Blowback Page 11

  “Just so you know,” Vanessa said, taking a quick hit on his cigarette while it stayed between his fingers, “I saw the same light show when I was ten.”

  “Then you know the curtain of night is about to rise,” Khoury said, reaching for her.

  She kissed him, happy and even a little relieved they felt easy again. Their rhythms matched. She leaned back just enough so she could see the gleam of white when he smiled. And she knew that was her cue. She kissed him again, lightly. Then she held up one finger, leaving him on the balcony as she walked to the bedroom. She picked up her copy of Madame Bovary from the small writing desk, slipping the envelope from inside the cover.

  She turned to walk back to Khoury, but he had followed her and now stood just inside the bedroom doorway. She pressed the envelope into his hands.

  “What’s this?” he asked, his voice wary, his eyes reading her face.

  “Open it,” she said, suddenly apprehensive. She knew her timing wasn’t always good . . . and that had created problems at work and with men. But she pressed on. “Just take a look, please, David.”

  Still he stared at her. “Vanessa . . .”

  “I need your help. My dead asset sent this to us through his wife.”

  His expression hardened. “Let me get this straight, you’re handing me top-secret intel that came from your Iranian asset?”

  Her mouth had gone dry. “It’s vital or I would never ask.”

  He shook his head, and she hated what she saw on his face: the disbelief and disappointment. But she pushed on: “NSA isn’t making any headway. They’re just saying that it’s Middle Persian, but we already knew that. And our Farsi expert had emergency surgery . . . I’m positive these are the geo-markers my asset promised me, but he’s embedded them in some kind of code.”

  “Jesus, Vanessa.” He tried to press the envelope into her hands, but she backed away.

  “We can’t afford to waste time while decryption flounders around. You’d do the same, David.”

  “You’re asking me to go outside the bounds of an active operation? Christ. You know what this means—”

  “Just take a look.”

  “No.” He dropped the envelope, unopened, on the writing desk. “Do you even care about me? About us? Or is this just about what you can get out of me?”

  She stood frozen in place. She knew she was right to ask for his help—she needed his help. But she heard the echo of her own voice, how ruthless she’d sounded.

  “I’m sorry, you’re right, forget it.” She shook her head, a sharp heat flooding through her body. It was hard to meet his eyes. “Let’s just get out of here.”

  At first he said nothing. But after a long moment, eyes cutting away, he shrugged. “I can’t. They need me back at the embassy. That was the message I just got.”

  Was he lying to her? She thought so. He was gathering his shirt and socks. As he walked toward the bathroom, she called to him. “Khoury? You wanted to tell me something earlier. What was it?”

  Without turning, he said, “It doesn’t matter now, it can wait.”

  As he closed the bathroom door halfway, Vanessa sat heavily on the edge of the bed. They had moved from strangers to lovers to strangers again. The whole emotional energy of the day had left her weary.

  He stepped out of the bathroom, fully dressed, a few beads of water still on his skin and hair where he’d dampened it. She saw the bone-deep exhaustion again, and she felt a pang of fear as she moved toward him. But she stopped when he reached for the envelope containing Arash’s code. For a moment Khoury held it between them, and then he slipped it into his pocket. She knew enough not to say a word.

  He kissed her coolly on the cheek and then walked out of her hotel room.

  Vanessa returned the prospectus to its folder and set it on her desk. She’d arrived back in Cyprus midday from Cairo, and the trip had left her with a short day and little ability to concentrate on venture-cap deals. For the last ten minutes she’d read the same paragraph a half-dozen times and still couldn’t accurately quote the numbers. Her thoughts kept turning obsessively to the memory of Khoury as he walked out of her hotel room.

  Now she had five minutes to exit her sixth-floor office if she planned to maintain security and also keep her clandestine meeting with Sergei Tarasov at a safe house in Limassol. She couldn’t use her personal vehicle to get to a secret meeting, so an inside officer had a “company” VW waiting for her on the street. She already had the keys, but she needed at least ninety minutes to carry out a surveillance-detection routine.

  She couldn’t wait to take a good look at Sergei’s financial spreadsheets.

