Oath of Office

26

Lucile Fournier glared at da Rocha’s reflection in the mirrored lobby walls while they waited for the elevator door to open. Elevators were apparently one of the few places on earth where she was not a picture of calm. Hand inside the gauzy black cover-up she wore over her blouse, she stood on da Rocha’s right, keeping her own gun hand free, bouncing on the balls of her feet, grossly out of sync with the canned music pouring from the overhead speaker. An audible chime signaled the car’s arrival and da Rocha stepped aside, allowing Lucile to enter first.

She wore the same shorts and T-shirt she’d had on earlier, during the business with Don Felipe. Da Rocha outweighed his curvaceous assassin by seventy-five pounds and towered above her at a little over six feet four inches tall. Still, he found himself mildly terrified every time she came near him. She’d been attracted, she said, to his coarse, bottle-brush hair that stuck out in all directions if he didn’t keep it short. He knew differently. If Lucile Fournier was attracted to anything, it was the prospect of violent death. It appeared to make little difference if it was someone else’s or her own, it was the notion that fascinated her, and the more violent the better. She seemed like a moth to the flame of the life da Rocha offered, begging for assignments that were incautious at best, and often appeared suicidal to anyone who did not understand how meticulously she planned her operations. There were, of course, always variables. It was for this uncertainty that she seemed to hunger most.

And da Rocha gave her plenty of opportunity to feed.

Urbano was baptized into violent action at the hands of his father, breaking the bastard’s neck with an ax handle in a fight over the car. His job delivering groceries paled in comparison, and he’d sought work as an errand boy for the Ochoas, a mid-level clan in the Galician mafia that ran prostitutes and drugs from northern Spain down into Lisbon. Fistfights and a brutal reputation had seen him move up quickly in the organization. He’d earned a nod from old man Ochoa himself when he’d stabbed a rival clan member for trying to recruit some of their girls in Porto. The mob boss became a stand-in for the father young Urbano had killed and welcomed him into the next level of the family business. By the time he was twenty-six, da Rocha had a crew of his own, responsible for receiving cocaine shipments inbound from Colombia and cutting them up for dispersal to the hungry European market.

He was in charge, surrounded by men who respected him and women who answered his every whim — and he had a lot of whims. Life was good. And then he’d run across a load of Russian-made 9K38 Iglas meant for the return trip to Colombia on the same transport ship that brought in his coke. He recognized the sleek, bazookalike weapons immediately from playing Battlefield 2 with the guys on his crew. He’d always had a thing for weapons of any kind — but had this been a simple load of Kalashnikovs, he would have let them go with no more than a passing glance. The Iglas were a different animal altogether. Igla — meaning “needle”—was an advanced man-portable air-defense system, or MANPADS. There were newer models, but the Grouse, as NATO called this one, was a highly sophisticated piece of machinery in its own right. There were those in the Middle East and elsewhere that would pay handsomely for them. Da Rocha calculated correctly that he could get upward of $25,000 U.S. for each unit, earning him a quick half-million after expenses. These came with no overhead, but for the time lost dumping the bodies of the smugglers off the Douro Point lighthouse.

He found the glamour and excitement of dealing in armaments much more appealing than pushing drugs and pimping whores. It was a heady feeling, this shaping nations. Working with governments had downsides, to be sure, but in the long run, even a shaky regime was more stable than the best cartel — and you didn’t have to worry quite as much about ending up in a barrel of acid if you sold to both sides of a conflict. Though such a thing was not out of the realm of possibility.

At first, da Rocha paid a tribute to Ochoa for working in the old man’s territory. It was paltry compared to what he was making, and he paid it for the same reason a man shooed away a fly instead of using a newspaper and ridding himself of the nuisance once and for all — it was simply too much trouble. Then the old man had gotten greedy and demanded a piece of the action. Da Rocha killed him and every member of his family, but rather than taking over the business, he left it to the three Ochoa lieutenants to fight over — a battle that would surely consume them for years.

