Blood Pact (McGarvey) (20 page)

Page spread his hands. “What do you want?”

“Stay out of my way.”

“I don’t know if we can do that,” Bambridge said. “There’s to be at least a coroner’s hearing in Sarasota.”

McGarvey got up. The reaction was about what he’d expected, and he couldn’t honestly blame them. The story was at the very least far-fetched. But the bodies were real, and someone would have to answer for them. He headed for the door.

“What will you do now?” Patterson asked after him.

“Find the diary,” McGarvey said without turning back.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Giscarde Petain had been a careful man, a precise man. His walk-in closet, separate from his wife’s, was in perfect order. Trousers left to right in color sequence, light to dark. His shirts all facing left, the same with his suit coats. His ties were on an ingenious rack, as were his shoes in their own—at least two dozen pairs. His hats were in boxes, and his sweaters were arranged in cedar-lined drawers. Even his stockings and linens were ironed and set in order.

Al-Rashid stood in the middle of the master suite trying to get a sense of the man, and by extension perhaps, of the Voltaire Society. The apartment was quiet. No noises from the rest of the building or from outside on the street intruded. This was a serene place. An inner sanctum. A castle keep where a man with his family under siege could maintain if not his personal safety at least his secrets.

He’d made a cursory search of the place, finding nothing but the man’s super-organized closet. This time he started again in the living room, ignoring Madame Petain’s and the boy’s bodies, and looked for what he had missed. Perhaps the obvious.

An hour and a half later, after going through the living room, dining room, kitchen and pantry, three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, all the closets, and the laptop in the man’s study, which yielded absolutely nothing except that Petain had a penchant for pornography involving very young girls all of them prepubescent, he found himself back where he’d started from.

Frustrated, he went to the broad windows looking down on the street, parted the curtains a little to watch the sparse traffic, but then let them fall and perched on the window ledge that was wide enough to be used as a seat.

The seat was loose.

Al-Rashid got to his feet. Everything else in the apartment had been in perfect order, nothing had been out of place. Now this. Either someone else—Madame Petain or the boy—had pulled the ledge up, or this was a booby trap; open the lid and the apartment would blow. But that made no sense.

Getting down on his knees he examined the length of the ledge and spotted what could have been two spring-loaded catches, only one of which was engaged. He pressed the other and the ledge rose up on hinges.

Inside was a narrow compartment about three feet deep, at the bottom of which was a leather-bound case about the size of a slim hardcover book.

Making sure that the case wasn’t itself booby trapped, al-Rashid pulled it out and opened it. The thing was an ordinary iPad. He powered it up and the first page contained a couple of lines of what appeared to be Latin in the same sort of code as the diary was written in. Below that was a blank box, obviously meant for a password. But in the bottom right-hand corner was an address on the Rue Gaillon.

Al-Rashid looked at the body of the boy lying in the corridor. The kid had lied to him. The address he’d given for his father’s office was different from the one on the iPad. It probably meant that Madame Petain had also known the truth not only about where her husband worked but what he did. She’d known about the Society.

After the boy had blurted out his father’s address the woman had looked at the window. At the time al-Rashid thought that she was perhaps looking for help, maybe the flashing lights of a police unit. But it had been the secret window ledge compartment, which she’d opened and failed to properly close.

Turning off the iPad, he stuffed it in his belt at the small of his back, closed the ledge, and left the apartment, someone up the street still singing terribly off tune.

*   *   *

The Second Arrondissement along with the Eighth and Ninth constituted one of the city’s most important business districts, where a great number of bank headquarters along with the Greek-styled building that had once held the Paris Bourse—the stock exchange—were located.

During the day the area was as busy as was New York’s Wall Street, but at this hour of the evening only the restaurants and the Opéra-Comique concert hall were open, and the streets were mostly quiet, except for the occasional taxi or police patrol.

