Burned (Vanessa Pierson series Book 2) (3 page)

The jet boat bounced roughly to the dock at Quai Voltaire.

A silent driver behind the wheel of an idling black Mercedes waited just above Port des Saints-Pères; he would take them the few blocks from the Seine to the French service safe house on Boulevard Saint-Germain in the Sixième.

Jack slid into the back, and as Vanessa followed, she heard him sniff twice. She smelled it, too: The cocoa leather interior of the Mercedes held the faint tang of cigar smoke.

She took systematic inventory—of herself, of Jack. He had a large bruise darkening his left wrist, small abrasions freckling his face and hands, and she’d noticed him limping off the boat although he answered with a shrug when she asked about it. His clothes were filthy and bloodstained, as were hers. On herself, she found bruises and cuts on her elbows and forearms; her knees ached where she’d hit hard ground, and her cheeks and chin felt raw when she ran her fingers gingerly over her face. She worked to deny the headache, the pulsing shards of pain.

One image seemed permanently lodged in her consciousness: the bomber’s unflinching eyes staring through her in that last moment before detonation. An image she could never erase. Good, because she never wanted to forget. Those images were part of what motivated her to keep going, even when she was beyond exhaustion. They were part of what made her capable of doing her job.

Her breath came with a shudder and she forced her thoughts away and out—staring at the almost deserted Paris streets outside the window.

Without once uttering a word, the driver of the Mercedes let them out a short block from the elegant, still-imposing six-story seventeenth-century building, the location of their safe house. Just across Saint-Germain, the beautiful and historic Saint Thomas d’Aquin church graced the end of a narrow alley. It was visible from the master bedroom in the safe house, and after only a day in residence, Vanessa had already witnessed one wedding; she wondered when she would see a funeral.

She led the way through their building’s courtyard, which had once served horse-drawn carriages. The winter-barren rosebushes cast dull shadows against damp stones. She could hear Jack’s urgent footsteps behind her. When she glanced back, she caught the grimace on his face and she felt a pang of worry for him. Even the most experienced ops officers weren’t hardened to attacks and civilian casualties.

The entry door had been left ajar and the slightly musty-smelling ground-floor passage was deserted. When they were almost to the ornate and antique caged lift, Vanessa slowed, calling softly to Jack to do the same.

“I still can’t fit everything together . . . but I’m positive about one thing—the bomber was not my asset.”

Hays hovered at the door to let them into the apartment’s third-floor entry hall. His round face and owlish features were twisted by worry, eyes somber beneath thick brows; even so, he looked more like a dimpled tween than a twenty-five-year-old MIT honors graduate. And Vanessa, taking a little bit of comfort from what was familiar, thought he was a beautiful sight.

“Everybody okay?” he asked; his voice sounded strange, too high.

“Okay,” Jack said, at the same time Vanessa said, “Oh, we’re just peachy, Hays.” But when she saw the mortified expression on his face she shook her head apologetically. “Thanks for asking, though.”

Jack patted Hays on the back as Vanessa locked eyes on him. “I need to know you got a good frontal shot of the bomber so we can run him through the facial-recognition programs
.
We need to ID him and we need to do it fast. Tell me you got something, Hays, and I’ll owe you forever.”

“I’ll show you everything I got, but first—” Hays broke off with a nervous shrug.

A man stepped into view. He was holding an open laptop. Trim mustache, sharp nose over a downturned, sour mouth.

Hays answered Vanessa’s questioning look with a vague nod and a murmured, “
They
got here just before you.”

Now Vanessa saw a second man, this one wielding a yellow-cased instrument the size of a small radio. His nose and mouth were hidden beneath a white protective mask. He gestured to Jack.
“Arrêtez.”

“Dosimeter,” Jack drawled, standing still as the man passed it over his body.

“It was a dirty bomb?” A rush of panic hit Vanessa’s system.
A radiological dispersal device . . .
She whispered the question hoarsely to Hays, and then, before he could respond, she repeated it in French to the men. Neither looked directly at her; neither responded. She’d never claimed her French was perfect, but she knew she was at least intelligible.
Infuriating imperious French.

Hays held up both hands, palms flat against an invisible wall. “No, no—there’s no trace of radioactivity from the first bomb—”

“The
first
bomb?” Jack asked slowly.

Hays continued. “Police found a second bomb in a backpack at the Tuileries.” Still, he held his hands like small shields. “But it didn’t detonate.”

“Shit.” Vanessa stared blankly at Hays. The Tuileries, the royal garden of the Tuileries Palace, was only a stone’s throw from the Louvre. “A second bomb . . .”

“Why the hell didn’t it go off?” Jack asked, sounding incredulous. “Was it a dud?”

“Or a second bomber freaked out and dropped it,” Hays said. His Adam’s apple bobbed when he swallowed. “It was discovered only minutes after you and Jack left the scene.”