  But even as she stood, easing her cotton jacket from the chrome coat hanger, a sharp trill from the red desk phone jarred her back to earth, and she grabbed the handset. “This is Vanessa Pierson.”

  “Tag! Hallo—”

  She pegged the voice on the phone immediately: the German lawyer representing a hot biotech startup in Munich. “Guten Tag, Werner. You caught me on my way out the door.”

  Good at her day job, Vanessa usually enjoyed the intricacies of venture capital, from seed funding to working capital to mezzanine and bridge financing.

  Not today—Werner loved the sound of his own voice too much.

  Sergei would be gearing up for their meeting and she was taking no chances, unpredictable as he was . . .

  With the handset wedged between chin and shoulder, she slid her keys into her bag and grabbed her iPad. “Yes, looking forward to lunch on Wednesday.” Already on the move—“I’ll e-mail you with time and place”—she almost collided with Michelle, her receptionist, who now stood in the doorway waving her arms, miming that Vanessa had another caller.

  Won’t give his name, Michelle mouthed. Very rude!

  “Perfekt, Werner. See you in a week.” Vanessa clicked off before the lawyer could launch into a lengthy response.

  She raised her eyebrows at Michelle. “Yes?”

  Now Michelle spoke rapidly, in theatrically hushed tones. “He insists on speaking to you, refuses to give his name or number, and”—she sucked in a quick breath—“he sounds very Russian.”

  Shit, Sergei. Vanessa produced a practiced smile. “Thank you, Michelle. Put him through. I’ll handle it.”

  She closed the door.

  It wouldn’t be the first time an asset did something dumb or foolish. After all the trouble to be clandestine, he was calling her on an open line.

  “I cannot meet you today,” he pronounced before she even finished saying hello. “Something doesn’t feel right.”

  “I’m leaving the office now,” she said. “Call me in five on my other line.”

  Sergei had the contact number for a disposable cell to be used in emergencies.

  “Nyet, nyet, nyet—tomorrow. I call you.”

  Then he was gone, and Vanessa replaced the phone in its cradle with exaggerated care. Had something happened, or was Sergei acting paranoid? For a moment she stared at nothing, with the sharp sense she’d just witnessed a cat dangling from a ledge by its claws ten stories up.

  Fuck.

  With the Dragunov resting snugly on his shoulder in firing position, Pauk frowned as he adjusted the Leopold Mark IV scope to a magnification of 6×. He had stretched himself long and belly-down on the room’s heavy dining table. Could he make a clean head shot from this angle? He was beginning to feel at home in the sparsely furnished third-floor condominium across from the Russian’s Limassol penthouse. The development was so new the brokers had strung little white, blue, and red triangle-shaped flags across the cul-de-sac. Russian colors, Pauk noted, because wealthy Russians living or vacationing on Cyprus loved this area of the island in particular. Until the latest crisis, they’d loved the banks, too. The flags flapped lazily in the breezes—at about six knots, Pauk gauged—coming from the southwest this afternoon.

&n
bsp; Even seen from a distance of five hundred meters, the bodyguard stank of steroids. The Dragunov’s scope caught so much detail Pauk could see the fine red rash peppering the bodyguard’s massive, pumped-up body. The kind of child-man who grew bored as soon as no one was looking at him.

  But now the bodyguard sucked in his belly, puffing up, and Pauk knew before he had a visual that the Russian boss had entered the room. For a brief time, the two men filled Pauk’s sight, and he focused on his target’s wide forehead as it danced in and out of view behind the bodyguard. He reminded Pauk of the red-faced Russian commanders at the checkpoints around Urus-Martan and Tangy-Chu, strutting and grinning like vicious dogs. But this Russian still had a few moves. Cagey, Madame Desmarais might say. He did not stay long in one place, he kept the bodyguard close by, and, in general, he shied away from glass.

  No problem. Pauk was good at lying in wait.