Next he started to work on his competition. Lucile had worked for a minor dealer in the south of France, a human stain of a man who possessed no charm or charisma. It had taken little more than a wink to get Lucile to cut his throat and come to work for da Rocha.

There was, he supposed, always the chance that she would do the same with him. She was certainly capable of it. But that was what made it interesting.

The elevator was incredibly slow, the canned music accompanied by the noise of banging cables and sliding counterweights. Lucile appeared to hold her breath during the ride, and gasped audibly when the door hissed open on the third floor. A thick Russian man was waiting outside the elevator. A metal railing behind the Russian came up to just below his belt. Lucile hummed under her breath, a tune da Rocha knew she always hummed when she was thinking of how best to kill someone. She gave the Russian a wicked smile, surely pondering how easy it would be to give a little shove and send him crashing to the floor below. He smiled back, surely with murderous thoughts of his own. The tattoo of a dagger rose above his collar indicated that he was bratva—Russian mafia. Da Rocha had no doubt a man like this would have an abundance of other ink under his shirt. The rose impaled by a dagger was a badge of honor, meant to intimidate and let others know this one had done time in prison before he’d turned eighteen.

The man grunted and tossed a glance over his shoulder before turning and walking down the hall without a word.

Da Rocha exchanged glances with Lucile, and the two followed dutifully. This meeting was, after all, what they’d been working toward for the past three months.

Rose Neck halted at the door to room 314, a suite, from the looks of the placard, and gave two sets of three sharp knocks in quick succession. Da Rocha was surprised the man hadn’t patted them down as soon as they got off the elevator, but when the door opened he understood why.

The Russian with the odd haircut waved them inside with a flick of his hand.

“Disrobe,” he said, while they stood in the cramped alcove next to a vanity and mini-fridge. A curtain made from what appeared to be the bedspread hung from the ceiling at the end of the entry, blocking da Rocha’s view of the room’s interior. He caught the odor of something he could not quite put his finger on, but the order to take off his clothes put his mind on other things.

“If we are going to strip,” he said, “perhaps it is time I learned your name.”

“You may call me Gregor,” the one with the bad haircut said. His thickly accented English made it sound as if he were talking around a mouthful of food.

Da Rocha’s eyes narrowed. “Is that your name?”

“No,” the Russian said. “But you may call me Gregor just the same. Now, please to undress. There will be robes.”

Da Rocha put a hand on his belt and then stopped, canting his head to one side.

“Why?”

“Guns, listening devices, all of those reasons,” Gregor said. “You have proven with devastating effect that a man in your line of employ has access to many weapons. Perhaps you have technology that could defeat our scanners.”

“I see,” da Rocha said, smiling at Lucile. “My dear, you take the bathroom first.”

The Russian stepped sideways to block the door. “You will undress here,” he said. “Is safer for all of us this way.”

Lucile pushed a lock of hair off her forehead. “May I remove my pistol?”

The Russian produced a heavy foil envelope approximately a foot square and held it open. Da Rocha recognized it as a Faraday bag, designed to stop electrical signals from getting in or out. “Put in this.” Gregor’s eyes narrowed. “But very slowly.”

Lucile grabbed the diminutive Beretta Nano from a holster inside her waistband under the tail of her T-shirt, letting it dangle between her thumb and forefinger before dropping it in the bag.

“I do not need a pistol to kill you,” Lucile said through a serene smile.

“I am sure they know that, my dear,” da Rocha said.

“You make killing complicated,” Gregor said, leaning in to encroach on Lucile’s body space ever so slightly. “Silent pistols, specialized toxins… Why you go so much trouble?”

“Oh, mon petit nounours.” Lucile smiled, batting her lashes. “It is no trouble.”

The Russian glared down at her, clicking his front teeth as if chewing on his next words. If he understood that she’d called him her teddy bear, he didn’t mention it.

“Mobile phones,” he said at length, and then put the Faraday bag in the mini-fridge once they’d dropped their devices in. “Now your clothing, if you please. Shoes as well.”

