The journalist nodded with an appearance of sympathy. “As I’m sure you’re aware, taking you on as chef here created some controversy, and your changes to the menu have been…splashy. Do you think a salmonella outbreak at Audessus supports those who have always claimed you were too young and too…flamboyant…to handle the job?”
Fuck, fuck, fuck. Oh, shit, any minute they were going to bring out the “woman chef” thing. And she might have to hit somebody. “I think you’ll find there’s some other source to this salmonella outbreak.” She looked at the health inspector grimly. “Let’s see those tests.”
“I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you and your staff to remain off the premises while we conduct the investigation,” the military-like inspector said stiffly.
“Oh, no, you damn well will not.” Vi forgot all about the television camera. “Mess around in my kitchens without me there? Over my dead body.”
***
“Salmonella?” Chase demanded between his teeth. “Out of all the possible excuses for shutting that restaurant down, they went with the only one that would do someone actual harm?”
Mark propped his butt against the table behind him and folded his arms. “They said it was the perfect cover. It stirs up doubt. Al-Mofti might have to make calls to find out what was going on, and maybe we can get a location. Was there a ricin attack attempt? Did one of his men carry it out? Did they get caught and this is our cover up? He’ll want to know. And the more of his men he tries to communicate with, the more chance we have of tracking him down.”
“I said a kitchen fire! Plumbing!”
“You’ve got to admit it’s better,” Mark said.
Maybe. If Chase turned off all thought of individual consequences and went into his cold place. Kind of a lousy, crappy place to go when it came to a gorgeous, vivid, life-filled blonde in leather.
“Better only if you consider destroying a chef’s career a minor side effect,” Elias said, his voice very even and cold. “Putain, but you people have no idea of culture. Maybe later you can build a McDonald’s where her restaurant stood.”
Ice entered Chase’s soul. “I thought you said she can handle anything.”
“I suspect she can,” Elias said. “But that doesn’t mean her restaurant can. Or her current career can. Food poisoning. At a restaurant already at the center of every critic’s eye this year, as they love her or hate her or swear she’ll never make it. Merde, it’s a top chef’s worst nightmare.”
“At least she’s alive,” Mark said. “Which she wouldn’t be, if she were exposed to ricin. She probably has friends who aren’t alive, from the last Paris attacks.”
A grim look settled over Elias’s face. He didn’t have to tell them that he also had friends who were no longer alive. They all had friends who were no longer alive, these days. “Who the hell made this call? Were my people involved or was it the damn CIA?”
“It’s a coordinated initiative,” Mark said wearily. Within their team, that was working fine, but on a larger scale…it had already been a nightmare coordinating operations between the CIA and the military when they only had one country involved. “That’s all I’ve got.”
One of those visions of Violette Lenoir dying of ricin again. Not rippling under him in a glorious orgasm, shining with life, but wrenching in death, convulsions going weaker and weaker, until all of her was gone.
Sometimes he really wished he had gone into ranching or something for a living. Surfing. Skiing. Something else challenging and daredevil that didn’t stuff his brain with so many visions of so many different moments of dying. His brain was so damn good at switching out the real bodies seen with those of the people he most cared about, too.
A lot of people claimed his breed were psychopaths. But Chase knew how many of them had gone into the military not because of too little empathy but too much. They’d seen those bodies jumping from the windows of incredibly high buildings rather than burn alive, and the pain and the fury on their behalf had been too much. I’ll get those bastards back for this, the teenage boy thought. I’ll make sure it never happens again. And he enlisted.
Maybe that teenager adopted some traits of psychopathy later. Learned how to turn off that empathy switch, because what else were you supposed to do, when your mission night after night might be to slip into someone’s compound while he was asleep and kill him? But he wasn’t born that way. The problem of that teenage boy who enlisted wasn’t that he was born with too little heart where others were concerned…it was that he was born with too damn much, and he didn’t know how to give enough of it, except with his actual blood.
“I just think they could have used some excuse besides food poisoning,” Chase said. Damn it, and he’d been the one to say he didn’t care what they came up with. “What the hell was wrong with the kitchen fire excuse?”
“This leaves Al-Mofti in greater doubt, which gives us that many more chances to finally pinpoint where that bastard is.”