Burned (Vanessa Pierson series Book 2) (24 page)

The steel frame shook when the G-IV hit an air pocket, but Vanessa barely noticed. She had learned to walk on a military transport and was teething when her parents first took her on a flight from Anchorage to Ankara. Instead, on this early-morning flight back to Le Bourget, she kept replaying the interview in her mind.

She was rattled by Dieter’s revelation linking Scarface back to the mole. Fournier, too, had been sobered by the interview; they’d barely spoken on the drive back to the plane.

Once on board, he sent the digital file of their interview to Chris and select members of the French tech team via secure e-mail.

She glanced over at Fournier now. Despite a fairly rough flight, he hadn’t stirred for the past hour. He had definitely mastered the half-sleep of trauma docs, soldiers, and ops officers. And maybe, like Vanessa, he wanted to be left to his own thoughts. The man was no fool; he had to have guessed that the Agency had a mole because he knew about Vanessa’s disastrous few months, but he didn’t know who authorized Dieter’s transfer to the black site. He didn’t know it was Jeffreys.

She shook her head to clear her brain and then gazed at the blinking cursor at the top of a blank page on her laptop screen. She’d started
to tap out a few notes, but she’d given that up. Her summary would normally go to Chris, as well as everyone on the bigot list—Team Viper, the chief of station Paris, select analysts and management at CIA Headquarters and counterparts at DCRI. But she wasn’t drafting a summary report on this particular interview—not until she cleared everything with Chris. She closed the file and shut down her computer.

She pushed the shade on the porthole next to her seat fully open. The sky was slowly brightening to daylight and her thoughts circled back to Dieter. His attorney could have acted as courier to get word to Bhoot. After that, it would have been simple to set up a quick way to pass intel via chat rooms, e-mail, or a dead drop. Old-fashioned tradecraft.

The irony didn’t escape Vanessa. By helping put away Dieter in Belmarsh, she’d unwittingly opened the way for the mole to reach out to Bhoot, thereby signing the death warrant of her own assets. The hair on the back of her neck bristled and she felt as if someone had touched her. Yes, Fournier’s eyes were open and he was watching her.

“Was it the fucking Ladurée?” Fournier asked in French. “You did something back there, something happened between you and Schoeman. I don’t know what. Maybe he’s been promised help from your government and the Brits?” He stared at her for several seconds without blinking. “But you got what you came for, didn’t you?”

“
We
got what we needed,
didn’t we
?” Vanessa returned quietly. “A link between Scarface and True Jihad, and, most relevant at the moment, the terrifying confirmation that the prototype nuke is
real
.”

He nodded slowly.
“Terrifiant, oui.”

She closed her eyes, not really expecting Fournier to take the hint and leave her alone. But he did.

She must have slept for twenty or thirty minutes. When she awoke, they were preparing to land. Her gaze flicked from the window to the monitors, where the images on two of them caught and held her
attention. At the moment those monitors were tuned respectively to CNN and Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera was playing an interview with the mother of the suicide bomber Vanessa had faced in the courtyard of the Louvre. Rebecca Warren, interviewed in her hometown of Seattle, was probably in her early forties but looked older in the aftermath of her son’s destructive last act. Vanessa found it difficult to look at the woman—was she afraid she would see some resemblance to the young bomber? She skimmed the subtitles for a few seconds. “My son Omar was no terrorist! Omar was a fervent Christian—”

Vanessa cut her gaze away, distracted by images on the second monitor: CNN was running footage of the wreckage of a helicopter strewn on a desert landscape. The crawler at the bottom of the screen read: “Private U.S. Helicopter Explodes. At Least 4 Dead in Yemen.” But what drew Vanessa’s attention so sharply was the closed-captioned mention of Eagle Enterprises, the private military contractor.

Allen Jeffreys was the former CFO.

Vanessa had learned long ago not to believe in coincidence.

When the G-IV was on the ground at La Bourget, she checked her messages. Charles Janek had returned her call two hours earlier and had left a voice mail. In typical Charles fashion he agreed to her visit: “But only if you can make it tonight. We can celebrate my birthday and catch up on old friends and even older enemies.”

Charles wasn’t talking about his real birthday; he guarded that date like a state secret. After all his years working in intelligence, he spoke in his own sort of code. He would help her, and she felt certain he would be able to answer some of her questions.

A frisson of anticipation and fear moved through her—even if she was on track with her suspicions, would any of it lead them to Scarface, True Jihad, or the loose nuclear prototype? And if she found leads, would it be enough to stop another attack—a ten-kiloton nuclear attack?

“I’ve listened to the entire interview,” Chris said.

“It’s not good.” Vanessa played with a napkin, wadding it, and working it mindlessly with her fingers. They were both sipping a coffee in a small upstairs booth at Café de Flore. She had come straight from the airport and she desperately craved a very hot shower, but not before completing this short debrief to Chris.

