Burned (Vanessa Pierson series Book 2) (6 page)

Walking quickly, Vanessa covered the last dozen meters to the cordoned outer perimeter of the site. Dozens of spectators still huddled behind the barriers at the Place du Carrousel. A uniformed security officer opened one of the barriers to let her pass. For a moment, she stared down the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe—commissioned by Napoléon in 1806 as a monument to his military victories but not completed until fifteen years after his death.

A quote from Graham Greene’s
The Quiet American
came to mind: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.” She owned all of Greene’s works, given to her by her longtime Agency friend and mentor Charles Janek. The books even merited their very own shelf in her apartment in Nicosia on Cyprus. She loved the author’s exploration of the ambivalent morals of life; his view captured her experiences so far in the CIA.

She thrust her hands in her pockets, suddenly realizing she’d left her wallet behind at the safe house when Fournier rushed her out. It mattered little; the only vehicles on the street belonged to officials.
No cabs or buses were running, at least not in this part of the city. She would have to walk back to the safe house, but, honestly, after all that had happened, she welcomed the opportunity to be alone and clear her head despite the weather.

She turned in the direction of the Seine but faltered when a teenage boy almost bumped into her before he tried to thrust something into her hand.

She pushed it away, but he pushed it back at her, stuttering,
“L’homme l’a d-d-d-dit—”

“Quel homme?”
She stared at the phone in his outstretched hand.
“Où est-il maintenant?”

What man? Where is he now?

The teenager offered a slouchy shrug. “
Il a dit que vous le sauriez.”

He said you would know.

And then, as the boy turned away, he tossed the phone in the air.

She caught it on reflex before it hit the ground.

It rang—scaring the hell out of her, vibrating in her palm.

But she still raised it to her ear.

“Hello, Vanessa.”

A shock immediately ran through her body. She’d never heard his voice before, but she knew this had to be Bhoot, CPD’s target—Vanessa’s obsession. The man had authorized no less than a half-dozen assassinations of his enemies. Her anger flared, barely in check, but she forced herself to regain calm. She wanted—
needed
—information.

In the momentary silence, she heard the susurrus of his breath.

“Remembering why you detest me?” he asked.

His voice sounded weak, as if he were using a marginal computer connection. She placed his accent as British, but his deep, whispery voice was laced with the underlying tones of another language impossible to place.

“Yes.”

“I admire your honesty, Vanessa.”

She shifted on her feet, abruptly cold. With his phone held between her chin and shoulder, her hands slid frantically into her pockets—where was her phone? She had to record him. She couldn’t let this moment slip away. She’d never forgive herself if she did.

He exhaled sharply. “We both know this number is untraceable. If you try to record me, or if you lie to me, I will hang up. If you are truthful—well, either way we have little time.”

Vanessa’s fingers gripped the phone. Was he watching her now? The cold rain had picked up again. She scanned the streets.

“You’re stalling, we’re done—”

“I’m alive!” she said quickly, forcing the words through clenched teeth. “Your bomb missed me.”

Keep him talking. Memorize every word of this conversation.

“If I had tried to kill you today, you’d be dead.”

“Don’t deny it, you injured scores of innocent people and murdered three.”

“Four,” he said. “The tally has risen. But that wasn’t my work. You should recognize that.”

A fourth death
—but she couldn’t afford to go there, not now. “Why should I believe you?”

“Believe the evidence.” Contempt bled through his words. “A pipe bomb carried by a boy? A dirty bomb—
a dud
—left in the Tuileries? A lurid Internet execution played for shock value? Does that really strike you as my style?”

No—the internal admission instantly left her deflated. But maybe that was what he wanted—to stage an attack that defied his profile. Jesus, it was like searching for one true image in a house of mirrors.

“How do you know about the RDD?” She felt eyes and saw the female officer who’d argued with Fournier staring at her from a distance. Vanessa turned away, cupping the phone tautly. “That information hasn’t been released.”

“I don’t get my news from CNN,” he snapped derisively. “My sources are my own.”

She thought instantly of the mole inside the Agency and felt a flicker of insight—but just then Bhoot’s voice snuffed the tiny flame.

“One minute and we’re done.”

“If you aren’t responsible for the bombing, who is True Jihad?”

