“Have you been in Portugal long?” she asked.
Gaspard grunted in time to her kneading. “Now… you start… the small talk…”
She ignored the gibe. “Do you know sebastianismo?”
“I confess that I do not,” he said.
“King Sebastião,” she said. “He was also a rich man. Like you, he too had an important meeting, his against the Moors. Unfortunately, he was forever lost in the deserts of North Africa. The word sebastianismo comes from that. A failed venture — hope for something that can never be.”
“Stop,” Gaspard said, sounding pained. “Your history lesson depresses me.”
“As you wish,” she said. “But I do like the word. Sebastianismo…”
She leaned forward now, kneading with her left arm, pressing her breast against Gaspard’s back. Her right hand slipped into the paperback book at her knee and retrieved the MSP derringer hidden in the hollowed pages. A whirring noise above her head, like a dragonfly — or a passing bullet — almost caused her to fumble with the pistol. She regained her composure and brought the gun up quickly before the bodyguards could see it, covering it with a cupped palm. Pistol secure, she turned, looking for the source of the noise, half expecting to see Farrin standing there, ready to blow her head off. Merde! She released a pent-up breath. Nothing but a blinding sun. Maybe it really was a dragonfly. She willed her body to relax and become more fluid, and then returned to the task ahead.
The Soviet-era Malogabaritnyj Spetsialnyj Pistolet fit her hand perfectly — better, in fact, than the Beretta she customarily carried. The Small Special Pistol had first seen action with KGB units in the early 1970s. Its specialized ammunition utilized a captive piston inside the brass casing that drove a 7.62x37 projectile, similar to that of an AK-47, out a short barrel at a speed just shy of five hundred feet per second. The gases from the detonated propellant — and nearly all the resulting noise — remained trapped inside the cartridge, rendering the MSP very close to “Hollywood quiet.” The ballistics were quite limp, something around half of the diminutive .32 auto. But the Russians had proven many times over the last four decades that a Spitzer bullet delivered at point-blank range more than made up for the round’s middling performance.
Lucile leaned forward slightly, digging in with her elbow to draw a grunt of pleasure from Gaspard. She nodded to herself. That would be plenty loud enough to cover the noise.
He groaned. “Masterful. Are you certain you are not French?” He clenched his buttocks beneath her groin, making her want to vomit. “I am usually the one to do the riding,” he mumbled. “If you know my meaning.”
Pistol hidden between her breasts now, Lucile clutched with her thighs to retain her balance and leaned farther forward, lips touching Gaspard’s ear. The smell of his sweat was nauseating.
“…courir sur le haricot,” she said. Literally “run on the bean,” the phrase more figuratively meant he had gotten on her last nerve.
Gaspard froze, suddenly realizing Lucile was not who she’d said she was.
“Tu es française,” he whispered, face still buried in his towel. You are French!
Instead of answering, Lucile dug deep into the muscles of his back with her left elbow. With her right hand, she pressed the MSP against the depression at the base of his neck, just below his skull, aiming downward. She pulled the trigger in perfect time with the resulting grunt brought on by her elbow.
Gaspard sagged in the sand, all the air leaving his lungs with a heavy, gurgling groan, his brain stem clipped at the base. Fini.
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.