Oath of Office

“I was just thinking,” Ryan said. “I hope Jack Junior finds a girl like I did.”

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.