She said, “Dieter wouldn’t link the nuke to Bhoot, but he confirmed its existence, its weight and potential impact. Well, you heard . . .”

Chris was quiet for a few moments, his forehead creased with apprehension. “So we’ve definitely got a loose nuke . . . and then we’ve got the ‘other thing.’”

She nodded.
The mole.

“So . . .” Chris was watching her very carefully; he knew when she was tiptoeing around information. But it was definitely too soon to spring her theory about Jeffreys on him. She was still working it out in her head.

Even with coded confirmation from Dieter about the “weasel,” it simply showed that Scarface was acting as the contact for someone
with enough power and access to get him into Belmarsh to see Dieter and that powerful someone wanted to connect with Bhoot. But she had absolutely no proof that any of this connected back to Jeffreys.

Chris let his silver-rimmed glasses slip down and he massaged the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “Let’s keep in mind that this story comes from an inmate who would do just about anything to get back to Belmarsh.”

“He was telling the truth,” Vanessa said, almost surprised by the intensity of her conviction. “If he wanted to make something up he would claim to have knowledge of an imminent attack, and he would have demanded to be moved before,
not after
, he shared what he knows.” She took another drink of the bitter black coffee. “I actually think he was spooked by what he put together from our session, the ‘Ladurée message’ from Bhoot, and what he’s seen and heard. He’s a highly intelligent sociopath.”

“If Dieter’s spooked, that’s not very reassuring,” Chris said.

“No, it’s not.”

“From what I heard on the recording, you managed to handle Fournier.”

“He’s not easy to read,” Vanessa admitted, touching her mouth to the edge of the cup. “He was very suspicious on the flight back. He came out and said so. He knew something went down between Dieter and me, but not exactly what. He even wondered about . . .”

Chris swallowed his coffee and then said, “The macaroons were a nice touch.”

He’d given her an easy pass on the Ladurée. The fact she’d found them in the back of an Agency rental vehicle was not encouraging when it came to security issues, and there would be follow-up. But at the moment there were many other urgent questions, so that one would wait.

Chris spoke first. “So we still have no idea where the nuke is.”

“But we do have a plausible theory of how and where the mole
initiated contact with Bhoot,” Vanessa said as she stared down at the distressed fragments of the napkin in her palm. She closed her fingers around the small mess and looked up at Chris. “But what the hell is the mole doing with True Jihad?”

Chris nodded. “That’s the question—
what the hell?
”

She lowered her voice and leaned into the table of the booth. “Can we get our hands on security and interview footage from Belmarsh? He said the man visited him during his first month there, so we’ll have a month of footage to review. Zoe could do it, and then we would have visual proof of Mr. Hanna, Scarface, meeting with Dieter.”

Chris nodded, but mentally he was far away, factoring quickly. “Even more dicey—”

“Right,” Vanessa jumped in, whispering. “We need the official trail: who authorized Mr. Hanna’s visit, who dealt with the bureaucratic hurdles.”

“And it’s going to be someone smart enough to cover their trail,” Chris said.

Both agreed that the mole they were hunting was nothing if not cunning.

“But we might at least get narrowed down to the authorizing
agency
,” Chris said.

Vanessa actually opened her mouth on impulse to broach her suspicions of Jeffreys when they were interrupted.

A waiter in a red apron over black slacks paused at their booth to change out their salt and pepper shakers. Vanessa played the tips of her fingers impatiently over the surface of the table. When the waiter was finished and they were alone, she set both elbows on the table and stared at Chris. “The timing seems a little crazy, but I need to follow a hunch and I’m asking you to trust me and I know I’m pushing the envelope.”

“You have no envelope left to push,” Chris said.

“Okay, so then nothing to lose, right?” Her attempt to lighten the
mood fell flat, even to her own ears. “I need to speak with Charles Janek. He’s agreed to meet in Venice if I can make it there by tonight. I’m asking your permission—can I leave for Venice ASAP? I can be back by tomorrow morning.”

Charles Janek had been one of her instructors at the Farm. After that he’d worked a couple years for private contractors. Now he’d returned to field work even though he was older than most, sixty-two, because his skills were invaluable to the Agency. He also knew the world in a way no one else did and the DCI himself begged him to return. Vanessa thought he might be the one person she could confide in about Jeffreys, who would hear out all her suspicions, questions, hunches, but most important of all, the one person who could provide some answers.

“No way,” Chris said, whispering fiercely. “We’ve got a fucking missing nuke and you want to traipse off to Venice in the middle of Carnevale—”

“Shit, it’s Carnival? I totally forgot.” She huffed, then started fidgeting. “But we’re just sitting here, waiting with no real leads to move on. Zoe can research Belmarsh while I’m gone for a few hours, and I might get a bead on the mole’s identity.”

Chris stared at her, his expression seemingly locked into a permanent frown. He startled her when he said, “Go, damn it! I’ll cue in the DDO and Fournier, and I’ll tell the team the truth. I’ll cover your ass for the next twelve hours. After that, I expect the whole story, whether your hunch plays out or not. Understood?”

