Oath of Office

Lucile continued to knead Gaspard’s flaccid muscles, chatting amiably. This man had never been anything more than a hollow shell, so it was not at all difficult to talk to him when he was dead.

She stopped abruptly as if he’d said something to her, then tugged at the seat of her panties, drawing the bodyguards’ attention there, away from the blood and bone on the towel where this pig’s lower jaw had been. She looked up at Farrin.

“He wants some wine,” she said, sotto voce, as if she were letting Gaspard drift off to sleep.

Farrin scowled.

Lucile gave him a Suit yourself shrug. “I have a bottle in my car if you want to get it.”

The bodyguard gave a toss of his bulldog head up the hill as if to say Get it yourself. She knew that’s what he would do, if only to watch her walk away in the torn bikini bottoms.

* * *

A scant twenty feet below the edge of the cliff where Ding and Midas had set up shop, Jack Ryan, Jr., wedged a knife hand into a rock crevice, made a fist, and used the resulting friction to pull himself closer to the face. The pain against his knuckles was a welcome penance. He’d decided to swear off women for a while, at least the conquest of them. Climbing above him, a perfect triangle of perspiration where tight climbing pants met the small of her back, Lisanne Robertson was making the decision difficult. She was pleasant to climb with and behind, but she was also a workmate and friend, certainly not someone he should be fraternizing with. Don’t dip your pen in company ink, Clark had baldly warned everyone after Dominic Caruso and Adara Sherman had become an item. It didn’t matter. Ryan had had such shitty luck with women lately that he’d decided to remain celibate in the near term anyway.

Lisanne was the better climber and took the lead, picking the route. She moved effortlessly, slowing down for Jack’s benefit. He was plenty athletic, getting more than twenty miles a week on the roads around his home in Old Town Alexandria and at least two nights a week with a local soccer league. If climbing were simply a function of strength and size, he should have been able to match this lithe woman pitch for pitch. Fitness was vital, and though Jack’s six-foot-plus wingspan definitely helped, it turned out that climbing had a lot in common with ballet.

Lisanne hugged the rock face, stretching her Lycra climbing shorts to reach with an incredibly long leg for a toehold as high as her waist. Directly below her, Ryan behaved as a warrior monk and did the gentlemanly thing, turning away to look down at the beach and their target.

Ryan had little doubt that Hugo Gaspard was here to meet with the two Russians who had just arrived in the village of Carvoeiro, some five kilometers along the coast to the west. According to Dom Caruso, the men might as well have had GRU tattooed on their foreheads. The location of the meeting was still up in the air. Caruso and Adara Sherman kept an eye on the Russians, while John Clark kept an eye on them, providing countersurveillance and protective overwatch.

As with the lion’s share of Campus operations, the road to action had been prefaced with a hell of a lot of reading, analysis, and conjecture — some of it educated, some more along the lines of a WAG — or wild-ass guess.

Hendley Associates’ proximity to the Pentagon allowed the Internet gurus of The Campus to strain terabytes of raw data in the way of intelligence information from daily encrypted transmissions from Fort Meade. Mary Pat Foley, the director of national intelligence and confidante of the President, was fully aware of the broad mission of The Campus, but details were kept in house, giving Liberty Crossing — home of the director of national security — and the White House deniability. Sort of.

A transmission grab from Creech Air Force Base had shown eleven seconds of footage from an MQ-9 Reaper drone loitering over Helmand, Afghanistan. The video was grainy, but analysts were fairly certain the guy in the picture had gotten his hands on a half-dozen MICA rockets.

Jack Junior had worked up the report, identifying the ISIS leader in the video as Faisal al-Zamil, a Saudi national — or at least he had been until the Hellfire missile from the MQ-9 had turned him into fine desert shellac. Zamil came from a wealthy family with bank accounts in various locations around Europe. With the help of Campus Internet savant Gavin Biery, Ryan had been able to follow money from an account in Amsterdam to several pass-through shell companies that would have fooled a casual observer — to a mid-level French arms dealer who thought he was more important than he actually was, named Hugo Gaspard. A tap on the Frenchman’s Paris phone had revealed the appointment with the Russians in Portugal.