Blowback by Valerie Plame Page B

barefoot, her duffel over her shoulder, through the patch of lush grass.
    She jogged the exterior staircase to her second-floor apartment. After the flight back from Ankara, she was impatient to see if Headquarters had passed the code to NSA decryption division. If Arash was right, they had eleven days until Bhoot would be in Iran visiting a facility that could already be producing nuclear weapons. She had to believe it was possible to respond to the immensity of the threat.
    As Vanessa slid her key into the dead bolt, something warm brushed her ankle: Vasilias,
yia yia
’s huge gray cat. He darted into her apartment, racing a beeline to the kitchen, and she followed. She hit the TV remote and it brought up the voice of
MasterChef
UK’s Gregg Wallace discussing caramelized frog legs with a contestant; the show, one of Vanessa’s favorites, caught on Sky TV Cyprus via the four-meter dish on
yia yia
’s rooftop.
    Still moving, Vanessa tossed down her duffel. She spilled cat kibble into a saucer and poured herself a generous shot of her favorite bourbon, pausing a moment to watch a sweet-faced, curly-haired wannabe apron winner dicing onions. As he tossed them into a sizzling pan, she carried the tumbler into her office. She took a glancing assessment of her personal calendar and new e-mail tally on her laptop, and then she logged on to her secure program.
    She pulled up files from CCTV cams located on streets that ran between Iran’s delegation hotel and the Prater. Vanessa had taught Arash about surveillance detection routes. Plan the predetermined stops and factor time and distance ratios.
If you spot someone at point A, and then you spot that same someone again when you are at point H, chances are very good that you are being followed.
    Vanessa knew the streets in that part of Vienna. She also knew something about Arash and his habits. He’d loved sweets, especially the Viennese specialty, the chocolate and marzipan Mozartkugeln, or Mozart balls. Even late and hurrying to Prater from the Hilton, he would lean on habit and choose a familiar route, perhaps the one that took him past the confectionary Furst. If she was right, he’d passed one of these cameras on his way. If she was lucky, the camera had caught an image of his assassin in careful pursuit.
    She forwarded through the digital images until she reached the time/date stamp ninety minutes before Arash’s death. She clicked play.
    Forty minutes later, she paused the files. 1730 hours in D.C., and still no word from Chris confirming the handoff to NSA decryption.
    Nothing from Zoe or her guy in Tech.
    Did you find a match or not? she pinged Zoe via secure IM.
    Reaching for the tumbler of bourbon, she saw a reflection distorted in the window. For a moment she didn’t recognize the raw, wired woman with the tangled blond hair. She took a long drink, letting her gaze move irresistibly back to the flickering CCTV images.
    0030 hours, Cyprus.

Vanessa started at the familiar burble, the Skype bubble bouncing in the corner of her screen. Her mother’s face appeared in the icon prompt.
Shit.
Vanessa arranged her smile.
    Her mother (one of only three people outside the Agency who knew where she really worked, the others being her brother and her college friend Marie) would see the dark lines around her eyes and the faded bruise on her cheek, and she would know that something hard had happened. Vanessa couldn’t go there.
    Her mother would also carefully avoid any mention of Vanessa’s brother, Marshall, and the latest casualties in Afghanistan. Instead, she would fill the silence with talk of Vanessa’s father, Colonel Jack Pierson, and the cancer and his death ten years ago, until she closed the one-sided conversation with the latest Agent Orange litigation and the new research on generational birth defects.
    Vanessa’s father’s exposure to the chemical defoliant Agent Orange was a legacy of his Air Force service in