She nodded, her fingers already bringing up airline bookings on her smart phone. There were half a dozen flights from Paris to Venice leaving in the next six hours. “I’ll text you my itinerary.”

“And Vanessa, be careful and watch your back.”

Vanessa was in her room at the safe house packing a few necessities for her trip when Khoury found her. She was glad to see him, but she knew their personal business would have to stay on hold, at least until she was back.

“You just got back and now you’re going to Venice? What’s going on, Vanessa?”

Thinking fast, she pushed a sweater into her carry-on and zipped the bag shut. Chris, Fournier, and those above them would decide how much to share with the others.

“How did you know about Venice?”

“Shouldn’t I?” He moved restlessly, picking up the sweatshirt she’d left folded on top of the bed, running his fingers along the seams.

“Yes, of course, but I just got the go-ahead from Chris.”

“And I just ran into Chris; he was with Aisha and Fournier outside Café de Flore, and they updated me. Were you going to tell me?” He flicked the light switch on, brightening the gloom.

“Of course,” she said, crossing the small space to him. They both reached out at the same time, then both pulled back—an
awkward little dance until he made a big gesture of wrapping his arms around her.

He held her with such intensity, and yet so gently. It felt incredibly good.

But after a moment she exhaled deeply and freed herself. “I have to be on a flight in ninety minutes, so this, and any other conversation, will have to wait.” She reached for her bag and tried to pass him in the doorway, but he stood blocking her way.

They stared at each other for seconds. Vanessa knew that if she simply waited silently he would step aside and let her go. But she was glad that he cared about her, about
them
, even as he understood the demands of the lives they had chosen.

“I’m having dinner with Charles tonight.”

“Janek?” Khoury looked truly startled. “That’s the last name I expected to hear.”

“Walk with me,” she said, touching his sleeve.

He followed her through the empty study and living room to the foyer. For a few moments, at least, they were alone in the safe house. He stopped before they reached the door. “But why Janek, and why now?”

She shook her head, holding her index finger to her mouth. “Come on.” She led him outside onto the landing and down the stairs.

They reached the second-floor landing and she stopped. When she spoke, she kept her voice to a whisper. “I can’t tell you much except that I’m tracking a lead to ID the mole. After Dieter, I don’t know how much of the interview Chris will share with the team, so . . .”

At her first mention of the mole, Khoury had braced himself, his face grim. Vanessa knew at least some of what was going through his mind: Over the course of the past year, the mole had targeted Vanessa. It was likely that Khoury even thought that the Agency might have been suspecting him. He would have very mixed feelings about Vanessa closing in on the mole.

She said, “Our work is dangerous, we both knew that when we signed on.”

“There’s a difference between dangerous and deadly,” Khoury said very quietly.

“Dieter linked Scarface to the mole, Khoury. And we’ve linked Scarface to True Jihad and to Bhoot’s stolen suitcase nuke—so what the hell are they planning?”

“Christ.”

“This is going to sound over-the-top, but I think Allen Jeffreys might be involved somehow.” She was so close to Khoury she could see the pores on his cheeks and the very beginning of a five-o’clock shadow.

“What are you talking about?
The
Allen Jeffreys. Where the hell does that come from except left field? Shit. Vanessa. That sounds
way
over-the-top. What kind of proof? How did you even get there? I get that he has access, but what else would make you even begin to suspect him?”

Was she disappointed in his reaction? She couldn’t blame him for his initial disbelief, but she had to admit that it stung a bit. But Khoury wasn’t finished. He’d been in the field long enough to understand good instincts, and Vanessa had good instincts. Usually. But she could see the doubt on his face.

“What the hell motive would he have? He’d be betraying his country. It would make him a traitor, and for a man in his position, why? He’s a genuine patriot. And it wouldn’t be for money.”

“You’re right,” she said, pulling back. “I’ve got to go or I’ll miss my flight.” She started down the final stairs.

“Vanessa—” Khoury was right behind her. He said, “Maybe I’m wrong, hell, the world is strange.”

She stopped at the foot of the staircase and turned to him as he pulled her close.

“I care so much about you I get crazy,” he said. “And I don’t want to see you get caught up in another one of your obsessions to the detriment of the op and, most important, to the detriment of you.”

“I’ve
really
got to go,” she said. But then she surprised herself by reaching for his hand. He tightened his fingers through hers and the strength of his grip felt good.

“Maybe you’re right about my obsessions,” she said, and for a moment she felt lost. Then she pushed the feeling away and rallied. “But it can’t hurt to check it out and I know Charles will give me a reality check. I’ll be back by tomorrow morning. One way or another, we need to stop True Jihad.”

Vanessa boarded the Air France nonstop flight departing from CDG Paris at 1535 hours. Barring flight delays, she would be arriving at VCE Venice at 1715 hours.