by Marc Cameron
Ryan made a slow right on Rua do Cerro. Trees lined the quiet street, lush and green with new spring foliage. Low limestone walls, thick hedges, and dazzlingly white villas made him wish he were here on vacation instead of on an op.
“This is incredible,” Lisanne said, her voice hushed as if she were in church.
Ryan stopped at the bottom of the hill, at the intersection with the larger Estrada do Farol. Midas and Ding were to the east, waiting to pick them up so they could abandon the Audi, which had been rented under a false ID.
“What do you think?” He looked at Lisanne. “Keep looking or turn left?”
Chavez answered, “Get your ass over here.”
“Copy that,” Ryan said, making the turn. He hadn’t gone a half-block before Lisanne gave an excited bounce in her seat, humming with sudden emotion.
“On the left,” she said. “Red Ducati.”
Ryan slowed, peering up a cobblestone drive alongside a white three-story building with a bar and restaurant on the ground level and two floors of apartments above. The fuel tank and front tire of a red Ducati Monster peeked out from behind a rock wall in back.
“We might have her,” Ryan said, giving their location over the net. “She could be in one of the upper apartments.”
“Or the next building,” Chavez said. “Or across the street, or just maybe she’s abandoned her bike and is at this very moment hauling ass to Lisbon.”
“Your call, boss,” Ryan said. “But we’re sitting right here. I think I should try and get a plate number off the bike. I’ll drop Lisanne off here so she can watch the front, then I’ll drive up, take a look, and be down the hill in a flash. I’ll pick up Lisanne and we’ll be outa here in two minutes, maybe less.”
“Two minutes,” Chavez said. “We’ll head your way.”
* * *
—
Dominic Caruso asked the waitress for a touch more Foral de Portimão, an inexpensive local red that she’d recommended. Adara reached across the table and gave his hand a squeeze, prompting him to follow her gaze over his shoulder.
“Our friends on overwatch are starting to get antsy,” she said, once the waitress had poured the wine and left.
Clark came over the radio. “I see that.”
Adara smiled at Dom, chatting away about the weather, the beach, anything but a surveillance on a couple of Russian spooks. She gave a play-by-play so he didn’t have to turn around. “One of them just clouded up like he saw something he didn’t like . . . He’s standing now. I think he’s about to head across the street . . . Nope. Scratch that. Now he’s sitting back down.”
“Must be in commo with his Ruski friends,” Dom said. He scanned the balcony for anything out of the ordinary. “I think I see what’s going on.”
“Care to enlighten us?” Clark said.
“There’s a new player,” Dom said. “Tall, jeans, tan sport coat with the sleeves pushed up like he’s auditioning for a remake of Miami Vice. Dark hair cut over his ears. Big honking watch I can see from here. He was just standing in the doorway watching a minute ago. I thought he was looking for someone. He’s making his way toward the Russians’ table now. There’s no one else seated at that end of the balcony. That must be what spooked our friends here.”
“One of Gaspard’s men?” Clark offered.
“Could be,” Dom said. “He’s sitting at the table with the Russians. Hard to tell from this distance, but they don’t look very happy to see him.”
* * *
—
Urbano da Rocha made his move the moment he received the call from Lucile. He’d had no doubt of her abilities, but things happened, and he did not care to be caught in a meat grinder between Hugo Gaspard and the two Russians who were about to become his friends.
“Hallo,” he said, giving the two men the closest thing to a benign smile a man like him could muster. “Would you mind terribly if we speak English? I can manage in Russian, but in this sort of back-and-forth, mistakes could be made, leading to unfortunate events.”
Neither Russian smiled. They did not appear to be startled as much as dyspeptic, bothered as they might be bothered by a fly that had just flown onto their pudding from a manure pile.
“Who are you?” the elder Russian said, curling a long upper lip.
“My name is da Rocha.”
“I do not know you,” the Russian said.
“What you mean to say,” da Rocha said, still smiling, “is that you do not know me yet.”
“It would be better for you if you left us alone,” the younger Russian said, flicking his hand. He had a ridiculous bowl cut and an ill-fitting suit that made him look like a runaway child who had climbed out the window of his nursery.
Dealing with Russians was tricky business—especially the brutish ones—and what Russian did not have a little brute in his DNA? These two cretins would certainly have a difficult time with subtlety, so da Rocha decided to get straight to the yolk of the egg.
“Hugo Gaspard is dead.”
The Russians looked at each other. Bowl Cut’s tongue darted out, tasting the air.
“Who is this Gaspard to us?”
Da Rocha shrugged, ignoring the sidestep. “I am here to take his place. With, I might add, much better terms than anything Gaspard could have provided . . . God rest his soulless black heart. I can provide you with all the hardware he could, plus—”
Long Lip gave a curt nod and then dropped a wad of cash on the table for their unfinished meal. “If you will not leave, then we will.”
Da Rocha suddenly brightened. “I have military contacts who can vouch for my bona fides, if that makes a difference.”
Long Lip pushed away from the table. “Mr. da Rocha,” he said. “We will be in touch if we are interested. Any attempt by you to make contact with us would be a grave error on your part.”
