Blood Pact (McGarvey) (11 page)

He stepped aside, out of the likely path of a ricocheting bullet fragment, and fired a shot into the lock at the gate to no effect. The mechanism was made of case hardened steel as he thought it might be.

A slight scuffling noise came from the southern end of the compound and McGarvey was in time to see a dark figure at the top of the wall for just an instant before it disappeared. He fired on the run, knowing he’d missed.

At the corner he was again in time to see the CNI agent disappearing in the darkness. This time he did not fire. Instead he ran across to the next property, this one whose sloping lawn led from a long dock, up to a cantilevered infinity pool just below a very large house.

He stopped in the darkness for just a second, searching for movement somewhere up on the pool deck, but he was in time to see the dark figure leaping up the wall of the next compound to the south and disappearing on the other side.

The man’s speed was nearly impossible. He was nothing more than a shadow.

McGarvey reached the walled compound and ran immediately to the southern side, where he stopped again to listen and to watch the top of the wall.

“We are not your real enemy,
signore,
” a high-pitched voice, either that of a young boy or a woman, called from the other side of the wall. The accent was Italian, not Spanish.

“You tried to kill me,” McGarvey said. He leaned against the wall at the southern corner.

“Merely to get your attention. I knew the dummy in the chair was a ruse and that you were hiding somewhere very close with the intention of doing me harm.”

“Get my attention for what purpose? You’re not with the CNI.” If whoever it was came over the wall, McGarvey would have a clear shot.

“Be careful who you talk to. Someone else will be coming to ask for your help, but trust no one. Believe me, Signore McGarvey, I have taken a vow never to lie.”

“I’ll put my pistol down, and you do the same. Come out and we’ll talk.”

There was no answer.

McGarvey waited a full minute then started along the wall to the front of the compound. But no one was there; nothing moved in either direction on the road.

His phone vibrated again. It was Otto.

“You okay, Mac?”

“I’ve been chasing after the fastest guy I’ve ever met, and I think I’ve lost him.”

“It has to be one of the CNI operators, because the one video feed I left open was shut down.”

“I don’t think so,” McGarvey said. “He spoke to me. Called me
signore.
He said that he wasn’t my enemy and warned me that I wasn’t to trust anybody. And he said something else damned curious. He said that he’d taken a vow never to lie.”

“SMOM—Sacred Military Order of Malta.”

“That’s what I figured. The Spanish government wants the treasure, and so does the Vatican, along with the Voltaire Society. So who stole the diary? Whoever it was wouldn’t be snooping around here.”

“You’re right,” Otto said. “So what’s next?”

“I’m not sure. But I’m getting a little tired of people who talk to me getting blown up, or people next door watching my every move, or someone from the Church taking potshots, so I’m going to find out what the hell is going on.”

A boat roared to life on the ICW a couple of doors away.

“Got to go,” McGarvey said, and he headed in a dead run back north to the CNI’s surveillance house and the boat tied up to the dock.

The boat that had just started came up the ICW at full throttle and was well past when McGarvey reached the CNI’s boat. He jumped aboard and turned the key to start the engine but nothing happened.

He turned to check the outboards, but the fuel lines were missing. He leaned back against the back of the seat, and shook his head.

The son of a bitch was not only fast, he was good.

TWENTY-ONE

Dorestos tied a loop of line from the stern of the powerboat he’d stolen to a cleat on the dock at the CNI’s Siesta Key safe house, put it in gear at idle throttle, and pointed out toward the ICW. As it strained against the tether, he stepped up onto the dock and released the line.

The boat slowly made its way up the narrow private channel, hesitated as it touched bottom, but then broke free and the torque of the spinning prop gradually eased it to the south into the deeper water of the ICW. It was unlikely that the boat would be associated with this place, giving him an extra margin of time to get away.

Nothing had been disturbed in the house since he’d left earlier this evening, and once he made sure that no traffic was moving on the road, he opened the garage door and headed north in the Chevrolet Malibu rental car. He tossed the garage door opener over the roof and into the ditch beside the road.

In ten minutes he was off the island and heading to I-75, which would take him up to the Tampa International Jet Center where he’d rented the car from Hertz and where the chartered Embraer Lineage that had brought him from New York earlier today was parked, its crew waiting at a nearby motel.

He’d not heard another boat coming from the south, and he was reasonably certain that McGarvey wasn’t following him. Nevertheless he changed lanes often, and kept glancing in the rearview mirror to make sure no one was on his tail, until he was on the interstate highway at Clark Road heading north.

He called his handler and explained what had happened.

“You’re sure that you got away clean?”

“Sí.”

