Burned (Vanessa Pierson series Book 2) (5 page)

Fournier held out the jacket he’d pulled from the rack in the foyer. “Put this on.”

Vanessa shook her head. “That’s not mine.”

Her heartbeat finally was slowing and she could breathe again.

“Then find yours, because you’re coming with me,” he said tersely. “If you want a prayer of working with Team Viper, don’t slow me down.”

Same asshole delivery he’d used when she boarded the jet boat—only now she didn’t want to punch him. Somehow he’d jolted her from the beginnings of a panic attack. He’d never know it, but she
owed
him one. So now she was just pissed off at him.

Minutes later, inside the back of the same black Mercedes that had waited for Vanessa and Jack at the Quai Voltaire hours ago, Fournier rapped twice on the open glass divider. The driver accelerated so quickly Vanessa’s spine pushed into the seat leather. They were heading back toward the Louvre.

She was deciding how she wanted to break the silence when Fournier tossed a manila envelope onto her lap. With a glance at him
she unwound the thread that held it closed. When she opened the flap a photograph edged out. She pulled it free, studying the image: a surveillance photograph, time-stamped and dated six weeks earlier, and the subject was a dark-haired man of about twenty, possibly of Middle Eastern heritage.

“Recognize him?”

“No.”

“What about any of the others?”

She examined each of the remaining eight photographs. The subjects were similar—young men who appeared to be Middle Eastern. “Are these your candidates for the suicide bomber?”

“The most obvious. They’re all known militants in the area, connected to several mosques that we’ve had under watch.”

“I don’t recognize any of them.”

“And you got a good look at the bomber?”

“Yes.” Even if she wanted to, there was no way to block the mental image she knew would stay with her forever.

She slid the photographs back into the envelope, even as she observed DCRI’s head of operations. For the first time since their initial encounter, she could begin to absorb and assess what she had only reacted to earlier. She placed him in his mid-forties, fit, intelligent, with a restless edge that struck her as feral. His classic Latin features told her his roots reached south to the Midi or perhaps as far as Corsica. She hadn’t had time to use the easiest open source for background checks—Google—but she would soon.

She braced herself as the Mercedes took a hard turn at Pont Neuf.

The driver signaled Fournier with the fingers of one hand.
Detour.

Fournier extended his left arm quickly to glance at his watch. Even with the brief exposure beyond the cuff, Vanessa recognized the vintage timepiece as a Vacheron Constantin, a watchmaker whose elite customers included Pope Pius XI, the Duke of Windsor, and Napoléon Bonaparte.

Nice watch for an intel officer.

As if he’d heard her thought, Fournier adjusted the cuff of his jacket, covering the Vacheron.

Vanessa shifted her gaze and found herself staring into deep-set eyes that widened as he raised his thick, dark eyebrows—challenging her to comment. She could smell a not unpleasant mix of coffee and citrus. A small muscle twitched on the left side of his jaw, as if he habitually locked down that side.

She flashed back to Jack’s quip that Fournier would appeal to his wife’s taste for “bad-boy actors”—and her own thought that Fournier looked more like a cop than an actor.

She would amend that judgment now because after a few minutes in close proximity to him, Vanessa thought Marcel Fournier might be a very skilled actor indeed. The man gave no clue to his thoughts.
A good poker player
—but Vanessa sensed his natural intensity, and that made her wonder about his ability to mask complex emotions.

His voice held a low, smoky tone when he asked,
“Croyez-vous me connaître?”

“Do I think I know you?
”
She shrugged; she could play poker, too. Her brother Marshall had taught his little sis how to win at poker and pool and some other important games of life . . .

“Pas encore. Mais . . .”
She shifted back to English intentionally. “But you’re right, I am curious about you. I want to know who I’m working with.”

“You’re not working with me, yet.”

“Actually, the Agency has okayed my place on Team Viper.”

He clicked his tongue once against his very white teeth. “Your Agency is not lead on this op—not now that it’s cleanup to your fuckup.”

Obviously his colloquial English was just fine.

She felt the bore of his gaze. She found him repellent in many ways, but his confidence was so powerful and politic, she had to admit
she felt some respect and a hint of admiration for him, too. Her self-confidence still vied too often with self-doubt.

“Just so you know,” he said, speaking deliberately, “I handpick my team—
et je pense que
—your value to me is the fact you’ve been working for the CIA pursuing Bhoot. You think we don’t know about your operations? We want him, too. After today, maybe more than your government.”

“Not more than me,” she said through clenched teeth.

“What do Americans say, you have true grit? But what’s bothering me most at this moment is the question of why Bhoot—or whoever these terrorists are—wanted you in the middle of
le tas de merde
.”

A pile of shit
—Vanessa scowled—but she couldn’t dismiss Fournier’s question. She shared it.

Their shoulders pressed together as the driver guided the Mercedes into a second sharp turn, accelerating markedly. She contracted away from him again.

But he leaned even closer, his breath warm against her ear as he said,
“Les ennuis vous suivent partout.”

As Vanessa watched the bridge and Seine below blurring together, she said nothing. At this moment she thought Fournier might be right—
trouble did seem to follow her around.

Once again Vanessa stood in the courtyard of the Louvre, surrounded by devastation in the aftermath of the bombing; the museum and the Glass Pyramid seemed diminished to mere human scale, left vulnerable in a way they had not been hours earlier. The deepening gloom of winter’s early dusk did nothing to dispel her dark mood, and neither did Fournier’s questions. She’d answered a dozen during the walk-through inside the museum, where she shared a chronology of her actions preceding the bombing.

“Why plan a meeting in such a public place?” Fournier made no effort to mask his censure. “
Our
people would never do that.”

