Blood Pact (McGarvey) (3 page)

“The fund for our endeavors originally came from the four charter banks and from the personal wealth of the dozen founding men, but since the mid-eighteen hundreds the money has come from the seven caches of gold in your southwestern desert. Voltaire himself thought the idea to plunder the treasure that the Vatican believed was rightfully its was rich—which was his word—though it was many years after his death before we were able to find it.”

“I’m still not understanding why you’re here.”

“Spain also believes the treasure belongs in Madrid. Catholic monks had been siphoning off gold and silver that had been bound back to Madrid through Havana, or to the far east via Manila. So two military expeditions were sent north from Mexico City to find what had already become a legend. The first disappeared, no trace of the men ever found. But the second in eighteen thirty-eight was stronger and better equipped. Even so only two soldiers managed to return with maps and a journal of their trip. The locations of the seven caches had been found and marked on the maps and in the journal, and even a few gold coins and silver bars were brought back.”

“I was at the archives in Seville and nothing was mentioned about any journal or maps.”

“That’s because they never reached Madrid. Our agents killed the two soldiers and took all the evidence.”

“And this is what has been stolen from your bank vault?” McGarvey asked. “You need a private detective, not me.”

“The maps and journal were fakes, as we suspected they might before. But one of the members of the Spanish expedition was the surveyor and mapmaker. His name was Jacob Ambli, and he’d been sent by the Vatican as a spy. It was he who drew the false maps, while he kept the real journal, in which the actual locations were pinpointed.

“Five days after the two Spanish soldiers were eliminated, Ambli made it back to Mexico City and from there to Veracruz where he took a ship to Havana and another to Boston. He was met there by another man sent from the Vatican to protect him, and save the journal.”

“SMOM.”

“Oui,”
Petain said. “They boarded the paddle wheel steamship
Britannia,
bound for Liverpool. But both men disappeared overboard.”

“Your agents?”

“
Oui.
We couldn’t allow the journal to reach the Vatican. If the Church—or Spain for that matter—had known where the treasure was buried all of it would have disappeared, and either been squandered to prop up the corrupt government in Madrid or used to build dozens of gold-encrusted cathedrals around the world. A useless waste, then as well as now.”

“The Voltaire Society got the diary, and over the past hundred and eighty years or so, you’ve dug up at least three of the caches and used the money for what?”

“For good, I can tell you that much.”

“Spare me,” McGarvey said, getting to his feet. “Now if you don’t mind, monsieur, get the hell out of my office.”

Petain jumped up. He was distressed. “Please, you don’t understand.”

“Your society committed murder to grab this journal, and now someone has stolen it, and you want me to get it back for you. As I said, you need a private detective.”

“Jacob’s diary, and it was in a very secure vault in Bern. We need you to find it because both the Vatican and the Spanish government have been searching for years, and the point is they’re still searching.”

McGarvey opened the door. “You’ve come to the wrong place. I’m not in the business of hunting for treasure.”

Petain handed him a business card. “You cannot imagine how important this is. If you change your mind call me anytime night or day.” He stepped out into the hallway but then turned back. “My life is in danger, as are the lives of the other members of the Society.”

“Send your own people to search for it.”

“There aren’t many of us left,” Petain said. “In any event we are businessmen, not professionals.” He hesitated. “My life is in danger, and so is yours. Not because I came here to talk to you, but because you came so close on the
Jornada del Muerto
. Be careful with your movements, Mr. McGarvey. Trust no one.”

Petain turned and left.

McGarvey waited a couple of minutes before he got his briefcase and headed out. He didn’t want to catch up with the Frenchman. Even if the fantastical story were true McGarvey wanted no further part of it. Otto’s wife had been kidnapped by Cuban intelligence agents and held at gunpoint to force her husband to cooperate in a wild-goose chase that had ended badly, with a trail of bodies.

Useless.

He took his time walking the fifty yards or so back to his car, and when he reached it Petain had just gotten into his Lexus. Two students, a boy and a girl, were unlocking a couple of bikes from the rack nearby, and out of the corner of his eye McGarvey noticed a black Mercedes S550 with deeply tinted windows at the exit from the parking lot ready to turn toward the Ringling Administration Building and past it North Tamiami Trail—Sarasota’s main north-south thoroughfare.