Al-Rashid headed up the street, arriving at the address on the iPad in five minutes. The boy had probably not lied when he’d said that his father walked to work, which was clever of him, mixing one truth with a lie. Made the story more believable.

The building was a very narrow three-story wedged between two commercial banks, solid with tall arched windows on the first. Only the Society’s number on a brass plaque over a plain green door distinguished it from its neighbors.

A streetlight at the corner cast long shadows, but lent enough illumination that allowed al-Rashid to get a good look at the door as he passed. He could open the lock without a problem, but he would need time to first find and then disable the alarm system that certainly would be armed. But the chance that a car, likely even a police patrol, would pass before he was inside was too great for him to take the risk.

He turned left at the end of the block and around the corner on the street paralleling the Rue Gaillon he found a pass-through back to a narrow courtyard that had at one time been used as a mews with stables that had since been converted into million-euro apartments.

A few windows were lit, but for the most part the space was in shadows. The rear windows of the Society’s building were protected by bars, and the sturdy-looking metal door was covered by a pull-down mesh security barrier.

Taking a small penlight with a red lens from his jacket pocket, al-Rashid studied the lock on the mesh, the track on which it was lowered and raised and the roller bearings at the top, but he could detect no signs of an alarm mechanism. Nor could he see any video surveillance equipment. The Voltaires likely thought that their almost complete anonymity was protection enough, beyond ordinary locks and probably a basic alarm system.

Using a pair of case-hardened steel picks that extended from the handle of a Swiss Army penknife, he opened the lock on the mesh gate in under twenty seconds. Looking around to make certain that no one was looking out any of the windows, he slowly eased the gate up against the stiff resistance of a long time of neglect. No one had come this way in months if not years. But the grease had not completely dried up and raising the gate had been nearly soundless.

Nor was any alarm mechanism visible around the frame of the door, and especially not on the hinges. This lock, however, was stronger and it took a full minute before he’d defeated it.

The rear vestibule was nearly pitch-black. The air smelled dry, musty, like an antique bookstore in Nice that he went to from time to time. Ancient. As if business had been conducted from this location for a very long time. A century and a half or more, al-Rashid mused.

He lowered the mesh gate then closed the door and made his way to a narrow corridor that led to the front entrance and stair hall. An umbrella stand was next to a tall mirror and hat rack that looked as if they should be in a museum.

One door on the right was open to a reception area with a secretary’s desk and an IBM Selectric typewriter. A small two-drawer file cabinet was placed in a corner behind the desk, and two side chairs were placed on either side of the doorway.

The file cabinet was not locked, but both drawers were filled with file folders stuffed with blank paper, newspaper pages folded to file size and magazines, most of them French.

Al-Rashid stepped back into the stair hall and held his breath for a long moment to listen, and then to smell and try to sense the meaning of the building. The age of it. The purpose of the place.

He was not carrying a pistol. And in fact he rarely went out armed, he’d seldom found the need. If he were stopped by the police he could offer up his Swiss Army penknife, but nothing else. And in the rare instances when he needed to use force, he’d most often found that his hands were enough.

Nor did he feel any uncertainty now, except that nothing about this place seemed right. He felt as if he had walked onto a movie set that had been made to look real, but on closer examination everything was a sham, an elaborate prop.

He checked out the front window but there was no traffic, and he started up the stairs moving softly on the balls of his feet, already convinced that he was not going to find the name of a translator for the diary here. The Society, if it actually existed, which he was convinced it did, was not as simple as he’d first suspected. There was more here, though. A clue if he was smart enough and patient enough to find it.

Near the head of the first flight of stairs al-Rashid suddenly froze. He thought that he’d heard a slight noise just to the left three or four meters away, as if someone had shuffled his feet.

Al-Rashid waited for a long time, listening, trying to gauge what it was he sensed, until he realized he was smelling a man’s cologne. Faint, and he could not immediately place it. But whoever was just around the corner was not making a noise.

“Giscarde, mon ami, c’est tu?”
al-Rashid said, and he went the rest of the way up to the landing.

