Page 82 of The Woman Left Behind

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 youdoing?”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 trustworthy 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 other 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 backward 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 somehow 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 had been in D.C., he’d outsmarted the best and disappeared for four hours. Not long after that, Burger 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.”

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