Oath of Office

19

The killing would occur in the sand, less than a block away from where John Clark sat on Calle Adriano in the shadow of the great bullring of Seville. He was relaxed, sitting back in his chair, a folded edition of El País on the sidewalk café table. Jack sat across from him, not quite as accustomed to death, but experienced enough that he did not startle anymore. It was quiet here, reminding Clark of a side street in Manhattan or northern Virginia — except for the odor of bulls and horses.

El sol es el mejor torero, Spaniards said: The sun is the best bullfighter. And they were right. Clark watched the Russians from the comfort of the shade, while the low sun shone directly across the street, all but blinding them. There was a new man at the table now. Clark couldn’t see his face, but hadn’t recognized him when he’d first come up to join the Russians with the long lip and the farmboy haircut. This new man was tall, paunchy, without much of a chin. Dirty-blond curls stuck out from beneath a tan beret. A powder-blue sweater draped over his shoulders, one sleeve tucked neatly into the tube of the other in front of his chest, the way Clark had seen men do in South America and Europe but rarely in the United States. The man carried himself like a local, sitting with his back to the sun so the Russians got the brunt of the blinding. He’d arrived twenty minutes earlier, greeting each Russian as if he’d been expected. Clark guessed that he’d probably picked the meeting spot — using the sun to put them off balance. It was much too early to eat dinner, but the café was a good place to link up and grab a drink before they went into the bullfight — where refreshments would cost double what they did outside.

Ding and Midas were a block away, nursing a couple of beers in front of the Hotel Adriano. Dom and Adara waited in reserve in an Irish bar around the corner, still staying out of sight to avoid being recognized by any of the Russians who might have seen them in Portugal.

Everyone was connected via their radios and earbuds, using push-to-talk switches rather than voice-activated, so they could chat among themselves without cluttering up the net. They could easily flip a switch on the radio itself and render the mics on their neck loops constantly hot, obviating the need to reach into their pockets and hit the PTT each time they wanted to transmit.

Both Ryan and Clark were dressed in khaki slacks and casual lace-ups with rubber soles that provided good traction. Long experience had taught Clark that he was bound to do a lot more running than he did shooting. He wore a pair of simple suede Desert Boots that were probably half as old as Ryan. Long-sleeve shirts, slightly tailored, made them look a little less American — Ryan’s charcoal gray and Clark’s white. John’s wife, Sandy, always joked that he had to be extra brave to wear white shirts on an operation, since the guys wearing white in the movies always seemed to die before the show ended. It was amazing that she could still joke about that sort of thing — but, he supposed, it was her way of coping. Everyone had to have some mechanism. Sandy’s was her sense of humor. There was rarely a time when she wasn’t grinning — at least with her eyes. It was a good thing, too, because one of them needed to look happy, and Clark’s smiles always looked a little forced — except when he watched his grandson play ball.

Clark had never really stopped paying attention to the Russians, but someone practicing a few notes on the trumpet in the nearby bullring jerked him fully into the here and now of the street.

Absent the colorful splash of the purple jacaranda trees along the banks of the canal off of the Guadalquivir River just two blocks away, the knotted sycamores of Calle Adriano were set against muted buildings painted amber and rust. Siesta time was over, and people were up and about, preparing for the bullfights that would begin in less than two hours. There was room in the arena for twelve thousand, and hundreds of locals hustled like bees on the streets and sidewalks surrounding the centuries-old Plaza de Toros de la Real Maestranza de Caballería de Sevilla. Vendors rented cushions for the stone benches and sold roasted nuts, beer, and gaseosas. Ticket scalpers prepared to haggle with frugal locals and earn their losses back on eager turistas. Carriage drivers checked horses’ hooves and folded blankets customers would need once the sun went down and the evening grew chilly.

Shafts of bright light cut rapierlike down the east-west alleys, leaving those on the east side of the road still in sunglasses and low hats, while Clark, and those experienced enough to choose a table on the west side of the street, received welcome shade. Inside the bullring, aficionados paid much more for seats in the shade, or sombra, than in the eastern, or sol, side of the ring.

Clark had already purchased two tickets in the sombra, in the upper boxes, for a hundred and twenty euros apiece. This high vantage point would give them a good view of the Russians, no matter where they sat. None of the team had been eager to go in and watch the bullfights — each offering various reasons. Adara had already made plain her disgust for the practice, and appeared ready to gut anyone who thought otherwise. The others were more taciturn, but no one was excited about it. For Clark, the problem was the horses. His rational brain said they should not be any higher ranked than another animal, but they were, and to a lot of people. Seeing horses blindfolded and gored while the picadors went after the bull’s shoulders with the spear, well, he could do without that. But the Russians and this new Spaniard looked as though they were going in. Someone had to follow them.

