Blood Pact (McGarvey) (21 page)

The hospital’s iron gate was electrically controlled from a security station just inside the front doors. Entrance was by recognition only. The place was secure. There’d never been a breach in its forty-eight-year history, which this evening was something else McGarvey worried about. There was a first time for everything.

He parked in the rear and was buzzed through the door by Ms. Randall—Randi to her friends—the same nurse from this afternoon.

“Good evening, Mr. Director,” she said.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” McGarvey asked.

“Who has the time?” she said. “She’s awake and had a light dinner, but she’s insisting that she needs to talk to you.”

“Where are the babysitters?”

“Pat is outside her room on four, and Ron is in security.”

McGarvey caught a slight hesitation. “But?”

“I don’t think their hearts are in it. I guess the woman is a piece of work.”

“That she is,” McGarvey said. “I’ll go up in a minute.”

“Yes, sir.”

The ground floor was made up of a staff lounge, the pharmacy, a small but brilliantly equipped laboratory, the food prep area where the chef, sous chef, and dietician could prepare anything from Cream of Wheat to boeuf Bourguignon with truffled asparagus, and the security station. All Saints could handle as many as twenty-five patients, but McGarvey could never remember more than a handful at any time. This evening in addition to María León there were only four other officers—all of them CIA—who’d been transferred from Afghanistan via the hospital at Ramstein AFB in Germany where they’d been stabilized.

McGarvey went to the security desk, which was manned 24/7 by men who were weapons and martial arts experts—many of them ex–Navy SEALs. This evening the hospital’s on-duty security officer, Steve Ellerin, had been joined by Ron Kutschinski, a Chicago ex-cop who’d worked as muscle for the CIA for nine years, ever since he’d been wounded on duty. He was a bulky man, and handy with his fists.

“Good evening, Mr. Director,” Kutschinski said, getting to his feet. He’d been perched on the edge of the desk from where Ellerin had access to more than a dozen low lux cameras around the hospital and grounds. Anyone coming within a few feet of the gates would show up on the screens no matter what the weather was doing.

“Anything doing?” McGarvey asked.

“Just you, sir.”

“Keep your eyes open, there’s a good chance we’ll have some company tonight.”

Ellerin looked interested. “How do you see it, sir? A team effort? A loner?”

“One big guy, but I’ve never come across anyone faster. The bastard is like a shadow; now you see him, now you don’t.”

Kutschinski grinned. “He’s a lucky bastard, then. Coming up against you, and still being alive and kicking.”

“Keep that in mind,” McGarvey said.

“Sir?”

“He’s not lucky, just good.”

McGarvey walked back to the elevator and took it up to the fourth floor. Dr. Franklin, who’d operated on María, had finally gone home after a thirty-six-hour stint, leaving only three trauma nurses on duty. But he and two other doctors were on call 24/7 should the need arise. The lab tech and cooks wouldn’t be back until five in the morning, and except for the security team and five patients the hospital was empty, and very quiet.

Nurse Randall was waiting for the elevator to take her down to three, where the four wounded CIA officers had been moved after Dr. Franklin ordered María to be kept in isolation. “Just in case,” he’d told McGarvey. “These guys were in pretty tough shape. I don’t want anything bothering them.”

“How’s the patient?”

“Bitchy,” Randall said.

Pat Morris, the other CIA babysitter, was sitting in the darkness in the visitor’s lounge at the end of the hallway from where he had a clear sight line to María’s room.

McGarvey walked down to him. “If something’s going to happen it’ll probably be after midnight.”

Morris nodded. “He won’t get past Elias.” He’d been a Navy SEAL and his primary weapon of choice now was the same as then: a Heckler & Koch MP7 submachine gun with a suppressor, which lay on the coffee table in front of him. He also carried a standard SEAL 9 mm SIG Sauer P226 pistol fitted with a suppressor in a shoulder holster. His jacket was lying over the arm of a chair.

“Keep frosty, this guy is good.”

“May I speak plainly, sir?”

“Yes.”

“This assignment sucks shit, if you know what I mean. I don’t mind putting my life on the line for one of our own, but from what we were told in our briefing this broad is a colonel in Castro’s secret police.”

