Burned (Vanessa Pierson series Book 2) (15 page)

Vanessa opened her eyes to find she was staring into a glowing clock face: 0328 hours.

Khoury’s deep, steady breaths warmed the base of her neck. She didn’t move for minutes just because it felt so good to lie next to him, bodies touching, almost as if they were one, not two.

But when she didn’t drift back into sleep, she gently lifted his arm and eased herself out and away. She sat at the edge of the bed for a few more minutes, listening to the faint early-morning sounds of the city. The curtains were open just enough to let in some light from the street.

His boxing gloves were resting on the side table and she reached for them, touching smooth leather that shone from use. He’d graduated Harvard early, at twenty, in the top one percent of his class. Always intent on proving to the world that a Lebanese American was the best of America; he loved his adopted country and he knew what his parents and grandparents had suffered to survive. All of that made the ongoing internal investigation at Headquarters into him all the more painful and offensive.

She touched her nose to the gloves, inhaling the musky scent of dust, oil, salt, sweat—the smell of discipline and drive. She set them back in their place, and then she picked up his Qur’an. The cover felt silky after years of use.

Vanessa stood and carried the holy book from the bedroom to the bathroom, where a soft light glowed. She opened the cover to find inscriptions from his parents inside. The Arabic was beautiful. She didn’t know if it mirrored the English inscription.

To our beloved son Dawood. May love be the gardener of your years, bringing from you grounding in God, a harvest of wholeness and peace and a bounty of courage and compassion.

David’s mother, a classical poet and academic, had been raised in a devout Lebanese Sunni Muslim family. His father, a professor of international studies, had been raised in Lebanon by Maronite Christians. His surname, Khoury, translated to English as “priest.” That difference of faith had not deterred his parents from falling in love and marrying.

Within weeks of their first romantic involvement, Khoury had told Vanessa about his complex heritage. “Obviously my parents are not devout in their beliefs, or they never would have married and I wouldn’t be here.”

“I’m so glad they fell in love,” she’d answered, before kissing him tenderly.

Now Vanessa caressed the buttery leather of the Qur’an once more before she set it down with care.

He’d left his robe hanging on a hook on the door and she put it on. She found his toothbrush and then she squeezed a thick line of his toothpaste onto it. She stared out the small bathroom window to the street as she finished brushing. The heat of their lovemaking lingered; her body felt nicely used, even a bit sore in places.

She reached up and touched the scar Aisha had noticed on her biceps, where she’d been grazed by the Chechen’s bullet. Most of the
marks would fade, but some would be there for the remainder of her life. She tightened the cap on his toothpaste and set his toothbrush carefully back in its small holder.

She found an open can of cashews in a kitchen cupboard and a can of apple juice in the refrigerator. She ate a few nuts and washed them down with the juice. She wandered from the kitchen to the living room, exploring her lover’s world, trying to identify what was Khoury’s in the midst of someone else’s possessions. She searched for small details other lovers took for granted.

A copy of
A History
of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000–323 B.C.
by Marc Van De Mieroop rested on an end table. Archaeology was one of Khoury’s many passions. He’d marked his place in the book with a small, worn photograph. Vanessa pulled it out. Her own childhood face gazed solemnly back at her—the one photograph she’d given David when he insisted. She felt deeply touched that he’d kept it with such obvious care. In the photograph, taken on a boat during a family outing to a lake, she was just turning twelve. It was the year her father first began to show signs of his illness, the cancer that ultimately killed him.

She had just slipped the photo back between the pages of the book when she heard the noise. It was almost inaudible: the soft brush of fingers against the apartment door. Vanessa stiffened, listening. From the living room, she could see Khoury through the open bedroom door, sprawled across the rumpled bedcovers. Fast asleep.

Walking lightly, Vanessa crossed the short distance to the door. She waited another few seconds and then she put her eye to the peephole. No one. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary through the tiny fish-eye lens. She turned the deadbolt and it moved silently. She rotated the brass doorknob and it responded with a dull click. She opened the door, and her eyes followed the length of the darkened hallway to the staircase.

No sign of anyone, but she thought she saw a shadow flashing across the top of the stairwell.

