Blood Pact (McGarvey) (9 page)

“I’ll be in Washington.”

“I could hold you as a material witness.”

“Tell Mullholland that I’ll be checking in with Bill Callahan, he’s the deputy assistant director for Counter-Terrorism.” Lloyd Mullholland was the Bureau’s special agent in charge of the Tampa office.

Forest smiled a little. “Pulling rank?”

“A little, but I have a couple of ideas I want to check out.”

“Care to share them with me?”

“Wouldn’t do you any good, believe me. Because whatever this was all about this afternoon will probably be a job for the Company, or at the very least Interpol. It’d be a waste of your time to get in the middle of it. To start with, the Bureau is going to take over.”

“Like I said, they already have.”

“So why are you here, Lieutenant?”

“Name is Jim. And I know that whoever the guy was in the Lexus came to talk to you about something that got him blown up. I’d like to know what he had to say.”

McGarvey looked away for a moment, sorry that he was involved, and yet curious. “The guy’s name was Giscarde Petain, from a bank in Paris, but we’ve not been able to find such a bank or anyone by that name involved with the banking business in Paris.”

“We?”

“He came to ask for my help searching for something that he said had been stolen from a safety deposit box in an affiliate bank,” McGarvey said, sidestepping Forest’s direct question.

“What was it?”

“Doesn’t matter, because I told him that I wasn’t interested.”

“But you were in the parking lot when his car blew up, with him in it. Now that must have gotten to you.”

“The deaths of those two students got to me,” McGarvey shot back. “Senseless.”

“And you’re going to fight back,” Forest said. “I have a few connections too. Enough to know some of your background, including how your wife and daughter and son-in-law were killed.”

McGarvey held him off. “I’m not trying to pull rank, but you’re out of your league with this. Trust me; back off, let the Bureau handle it.”

“I’m not going to back off, goddamnit! My daughter is a freshman at New College. It could have been her killed this afternoon. And I fucking well want to know what the hell is going on. What the hell might be coming her way next. Do I pull her out of school or can you tell me that she’ll be safe? Absolutely safe? Your word as a father who’s already lost a child.”

It hurt. “They’re after me now.”

“You’re going to run.”

“I want them to follow me away from here.”

Forest got to his feet. “Trouble finds you, McGarvey. Maybe it would be for the best if you didn’t come back.”

SEVENTEEN

The CNI safe house on Siesta Key was a winter rental in a group of similar properties. Since it was out of season the entire neighborhood was all but empty. It was why the Spaniard infidels had rented this place, and the bigger house on Casey Key, and after his initial search Fr. Dominigue Dorestos proved who they were watching and why they had found a safe haven such as this one so necessary.

His handler had warned him at the contact house in Rome that he should expect Kirk McGarvey to be somehow involved because of the Cuban intelligence service’s search for the treasure. What had been unexpected was the presence of the man who’d come to the college, apparently to speak to McGarvey, and the CNI’s reaction to the meeting. Previous to this afternoon the Spaniards had been content merely to watch the former American CIA director, presumably to see what his next moves might be. And especially to watch for someone from Havana to show up.

“This is a delicate situation, as you may well understand, Father,” Augusto Franelli had briefed him two days ago. “The Voltaires have evidently lost something of great import. Very likely the diary. Our first guess would be Cuban intelligence—except we do not believe they have the expertise for such an operation. The Spanish do, but they have been sent to America presumably to either contact McGarvey or wait to see if the Cubans do so.”

“Which would suggest that he might be the thief?” Dorestos asked.

“Not the man’s style. Nor do we believe that even if the Cubans showed up would he agree to help.”

Then this afternoon just after Dorestos had arrived here, Franelli had called his cell phone to advise him about the car bombing.

“Perhaps the man at the college was a Voltaire, come to ask for McGarvey’s help,” Dorestos had said. “And perhaps it was CNI who destroyed him.”

Franelli—a tall, ascetic man who’d been in the military arm of the Hospitallers since he’d left the Italian army’s Ninth Parachute Assault Regiment as a captain eleven years ago—was silent for a beat. “Perhaps you are right.”

