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

served his country for many years.”
    “How dare you speak of my father—”
    “Our time is up for now. Where we go from here in the future depends upon your answer, your honesty. Just one final question . . .”
    “What?”
    “You do realize that we’ve both been betrayed?”
    Through the silence she braced against a wave of vertigo. But then she was filled with a visceral certainty. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Don’t try to pretend we’re somehow allies—
we share nothing.
”
    His silence stretched through her eerie sense of calm—until her rising panic pushed through. “I’ve answered your question,” she said, speaking fast. “So now you hold your side of the bargain. Give me something—”
    “But you already have it.” His breath came more rapidly, as if he were on the move. “Isn’t the adage ‘a bird in the cage’?”
    “No, it’s ‘a bird in the hand’—”
    “You caged him, Vanessa.”
    “Who—”
    But the phone had gone dead.
    Still shielding her actions from curious eyes, she wrapped the cellin her scarf and slipped it into her jacket pocket. For a moment she simply stood in place, unable to move.
    One or two people passed her as they abandoned their vigil at the bomb site.
    Something broke free internally and she began to walk back toward the river. The sense of violation intensified with each sodden step.
    She couldn’t quiet his voice in her head if she wanted: his muted words and theatrical concern, the cold contempt when his mask slipped briefly, and, finally, the satisfaction—consummation, almost—when he got what he’d been after.
    He’d breached her defenses—at least that’s what he believed. And he would test her where she was most vulnerable—her fixation on him. It didn’t take a degree in psych to get that Bhoot was a control freak and he thrived on manipulation. But she could handle him—that’s what she told herself even as foreboding flooded through her for an instant.
    She let it pass and turned her focus back to their conversation, replaying it silently again and again. When she reached the safe house she would get pencil and paper and write it all down.
    She pulled her jacket tightly around her body. It didn’t block the cold. Nothing could.
    How was Bhoot able to track her? He must have surveillance on her. But was there more than one person following her? The angry woman who forced her to the perimeter? Someone else? Bhoot seemed to possess almost unlimited resources. It could be anyone.
    And was Bhoot responsible? She wanted to believe he was—then she could focus her rage on tracking him down. Was this feint part of his game?
    She checked herself—she’d been walking almost blindly. She stopped, turning to orient herself and to see who was nearby. But other than a few pedestrians in the distance and hurrying in otherdirections, she was alone. She glanced down at the choppy waters of the Seine.
    For that moment, the darkness of the suicide bomber, the resulting carnage and death, and Bhoot’s malevolence, all seemed capable of dimming the City of Light. But the fight rose in her and she breathed, pulling herself up, opening to Paris and its beauty and life.
    And then it came to her—
    Isn’t the adage ‘a bird in the cage’? . . . You caged him, Vanessa.
    She shook her head, exhaling when she made the connection. The only person Bhoot could be talking about was arms dealer Dieter Schoeman—until last year, his number-one man in South Africa. But now Dieter was caged in the UK in Belmarsh. Thanks in good part to Vanessa; she’d helped the Brits capture him during their Operation Ulysses.
    You caged him . . .
Dieter was one of only a handful of Bhoot’s associates Vanessa had helped imprison—and he was certainly the most important one.
    Could Bhoot be telling the truth that True Jihad’s bombing was a diversion?
    A diversion for what?
They had executed Farid and murdered innocent civilians, the deaths were real, the