Burned (Vanessa Pierson series Book 2)

by Plame, Valerie

  She eased her fingers, noting the knuckles had gone white. Goose bumps rose on her skin. Why? She wasn’t afraid. Okay, she was very much afraid. Okay, breathe. But she wasn’t panicked. That fact registered as a kind of flashing victory.

  A nearby streetlamp allowed her enough light to read. She stared at the note taped to the back: a small square of paper with a ten-digit phone number typed out, as well as the message: “tick tock.”

  Shit. She checked her watch: She’d discovered the phone in her bag about four minutes ago, but there was no way Bhoot could predict when she would find it. Not unless he had eyes everywhere watching her. He was playing with her again.

  She shook off the chill and focused on next steps. The number appeared to be local, but that was all smoke and mirrors—these days any number could be routed to any destination around the world. Good luck to the analysts on finding digital footprints to trace back to the source. She had no doubt Bhoot had covered his tracks well.

  A single drop of rain caught Vanessa on the neck under the collar of her trench coat. It felt a little like a cosmic tap to move quickly, get this done.

  She had so many questions to ask him.

  She reached into her pocket before she remembered that she had zipped the special pen into the single interior compartment of her bag. She slowed to retrieve it, holding it in her right hand with the phone clutched in her left. She closed her eyes and stood planted on the sidewalk, on a side street off Boulevard Saint-Germain. Her fingers tingled, but not from cold.

  She clipped the pen to the collar of her coat and activated the recorder. Any initial sound to indicate that it was recording was barely audible, like the quick tickle of air, then nothing. No giveaways. If Bhoot guessed she was recording, he would react with rage, he would hang up on her—and he might not make contact again. The thought made her feel like a swimmer who suddenly discovers the shore is very far away.

  She dialed.

  For seconds she heard nothing. Then there were several clicks. The descending mist was bringing a sharper bite to the air. Was that breathing she heard?

  “Are you there?” she whispered.

  “I almost gave up on you.” It was Bhoot. This call gave her the same impression as the first: of distance distortion, a bad Skype connection, or sat link, but she knew it was an intentional effect to mask identifying data.

  “I called as soon as I could.”

  “Move faster next time,” he said. Then, after a moment, “You did good work in Amsterdam.”

  Of course he would know about that. “It went well, yes. Did you hear the details from your mole?”

  “Hah.” He snorted. “You mean your Agency’s weasel?” He was silent for almost too long. When he spoke again, his tone had darkened to a bitter edge. “Apparently, he’s not mine anymore.”

  Vanessa believed Bhoot. “Then who is selling secrets to you now?” she asked. She couldn’t tell him about the police artist’s sketch of the man with the pockmarked face.

  “Bogdan gave you something. He identified the buyer.”

  “How do you—” She bit off her question. Aisha. Vanessa pictured her on the train and later when she was chasing down Bogdan in Amsterdam. Was she working for Bhoot?

  “My turn, Vanessa.” Bhoot said her name softly in a way that made her skin crawl. “What have you learned about the people behind True Jihad? Maybe they are getting the mole’s secrets now.”

  Vanessa’s breath caught. Was the mole betraying everything? Was Scarface the leader behind the terrorist group? Was he one of the hooded men on the videos? Would someone from True Jihad actually be brash enough to meet with a petty liar and thief like Bogdan?

  “I can hear your mind spinning,” Bhoot said, sounding almost amused. “You’re working so hard to put it all together.”

  “You think this is a joke?”

  “No joke.” His anger instantly matched hers. “I will kill the men who stole my prototype, and I will kill the mole who I’m certain helped set me up.”

  He fully intended to make good on it, Vanessa knew that much. And he was using her to do so. She wouldn’t lie to herself—she knew that if she was successful, and if Bhoot killed the mole, she would be morally complicit.

  She said nothing. Bhoot remained silent, too. Except for a sound—in the background? The whine of an engine? God, it was impossible to truly hear. She brushed her free hand against the pen clipped to her collar. Please be recording this . . .

