Blood Pact (McGarvey) (27 page)

“Nor does your whore make much sense,” al-Rashid said harshly, and the vice mayor rose half up off his seat.

Al-Rashid pointed the gun at Chatelet. “I am done with the fantasy.”

“I gave you want you wanted,” Mme. Laurent cried.

“You gave me a clever password, which I would have to return to Bern to use. But even if it were a valid number, Interpol would be waiting for me. I want the truth this time.”

“I’m telling the truth.”

“No.”

“I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I’ll give you whatever you want to make this situation disappear,” Chatelet said. “For Christ’s sake, Adie, give the man what he wants.”

“I have.”

“No,” al-Rashid said.

“What is it worth?”

Mme. Laurent lowered her eyes for a moment. “More than you can possibly imagine, my dear Robert.” She looked up. “It is all I have to say.”

Al-Rashid stepped forward and jammed the muzzle of the silencer against the vice mayor’s forehead. “The truth.”

Mme. Laurent said nothing.

“Where is the cipher key?”

“I don’t know.”

“I will kill him,” al-Rashid said. The dynamic was interesting.

Mme. Laurent looked up. “You’ll kill us anyway.”

“You cannot know that for sure.”

“For God’s sake, Adie,” Chatelet said, gripping her hand.

“Robert,” she said softly.

“Please.”

Mme. Laurent looked away. “I don’t know who of us has the key, and that’s the truth. But the original is in Seville. Has been from the first.”

“What’s in Seville?” al-Rashid asked.

“The Archivo General de Indias.”

Al-Rashid knew of this place. It was the repository of original documents from the Spanish Empire’s interests in the Americas and the Philippine Islands. And this was the first thing she’d told him—other than her love for Chatelet—that had the ring of truth to it.

“That is a very large, complicated place, unless you know your way through it.”

“Dr. Vergilio is the curator,” Mme. Laurent said. “Or at least she was during the last trouble several months ago involving a pair of agents from the American CIA.”

She’d piqued al-Rashid’s interest. “What trouble?”

“I’m not sure, but it had to do with the treasure,” she said. She glanced at Chatelet. “I am truly sorry, Robert. None of this has anything to do with you, or with France.”

Chatelet started to say something, but al-Rashid fired one shot, driving the vice mayor’s head back in a spray of blood.

“No!” Mme. Laurent screeched, and she lunged over his body.

Al-Rashid switched aim and fired one shot into the top of her head, and she fell forward, her head bouncing on the coffee table, her legs twitching violently for several seconds before her entire body went slack.

For a full ten seconds al-Rashid remained perfectly still, waiting for the sounds of alarm, but the building was quiet.

He stood up, wiped down the pistol, laid it on the floor in front of the couch, then left through the French doors into the courtyard, and through an old wooden door onto the mews and then to the avenue, where two blocks later he hailed a cab for the Hotel Inter-Continental and had a well-deserved bath and full breakfast.

FIFTY

It was late in the afternoon by the time McGarvey got back to All Saints. The place had been put back together, no battle damage visible anywhere. A team of security technicians had come down from Langley and installed dual motion/infrared detectors around the perimeter of the entire hospital, including the woods at the back. In addition four heavily armed combat training officers and four of their students had come up from the Farm and stood guard.

Callahan was at the security station in the front hall with Tommy Newman. He broke off when McGarvey came down the hallway from the rear entrance. “He checked in yesterday at the Georgetown Suites just off M Street.”

“He wasn’t there?” McGarvey asked. He thought it was probably a dead end. The priest might have checked in, but he would not have gone back there after last night.

“No. The cleaning crew said it appeared as if he’d slept in the bed, but when we interviewed the night staff, they remembered him, high-pitched voice and all, but he’d left around ten and no one saw him come back. I just found out, otherwise I would have called you earlier. What about the churches?”

“No one would admit that anyone had asked for sanctuary, though I had my doubts about the university chapel. The father superior was hearing someone’s confession when I came in, but the guy was in a wheelchair and his voice was all wrong.”

“Could it have been your man?”

“Except for the voice, but he looked me in the eye and nodded. Seemed that he was relieved about something.”