“It would make sense, sir.”

“So, it is something that you will find out.”

“Shall I attempt to make contact with McGarvey to see if he knows of the existence of the diary? It might be important. Because if he does know, then mightn’t he continue the search on his own?”

“That’s not likely,” Franelli said. “He would have no motivation. He’s a reasonably wealthy man even by American standards, and after the business a few months ago with the Cubans first in Texas and then at Fort Knox, he was done with it.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Yes, necessarily. He went back to his home in Florida. When you find out exactly what the Spaniards are up to you will return here at once. Do you understand, Father Shadow?”

“Perfectly,” Dorestos said.

“And what else you may have to do when you learn what there is to be learned? Because make no mistake, the infidel Spaniards are the enemies of the Church in this.”

“Sí.”

On the flight over from Rome to New York and then to Tampa where he’d rented a car, now parked in the garage, he’d had plenty of time to work out all of the ramifications of his assignment, especially what it would ultimately mean for the well-being and continued strength of the Church.

The treasure, lost for a century and a half, rightfully belonged to the Vatican from whom it had been stolen, and it was his job, as a defender of the faith, a soldier for Christ, to recover it, even if it meant he had to take a life or lives again. But only for the grace of God’s glory, and only at the behest of the Jesuit’s Superior General, who was known as the Black Pope because his robes were black by contrast to the white robes of his Holiness.

Standing in the deeper shadows a few feet from the man he’d shot to death he watched and listened for someone else to come, but the night was silent.

He recognized the man on the floor as Alberto Cabello, but his showing up here had come as a complete surprise. It had to mean the CNI had run into trouble this evening. Probably of McGarvey’s doing, if the SMOM files he’d been allowed to read were anywhere representative of the man.

He phoned Franelli and explained what he’d found, what he had done, and his speculation that something must have gone wrong at the CNI’s surveillance house.

“I can think of no other reason for Cabello to have shown up,” he said.

“You may be right, but you must make sure that McGarvey has not agreed to work with them.”

“Immediately.”

“Under no circumstances must you allow an interaction with the authorities, especially not with the FBI who will almost certainly become involved because of the car bombing.”

“I understand,” Dorestos said.

“We need the information, and you are the only man who can get it,” Franelli said, and Dorestos’s heart swelled. “God be with you, my son.”

“And with you, Monsignor.”

Pocketing the telephone, Dorestos let himself out of the house, carefully locking up, and went down to the boat. For a long time he stood stock-still, in the deeper shadows, as was his usual preference, and listened to the night sounds.

Somewhere to the north, up island, he could hear music from one of the clubs, and out on the ICW a barge slowly glided up the waterway toward Sarasota. But there were no other sounds.

He got in the boat, started the engine, and slowly motored out the private channel and into the ICW and headed south, a slight, almost beatific smile creasing his boyish features. He was most happy when doing God’s work.

EIGHTEEN

After Jim Forest left, McGarvey took his silenced pistol from the hall table, got a box of 9 mm ammunition and a cleaning kit from a locked cabinet in the pantry, and walked back to the poolside table where he got to work.

He laid out a towel, unscrewed the suppressor, and laid it down. Next he switched the pistol’s decocking lever down to the safe position and ejected the nearly half-empty magazine, setting it aside. He cleared the chamber of the one round then, pulling the front of the trigger guard down and pressing it sideways, he jacked the slide back and removed it. He took the recoil spring off the front of the barrel and set it aside with the magazine and slide.

With care for a task he’d done a thousand times he cleaned the barrel of firing debris, and wiped down the weapon frame and all the parts with an oily rag. Once the pistol was reassembled, he removed the cartridges from the magazine, wiped it down with the rag, and reloaded it.

When he was finished he washed his hands at the kitchen sink, made a ham and cheese sandwich, and opened another bottle of beer and sat listening for boat traffic on the ICW, the loaded pistol on the table in front of him.

He’d been thinking about the fourth CNI operative who had taken the boat and headed north. It was possible, even likely, that the man would come back to find out what happened to his team, and perhaps try to finish the job here.

