Oath of Office

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.