Oath of Office

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.”

27

Da Rocha’s hands shot up, as if to fend off an attack. A guttural, animalistic growl escaped his throat.

Clear plastic sheeting covered the floor and hung from the ceiling along the far wall, tacked up and fixed to the floor with black gaffer’s tape. Lucile ran into his back, her skin hot against him.