Blood Pact (McGarvey) (16 page)

McGarvey was well known by Saudi intelligence. “Did he agree?”

“No. In fact he killed them all, and then disappeared.”

The prince thought about it for a moment. “How do you know that the Society asked for McGarvey’s help?”

“Speculation. But the timing was right.”

The prince tossed the diary on the table. “So now what? As it stands this is worthless to me.”

“Which still may be the case even if I manage to have it translated. At the very least this may be nothing more than an urban legend. But at the most the so-called Spanish treasure might amount to only a few billion Euros, all but inaccessible to us somewhere in New Mexico. Possibly in the middle of the military’s White Sands Missile Range. A hostile piece of landscape.”

The prince waved his hand out to the desert that surrounded them. “We are a desert people, Mahd. And don’t turn up your nose at a few billion. Or keeping it from the Americans.”

“Or from the Spanish, or the Vatican, or the Voltaire Society.”

“Of which we don’t know enough.”

“Very well, my Prince, what comes next?” al-Rashid asked, though he knew exactly what it would be.

“Have the diary translated, at which time we will plan an operation.”

“To retrieve the treasure?”

“No, of course not. I want merely to keep it from everyone else.”

Al-Rashid sat back, stunned for just a moment, but then he smiled. “We’ll need help, if I understand what you are suggesting.”

“Yes,” Prince Saleh said. “From the Iranians. There are certain back burner connections I have.”

“You would be playing with fire.”

“Indeed—if it comes to that.” The prince laughed because of the allusion.

THIRTY

Louise went upstairs to watch from one of the front bedrooms after she’d bandaged María’s slight neck wound. Otto took a position at the living room window and McGarvey and María went to the back of the house from where they could watch the woods. Everyone was in calling distance of one another.

Nothing moved out there, but McGarvey expected the shooter to return, though probably not until after dark.

“I only got a quick glimpse of the guy in the Tahoe, but he sure as hell didn’t look like a Cuban to me,” María said. She was armed with a lightweight 5.45 mm Russian made PSM semiautomatic pistol that was all but useless except at extremely short range. It had been taken from her four months ago, and Louise had given it back from the gun safe in the front closet.

“I don’t think he, was Cuban,” McGarvey said.

“Well, who is he, then? He didn’t open fire until I showed up.”

She was at the breakfast room window adjacent to the kitchen from where McGarvey was watching. “Anything out there?” he called up.

“Nothing yet,” Louise said.

“He’ll be back,” McGarvey said, and he looked at María, who was staring at him.

“Are you going to tell me who he is, and what his gripe with me is?”

“It was you in my apartment in Georgetown. How did you find out about it?”

“I have my sources, you know that. Anyway, how did you know I was there?”

“Your perfume, though you did a good job with my fail-safe on the lock. But what were you doing there?”

“Looking for you,” María said. “I knew that you’d be showing up either there, or here, after your little dance in Sarasota.” She smiled a little. “It’s Chanel, I wanted you to know that it was a woman who had come calling.”

“How’d you know about this place?”

“I had Louise followed from the day-care center.”

“When?”

“Two months ago.”

McGarvey looked away to study the woods again, not exactly sure what he was feeling other than nearly blind anger. Several months ago Cuban intelligence operatives had kidnapped Louise from in front of the day-care center where she’d dropped off Audie. In the process the woman who owned the school had been standing at the open door, children behind her, and had been shot to death. The bullet could easily have missed her and hit one of the kids. Audie.

The whole operation from start to finish had been a cocked-up mess in which María and the Cuban intelligence service had hatched an insane plan to find and steal the Spanish gold just across the border from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

A good many people had lost their lives, and at least two dozen Mexican drug cartel spies and spotters had managed to infiltrate the United States and lose themselves in the country somewhere. INS was still looking for them.

In the end she’d gone back to Cuba, presumably to either go to prison or be executed for her role in the operation, yet here she was.

Nothing moved yet in the woods, and McGarvey turned back to her. “The gold doesn’t exist,” he said. “I thought that you had that much figured out.”

