Burned (Vanessa Pierson series Book 2)

by Plame, Valerie

  “He’s not there,” Chris whispered sharply, his dark eyes flashing impatience. “He’s been transferred.”

  “What?” She stopped and stared at Chris. News of the transfer caught her completely off guard. “Why the hell would the Brits move him now?”

  “Not the Brits, us. We moved him.”

  She felt her face go taut as she tried to comprehend what bureaucratic machinations might have taken place, what and why government gears were grinding. “Why? It makes no sense. Have there been threats?”

  “This is over your head, Vanessa. Listen to me. I’m looking into this, so let it go. I don’t want to hear even the tiniest whisper that you’re making waves, do you understand?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, she nodded.

  “Katalava?”

  “Yes.”

  With one abrupt nod, Chris walked from the foyer to the exterior landing. Vanessa followed. “One last thing,” Chris said without looking at her. “I did not assign Khoury to Team Viper. You can thank your friend Fournier.”

  “Thank me for what?” Fournier asked, joining them on the landing.

  He glanced curiously from Chris to Vanessa before he said, “While you discuss confidences, the car is idling downstairs—”

  “I’m gone!” Vanessa said, moving quickly for the stairs.

  She caught a last look from Chris and knew he was thinking about the missing weapon and the city of Paris on high alert.

  As if that were not enough, he couldn’t avoid the fact that Vanessa would be working closely with David Khoury on Team Viper.

  20

  A cold gust of wind hit Vanessa as she stepped out onto the street. She hadn’t been outside the safe house since yesterday evening. She was struck by the sense of Paris as a ghost city—0740 (what should have been morning rush hour) and hardly any traffic on the street, on foot or in vehicles, almost like a stage set, waiting for the players.

  Officials had been warning Parisians to stay home, indoors, and off the streets unless absolutely necessary. For the most part, they had complied, although Vanessa doubted such cooperation would last longer than a day or two unless there was another act of terror; the city’s denizens were an independent lot.

  As if to punctuate the gloom of that last thought, the rain fell in the constant drizzle so common to the city in winter.

  She hurried to the now familiar Mercedes idling at the curb. Through the darkly tinted windows, she saw two silhouettes in the backseat: Aisha and Khoury.

  She wondered again—was there something between them? The familiar way Aisha had reached out to touch his wrist, did it go beyond professional contact?

  The questions bothered her but she pushed them away and got in the front passenger seat. She chided herself, Stop getting distracted by petty jealousy. If True Jihad had breached SARIT to steal a spark gap, then they were about to have a finger on the button of the missing nuke.

  The driver guided the car onto the beautiful and historic tree-lined Champs-Élysées, a canyon walled by ornate seventeenth-century architectural “dowagers.” Traffic, normally bumper to bumper, was eerily sparse; even so, the trip seemed to take forever. Vanessa checked her watch: Ten minutes stretched to fifteen. When they slowed to pass through cones and barriers at a chokepoint—a temporary traffic security screening—she glanced at the time again.

  Vanessa addressed the driver: “Encore combien de kilomètres?”

  “Eight kilometers total, and I’d guess we’re two-thirds of the way there,” Aisha answered in English. After a moment, she added, “Are you familiar with La Défense? It’s a major business district—”

  “On the outskirts of Paris,” Vanessa inserted, “seventy-plus skyscrapers. Has it topped two hundred thousand employees yet?”

  “Then you know fifteen hundred corporations have located their head offices here, and about fifty of those are the world’s biggest.” Aisha sounded amused.

  “Speaking of,” Khoury said quietly. “We’ve changed centuries.”

  Vanessa gazed through the windshield at a world looming not far ahead—a world of glass and steel. She’d been here once before on business, but she was struck anew by the dramatic and capricious impact of its architecture: One building was cylindrical, the next a study in flowing waves and folds, the next harshly angular—together they had an impulsive quality, as if their creators had surrendered logic and given over completely to instinct.

