Chapter Twenty-Five
Leland
For two months, I didn’t hear from Jena or know if I was in the clear with the CIA. I hadn’t heard from Richard either, and while I knew it was best, even after the betrayal and near disaster he brought to my life, it was painful for me knowing we were over.
I grieved him as if he’d been the dead body I’d found on the floor in my sunroom.
Who he’d been at Princeton.
Who he had been to me as my lover.
What the life I lived for the agency had cost us.
And even who he was when he’d walked out my front door forever—a weak addict unworthy of his career and a danger to me.
Would have, should have, could have were the thought headings from the anguished musing I couldn’t shut down in my head. If I hadn’t left him in DC, would he be—would we be—where we were then?
It was stupid to wonder any of that. But the heart wants what it wants no matter what the mind tells it. The tiny speck of beating flesh that had survived watching Jena and her men clean up Richard’s mess missed him.
I’d lived my life for the most part alone, but being alone when there was no one left to love turned it something akin to a slow, suffocating death.
I was sitting at a table on the patio, staring with unseeing eyes at the blue-sky day, when as if out of thin air Jena plopped onto the chair beside me
“Oh, Lee,” she crooned. “Snap out of it. Richard isn’t worth it. He never was. He isn’t worth doing this to yourself because of him.”
I knew she was right—in the cerebral hemisphere—but her words didn’t do shit for the brick that resided where my heart had been.
I rallied enough to smile at her. “If you’re here, Jena, it means I’m not on a burn list somewhere. That’s something, I guess.”
She rolled her eyes and did an annoyed shake. “No way I’d ever let anything bring down my favorite guy. You’re too important to me.”
“To the agency, you mean.”
“No, me.” And she almost looked genuinely offended when she said that.
She poured a glass of iced tea from the untouched drinks tray Lauren had set out for me earlier.
She held out the tea to me and crinkled her nose. “What’s going on out here? I’ve had enough of it. And by how you look you’ve had too much of it. It feels like a wake around here. What’s that fucking music you have blasting the patio? It’s sad as fuck. Nearly enough to depress even me. Joan Baez, is that who this is? How do I shut it off before I start shedding crocodile tears?”
Jena wasn’t very good at being uplifting and it wasn’t worth the effort of telling her that. “That’s Christian Parker’s cover of ‘Diamonds and Rust,’ you music illiterate spook.”
She made a face. “I would have thought ‘Long and Hard’ by Alan Manzone more to the liking of your gay ass.”
That managed to stir a laugh from me. “It’s the next song in the playlist.”
“His voice is sexy as fuck. Even I’d bone him.”
I bit back a grin. Jena and I on the same page over something inane. It felt almost like old times. That was a start, I supposed, to pulling out of this funk I was in.
She leaned back in her chair and tilted her face to the sun. “Why aren’t you talking? I’m not used to you not running your mouth a mile a minute.”
“Trying to figure out if you’re here to tell me bad news or good, and if I want to know either.”
“How about a compromise? Neither.”
I arched a brow. “Meaning?” Jena didn’t make house calls without a reason.
“Lee, there isn’t going to be any blowback from the corpse you had me haul out of your house. What went down here is between me, you, and Richard. Funny how the three of us always end up linked in things we’d rather not have been a part of and would prefer to forget.”
I didn’t want to think of that, not our Princeton days or any trail that led back to Richard. I decided to push her to get on with why she was there. “Well, if you didn’t pop in to tell me to go find a hole to hide in because the CIA hit squad’s been dispatched, why are you here?”
“Can’t people visit old friends without a reason?”
“People, yes. Jena Garret, no.”
One side of her nose and mouth crinkled up as she tilted her head. “You’ve got a point.” Without further ado, she reached into her satchel and pulled out a file. “I’ve let you mope and lick your wounds long enough. Time to get back on the horse, my mighty NOC.”
Horse, indeed. She was excellent at cheesy word choice. Reluctantly, I forced myself to examine the photos she was slapping down on the table between us.