“If I knew we would not be having a conversation. I have only my suspicions.”

“So you called me to—
what?
Gloat? Your Chechen killed good men. I worked with three of them—” She froze as anger locked up her throat. “You had them executed in cold blood.”

Silence. Had she lost him?

But then, in a harsh whisper, he said, “You took something from me. A trusted associate.”

“What? Your psychopath for hire?”

With the hard intake of his breath she realized too late—on some weird level Bhoot had cared about the man she’d just scorned.

She felt his finger reaching to disconnect—

“What do you want from me?” she asked desperately. “Don’t play games. Why are you calling?”

“I want what is
mine
.” His rage surfaced, a fin slicing through cold seas. “Your government inflicted damage to my interests. And now someone has set me up—” He cut himself off.

Was he referring to the nuclear device he’d smuggled out of Iran? “What are you talking about—was something taken from you? Was it a weapon?” she prompted. “We’ve heard rumors—”

“True Jihad—I can’t help you there—” He cut himself off. “But the suicide bombing is a
diversion,
a
distraction
.” He let the silence hold for several seconds. “Can you afford to lie to yourself at this moment, Vanessa?
Think
—if I’m taking this risk, if I tell you I’ve been betrayed and what is mine has been stolen, think what might be set loose in the world.”

She faltered, light-headed. She had to swallow twice, painfully, to find her voice again. “Then give me something to work with.”

“You’ve got it wrong. First you give me something, Vanessa . . .”

As he lingered on the last syllables of her name, he let her hear the faintest note of triumph.

Her gut tightened. “If you think I would betray my country, you’re a fool.”

“You’re right, I’d be a fool to think that. I know how patriotic and loyal you are—I know it runs deep in your family.”

Violation punched through her like a fist. “What do you know about my family?”

“I know your father served his country for many years.”

“How dare you speak of my father—”

“Our time is up for now. Where we go from here in the future depends upon your answer, your honesty. Just one final question . . .”

“What?”

“You do realize that we’ve both been betrayed?”

Through the silence she braced against a wave of vertigo. But then she was filled with a visceral certainty. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Don’t try to pretend we’re somehow allies—
we share nothing.
”

His silence stretched through her eerie sense of calm—until her rising panic pushed through. “I’ve answered your question,” she said, speaking fast. “So now you hold your side of the bargain. Give me something—”

“But you already have it.” His breath came more rapidly, as if he were on the move. “Isn’t the adage ‘a bird in the cage’?”

“No, it’s ‘a bird in the hand’—”

“You caged him, Vanessa.”

“Who—”

But the phone had gone dead.

Still shielding her actions from curious eyes, she wrapped the cell
in her scarf and slipped it into her jacket pocket. For a moment she simply stood in place, unable to move.

One or two people passed her as they abandoned their vigil at the bomb site.

Something broke free internally and she began to walk back toward the river. The sense of violation intensified with each sodden step.

She couldn’t quiet his voice in her head if she wanted: his muted words and theatrical concern, the cold contempt when his mask slipped briefly, and, finally, the satisfaction—consummation, almost—when he got what he’d been after.

He’d breached her defenses—at least that’s what he believed. And he would test her where she was most vulnerable—her fixation on him. It didn’t take a degree in psych to get that Bhoot was a control freak and he thrived on manipulation. But she could handle him—that’s what she told herself even as foreboding flooded through her for an instant.

She let it pass and turned her focus back to their conversation, replaying it silently again and again. When she reached the safe house she would get pencil and paper and write it all down.

She pulled her jacket tightly around her body. It didn’t block the cold. Nothing could.

How was Bhoot able to track her? He must have surveillance on her. But was there more than one person following her? The angry woman who forced her to the perimeter? Someone else? Bhoot seemed to possess almost unlimited resources. It could be anyone.

And was Bhoot responsible? She wanted to believe he was—then she could focus her rage on tracking him down. Was this feint part of his game?

She checked herself—she’d been walking almost blindly. She stopped, turning to orient herself and to see who was nearby. But other than a few pedestrians in the distance and hurrying in other
directions, she was alone. She glanced down at the choppy waters of the Seine.

For that moment, the darkness of the suicide bomber, the resulting carnage and death, and Bhoot’s malevolence, all seemed capable of dimming the City of Light. But the fight rose in her and she breathed, pulling herself up, opening to Paris and its beauty and life.