“That she is,” McGarvey said from the doorway. “But she’s an important asset for the moment. The guy coming our way to take her out has some answers I need.”

“She’s bait?”

McGarvey shrugged. “If that’s how you want to see it. Thing is I want him alive, if possible.”

“If not?”

“His life is not worth yours.”

“I hear you, sir,” Morris said. Like many SEALs he was not a particularly large man, but he had the look in his eyes.

McGarvey went down the hall to María’s room and knocked on the door frame before he went in. She was watching television with the sound very low. It was the Tchaikovsky violin concerto in D minor live from Avery Fischer Hall at Lincoln Center. At first she was lost in it, a look almost of rapture on her pretty oval face, until suddenly she looked up and scowled.

“I want to get the hell out of here,” she said, her voice still a little croaky as if she had a bad cold.

“Not for another day or two. How do you feel?”

“Like hell, and not just from a hole in my chest. I want to know why pretty boy is sitting there in the dark at the end of the hall. Is he keeping me in, or trying to keep somebody out?”

“Both.”

“He’s coming back.” She said it as a statement, not a question.

“I think so. But if he gets this far, which I don’t think he will, shoot to stop not to kill.”

María laughed harshly. “Give me my pistol and I can protect myself, or give me a telephone and I can have ten operatives who’ll close up this place tighter than a gnat’s ass.”

“We saved your life.”

“After you put me in jeopardy.”

“You did that by coming back,” McGarvey said, and before she could say anything else he held up a hand, tired of her bullshit. “He probably won’t try to get in until sometime after midnight. By then the lights on this floor, including your room, will be out.”

“Where will you be?”

“Close.”

THIRTY-NINE

The CyberCafe du Monde, a few blocks from the Jardin du Luxembourg, was one of the very few Internet cafés in all of Paris that was open 24/7. Seedy with a dozen old and slow computers, it was the sort of place whose clerks didn’t give a damn why you wanted to go online. They only wanted their 2.80 euros per hour.

When al-Rashid, who’d found the place listed on his iPhone, showed up a few minutes after three in the morning only four of the machines were in use, three of them displaying kiddy porn.

He paid for two hours, took a machine near the back door, and when it was connected brought up the website for Agence France-Presse and entered Robert Chatelet,
histoire.
Every man had a vulnerable spot, an Achilles’ heel, and al-Rashid figured that the vice mayor of Paris and the leading candidate for president of France was no exception.

For thirty minutes he plowed through two dozen speeches and position papers published on behalf of the
Parti socialiste,
the PS, when Chatelet had switched from the center-right Union for Popular Movement because of what was being called the growing Muslim problem, which had come to the fore when a law had been passed banning the burqa—the facial covering for women.

Chatelet’s position had not been unique: France for the French, purity of the language and customs, individuals on the world stage. Second to no people, to no nation.

Switching to the AFP’s photo archive, he scanned shots of Chatelet as early as December 2004 in one of a group dedicating the opening of the stunning Millau Bridge over the River Tarn in the Massif Central mountains of Southern France, and as late as groundbreaking for the Lavallette Dam in Saint-Etienne in 2012, and La Tour Bois-le-Pretre, which was a public housing project at the edge of Paris later the same year.

Al-Rashid brought up France 24, the global television news channel owned mostly by TF1—which was akin to CBS in the United States—but its archives yielded little more than what he’d picked up from AFP, except that he saw and heard the man. Chatelet was typically French, more or less undistinguished in stature and looks, but with a lovely wife who’d been a minor movie actress and model. His voice was rough, that of a smoker, and his French, to al-Rashid’s ear, was southern country, not at all refined.

But neither the politician nor the husband had made even the smallest of missteps, which after more than an hour of searching the Internet was the most interesting conclusion al-Rashid had come to. The man was lily-white. Too pure, too clean. It was as if he was either exceedingly careful, or extraordinarily lucky. No politician was that without sin.

