The man grunted and tossed a glance over his shoulder before turning and walking down the hall without a word.
Da Rocha exchanged glances with Lucile, and the two followed dutifully. This meeting was, after all, what they’d been working toward for the past three months.
Rose Neck halted at the door to room 314, a suite, from the looks of the placard, and gave two sets of three sharp knocks in quick succession. Da Rocha was surprised the man hadn’t patted them down as soon as they got off the elevator, but when the door opened he understood why.
The Russian with the odd haircut waved them inside with a flick of his hand.
“Disrobe,” he said, while they stood in the cramped alcove next to a vanity and mini-fridge. A curtain made from what appeared to be the bedspread hung from the ceiling at the end of the entry, blocking da Rocha’s view of the room’s interior. He caught the odor of something he could not quite put his finger on, but the order to take off his clothes put his mind on other things.
“If we are going to strip,” he said, “perhaps it is time I learned your name.”
“You may call me Gregor,” the one with the bad haircut said. His thickly accented English made it sound as if he were talking around a mouthful of food.
Da Rocha’s eyes narrowed. “Is that your name?”
“No,” the Russian said. “But you may call me Gregor just the same. Now, please to undress. There will be robes.”
Da Rocha put a hand on his belt and then stopped, canting his head to one side.
“Why?”
“Guns, listening devices, all of those reasons,” Gregor said. “You have proven with devastating effect that a man in your line of employ has access to many weapons. Perhaps you have technology that could defeat our scanners.”
“I see,” da Rocha said, smiling at Lucile. “My dear, you take the bathroom first.”
The Russian stepped sideways to block the door. “You will undress here,” he said. “Is safer for all of us this way.”
Lucile pushed a lock of hair off her forehead. “May I remove my pistol?”
The Russian produced a heavy foil envelope approximately a foot square and held it open. Da Rocha recognized it as a Faraday bag, designed to stop electrical signals from getting in or out. “Put in this.” Gregor’s eyes narrowed. “But very slowly.”
Lucile grabbed the diminutive Beretta Nano from a holster inside her waistband under the tail of her T-shirt, letting it dangle between her thumb and forefinger before dropping it in the bag.
“I do not need a pistol to kill you,” Lucile said through a serene smile.
“I am sure they know that, my dear,” da Rocha said.
“You make killing complicated,” Gregor said, leaning in to encroach on Lucile’s body space ever so slightly. “Silent pistols, specialized toxins… Why you go so much trouble?”
“Oh, mon petit nounours.” Lucile smiled, batting her lashes. “It is no trouble.”
The Russian glared down at her, clicking his front teeth as if chewing on his next words. If he understood that she’d called him her teddy bear, he didn’t mention it.
“Mobile phones,” he said at length, and then put the Faraday bag in the mini-fridge once they’d dropped their devices in. “Now your clothing, if you please. Shoes as well.”
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.