And then it came to her—

Isn’t the adage ‘a bird in the cage’? . . . You caged him, Vanessa.

She shook her head, exhaling when she made the connection. The only person Bhoot could be talking about was arms dealer Dieter Schoeman—until last year, his number-one man in South Africa. But now Dieter was caged in the UK in Belmarsh. Thanks in good part to Vanessa; she’d helped the Brits capture him during their Operation Ulysses.

You caged him . . .
Dieter was one of only a handful of Bhoot’s associates Vanessa had helped imprison—and he was certainly the most important one.

Could Bhoot be telling the truth that True Jihad’s bombing was a diversion?

A diversion for what?
They had executed Farid and murdered innocent civilians, the deaths were real, the blood was real.

But if not Bhoot, then who were these new terrorists?

She heard his voice replay once more: “. . . if I’m taking this risk, if I tell you I’ve been betrayed and what is mine has been stolen, think what might be set loose in the world.”

At that moment, his words had rung true.

And that made her very afraid.

Just before 1900 hours, Vanessa took the lift two flights up to the safe house on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Her headache had almost disappeared, perhaps numbed by the deep chill that had crept into her bones from the walk through Paris.

On the intentionally zigzag route back, at least she’d been able to verify that no one had followed her. She had been outstanding in her class at the Farm in identifying surveillance.

The lift stopped and she slid the ornate cage open onto the dimly glowing entrance hall. The apartment, dark behind frosted glass, showed no sign of life. Had everyone left? The French and Jack to their respective residences, Hays to whatever hostel he could afford with his 100-euro per diem. (CIA tech guys loved getting the cheapest place possible and pocketing the difference in their per diem from the USG.) Just this morning she’d reminded him to make use of the safe-house bath and kitchen, which were obviously superior to whatever a hostel had to offer, but it would be nice to have some solitude.

As she punched in the key code, she heard the soft murmur of voices coming from inside. At almost the same time the door opened and she found herself face-to-face with Chris Arvanitis.

He beat her to words, saying, “Damn, Vanessa, you look worse than I feel.”

She gave him a quick hug. “I’m happy to see you, too,” she said simply.

“Ditto,” Chris said, his expression serious.

“I have so much to tell you,” she said, shrugging out of her damp jacket and hurriedly draping it on a hook of the old-fashioned coat rack. She was reenergized by Chris’s presence. “I just came from the site and a walk-through with Marcel Fournier, but I had—”

She broke off as Hays appeared from the living room carrying two steaming mugs. He held them out in offering. “Very hot, very bitter coffee.”

Chris took one and Hays pressed the other into Vanessa’s hands before reaching around her to nab his coat off the rack. “I’m on my way over to the Station. They have a possible match on your bomber—and we’re going to put a rush on the analysis of some DNA taken from the site—they’ve got better toys, so I’m out of here.” He two-stepped restlessly toward the door.

“Let me know the instant you find out anything on the bomber’s ID,” Vanessa said. “And Hays, I heard that a fourth victim died?”

“A forty-two-year-old man,” Hays said soberly.

Vanessa nodded wearily. So not the girl. Yet. She stood on tiptoe to give Hays a quick hug. He blinked in surprise, but his smile was the last thing she saw as he closed the door.

As the lock clicked in place behind Hays, Vanessa turned to Chris. “Give me one minute?” She was already walking toward the apartment’s third bedroom—hers—index finger raised to signify “one.” “And make yourself at home.”

Alone, she dropped onto the neatly made bed and covered her face
with her palms. Hays had put a damper on her first impulse to tell Chris everything, beginning with her call from Bhoot. Now she’d had time to second-guess that. What if he declared her burned and pulled her off the team? He had the power to do that. She ran her hands from her face across the top of her head, smoothing her hair back. Her cheeks stung where debris had cut her skin. She found a few Advil she’d left on the bedside table and she gulped them down with a stale glass of water.

What the hell am I getting myself into?

But now wasn’t the time to give in to doubts. She had to follow her instincts—they’d led her this close to Bhoot. And she wouldn’t lie to Chris again. She had let him down before by withholding the truth about her relationship with her colleague David Khoury. The awfulness of her betrayal still stung. But their professional and personal relationship had survived. She respected Chris enormously and thought of him as a true friend—rare enough in general, but even rarer in her world.