  The driver slowed, and then turned off to follow a clover-shaped tributary into La Défense, where he left them within walking distance of the sharply gleaming silver angles of the Grand Arche. It marked the heart of the complex, the westernmost point of the ten-kilometer-long historical axis of Paris beginning at the Louvre and stretching beyond the Arc de Triomphe along the Champs-Élysées.

  As she walked, Vanessa pulled her jacket tighter against her. She said, “If SARIT’s disrupted security yesterday morning means someone robbed them under cover of the terrorist attack, then the thief or thieves had a dependable way of getting in and out of the building quickly and without attracting undue attention.”

  “Motorcycle would be my choice,” Khoury said.

  “I’ve already put in a request for security footage of the lots,” Aisha said. She strode past Vanessa and her words drifted over her shoulder: “And also public transportation hubs serving La Défense.”

  About a thousand meters east of the arch, the six-story building occupied by SARIT stood shouldered between two twenty-story high-rises. Postmodern light posts, their silhouettes bent like palm trees, cast reflections on the glass façades of surrounding buildings. Today, only a few brave or foolish souls had ventured into work.

  When they were about thirty meters from SARIT, they spotted law enforcement.

  Actually, only one man and one woman wore the blue jackets with POLICE emblazoned on the back. The three other men sported the uniform of private security: dark suits and white shirts and dark shades, even on this overcast day.

  Aisha took lead, holding her badge that hung around her neck in hand. She announced herself to the group as the French equivalent of Homeland Security, and Khoury, close on her heels, flashed his own badge.

  Vanessa slowed, holding back, to give Aisha and Khoury time to explain their presence; her own French was good—but not good enough to pass for Parisian law enforcement. When she was close enough to hear the conversation, the female police officer was explaining in rapid-fire French: “Because of the bombing and everybody calling in to say their neighbor is a terrorist, we’re playing catch-up on everything else. We welcome any help we get from you guys. I’ve never seen the city so quiet. It’s a bad day—everyone waiting for the next attack.”

  When Vanessa had almost reached the group, it broke up. One of the private security officers opened the door of SARIT to allow Aisha entry, and Khoury and the Paris officers began walking the building’s perimeter.

  Vanessa quickened her stride to follow Aisha inside.

  Accompanied by the security officer, Aisha headed straight for the elevators and the directory. Her deep, authoritarian tone was at full strength—“I’d like to look around so I can report back”—but the way she was asking made it clear it was an order, not a request.

  A woman, young and stylishly dressed, hovered near a sleek reception counter. In the middle of her forehead, her perfect skin creased deeply with worry.

  Vanessa smiled reassuringly at her, approaching with a disarming shrug. In her best French she complained how desperate she was for a smoke break, and then, leaning forward in commiseration, she asked if the receptionist was frightened to be at work when the authorities had warned everyone to stay at home. The young woman nodded, wrapping her slender arms protectively around herself. As if Vanessa had pulled a crucial piece from a dam, words began to flow.

  “One of my bosses called me, ordered me to come in, so here I am on my day off and it’s like a graveyard,” she complained in French. “And he’s been running around leaving me with nothing
to do except stare at the stupid security goons, and the other boss keeps calling from the Caymans, where he’s at this big corporate retreat, and they keep saying everything is fine, except they’ve locked off the basement where they do the most sensitive research and where they have all the vaults—”

  She broke off speaking when something caught her eye in the hallway behind Vanessa: Aisha returning with her security shadow and another man.

  The receptionist became stern and Vanessa knew it was the boss who’d been “running around.” From her vantage point, he was working too hard to look blasé.

  He shook his head and shrugged, explaining to Aisha in too much detail that yesterday’s security camera footage was useless because there had been a glitch during their internal beta tests—“C’est pas grave.”

  “We will need the footage anyway,” Aisha told him, making certain her badge was clearly visible dangling from the leather tie around her neck. “Someone from your facility reported a security breach and we’re checking out all leads. This is not a request.”

