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 was Paris. 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, was a 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.”

“I have eyes, and I can drive.”

“You might be needed here at any time, and trust me, you can’t drive in Paris. It’s a nightmare. You don’t speak French, you don’t know anything about the streets, you’d get lost, and you’d likely cause an accident that would get you killed.” He grinned at her. “We’re looking out for you.”

And boring her to death at the same time. “Does everyone speak French except for me?”

“Some, at any rate. Voodoo’s fluent, Ace and Trapper not quite as good. The others get by, but the French sneer at them. You should take some language courses.”

“In my spare time.” But that was an idea. She’d see which languages were most useful now, and at least get some rudimentary language skills going. Overseas flights were long, and that would be something to pass the time because sleep was hard to come by. She’d been too excited, quarters had been cramped, and she hadn’t acquired the guys’ ability to nap on a moment’s notice whether they were lying, sitting, or propped against a wall. Not only that, Jelly and Crutch were such practical jokers she didn’t think she’d ever feel comfortable sleeping in their presence.

Her work cell phone buzzed. She jumped, and her heart rate picked up. Part of the protocol was that anything relating to the drone would be sent by text, instead of a phone call that might be picked up by an audio recording bug. The text was from Levi:

Adrenaline shot through her system, making her feel almost dizzy. She jumped to her feet and got Tweety ready to fly. Guidance systems for drones originally required line-of-sight communication with the controller, but they were so far beyond that now she could operate him from just about anywhere; the military’s Predator drones could be controlled by people sitting in front of a screen thousands of miles away. But that much distance had the built-in lag time that MacNamara had wanted eliminated, so Tweety didn’t need that kind of capability. Paris was a big city, with innumerable obstacles, but with Tweety’s 360-degree cameras, sensors, and pinpoint GPS, she could zip him around the city as easily as if he were a real bird.

The next text was the coordinates where Levi wanted the drone to be positioned.

Swiftly Jina pulled the coordinates up on the computer and surveyed the area, while the computer plotted the best path. Paris was an old, overcrowded, jumbled city, with almost no straightforward route to anywhere. There were so many variables that had to be considered: wind, pedestrians, buildings, streetlamps; Tweety had been designed to attract minimum attention—he was silent and had awesome battery power—but keeping him unnoticed with so many people around was a priority. The last thing they wanted was to have an incident that resulted in the drone being knocked from the sky and captured. That wouldn’t be as bad as the software in the laptop falling into the wrong hands, but still.

She texted Levi that Tweety was on the way and suited actions to words.

It was a rush, watching on her computer screen, seeing what Tweety saw, deftly guiding him over or around obstacles, sending him flying to Levi’s location. This was what she’d trained for months to do, though not exactly this; she’d thought there would be more of a “hot mission” feel to it, rather than these rather prosaic conditions. The sky was overcast, the day cold and windy but not drastically so, with the possibility of rain at any time. Paris might be called the “city of lights,” but it looked dreary on a cold, late November day, and Jina was just as glad to be inside their cramped, run-down hotel room, exploring Paris from the all-seeing eyes of her Tweety.

There was an art to the flight, choosing ways that allowed her to blend the drone in with the background. She had practiced making his motions look like those of a bird, sometimes darting and swooping, sometimes flying straight, sometimes pretending to “roost” by hovering close to a ledge or anything else appropriate. Now she opted for more speed, because the faster she got to Levi’s coordinates, the better.

Getting him there on surface streets would have taken over an hour. Flying him there, she had him close in fifteen minutes and texted Levi for further instructions.

Crutch was quietly talking on his headset, coordinating the six guys on the ground, making sure everyone knew what everyone else was doing and no piece of information went by unnoticed. Jina half listened to him while she mostly concentrated on her eyes and fingers, seeing what Tweety saw, immersing herself in the program the way she did when she played computer games.

