Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2)(18)

Hey. “Maybe she’s desperate.” Chase yawned and stretched and rubbed his knuckles against his chest. “Real men, you know. She probably never met one before, growing up here.” He shot Elias a bird.

“Well, she’d have to be desperate if she thought you were one,” Ian said from the doorway. He folded muscled arms across his chest and gave Chase a competitive look. “Or exhausted.”

“Ego depletion,” Jake said judiciously. “Eighteen hours handling a top kitchen. Decision fatigue, man. Give her a chance to sleep and she’ll wonder what the hell she was thinking.”

Chase scowled, slouching a little in his chair. It was not that he thought they were right, obviously, but still…

Damn it. They were probably right. Part right. They all knew the research on decision fatigue, kind of essential to anyone in special ops. Shit.

“I’ll go introduce myself to her, and then she’ll wonder what she was thinking,” Ian said and grinned. “But that’s okay. I don’t mind giving her a second chance to find the right man.”

“Okay, you know what—?” Chase started to stand.

“If we could focus on the main subject,” Mark said with that too-long-on-the-grill note to his voice. Long, lean, dark-haired Mark had a quiet manner and a bony angularity to him that always managed to convey the impression that he was a nerd, which was kind of hilarious considering his physical abilities. The iron man geek. Who had the nerves to deal with men like Chase, Jake, and Ian.

Chase subsided, Ian relaxed back against the wall, Jake gave them both a sardonic glance, Elias gazed heavenward, and they all paid attention.

“Chase. Other than chasing tail, anything?”

And Chase settled down. Way down. Into that cold place, where his heartrate dropped, where his focus was perfect. He didn’t think he was a psychopath, like people always liked to claim about special ops, because his emotion switch was usually full on. But he knew how to turn it off. That empty, calm clarity that took over his brain and body when he did.

“Nothing,” he said. “But…” And he dropped his head back, staring at the ceiling. “Is there any more on that ricin rumor?”

SOCEUR, United States Special Operations Command, Europe, was coordinating special ops with the French for one primary reason. Obviously, SOCEUR, too, would do anything and everything in their power to help prevent additional attacks on French soil, and they’d been instructed by the President himself to assist in any and all ways they could to track, punish, prevent.

But Al-Mofti was their highest value target now, and the reason SOCEUR had more or less crowbarred their way into operations here. Al-Mofti had been the mastermind behind the attack that took down a Paris-New York flight over the holidays, full of hundreds of French and Americans going to visit families, usually with their little French-American children with them on their way to see grandma. There had been a symbolism in the attack, to hit both France and the U.S. at the same time, a strike right at the heart of where the two were most vulnerable and most united.

And every person in the room and all the way up their chain of command to two presidents would kill that motherf*cker if it was the last thing they did.

Mark shook his head grimly. “They’ve gone entirely dark.”

Chills prickled up Chase’s arms. He hated it when terrorists went dark. Especially when several of them in Paris and Brussels went dark together. Especially after the word ricin had been picked up by the CIA. Especially when one of the men they were tracing on his return from Syria was the cousin of Violette Lenoir’s pastry chef and had been seen on the street of the restaurant, using a phone for a purpose they hadn’t been able to trace. Damn encrypted chat apps.

Fuck, that kitchen was a nightmare. Jesus, they had shelves and shelves of half-prepped desserts sitting there overnight. Someone with a code, which probably covered all the upper levels of staff, could come in early and…

…and the first they’d know about it was when people started to get sick. And there was no cure for ricin.

They had nothing on the head pastry chef, nothing at all except the relationship with that very problematic cousin.

But what if…

That was what a counterterrorist unit had to deal with. That huge, horrible what if.

Who would be on the front line if the crazy bastards did manage to use ricin?

Violette Lenoir and all her staff. Handling all the food. Tasting it before it went out.

“We need to shut it down,” he said abruptly. “Find some excuse that gets the kitchen closed until after the President’s visit or we nail the bastards. Something that doesn’t tip them off. A plumbing problem or something. Rats?” No, shit. Vi would be pissed about rats. He’d seen the way those critics reacted in Ratatouille. Watched it during one f*cking cold winter in Kandahar, where even a rat’s vision of Paris had made for an enticing contrast. “An electrical issue. Small fire.”

“That’s your call?” Mark assessed him steadily.

There had never been a successful mass ricin attack. But Chase had seen far more than his share of aftermaths of attacks with bombs and AK-47s, and they crowded up in his brain suddenly, sent ripples of horror down his skin. “Yes,” he said flatly. “It’s too big a risk.”

“The chef can’t know what happened,” Elias said. “She’s got to be left as much in the dark as anyone. We can’t risk tipping them off.”