Both Rose Neck and Gregor watched with rapt interest as Lucile stepped out of her shorts and then her underwear without so much as a fumble. They took particular interest in the thin white lines that scarred her legs. Parallel and roughly an inch apart, there were nine of them, from the hollow of her hip well down her thigh on each side. Some might think she’d cut herself, but da Rocha had seen them before, and knew the wounds had come from a straight razor when she was only fourteen. Her own father had tried to mark her as his property. Lucile had dosed his beef broth with some sleeping pills she’d found in his kit — and then done a little work on him before enlisting a boyfriend to help dump him in the river. Her young age and the horrific wounds on her legs had kept her from doing more than eighteen months, and all of that in what the French called a “closed school.”

Completely naked, she gave a little twirl to demonstrate to the Russians that she was in control of the situation. “See,” she said. “No weapons, but for my naughty bits.” Gregor retreated a half-step when she shoved the tiny ball of black silk that was her panties out toward him. “Shall I put this in the bag, or do you wish to hold on to them for me?”

Rose Neck gave a crooked grin. Gregor hooked a thumb toward the top of the minibar. “There will do.”

Da Rocha shot her a sideways glance, which she returned with a little C’est la guerre shrug.

He followed Gregor down the short hallway with Lucile close in behind him. Rose Neck brought up the rear.

It was only when Gregor pushed the makeshift drape aside that da Rocha was able to identify the smell that had previously eluded him.

The floral scent of oranges mixed with the aroma of horse manure from the carriages of Barrio Santa Cruz drifted up on the hot evening air to Ding Chavez’s perch inside the third-floor window of La Giralda, a block south of the Russians’ hotel. During the day, the centuries-old minaret turned Catholic bell tower was one of the most visited places in Seville — and in all of Spain, for that matter. The tours stopped at five p.m., giving Chavez and Caruso the stairwell all to themselves. The night watchman was a big-bellied man who appeared to believe that as long as he watched the base of the stairs, there was really no reason to expend the effort to check out the space above. The biggest danger the operatives faced now was being seen by one of the hundreds of tourists milling around on the cobblestone streets below, snapping hundreds of photos in the dusk that they would surely delete later. To avoid detection, Chavez wore dark clothing and stayed well away from the opening.

He stood behind the eyepiece of what looked like a tripod-mounted SLR camera. Dominic Caruso was a few feet to his left, also back from the adjacent window, with a similar setup. An infrared beam from Caruso’s laser microphone was aimed directly at the Russians’ terrace window. If things worked as they hoped, conversations occurring inside the room would cause the window to vibrate, modulating the light from the laser when it bounced at an angle to Chavez’s receiver and digital recorder. He’d picked up a few terse phrases when they’d first come on station twenty minutes before, mainly jokes about Spanish women and bitching about the Seville heat. There had been another sound, like the squeak of a twisted balloon or duct tape coming off a roll. Then nothing.

Clark and Adara, who was now sporting a curly auburn wig and nonprescription glasses, had set up shop two rooms down from the Russians, monitoring the cameras and GSM listening devices they’d installed under the metal railing three feet from the door to the junior suite and against the glass of the fire extinguisher on the wall outside the elevator halfway down the hall.

Midas and Jack sat at a sidewalk table of a tapas bar near the hotel entrance, almost lost among the crush of tourists as they nursed a couple of local beers and nibbled on thin slices of rich ibérico ham.

“Okay,” Clark said over the net. “Jack, Midas, time to scoot over to da Rocha’s room and do a little snooping. Be alert for anybody he’s got babysitting the place.”

“Roger that,” Ryan said. “On our way.”

“We’ll give you a heads-up when they leave the room,” Clark said. “Ding, how about a sitrep?”

“They can’t be that quiet,” Chavez whispered into the mic on his neck loop. He shot a sideways glance at Caruso. “You bump the laser?”

“Nope,” Caruso said, his words muffled by the pair of binoculars he used to peer at the Russians’ hotel window. “I’m good on this end. I have eyes through a small crack in the blinds, and you’re not gonna believe what they’re doing in there.”