“Not according to Dr. Vergilio,” María said. Adriana Vergilio was the curator of the Archivo General des Indias, in Seville where all of Spain’s records from the exploration and subjugation of the New World were stored. “Something happened a few weeks ago that got her excited enough to warn me that the CNI was on the hunt.”

“For the gold?”

“For you,” María said. “I didn’t think they’d get very far, so I ignored her. Until the car bombing at your university and the shoot-out with the CNI operatives next door to your house.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t not come.” She glanced out the window. “So who is this guy, someone from the CNI gunning for me now that I’ve come to offer my help?”

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

“Well, Dr. Vergilio thinks you know something, and so does the CNI. You must have talked to them. What’d they tell you, or what did they do that made you kill them? Last time I checked, Spain and the United States are not at war.”

“They left me no choice.”

“You’re saying you shot back in self-defense? Who was the guy in the car bombing? One of them?”

McGarvey didn’t answer. The entire situation was insane, and was already so out of hand that he couldn’t think of a way in which it could be ended in any reasonable way. And yet he knew that he couldn’t back away. In fact he’d just as soon put a bullet in María’s brain for the danger she and her operatives had put Louise and Otto in, and for the danger his granddaughter was facing right now.

“Goddamnit, I’m risking my life to help you,” María shouted.

“You’re still looking for the gold, and nothing’s changed—you’re still willing to pull the trigger on anyone who gets in your way.”

“Like the CNI on Casey Key? Was it them who planted the car bomb and killed whoever was—” María suddenly stopped. “Whoever it was had come to the college to talk to you, about the only thing the CNI was so interested in they set up a surveillance operation on you. When whoever it was showed up they killed him.”

“And two students who were innocent bystanders.”

“Collateral damage,” she said indifferently. “But what about this guy gunning for me now? He’s not Cuban or Spanish—I don’t think. But what’s his relationship to whoever got killed in the car bomb? Who is he working for?”

“Go back to Cuba, there’s nothing here for you,” McGarvey said.

“You need my help with the Spaniards. Especially with Dr. Vergilio. Believe me she’s the key, but she won’t talk to you. Especially not now.”

“Maybe I’ll call my friends in Miami to come get you,” McGarvey said.

“First we have to get me out of here. But all I came for was Cuba’s share of the treasure—if there is any—and I think you know by now that there are a lot of people willing to kill because they think there is. Just give us a shot in an international court to convince the judges that one-third should belong to us.”

McGarvey figured that since the Maltese operative hadn’t come in by now, he’d either left or was waiting until after dark. But if he was coming it was because María had shown up, and just like Petain she’d come because she wanted to help find the treasure. It was another factor that the Vatican didn’t want.

He went into the dining room, and before María could react he snatched the pistol from her hand. “Your purse is on the hall table. Leave now while you can. He’s not going to come after you until dark, and it’ll be through the woods. You’ll just have to take the chance that he’s not watching the front of the house.”

“I’m not going to walk away.”

“He’s probably gone anyway, figuring that either one of us or a neighbor called the police.”

“No sirens. Anyway, if he’s CNI he’s monitoring the police bands.”

McGarvey’s grip on his pistol tightened. What to do? Shooting her would be easy because of what she had already done to his people. She was a sociopath who didn’t give a damn about anyone other than herself. Much like her father had been. She claimed that she’d come to fight for Cuba, but he was almost one hundred percent certain that she’d come to fight for herself, to secure her position in Havana.

And yet in a lot of ways she was an underdog. She’d never had a father, no family, no friends from what he’d been able to gather, and almost all of the people she worked with and for were men in a machismo society that tended to trivialize women, even ones in her powerful position. She’d had to fight for every single thing she’d ever had in her entire life, with no one to help.

She read something of that from his eyes. “
Cristo!
I won’t have you feeling sorry for me. Shoot me if you must, but I don’t want your pity!”

McGarvey lowered his pistol, and handed the PSM back to her. “I’m not going to wait for him.”

He went back into the hall.

“What’s up?” Otto asked.

“He’s not coming in until after dark, which means he’s holed up somewhere safe until then. I’m going to find him.”

