Page 50 of The Woman Left Behind

“Does the software have military applications?”

She shrugged. “I guess it could. I’m not with the military, though.” Again, complete truth.

“And you going off to Paris at a moment’s notice—”

“Was troubleshooting. I’m good at what I do. Want to play some games, try to beat me?”

“Forget it,” he grumbled, because neither he nor Jordan had ever been able to regularly best her at computer games. Then he said, “Race you!,” and took off at a sprint.

He was taller than her, had longer legs, was younger (even if only by a year and a half). He ran a lot, because he was in the army. But he was years out of basic training, and the conditioning the GO-Teams went through was constant, unrelenting. Jina’s reaction time had been honed so that she was sprinting, too, before the word “race” was out of his mouth. Top end speed was one thing, and she likely couldn’t match him, so she leaped over a ditch and went cross-country. Hah! That would teach him to try to get the jump on her, instead of setting the rules out first. She heard him yelling at her, but when she glanced over her shoulder he was running as if he were in the last leg of a relay with just a hundred yards to the finish line.

She raced over the rough ground of the field, once planted with what looked like soybeans but now lying fallow for the winter, the humps of the rows forcing her to pay attention to where she placed her feet—or at least as much attention as she could, given that she was leaping over them like a deer. She reached a fence and barely paused, bracing her left hand on a post and vaulting over the strands of wire. There had been rain recently and the ground was soft, but not so soft that she bogged down.

This is nothing,she thought as she raced through her dad’s small apple orchard, the tree limbs bare now, then vaulted another fence. The land was flat here in south Georgia, unlike the hills where she trained. “Slowpoke!” she yelled, not sure Taz could hear her, but she thought she heard him bellow something in response and laughed. This was how it had always been with her brothers, in constant competition with them, trying to keep up and most often being left behind. She might not win this race, but Taz would know he’d been in a race.

She pelted forward, approaching the house from the left side while Taz turned in from the road and pounded up the driveway. He cut across the yard and was still ten yards away when she jumped onto the front porch. “Hah! I won!” she crowed as she wrenched open the front door and burst into the warmth of family, the smell of fresh-brewed coffee and bacon cooking in the oven. Their dad was sitting at the table enjoying his first cup of coffee; Caleigh was nowhere to be seen, so she was probably still asleep.

“You cheated,” Taz charged.

“How? What were the rules?”

He looked frustrated, because he hated like poison to lose at anything. “We didn’t make any,” he groused.

Melissa eyed them with a long-suffering, will-this-ever-end look in her eye. “You two go shower, because you’re sweaty and you stink. After we have breakfast, I’m putting everyone to work. Got that?”

“Yes, ma’am,” they both said, then Jina bolted for the Jack-and-Jill bathroom between her bedroom and Caleigh’s, so she could get a jump on the hot water. The battle for hot water was an old one, and the loser got to finish showering in the cold.

Just as she closed the door she heard Taz mutter, “Computers, my ass.”

Okay, so he didn’t believe her. She didn’t care. She was home for Thanksgiving, her new tattoo was itching, and the promise of her favorite dessert in the whole world would get her through jet lag, parachute jumps, boring missions—and missing Levi.

She briefly leaned her head against the doorjamb, fighting against the hollow feeling in her chest, then shoved the feeling down and got on with the day.

Fifteen

Joan Kingsley punched the remote button that closed the garage door behind her and got out of her BMW SUV. She opened the back and retrieved the small overnight bag she’d taken to visit her son for Thanksgiving. Once she’d had a driver, but now she preferred to drive herself because she would forever be suspicious that any driver she hired would be a spy for Axel MacNamara. Driving in D.C. traffic was a nightmare and occasionally she would Uber if she needed to work during the commute, but for the most part she drove.

The inconvenience was a small one in comparison to all the other changes in her life, but it grated.

To all appearances she was doing exactly as MacNamara had ordered her to do. She knew all mail she sent and received was photographed and opened, though very skillfully. No packages arrived that hadn’t already gone through inspection. There were bugs in her house, all her calls on both cell and landline were monitored, and two or more agents followed her everywhere she went. She was nailed down as tightly as they could manage, without actually arresting her—which would be difficult to do unless some evidence was manufactured, because she’d taken care that nothing provable existed.

They underestimated Devan.

It was so simple, really, and perhaps that was what created the hole in their surveillance. Her house was watched—when she was here. When she left, the watchers left and followed her. They trusted that their listening bugs and her own alarm system had the property covered with video as well as the more traditional entry alarms. She knew the alarm system had been hacked into, which gave her an advantage because she knew what they saw. She’d checked her video feed and verified that the view of the bottom of the mudroom door was blocked by a chair on which she sat to change her shoes whenever she went into the back garden.

There were two churches on her block where Devan could park without attracting attention. It was a simple matter for him to approach the house from the rear, using the code she had given him for the back gate so no alarm was raised, and slip a single sheet of paper under the mudroom door. He knew what days her housekeeper, Helen, worked, and what hours; Joan had perfected the art of retrieving the paper without it being noticed. Sometimes she would slip it up her pants leg while she was bent over changing her shoes and read it later when she was in a bathroom. There were other methods, and so far they had all worked. She and Devan communicated with ease, and it gave her enormous gratification every time they outwitted Axel MacNamara.

She never went straight to the mudroom; that in itself could look suspicious. Though she was anxious to find out if the Graeme Burger bait had been taken, the result would be the same regardless of when she found out. The laundry was adjacent to the mudroom, and when she took the day’s dirty clothing down, she’d find out then if there was a message.

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.

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