Jack squinted at his watch. “So forty minutes ago?”

“About. Police had fanned out from the courtyard, the explosion site, when they spotted the pack next to a bench. Just like our guys,
they’re equipped with PRDs, and they alerted the bomb squad before the media vans reached the scene.”

PRDs were personal radiation detectors, badges or digital devices smaller than a cigarette lighter. Vanessa’s throat felt unbearably dry. How many people might be affected? She swallowed hard. “How much radiation leaked?”

“A trace,” Hays said. “Just enough so the
démineurs
, the squad, are taking all the right precautions.”

Vanessa stared at Hays, still trying to take in this news. She felt as if she were underwater and had stayed down so long that her thoughts swirled around her like escaping bubbles of air. She heard Jack murmur, “Jesus . . .”

Hays nodded. “Imagine the damage if it had detonated . . .”

The thought of it scared the hell out of Vanessa.

Moving in slow motion, one of the Frenchmen passed the dosimeter just inches from her body, head to toe and back again.

She looked beyond him to Hays—mentally commanding herself to remain fully present. “What’s the chatter on the jihadi sites and social media? Is anybody claiming responsibility?”

“Noise off the charts,” Hays said. He gnawed on his lip as the masked guy with the wand gestured for Vanessa to turn. She did, her skin prickling as she imagined the wand almost touching her spine. Laptop Man kept staring at his screen.

“Lots of tweets, posts, and general chatter that it’s Hezbollah and Bhoot in retaliation for last year.” His eyes kept darting to Laptop Man, who was busy reading the stream of data. “But no one’s stepping up personally to take credit.”

Vanessa almost jumped when the dosimeter beeped once. Laptop Man shook his head, apparently not alarmed. Wand Guy kept doing his thing. After a few seconds, Vanessa remembered to breathe.

“As soon as you can,” Hays mumbled. “Headquarters wants a video conference.”

Vanessa nodded, eyeing Hays intently as she mouthed,
What about Chris?
Referring to Chris Arvanitis, her direct supervisor at CPD. Chris had been in Greece for several weeks on TDY (temporary tour of duty), but she hoped he was reachable and would be on the call. He had her back—they’d been through a lot together and she trusted him.

Tracking him down,
Hays mouthed in reply.

Vanessa nodded. “In the meantime I need a solid photo of the bomber. And pull up a map with the location of the second device.”

“I’ll get on both of those for you right now,” Hays said, inching backward to his primary computer.

For the next few minutes—although it felt like hours—the Frogs stared at their laptop and conferred quietly in rapid-fire, utterly unintelligible French.

Finally, Laptop Man looked up before rendering his verdict in perfect English. “Okay, you’re clean. But if we were you, we’d ditch the clothes.”

As soon as the French techs were out the door, Vanessa grabbed a shower, the water just shy of scalding. She scrubbed her skin with a soapy washcloth. And then she scrubbed herself again until she was pink and blotchy. She knew she couldn’t scour off radiation, but still the water felt heavenly and way beyond cleansing.

Out of the shower, she avoided looking at her balled-up clothes—filthy and bloody and pushed into a corner. A quick check of her face revealed the scratches and abrasions she’d felt before, risen to freckle-sized welts now. The blood that had shaded a few strands of her blond hair was gone, rinsed away. The right side of her wide mouth had swollen temporarily. She had a bruise under one blue eye, and both eyes were bloodshot. When she wiggled her nose, nothing hurt. Her ears still rang a bit, but that would go away soon. Or at least she hoped it would.

When she was dressed in jeans and a sweater, Hays handed her a bag and she gingerly used it to dispose of her clothes in the kitchen trash.

Jack reappeared from the master suite bathroom. Judging by the
bright red hue of his skin, he’d scrubbed even harder than Vanessa had. He wore too-short sweatpants and a T-shirt scrounged up by Hays.

Now Hays signaled to Vanessa and Jack to follow him into the office. The safe house was one of the nicest she’d ever seen. One block west, Boulevard Saint-Germain, Boulevard Raspail, and Rue du Bac converged at a vital intersection. Two blocks north on Rue du Bac and you’d run into the Seine and beyond that the Louvre. Métro stops were close by. The expensive Left Bank neighborhood had afforded proximity for this operation—still, the elegant amenities were evidence that the DCRI certainly apportioned their resources differently than the CIA. Score one for French style.

The apartment was softly U-shaped, with the kitchen and formal dining room at one end of the U, and two small guest bedrooms at the other. The larger master suite (with its view of the church of Saint Thomas d’Aquin), along with the adjacent office and living room, had been converted into the apartment’s nerve center. Within those three adjoining rooms, computers hummed and competing and constantly shifting images—from open-source news and surveillance feeds, CCTV, and myriad links—filled half a dozen monitors. Footage of the explosion captured by tourists and visitors on their cell phones and cameras was already running on TF1, France 2, and Al Jazeera.

