Blood Pact (McGarvey) (29 page)

“Where is the diary?”

“In a safe place. I didn’t think it would be wise for me to carry it around.”

Saleh nodded. “Is it here in the country?”

“No.”

“In France?”

“No.”

Saleh’s anger flared. “Don’t toy with me, Mahd. For now you will suspend your search for the key. I want you to get the diary and bring it to me for safekeeping.”

“And afterward?” al-Rashid asked, knowing for sure now what he would do next.

“I may have another assignment for you. We’ll see. But in the meantime you will not return to France ever again. You will stay here as my guest.”

FIFTY-THREE

For the next couple of days McGarvey shuttled between the CIA’s surveillance and information processing center called the Watch, which was on the seventh floor of the OHB where the situation in France was being closely monitored, and Callahan’s office in the FBI. The Bureau’s forensics people were trying, without luck, to identify the priest who McGarvey had shot to death. He’d gone back to the Renckes’ safe house.

The French had come to no definite conclusions about either the killing at the bank building or the deaths of Madam Petain and her son. Nor had they’d made connections yet between those crimes and the bloody scene at Mme. Laurent’s apartment.

But the French tabloids were all over the supposed love triangle between the vice mayor, the doorman, and the mistress, for which the Sûreté had no comment.

“They’re still looking for a fourth person who a passerby might have seen leaving the building from the rear courtyard about the time of the killings,” Otto had told him last night over dinner at his and Louise’s new safe house. “A slender man, but nothing else.”

“Anything yet from Seville?” McGarvey asked.

“The CNI have taken no special notice, so they’re either hiding in the bushes on the chance you’ll show up, or they’ve not made the connection. But you’re certain that the priest told you the answers were in Seville?”

“It was before I shot him. I told him that I didn’t know where to begin looking for the diary. And he said Seville.”

“Do you think he was lying, trying to throw you off?”

“I think that everything he did in Florida and then up here was to get me involved.”

Otto shook his head. “If he’d come to your apartment to kill you, why would he give you such a clue? Doesn’t make any sense.”

McGarvey had thought hard about that exact thing, and the only conclusion he’d come up with was totally nuts. “Could be at the end he was ordered to kill me, but rather than that he pointed me toward Seville and then to prove that he wasn’t lying committed suicide.”

“Jesus,” Otto said softly.

They were at the table in the kitchen, Louise seated across from McGarvey. “Only the Islamic fundamentalist crazies do that kind of stuff anymore,” she said.

“He could have been the same guy at the college chapel. His voice in the apartment was a little ragged. Could be he’d taken something to change it. If it was him, he’d apparently given his confession. I just saw him for a couple of seconds, but to me he looked happy.”

“Like he’d made a decision?” Louise said.

“Yeah. And Bill Callahan agreed with me. If this guy was from the Order he might just have martyred himself to push me to find the diary.”

“Then isn’t it likely that someone from the Order will be waiting for you in Seville?”

“I’m counting on it,” McGarvey said.

He’d wanted to go back to his apartment, but the FBI had mounted a tight surveillance operation around the place, looking specifically for Cuban intelligence operatives, who by now had to know where María León was being held, and that once again McGarvey had had something to do with her hospitalization.

The Bureau didn’t want him anywhere near the place, and he wanted to keep his distance from Otto and Louise in case the CNI or the SMOM or someone else traced him and wanted to try something.

“What are we waiting for?” Otto had asked. “If the answers are in Seville, let’s get going.”

“Soon,” McGarvey had said.

He’d cleared out first thing in the morning, before dawn, and had driven over to All Saints in time for the surveillance team’s shift change. Newman was back, and McGarvey made the scheduled trek around the perimeter fence with him.

“Anything we need to know?” he’d asked.

“Bill Callahan thinks it’s possible that Cuban intel might mount an ops to grab the colonel, but that’s fringe. They’re just guessing.”

They’d stopped at the back door, the woods behind the compound just beginning to take definition with the dawn. “What’s your gut telling you, sir?” Newman said.

“I’m going to ask her just that before I get her out of here.”