  “We need a team on R/258.” Vanessa tipped her head toward the monitor, where Chris Arvanitis stared back, mouth pursed, brows raised, forehead creased in obvious exasperation. Roughly six thousand miles between them, and she could almost smell the stale coffee in his mug, thanks to Headquarters’ secure version of FaceTime. He was in his office, door open, and she sensed the energy and bustle of activity surrounding Chris and CPD. She was sticking it out on Cyprus, doing her best to protect her erratic, possibly paranoid Russian asset. She was the one who should be overseeing the options for capturing Bhoot—she had the best shot at predicting his movements, his behavior once he realized he was cornered—

  “Come on, Vanessa, you know you’ve got it.”

  “He’s tipping out of control, sounding paranoid, and probably has good reason to be.”

  “Are you telling me you can’t handle him?”

  Damn. Was that condescension in Chris’s voice? “No—that’s not what I’m saying.”

  “Good.” Chris glanced at his watch, frowning. “Listen, I’ve got an ops meeting in five. So hear me on this: The closest surveillance team is in Beirut for two more days. So the answer is yes—in forty-eight hours.”

  “That may be too late.” Vanessa gnawed the corner of her lip, unable to shake the sense that something bad was on the way. “I’m talking about now.”

  Chris raised both eyebrows. “Who do you want to call, Batman?”

  Her thoughts chaotic, Vanessa paced the length of her apartment a half-dozen times, growling at Vasilias each time she passed the kitchen counter where her landlady’s fat cat sprawled, eyeing her dubiously. On MasterChef, a sweating man in a purple chef’s hat inched a tall, pouffe-shaped soufflé from a gleaming silver oven—smiling in triumph until it collapsed. The audience gasped, but Vanessa barely noticed, stabbing her cigarette out in her one and only ashtray—a very small brass dish bought from a vendor in a village on Rhodes; a gift from Khoury.

  Which brought to the front of her mind again, still no word from him.

  Finally, she stopped trying to deflect the various waves of agitation and frustration, and she retrieved the sketch pad from the drawer of the small drafting table by her office window. She opened the pad to the last page, where she had hidden two charcoal sketches. As she pulled out the pages, Tunisian sand dusted her bare thighs.

  The first was a sketch of Khoury when she’d caught him unaware on the beach: leaning back on his right arm, a cigarette in his left hand, hair tousled from salt water, his profile barely visible as he stared out to the horizon.

  She’d sketched the second when she found him sleeping in their bed on their last afternoon. As she studied the drawing, she traced her index finger very lightly along the charcoal lines. Her stomach clutched at the worry and fatigue she saw so clearly on his face. How had she missed it then? And what had he wanted to tell her in Cairo?

  For minutes she sat with the pad and sketches lying in her lap. These were the only drawings she had of Khoury, and maybe she needed them to reassure her that their relationship was real. It went against protocol to keep personal photographs, although she had a few snapshots locked inside her small safe along with her personal firearm, a FN Five-Seven pistol, her passports, and other irreplaceable documents. Vanessa Pierson’s cover identity rarely touched her other lives. But her relationship with David Khoury crossed that boundary, and that made it dangerous.

  The children’s bodies blocked her path through the narrow streets of the Kurdish village; at first she thought the kitten was dead, too, but then she saw its eyes were open and it seemed to be watching her expectantly. She reached out, wanting to take the tiny animal into her arms, but someone whispered to her—“Go back to sleep, don’t dream of this”—and just then she heard the sound of footsteps and she was on her hands and knees. When she turned, she saw a faceless soldier in the distance. Help them, she called out. Please help them!

  A siren sounded shrilly, but they were coming too late to help.

  Vanessa lost the images as a ping from her computer made her bolt from the urgent nightmare up to consciousness.

  Groaning, she dragged herself from the chair where she must have fallen asleep.

  Dark outside. No sense of time.

  She leaned toward the monitor, clicking accept.

  “About time,” Sid said, as his creased and crinkled face filled the screen.

  Vanessa pulled herself straight, skimming strands of loose hair back from her face. The clock on her monitor showed 3:48—she’d slept only minutes.

  Sid stared back at her over the top of an oddly small pair of reading glasses kept around his neck by a lanyard; deep purple circles pooled beneath his bloodshot eyes. Close to sixty, with an oddly luxurious head of Cary Grant hair, it was easy to get that he’d lived hard, traveled wide, and seen it all and then some.