But the Mercedes was just sitting there not moving, not leaving the parking lot.

Everything was wrong.

Petain backed out of his parking spot and headed toward the exit at the same moment the Mercedes pulled out and turned to the right along Bayshore Road south toward the Ringling Museum.

“Get down! Get down!” McGarvey shouted to the students who looked up but stood there like deer caught in headlights. He tossed his briefcase down, withdrew his pistol, and headed on a run at a diagonal toward the Mercedes, hoping to reach the road and block it before it was past.

Petain’s Lexus exploded with a tremendous flash completely engulfing it in flames, flipping it up on to its roof, sending pieces of metal and burning plastic flying outward. A split second later the boom followed by the immensely hot blast wave knocked McGarvey off his feet, singeing his eyebrows, car parts flying all around him.

The detached roof of the car, twisted and on fire, fell from the sky as if in slow motion, landing directly on top of the two students.

The Mercedes sped past, as McGarvey managed to sit up, giving him just an instant to catch the first three digits of its Florida plate.

He got to his feet, his ears ringing, his entire body numb. Stuffing the pistol back in his pocket he went to see if there was any possibility that the boy and girl could have survived.

A couple of aides and a woman by the name of Carolyn on the Ringling Museum staff staggered out the front doors, blood smeared on their faces. The blast had taken out several windows in the two-story building.

Other students and faculty came on the run from the direction of the bay.

Petain was dead, nothing of his body left intact, and the students at the bike rack were dead as well. None of them had a chance. And whoever had placed the explosives in the Lexus and had set it off hadn’t given a damn what collateral damage they would inflict.

Staring at the burning wreckage of the Lexus, McGarvey was brought back to the morning at Arlington National Cemetery where he and his wife and their daughter had gone to the funeral of Todd Van Buren, their son-in-law who’d been assassinated. Driving away from the graveside ceremony, he’d followed Katy and Liz riding in an SUV that had exploded, killing them instantly.

He’d lost a lot of his ability to feel much of anything: compassion, remorse for the people he had eliminated in his work for the Company, and love for anyone or anything. And it had only been in the past few months, since the incident with the Cuban woman and the treasure that had been buried in the Texas and New Mexico deserts, that he had begun to get anywhere close to normal. Enough to read a book, see a movie, or watch a sunset over the Gulf of Mexico and not feel guilty about enjoying it.

Now this senseless thing. Petain had been at war. But the boy and girl at the bike rack were innocents.

A siren sounded somewhere in the distance and then another. The Vatican or the Spanish government or the so-called Voltaire Society or some fabulous treasure meant nothing to him. All that mattered was finding the people who had killed a boy and a girl. That he would do. Guaranteed.

THREE

Within a half hour the fires had been put out and the bodies of the students had been loaded aboard an ambulance, but it had taken much longer to find anything identifiable as human remains in the totally destroyed Lexus. And by six a crane had loaded the frame and other parts, including the engine block, onto a flatbed truck to be taken to the police garage where it would be examined.

A skeptical Sarasota police detective who knew something of McGarvey’s background had briefly questioned him. “Any idea what happened here?” he’d asked. His name was Jim Forest, and he looked like a kid, with dark features and a wide smile. But he seemed to be good at what he did and McGarvey had respect for him.

“Not really. I was getting into my car when the Lexus blew.”

“Didn’t see anything, talk to anyone?”

“Saw those two kids get killed, and some people in the admin building cut up with falling glass. But it could have been a lot worse if it had happened a few hours earlier.”

Forest shrugged. “Trouble does seem to follow you.”

“Not anymore,” McGarvey said. “I’m retired. Just here teaching kids a little philosophy.”

The crowd had mostly thinned out by now, and the flatbed truck driver was securing the Lexus’s chassis, leaving only a couple of police cars plus the crime scene investigator’s panel truck. McGarvey, drinking a cup of coffee someone had brought over, leaned against his car.