She pulled a weathered Moleskine notepad from the drawer and found a pen on the floor. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and after a moment, her hand began to push the pen rapidly across the page, using her own version of shorthand to write down her conversation with Bhoot.

—

“ACTUALLY, YOUR ‘ONE MINUTE’
lasted eight minutes, twenty seconds,” Chris said, when she found him in the living room, seated on the worn silk loveseat.

She raised her eyebrows. “Glad you missed me.” She took the chair next to him, setting her now lukewarm mug of coffee on the antique side table between them. They were alone in the apartment, with the white-noise hum of computers punctuated by the syncopated drip from the leaky kitchen faucet.

Chris shifted position on the loveseat so his knees almost touched Vanessa’s. He studied her intently—Phi Beta Kappa and Mensa; the look lasted a matter of seconds, but still she almost squirmed. In her pocket, Bhoot’s phone pushed uncomfortably against her thigh.
Where to start?

He beat her to the punch.

“We’ve heard from the analysts who’ve been going over the video of your asset’s execution. Their very preliminary call: It was videotaped outside Paris, probably in a rustic outbuilding at a rural location where a gunshot would barely register—” He glanced at his watch. “Roughly twenty-two hours ago.”

Quickly calculating in her head, she asked, “How could they know that already?”

Chris eased his position, but he still stayed rod-straight; he worked out, pumped weights, kept more than fit and ready. He chose his words with care: “You know they can magnify the light in a subject’s eyes one thousand times and pick up all sorts of reflections . . .”

“So Farid was already dead when I was waiting to meet with him.” She wasn’t asking a question, so Chris stayed quiet.

She lifted the mug toward her mouth. “No report of a body dumped somewhere?”

“Not yet, no match.”

She nodded briskly, trying to convey professionalism but feeling empty. “Right.” She set the mug down again, coffee untouched. She let the painful feeling pass, looking back at Chris just as he shook his head.

He said, “I’m sorry that we’re here again—with another loss. Truly sorry, Vanessa.”

“One part of me thought the deaths would stop now that the Chechen’s dead, but another part knew . . . this is a nightmare.” She turned her face toward the French doors to the balcony that overlooked the front courtyard and the street. A slice of the rainy darkness
beyond the glass showed through where the drapery edges didn’t quite meet. When she spoke, her voice was a rocky whisper. “Have you noticed that everyone I touch turns up dead?”

“Don’t talk that way.” He lowered his voice. “You’ve proven who was behind everything that happened last year.”

“At what cost?”

Bhoot’s whispered question replayed internally:
“You do realize that we’ve both been betrayed?”

For much of the past three years, CPD had focused resources on Ghost Hunt—the operation aimed at unraveling Bhoot’s massive network and unmasking his identity.

And over the last year, she’d felt the heat and excitement of the investigation and the sense the team was drawing closer to identifying him. Following the Chechen’s trail, Vanessa and CPD discovered executions dating back years—and most important, they’d been able to find a money trail implicating Bhoot as the mastermind behind those assassinations.

But those wins were accompanied by human losses, which were pinned on her.

“Hey . . . Vanessa.”

It was Chris, prompting her back to the present.

She blinked, turning her focus outward again. “We still don’t know
who
is passing our ghost his information so he can compromise my ops.” Even with a full-time Agency task force bent on finding a mole, they hadn’t ferreted him—or her—out. And Vanessa knew as well as Chris that the Agency’s track record on finding moles quickly was, in a word, dismal.

Chris raised one palm. “Give them time to get results, Vanessa.”

“We don’t have time!”

Vanessa’s thoughts were racing now, her mind filled with too many questions to allow her to make connections. She stared at Chris. “Why me?”

Chris frowned. “I know it feels like you’ve been singled out—”

“No, I mean,
why me?
I
have
been singled out. Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to set me up. They kidnapped my asset and sent a double so . . . so I’d get blown up, too? Doesn’t make sense.”

“No, it doesn’t, and I don’t like any of it,” Chris said. “You sure you want in on Team Viper?”

“I can’t believe you’d even ask that question.”

