Oath of Office

10

The Russians were in Seville for less than an hour before they decided to go swimming.

Jack Ryan, Jr., sat on the floor of Midas’s hotel room, leaning against the angle formed by a set of whitewashed radiator pipes and the wall. A dog-eared paperback copy of The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk lay on the rug beside him. The room was pleasant enough, and smelled, as most hotel rooms around the world smell, of instant coffee and the last person to occupy them — in this case, a woman who was overly fond of her Coco Chanel. Even boutique hotels like this one made it far too easy to wake up in some cookie-cutter suite and forget where you were.

It was nearing noon, and Midas was posted a few blocks away in Clark’s room to keep watch. According to the retired Delta operator, the Russians were lounging around the rooftop pool, pasty and white in the Spanish sun. They were waiting for someone.

Surveillance could go kinetic at any moment, so this momentary lag was the first opportunity to form up the team to regroup and do a quick AAR for the past few days. Midas listened in over the radio from his post, in virtual attendance.

Clark loved his after-action reviews. Jack certainly saw the need, but some things that were done in the heat of the moment sounded… well, asinine with the benefit of hindsight. Still, Clark was a talented and experienced leader who’d made plenty of mistakes of his own. He didn’t use the AARs as a chance to embarrass, at least with no more than a good-natured gibe or two. Honest, open critique benefited the entire team. Serious corrections happened in private. Jack had learned early on that though neither Clark nor Ding would often admit it out loud, they forgave almost any mistake of the head. Mistakes of the heart — errors that demonstrated a weakness in character — would never be tolerated.

Clark sat on the end of the bed. Dom and Adara on the floor at the foot of the leather love seat, while Ding leaned back in the swiveling desk chair, notebook in hand. Jack absentmindedly ruffled the pages of the book with his thumb, like shuffling a deck of cards. Both Clark and Chavez had come to believe strongly in reading assignments — geopolitical, cultural, leadership, even some fiction. Nothing was out of bounds. Essays on intelligence and tactics were favorite topics. DNI Foley, with whom both men had worked extensively at CIA, wrote an in-depth study called How to Work a Russian Asset. She had the chops for it. Born Mary Pat Kaminsky, she was the granddaughter of a riding instructor in the house of Tsar Nicholas II. There was even some stuff by Jack’s dad. He could almost hear the old man’s voice when he read it.

According to Ding Chavez, good intelligence officers were like sharks — they kept swimming or they died. Languages, once learned, had to be practiced consistently or they risked growing stale. Techniques and methods had to be practiced — in the mat room, on the pistol range, or on the street. Some things you could come by naturally — but even those required sharpening with a great deal of practice and study. Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice until you don’t get it wrong. The sentiment had a hell of a lot more meaning when ignoring it could get a friend killed. The real intel types were more bookworm than playboy — though, Jack admitted, the human-engineering side of the job was more interesting than the Chinese or Cyrillic flash cards Adara was always carrying around.

Jack didn’t mind the reading. It gave him something to do during the down time — and there was always a good deal of that, hours of sheer boredom punctuated by massive adrenaline dumps big enough to explode the average human heart.

The Russians had gone from their meeting at Casa Ibérica to a small hotel in Lagoa, north of Carvoeiro, where they’d stayed for two days. Lagoa was larger than the tiny hamlets along the coast and marginally easier for Clark and the rest of The Campus to blend in to without too much worry of being recognized, so long as they didn’t press the surveillance too much. The Russians departed on the afternoon of the second day in a meandering surveillance-detection run that took them six hours to make the two-and-a-half-hour drive east to Seville. The one with the bowl haircut spent a lot of time in the hot tub. His partner sat by the pool and read or talked on the phone. The two who’d been on overwatch stayed in their room, apparently content that their services were not needed between operations.

Ding and Midas had a back-and-forth while still in Portugal on the risk versus benefits of placing a small GPS tracking device on the target vehicle. The device would transmit location information to Campus operatives over a GSM cell signal, allowing them to run a looser tail. The Russians made the decision for them when they came out at the end of the first day and ran a handheld cell-phone tracker over both cars. They weren’t especially thorough, but they had a directional antenna, so they didn’t really have to be.

They’d have to keep at least one of the cars in sight.

The three Campus vehicles bounded, trading places over the course of the journey, all the way to the EME Catedral Hotel, tucked into the pedestrian district in the shadow of the Giralda bell tower. It was a few blocks from the bullfighting arena along the canal off the Guadalquivir River in Seville.

Clark booked a double at the same hotel, down the hall from the Russians. The others set up at small hotels in the area, none close enough to offer a direct view of their target, but that couldn’t be helped. Dom and Adara generally stayed out of sight, since the Russians who’d been working overwatch in Portugal would likely recognize them from the restaurant.

“You with us, kid?” Clark asked, dragging Jack back to the present.

“…Yes?” Jack gave a wan smile. He hoped there wasn’t going to be a quiz on whatever it was that Clark had been saying.