Newman was startled. “No shit, you’re springing her?”

“Yeah. You guys can stand down.”

The CIA security officer was wistful. “A lot of good people died here for no reason. Tell me she was the cause, and you can take her out in a body bag.”

“She’ll be more useful alive than dead,” McGarvey said.

“If you say so, sir,” Newman said, but he was skeptical.

McGarvey had waited until after breakfast was served to María, who was their only patient, and until the staff and surveillance guys were fed before he went upstairs to her fourth-floor room.

A bulky young kid with a shaved head who was a student at the Farm was seated on a chair in front of María’s room, the door closed, and when McGarvey got off the elevator he pulled his pistol from a shoulder holster and jumped up. He was nervous, and when he saw who it was he visibly relaxed.

“You gave me a start, sir,” he said as McGarvey came down the corridor.

“Everything okay?”

“Yes, sir, except she bitches nonstop about everything. Why I closed the door; I got tired of listening to her.”

“I’m taking her off your hands,” McGarvey said. He knocked on the door and went in.

María had just gotten out of the shower and was toweling off. She looked up without modesty. A small square bandage about the size and thickness of a pack of cigarettes was taped just above her left breast. She had been careful not to get it wet.

“If you’ve come to tell me I have to stay here another day, you might as well shoot me, because I’ve leaving.”

“Technically you’re under arrest,” McGarvey said. Louise had given him a bra and panties, a pair of jeans, and a white cotton blouse, in a paper grocery bag, which he handed to her. “Sizes are all wrong, but these should do until we can get your other things wherever you’ve stashed them.”

“In the rental car, wherever your people impounded it,” she said.

“I’ll send someone over. In the meantime do you feel good enough to travel?”

“Spain?” she said. “It’s why I came from Havana to see you in the first place.”

“But you have a lot of catching up to do before we go.”

“I’m listening,” she said. She tossed the towel aside and put on the panties, which more or less fit, but the bra was too small, so she laid it aside and put on the blouse. “Louise send these?”

“Yes, but I don’t know why after what you put her through four months ago.”

“Not me, just the idiots who worked for me. But she did it because she is a good woman.”

“The Vatican is not the only organization who thinks the treasure exists and who want it.”

“We do, and so does the CNI, which Dr. Vergilio warned me about. Something put them in high gear, and according to her they are seriously motivated. Who else? Your people?”

“The Company doesn’t believe in it. But what’s Vergilio’s take? I would expect she wants it for her own government.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

“Her father was Castilian, but her mother was a Cuban. They met on some aide program in Zaire, I think. I never properly researched it. Thing is her father died when she was an infant, and her mother raised her alone. She still has relatives in Cuba, who I’ve looked after.”

María pulled on the jeans, which barely fit at the waist, but she had to roll up the cuffs.

“It was a priest who tried to kill you.”

“That figures.”

“Have you heard of a group that calls itself the Voltaire Society?”

She shook her head. “Like the French philosopher?”

“Yes. They have been in control of the seven caches of gold since the mid-eighteen hundreds. And they’ve already emptied three of them.”

“Jesus,” María said, and she came out of the bathroom. “Then it does exist.”

FIFTY-FOUR

Walt Page was chauffeured over to the White House first thing in the morning at the president’s behest and was immediately shown into the Oval Office. He had a reasonably good idea why he’d been called over, so he wasn’t surprised to see the attorney general, Stanley Blumenthal, seated in front of Joseph Langdon’s desk.

“Morning, Walt,” the AG said. Neither he nor the president seemed happy.

Page took a seat and a moment later Frank Shapiro, the president’s adviser on national security affairs, shambled in like an uncaged bear, closing the door and taking a seat.

Langdon picked up his phone. “No interruptions, Joyce,” he told his secretary.

“We have a brewing situation on our hands that needs to be dealt with before it spins totally out of control,” Shapiro said to Page.

“The incident with the Spanish intelligence officers who were shot to death in Florida,” Page replied. It was what he’d expected.

“By the former director of your agency,” Shapiro said. “The man needs to be kept on a leash and right now you’re the only one who can do it.”