  Bhoot broke the silence abruptly. “Why haven’t you followed my other lead?”

  He was talking about Dieter Schoeman. She took a quick breath. “I’m working on that—but I’ll need to tell or show him something to convince him that you want him to talk to me.”

  “Don’t try to be coy, it doesn’t become you,” he snapped. “Why was he moved from Belmarsh?”

  Jesus, what didn’t Bhoot know? “He was transferred.”

  “Obviously.”

  Vanessa grimaced. “What can Dieter tell me that you can’t?”

  “Tell you?”

  His tone was incredulous—the tone used by a parent or a teacher when an answer was so far off base it was ridiculous, with drastic consequences.

  “Who’s behind True Jihad?” She thought she sounded plaintive, for Christ’s sake. “Who has the power to rival you and your network?”

  “They are not my rivals, I have no rivals. We have different aims. I don’t want to end the world. But I’m beginning to believe that True Jihad does. You’re out of time, Vanessa. We are all out of time. True Jihad will strike again, and if I’m right, their motives are much larger than their apparent goals.”

  “Then what are they waiting for?”

  “For their perfect window. It’s all in the timing. They are preparing for their Battle of the Horns of Hattin.”

  The line clicked, startling Vanessa. She stared at the phone in her hand. Another click.

  “I told you there would be consequences,” Bhoot snarled.

  “I’m just—wait, hello?”

  The line was dead. She’d lost him. Shit shit shit.

  A shadow moved out of a doorway about twenty meters up the block. Vanessa froze.

  It was a man in a dark raincoat.

  He stared back at her as he raised one arm. In his hand he held something small and dark. Even as she contracted, bracing for a bullet, she knew it was a phone.

  Bhoot’s man.

  He took a slow step toward her, moving into the splash of streetlight. For a macabre moment, she was certain he grinned at her.

  Abruptly, she melted into flight, pivoting and bolting into a full-out run.

  41

  “You could have been killed,” Chris yelled at Vanessa for the third time.

  As soon as she was moving, Vanessa had pulled herself together enough to redirect her route away from the location of the safe house. One block later she’d flagged a taxi, and after making certain they were not followed, she had the driver drop her a few blocks from the Hôtel Cayré.

  “Valid point, Chris,” Peyton said. “But we’ve already covered that, so let’s move on.”

  Vanessa stood with Chris and Peyton, the three of them in Peyton’s suite, hovering over Hays. He had been called in by Chris to work with whatever recording the pen device had caught during the call.

  Hays looked up now, his owl face set into a frown. “You guys are making me supremely antsy.”

  “Are you getting anything?” Vanessa asked, unable to hold back.

  “For the zillionth time,” Hays said, quietly, “we got something, but I can’t tell you more than that right now. And honestly? I need to get this to the French techs because they have all the bells and whistles and I’ll be able to do even more to recover and enhance it than I’ll be able to tonight with my portables. Also, it went through French cell towers, so they are querying them right now, too. But for now, for you, I’m trying, so give me more time.” His eyebrows arched pointedly. “And space, give me space or I can’t breathe prope
rly. My effing hands are sweating!”

  “Let’s leave Hays to his breathing space,” Peyton Wright said, motioning Chris and Vanessa toward the room’s tiny kitchenette. They followed dutifully and each took a seat around the small oval table. Peyton moved three steps to the counter, where an electric kettle was working up to a whistle.

  Vanessa met Chris’s dark eyes and felt his accusation. He was spitting mad at her, and exasperated, at wit’s end maybe, and she deserved that and more, but she thought she saw hurt, too, and that was the worst, cutting to the quick. How was it she kept disappointing the man who risked his own career to actually help and trust her?

  She remembered their covert meeting at the London Eye last fall, when she’d come to confess all her sins and win his forgiveness. Back then, she’d promised to end it with Khoury. And she’d meant what she said, and she had tried . . . just like she tried to quit smoking. Hell . . .

  To complicate matters further, she and Khoury were—what? Just thinking about their most recent conversation made her flinch. They certainly had some things to talk through.

  She mouthed to Chris now: I’m sorry.

