Burned (Vanessa Pierson series Book 2) (8 page)

She slept deeply, as if his arms around her kept the world’s darkness at bay, at least for these hours. She drifted up to awareness just enough to feel lucky and grateful for his warmth, his strength.

It was different when she woke to the gentle yet persistent nudge of him against her thigh. She thought he was drifting, too, half awake and aroused. She drew out the minutes until she turned her face to his and met his mouth with hers.

“Habibti,”
he said, burying his face against the hollow of her neck, lips warm and wet on her skin. An Arabic term of endearment—for a lover or for a child.

He rarely said more than that—partly his natural wariness, a quality she could match in spades, and partly because of the covert nature of their jobs, the complexity of their lives.

But now he surprised her. “God, I’ve missed you . . . I can’t stand being away from you . . .”

She melted, falling into the heat and the sensuality and the chance to forget the horrible events of the previous day.

But just then Chris flashed through her thoughts. “Wait, wait . . . we shouldn’t, it’s wrong. I made a promise . . .”

“Why is it wrong?” Khoury whispered softly. “I love you, and I’m pretty sure you love me.” He pulled her body tightly against his. “Do you love me?”

“David . . . it’s not that simple . . .”

“Vanessa, do you love me?”

“Oh . . .” She’d been through the pain of missing him, aching for his touch, the grief and the loss of him—and now he was asking her to open up again, to risk everything again.

A shudder ran through him . . . into her.

She breathed her answer. “Yes.”

All she heard in reply were his very faint words, “Love you . . .”

The hush of breathing invaded the murky waters of Vanessa’s dream and she tried to swim her way to the surface. She reached out—
David?
—feeling for her lover’s warmth, feeling the heaviness of desire throughout her body even as she realized: He’d left her bed hours ago.

Her eyes shot open and she stared up at someone standing just inside the doorway.

That someone muttered, “Sorry.”

“Hays?” She grabbed the covers, pulling them to her throat, and bolting halfway up. “What’s happened? The dirty bomb—is there something new?”

“No, no, all status quo, didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, looking rumpled and caffeine-fueled—and was he blushing slightly?

“Then what?” She tugged the sheet around her bare shoulders. “Why are you in my room?” she asked, keeping her tone nice but firm.

“We’ve got something on the bomber—and mostly black holes on True Jihad—and Chris called to say he’ll be running late because of
an exchange with Headquarters and he wants you to greet Team Viper and get them settled . . . so . . . well”—he barely glanced at his large red wristwatch—“0619 hours. You should get dressed.”

“Got it. Thanks.” This time she let the sarcasm show, but he didn’t even notice.

Wait. Where did David toss my T-shirt and boxers? And why did I let myself fall back asleep once he left?
“Okay, I’m grabbing a thirty-second shower.”

“Sure,” he said, stumbling over his own feet as he backed out the door.

“But Hays”—she stopped him—“what about the bomber?”

His eyes flitted toward the bed’s brass headboard, and she caught a glimpse of her boxers inside out and flagged on a post.

He tried to look serious, but his mouth curved briefly into a crooked smile.

She kept her expression flat. “Gary Martin Hays,” she prompted, enunciating each syllable of his name. “The bomber?”

“Right. Remember Abdul Hasib al-Attas . . .”

“Yes . . .”

“Remember he married an American woman before he found his calling to move back to Yemen and climb the ranks of Al Qaeda?”

“C’mon, Hays, get to the point—Abdul’s been dead for more than a year.”

Hays shrugged. “And now it looks like his son Omar is dead, too, following the call of jihad. We haven’t confirmed DNA, but—”

“The bomber was Abdul’s American-born son? Shit.
Shit.
” She pulled the sheet with her as she almost jumped out of bed. “So he was recruited? By True Jihad? Are they even a part of Al Qaeda in Yemen?”

“We still need DNA confirmation, but we’ve got a solid match via facial ID,” Hays said slowly. “The weirdest thing, True Jihad, they don’t show up on anybody’s radar until about ten days ago when a bare-bones website launched. So we haven’t connected the dots yet—
between Abdul al-Attas and Al Qaeda and Omar—but they might be there. We’re looking through every haystack.” He frowned so hard the skin on his forehead creased into a knot. “But you know, Shia-Sunni-wise, why would Al Qaeda insert itself into something that really concerns the Iranians?”

Bhoot’s words whispered through Vanessa’s thoughts:
“. . . what is mine has been stolen . . .”

A chill stung her skin. “So they can get their hands on a prototype of a miniaturized nuke,” she said, as much to herself as to Hays.