“I’ve got new intel for you to see. We have eyes inside the Ramos cartel’s compound outside Mexico City. This one we know is Hector Ramos.” Her red fingernail tapped the eight-by-twelve glossy she’d put in the middle. “This one is Arab. No identity yet.” She continued to tap, either giving names or nationality. “Quite a bit going on in Ramos’s world. Lots of activity. Lots of new faces. Lots of coming and going. You’ve got to work your magic and get on the inside with this shop of horrors club. We’re not getting enough good intel off the wiretaps and the surveillance.”
It was the standard assortment of bad guys. A bit of everything from around the globe. At least half of the ones as yet unidentified I knew from my Middle East travels, and as I started filling in the holes of what Jena’s other sources had put together, even the prospect of a new field operation didn’t send sensation through me.
“So that’s what I’ve been doing the two months you’ve been crying into your beer over Richard. Getting up to speed on this escalating threat to the country and a new mission for the two of us. We need to get you inside the Ramos cartel so we know what they’re planning.”
That I didn’t want another mission wasn’t a point worth saying aloud. You didn’t get your fucking life back from the CIA, not after you gave it to them. And Jena was right. Anything was better than sitting around crying in my beer over Richard.
I grabbed Hector Ramos’s top-secret file, sat back, and began to learn and study him. Jena’s reports were always accurate, always brilliant, and thank fuck, always detailed. Nothing was too small or trivial for her to include.
Read page. Flip.
Read page. Flip.
Mexican national.
Born into the cartel.
Killed his own brother to seize power.
One sister. Sofia. Aspiring ballerina.
One wife of twenty-five years.
One son. Alberto. Teenager.
Hector reported to be a closeted gay.
Overtly a monster sexually with women.
Publicly misogynistic.
Trafficked drugs, arms, and sex workers—both male and female.
The number one supplier of all three illegal commodities from Mexico into California, Indiana, Florida, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.
Why the fuck would he want to work with the terrorists? Crime didn’t get more profitable than this.
Over three billion dollars in revenue each year crossed across the border to dear old Hector—that nearly earned kudos from me—but that kind of money needed the best at washing it.
Hector ran his crime proceeds back to Mexico across the border hidden in semi trucks. There were a multitude of ways to fuck that up for him and make my services an appealing option.
Oh, Hector.
Hector.
Where’s your weak spot?
All men have them…
When my gaze landed on a photo halfway back in the file, I halted flipping pages and stared.
Hector holding a young woman on her knees with his hand on the back of her neck.
The way he clutched her. Proprietary and mean.
Almost to prove something to his associates.
Not gay?
But that wasn’t what got me to hold up at the photo.
It was her eyes that caught my attention.
Sad, blue orbs set in a fragile, beautiful face framed by long blond hair. Next to Hector’s barbaric, lecherous sneer her expression was even more moving. A suffering girl’s face on the lush body of a woman.
“Who’s the girl?” I held the file so Jena could see.
“Layla Hagen. Well, that’s what Hector calls her. Our intel suggests her real name is Holly Webster from Iowa. Grabbed off the street by Russian sex traffickers at fourteen, five years ago during a family vacation in Madrid. Sold at auction in Paris. Hector paid a hefty sum for her. She was supposedly a virgin. Given how old she’d been I imagine that’s possible. He likes to parade her about like a trophy to his manhood. She’s his most prized toy.”
The way Jena said that sent shivers across my soul. We might have been talking about the weather for all the emotion Jena had while telling me about poor Layla.
Christ, without someone to love, someone to believe in and hope for, it wouldn’t be long until there was no human feeling left in me and I’d be like Jena, neck deep in heinous atrocities, unaffected by any of it. The grimness of that was near paralyzing. I almost couldn’t breathe.
I slapped shut the folder. “I’ll leave early next week for my house in Mexico City. I can have the new branch of the charity up and running in thirty days. Then I’ll start on Hector Ramos.”
“That’s the Lee I know. Glad to have you back working with the good guys again. Get close to Hector and then, first task, find our mole in the intelligence community helping him.”