  Without so much as a blink, he looked away from her to a spot somewhere between the ice bucket and the sink.

  “Good,” Peyton said, adjusting the teapot she’d already prepped with loose tea. “A soothing cuppa is just what the shrink ordered.”

  “Is that a professional joke? Because it kind of sucks,” Vanessa said, trying to recover her composure after Chris’s rejection.

  “Sorry. Think of it as a prescription,” Peyton said, briskly. “Milk or sugar?”

  “Neither,” Chris said at the same time Vanessa answered, “Both.”

  “Different strokes,” Peyton said, glancing at them. “Tea helps soothe the soul, sharpen the mind, and lubricate communication.”

  “Good, because we need all of that,” Chris said, his tone sharp.

  Peyton delivered cups and sat.

  “Ah, perfect,” Peyton said, sipping her tea.

  Vanessa followed suit and she had to admit the tea went down warm and sweet with the promise of making everything better.

  Peyton tipped her head to Chris. “Make sure it’s not too strong.”

  And he actually took a sip of tea, considered, and said, “Fine. It’s good. Thanks.”

  A smile crossed the psychologist’s face, but it faded quickly. “How did the phone get into your bag, Vanessa? That kind of access is beyond troubling and it’s an escalation on Bhoot’s part.”

  She didn’t feel comfortable confiding her suspicions, but she didn’t want to withhold any more information.

  “The most obvious person to plant the phone is Aisha,” Vanessa said, taking another sip of tea. “She had opportunity, she found me with Khoury at Café de Flore.” She noted Chris frowning but she continued speaking. “I know she’s respected in DCRI, but her behavior has been disturbing more than once. When we were in Amsterdam I was behind her chasing Bogdan and when I caught up, well, it looked like she was trying to choke him to death.”

  Chris scowled at her. “Why didn’t you report this?”

  “This is the first chance I’ve had to tell you, because it’s not the kind of thing I wanted to put in the summary report,” Vanessa said. She had to work not to sound defensive. “You were at the Station when we briefed Team Viper.” She shrugged, thinking back even as she wanted to block the last minutes of the call from her mind. “The other obvious possibility is Bhoot’s man; he was certainly there on the street with me, so why not in the café? But the one time I left the table, Khoury and Aisha were both sitting there, so . . .”

  She looked to Peyton and then to Chris. “I don’t know, everything seems scrambled now. He kept pushing to find out more about True Jihad. He thinks the mole is selling our secrets to them now.” Vanessa glanced toward the suite’s living room, where Hays had been working. “I hope it’s all on the tape. Bhoot thinks True Jihad has the prototype and he says they might want to end the world as we know it and they’re waiting—preparing—for their—”

  She stopped as Hays appeared in the doorway holding one of his laptops, and Bhoot’s voice—eerily distorted, watery—filled the room:

  “. . . out of time, Vanessa . . . all out of time . . . True Jihad will strike . . . and if . . . motives are much larger than their apparent goals.”

  “. . . are they waiting . . .”

  “. . . For their perfect window . . . the timing . . . preparing for their . . . Horns of Hattin . . .”

  Hays clicked off the recording. His face was flushed even as he stared at them somberly. “That’s the best I could do for now. The pen is sensitive to movement and distortion, so we lost some, but when we enhance . . .”

  “You did great, Hays,” Vanessa said. Her voice sounded too loud in the tiled kitchenette. She softened her voice to ask, “The Horns of Hattin . . . what was it?”

  “Jerusalem, 1187,” Chris said quietly. “Horns of Hattin was a brutal battle that turned the tides of the Crusades. That was the battle when Saladin recaptured the city and Muslim forces were dominant again.”

  “‘My righteous servants shall inherit the earth,’” Peyton said quietly.

  Hays looked at the psychologist with a quizzical expression. “Bible?”

  “Qur’an.”

  —

  HOURS LATER, Vanessa struggled to catch even a little sleep at the safe house. As far as they knew it remained undiscovered by Bhoot.