On a separate monitor feeding directly from a security camera, Vanessa eyed live footage of the Paris bomb-squad vans—
fourgons de déminage
—parked in the Tuileries. A dozen personnel were on-site, several in full-body EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) suits. She spotted a portable X-ray system used for initial radiography of the device, and an EOD robot, no doubt with a gas-tight chamber made to withstand multiple shots while containing chemical, biological, or radioactive agents. But before they did any of the complex work, officials were covering the site with a huge white tent—protection from unauthorized cameras, journalists, and curious spectators. They
weren’t taking any chances as they stabilized and removed the RDD from the royal garden.

This footage was definitely not on the news stations. Until it became absolutely necessary, French authorities would not release any information on an unexploded dirty bomb to the public. Not unless they wanted wide-scale panic.

She peered at the action on the monitor. Suited bomb-squad personnel were extremely careful where they set up equipment. She had to force herself to look away from the scene to focus on Hays.

His eyes had been on her. “We’ve never been so effing lucky,” he said softly.

He zipped open one of several duffel bags, dug around for half a minute while discovering and setting aside several electronic devices—until he finally pulled out a black handheld device with two extendible antennas.

“You guys probably need to get some coffee, maybe something to eat,” he said in a voice that was slightly theatrical. He turned up the volume on one of the monitors. Then he activated the handheld device and it responded with a slightly plaintive digital bleep. He extended one antenna and began a slow-motion dance around the room.

Now he looked at Vanessa, his eyebrows raised.

She nodded and mouthed,
Bug sweeper?

After all the NSA revelations over the course of the past year and the admissions from other governments that their spy programs were also amped up, no one expected privacy. Not one inch of the safe house was truly safe—they all knew that. For the U.S. team, this was a French safe house equipped and maintained by DCRI.
Always assume the walls have ears.

Hays acknowledged, moving his bushy brows up-down-up.

Jack shrugged, heading for the kitchen, apparently taking Hays’s suggestion to find coffee.

Hays made his way into the adjoining office as Vanessa sat,
balancing her laptop on her thighs, logging in to her secure screen. She found an instant message waiting for her from IM tag X32, Zoe Liang—a thirty-two-year-old laser-sharp analyst at Headquarters.

Zoe and Vanessa had butted heads more than once—hackles rose on both of them the very first day they met. Now, going on three years of working together, they definitely were not friends. But last fall, on Operation Ghost Hunt, Zoe had helped Vanessa track and identify Bhoot’s Chechen hit man. And Vanessa knew the analyst had developed a grudging respect for her. In fact, over the course of the past year they had managed to build a sense of mutual appreciation. Maybe even trust . . .

X32: OK?

Vanessa had to delete and retype her simple response twice—her fingers didn’t want to find the keys. Finally, she got it right and hit return.

044: we r ok—who? Bhoot?

X32: no takers yet

044: 2nd device?

X32: on it—be careful cuz someone wants you in middle of hornets nest

And almost immediately followed by:

X32: still there?

044: here

Zoe’s warning had stopped her fingers cold for a few seconds because she knew the analyst was right.

044: will take care thx

X32: we’ll get the SOBs

Vanessa smiled wearily and then she typed.

044: copy that

She closed out of messaging knowing that Zoe would be in touch as soon as there was even the slightest link to a group claiming responsibility for the bombing.

Within days of the attempt on MI5’s director-general last fall, both U.S. and UK intelligence services had formed their respective task forces—there could no longer be any question that security had been severely breached. They had a mole to ferret out—a mole feeding highly classified intelligence to Bhoot, the black market nuclear arms dealer.

The task force would be looking within the Agency and outside as well. The traitor was (a) someone hacking into the most highly secured servers, or (b) someone who already had access. The pool of potential suspects was massive.

Zoe Liang had been picked to serve on the Agency’s internal task force.

Vanessa looked up from her laptop to find Hays standing in the doorway to the dining room. He held the sweeper in one hand and a ceramic lamp in the other.

Jack appeared from the kitchen gnawing slowly on a sandwich. He stopped about six feet behind Hays, chewing thoughtfully.

“Hey,” Hays said loudly to Vanessa. “Toss me my laptop case, will ya?”

Before she could look around for the case, Hays smashed the lamp to the floor, where it seemed to explode and pieces flew everywhere.

“You’re not playing on my team—you hit the lamp!” Hays said, mugging.

Vanessa waved her middle finger and smiled. “Oops, sorry about that. I must still be shaky.”

Hays began rooting around among the pieces on the floor. He stood and stomped around heavily several times. After a moment, he collected a broken black bug and held it up in his fingers, his expression triumphant.

But he didn’t have time to celebrate. Monitors came to life behind him.

Hays swiveled around, thrusting an index finger at Vanessa. “We’ve got the feed from Headquarters, you’re on.”