Blowback (13 page)

Whispers summoned Vanessa
back to the world. She opened her eyes. Khoury smiled down at her. He rested on one elbow, his skin two shades darker than hers.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” he said softly. “Let's go see the pyramids.”

“Later,” she moaned. She yawned and stretched, her fists punching feather-filled pillows. “How did we make it to the bed?”

“You don't remember?” Khoury teased gently. He reached for something on the bedside table: the bottle of wine. He drank freely from the already open bottle, and then he offered it to her. She shook her head, eyeing him seriously. Was he more than a little drunk? Although a non-devout Muslim, Khoury rarely drank, and she was about to ask if he was okay when she heard the low vibration of a cell phone.

Khoury reached for his where he'd left it on the table. As he read the incoming message, his frown cut a deep crease across his forehead.

“Bad news?” she asked softly.

He met her gaze, and for an instant she saw a dark glint of emotion, but then it was gone.

“Hey, Khoury . . .” She shifted, turning her body toward his. She could read him well enough to know he had wanted to say something. She also knew she couldn't push him if he wasn't ready to confide. She pressed her index finger against his breastbone, his heart. “What's wrong?”

He almost answered, but then he pulled back and rolled, and Vanessa ended up on top. “Hey, beautiful, stop worrying,” he whispered, stroking the hollow of her throat.

She inhaled sharply at his touch. “David—”

“Nothing's wrong, I promise,” he said, brushing his fingers lightly across her breasts.

She leaned over him, eyes fierce, voice hoarse. “So, has your mother fixed you up with any nice Lebanese girls lately?”

“Yes.”

“Really.”

“Really. One of them is a belly dancer when she's not curing heart disease.”

“I'll show you a belly dance . . .”

“Habibti,”
he whispered again, tracing his finger along her ribs, an erotic touch that quickly turned ticklish.

“Hey,” Vanessa said, laughing, “that's not fair.” She rolled over and off the bed, feeling his eyes on her as she made her way across the suite, following the trail of clothes they'd left behind only an hour ago. She pulled on her T-shirt, then picked up his boxers and tossed them casually back to him over her head.

“Let's get out of here,” he said.

“We need to talk.” She took a quick breath, her voice fading as she turned toward him.

He shook his head, swinging up to sitting, donning his shorts. “Talk can wait,
the pyramids . . .”

He grabbed the bottle of wine and walked past her onto the terrace. She followed to stand by his side. It was full darkness now, and the illuminated perimeter of the pyramids glowed eerily beyond the bright city lights. Still, the noise never stopped: the endless honk and rumble of traffic and the voices, laughter, and music rising up from the sparkling hotel pools and surrounding gardens.

She eased the bottle of wine from his hand, setting it down on the table. Then she pressed her palm gently to Khoury's back. He was still bare above the waist, and his dark olive skin radiated warmth. “David . . .”

“Talk can wait,” he repeated, still staring out across the desert. He pulled a cigarette from the pack she'd left on the table and lit up. Exhaling smoke, he deepened his voice melodramatically: “Here on the plateau of Giza stands one of the world's mightiest wonders. No traveler, soldier, emperor, or poet has trod on these sands without gasping in awe—”

“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.

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.