Blood Pact (McGarvey) (5 page)

“The Confederacy didn’t really exist at that point, and who knows, maybe someone in the Society had a sense of humor, just like its namesake Voltaire had.”

“Doesn’t make any sense,” McGarvey said, and yet there was a certain symmetry to the idea. Petain had come to him with his fantastical story and he was assassinated.

“A lot of things don’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense, Mac. And here’s another one for you. I ran the partial tag number you gave me, and came up with a hundred seventeen hits. Tampa, Miami, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, even one in the Keys. But the most interesting was for Juan Fernandez from an address just off the Calle Ocho in Miami. Little Havana. But Señor Fernandez only exists in a few places—Mercedes Benz of Miami, the dealership where the car was purchased for cash three weeks ago, and the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles. But no Fernandez lives at the address on the title. The man doesn’t exist in Miami. And the only other place his name pops up is for a three-month rental on Casey Key, right next door to you.”

“Fernandez is a work name,” McGarvey said, not terribly surprised.

“Be my guess. Probably the CNI. I’m working their mainframe in Madrid now, but this guy most likely is a NOC, so he’ll show up only as a coded entry somewhere that only his case officer would have access to.” In the parlance a NOC was an intelligence agent working in the field with No Official Cover.

“These people are team players, so there’ll be more than just him.”

“Exactamundo,” Rencke said. “Have you seen or noticed anything over the past few weeks? Met the neighbors? Been invited over for drinks? Anything like that?”

A good-looking girl in a bikini at the pool. She’d waved, and he’d waved back. A guy doing something with a small Boston Whaler center console at the dock. Another guy at a second-floor balcony—or maybe the same guy from the boat. Nothing unusual. Yet thinking about it now, maybe they had sent up an alarm; they were nothing out of the ordinary for Casey Key this time of the year, yet they were new.

“Three, maybe four people. Didn’t seem as if they were trying to hide.”

“And?”

“I don’t know,” McGarvey said. “But I’m going to check it out.”

“Watch yourself,” Rencke said.

McGarvey switched off, and upstairs he got a pair of night-vision binoculars from the hall table at the balcony sliders and took them back to the master bedroom, one side of which looked across at the house next door. He’d taught Katy to use them when she wanted to look for night feeding birds.

Lights spilled out onto the pool deck from what he thought was probably a kitchen. Other dim lights were on in other parts of the downstairs, but all of the upstairs windows were dark.

He watched for a full five minutes, but saw only one dark figure appear briefly at one of the open first-floor sliders and then disappear. Someone was home, but no one was in the pool or down at the dock by the boat. Nor could he spot movement at any of the upstairs windows or balconies. Nor could he detect any signs of surveillance equipment; cameras, parabolic dishes, microwave antennas.

Setting the binoculars aside, he got dressed in jeans, a lightweight dark long-sleeve pullover, and boat shoes. He took a 9 mm version of the Walther PPK from a drawer in his nightstand, screwed a silencer on to the end of the barrel, checked the load, and pocketing a spare magazine of ammunition, stuck the pistol into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back, and went downstairs where he slipped out of a side door out of view of the next-door house.

SIX

Donica had just finished laying out a bowl of blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries over which she had poured some Lepanto, a mild Spanish brandy from Jerez, when Alberto Cabello came to the doorway. He was twenty-four, thin, almost anorexic with long black hair and the eyes of a night cat. He was dressed in a bicycler’s black spandex shorts and top.

“He is on his way over,” he said in Spanish. His voice was soft, his manner unhurried.

“In English, please,” Donica corrected automatically. “Are we talking about Mr. McGarvey?”

“Yes.”

“Where is Felix?” Alberto asked.

“He just went upstairs to surveillance.”

“Make yourself ready, but stay out of sight unless the need arises.”

“He must suspect something. Perhaps his friend in Washington discovered your work name. It is no coincidence that he is coming here at this moment.”

“Is he armed?” Donica asked.

“I don’t know, but he’s dressed in dark clothing.”