Tweety’s software was programmed to recognize the team members, and one of his cameras immediately locked in on Levi, showing him standing under an awning that protected him from the light rain that had started falling. Even from Tweety’s viewpoint, Levi’s physical presence was like a punch in her sternum, making her feel breathless and dizzy. He was so tall and powerful that people instinctively glanced at him, which wasn’t the best thing for covert work but perversely made others in the same field disregard him because he was so noticeable. His features, though, blended in with the native French; his hair and eyes were dark, his facial bone structure was chiseled enough that he could belong to any number of nationalities.

She didn’t want to notice, didn’t want to think about what had happened between them Sunday afternoon. Staying busy was the best antidote to depression and frustration.

She sent a text that Tweety was in position. Levi took out his phone and read the message, but was too professional to look around for the drone. Instead his thumb moved over the keypad, and her phone buzzed again. Across street in cafe, get photo of file was followed by a brief description of the men in question. Then Levi pocketed his phone and walked off down the street, not once glancing at the café or his quarry.

Okay, it was up to her now. She positioned Tweety and located her target. The two men were sitting at a table against the window, protected from the elements but able to watch their surroundings. With Tweety’s fast, high-resolution camera recording, she flew him past the window, high enough to look down. From what she saw on the laptop, the file was an actual file folder, which struck her as ridiculous. If they were up to something nefarious, shouldn’t they be sneakier about it, rather than meeting in the open with a real file folder? She gave a mental shrug. Maybe being so open and acting innocent was the new thing with terrorists. She’d been told to get photos, so she got photos.

The two men talked. Graeme Burger opened the file, turned it around, and with the expertise of someone who often dealt with upside-down paperwork, pointed out several things to Nawal Daw. For all the world, it looked as if he was making a presentation, or trying to close a deal, maybe convince the Sudanese to move some money to his bank. Well, at the base of it, terrorism needed money to exist. But what did this have to do with Burger’s planned visit to the United States? Maybe something, maybe nothing.

She took Tweety on another pass, photographing the open file. Then she took him to a roosting position on a streetlight, looking down and waiting for another page to be turned. The two men often looked at the foot traffic on the sidewalks, and around them in the café, but neither of them noticed Tweety’s roughly bird shape.

Crutch murmured, “Everyone has pulled back, waiting to resume surveillance.” His phone dinged, and he looked at the message. “Burger has booked himself on a flight leaving De Gaulle this evening, back to Johannesburg. Given the flight schedule, he should be leaving here and going straight to the airport.”

Levi said, “Snake, Voodoo, you’re on airport duty. Boom and Trapper, swap out with them. Jelly and I are on Daw.”

Two acknowledgments.

Another page was turned in the thin stack contained in the file folder. Jina sent Tweety by the window again. Burger caught a glimpse of movement and glanced up, and smoothly Jina swung the drone higher, out of his view.

The file contained five pages. After each page had been examined, the two men shook hands and parted company.

“That doesn’t seem very interesting,” she said to Crutch.

He shrugged. “Never can tell.”

She sent the intel to GO-Teams headquarters for analyzing. She could have read what was on the papers herself, by enlarging, but she didn’t have any way of putting what she read into global context.

On Levi’s command, she began bringing Tweety home. The rain was falling more heavily now, and wind gusts kept her busy finessing the drone’s balance and direction. Umbrellas popped open on the sidewalks, where pedestrians were rapidly finding dry places to be, meaning she didn’t have to be as careful about disguising Tweety’s movements. Still, it was nerve-racking. At one point a gust blew it against the side of a building and she hastily recovered its balance, swearing under her breath—or not so under her breath, because Crutch looked up with eyebrows raised—and praying there was no damage. She’d become fond of Tweety. Never mind the drones were all the same, and never mind it was a miniaturized machine/computer; this particular drone was hers. She’d named him. And once things had a name, they developed personalities, even if the personality was wholly in the mind of the operator. Tweety was her bird.

She was sweating when she brought him safely in through the open window. Quickly she closed the window against the wind and rain, shutting out the gloomy day, and checked the drone for damage. There were some scraped places, but the powerful cameras and sensors were all working when she ran the diagnostics. The drone was sturdy; it had to be, to function in all sorts of conditions. Granted, some rainy weather in Paris didn’t equal a sandstorm in wherever, but rain and electronics were notoriously unhappy together.