  Forearms extended, he showed her his palms in a gesture that asked for mercy. “You are busy and so are we. There was an initial report of a security issue, yes, but it was all a mistake—one of our employees, a new hire, got mixed up and accidentally shut the system down.”

  Aisha’s expression hardened and her voice turned guttural as she barked her response: “If you had any kind of breach here at SARIT, we will find out. Your company develops sensitive technology and relies on government contracts. Your security issue coincided with a terrorist attack—so I suggest you take this seriously and start cooperating. Now!”

  Vanessa wasn’t surprised when the man stammered; Aisha seemed to have that effect. When he mumbled some kind of apology and pivoted to march down the hall, apparently complying with Aisha’s “request” for digital copies of yesterday’s footage, Vanessa felt a tinge of admiration—her fellow team member got results.

  Aisha had things under control and Vanessa needed air and the chill of rain to shake off her rising anxiety. She quickly thanked the receptionist, and, as she moved to the front doors, she tipped her head to Aisha.

  Outside, the sky was still overcast but the rain had stopped for at least a few minutes. Restlessly, Vanessa pulled a cigarette from the pack she’d brought on impulse and fished her father’s lighter from her jacket pocket. She clicked the flame and inhaled, letting the nicotine rush spill through her. Alone between the sharp clifflike buildings rising around her, she savored the cigarette and the moment of solitude. I’ll quit again soon, she told herself, just as a ray of sun shone weakly through clouds and the light came alive.

  She caught sight of a moving reflection on glass: Khoury, alone now and back from his scouting mission. “Where did your police friends go?” she called out softly.

  He moved toward her, holding his notepad in one hand and reaching out his other hand for her cigarette out of habit. He said, “They’re arranging to have the security footage from parking areas and public surveillance cameras be released over to DCRI technicians for analysis.”

  She let him have the cigarette, and he inhaled deeply before handing it back.

  Why hasn’t he explained why he’s on the team?

  She was revving, flustered, and now anger threatened to surface.

  “Before you start,” he said, “I didn’t know I was on Team Viper until this morning, minutes before the meeting.”

  She studied his face intently: his handsome features so familiar, eyes that devoured her—and always the sense he understood the deepest parts of her that others never saw. But just as quickly as the flurry of thoughts and images came to her mind, she pulled herself back. No place for emotional anarchy. “Okay, I believe you.”

  His eyebrows almost met as he deciphered her words and filled in the blanks. “Then what’s got you thrown?”

  “Not now,” she said.

  “There’s never a good time, Vanessa.”

  “Or we’ll always have Paris?” she said flippantly.

  “Well, we know how that movie ended,” he said, responding to her attempt at humor—but he wasn’t smiling. “Have you told anyone about us?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not even Chris?”

  She sidestepped his question. “What is it between you and Aisha, anyway?”

  “What? Nothing. Since my reassignment to Paris Station we’ve worked together on a couple of things, that’s all.”

  “Whatever,” Vanessa said dismissively. But she’d ruffled him, and when he answered, too casually, he looked to the side.

  Now he was silent, and she stepped away from him to stab out the Dunhill in a smokers’ receptacle. She thought about tossing the entire pack—Buy another patch and quit the stupid habit, Vanessa. But just then she felt Khoury beside her and she knew he was going to tell her something important.

  Instead, he said, “Hey, you got something?” And he was speaking to Aisha, who had abruptly rounded a corner about ten meters away. She held a flash drive in her hand.

  “Am I interrupting a tête-à-tête?” Aisha asked.

  “No,” Khoury said, sounding distracted. “You got yesterday’s security footage? Didn’t think they’d give it up that easy.”

  “You know what I’m capable of, David,” Aisha said, using a tone that bordered between flirty and intimidating. “And I think the bastards are lying. For his own sake, hope he doesn’t try to play poker, because the guy can’t bluff. Merde.”

  Vanessa heard them, but she was remembering last night’s conversation with Chris about True Jihad’s video, and she was intently studying the tall office building that stood behind SARIT.