Donica shrugged. “I suspect that he is no different than any American male,” she said. “I’ll go out to talk to him.” She took off her bikini top, her breasts small and firm.

“Maybe not,” Alberto warned. “Don’t provoke him.”

“That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

Cabello had disappeared into the darkness outside, and Miranda took a 9 mm Steyr GB pistol and silencer from a drawer in the kitchen desk. He’d always favored the unusual Austrian-made semiauto because it was very light—less than one kilo unloaded—carried an eighteen round magazine, and could be disassembled in under six seconds. All their weapons were fitted with silencers.

“I thought we needed him alive,” Donica said.

“The need to keep you alive is greater,” Miranda said. “And make no mistake, this man is dangerous. He is a killer.”

“So am I.”

“You are an amateur by comparison. And too ambitious.”

She was hurt, though it was true she was ambitious. When she’d first joined the CNI her primary training officer, Lieutenant Martinque Cordona, had skirted around two issues: The first, would she be willing to make a kill without hesitation, with no remorse? And the second, would she be willing to use her body if need be?

Donica had smiled. “Of course,” she’d said.

“Then you will go far, my little dove,” the lieutenant said.

That evening Donica went to his room where they made love. Within less than twelve months, her training completed, she went on her first assignment, posing as a high-priced call girl in Paris to seduce a German diplomat at a meeting of the G7. It went well enough that two weeks later the German resigned as finance minister, unable to stand up to the CNI’s blackmail demands. It was the outcome Madrid had wanted.

The good news was that Donica became a superstar overnight, but the bad news was that overnight she got an overinflated opinion of her own worth.

“You’re right, of course,” she told Miranda. “But before you start shooting let me see if I can calm him down. He’s better to us alive.”

“What will you tell him?”

“I’ll improvise.”

“It’s not necessary. It was only important that Petain came to see him. Finding that out and eliminating the man as a threat was our primary mission goal.”

Donica waved him off. At the open slider she flipped on the pool lights, but not the overheads, and outside she grabbed a towel from the cabinet and draped it over her shoulders before she padded across the patio to the water’s edge.

For several long seconds she stood unmoving, aware of the picture she made, and smiling a little because of it. But then she heard a noise to her right and she turned as the American appeared at the edge of the darkness. He had a pistol in his right hand, a silencer on the muzzle.

“Do you mean to shoot me, or is this a simple robbery?” she asked.

“Who are you, and what are you doing here?” McGarvey asked.

His manner and tone of voice seemed languid. “I think it is I who should be asking those questions,” Donica said. She smiled. “But you are my next-door neighbor. I’ve seen you in your backyard. On the dock.”

“Where are the others?”

“If you mean Juan, I think he’s somewhere in the house. We’re getting set to have a light supper. Won’t you join us?”

“The Mercedes registered to Juan Fernandez was involved in an incident at New College today,” McGarvey said, and he stepped into the light and stopped five feet away.

Donica wanted to back up, but she stood her ground. “Put the gun away, Señor McGarvey, we are not your enemy. In fact we’re after the same thing as you are.”

“She is telling the truth,” Miranda said from just inside the house. “We mean you no harm.”

McGarvey pointed his pistol directly at Donica’s head. “I won’t miss at this range.”

“There is no need for violence.”

“Listen to him,” Donica said, but McGarvey cut her off.

“Why has the CNI sent a team to watch me, and why did you kill the man at the university?”

Donica could see directly into McGarvey’s eyes, and all of a sudden she felt cold. “He’s an intruder, Juan. Shoot him. We will be within our rights here in Florida.”

“Because the man who came to ask for your help was the enemy,” Miranda said. “Yours as well as mine. Had the situation been reversed he would not have hesitated to kill either of us.”

“What about the two students who just happened to be there?”

Donica could see McGarvey’s jawline tighten, but she also spotted Alberto in the darkness behind a palm tree across the pool. “Too bad for them,” she said. “But then Americans are used to drive-by shootings and bombings.”