Less than four minutes after Hays left her room, Vanessa stepped out of the shower aware of new activity in the safe house: Hays holding his ground as the French tech crew set up, some bilingual bantering, the robust smell of slightly burnt coffee beans.

She toweled off quickly as she grabbed the bra and underpants she’d remembered to wash out with hand soap last night. They weren’t quite dry, but she put them on at the same time she brushed her teeth. She stepped into wrinkle-proof light gray slacks and pulled on a mauve sweater, fitted but not too tight.

Base with sunscreen, tinted lip gloss, mascara—she knew all too well the power of presentation. She draped a gray-and-rose-hued scarf around her neck—an impulse bargain buy next to the checkout counter in the French chain Pimkie. Even though she wasn’t confident when it came to the knot, she decided to wear the scarf anyway—de rigueur for French women.

She was, after all, a female in Paris
and
a woman on an international team where you brought your game to the table.

She ran a brush through her hair to pick up the natural shine;
stepped into soft Isabel Marant ankle boots, a recent and very big splurge. One last check in the mirror, and she was ready to greet Team Viper, as per Chris’s orders.

She found Hays still hovering between screens in the study-turned-tech-lair. She quickly cornered him. “Any update from Chris? Did he say when he’d be here?” Was he arranging access to Dieter Schoeman? she wondered silently.

Hays shrugged, barely looking at her because he was too caught up in watching the strands of numbers running across one monitor, looping CCTV footage of the Louvre courtyard on the second, and the surveillance photos of the suicide bomber, Omar, on the third.

She pressed her lips together and moved her gaze from the disturbing images to the spray of tiny fiber pills covering the back of Hays’s green-and-blue-striped polyester sweater. “I know you’re doing a hundred things at once, Hays, but I really need you to add one more to the list—and maybe do it now so if you find what I think you might find, we can bring it to the Team Viper meeting.”

Now he did look at her. “What?”

“I need you to nose around in open source, see if any events from yesterday—robberies, security disruptions, I don’t know what else—stand out, where the timing coincides with the bombing. Discrete events that happened in that same time frame.”

Again she heard the echo of Bhoot’s accusations:
“But the suicide bombing is a diversion, a distraction.”

“You’re thinking it was like a magic trick?” He blinked his owl eyes at her. “The RDD was a diversion for something else, something bigger?”

“I think it’s possible,” Vanessa said.

Hays cut his eyes away, following some vanishing point. When he looked at her again, he said, “That would be bad.”

At 0643, Vanessa took a deep breath and then breezed into the dining room to find five people already seated around the table, laptops open, coffee cups close. The French on one side, Americans opposite—operations officers closest to the still-vacant head of the table, techs at the far end nearest the kitchen. Unspoken divisions but clearly understood by all; territory marked without the piss.

Jack motioned to Vanessa to take the empty seat to his left—putting her contiguous to lead and opposite the seriously unfriendly woman who’d chewed her out at the Louvre.

Stepping over a snake’s den of cable and wire, Vanessa set down her coffee and laptop, but she did not sit. She straightened her posture before reaching across the table to introduce herself. “Vanessa.” Continuing in French:
“Sorry I didn’t properly introduce myself yesterday. I didn’t realize you were part of this team.”

The woman looked up, reading Vanessa with striking brown eyes defined by dark, arching brows against olive skin. Just past thirty, Vanessa gauged. With her classic bone structure; wide, full lips; and thick cascade of dark curls, she was undeniably beautiful.

But her expression was stony. In stark contrast to the intense emotions she’d displayed yesterday, her features were as composed as if she’d donned a mask. And she took a few seconds longer than necessary before she said, “Yes, I remember now.”

Without visibly reacting to the snub, Vanessa turned her attention to her notes. She had a meeting to open for Chris and no time to spare for the distraction of dramatic petty turf games.

She looked up and around the table, noting one empty seat between the woman and a man who was now nodding amiably to everyone.

“Good morning, I’m Jean.” His English carried a heavy French accent. “And my colleague is Aisha.”

And that set off a chain of quick first-name introductions all the way down to the French techs, one of whom Vanessa recognized as the sour-mouthed dosimeter guy from yesterday—his name today was Canard.

Duck?
Really?
With an internal shrug, she let it pass.

As good a time as any, Vanessa thought. She scanned the faces at the table and said, “Good morning, I want to welcome everyone to Team Viper. I’m standing in for Chris—some of you already know him. And he will introduce himself when he arrives momentarily.”

As Vanessa took a quick sip of her coffee, she felt a new presence in the room. She glanced toward the door expecting Chris or Fournier. Instead, she met David Khoury’s eyes.

Breathe.