Louise came to the head of the stairs. “Watch your step,” she warned.

“I don’t think he wants me. He wants her.”

María had come to the stair hall. “We already know that. What I don’t know is who the hell he is.”

“He’s from the Vatican. The Malta Knights.”

María laughed without humor. “Why didn’t I think of that? They want the gold and they’re just as ruthless as we are.”

“Have you dealt with them before?”

“No. Have you?”

“Not till last night,” McGarvey said. “Go back to the kitchen and watch the woods.”

“What are you planning to do? Drive, keep a lookout, and shoot all at the same time? Two guns are better than one.”

“I’m not planning on killing him.”

“Maybe he has a different idea,” María said.

The house was silent for a beat. “I hate to admit it, but she could be right,” Louise said. “Otto will watch the front, and I’ll stay up here. If you get yourself killed I’ll never speak to you again.”

“Get your keys, you’re driving,” McGarvey told María, and he went to the front door and eased it open.

A blue BMW five hundred series sedan came into the cul-de-sac, and pulled into a driveway of a house across the circle down as the garage door opened.

“The Abbotts,” Otto said.

When the garage door came down, McGarvey stepped outside and got into the passenger seat of María’s rental Taurus and she slipped behind the wheel.

“The Knights,” she said. “They’re good.”

THIRTY-ONE

Dorestos, on foot, had just come to the opening of the cul-de-sac when McGarvey and the Cuban woman came out of the house. It was unexpected, but it was going to make his job easier than trying to storm the house and not get killed in the process, especially without taking McGarvey out. Though he hoped that day would come.

He ran back to his Tahoe, and drove two blocks away to the McDonald’s on Old Dominion Drive, in the opposite direction from the gas station. He parked in the rear, mostly out of sight from the road, and finding the number for the Fairfield Taxi Service called for a cab.

He stuffed the 9 mm SIG Sauer P226 in his belt at the small of his back. Next he unscrewed the long suppressor from the barrel of the compact Ingram MAC 10 and stuffed it in his belt and the two spare magazines of 9 mm ammunition into his jacket pocket. He held the submachine gun under his jacket with his elbow. It was awkward, but only had to do until he got into the taxi.

He waited in the Tahoe for a couple of minutes, then locked up and walked around to the front. A few minutes later the cab showed up and he got into the backseat, giving the driver the address of a five-story government building he’d noticed on the way in.

“The place is locked up by now,” the driver, a Pakastani, said.

“I’m meeting someone in the parking lot.”

The driver looked at him in the rearview mirror. “I don’t want any trouble.”

“Neither do I. That’s why we’re meeting there. So her husband won’t find out.”

The cabbie smiled. “I get it,” he said, and pulled out of the parking lot as the gray Taurus passed.

Dorestos thought that he could make out the figure of a woman driving. McGarvey was in the passenger seat; riding shotgun as it was called. He was about to tell the driver to turn left at the next intersection, but the Taurus turned right, which would take them to the park in the woods behind the Renckes’ house.

He’d been spotted in the Tahoe, probably by the Cuban, and she and McGarvey had figured that if an attack against them were to come it would be from that way. It also meant that McGarvey might have spotted the Chevy one too many times for coincidence on the way in from Andrews. The GLONASS real-time satellite system he’d used had made him sloppy.

Five minutes later the cabbie pulled into the nearly deserted Government Services Administration Satellite Office parking lot.

“She’ll be in the back,” Dorestos said, laying the MAC 10 on the seat and taking the silenced SIG from his belt.

The driver was nervous now but he did as he was told.

“There is no one here,” he said.

“No,” Dorestos said, and he placed the muzzle of the silencer against the back of the Pakastani’s head. “Drive over to the Dumpster, and park.”

The cabbie practically jumped out of his skin, his eyes wide. “Please, do not kill me. I have a wife and three children and my mother to support in Lahore. They will starve without me.”

“I’m not going to kill you. I just want to use your cab for a few minutes. Won’t take very long for the police to find it, if you promise not to call for help for one hour.”