Three hours later, they were on a plane returning to the States. Jina couldn’t believe it. Just like that, her first mission was over, having been as dramatic as doing her laundry. She was exhausted from lack of sleep, disappointed by the boredom, by Paris in general, by missing Thanksgiving for basically nothing—though “nothing” might change to “something” when the photographs were analyzed—and . . . “Wait a minute,” she said aloud. She wasn’t sure of her math, because she was so jet-lagged, but she was gaining back six hours, right? They would land in D.C. about three hours local time after they left Paris, because they gained back six hours. She scrubbed her face and poked Snake, who was the one sitting beside her this time. “What day will we get back?”

He’d already dozed off in that annoying way they had, but he woke up and scrubbed his face much the way she had. “Ah . . . Tuesday. Maybe early Wednesday.”

“So I can still go home.”

He grinned at that. “Yeah. We’ll be back for Thanksgiving.” He gave a rumbling sigh and closed his eyes again. “Grab some sleep, or you’ll be worthless for two days.”

Grab some sleep, he said. He had already dozed off again. Looking around the plane, the others she could see had already done the same thing. Okay, this was a talent she needed to master, as of right now. She was certainly tired enough, so tired that her brain, which felt slightly buzzed, had separated itself from her heavy-as-lead body. Even if she couldn’t sleep, at least she could close her eyes and rest. Wadding her jacket into a ball to use as a pillow, she hugged her arms around herself to ward off the chilly air, curled into herself as much as possible given the constraint of the seat belt, and determinedly closed her eyes without any real hope of catching some sleep.

She was wrong.

Jina stumbled bleary-eyed off the plane and stood staring at the signs directing passengers to the luggage claim area, to the exit area, to public transport, to parking . . . they might as well have all said “to hell” for all the sense her sluggish brain was making of them. The guys all seemed to be coping with jet lag better than she was, but this was her first time out of the country, period, and she felt as if she’d been body-slammed.

“I need coffee,” she mumbled. “Before anything else, I need coffee.” There had been coffee served on the plane, but the pick-me-up had already let her down.

Seven masculine grins came her way. Then Levi slung his bag over his shoulder and said, “I’m heading over to check on things before I go home,” meaning he was going to headquarters to see if the analysts had come up with anything interesting on Graeme Burger, and strode away.

Looking around for a coffee shop was more important than watching him walk away. Besides, Jina figured she’d see him walking away a lot in the future, so there was no point in letting herself yearn.

“Yeah, let’s find some coffee,” Trapper said. She hadn’t meant for it to be a group thing, but somehow she found herself borne along anyway and that was okay because now she was a real part of the team. However they kicked back and rehashed things, she wanted to be included—though she wouldn’t have chosen a coffee shop in a busy airport, but what did she know? They were the experienced ones. She’d stay a short while, get enough caffeine in her to get safely home, then she’d take a much-needed nap before getting up, showering, and packing for her flight home that night. After two trans-Atlantic flights in about forty-eight hours, getting on a plane again so soon didn’t appeal at all, but going home did.

They found a place and kind of took it over, dragging tables and chairs to their corner and ordering not just coffee but food, too. “Eat,” Boom advised, when she said she just wanted coffee. “You need the energy. Food will get you through.”

So she ate, and he was right, she did feel better afterward. To her surprise they didn’t rehash; instead they unwound, talking sports and Thanksgiving. They did take a few shots at her for packing like an amateur, but she was one, so she shrugged it off.

Then Jelly smiled the innocent smile that always meant he was up to something and said, “Hey, Babe, this is a landmark day for you.”

Instantly wary, she drew back and scowled. “No, it isn’t.” She didn’t know what he was up to, but considering this was Jelly it couldn’t be anything good.

“Sure it is,” Crutch put in. “You’ve finished your inaugural mission. Only happens once in a lifetime.”

Uh-oh. Jelly and Crutch together was a disaster in the making. Whatever they’d concocted, Boom wasn’t in on it, because he was giving them a questioning look. Snake, Voodoo, and Trapper were harder to read, though she thought Voodoo had a slight smirk on his face. “The whole thing was boring,” she said, trying to head off whatever they had in mind. “Nothing worth celebrating.”

