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Authors: David Hagberg

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BOOK: Blood Pact (McGarvey)
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“I’ll come over to your office tomorrow, as soon as I can. I’m going to need the Bureau’s help.”

“With what?”

“Start by keeping your SAC in Sarasota. I don’t want him poking around down here. You can depose me yourself. It’s a long story.”

“All your stories are long. I’ll keep the SAC reined in for now, but what else do you want?”

“Time.”

“Christ, Mac. Three dead so far. What the hell are you into now?”

The bridge had not signaled that it was opening, and McGarvey thought that he heard the highly muffled sound of an outboard motor at dead slow somewhere very close.

“I’ll tell you tomorrow. You’ll just have to trust me until then.”

Callahan hesitated. “You’ve never lied to me.”

“No, and not this time either.”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

“I’ll be there,” McGarvey said.

He took his pistol and went upstairs to the widow’s walk on the roof, where keeping below the railing so he didn’t present a silhouette, he was in time to see a dark figure flitting from shadow to shadow from the dock next door up to the house.

In his bedroom he grabbed a pillow from the bed and one of his dark sweatshirts from a bureau drawer. Downstairs at the kitchen pass-through he stuffed the pillow into the shirt and propped it on the stool he’d been sitting on. He pulled the stool a little back from the counter so that it was in deeper darkness, then headed outside around the pool and down to the gazebo.

The fourth CNI officer had come back, as he thought the man might, and this one he did not want to kill. He wanted some answers.

 

NINETEEN

 

Fr. Dorestos stood just outside the doorway into the pool kitchen of the CNI’s surveillance house, all of his senses hyper alert for any sign that the killer—who he assumed was Kirk McGarvey—was lurking somewhere inside.

An attractive young woman lay on her back, her neck and bare chest covered in blood. The body of a man, also shot to death, lay a couple of feet away. The woman had a silenced pistol in her hand. A shoot-out had occurred here. But noiseless so as not to attract the attention of neighbors, though the house to the south was dark, and the one just to the north had only its outside landscaping lights on.

These people and their killer had been careful. Professionals, something Dorestos respected.

Taking care not to step in the blood, with his pistol, a SIG Sauer P226 9 mm with the Osprey silencer that reduced sound by a respectable 125 dB, in hand he crossed the kitchen and set out to search each room on the first floor.

A window in the dining room had been broken out, a chair lying on its side nearby. Dorestos glanced over his shoulder the way he had come from the kitchen. There’d been an altercation in which two of the four CNI officers had been taken down. He looked at the window again.

McGarvey had fled deeper into the house, to this room, pursued by the other officers, and he used a dining room chair to break a window.

To make it seem as if he had escaped. But it had been a ruse, because McGarvey had not been finished here.

Dorestos went upstairs, careful at the top to make certain no one was waiting in ambush. A body lay outside an open door in the corridor to the left. Even in the relative darkness he could see the blood pooled on the wood-planked floor, see the blood splattered on the wall across from the door and the damage to the wall next to the door frame.

Stupid on the part of the dead man to hide behind a flimsy plasterboard wall.

He remained standing stock-still in the dark for a full fifteen seconds before he made his way down the corridor, sure that whatever had happened here was long over with, and that McGarvey had come to find out what he wanted, got into a shoot-out, and left.

At the door frame he held up for just a moment before he rolled around the corner and swept the room with his pistol. After a beat he lowered his gun and stepped back.

The table held some sophisticated surveillance equipment all connected to a laptop computer. Laying down his pistol he booted up the laptop, which opened with nothing but a black screen, a blinking white cursor at the upper left corner. The machine’s memory had been erased, probably automatically when McGarvey, or whoever, had tried to access it.

He gingerly approached the window and hanging back out of sight from anyone on the ground, he had an excellent sight line to the house next door—the one to the south that showed no lights, not even outside lights on the palm trees. McGarvey’s. All the surveillance equipment was pointed in that direction.

