Burned (Vanessa Pierson series Book 2) (13 page)

The man in the plain gray raincoat and the olive-green porkpie waited inside his beige Peugeot. He had parked on the street a good distance from the driveway of the Hôtel Cayré—but in a spot where he still had a clear view of those coming and going.

His assignment was the young blonde his employer called Vanessa. Two days ago, near the Louvre, in the confusion that followed the bombing, he had managed to pay a teen to hand her a phone. But he couldn’t risk that kind of exposure again.

Vanessa wasn’t staying at the hotel, but her boss with the wire-rimmed glasses was registered under a pseudonym.

The man in the gray coat had three employees of his own; he trusted them to be discreet, and he had taught them to carry out surveillance. Two of them were available and on call today. One rode a motorbike, the other drove a late-model Renault.

But even with three vehicles and three drivers, surveillance on this job was tough. Vanessa and her boss were both sharp-eyed and trained to be vigilant for surveillance. It came with their kind of work.

So his orders were to wait, to be the invisible man, and to update
his employer when he could. Fine, he could wait. He had already had his morning
café
, and waiting had become his profitable specialty.

As he bit into his croissant, he was rewarded. A BMW pulled up the short driveway to the hotel’s entrance. The doorman stepped forward, sharp salute, to open the rear door. The man in the gray raincoat started his car at the same time he assessed the new arrival: female, fit, attractive, dark blond hair, well dressed.

But she was not Vanessa. This woman was too old, in her forties. She leaned down to speak briefly with someone in the front seat of the BMW while the doorman retrieved a garment bag and a briefcase from the trunk.

He finished the last bite of his croissant as the older woman gave a small wave and the BMW inched forward, coasting onto the one-way street. Now with a different view, he recognized the driver by his distinctive military haircut and his glasses. Vanessa’s boss.

Eureka.
The passenger was young and blond and very pretty.

As the man in the gray coat pulled out a discreet distance behind the BMW, he speed-dialed his employee, quickly telling him to be ready to take over surveillance. Then, following orders, he dialed his employer to let him know they were moving and he would continue to report in.

A call had summoned Team Viper back to the warehouse manned by French service: Analysts would present preliminary results on security footage retrieved from La Défense.

Still shaken by Peyton Wright’s warning, Vanessa arrived with Chris. He’d said barely a word since the Cluny.

As they walked through the huge industrial door, Vanessa resolved to push away all thoughts other than what was in front of her.

The first thing she noted was the absence
of Khoury, Fournier, and Aisha from the group standing in front of the monitors. Then she heard Zoe Liang’s voice. For an instant she imagined that Zoe had hopped a plane to Paris with Peyton. But CPD’s crack analyst rarely left Headquarters; she oversaw too many operations and could juggle most of them virtually. In short, she was too valuable to be sent into the field.

Hays had once described Zoe as having all the tonal range of a flatline. Vanessa, usually the focus of Zoe’s wrath, knew the analyst was capable of quite a few tonal variations, but she got Hays’s drift—
Zoe didn’t excite easily—and she actually appreciated Zoe’s sangfroid, especially when all hell was breaking loose.

And now, the typically unflappable Zoe said: “. . . the process entailed image segmentation, restoration, enhancement—the triple whammy, so it’s a good sign to get early results like these.”

“Oh, yeah,” Hays said, at the moment carrying all the jittery energy Zoe lacked. “And you’re doing it with all your balls in the air at once because you’ve got the reflective issues and the hacking issues on the SARIT security itself.”

“Looks like you guys have all the fun toys,” Zoe said, “but we have our own gadgets and CART lent a hand.”

Vanessa, still out of view of the monitor, called, “I can’t believe you needed help from the Bureau!” The FBI’s CART—Computer Analysis Response Team—had half a dozen mobile labs they could send into the field, in addition to the vast resources at their stationary facilities. It was also a matter of pride and rivalry between the Agency and the FBI—help was only requested as a final resort.

“I know that voice that’s giving me shit,” Zoe said. “And FYI, we’ve done all the heavy digital lifting, they just shared equipment.”

Vanessa took a step into range and flashed Zoe a lopsided smile. “Hey, stranger.”

Zoe kept her poker face but said, “Glad you’re here. I want you to see what we’ve managed to pull from your less-than-stellar originals, especially your reflections. Hays, can you—?”

The second empty screen went from white to gray-white.

“That’s all you got?” Khoury asked, joining the group. Vanessa assessed him quickly while he was focused on Zoe. His dark-honey skin glowed from the cold, hair damp and tousled, and his leather bomber jacket shone with beads of water.
Raining again. He looks good.
But luckily, he was spared from being too pretty by a small scar and a few other physical imperfections.

“Hey, David, good to see you, too,” Zoe said from the monitor.

“That’s the
before
,” Hays said. “The raw material we were working with from the cameras on the building adjacent to SARIT.”

“Give us a minute,” Zoe said, “and we can show you how we subdivided the image, and once we began working with constituent parts, we can isolate whatever we want, like this—”

A few seconds and the image morphed into a smaller, closer image with discrete pixels visible. Vanessa thought she could just begin to make out a human form on foot—maybe male, maybe hiding his face under the brim of a hat . . .
maybe
 . . .

She stared so intently her eyes began to burn, and she asked the question mutely,
Who are you?

Khoury was studying the image, too. “Can you pull out enough detail so we can run this guy through facial recognition and get him on a watch list—or have the guys at the Fort take a look at this?”

Zoe’s eyes narrowed into dark slivers. “Just for you, David.”

“Zoe or Hays, what’s the time stamp on this?” Vanessa asked.

“This was caught ninety seconds after the internal security went down on SARIT,” Zoe said. “So it would have been an approach. We’ve got a lot more to work on, other images, but this is the start.”