  “Let’s get going,” Aisha said, already starting to retrace their steps. “I think we should bring the CEO in for questioning—hey, David, is your American friend coming?”

  “Not quite.” Vanessa shook her head. She pointed to the tall building. “We need their security footage.”

  “That’s another office altogether,” Aisha said, sounding impatient. “None of their security cams are angled to pick up visuals of SARIT’s main entrance or security access at the back of the building, or the plaza, for that matter.”

  “I checked them out pretty carefully when I walked the perimeter, Vanessa,” Khoury said slowly.

  But Vanessa was already on her way around SARIT to the other building.

  Khoury caught up with her and saw what she’d seen: The building’s cameras were capturing reflections on their sister building opposite SARIT. He gave a quick, appreciative nod. “Good call.”

  “Right.” Vanessa allowed herself a small smile, but her pleasure was fleeting. The stakes were off the charts. “We could use a little luck.”

  21

  When they were still 100 meters from the closest vehicle access to the central courtyard, the Mercedes flashed into view moving fast, its wheels rolling over a curb and onto a lane normally restricted to utility and security vehicles.

  Vanessa had lead this time and she accelerated her pace, sensing Aisha and Khoury moving with her. As she opened the car door she heard the driver’s voice for the first time, a deep, rumbling bass.

  “La vidéo, True Jihad.”

  He spoke rapidly with a thick provincial accent, but Vanessa got the gist: True Jihad had made good on their promise to release a new video—their latest terror threats—to Al Jazeera.

  Inside a converted warehouse located in a bleak industrial district, a suburb of Paris, DCRI had assembled a satellite studio for technical analysis, a state-of-the-art outpost.

  Vanessa, Khoury, and Aisha joined Chris, Fournier, and other members of Team Viper as they stood clustered around an array of large, wall-mounted screens worthy of a glossy spy movie.

  Hays, apparently now working seamlessly with French techs, extricated himself from a heated geek huddle. He said, “As far as we know, only Al Jazeera has seen this—and they’re cooperating with us.”

  The screens shivered to life: Four
men faced a camera, black hoods covering their heads. They were seated around a table. Black fabric obscured most of the visible background. Draped behind them, a white banner with a crudely written True Jihad in both English and what Vanessa now recognized as Arabic script.

  She took several deep breaths; it looked like the banner used on the execution video.

  Three of the men wielded AK-47s, while the fourth held no visible weapon.

  As he began to address the camera in Arabic, Vanessa recognized his voice—the terrorist who had executed Farid in cold blood. Her skin pricked goose pimples at the same time that she registered her revulsion.

  Khoury spoke up quietly. “He says, ‘Death to the infidels; we are warriors in global jihad.’ The Arabic on the banner reads ‘The way of True Jihad according to the Qur’an.’”

  A graphic of the Eiffel Tower surrounded by Photoshopped flames filled the screen; that was followed by the image of the Centre Pompidou dripping with blood; and then a quick montage of Notre Dame Cathedral and the British Museum, both alight with flames; and, finally, the easily identifiable façade of the American embassy in London—the last image followed by cut-in footage of teenage boys and girls donning suicide vests, and then the ominous visual finale of a massive nuclear explosion and a mushroom cloud blooming into the skies.

  There was an awkward cut back to the unarmed terrorist who stood facing the camera. He began to speak again in Arabic.

  Khoury continued to translate: “He’s saying, ‘We will exterminate the infidels, our Western enemies . . . We don’t want to harm the devout . . . Muslims stay out of Western landmarks and public places . . . Infidels believe we will deliver the harshest punishment to those who defame Allah and God . . . Our enemies will suffer and we will wipe you from the Earth . . . No place is safe for infidels, we have struck before yesterday and we will strike again soon—make no mistake, we will kill millions.’”

  The screen finally went black. Vanessa collapsed into herself as Chris spoke her fear aloud: “Let’s hope to Christ they’re not holding a stolen nuke in their hands.”