Dorestos started to go when something in his peripheral vision caught his attention and he turned back. For a long second or two he didn’t know what it was, until all of a sudden he spotted a small green light on one of the cameras pointed out the window.

Instinctively he stepped into a pool of deeper shadows to one side of the open door. The computer had been disabled, but at least one camera was still powered up. It came to him that McGarvey knew there were four CNI officers here, and that one of them had escaped—to the north—by boat. It was also possible, even likely, that McGarvey might be expecting the officer to return.

The priest saw the error he’d made. McGarvey had been waiting for the boat to return. It was possible that he’d heard it coming down the ICW to a low-slung swing bridge. But the tender had not signaled an opening.

McGarvey knew that someone had come back, and whoever was controlling the surveillance equipment was waiting for someone to show up next door.

Dorestos glided across the room and pulled the camera’s plug, and methodically pulled the wires from all the other equipment. McGarvey might be alerted, but he would have to suspect that it was the fourth CNI officer.

Out in the corridor Dorestos stepped over the body, and at the head of the stairs phoned his controller. They used the Australian-based GSM Thuraya encrypted satellite network, immune to interception by any governmental agency.

“You must be at the surveillance location now,” Msgr. Franelli said. “What is your exact situation?”

Dorestos explained what he had found, including the blank laptop and especially the live camera pointed at the house next door.

“The deaths are Señor McGarvey’s work, without doubt,” Franelli said. “And now he will be expecting someone to come for him.”

“I do not believe that the Spaniards convinced him to help,” Dorestos said, meaning no humor.

But his handler chuckled. “No. The question you have called to ask then is: What must come next?”

“Sí.”

“At this moment Mr. McGarvey will be very dangerous, not likely to be approachable by any ordinary means, and certain that whoever comes his way this night means to kill him. But in this we might have a slight advantage.”

“He cannot be convinced to help us?”

“Not tonight. But he will want some answers, which he figures you might have for him. It means that he will not want you dead.”

“I don’t understand, Monsignor. Do you want me to kill him, or try to talk to him? Perhaps I might surrender myself; go in without my weapon and with my hands up.”

“No. At this point he must not know the Hospitaller’s involvement.”

“What then?”

“Listen carefully, because what you must do next will be extremely difficult and dangerous,” Msgr. Franelli said, and he explained what he wanted. “A delicate but necessary illusion.”

“I still do not understand.”

“It is simple, Father. We still need his help, and he will give it to us in such a way that he doesn’t know he has. You will drive him like a quarry to its hunter.”

“What if the opportunity you suggest does not present itself?” Dorestos asked.

“Then you will create one, or you will have failed.”

*   *   *

Pocketing his sat phone, Dorestos went downstairs to the dining room, and flattening himself against the wall peered out of the shattered window. The house next door was still in darkness, and he had to assume that McGarvey was now waiting for someone to show up. Probably the fourth CNI officer.

He had no earthly idea what he should do next that would fit with his orders, but he wasn’t frightened. At least not of McGarvey, not even of death because surely there would be salvation for him on the right hand of God. Each time he went out on a mission he was given absolution from his sins by the unit’s priest. But this time he’d been given Extreme Unction, which was usually reserved for a person
in extremis
—on the verge of death. At this moment it was a comfort.

Something moved in the nearly absolute darkness alongside a pair of cabbage palms. He couldn’t make out a figure, but he’d seen a slight shifting of patterns. McGarvey was waiting there, at the rear of the house with a view not only across his pool deck, but of the rear of the Spaniards’ rental.

Dorestos stepped back. McGarvey had set a trap for someone coming up from the dock, or across the backyard. Presumably whoever was monitoring the camera trained on the front of the house would have warned him if someone were to come that way. But that option was off the table now.

Letting himself out the front door he hesitated for only a moment between the Mercedes parked in the driveway and the open garage door as he tried to work out the meaning of the two facts. But whatever might have happened here earlier this evening made no difference now.

He made his way through a line of flowering bushes that separated the two properties, then hurried silently down the north side of the house to the rear corner overlooking the pool and pool deck.