She stepped back inside, shutting the door and locking the deadbolt. At the window she positioned herself so no one could see her from outside. Then she parted the edge of the curtain and looked down four stories to the street below.

At first it looked deserted, but then a dark form stepped out, walking quickly in the direction of the river. Whoever it was wore a dark raincoat, dark pants, and a hat pulled low. Vanessa thought for a second that she heard the click of boots on the pavement. Although it could have been a slender male, Vanessa had the strong feeling it was a woman.

Aisha had been wearing jeans and boots at the debrief.

If Vanessa’s intuition was right, she wondered why Aisha would show up at Khoury’s door after three a.m. And how did she even know where he lived?

Vanessa dressed quickly, quietly.

Abruptly, the drain of maintaining a lie, of not letting Chris know the full truth of her relationship with David, hit her full-force.

She jotted a quick note for Khoury:
Have to go, thinking about what you said, talk tomorrow~ I love you.
Then one last look at her lover sprawled restlessly across the bed, and she grabbed her coat and left.

For the second morning in a row, Vanessa made it back to the empty safe house just before dawn. She opened her laptop and grazed her fingers across the keys to log in to her secure screen, but her stomach felt a little queasy, and she’d caught a chill on the walk back from Khoury’s apartment. Laptop shut, she checked her cell phone again, but there was still no call from C. Days had passed since Bhoot had contacted her. What the hell was going on?

She set her alarm for 0645, figuring that was optimistic. She wasn’t likely to fall back to sleep now. And if she somehow, miraculously, managed to, Hays would wake her when he arrived at 0600.

She yawned, sighed. She should at least try for sleep just like Dr. Peyton had suggested to her months ago.

She stripped off her clothes, pulled on a T-shirt, and climbed under the covers.

—

“GLAD SOMEBODY GOT
their beauty sleep.”

She cracked her eyes open from a half-sleep. Chris was talking
to her from the bedroom doorway. Again. And there was a terseness to his tone that told her his seemingly lighthearted banter was bogus.

She found her voice. “Time?”

“Going on 0600. Get dressed. You’ve got a seven-twenty train to catch.”

Twelve minutes later, she found Fournier, Hays, and Canard in the living room. The three were staring at something on a laptop.

“Drink.” Chris pushed a cup of coffee into her hands. “We’ve got a location on Bogdan.”

“You’ll take the Thalys 9309 departing Paris Nord at 0725—three hours and fifteen minutes, nonstop—and that gets you into Amsterdam Centraal at 1042,” Hays said.

Fournier continued: “According to our intel, Bogdan gets into Amsterdam Centraal at 1525, same intercity arrivals level because he’s coming in from Minsk, so that should give you time to set up a warm welcome for your pal.”

Fournier glanced up. “Be ready in five. The car will be downstairs to take you to Paris Nord.”

The coffee was hot and Vanessa barely avoided burning her mouth; she nodded mutely. She had already packed her toothbrush, alias docs, comb, necessary toiletries, and her pen recorder—all easily fitting inside her lightweight shoulder bag.

The front door opened, then slammed shut. Vanessa turned in time to see Aisha enter the living room.

“Tu es en retard,”
Fournier snapped, barely glancing up.

Vanessa winced even though Fournier’s ire wasn’t directed at her. She couldn’t take her eyes off Aisha. She looked nothing like she had the previous day. Her eyes were bloodshot and shadowed by dark circles; her long hair hung in a tangled braid; her naturally flawless olive complexion looked chapped and washed out. Not only that, she was
trying to hide a very slight tremor. But Vanessa saw it when Aisha wrapped her arms tightly around her ribs.

What the hell happened to her?

The changes Vanessa saw were the kind caused by suffering—from abrupt physical or emotional withdrawal. For an instant Aisha met Vanessa’s eyes, a look of loathing startling in its intensity. But she looked away and her jaw tightened defensively.

Chris had noticed, too; his eyebrows lifted, but he said nothing.

“Print these maps out, one for each of them,” Fournier ordered Canard. He turned his gaze to Aisha and Vanessa and filled Aisha in. “Word from our friends in Belarus: Bogdan Kovalenko is headed for Amsterdam, and you two will be waiting to meet the ridiculous little turd.”