He scrubbed one hand atop his buzz-cut hair, a habit when he wasn’t at ease with his own thoughts. “We’re going to have to declare you to the French.”

“Shit,” she breathed. Her career was careening everywhere—from highs to lows to potentially nonexistent, and it was hard to keep up and sort it all out.

“It’s an order from Headquarters and I don’t see any way around it, I’m sorry. After today, after everything that went down last year, you’re too inside of this whole thing.”

Resistance sparked through her even though she knew he was right. It wasn’t a step Chris took lightly—every time an ops officer is declared to a foreign service, her effectiveness is diminished—they both knew that. She picked at the edge of her sweater, but her eyes stayed on him.

“The best we can do is stick to first names,” Chris said, staring into his coffee mug. He made a face, looking around restively. “Is there anything stronger?”

Without a word, Vanessa walked the short distance to her room to retrieve the half-full bottle of Blanton’s from the side table. She also collected her lighter and an unopened pack of Dunhills, pushing them into her sweater pocket.

As she returned, she held up the bottle. “Hey, look what I found. And I haven’t collected this particular stopper yet,” she added, referring to the distinctive series of unique bottle plugs. She knew it was a
little juvenile, having a collection of
anything, but it amused her. It also connected her to her father’s memory; Blanton’s had been one of his favorites.

As she poured three fingers of bourbon into each of their mugs, Chris eyed the bottle appreciatively. “Either the French have seriously upgraded the amenities in their safe houses, highly unlikely, or—”

“This is my personal upgrade from a little shop down the street.” She managed a lopsided half-smile. “Glad you’re here.”

“Glad you’re alive,” Chris responded—but his eyes went to her hand that held the drink. She was shaking so badly the amber liquid shivered up the sides of the glass.

Vanessa clamped her free hand on her wrist. “Sorry. I’ve managed to keep it together all day until now.”

“I’d be worried if you weren’t shaking after everything that happened. You are, after all, human.”

She bit her lip and nodded as Chris clicked his glass against hers. He took a slow sip, watching her as she swallowed half the glass of bourbon. It went down tasting of fire and honey.

Vanessa set her mug hard on the pitted, stained wood of the Beaux-Arts table. “So that’s that . . .”

She knew it was pointless to argue. She would survive the declaration—at least it meant she was officially on Team Viper, in spite of possible pushback from Fournier. And indeed, if the French had placed more than one bug in the safe house, she’d been declared anyway.

“Chris, there’s something else . . .” She said it slowly, tiptoeing verbally so that he looked up, frowning. She could no longer put off the subject of Bhoot’s phone call.

“I already know I won’t like this.” He gave her another look, brown eyes narrowed to slits. “Shit.” He pulled something from his pocket—
the blue-beaded amulet on his key ring. It provided protection against evil, according to his Greek
yia yia
, grandmother, and Chris’s philosophy was, Why not cover all the bases?

He said, “Go ahead.”

Vanessa quickly topped off the bourbon in her mug. She shot it back, almost inhaling down the wrong pipe, coughing to recover. She pulled the notepad from her back pocket, set it down, tapping the shorthand notes she’d scrawled there.

Chris shook his head when she held up the bourbon, the offer of another pour. “C’mon, Vanessa, now you’re stalling.”

Her fingers had contracted into fists and she relaxed them with effort.
Already in too deep.

She dug into her hip pocket and pulled out the phone she’d wrapped in her scarf. “I wanted to trash this—but maybe, just maybe, Hays can work a miracle and get something off it.”

“What is it?” Chris asked.

She carefully placed the phone on the table, locking eyes with Chris as she mouthed,
Bhoot.

She stood and gestured to the French doors to the apartment’s balcony. “Come on outside, I need a smoke, and I don’t want to stink up such a beautiful safe house . . .”

Physically bracing himself, Chris shook his head.
What?

But he followed her outside onto the balcony.

She tapped one from the pack, picked up the lighter, and clicked to flame.

“I thought you quit,” Chris said, tone quizzical.

“I did.” Vanessa inhaled like a diver coming up for air. She held the smoke in her lungs for seconds before she exhaled slowly. “I do. Regularly.” She reached under the neck of her sweater to her upper left arm, nudging the edge of a Nicoderm patch and ripping it free.