Vanessa inhaled sharply. “He’s carrying something—a briefcase?”

“Makes sense,” Khoury said. “They’d bring in their own high-tech case so they could carry out their booty . . .”

A second image filled a screen: gray-white again, then coalescing in front of their eyes to a tighter pixelated image, this time revealing the ghosts of three human forms wearing what appeared to be identical jackets and hats.

“They obviously dressed to pass for security,” Khoury said. “Do you have any motion footage?”

“Not yet,” Zoe said, frowning from the first monitor. “But we will.”

“I need it the moment you get it,” Khoury said, his jaw taut.

“What do you see, David?” a new voice asked.

All heads turned to see Aisha and Fournier entering. It was Aisha who’d spoken, while Fournier raised a hand in the air, a terse greeting.

Khoury shook his head. “Just a hunch—until I see more in the motion footage.”

“Share the hunch,” Fournier said, eyeing the monitors intently. “No time to be cautious.”

“The trio, their bearing, they strike me as military, or could be paramilitary. But I told you, a hunch.”

“Just a matter of hours and geek power ’til we get motion,” Hays said. He waved his coffee mug in the air a little wildly, and Vanessa wondered exactly how many cups of espresso he’d consumed during the past twenty-four hours.

She took a step toward the monitor and Hays. “I need clarification on this: The two images, the single man and the trio, that lets us know there were at least four men on the team that breached SARIT, is that correct?”

“That’s what we’ve got so far,” Zoe said.

“Right,” Vanessa said, glancing around at the group. “So for what it’s worth, I am noting that the second video released by True Jihad featured four hooded men.”

The hum of machines seemed to amp up in the silence that followed. Hays looked to Zoe, who said, “The True Jihad videos are undergoing intense forensic analysis as we speak, and we
will
cross-check the imagery, and I guarantee you, we will find any links there to be found.”

Vanessa nodded. “That’s what I needed to know.”

“Good call,” Chris said, stepping up. “Now what about the security footage that actually came from SARIT?” His sleeves were rolled up, a light sheen of sweat on his forehead. The warehouse was hot, and they were all on edge.

Zoe nodded. “We’re getting to that. We were able to track some
code that shows us these guys hacked in weeks ahead of the physical breach. They were monitoring the company’s internal security system, getting to know it, and inserting their own virtual time bomb to disrupt the signals and cams for the eighteen minutes of the actual break-in.”

“So you would classify this as a sophisticated operation?” Vanessa asked, absorbing Zoe’s information, explicit and implicit.

“Extremely sophisticated,” Zoe said. Hays nodded.

He said, “This was well planned, successfully executed, and timed with precision.”

It was Vanessa who said what they were thinking: “Timed to occur at the same moments as the suicide bombing and its immediate aftermath.” She took a quick breath. “It seems more and more plausible that they walked in with a suitcase to take something important. Something that could detonate a nuke.”

Hays held up a slim black pen, which was actually a digital recording device. Most of the team had left to grab a late lunch before they would meet up at the safe house in two hours. Only Chris and Hays had stayed behind at the warehouse with Vanessa. The French analysts and technicians who staffed the facility had accepted Hays first as their guest and, soon after, as their peer; and the French weren’t paying any attention to the two extra Americans who talked with Hays now.

“This is going to pick up your side of the conversation, and it should catch most of the other party’s.”

Vanessa avoided his eyes. Of course he wondered what she was up to; he’d simply been told to equip her with the most discreet device possible.

“We have devices that will collect everything from the caller, and I mean
everything
, but that means you need to know the phone you’ll be using, and I gather you may not know ahead of time.”

Vanessa skipped over his question with her own: “Do I activate the recorder on the pen manually?”

“It’s set to voice-activate, but obviously—at least I think it’s obvious—you don’t want to have every word you say all day recorded for posterity, so, yes, when you are going to call or a call comes in that you want to record, you activate this way—here, just click and you’re set. After that it will record steadily until you manually turn it off.”

She studied the streamlined design of the pen. “So does it attach somehow?”

“Sorry, forgot to tell you that part. When you depress the clip, here, you can piggyback it to pretty much any phone.” He pointed to the cap end. “You’ve got a nanoport right here for downloading the recording onto your laptop. And you’ve got this handy-dandy mini-plug that covers the port when it’s not in use.”

“You keep it on you at all times,” Chris said, his eyes boring through Vanessa.

She met his gaze without blinking. Hays could clearly sense the tension between them. She had pressed Chris again earlier in private about Dieter Schoeman.

Chris had instantly slapped down any argument—“I don’t know who’s blocking access, but I’m working on it, and I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

Now Vanessa gripped the pen like a tiny spear, holding it at shoulder height. “So if someone asks to borrow my pen?”

“Go ahead,” Hays said, smiling. “It has a nice medium point, good action, and steady ink flow. Just don’t let them run off with it. It costs a lot more than a Bic.”

Vanessa nodded. “One more question.”

“Sure.”

“Which thingamabob do I push?” Vanessa said, peering intently at the pen. “When I need to shoot a lethal poison dart?”

Hays took a moment before he turned to Chris. “She’s kidding, right?”

—

CHRIS LEFT
the warehouse before Vanessa, on his way to stop at the hotel to pick up Peyton Wright.

Hays, driving a car provided by Paris Station, would take Vanessa back to the safe house in time for the team’s debrief at 1700.

While Hays gathered up pads, computers, and extra drives, Vanessa checked her cell phone discreetly. Still no message from C. At this rate, how the hell was she ever going to get to see Dieter?

Outside, while Hays started the car, Vanessa automatically scanned the street.

No sign of anyone following as they pulled out, but she would stay vigilant. Always
.