Oath of Office

“Everyone good to go?” Clark said half an hour later, sitting at a sidewalk café on Avenida del Cid, approximately three blocks away from the Hotel Alfonso XIII. The thousands of people who’d attended the bullfights, mostly locals, had returned home but the streets around the Royal Alcázar park were still modestly crowded with tourists not quite wanting to give up on the vibrant Spanish nightlife.

Adara and Caruso sat at the table with Clark, while the others loitered at various points outside the hotel itself, making it a virtual meeting over comms. Adara had a view of the Russians’ rooms over her webcam. Gavin Biery was patched in via radio link.

By “good to go,” Clark meant physically. He knew Ryan and Midas had been in a scrap but he’d yet to lay eyes on them. They’d already told him they were fine — good to go — but Clark knew all too well that debilitating injuries had a way of showing up after the adrenaline of the incident wore off. Lucile Fournier had proven she was wicked good at killing people. He wanted everyone on their toes.

Midas said, “My nose is toast, but it’s been toasted before. I can still breathe with my mouth shut, and I can’t really get any uglier.” His tone was light, but they’d all been hurt before, and badly. The entire team took these reports seriously. If someone was operating at half speed, everyone needed to know.

“I’m good,” Jack said. “A couple of bruised ribs and some ringing in my ear, but I don’t think anything’s broken.”

“Roger that.” Clark moved on, taking them at their word. “So we’ll know when da Rocha opens his computer?”

“When he pops up on a network,” Gavin says. “His computer will send us a notification. The malware is designed to phone home to my system as well as whoever used their device to insert the program. In this case, it was Jack. I’ll contact you when I get an alert, just in case Jack happens to be otherwise occupied chasing some piece of tail through the streets of… wherever you are in the world.”

“Geez,” Ryan said. “Is that what you think we do?”

“Well,” Gavin said, chuckling, “not all of you.”

“Enough of that,” Clark said. “Good to have the redundancy. The point is that we’ve had no phone home from da Rocha’s computer as of yet. Maybe there’s a problem with the malware.”

“I doubt that, boss,” Midas said. “Gavin designed it to be robust as well as stealthy. It’s late. Maybe da Rocha just went to bed.”

Contrary to the public image of the knuckle-dragging Tier One military operator often imagined by the public, Midas and most of the guys in his cohort had advanced degrees, spoke at least two languages, and possessed a depth of knowledge and experience with phone traps, computer forensics, and other surveillance tech. Every Campus operator was accustomed to working with a variety of technical means, but of all of them, Midas was the most likely to trust it.

“Midas is right,” Caruso said. “From my vantage point through the window, it looked like the Russians were hanging plastic sheeting. Hindsight allows us to say they put it up to defeat any attempted surveillance, but it must have scared the shit out of da Rocha when he walked in and saw a kill room. Near-death experiences tend to spool up the drive to leave a little posterity on the planet, if you know what I mean. Good chance da Rocha and Fournier are just in there exploring their own mortality.”

Adara’s mic picked up her scoff.

“What?” Caruso said. “You know it’s true.”

Ding spoke next, bringing the conversation back on point. “We have some choices to make. Like you said, Mr. C., everybody we’ve got eyes on is involved in some kind of shit.”

“I’m not comfortable splitting up the team,” Clark said.

A good long-term surveillance operation on either da Rocha or the man they’d marked as the lead Russian would require double the number of people he had. The relatively small size of the tight-knit team offered the ability to change direction quickly, to lift and shift, but it brought limitations as well.

“Hard to tell if the Russians or da Rocha have the ball here,” Ding offered. “We need to follow whoever runs with it.”

“Agreed,” Clark said. “This da Rocha guy keeps showing up like a bad penny, and it’s always bloody when he does. We’re looking at the tip of the iceberg here. I want to know what we’re not seeing.”

29

The morgue was tucked down in the basement at the end of a long hallway — a good place, Sassani thought, for handling the dead, especially dead traitors.

Maryam Farhad’s body stayed where it had fallen until the IRGC officer and his men completed a thorough search of her apartment. Ali — the most pious member of Sassani’s team — had covered the obscenity, but someone else had pulled back the bloody sheet, leaving her exposed during the search. Sassani thought it better that way. It would incense the men, show them what kind of whore she was, inspire them to work harder to discover her co-conspirators.