“Very well,” da Rocha said and sighed. “I had hoped you might be more reasonable.”
“I mean what I say,” Long Lip said. “Do not contact us again.”
Da Rocha picked up a breadstick from the table and dipped it in the nearest bowl of half-eaten pasta. “Oh.” He chuckled, speaking around a mouthful of food. “Make no mistake. The next time we meet, you will beg to hear about my terms.”
* * *
—
Da Rocha gave the Russians a moment to leave, not wanting to press them too much for the time being. He’d had nothing to eat, but left twenty euros on the table anyway, buying a little goodwill from the waiter who’d watched him sit down with the Russians.
He had to force himself not to hum as he made his way inside and then quickly down the stairs to street level. A silver Porsche 911 R drove down from Encarnação, directly past the Guarda Nacional depot, and pulled to a stop along the curb. He opened the door and slid into the passenger seat, leaning across to kiss the blond woman behind the wheel. She wore large sunglasses and a sheer white wrap over a two-piece swimsuit. A brunette wig lay draped across the console between them.
Lucile Fournier shifted into second gear, keeping the roaring 4.0-liter engine caged as she drove north through town on 124–1. “The Russians did not accept your proposal?”
“They did not,” da Rocha said. “But I am not really surprised. They do not know us. It is only a matter of time. Soon I will be the only one left who has the connections they need.”
“If I do my job,” she said.
“Precisely.” Da Rocha stuffed the wig behind his seat. “Speaking of that, it went well, my darling?”
“Easy,” she said, pretending to spit. “Hugo Gaspard was a very nasty man.”
Da Rocha raised a brow. He reached across the Porsche’s black leather interior to caress the back of her neck. “And if they are not all such nasty men? Will it be so easy then?”
“It will, my love.” She shrugged, shifting into fourth when she
reached the edge of town. The 911’s engine growled. “I am a very nasty woman.”
“Indeed you are,” da Rocha said, his hand dropping to her bare knee. “In so many wonderful ways.”
Lucile gave the top of her head an absentminded scratch, the itch no doubt brought on by covering her blond locks with the mesh of the brunette wig. “What do you think it is?”
“What what is?” Da Rocha thrummed his fingers on her thigh.
“Arrête!” She pushed his hand away. “None of that until you concentrate. I am talking about the job, this thing the Russians want.”
“I honestly do not know,” da Rocha said. “It is enough that Hugo Gaspard believed it would set him up for life. The Russians must be trying to move something that will bring an incredible amount of profit.”
* * *
—
Killing Colonel Mikhailov had not been easy, but even that was preferable to this interminable waiting. Cherenko was a pilot, and a damned good one. He was meant to be in the air, not lying on a bunk in Oman under a clattering swamp cooler. Babysitting was not the work of a pilot. He could have gone swimming, but these people probably flushed their toilets into the sea. He’d never been fond of the ocean, preferring air currents to even the bluest of water. And this water was brown, a dusky, foamy mess like wet concrete that made it impossible to tell from a distance where the sand ended and the sea began. When the wind blew hard, it picked up enough sand that air and earth and water all seemed to combine into a single ugly element. In an airplane, he could have gotten above such nastiness.
One could read only so much news. Most of it was lies anyway, even from his own country. He laughed at that—especially from his own country. What little truth got out was incredibly depressing. As if there was not already enough to worry about in Russia, Cherenko was assaulted daily with stories of missing children, brutalized women, and all manner of plague from every corner of the world. This deadly strain of flu in North America was particularly chilling—if the stories about it were true. Perhaps an island off the coast of Oman was not such a bad place to be after all.
The most eventful portion of the mission had so far been the midair ballet south of Moscow. After that, it was just a series of stops and starts to disrupt any trail. They spent one night in Erbil, Iraq, offloading a couple of crates to establish a reason for their flight and give American intelligence an opportunity to take a few photographs of the airplane while it sat on the tarmac. Russia sold many weapons, including T-90 battle tanks, to Iraq, so the presence of a large transport aircraft was hardly noteworthy. The tail numbers had been changed to those of 2967 when they put down in Saratov for “systems check.” They’d also used the opportunity to pass Mikhailov’s body to a waiting GRU cleanup man while still inside Russia for later transfer to an area of the mountains nearer the presumed crash site. They could have dumped him out at altitude, but it would have been problematic if some hiker, or even a military patrol, found the body of a Russian Air Force colonel a thousand kilometers from where his aircraft was supposed to have gone down. Conspiracy theories abounded around vanished aircraft, especially those thought to be carrying nuclear material. There was no point in pouring petrol on the flames.
Landing at the island airbase of Masirah hadn’t been too much of a problem, considering the Antonov’s established record of recent electrical problems. There were few airports in the world that would not allow an aircraft to land with a declared emergency. Oman and Russia were not exactly friends, but they were not enemies, either. One million dollars in medium-denomination bills weighed approximately fifteen pounds. The largesse of a twenty-pound briefcase along with some whispered words about rare antiquities bought a blind eye from even a neutral acquaintance. What did the Omani base commander care if the Russians smuggled a little statuary and art out of Iraq? Cherenko had half hoped the Omani colonel would tell them to move on, or, at the very least, become nosy so they would be forced to fly somewhere else. At least then he’d be in the air instead of loitering on some shithole of an island waiting for further instructions. But the greedy old fool was too busy counting his money.