A very large man, possibly the twin of the Corsican in front of the Petain apartment, stepped out of the deeper shadows just a couple of meters away, illuminated from a reflection of the streetlight at the corner. He held a silenced pistol in his left hand. A SIG Sauer, boxy but effective.

“We were expecting you,” he said in badly accented French.

“What is wrong?” al-Rashid said, moving closer, his hands spread. “No one tells me anything. Sophie and Edouard are dead, for God’s sake. And now Giscarde does not answer his cell phone.”

“What are you talking about?” the man demanded. He was alarmed.

“I don’t know who to call. I don’t have an emergency number other than Giscarde’s and he does not answer.”

“He is dead.”

Al-Rashid let his shoulders slump, and his face fell. “My God, I didn’t know. I’ve been in Switzerland following up a lead.”

The Frenchman was suspicious. “Why did you come here, of all places?”

“I couldn’t think of anything else. But I have information about the diary, and I need instructions how to proceed.”

“Tell me. I’ll see it gets to the right person.”

The man had made a mistake by admitting he knew a Voltaire other than Petain. “I was told only to report to Giscarde.”

“He’s dead, Monsieur McGarvey, as you well know.”

Al-Rashid laughed. “Do I look like an American spy, you idiot,” he said.
“Merde.”
He turned away.

The Frenchman stepped forward. “Don’t move.”

Al-Rashid turned back and grabbed the pistol, his hand so fast that the man had no chance to react.

“All I want is a name and a telephone number so that I can make my report.”

“Fuck you.”

“Give me that much and I’ll leave you in peace. Otherwise I’ll shoot you in the head and find another way. But understand me,
mon ami,
this business is of supreme importance to the Society. We are under attack, and I will not permit someone to stand in my way.”

The Frenchman hesitated, no longer sure of himself.

Al-Rashid pressed the muzzle of the pistol to the man’s forehead. “One name is all.”

“I report to Monsieur Chatelet,” the man said. “Robert Chatelet.” He gave a telephone number.

Al-Rashid stepped back as if he were leaving, but then turned when he was certain that he would be out of the range of blood spatter and pulled the trigger, driving the Corsican backward off his feet. He stuffed the pistol in his belt under his jacket then went downstairs and let himself out the front door after making certain that the street was empty.

Three blocks later he found a cab to take him to the Moulin Rouge nightclub, and from there another back to the Inter-Continental.

Chatelet was the vice mayor of Paris, and one of the leading candidates for president of France. A sharp critic of the United States, and one of the leaders of the Socialist Party, he nevertheless was a strong advocate of keeping the EU and therefore the euro intact, whatever the cost.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Otto and Louise had settled into an upscale three-bedroom condo just off Dupont Circle in the heart of Embassy Row that was used from time to time as a safe house for visiting VIP intelligence assets. Pulling through the iron gates onto the All Saints Hospital Compound around eight in the evening, McGarvey could see the look of resignation on their faces when he’d left them, and he’d felt for them. But in this business a normal life was never normal, and if you wished for something like that you would be disappointed.

“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” Louise had told him at the door after dinner. She’d made a pot roast with mashed potatoes and gravy, and even a loaf of bread machine whole wheat. It was her stab at normalcy.

Otto had gone into his temporary office where he’d gotten busy trying to figure out what the Cuban DC intelligence apparatus was up to. So far there’d been absolutely no reaction to María suddenly dropping out of sight.

A cleanup crew had gotten rid of her rental car and had repaired the bullet damage to the front of the house. And with Otto’s help they made sure that the surveillance system in place would also keep a sharp eye on the neighbors’ houses.

“It won’t always be this way,” McGarvey had told her, but neither of them believed it.

“For the foreseeable future,” Louise said.

McGarvey gave her a hug. “Make sure he keeps his head down. I don’t know about this one.”

She’d smiled. “That’s about as likely as you doing a sudden one eighty.”