  But for a moment Vanessa worried that he wouldn’t live to make retirement.

  “You don’t look so hot yourself,” he cracked blandly, reading her too well. “Maybe it’s time for that spa vacation.”

  “Thanks for the tip.” She played along, curious and ready for an update on Operation Ghost Hunt, but also wary. Why was he reaching out when almost everyone else at Headquarters had no problem ignoring her? Was he on a fishing expedition? If so, fishing for . . . ?

  “My last ex-wife went on and on about the Silver Door or the Copper Door,” Sid said, breaking into her thoughts.

  “Think that’s the Golden Door, and I’ll book it ASAP,” she said. “But first, what’s the word on the SAD team?” SAD—the Agency’s Special Activities Division—had been the first U.S. personnel unit into Afghanistan after 9/11; they’d gone in on horseback. “Are they ready to move as soon as we get the geo-coordinates?” Her speech accelerated as she began asking about the mission, and she was startled when Sid tapped a small yellow notepad against his monitor.

  He said, “Forget the op and SAD for the moment. I’ve been curious about your shooter . . .” He paused to drink something from a coffee cup.

  Not coffee, Vanessa was quite certain.

  “So I cashed in a couple of chits that I had to use up before their expiration date. I fed the database what we had: MO, sniper, partial tattoo, Chechnya, et cetera.” He drank again, this time spilling almost clear liquid down his chin.

  She pushed her face close to the screen. “Is this bus going somewhere?”

  He looked at her, his Groucho eyebrows twitching. “Smile, darlin’, I’m about to make you sing.”

  “Screw you,” she said, but she grinned back at him. Jesus, she had to admit at the moment she was grateful that somebody, anybody, seemed happy to see her, even an old-timer like Sid.

  “Europol has an open file, could be your shooter, your Chechen, and if it is, they can connect him to at least three other hits.”

  Vanessa’s pulse kicked up, and suddenly Sid didn’t seem like such an old-timer.

  He pushed his reading glasses up on his nose, glancing at what she guessed were
his notes. “Spring 2011. The murder of a Spanish prosecutor who was going after two smugglers involved in black nukes probably linked to guess who?”

  “Bhoot,” Vanessa murmured, “I remember that one . . .”

  “Well, you might. The unfortunate prosecutor was shot in the open—outside the Gaudi in Barcelona. The date on this one is interesting: April first.”

  Vanessa’s mouth turned down. “April Fools’ Day . . .”

  “April first, and as you probably know, Vanessa, April 1, 1939, also happens to mark the end of the Spanish Civil War.” Sid pinched the bridge of his nose, and his glasses slid even lower so he looked like a mad professor. “Then, two months later, June third, they’re pretty sure he was in Moscow at the same time an engineer working at Sverdlovsk-forty-five was assassinated in front of his residence, I’m tracking down various ballistics reports—but for two of these, the round was the 7.62×54R—the R standing for Russian—168-grain, hollow-point boat tail. The Russian-made Dragunov, a lethal, very effective sniper rifle, uses this bullet.” Sid’s mouth pulled wide. “The utter casualness after each kill impresses me as absolutely chilling. And—get this—apparently some kids actually saw the shooter walking away. He matches the basic description for your Chechen, except one of the kids said he had huge canines . . .”

  But Vanessa didn’t register Sid’s attempt at punctuated levity—Sverdlovsk-45 was one of Russia’s major nuclear weapons assembly/disassembly facilities. “Any theory why the engineer was a target?”

  “Seems he was selling stolen components as a sideline. And it looks like he might’ve been snitching to the Brits for more pocket change, although our cousins won’t confirm or deny.”

  “You said at least three hits,” Vanessa prompted.

  “Hold your horses . . . eighteen October, 2012. Dutch officer in MIVD investigating black-market procurement, and he was killed on the grounds of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. If he’s your Chechen, he took one kill shot, mid-range, and then he walked out cool as a cucumber. He’s good. Precise. Enjoys his work.”