He scanned the archives of
France Diplomatie,
which was a site hosted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
Le Monde Diplomatique,
which was a left-wing monthly magazine, and even some of the English, ex-pat-oriented news outlets such as
Paris Voice, Radio France Inernationale, Expatica.com-France,
and the
International Herald Tribune
.

Until the
Metropole Paris
—which was a weekly that included pictures, cartoons, and the occasional bit of gossip. In a brief photo spread Chatelet was dedicating some Paris street project, and beside him was a tall, slender woman, beautiful, with luxurious hair, high delicate cheekbones, and full sensuous lips. She was identified merely as Mme. Laurent, an engineer in the city planning department.

They were holding a golden shovel, their hands touching, and Chatelet was smiling as if he were the cat who’d got the cream.

Al-Rashid brought up more photo spreads in the
Metropole
from 2009 until just a couple of months ago showing the two of them together dedicating various city public works projects. In one photo their hips were actually touching, and in still another she was standing slightly behind him to his left, an arrondissement manager just forward, and Chatelet was actually touching her ass. In this photo she was identified as Mme. Adeline Laurent, City Works Special Projects Manager.

Five minutes later, he was inside the public area of the City Public Works Department, where he verified that a woman of that name did indeed work there, with an office in the
Hotel de Ville,
which was city hall. It was a prestigious location for the office of a simple city engineer, but then French politicians tended to keep their mistresses close at hand.

He ran into some difficulty when he went looking for her address in the city directory. Seven women by the same name were listed, but within five minutes he’d narrowed his choice to only one of them who had a place in the northwest corner of the Eighth Arrondissement a few blocks above the Boulevard Haussmann and across from the Parc Monceau, where even very small apartments listed for more than one million euros.

Al-Rashid backed out of the program, erasing his steps, and left the café walking all the way up to the Boulevard St. Germain where he was able to find a cab to take him over to the Gare d’Austerlitz, and from there another cab to within a block of the woman’s apartment.

The streets were starting to come alive with service traffic—street cleaners, delivery vans and trucks, garbage collectors, road maintenance crews making minor repairs overnight before rush hour began.

A bakery was just opening when al-Rashid walked through the park and stopped a moment to light a cigarette. The street was fashionable without being overly ostentatious as many Paris addresses could be, the building was four stories and well maintained with her apartment on the ground floor at the rear, in all likelihood opening on a rear courtyard garden.

Crossing the street he passed the front entrance, which was flanked by tall windows made up of small square panes of lightly colored glass, and inside he spotted the night doorman seated behind a small desk just within the entry hall. The image was distorted, but he was certain the man was asleep. The doormen in places such as these were mostly for decoration and not for security.

Crossing the street again he bought the early edition of
Figaro
from a newsstand that had just opened and walked down to the bakery where he ordered a café au lait and a warm croissant with a small container of raspberry confit. He sat by a window from which he had an oblique view of Mme. Laurent’s apartment.

Chatelet was a member of the Voltaire Society, which made it likely that he either had the key to translate the diary or he knew the person or persons who did. Mme. Laurent was in turn the key to the mayor.

Which was the next problem. Vice mayors of large cities, and Paris was no exception, usually did not travel alone. They were almost always accompanied by aides and very often bodyguards. In Chatelet’s case al-Rashid had spotted at least one bodyguard in nearly every photo taken of him at a public gathering.

The two exceptions, of course, would be when he arrived home, or when he showed up at the apartment of his mistress—especially if Mme. Laurent told him that it was important he come to her immediately. That they had a problem needing his attention.

Madame Chatelet herself would be the problem.

FORTY

Parking the blue Tahoe on Thirty-eighth Street a couple of blocks north of the sprawling Georgetown University grounds, Dorestos, dressed in a jacket, jeans, and a dark green dress shirt walked down to T Street and headed east. The neighborhood here was almost completely residential. It was a little after 11:30
P.M.
, and the bars down on M Street were still busy, though here only the occasional car passed.

He hesitated at the corner of Thirty-seventh, which was also NW Wisconsin Avenue, All Saint’s Hospital a block and a half away on a narrow side street that connected with Whitehaven Parkway NW. Traffic was heavier here, and he had to wait for the light before he could cross.