“Why do you suppose I have this hunch that whoever was in the Lexus came here to talk to you about something?”

“Sometimes even good cops get it wrong.”

Forest shrugged. “Thanks for the compliment, if that’s what it was. But I think you’re lying. And I don’t like it.”

McGarvey tossed out the rest of his coffee. “Are we finished here?”

“For now. But let me know if you’re leaving town anytime soon.”

“Sure,” McGarvey said, and he got into his car.

“You’re up to something. I can see it in your eyes. It’s a specialty of mine, reading people.”

“Let me know if you catch the bad guys.”

“Bad guys?”

“The ones who planted the explosives in the Lexus. Semtex. You can smell it.”

*   *   *

Back at his two-story home on Casey Key, just across the island’s only road from the Gulf and less than a hundred feet up from the Intracoastal Waterway, which ran ten miles or so north to Sarasota Bay and fifty south to Fort Myers, McGarvey got out of the shower, and as he toweled off he padded to the sliding glass doors that looked down at the swimming pool.

Forest was right, trouble did follow him. Always had. At first because he’d been ordered to do things, but in the past several years it was because his reputation had caught up with him.

Wrapping the towel around his middle, he went downstairs, where at the wet bar in the family room he poured a snifter of Remy Martin XO, and walked to his study, where he powered up his computer and phoned Otto Rencke on encrypted Skype.

The two of them had a long history together, all the way back to a couple of operations in Germany and Chile in the early days when Rencke was nothing more than an archivist for the Company. But since then they’d become close personal friends. Otto, who was a genius and an odd duck, had married Louise Horn, almost as brilliant and odd as her husband. When McGarvey’s daughter and son-in-law were assassinated leaving Audrey, their two-year-old child, an orphan, Otto and Louise had adopted her, which in McGarvey’s estimation was a perfect fit. They were odd people—always had been—but they were loving and kind.

Nowadays Otto, whose specialty was computer operations, was the CIA’s chief of Special Projects, and Louise, who had been a chief photo analyst for the National Security Agency and now did freelance work for the CIA, lived in a two-story colonial in an all-American suburb outside of Washington, where the chief purpose in their lives had become McGarvey’s granddaughter.

Rencke picked up on the second ring, his long, almost always out-of-control frizzy red hair tied up in a neat ponytail, which was Louise’s doing. Her project after they’d gotten married a couple of years ago was to clean up her husband’s act. Now his jeans and sweatshirts were usually clean, he wore boat shoes instead of unlaced sneakers, and he’d stopped eating Twinkies and drinking heavy cream. Lately he’d seemed happier than McGarvey had ever known him, though he’d lost none of his genius, or his almost preternatural ability to see and understand things. Nor had he lost his almost constant boyish enthusiasm.

“Oh, wow, Mac, you weren’t hurt? You’re okay?”

“You heard about the car bomb on campus?” McGarvey asked, though he wasn’t surprised. A number of years ago, Rencke had put a tag on him. As long as he knew where McGarvey was, his computers would sift through every available bit of real-time information on that location.

“Of course. But you weren’t just a bystander.”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so. What do we have coming our way this time?”

McGarvey hesitated for just a moment. Early in his career he’d tried to distance himself from everyone he loved—even going so far as to leave his wife and child. He wanted to protect them from the bad people he’d had to deal with. He’d lived with the constant worry that someone, someday would retaliate against him by hurting his family. Which had happened, but not for the reasons he’d worried about. The bomb at the Arlington cemetery had been meant for him; their deaths had been an accident. In any event, Otto was a CIA employee, and he and Louise had always understood the risks.

“The guy in the Lexus that took the hit was Giscarde Petain. And he’d come to ask for my help with something having to do with a group called the Voltaire Society.”

“Just a sec,” Rencke said, and less than a minute later, he was back. “Okay, I’m getting thirteen million plus hits—everything from the Voltaire Society of America, which promotes what they call the spirit of enlightenment, to the University of Denver student honors organization. Lots of French philosophic and scientific groups, and even a Bible study organization in Geneva. None of them sounds like anything someone would be murdered for.”