Shooting proved to be unnecessary. They made it back to the checkpoint without being challenged. Once there, they got off the bike with hands raised and told the Israeli guards who they were. They were taken into a small room and searched. Then a senior officer strode into the room and smiled.
“Welcome back, gentlemen,” he said. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
They were taken back to headquarters, where Pool and Hassan greeted them. Pool looked justifiably anxious. They showered, had the worst of their cuts attended to, moodily subjected themselves to physicals and then ate something. After that, in spite of the fact that it was three in the morning and they hadn’t slept properly for the week they had been held, they confronted Pool and Hassan again.
“Cantara is dead,” Raoul told them in a flat tone.
“I am so very—”
“Don’t you fucking dare offer me condolences!” he yelled at Pool. “I told you what would happen…I warned you.”
Hassan sighed. “How did they get on to you, and how did you escape?”
Raoul was grateful for his professionalism. Facts he could handle, and they spent an hour retelling everything that had happened to them.
“So,” Raoul said at the end of the debrief. “The question remains, which of your trusted inner circle sold us out?”
“You must have gotten careless, let someone see you,” Pool said. “I told you it was a bad idea for you to go.”
Zeke had to hold Raoul back. Otherwise he would probably have spent the rest of his life in another prison cell for killing the bastard.
“Don’t you fucking dare question our professionalism, colonel.” He growled.
“Get some sleep,” Hassan said, hastily stepping between a snarling Raoul and Pool, whose entire face had drained of color. “I’ll start asking questions and will know more by the time you wake up.”
“Let’s hope so,” Raoul replied, “because, I gotta tell you, if you don’t find the mole, we sure as hell will, and I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes when we do.”
Raoul and Zeke slept for a few hours in quarters other than those they had shared with Cantara. They would never go back to those. Even so, Raoul had his sleep haunted by images of the woman they loved, and was sure Zeke did, too.
They looked a little better when they woke but felt worse after six hours in the sack than they had before they hit it. Realization had struck home. Cantara was gone. They would never see her beautiful face again, and Raoul would never forgive himself for allowing her to go on the mission. He felt tears prick the back of his eyes and made no effort to hold them back. He had known, known, it wouldn’t work. He should have tried harder to convince her of that. Damn it, he was an idiot!
They took breakfast then reported to Hassan.
“I have found the man who betrayed you,” he said in a hard, crisp tone. “My adjacent, Levi.”
Raoul nodded. “I thought it had to be him. It had to be someone at this end of the operation and he seemed like the most obvious candidate.”
“Why did he do it?” Zeke asked. “No, let me guess. He got caught in a honey trap.”
“We think so.”
“Christ, how could he be so fucking stupid?” Raoul asked. “People in his position are prime targets. Surely he knew that?”
“Evidently not.” Hassan sighed. “He isn’t talking, yet, but we’ve searched his stuff and it’s looking like there was a woman involved. All sorts of intimate e-mails to a female who isn’t his wife. We’re checking it out.” He shook his head. “The man’s been with me for years. I thought I could trust him absolutely. It just goes to show.” He stood up. “Gentlemen, I am so very sorry but, if it helps, Israeli justice is swift and brutal.”
“Give me five minutes with him,” Raoul said. “I’ll save you the trouble.”
“Sorry, but you know I cannot.”
“Just five minutes, come on, you owe me that much after we put our necks on the line for you. Five minutes is all I ask. Come on, come on, I…”
Chapter Five
Raoul woke with a start, pulled from his recurring nightmare by the sound of his own voice crying out for five minutes with the man who’d ruined his life. With the sheet twisted around his body, he was covered in perspiration, and racked by the devastating pain of loss. He sat up and ran a hand through his hair. Shit, would it never go away? It had been three years now, and he thought he had gotten over the worst of it—if a person ever really did get over that sort of loss. The guilt, the what-ifs, the regrets.
The sex…dreaming of it felt as though it had happened yesterday. He felt her emotions, her reactions, lived her thoughts—at least in his dream. Only in his dreams. His dreams were the only place he could still be close to his beautiful, wilful wife, and he never wanted to part with them, even if they left him feeling the raw grief all over again when he woke up. He gazed at the opposite wall to his bed, where he had hung an enlarged black and white photograph of Cantara, her head tilted playfully, her sloping eyes sparkling with mischief. It was the first, the only, thing he wanted to see when he opened his eyes each morning.
“Come back, baby,” he muttered, his eyes moist. “I can’t hack it without you. Neither of us can.”
Zeke was hurting too, but unlike Raoul he did his grieving mostly in silence. His Native American belief that Cantara’s soul had passed to the spirit world and that she would be reincarnated helped him to get through. Raoul wished he had a faith network to lean on, but he’d seen too much crap go down in this world to believe the next one would be any better—if there even was a next one.
“Fuck it, darlin’, why didn’t you listen to us?” he asked her picture. “Why did you insist upon leaving us?”