Clark didn’t mind at all when Jack Junior drew the short straw. He and Ryan Senior went way back, certainly further than either of them wanted to remember, but he didn’t get to work directly with the kid very often. Junior was a good deal like his dad. A little more off-the-cuff than Senior, who had more of an analytical bent. Sometimes. Both were incredibly brave, which meant even more when you considered how smart they were. It was easy to appear brave if you were too dumb to realize what kind of danger you were really in.

Clark took a sip of his San Miguel 1516. It was less boozy than the other beers on the menu, leaving him able to drink a little more and still stay on his toes.

“It’s tough being your old man’s kid,” he offered, suddenly nostalgic.

Ryan gave a half-smile and took a drink of his own beer. The kid was absent his usual easy smile. Life seemed to have beaten it out of him of late. “I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.” Clark shrugged. “This business is hard enough on someone who’s not the firstborn son of the immortal Jack Ryan. You doing okay?”

“I’m fine,” Jack lied. It was obvious he was not.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Clark said. “But it’s my job to ask — as your boss and your friend. I’m just saying, you’re a little young to be circling the drain like a dead spider.”

“Is that what I’m doing?”

“I got a nose for these things. You need to get your legs under you, son.”

Jack eyed the men across the street. “You think Beret Guy is another weapons dealer?”

“That would follow the pattern,” Clark said. He’d let the kid change the subject for now, but they’d come back later and get to the root of his angst — insofar as such a thing was even possible.

“The Ruskis must have something they’re trying to move,” Jack mused. “Or maybe buy.”

“They look official to me,” Clark said. “I’m going with option number one.”

Jack sipped his beer again, looking up and down the street at the steady stream of people heading for the arena. “Have you ever been to a bullfight?”

“I have,” Clark said. “Wasn’t what I’d call pretty.”

“I read online they give the bull drugs, put Vaseline and other stuff in its eyes before the fight so he’s all messed up and disoriented.”

Clark took a long, slow breath. “You read that online…” He took another drink of his beer and then pointed at Jack with the neck of the bottle. “Let me ask you this. If you were going into the ring with a thousand pounds of meanness and you wanted to make absolutely sure it charged where you directed it to charge, wouldn’t you want it to be able to see?”

“I guess I would,” Ryan said.

“Not to say they don’t do a number on the poor bastards,” Clark said. “But I wouldn’t trust a damned thing I read on the Internet.”

“So you are bothered by it?” Jack asked. “The bullfights, I mean.”

“You know me, Ryan,” Clark said. “I’m not one to engage in long philosophical debates. But I’ve thought some on this. Commercial beef cattle are customarily finished out in pens where they do nothing but eat and stand around on mountains of their own shit until their appointment with a captive bolt gun in the slaughterhouse — which usually happens sometime between eighteen months and their third birthday. The Spanish fighting bulls that make it into the ring live as near-wild animals until they’re graded and sent to fight at about four years old, at which point they have one bad day.”

“So you’re saying these bulls have a chance?”

“Not a chance in hell.” Clark shook his head. “I mean, a thousand-to-one shot, maybe, if the bull displays such incredible courage that the crowd begs the guy in charge of the fight to pardon it. But for all practical purposes, the bullfight ends with a couple of feet of sharp steel stuck between the bull’s shoulder blades and the dead carcass getting dragged off by a team of mules like the ones you saw clomping down the street a few minutes ago.” He leaned forward, swirling the rest of his beer in the bottle. “You ever read The Dogs of War?”

“Sure,” Jack said. “You assigned it to us.”

Clark smiled. “I guess I did. Anyhow, take it from an old man who’s rapidly approaching his use-by date, Forsyth summed it up about right. I want to go out with a bullet in my chest and blood in my mouth, and a gun in my hand. If I was a bull, I’d take a few spears to the shoulders to get an extra year on the range and a chance to use my horns. It’d be better than getting prodded up some alley with a hot shot in my ass so I can walk into a captive bolt.” He leaned back in his chair and took a drink. “But that’s just me.”

“I’d pick herd bull,” Jack offered. “If I got to choose. A few more years with the added benefits of tending a harem of cows.”

“You young guys.” Clark shook his head. “I’d imagine every steer once aspired to those same goals. But the odds are pretty grim. My way, I get to keep my nuts and have a chance to hook the guy who’s going to kill me…” His voice trailed off and he tipped his beer bottle up the street. Jack’s eyes followed slowly.

“That can’t be good,” Ryan said.

Clark reached into his pocket and pressed the PTT switch on his radio. “Heads up,” he said. “We’ve got company. Lucile Fournier — who is now as blond as Adara — is about twenty yards from the Russians and closing.”