But after a half hour when only three boats had passed, all of them heading north, he took his pistol and went upstairs where he packed a light bag with a few toiletries and a pair of jeans, a shirt, and a few other things. Anything else he might need was at his Georgetown apartment, along with his go-to-hell kit that was stacked with a pistol, money in U.S. dollars, British pounds, and Euros totaling about ten thousand dollars, along with a half-dozen Krugerrands, several valid passports in different names, driver’s licenses, medical insurance cards, untraceable credit cards, photographs of nonexistent families, even letters from friends. It was everything a man on the run needed to cross national frontiers and get lost for a reasonable period of time.

He had the same sort of kit here at the house, and he’d considered leaving it behind. But even though he would be flying up to D.C. aboard the CIA jet, he still had to get from Joint One Andrews Air Base to his Georgetown apartment, between which just about anything could happen.

The CNI had gone to great lengths to keep tabs on him, and deny him further contact with the man from the Voltaire Society, so it took no stretch of imagination to think that somehow they might be waiting to intercept him in Washington. And he never went anywhere under the sole protection of another man or men, another agency. Never.

He took the money and papers from the concealed floor safe in his walk-in closet and stuffed them into his overnight bag and took it downstairs to the garage where he put it on the front passenger seat of his Porsche.

Again he stood for a few seconds, thinking about what he was getting himself into, and exactly the why of it. He wasn’t sure, except that he kept seeing the falling piece of burning debris from Petain’s Lexus falling out of the sky onto the two students at the bike rack. They hadn’t a clue what was about to happen to them. And it wasn’t fair. Someone had to account for their senseless deaths; someone beyond the CNI team who apparently had been sent to stop him from making a deal with the Voltaire Society.

He’d never considered himself a do-gooder, assassins never thought of themselves in that vein. Yet the truly evil people of the world—the bin Ladens, the Hitlers, the Mussolinis, the Stalins—deserved to die. Or at least he’d come to believe that philosophy, though sometimes he’d had his doubts, his serious reservations that sometimes caused him nightmares. But in the end he was who he was.

An avenging angel someone, somewhere, had called him, only they hadn’t meant it as a positive comment on what he did.

All the lights inside the house were off, and in the kitchen he turned off the pool lights and the lights on the gazebo and down at the dock, as well as the small, colored spots that illuminated the palm trees and other landscaping elements around the house.

He laid the pistol on the pass-through counter from the kitchen to the pool deck and set down on a stool inside the house to wait.

The phone rang at the same time he heard a boat coming from the north down the ICW, but he couldn’t make out its lights.

The number was blind—out of area on the caller ID screen—and McGarvey answered on the fourth ring, waiting to hear the signal that the Blackburn Point Bridge was about to open.

“I hoped I’d catch you before you went to ground,” Bill Callahan said. They were old acquaintances, if not friends. Callahan was more or less a by-the-book FBI assistant deputy director who’d considered guys like McGarvey renegades. Useful, he grudgingly admitted once, but a renegade none the less.

“What makes you think that I’m going to ground?”

“You were involved with a car bombing, and I’m assuming it was meant for you.”

“Not this time.”

“Our Tampa SAC seems to think you belong at the head of the list, and he wants to talk to you first thing in the morning.”

“I won’t be here,” McGarvey said. “I’m flying up to Washington first thing in the morning.” The Blackburn Point Bridge hadn’t made a signal yet. “Are you at the office?”

“Home.”

“How’re Mary and the kids?”

“Just fine,” Callahan said. He’d been there for McGarvey after the funeral for Katy and Liz even though the Bureau had him in custody. He was a family man and he understood Mac’s pain. “Do you want to talk to me about what happened? The local police report has you as a prime witness, but they say that you told them nothing.”

“They wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it, and if they start to seriously poke around someone else will get hurt.”

Callahan was silent for a beat, and when he was back he sounded resigned. “Why did I think that you might say something like that? I could have you pulled in, but I doubt if it’d do us much good.”