“Boring is good,” Jelly said. “We all like boring. Go in, do the job, come home in time for Thanksgiving. Doesn’t get any better than that.”

“Yeah, speaking of Thanksgiving, I need to go home so I can pack—”

Crutch shook his head. “That isn’t what you need.”

“Is to. I haven’t seen my mom in—”

“What you need,” Jelly interrupted, “is a tattoo.” The last three words had a dramatic flourish.

“As a commemoration,” Crutch added.

Her mouth fell open and her eyes got huge. “No. I do not need a tattoo. Strictly speaking, no one needs a tattoo. I don’t like pain. I’m afraid of needles. A tattoo isn’t happening.” She’d have been less dismayed if they’d wanted to shave her head—she needed a haircut, and anyway hair grew back. A tattoo was permanent. A tattoo hurt. “Let’s just get me drunk again instead.”

An unholy light had entered Trapper’s eyes, and he slowly wagged his head back and forth. “Getting drunk is nothing. Drunk goes away. You can’t look at it and remember the occasion.”

“I don’t want to remember the occasion. I was bored. Who commemorates boredom?”

“Your first mission,” Boom said in a wondering tone. “It’s something special.”

Boom, too?? Feeling betrayed, she glared at him. “I’m telling on you.”

He tilted his head as though considering what Terisa might have to say, then shrugged. “There’s home, and then there’s team. You need a tattoo.”

“Do you have a commemorative tattoo?” she shot back.

They blew right past that; they all had various tattoos, which they began describing to her, but when she tried to pin them down on which ones had been “commemorative,” they ignored her. They were relentless. Before she knew it they were exiting the airport and she was being herded to Jelly’s truck despite her protestations that she had to get her car—“We’ll bring you back,” Snake promised, grinning. She was so telling on him, too.

The only way to get out of being tattooed was to get nasty with them, and she wasn’t prepared to do that because they weren’t being malicious. This was being part of a rough-and-tumble team, and the way to handle it was to go along then get back at them later. “Three conditions!” she yelled. Some people making their way to their own cars stopped and looked her way, maybe thinking she was in trouble. Her guys stopped and waited, their expressions laughing and expectant.

“One!” she said emphatically, holding up one finger.

“One,” they echoed.

“The tattoo artist has to be a woman.”

They all looked at one another, shrugged.

“Okay.”

“No problem.”

“Two!” She held up a second finger.

“Two!” They bellowed the number.

“I get to pick the design, with no input from any of you.”

“Aw, Babe.”

“Don’t you trust us?”

“We want to be involved.”

“You can be involved by listening to me scream,” she retorted. “This goes my way or it doesn’t go at all, and I’ll start screaming and fighting right here and your butts will all end up in jail, because who do you think the cops will listen to?”

Voodoo scratched his jaw. “We could take the cops,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, but the publicity would suck.” She had to stand her ground on this point in particular, or she could end up with something like a giant purple octopus inked across her back, with tentacles wrapping around her arms and legs. Trust them, she didn’t.

“All right,” Snake said, looking disappointed. “You get to pick the design.”

She moved on immediately after that concession, not giving them time to argue about it. “Three!” She held up three fingers.

“Three!”

“None of you get to watch.”

“What!”

“That takes all the fun out of it!”

“How will we know you actually get one, then?” That was Voodoo, trying to throw a monkey wrench into the situation.

“Trust, gentlemen. Trust.” She folded her arms. “Those are my conditions. Take ’em or leave ’em.”

“Ah, hell.” Trapper looked aggrieved. “She called us gentlemen.”

“And she used the T word.” Jelly heaved a disappointed sigh.

“Y’all ate my tacos and my cake,” she pointed out.

“All right, all right.” Amid much grumbling, they dispersed to their vehicles, though Jelly still insisted she ride with him. Evidently they didn’t trust her enough to let her drive on her own, and she couldn’t say they were wrong because she could see herself bolting.

Evidently she was getting a tattoo.