Miranda reached around the corner of the slider and pulled off a shot, but McGarvey had already stepped left, and he fired three shots at the house, turned and fired two shots over his shoulder at Cabello across the pool, and disappeared into the darkness.

SEVEN

Moving fast, and purposely making a fair amount of noise, McGarvey headed toward his house, but then doubled back and quietly made his way through the darkness to the front of the next-door property. Keeping close to the side of the building he threaded his way through the expansive landscaping—bushes, pineapple palms, several fruit trees including two very tall ones bearing avocados and mangoes—until he reached the driveway.

Besides the woman and the man in the house, McGarvey was fairly certain that there were at least two other CNI operatives on the property. They’d been expecting him, which meant they had a surveillance operation going on, watching his moves, listening to his phone calls and possibly even his encrypted Skype conferences with Otto. The pistol fired at him from the house had been silenced. They expected trouble but did not want to involve the local authorities if at all possible.

Somehow they’d known that Petain would come to talk to him, and they had waited until it had happened. But it made no sense that they would kill the man in such a public way, when it probably would have been easier and a lot less messy to assassinate the man in Paris before he came here. Except that they had
wanted
him to bring his request. In effect they wanted the same thing from McGarvey that Petain had come to ask for—help finding the diary stolen from the Voltaire Society.

The Spanish government believed the treasure was buried in New Mexico, and after nearly two hundred years they were still actively searching for it. But unlike the Cuban government that thought it could somehow negotiate for a part of the gold and silver, Madrid wanted the entire prize, and had sent agents to kill for it.

Which begged the question that if Petain had been telling the truth about the missing diary—and there was no reason for him not to have told the truth—who had taken it? Not the Spanish, maybe the Vatican. But that possibility raised the question why had they come here, and not to the Vatican?

The black Mercedes was parked in the driveway, the doors unlocked. McGarvey slipped behind the wheel and opened the glove box, which contained nothing more than the service and owner’s manuals, plus a contract from Mercedes-Benz of Miami in the name of Juan Fernandez at the fake address off the Calle Ocho.

A garage door opener was clipped to the visor. McGarvey pressed the button and got out of the car as the garage door started up. He left the car door open and sprinted past the front entryway to the opposite side of the house where he held up just around the corner.

A half minute later a slightly built man dressed in what looked like black spandex appeared at the open garage door. He was armed with a pistol, the big silencer tube visible even from where McGarvey stood in the shadows.

“The bastard’s not here,” the man said over his shoulder to someone in the garage. “Maybe he’s left.”

“It was a trick,” a man replied. “He’s gone around back again.”

The slightly built man turned. “We have to get help for Emilio,” he said, and he disappeared inside.

McGarvey waited a full ten seconds, about as long as he figured it would take the two men to return to the pool area, before he stepped around the corner and hurried to the open garage door, where he paused for just a moment to make sure one of them hadn’t stayed behind.

But the garage was empty, the house silent.

It would not take them long to realize they had indeed been tricked, only this time they would most likely split up, one covering each side of the house.

McGarvey went to the service door that led into the house and listened for a second or so, but hearing nothing he opened the door a crack. Someone toward the back of the house was talking, his voice low but urgent. The woman interrupted, her voice louder, her tone even more urgent, but McGarvey couldn’t make out the words.

Everything since the explosion had been nothing more than an exercise in futility, as far as he was concerned. These people had killed Petain, and they meant to kill him to find or protect some diary. But he was focused on the senseless deaths of the two students in the parking lot. He wanted to know why this team of CNI operatives didn’t care about inflicting that kind of collateral damage. In his estimation they were no better than common thugs; terrorists of the same stripe as al Qaeda.

Slipping inside to what was a short service hall that led straight to a large pantry, McGarvey closed and locked the service door—unless one of them had a key no one would be coming up on his six—and headed toward the back of the house.

EIGHT

Donica was on the tile floor just inside the sliders to the pool, holding a bath towel against the wound in Miranda’s chest, blood spreading under his shoulders and head. He was pale and obviously in pain, but he hadn’t lost consciousness nor had he lost his wits.