to carry you.”

  Carry her? She must have looked as appalled as she felt, because he mumbled something about not knowing she could walk yet. She hobbled around the car and got in the passenger seat and hoped he wasn’t chatty.

  He wasn’t, though she could feel him giving her occasional glances as if he was trying to size her up. When they reached headquarters, he jumped out and got the wheelchair from the trunk, unfolded it, held it steady while she transferred from the car to the seat. She already felt tired; despite her dislike of the chair, she was happy not to be walking the distance required.

  He pushed her along the sidewalk, up the handicap ramp, into the building where the air-conditioning was already cranked up to maximum, as if trying to get a head start on the day’s heat. Headquarters interior was very humdrum, deliberately so. Anyone who entered the building by accident would see a drab lobby, a single receptionist who would kindly direct them away and who would be holding a pistol under her desk, pointing at them. The door leading back to the business part of the building was armored and accessed only by a facial recognition program and a key card.

  Beyond that, the hallways seemed to have designed by a drunk troll, though she knew they were deliberately laid out for defense. Finding her way around, when she’d first been hired, had been a challenge. After a while she hadn’t noticed the mazelike layout and navigated the building without any problem. Now she saw things with different eyes and recognized the effectiveness of the design.

  Every time they met someone in the hallway, whoever it was stepped to the side and stopped to stare at her. Jina began to feel uncomfortable. Was it the wheelchair? Then they met a woman she recognized from her days in Communications, though she couldn’t remember the woman’s name. Whoever it was stopped and said, “Jina!” Grabbing both of Jina’s hands she said, “I admire you so much. When we heard what you did—running for hours like that . . . well, I couldn’t have done it. That was amazing.”

  “Ah . . . thank you,” Jina finally managed. So that was it. Should she tell them she hadn’t done anything heroic or amazing, that she’d been operating on blind desperation and the will to survive? In the end she let it go, because doing otherwise would take too much effort and she didn’t care enough.

  He wheeled her to one of the secure conference rooms. Mac was there, looking as impatient and ill-tempered as always. Levi was also there, and three others, two men and a woman, who she took to be intelligence analysts.

  “I have her,” Levi said, taking control of the wheelchair from the driver he’d sent.

  “Sure thing.”

  Levi pushed the chair up to the conference table, then poured a cup of coffee and set it in front of her. She murmured a thanks and was sincere about it—the coffee, anyway.

  No one introduced the three strangers, which didn’t matter to her. She’d likely never see them again, anyway. Mac paced around, scowling. “Okay, we know this mission was in the crapper from the get-go. Ace has been debriefed. What happened on your end?”

  “The kid, Mamoon, came in and watched me while I was operating the drone. I picked up a thermal signature, zoomed in on it. I thought he was amazed, interested, but now I know he was alarmed because he knew I would see the men who were waiting to ambush the team. He left, and a few minutes later I heard a voice outside, probably at the truck we were supposed to use to exfil. Whoever it was, Mamoon was talking to him. They were trying to be quiet, probably thought I couldn’t hear them.”

  “Did you understand what they were saying?”

  “No. I don’t speak Arabic. Even if I did, the words weren’t distinct. I could hear just enough to know there was someone with Mamoon.”

  “What happened next?”

  “I flew the drone ahead of the team’s position, looking for the thermal signature of the informant. Instead I saw a group of signatures, I’m guessing about fifteen. I didn’t have time to count them. I immediately alerted the team to the ambush, then the truck exploded and I was knocked . . . not unconscious, but dazed. I could see two people picking their way through the ruin, toward me. I destroyed the laptop, per instructions, and managed to work my way outside through a hole in the wall.”

  “Why didn’t you contact the team to let them know your location, that you were alive?”

  Ah. There it was, the question she’d hoped they wouldn’t ask, because that was what she most didn’t want to discuss, or even remember. “My throat mic was damaged,” she said steadily. “I could hear what they were saying, but I couldn’t respond.”

  She could feel Levi’s hooded gaze on her, fierce and intense. He hadn’t known that, hadn’t known that she could hear him. She couldn’t say that he’d made the wrong decision; looking at it unemotionally, she knew he’d made the correct one, the only one he could with the information he had. Unfortunately, though her head knew he was right, her heart couldn’t join in the applause.

  Mac said, “You didn’t have your comm headset with you when you reached the secondary exfil point.” It was an accusation, as if he thought she might be lying.

  She hadn’t known that, hadn’t thought about it. “I fell a lot, running in the dark. It must have been torn off. Deduct it from my pay.” The last was said with a coldness she hadn’t known she could muster.

  Levi must have thought Mac was capable of doing just that, because he said sharply, “It was damaged anyway. Forget about the inventory.”

  Mac gave them both an intensely annoyed look, but he didn’t argue.

  The debriefing continued. How odd that so much could be compressed into so few words. If anything, telling them about it made everything feel even more unreal, made her feel even more distant from events.

  The analysts grilled her for over an hour, going over details, asking for her impressions, what she thought could have happened. Why did she think the truck had been exploded? Was it possible there had been more than one person outside with Mamoon? Why hadn’t they simply come in and shot her?

  “My guess is the only way they could make enough noise to warn the others was to set off an explosion.”

  And, “Possible, but I heard only the one other voice.”

  And, “I’d taken my weapon out of my holster, had it lying beside the laptop. Maybe they thought I wouldn’t be an easy kill, and a shot inside the ruin might not have been loud enough to serve as a warning, so they opted for the warning explosion first, then came in to take care of me. I don’t know. Parts of it just seemed like poor planning.”

  Mac interrupted at that point. “Part of it seems damned Machiavellian. A team was sent to the Syrian interior because of the informant’s supposed intel about Graeme Burger. That’s a hard place to get into, a hard place to get out of. It looks as if the purpose of the whole plan was to bait a team into a hostile environment and eliminate the entire team.”

  “More likely the informant was captured, interrogated, and that was the best plan that could be put together on very little time,” the woman analyst said. “I agree with Ms. Modell. Parts of it are either poorly planned or poorly executed, or both.”

  “Or there was no real informant to begin with.” Mac scowled. “The intel we could put together on him was thin. Everything about Graeme Burger is thin, a hint here and there. But then he pulled that disappearing act, and—” He stopped, rubbed his eyes. He looked tired, as if he’d been up all night. “From my perspective, it looks as if a deliberate attempt was made to eliminate an entire team, a team that had been focusing on Burger.” He said abruptly, “All right, th