From where he stood he could make out the two cabbage palms where he thought he’d seen McGarvey, but from this angle nothing was there. It had either been a play of shadows or the CIA assassin had moved.

Keeping low and moving fast he darted fifteen feet to the relative safety of a grouping of three tall palm trees, hoping to draw fire, but the night remained silent. If McGarvey were out there somewhere he was biding his time, waiting to see. What?

Farther down the backyard a small gazebo just above the ICW, where a large sailboat was docked, a tender with an outboard motor out of the water on a lift was in darkness. It would make for a good firing position, though quite a long distance to the rear of the house for a pistol shot. But McGarvey’s file warned that the man was reputed to be an expert marksman of “outstanding abilities,” who should be approached with extreme caution.

Dorestos turned to search the pool deck and open sliders into what from here appeared to be a kitchen with an open pass-through to a counter with four stools on the pool deck. To this point he still had no idea how he would comply with his orders, until he suddenly saw the solution.

Something dark was seated at the pass-through inside the house. But the figure didn’t move and it was crude, certainly not a human, though evidently meant to look as if a person were seated there. It meant that McGarvey was within firing range of whoever took a shot.

Dorestos suddenly sprinted back the way he had come, pulling off three quick shots at the seated dummy as he ran.

Reaching the corner of the house two shots smacked into the stucco concrete block behind him, but low enough so had they not missed they would have hit him in the legs.

Then he raced toward the front of the house, his mission for this night accomplished. He’d gotten McGarvey’s attention.

 

TWENTY

 

The two silenced pistol shots at a distance of seventy feet were impossible even under the best of conditions, but McGarvey figured that he’d had a fifty-fifty chance of catching the CNI operator low, in the legs.

He waited for just a second or two in the lee of Katy’s gazebo in case the Spaniard intel officer was waiting for him, but then ran to the south side of the house hoping to catch the guy in front.

It was clear the man had come back to finish the job. Presumably he’d stopped at the surveillance house and found his people dead, which made him a motivated man.

McGarvey’s phone buzzed in silent mode in his pocket as he reached the front. He ignored it, holding up to take a quick look around the corner.

He was in time to see a ghost-like dark figure heading south through a thick line of orange, lemon, and lime trees next door. The agent was moving fast, but it was more than likely that he would pull up short or even double back and wait in the shadows to shoot anyone coming up on his six. For sure he had not been hit.

Across the street, which was the long, narrow island’s only road, was a narrow strip of beach and the open Gulf of Mexico. Nowhere to run and hide. The Spaniards’ Mercedes was in the driveway, but the agent had headed south.

McGarvey went next door to the Mercedes where he popped the hood, yanked off the engine’s plastic shroud, and ripped out all the spark plug wires. He tossed them aside, closed the hood, and headed around to the rear of the house where he would be in a position to intercept the CNI agent if he tried to make it back.

At the corner of the house he looked and listened for any sign that the man was heading this way, but he could detect nothing, and he went down to the dock where the CNI’s boat was tied up, the key in the ignition.

One way or another he thought it was reasonable to suspect that the man would to try to make it back here, either to the car or to the boat to make his escape north where there would be another safe house and transportation.

He took the key from the ignition and pocketed it, then headed south just above the waterline. It was at least five hundred yards to the Blackburn Point Bridge across to the mainland, and a fair hike after that back up to Tamiami Trail—Highway 41—which led north to Sarasota.

He stopped now and then to make sure that he wasn’t running blindly into a trap. Once he thought he heard something just ahead, but four doors down from his house he came to one of the several compounds on the island that was protected by a high concrete block wall, only a wooden gate opening to a path down to the ICW.

Lights illuminated the property and McGarvey spotted smudges near the top of the ten-foot wall, and for just a second he puzzled them out, realizing all of a sudden that someone had climbed up and over. The man was large but he had to be very agile, an athlete. It was a feat that McGarvey couldn’t duplicate.

BOOK: Blood Pact (McGarvey)
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