But her hand betrayed her, tipping just enough so that coffee stung her chin and she sucked in air.

He kept moving, letting his gaze brush past Vanessa, almost pulling off the studied ease. But she saw the tension in his throat where he caught and held uncomfortable emotions. Like excitement tinged with apprehension, for instance.

Why the hell didn’t he tell me last night that he is part of Team Viper?

He took the empty seat next to Aisha.

Throwing off the territorial balance. He’d been working with the French, okay, Vanessa could give him that, but he was CIA.

When Aisha placed her hand on Khoury’s wrist as she spoke softly to him in French, there was no way to miss the fact they knew each other—
well
.

“Since we have no time to waste,” Vanessa said, more tersely than she’d intended, “let’s make sure we’re on the same page with all the details we know to date. I learned this morning that we have a tentative ID—”

“On the suicide bomber.” A familiar male, French-accented voice had cut her off, and now he continued, “Omar al-Attas, although, as our American friend was about to tell you, we’re awaiting DNA confirmation and we need it—”

Startled, Vanessa stood silent while Marcel Fournier strode the last few paces to claim the head of the table, still speaking: “—
before
the press gets wind of this.”

He tossed down a stack of files. “Omar al-Attas,” he repeated, slapping the top file hard. “Nineteen-year-old American-born son of Abdul Hasib al-Attas, a senior Al Qaeda commander targeted and killed by a U.S. drone strike fifteen months ago. An event that certainly gave young Omar motive to strap on a bomb and kill Americans to avenge his father’s death—although why he was part of a plot to target what
should
have been a covert CIA meeting outside a French national treasure instead of a hard U.S. target is a question we urgently need to answer.”

Fournier only glanced at Vanessa, but that was enough—he’d singled her out. “This was a coordinated attack involving the kidnapping and execution of an intelligence asset, a suicide bombing, and a second device, a fairly sophisticated dirty bomb that did not detonate,
Dieu merci
—and for those of you who don’t know me, I’m Marcel Fournier, DCRI director of operations.”

He snapped open a laptop, giving the team a moment to breathe
and size him up. Today he wore freshly ironed jeans, a crisp white shirt, and the now familiar black leather jacket.

Vanessa pulled back to take her seat on a cushion that could double as a hair shirt.
So much for standing in for Chris.

Fournier launched in again. “I trust you’ve all made introductions. And by now you are
meilleurs amis
, best friends.”

Aisha made a small sound—Vanessa heard it as a snort. Khoury stared intently at her and she flashed him a dirty look:
You should have warned me.

Fournier clicked his tongue against his front teeth and sucked in air with his words: “I want every link we can find between al-Attas and True Jihad and—if they are there to be found—links between True Jihad and Al Qaeda—” He cut himself off, when something or someone caught his attention from the other room. A quick frown, and he raised his palm to the team at the table. “
Attendez
—one minute.”

Vanessa sat up sharply as she tracked his exit: Fournier stepping out to greet the CIA Chief of Station Paris—COS James Blount—who had arrived with Chris.

Vanessa had met the COS several times. She knew the assignment of chief—to a city like Paris or Rome—came at the end of a long and successful career. By that point the COS was either cruising toward a comfortable retirement or burned out.

Blount had the physique of a man long out of the field, now working government and diplomatic circuits, shaking hands, soothing ruffled egos, at the far end of his career and not dreading retirement. She’d put money on a cottage in the South of France.

Blount also had a reputation as a good man to work under; the fact he’d placed himself quietly in the background spoke volumes—he would not be pushing to run the show.

While Fournier quietly greeted the COS, Chris took the
opportunity to make his entrance to Team Viper. In his hands, he balanced files, laptop, and a cup of takeout coffee, steam rising from the vented lid. Somehow he eased everything onto the table without spilling anything.

Fournier out, Chris in—like a changing of the guard. No accident in the timing,
Vanessa thought.

This was Chris’s moment to assert himself and the Agency. CIA resources were vast compared to French means—but the territory belonged to
les grenouilles
.

“And if you’re not BFFs,” he said, picking up Fournier’s thread, “we hope you are at least ready to deal with True Jihad’s latest threat. Because minutes ago they contacted Al Jazeera claiming they will name new targets later today.”

Reactions to this somber announcement were muted—but the tension and the sense of urgency around the table—already high—rose to a new level.

Chris lifted his chin, sizing up the group. After a distinct beat, he said, “I’m Chris, CIA, good morning everybody. We will get to know each other soon, but right now, we urgently need to review the events of the last twenty-four hours.”

Chris moved his attention to Vanessa and she braced internally, here it was—her declaration to the French.