  She checked her cell for the tenth time in an hour and found the same three hang-ups from Khoury, the same nothing from Alexandra Hall.

  After she left the hotel and Chris and Peyton, she deliberately closed her mind to her most recent interaction with Bhoot.

  When Hays dropped her at the safe house, and she was finally alone again, that’s when the heat of betrayal hit. Khoury had rationalized his affair with Aisha—and maybe he was right, although she remembered it differently; maybe they had been separated during that time.

  But whatever the truth, it didn’t lessen the sting of his omission. He should have told Vanessa about Aisha right away. Why had he hidden the truth? Did he still care for Aisha? Or had he been trying to shield Vanessa? Most likely, she thought, he’d been doing his best to avoid any more complications in their so-called relationship. She understood that, because she might have done the same. Still, she didn’t want to forgive him that easily.

  She didn’t trust Aisha and she’d never really trusted Fournier. She had made the top of Chris’s shit list once again. And Peyton could never truly be a confidante—she was too allied with the VIPs in the Agency’s NOCdom.

  Hays was trustworthy, Vanessa thought, staring sleepless at the ceiling. But she couldn’t ask him to keep her secrets and risk his job, so who did that leave?

  Vanessa had resorted to pulling her covers up over her head, when her phone beeped announcing a new text message. Even before she looked at the phone display she knew that Alexandra Hall had replied to her request to meet.

  tomorrow, 1700 hrs, parliament hill, hampstead heath

  42

  At 0520 hours Vanessa woke, already wired and anxious to let Chris know she would be gone most of the afternoon for her meeting in London. She wished Hall had named an earlier time—Vanessa was chafing to find out what the hell was holding everything up, and she knew that Hall would have an answer.

  As it turned out, Vanessa’s day moved quickly, marked by two unexpected events.

  At 0945 Team Viper was summoned urgently to the tech outpost. A new video had been released through Al Jazeera.

  Vanessa arrived with Jack to find the team, including Chris and Peyton, already assembled. Only Khoury was missing. She wondered if she should be worried, but before she could ask anyone anything, Fournier took control of the meeting, explaining that they would proceed without David, who was following up on a crucial new lead.

  All questions were banished from her thoughts as Fournier snapped his fingers and a familiar ye
t still horrifying image filled the lab’s multiple and massive monitors: a hooded, shackled hostage seated limply on a chair; a terrorist standing beside the prisoner while holding an AK-47, his face also hidden behind a hood. The True Jihad banner filled the background like a macabre stage scrim. Three newspaper front pages had been tacked to the ends of the banner: France’s Le Figaro, Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, and the UK’s Guardian. The narration was a voice-over in Arabic; it sounded like the same narrator who was speaking on the first two videos; the guard on camera didn’t appear to be speaking.

  Vanessa looked toward Aisha. Had she heard her make a sound deep in her throat?

  As the voice-over continued, Fournier looked sharply toward Aisha.

  “That’s their threat to execute their hostage.” She translated with a shake of her head. As she continued, her tone stayed absolutely flat. “They are demanding that America and her Western allies pay retribution for their attacks on Iran, specifically the destruction of a medical research facility.”

  “Bhoot’s weapons plant in Baluchistan Province,” Vanessa said softly.

  “Unless their demands are met,” Aisha continued, “they will execute the next hostage.”

  Now the video cut to an inset image of a church—“Saint Peter’s Basilica,” Fournier interjected—and the crude Photoshopped effect of raining blood. Arabic music had been cut into the video, apparently replacing the narration.

  Aisha stood abruptly, eyes averted from the images on screen as she half stumbled to the door. “Je ne peux pas être ici—”

  Canard’s flat brows shot up, and he clenched his jaw.

  Peyton looked as if she might go after her, but Canard spoke up.

  “Non, non, I’ll go see . . .” he murmured, following just as they heard one of the warehouse doors slam shut.

  Vanessa pulled her attention back to the screen, filled now with a graphic and bloody image of a battle scene, with chain mail and swords and turbans and spears of the opponents—some artist’s vision of Crusaders clashing.

  The screen went black.