“He confessed his sins. A lot of Catholics feel that a burden has been lifted off their souls.”

“Then they go out and do the same thing the next day.”

Callahan nodded. “So what’s next, Mac? It’s your call.”

McGarvey’s instincts were humming in high pitch. His tradecraft, most of which he’d learned on the run, and his understanding of what motivated just about every son of a bitch he’d ever faced told him that the priest was coming back to kill María. The hell with the odds.

Yet all the facts pointed in the opposite direction. He’d abandoned the Tahoe and the hotel room. He had stolen a car, driven it out to National, and shortly after that the same charter Gulfstream that had brought him up from Sarasota had filed a flight plan for San Juan but then had disappeared somewhere over the Atlantic just outside U.S. airspace.

The guy was gone. Yet McGarvey couldn’t shake the fact that in his gut he knew the priest was not on that plane.

“I’m going home to get something to eat, take a shower, and get some sleep,” he said. He turned back to Newman. “Anything comes up give me a call.”

Newman, who’d been good friends with Kutschinski, nodded and smiled viciously. “Yes, sir. I’ll let you know when we stuff him in a body bag.”

McGarvey stopped himself from saying that he wanted the priest alive. “See you in the morning.”

He gave Callahan a nod and went back outside to his car and drove around front where he was buzzed through the gate. His apartment was less than a mile away just off Dunbarton across from Rock Creek Park. In the morning he would go for a ten-K run along the creek. It seemed like months since he’d stretched himself. He was getting a little rusty, especially after witnessing the priest’s antics on Casey Key and imagining how the bastard had made it over the fence at the hospital.

Sometimes like this he felt old, but then he reminded himself that self-pity was the start of a downward spiral, especially for people in this business. The ones who lost their mental edge were their own worst enemies.

As soon as he was away he phoned Otto. “I’m on my way home to take a break. That Embraer has to land sooner or later somewhere. Track it to its destination and see if we can put some boots on the ground to find out who gets off.”

“I’m already on it,” Rencke said. “It’s a Gulfstream V, same as the C37A we fly, with a range of right around six thousand miles—give or take. It can reach just about anywhere in South America and Europe, and it doesn’t need a major airport to land. Chances are we’re not going to find out until it’s back at its home strip.”

“Which is?”

“Executive Charters, London’s Heathrow. Except that the company doesn’t own an aircraft with that tail number.”

“It must have come from somewhere.”

“I haven’t found out where yet.”

“Try Malta first, and then Rome. My guess is it might be registered to a company with some sort of an arm’s length connection with the Church.”

“I’m on it. What about the hospital? Is María awake yet?”

“No, and the place has been closed down tight. No way he’s going to get past all that firepower.”

“Watch your back, Mac. This business is far from over.”

*   *   *

McGarvey found a parking spot a half a block from his apartment, and walked back, mentally cataloging the cars and SVUs parked on the street. It had been months since he’d stayed any length of time here, yet he remembered the cars from then and as recently as yesterday, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary to him now. No out-of-state plates, no diplomatic tags, no vans with deeply tinted windows, no vehicles with extra antennas.

He let himself in, and upstairs out of habit he stopped for a long moment on the landing to listen for any sounds, or this time odors, out of the ordinary. But nothing stood out.

At his door he checked the grease spot in the keyhole, which seemed undisturbed, yet that telltale had been defeated before and in the meantime he hadn’t taken the time to set another one in its stead. Sloppy, maybe, but he wasn’t going around unarmed. Not since the incident at Casey Key.

He pulled out his pistol and pushed the de-cocking lever to the up position, and eased the door open with the toe of his shoe.

The apartment was small, only the living room with the kitchen and small eating area to the right, and the single bedroom and bathroom to the left. A television and Bose stereo system were on a cabinet on one side of the room, bracketed by a couple of bookcases that held, in addition to books, some photos of his wife, their daughter, their son-in-law, and Audie.

He’d taken them down and put them in a drawer in the bedroom where they stayed for months, until he could finally bring them back out and face them every time he came through the door.

His heart still ached thinking about them, but he’d become a changed man. Harder, Louise told him some months ago. Easier to get angry, sharper, less patient, more content with being a loner than ever before.

