Page 42 of The Woman Left Behind

“I know other four-syllable words, too,” he replied, grinning. “I’m really pretty smart.”

All of them were, really. Doing what they did required a certain sophistication of thought and action, all of them spoke at least two languages, they could fly a variety of aircraft and operate computers; sometimes they made her feel almost backwoods.

She was suddenly surrounded by four big men, all the members of her team who had already arrived at the training site, even Voodoo, though he might have come along just for entertainment.

“Stay away from her,” Levi said, the words and tone flat; he meant business, and he didn’t mind Kodak knowing it. His chin was tucked and his hard gaze was level on Kodak, as if he was ready to start brawling.

Kodak just grinned. “I’m just standing here by my truck,” he pointed out. “She came to me, and from my point of view I’m the one who needs protecting. Evidently I’ve been going about things wrong, but I’ve now been set straight.”

Now Levi’s hard gaze switched to her. Jina hitched a shoulder. If she had the guts to do it, she figured she had the guts to own it. “All the other team leaders should have been training their assignees the way y’all did with me,” she said, folding her arms and lifting her chin. “That way they’re already part of the team when they go out on their first assignment, instead of being strangers.”

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 wasParis. 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,wasa 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.”

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