Alina cursed. They didn’t have time for this. Next to her, Wade Sullivan was the most senior and experienced field operative on the team. Unfortunately, he was also the least reliable. Worse than that, he was the one guy on the team she flat-out didn’t trust. Crap like this was exactly why.
While the senior leadership back in Langley loved the guy, to Alina, he’d never been more than a problem waiting to happen. The man drank too much, got off on winging his way through every mission, and didn’t give a damn about the job he did or the people he did it with. It was a given that no one on the team trusted him to cover their backs, but their bosses in the States seemed not to care about that, because she and her team always got the job done, in spite of Wade instead of because of him.
Alina left the window and walked over to the kitchen table to gaze at the floor plans of the industrial building spread out there. Looking at all the red marks and arrows drawn here and there, she groaned as she realized the worst part of Wade AWOL’s status. He was the intel lead on this mission. He’d not only come up with the tip that had led them here and had slipped in the previous night to scout out the building and bugged the room where the Syrian rebels and the local supplier were meeting, but he’d also scoped out all the entrances and blind spots. Even though all his intel notes were sketched out, she’d still rather have Wade here to cover everything one more time. Instead, he was off somewhere getting laid—or drunk.
“What do you have on the wire?” she asked Jodi.
Jodi pressed her fingers to the wireless earpiece she wore and closed her eyes. Pressing the earbud didn’t do anything, but Alina supposed it helped her focus on what the people in the room Wade had bugged were saying.
“I have four, maybe five male voices,” Jodi said. “Two are speaking fluent Turkish. The others are using a combination of Turkish and Arabic. They’re mostly making polite conversation right now, but they’ve said the words anlastik mi several times. That’s Turkish for deal. A few moments ago, one of the Arab men asked how many drums would be involved.”
“We going to do this or what?” Fred Stewart’s gravelly voice rumbled through Alina’s earbud over the encrypted channel. “If they’re already talking about deals and how many drums, there’s no way this meeting is going to last more than another ten or fifteen minutes. If we don’t go soon, we’re going to blow our chance.”
“I know,” Alina told her other teammate. “But Wade is still MIA, and our original plan was based on four of us going in. It’s going to be tough trying to pull this off with just you, me, and Rodney.”
“Not like we have much of a choice,” Rodney Miller said in his Southern drawl. “If they drive out of here with those chemicals, we’re never going to find them again. And when the Syrian people get attacked by some extremists using nerve gas, we’re going to know it was our fault. You ready to let that happen?”
Alina didn’t answer. Pushing the image his words had painted out of her head, she continued to scan the floor plans and maps on the table in front of her, trying to see a way three people could pull this off. But she couldn’t. There were too many doors, hallways, and rooms to cover.
She’d been working with Fred and Rodney for nearly four years. They were both well trained and knew how to handle themselves in a tense tactical situation. But there were at least five people in the building across the street, maybe as many as ten. This wasn’t a job that consisted of walking in and eliminating the bad guys. Her team didn’t do that kind of work. They’d been brought in to confirm these people were involved with a scheme to manufacture sarin nerve gas, then take them down while capturing as many of them alive as possible.
Stopping these guys with her full team would have been difficult enough. Trying to do it one man down when they were a team that was already too small for a mission like this would be nearly suicidal.
“You know,” Jodi said in a tone that suggested she knew Alina wasn’t going to like the next words coming out of her mouth, “I could take Wade’s place on the raid instead of sitting on my hands in here.”
Alina bit back a curse. She should have known.
The biggest reason Alina had grabbed Jodi out of the pool of new agents at Langley was because the girl reminded her of herself at that age. Smart, aggressive, eager, and more than a little bit reckless. Alina was taking her training slowly so Jodi wouldn’t end up making all the same stupid mistakes she had made back then. And because she and Jodi had become good friends. Maybe Alina protected Jodi more than she would have another agent in the same situation, but she wasn’t going to apologize for it.
“Forget it, Jodi,” she said. “You aren’t ready for something like this, and you won’t be for a while.”
Jodi made a face. “Are you serious? Dammit, Alina. I’ve been on the team for months, and so far, you haven’t let me do anything but watch computer monitors and listen to radios. This isn’t why I did all that training back at Langley. I’m ready for this. That’s why you selected me to be on your team, isn’t it?”
“I selected you to be on my team because I thought you had the potential to be a good field agent—with the proper experience. And until you get that experience, your job is to watch computer monitors and listen to radios.”
Jodi scowled. “How am I supposed to get any experience if you never let me do anything?”
Alina opened her mouth to answer, but Rodney interrupted her.
“Alina, I’m by the back entrance of the building near the garage. It sounds like they’re loading the truck,” he said softly into her earpiece. “If we’re going to do this, it needs to be soon.”
“Stand by,” Alina said to Rodney, then looked at Jodi. “Anything from Wade?”
Jodi glanced at her phone and shook her head.
“Dammit,” Alina muttered.
She and her team were here to stop this deal. That’s what they were going to do—with or without Wade.
Spinning around, she headed for the door. “I’m on the way down,” she said over the radio. “Rodney, you’ll go in the back as planned. Fred and I will go in the front. Once we get inside, he’ll split off and help you cover the garage, while I handle the conference room.”
The two men acknowledged the change in plans without comment. The adjustment would mean that Alina would be covering the largest concentration of bad guys on her own, but there wasn’t anything they could do about it.
Hand on the doorknob, she turned to look at Jodi. “Stay here and monitor the wire. Let us know if you hear anything.”
Jodi probably would have argued, but Alina opened the door and walked out of the apartment and headed for the stairwell.
Outside, Alina yanked the collar of her leather jacket up as she jogged across the street, trying to keep the cold rain from slipping down the back of her neck. She was only partially successful.
