Burned (Vanessa Pierson series Book 2) by Valerie Plame, Sarah Lovett Page B

she said, as much to herself as to Hays.

18
     
    Less than four minutes after Hays left her room, Vanessa stepped out of the shower aware of new activity in the safe house: Hays holding his ground as the French tech crew set up, some bilingual bantering, the robust smell of slightly burnt coffee beans.
    She toweled off quickly as she grabbed the bra and underpants she’d remembered to wash out with hand soap last night. They weren’t quite dry, but she put them on at the same time she brushed her teeth. She stepped into wrinkle-proof light gray slacks and pulled on a mauve sweater, fitted but not too tight.
    Base with sunscreen, tinted lip gloss, mascara—she knew all too well the power of presentation. She draped a gray-and-rose-hued scarf around her neck—an impulse bargain buy next to the checkout counter in the French chain Pimkie. Even though she wasn’t confident when it came to the knot, she decided to wear the scarf anyway—de rigueur for French women.
    She was, after all, a female in Paris
and
a woman on an international team where you brought your game to the table.
    She ran a brush through her hair to pick up the natural shine;stepped into soft Isabel Marant ankle boots, a recent and very big splurge. One last check in the mirror, and she was ready to greet Team Viper, as per Chris’s orders.
    She found Hays still hovering between screens in the study-turned-tech-lair. She quickly cornered him. “Any update from Chris? Did he say when he’d be here?” Was he arranging access to Dieter Schoeman? she wondered silently.
    Hays shrugged, barely looking at her because he was too caught up in watching the strands of numbers running across one monitor, looping CCTV footage of the Louvre courtyard on the second, and the surveillance photos of the suicide bomber, Omar, on the third.
    She pressed her lips together and moved her gaze from the disturbing images to the spray of tiny fiber pills covering the back of Hays’s green-and-blue-striped polyester sweater. “I know you’re doing a hundred things at once, Hays, but I really need you to add one more to the list—and maybe do it now so if you find what I think you might find, we can bring it to the Team Viper meeting.”
    Now he did look at her. “What?”
    “I need you to nose around in open source, see if any events from yesterday—robberies, security disruptions, I don’t know what else—stand out, where the timing coincides with the bombing. Discrete events that happened in that same time frame.”
    Again she heard the echo of Bhoot’s accusations:
“But the suicide bombing is a diversion, a distraction.”
    “You’re thinking it was like a magic trick?” He blinked his owl eyes at her. “The RDD was a diversion for something else, something bigger?”
    “I think it’s possible,” Vanessa said.
    Hays cut his eyes away, following some vanishing point. When he looked at her again, he said, “That would be bad.”

19
     
    At 0643, Vanessa took a deep breath and then breezed into the dining room to find five people already seated around the table, laptops open, coffee cups close. The French on one side, Americans opposite—operations officers closest to the still-vacant head of the table, techs at the far end nearest the kitchen. Unspoken divisions but clearly understood by all; territory marked without the piss.
    Jack motioned to Vanessa to take the empty seat to his left—putting her contiguous to lead and opposite the seriously unfriendly woman who’d chewed her out at the Louvre.
    Stepping over a snake’s den of cable and wire, Vanessa set down her coffee and laptop, but she did not sit. She straightened her posture before reaching across the table to introduce herself. “Vanessa.” Continuing in French:
“Sorry I didn’t properly introduce myself yesterday. I didn’t realize you were part of this team.”
    The woman looked up, reading Vanessa with striking brown eyes defined by dark, arching brows against olive skin. Just past