“Has O’Connor briefed you yet this morning, Mr. President?” Page asked. Francis O’Connor was the president’s new director of the FBI. “There’ve been several developments overnight.”

“I got a call late last night from President La Rocca demanding the bodies of the three men and one woman who he claimed were tourists. Their ambassador has returned to Madrid for consultations and he all but suggested that our ambassador return to Washington to explain to me the delicacy of this business.”

“According to McGarvey it may be worse than that,” Page said.

“Here we go again,” Shapiro said.

The president silenced his NSA adviser with a motion. “I didn’t like what La Rocca said to me, nor did I like his tone. But I have a feeling that I’m going to like even less what you’re going to tell us.”

“It’s complicated, sir, because there’s a lot more involved than just Spain. And the four who were shot to death have been positively identified as Spanish intelligence agents. But McGarvey only shot three of them, the fourth’s body was found a few miles north. McGarvey thinks he was assassinated by a Catholic priest.”

The AG started to protest, but the president silenced him too. “Anything having to do with McGarvey doesn’t surprise me.”

“He’s done good things for this country, Mr. President, and paid a very heavy price for it.”

“I won’t argue the fact. Nonetheless the people who’ve had to pick up the pieces after him are practically a legion. Does this have something to do with the Spanish treasure supposedly buried in New Mexico?”

“I’m afraid it does, sir. And it may also have something to do with the death of Robert Chatelet.”

The Oval Office was suddenly deathly still. None of them had expected such a bombshell, and their reaction was the same as Page’s had been, incredulity to the point of outright disbelief. The problem he faced was how to convince the president of something that he himself was having a hard time swallowing.

“You have my attention, Walt,” the president finally said. “I want the situation in a nutshell for now. You can send over a written report later this morning.”

“And try to keep yours and McGarvey’s wild speculations to a minimum,” Shapiro said. He reminded Page of an angry Kissinger, who had been a dangerous man when riled.

“It began a few days ago in Florida when a man claiming to represent an organization of international bankers came to ask for McGarvey’s help finding a diary that was stolen from a bank vault in Bern. Mac turned him down and as the man was driving away his car blew up, killing him as well as a pair of bystanders. The diary, written in the mid-eighteen hundreds—before our Civil War—apparently pinpointed the locations of seven caches of Spanish treasure in New Mexico.”

“Urban legend,” Shapiro said.

“One that has resulted in the deaths of a number of people, and McGarvey doesn’t think it will end until the diary is found.”

“Go on,” the president said. His mood was impossible to read just then, except he seemed patient. Something this president had never been known for.

“The Bureau has definitely linked the car bombing to the CNI surveillance team that had been set up next door to McGarvey. That same evening when he went over to confront them there was a shoot-out in which three of them were shot to death. The fourth escaped. That same evening McGarvey was attacked by someone he said had a high-pitched voice, and who spoke English with a decidedly Italian accent. McGarvey has reason to believe the guy was a priest, who served as a soldier in the Sacred Military Order of Malta.”

“What’s become of this priest? Has McGarvey also assassinated him?” Shapiro asked.

“He showed up at McGarvey’s apartment in Georgetown and there was another shoot-out,” Page said. “But the night before that the priest—if that’s what he was—managed to penetrate All Saints’ security measures and murdered four wounded CIA officers lying in their beds, one of the nurses, and the security team.”

“What was he after? Or should I ask who—” Shapiro said, but then stopped. “McGarvey was there.”

“Yes, but the priest wasn’t after him, he was after Colonel María León—the same one from Havana who showed up several months ago looking for the Spanish treasure. She came back again for the same reason, and was wounded in a gunfight at a safe house maintained by my Director of Special Projects. She was taken to the hospital.”

“Otto Rencke,” Shapiro said.

He had a long-standing love/hate relationship with the CIA, for a reason or reasons that Page had never learned. In the early days he’d been one of the architects of the office of the director of national intelligence, which most professionals in the business thought was little more than another wasted layer of Washington bureaucracy.