In the old days, even when he’d hidden out in Lausanne after the assignment to kill a general in Chile had gone bad, and Katy had given him the ultimatum—her or the CIA, for which he chose neither—he’d not been content to live alone. But every woman, including his wife when he’d gotten back together with her, had lost their lives because of their association with him.

Now being alone was better.

He swept the living room with his pistol, then closed and relocked the door behind him. He took a quick look in the kitchen, then went back to his bedroom.

Nothing moved, nothing was out of place. The only light was the one in the bathroom. The door was still half open as he had left it. And he started to come down.

He safetied his pistol and tossed it on the bed, then took off his jacket and quick-draw holster at the small of his back, tossing them on an easy chair in the corner where he liked to read at the odd moment.

For just a split instant he almost froze in his tracks, but then he went across the room to the chest of drawers, where he got a pair of shorts and a T-shirt that lay on top of another fully loaded Walther PPK—the one he’d taken from Casey Key—which was fitted with a silencer.

He’d caught the odor from the bathroom of sweat and the faint but distinctive smell of a pistol that had been recently fired. The son of a bitch had tracked him here, and after everything that had happened—especially the senseless murders of the four wounded CIA officers and Nurse Randall—he was glad they would finally have it out.

McGarvey moved to the left into the deeper shadows in the corner, switched the safety lever to the off position, and pointed it at the bathroom door.

“You came here because you wanted me to help find the diary for the Church,” he said, keeping any trace of anger from his voice. “I’m listening.”

“Does the woman still live?” Dorestos asked. His voice was ragged, but still high-pitched.

“She bled to death before the doctor arrived,” McGarvey said. “It was you at the confessional.”

“It was a relief.”

“How do you expect me to help you?”

“The diary is the property of the Mother Church.”

“What about the claim of the Voltaire Society?”

“They are the devil’s handmaidens. They stole the diary.”

“The Church stole the treasure from the Spanish government.”

“Spain stole it from the Native Americans. The Church has been their bedrock for four centuries. We brought Jesus Christ to save their immortal souls. It was enough.”

The argument was circular just as all religious debates were in the end. McGarvey wasn’t an atheist—he’d seen too much senseless death in his career to be without some belief. But he had never found a religious system that fit him. Like almost every philosophy, established religions were failures in the end.

“I don’t know where to begin,” McGarvey said.

“Seville. But put down your gun and we will talk.”

“Face-to-face,” McGarvey said.

“Of course,” Dorestos agreed.

McGarvey lowered his weapon, and an instant later the figure of the priest darted out from the bathroom and crossed the room in a blur, his speed incredible.

Leading the big man, McGarvey fired off four shots as fast as he could pull the trigger.

Dorestos nearly made it to the bedroom door into the short corridor, managing to get off one shot over his shoulder that went wide, before he crashed against the wall with a loud bang and went down hard.

He had fallen on his side, his gun hand underneath his body, and he tried to pull it out when McGarvey reached him. He looked up, obviously dying and obviously knowing it. But he didn’t seem in much pain or distress.

“Thank you,” he whispered, his voice still ragged.

“The people you killed: why?”

Dorestos’s eyes fluttered. “My mother was there,” he said.

“What?” McGarvey demanded. “I don’t understand.”

Dorestos smiled. “Go with God, my son,” he said, and he died.

FIFTY-ONE

“Seville,” McGarvey said to Otto just before they went into Walt Page’s seventh-floor conference room of the CIA’s Original Headquarters Building on the campus.

“Are we sharing that this afternoon?” Rencke asked.

“No.”

Including the DCI at the head of the narrow table, Bambridge and Carlton Patterson were on his left, Bill Callahan at the opposite end, and two chairs were open on the right.

Pete Boylan, the Company’s senior debriefer, sat at the far corner next to Callahan, an understanding smile on her pretty face. She was thirty-three, with short dark hair, bright blue eyes, and the voluptuous good looks and figure of a Hollywood superstar. She had worked with McGarvey on the operation that had sprung from the deaths of his wife, daughter, and son-in-law, getting wounded in a gun battle near the end.