“I know you all exchanged introductions earlier, so you know Vanessa by name. But you don’t know that she is one of our most highly respected operations officers.” Chris held her gaze for an instant—and maybe it eased the pain of exposure just a bit.

“She was integral in assisting MI5 with the arrest of Dieter Schoeman a year ago.” He paused a moment for emphasis. “The Brits have acknowledged their appreciation for her services on more than one occasion.”

“I think you all know by now that Vanessa was on-site yesterday.
You may not know that she was there to meet with a vital asset who promised to deliver intel on a nuke we believe was smuggled out of Iran last fall.”

Again, he acknowledged her with the quickest visual tap, and she appreciated Chris for it.

He said, “She can recap events of yesterday.” And with that he turned the floor over to her.

Vanessa stood, nudging the chair back with her foot so she wouldn’t feel cornered. She launched in, offering basic background the team would need—but withholding some things under the need-to-know principle.

“We’ve all heard rumors that a nuclear device was smuggled out of a recently identified underground facility in southern Iran just weeks before that facility was destroyed last October. That’s been in the news to a certain extent.” She paused, making sure everyone was following. “What has not been in the news is the fact the device is a prototype for a very powerful
miniaturized
weapon.”

She paused, letting her words sink in. In the silence that followed, she heard the faint and distinctive
ping
signaling a new IM on her laptop. She glanced down quickly to confirm that Hays had followed up on her request.

She returned her attention to the faces of Team Viper, and it was Aisha who leaned forward intently. “Are we talking about a functional nuclear weapon—miniaturized—now loose on the black market?”

“That’s a distinct possibility,” Vanessa said. “Or it could be in the hands of True Jihad.”

“Yesterday’s attack apparently was meant as a one-two punch with the pipe bomb carried by the suicide bomber, and the RDD that failed to explode,” Khoury said, frowning in concentration. “Neither weapon was a new class of nuke, so what does that have to do with the facility in Iran?”

Vanessa met his gaze—it still felt odd that he was sitting on the
other side of the table. “Farid—my asset—was going to give us intel to help locate the prototype.” She paused, as if checking notes, but really buying a moment to collect herself. “We hoped that this time he would help us to further identify Bhoot; the smuggled nuclear weapon was from a facility that was a joint venture between Bhoot and the Iranians.”

She slid her laptop around so that team members could view her screen. “I need to shift our focus for a moment—and I apologize in advance that we don’t have a bigot list compiled yet for everyone in the security loop, so this morning we will have to make do.” She clicked on a document icon and it suddenly filled the screen. “You are looking at a list that I asked Hays to compile for us from open sources. He has flagged anomalous events that occurred in or around Paris yesterday at approximately the same time as the explosion at the Louvre: power outages, security disruptions, full-out intrusions, fires, et cetera. As you see, there are almost a dozen entries—locations or business names.”

“You believe the bombing was cover for something else?” Khoury spoke slowly, following this new thread.

“It’s a possibility,” Vanessa said, glancing around the table. Most everyone was studying the monitor dutifully. But she was caught by the look of recognition on Aisha’s face as she stared at the entries.

“Aisha, vous le voyez?”
It was Fournier who addressed her as he stood between the French doors that connected the living room and dining room.

“Oui . . . mais . . .”
Aisha tugged restlessly on the soft coral-colored scarf draped around her neck. “I’m puzzled.” She eyed Vanessa sharply. “What led you in that direction? Do you have an asset who told you the bombing was a diversion?”

Aisha had asked a smart question, Vanessa thought, keeping her voice and her expression neutral. Bhoot certainly wasn’t her asset, but . . . she quickly reasoned through a way to stay
close
to the truth.
“One of my reliable sources picked up chatter from the streets and passed it along.”

“One hell of a diversion,” Khoury said flatly.

Aisha exchanged another look with Fournier.

He said,
“Aisha, dites-leur ce que vous savez.”
Tell them what you know.

Aisha tipped her head, a nanosecond’s gesture for
Okay, you’re the boss.
She said, “
Nous avons
—we have an open file on Société Anonyme de Recherche en Ingénierie et Technologie, SARIT, dating back to 2008. Shorthand, this is what we know about SARIT—they’re involved in legitimate cutting-edge technology engineering and software development. Several years ago they received a large government grant in support of their engineering research. Specifically for software and engineering of a smaller, faster, and more efficient triggered spark-gap design. We know that they are used in many things—medical devices, high-voltage switches, and so on.” She brushed a curl away from one eye. “But SARIT is also suspected of selling to less-than-legitimate customers on the black market. But we have no definitive proof, just dead ends.”