Cherenko grunted to himself, struck with a sudden idea. He rolled half over in his bed, the oval armed forces ID tags he wore around his neck falling to the side as he reached for his black leather briefcase. He pulled out the small tablet computer and stuffed the ID tags back inside his T-shirt before situating himself against the grimy pillows. Checking his personal bank account would help to pass the time. If converted into cash, it would weigh considerably more than fifteen pounds.
* * *
—
Dmitry Leskov picked a bread crumb off his longish upper lip and stared up at the headliner of the rented Toyota sedan, happy to be out of the fishy-smelling restaurant. A major in the 45th Guards Independent Reconnaissance, an elite Spetsnaz brigade of Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate, he’d never been fond of seafood. Give him a good borscht and maybe a few buckwheat blini with smetana and onion any day. He cared for none of this stuff you had to pry out of its shell to get in your mouth. He and Captain Osin had served together in Chechnya and Ossetia. Disguised as civilians, they’d distinguished themselves during the intervention in Ukraine, earning the trust of their GRU commanders for exceedingly delicate missions on behalf of the motherland.
“This da Rocha character is certainly pompous enough for our purposes,” Osin said, pushing blond bangs to the side of his face before starting the car. He was a capable soldier, Captain Osin, his penchant for farm-boy haircuts notwithstanding.
“Maybe.” Leskov gave a noncommittal shrug. “But I don’t like him. We still need to talk with Don Felipe. He’s no smarter, but certainly more trustworthy. We should mark the Spaniard off our list before we take a gamble on this one.”
“And we will,” Osin said. “You do have a nose for these things. Perhaps da Rocha is CIA, or American military.”
“Perhaps,” Leskov said. “But I doubt even the Americans would stoop to killing Gaspard. Yuri said he was indeed murdered by a woman while sunbathing on the beach. Odd that they would assassinate him so publicly.”
Osin grimaced. “At least we don’t have to spend another minute with that pig.” He nosed the Toyota into traffic as he spoke. “It is ironic that da Rocha would work so hard to be involved in our project, all things considered.”
Another shrug. “Ironic indeed.”
Leskov nestled down in his seat and closed his eyes, suddenly exhausted. These delicate missions for the motherland were becoming more tedious by the moment. This one would require a great deal of cleanup—and since it was extremely close-hold, that cleanup would fall to them.
* * *
—
Lisanne Robertson walked across Estrada do Farol after Jack dropped her off. It was still early in the season, with few outsiders on the street, but the bus stop in front of the hotel portico gate gave her an inconspicuous place to wait. She kept her back to the stucco pillar, scanning the area while trying to keep an eye on the Audi as Jack made his way up the lane toward the motorcycle. There was always a chance it was just another Ducati, unrelated to the assassination, but she agreed with Ryan. They were here. Why not check it out?
She couldn’t help but wonder about him. He was a nice guy. Smart, kind eyes, good heart—the traits her mother had told her to look for in a man. The fact that he was rugged and athletic didn’t hurt. Still, they worked together.
She turned to look to the south just in time to see a blond man jump out the passenger door of a gray Mercedes ten feet away. He kept a black pistol close to his body, half hidden by a leather jacket, and hooked his hand toward the car, barking an order in French to get in.
She raised her hands and stepped forward, closing the gap as if to comply. Shorter than the man by a head, Lisanne knew he probably underestimated her. A drastic mistake on his part.
Boot camp at Parris Island and the polic
e academy had only honed the natural affinity for fighting that she’d inherited from her father. She bowed her head when the man reached her, eyes wide, looking as subservient as she could.
“You killed the wrong person, bitch!” the blond man said, still speaking in French. He reached to shove her into the waiting Mercedes.
She sidestepped, moving into him rather than toward the car. Her left hand parried the pistol away as her right shot upward, catching him under the nose with the heel of her palm. She rolled up and over, intent on peeling the big thug’s nose off his scowling face. He backpedaled, striking out with the pistol instead of firing it. Wasting no energy on excess movement, she brought her right hand down, delivering a hammer fist to the bridge of his already injured nose.
The blows were painful but not incapacitating—and the man had been in a fight or two himself. He snatched her wrist as it went by his face, jerking her sideways and throwing her backward. She hit the pavement hard, landing on her butt, stupidly trying to catch herself. A wave of nausea washed over her as something snapped in her wrist.
“Salope!” the man spat, aiming the pistol at her face—just before Ryan roared across the street and plowed into him with the Audi.
Ryan kept going, dragging the body past the bus stop, through the gate, and into the hotel courtyard. The Mercedes sped away, abandoning the big Frenchman. Tires squealed as Ryan threw the Audi into reverse and shot out into the street, reaching across to fling open the passenger door. Lisanne scrambled in and he drove east down Estrada do Farol.