“I was concerned about it,” she said sharply; she hated being quizzed and she knew it showed on her face. “But Farid had a narrow window for the meet and he was taking a huge risk to get his information to us, so when he named this spot, we felt his information was of such value, and time was of the essence, so, ultimately, we felt we had no choice but to agree.”

Fournier’s response was a grunt as he strode directly beyond barriers and into the restricted area.

Vanessa followed, ducking beneath thick yellow tape to where investigators and dozens of emergency personnel sifted through debris. Only a few wore yellow hazmat suits. Except for a large zone cordoned off in the Tuileries—where the bomb squad under the cover of tents was dealing with the dud RDD—surrounding areas had been tested for radiation contamination and declared clean.

Fournier jabbed a finger her way. “Show me exactly where you were standing when the bomb exploded.”

She walked toward the spot, stopping approximately ten meters from the northwest corner of the pyramid. Most of the evidence had been collected, but blood still stained the courtyard. She went still, remembering the injured girl; she was so young . . .

Vanessa hated that she had been a part of bringing on this destruction, that she couldn’t stop the suffering. She clung to the knowledge that Hays had checked the list of the dead—an elderly couple, and a male tourist in his thirties from Germany. As tragic as those losses were, at least the girl was not among them.

The shriek of a siren filled the heavy air and then died away abruptly.

Vanessa shook off disturbing thoughts and looked around for Fournier, who had momentarily disappeared. Almost immediately she spotted him. About fifteen meters away, and he’d singled out one person, male or female, impossible to tell because he was blocking her view. But then he took a step back and Vanessa saw that he was talking with a woman. She wore a yellow hazmat suit but no protective hood, and her thick, dark braid fell halfway down her back. Vanessa caught her profile—the strong features, dark brows, and honey-brown skin of a Middle Eastern woman. For most of a minute the two spoke, the conversation notably animated, almost heated, and, once, the woman looked toward Vanessa, then back to Fournier.

Vanessa watched the little vignette play out, pegging the woman for French intelligence. Body language told her she was Fournier’s subordinate, but not by much.

The woman was shaking her head adamantly when Fournier turned his back on her. He covered the distance to Vanessa quickly.

“Let’s finish up here,” he said, with his already familiar low growl. But it was more of a snarl after his encounter with the woman. “Step by step, what happened when you saw the man you believed was your asset?”

In a flat voice, the only way to stave off the flood of emotions, she relayed the scene as accurately as she could from the moment she noticed the suicide bomber—including the signals that misled her and allowed her to move toward him. She wiped several stray raindrops from her face. “He was the right age, he had the right clothes, the hair, even Farid’s hat—he was his double, sent to convince me . . .”

Because, of course, once Farid was a prisoner of True Jihad they would have extracted the information they needed before they murdered him.

She swallowed past the ache in her throat. “When he was halfway to me he slowed . . . then he stopped.”

“You were here?” Fournier said, indicating the spot where she stood. “And he was over there—so that puts about twenty-five meters between you.”

Vanessa nodded. “That sounds right.”

“And you still believed he was your asset?”

“No. I realized something was off when he looked at me.”

“Wait. He actually recognized you? You’re positive?”

“Yes.” She nodded, understanding that meant the bomber had picked her out in the middle of a crowd.

Fournier inhaled and his dark, thick eyebrows knitted tightly. “And?”

“I saw that it wasn’t Farid,” she said simply. “Then Hays spotted the backpack.” She felt herself hollowing out. “That’s when the bomb went off.”

“This is most important,” Fournier said, stepping closer. “Did you see his hand on the detonator?”

Vanessa blinked, summoning images again. She shook her head. “His right hand was in his pocket.”

“So you didn’t see him actually detonate the bomb?”

“No.” She slowly took another breath. “But this is my intuition—he knew he was carrying a bomb and he set it off. One of the last things that crossed my mind before everything blew to hell was:
Is he praying?
”

Vanessa sensed someone behind her at the same time Fournier shifted his gaze. She turned to find herself facing the same Middle Eastern woman who Fournier had argued with earlier.

The woman was scowling, speaking sharply to Vanessa in Arabic.

The only words she caught were “dirty bomb.” Vanessa shook her head, fighting exhaustion.
“Français, s’il vous plaît, je ne parle pas arabe.”

But the woman was already hissing at her in posh English: “You Americans with your fucking hubris, you bring your stupidly run CIA operations to our country and you manage to kill and maim innocent victims, and you expect us to clean up after you.”

Vanessa stared openmouthed as the woman turned her back, snapped something in Arabic to Fournier, and then stalked away.

What the hell was that?

Before she got a word out, Fournier, staring after the woman, shook his head. “Go back to the safe house—you’re done here.”

Thanks for stating the obvious, Fournier.

Not far from the perimeter barriers that kept onlookers from entering the courtyard and the blast area, a man in a plain gray raincoat and an olive-green porkpie hat stood in the midst of a small congregation of the curious.

After at least twenty minutes of doing nothing but standing and watching, he answered his phone when it vibrated in his pocket. He spoke briefly, without animation, before he disconnected, pocketing it. In his other pocket, he closed his fingers around a cheap disposable cell, as yet unused.

Medium build, average height, the temples of his dark hair sprinkled with gray—the most striking thing about him was his ordinariness.

The people around him watched the action, the movement, the coming and going of investigators. He watched the slender blond American woman.

While she spoke with the French official, the man kept one eye on
a lone adolescent boy who was snapping a seemingly endless collection of photos of the site and texting countless messages—undoubtedly to his Facebook page. The boy would do for his purpose.

When the French official dismissed the American, the man in the raincoat moved toward the teen.