—

AISHA WAS FIRST
out the door of the safe-house foyer and Vanessa was right behind her when Chris stopped her with his hand on her arm.

His eyes burned with intensity, but he kept his voice low. “I think you need to tell me something. Where were you last night?”

Vanessa barely hesitated, emboldened by Khoury’s comment the night before. “I was with David. I spent the night at his apartment.” She felt instantly relieved to tell the truth—until she saw the look on Chris’s face.

“Goddamn it, Vanessa,” he hissed. “You are in—”

“Are you coming?”

It was Aisha, calling impatiently from the stairs.

Chris shook his head. “Go, but know that we will deal with this when you get back.”

Vanessa swallowed hard. “Right.” She didn’t take a breath until she was halfway down the stairs.

A woman’s muted voice announced, first in French, then English, then Dutch, the departure of the Thalys 9309 from Paris Gare du Nord bound nonstop for Amsterdam Centraal.

Always the same message in different languages, Vanessa thought; in this case, French won first place for brevity, while the Dutch and English phrases were longer and took about equal time to deliver.

She remembered a Hungarian friend in college telling her that the Hungarian and Finnish languages belonged to the same linguistic family. The complexities of human communication were fascinating, but she also knew she was letting her mind wander to avoid thinking about her confession to Chris. Now that she told him, there was no going back. She felt both relief and that terrified sense of diving off a cliff.

With a small sigh, Vanessa settled into her economy-class window seat on what regulars called the red train. The overall interior design and the seats with their purplish-red upholstery gave travelers the impression of being in an airplane without leaving the ground. European trains were the best: fast, economical, and free of the hassles of
flying. Unless, of course, one was flying on a private government plane.

Aisha had chosen a window seat across the aisle when they’d boarded at 0715.

Intending to review the file on Bogdan, Vanessa opened her laptop but then just stared blankly at the screen. She didn’t want to narrow her focus down to that small, framed world, but it would give her cover to secretly observe her traveling companion.

Immediately after taking her seat, Aisha had made a brief effort to pull her appearance together: She’d taken a brush from her bag but left it lying untouched on her lap; she applied colorless lip balm to her mouth; all the time her face remained half hidden behind very large, very dark sunglasses. Finally, she’d stuffed the brush back into her bag, and Vanessa almost missed the pills she shook from a tiny brown vial. Aisha’s hand was unsteady as she furtively tucked them into her mouth.

Were the pills something as simple as aspirin, or something else?

So far, no one had claimed either aisle seat between the women, but they still had another three hours before they reached Amsterdam. Fortunately, it was nonstop almost the entire way.

Grateful for the brief respite to focus her thoughts, Vanessa gazed out at the industrial areas bordering the tracks, her view obscured briefly by the snaking yellow flash of a passing train. She let her mind drift, something that lately felt like a luxury, edging around the new events of the past hours: the disturbing walk around the Cluny gardens with Chris and Peyton; the ghostly men seen on the footage retrieved by Zoe, Hays, and the tech maestros; the debrief on Bogdan Kovalenko and the startling change in Aisha’s appearance and demeanor; and flickering around it all, her own feelings about Khoury mixed up with questions about him and Aisha.

What is between them? Is there even a relationship? Why did Aisha appear at Khoury’s door in the early hours of the morning?
Somehow
Vanessa now felt sure it had been her traveling companion she’d seen crossing the street outside his apartment.
And what happened to make Aisha seem so altered?

“You want coffee?”

Startled, Vanessa turned to find Aisha hovering in the aisle.

“No, thanks, my blood is already ninety percent caffeine, but . . .”

“What?”

“Are you okay?”

Aisha’s mouth turned into a deep scowl. “Oh, I’m just fine.” As she turned to walk toward the café car, she said, “Maybe you should look after your own shit.”

Openmouthed, Vanessa stared after her.

Had Aisha known Vanessa was inside Khoury’s apartment when she stood outside his door? Could jealousy be driving her behavior?

She couldn’t ask Aisha those questions. But when she returned from Amsterdam, she would certainly have some pointed questions for Khoury.