“Outstanding,” Clark said, seeing right through him. “Hugo Gaspard was our main objective on this op. But we’re already here, so it’s worth keeping an eye on the Russians in the near term. Ding, how about you bring everyone up to speed on what Gavin found.”

The camera on the Snipe Nano mini-drone didn’t have the visual clarity that a cheaper, off-the-shelf model might have, but night vision and the ability to zoom more than made up for it. Midas got several good screen grabs of the female assassin from the footage. Adara’s numerous selfies contained some grainy photos of the Russians and the guy who’d dropped in on them at Casa Ibérica. Gavin and his team had been busy enhancing the photos and running them through some facial recognition programs and databases.

Ding Chavez flipped back a page in his notebook.

“The woman who killed Gaspard is named Lucile Fournier. She’s French, originally from a little burg outside Avignon. Father was a pharmacist until she literally gave him some of his own medicine and then dumped his body in the Rhone River. She spent two years in what the French call a ‘closed education center’ for the murder, apparently learning some pretty nasty stuff from a couple of cellmates. She eventually graduated to big-girl prison and, later, a couple of terrorist watch lists. Gavin did some link analysis and found one of her former cellmates was a half-sister to the guy you saw meeting with the Russians — a small-time Portuguese arms dealer named Urbano da Rocha. He’s been arrested a couple of times by gendarmerie in various countries, but never convicted. The Cuerpo Nacional suspects he had ties with the Ochoa crime family in Galicia, but, again, nothing that stuck. Other than that, very little information on the guy, except that he seems to be expanding his business. Gavin got nothing back on the Russians.”

Midas spoke up, his voice streaming in over the radio. “So we have international arms dealer and fat man of intrigue Hugo Gaspard about to do an unknown deal with some Russians, assassinated by the female associate of another arms dealer, who happened to sit down with those same Russians.”

“You’re trackin’.” Chavez nodded, though Midas was in a hotel room blocks away.

“All right.” Clark got to his feet, hands up and together in front of his chest. It was what law enforcement called a “field interview” or “ready” stance, and he looked very much like he was about to draw a weapon or smack somebody. A lifetime of smacking had ingrained the habit.

“One more thing,” he said. “This needs to be said, but I’m only going to say it once. We’re a small unit. Trust is imperative or none of this works. I know some of you… all of you… wonder exactly what went on in Texas with the Magdalena Rojas op. It’s no secret that I went a little ‘off the reservation,’ so to speak.”

Caruso waved a hand. “I told everyone there was nothing to hear.”

“I know you did,” Clark said. “And I appreciate it. But you and I both know that’s not true. I’m not going to address specifics. You all know as much as you probably should about my past—”

“It’s legendary, Mr. C.,” Ding said.

Clark scoffed. “I’m being serious.”

“So is he,” Midas chimed in.

“The point I’m making,” Clark said, “is that I’m not going to lie and tell you nothing went on out there. But I’m not going to drill down on the details, either. The sum total of all the unpleasant things I have done in the past should probably remain classified, or, at the very least, unspoken, for the good of all. That does not mean I don’t admit it occurred. Dom knows some of it, but not all. Suffice it to say that I hashed everything out with Gerry. Here’s the thing, and the chief reason I bring it up. Gerry Hendley is my boss. He did what bosses do and that’s between him and me. I am your boss. Anyone here decides to color outside the lines, you have to hash it out with me, not Gerry. And I gotta tell you, he’s a hell of a lot more understanding than I am.”

“Damn, boss,” Midas said over the radio, the only one too far away for Clark to smack. “You’re gettin’ me all choked up with this sweet sentiment.”

Never one to explain his explanation, Clark moved on. “How is Lisanne?”

“I talked to her a few minutes ago,” Adara said. “She’s at a comfortable hotel in Lisbon chasing down a couple of Tylenol with some good Portuguese wine. Her wrist is broken in two places, and she’s bummed that she can’t be here. But she’ll be fine. I was looking at the screen shot of Lucile Fournier we got from the Snipe — not too much of a stretch to think Gaspard’s thugs mistook Lisanne for the assassin. Same hair color, pert build.”

Ryan scrolled through the images on his phone. “I can see it,” he said.

Ding hung his head. “I shouldn’t have sent her out there,” he said. “She’s not op—”

“Heat of battle,” Clark said, raising his hand to put a stop to that kind of talk. “She has plenty of training to ride along. Good job getting her out of there, Ryan.”

“Thanks,” Jack said, kicking himself for leaving her alone in the first place. His track record with women was pretty dismal of late. It seemed like he picked girls who wanted to spy on him, were too busy spying for their own country, or were bona fide evil bitches. He was as red-blooded as the next guy, but had never considered himself a girl-in-every-port kind of guy. He wanted to settle down. Date someone cool. Someone pretty. Someone… sane. Lisanne certainly fit that bill. But the idea of asking her out was ridiculous. That definitely qualified as coloring outside the lines. First of all, Clark would shoot him. Second… Clark would shoot him.