“Then you have done a good night’s work, and the fact that you actually spoke to him, I think bodes well. But tell me, Father, what were your exact words?”

“I told him that we were not his real enemy. And I told him to be careful who he talked to, and not to trust anyone.”

“What else? Exactly.”

“I said: ‘Believe me, Signore McGarvey, I have taken a vow never to lie.’”

“Then he knows who you are.”

Dorestos didn’t see it at first, but all of a sudden he realized the mistake he had made. “He can’t know that I am a Hospitaller.”

“Perhaps not, but considering the scope of the issue he will have to guess that you are from the Vatican. It was an error on your part, Father, but not a grave one.”

“I will make a penance when I get home.”

“As you must, but it will have to wait. Where are you at this moment?”

Dorestos told him.

“Good. Your aircraft will be waiting for you in Tampa, but you are not returning just yet. First you are flying to Washington, where you will get a motel room under your work name, of course, and rent a car with tinted windows.”

“Do you believe that Mr. McGarvey will be there?”

“A government aircraft is to pick him up in Sarasota at eight in the morning, almost certainly to take him to Andrews where you will be waiting to follow him.”

Dorestos knew better than to question how the monsignor knew this as a fact, because the Church had people on the ground in just about every city large or small in at least all of the western world—both hemispheres.

“Somebody else will almost certainly try to reach him; in this you were correct. Perhaps the CNI, perhaps someone else from the Voltaire Society, perhaps someone from his own government because we have an idea where some of this treasure that rightfully belongs to us has gone, though we don’t yet know why. So it will be up to you to find out who he meets with.”

“Shall I intercept whoever it might be?”

“No,” Msgr. Franelli said sharply. “You have driven him to act. It is exactly what I wanted. Now I want to know not only who he sees, but what his next moves might be.”

“Do you believe that he will lead us to the treasure?”

“Almost certainly. And we will be there to take it from him when he finds it.”

TWENTY-TWO

The CIA’s Gulfstream touched down at Joint One Andrews under a cloudless sky a couple of minutes before eleven, and taxied directly into a hangar. McGarvey gathered his bag, thanked the crew, and walked off the plane where a young-looking master sergeant named Andersen in ODUs was waiting with a plain blue sedan.

“Welcome to Andrews, Mr. Director, may I give you a lift into town?”

“Just somewhere I can catch a cab.”

“Main gate, sir. There’s always a couple there. If not we can call for one.”

McGarvey hadn’t slept very well last night, nor had he gotten much rest on the short, bumpy flight up. He’d called Rencke on the way out to the private aviation terminal at SRQ and told him that no escort was necessary.

“No problem,” Otto said. “Louise was planning on picking you up. Audie’s staying home from day care and she wanted to come along.”

Audie was McGarvey’s granddaughter. And sometimes thinking about her, seeing her face in the photographs and videos Louise sent him made his heart heavy; she was the spitting image of her mother, Liz, who had been a spitting image of her mother, McGarvey’s wife, Katy.

“Could be I’m going to pick up a tail, so I’m going to cab it to my place in Georgetown. Make it easy for them. But I don’t want you or Louise in the line of fire. And it might be best if you sent Audie down to the Farm for the time being.”

The CIA’s training base for new recruits and for some missions was at a place called the Farm on the York River south of Washington. His daughter and son-in-law had been codirectors of training and Audie had been adopted by the entire staff. She’d been sent down to stay out of harm’s way twice; once just after her parents had been murdered and again a few months ago when Louise had been kidnapped and Otto had been forced to fly to Cuba for the funeral of Fidel Castro.

“Okay, but not until she sees you first. She’s practically going crazy, looking at your pictures and videos.”

McGarvey had seen his wife and daughter murdered in front of his eyes when the limo they were riding in exploded. And thinking that Audie could be exposed to the same kind of danger sometimes drove him to the brink. Sometimes it was nearly impossible to think rationally about her. “I don’t want to take the chance.”

“She’s our daughter now,
kemo sabe,
” Otto said tenderly. “Which means we get the final say.”

“I’ll be a couple of hours,” McGarvey said, not wanting to press the argument. But less than twenty-four hours into a situation six people were already dead, and he expected the body count to rise.

*   *   *

McGarvey maintained an apartment on the third floor of a brownstone in Georgetown on Twenty-seventh Street with a view of Rock Creek Park where he ran every morning when he was in residence. He’d bought the place as a refuge after Katy had died, and before he could face returning to their house on Casey Key.

He dismissed the cab a couple of blocks from his place, and walked the rest of the way. Georgetown was in full swing with a lot of tourists especially along M Street, which lent the place an anonymity. Nevertheless he tried to come in clean each time.

On the ride in from Andrews he’d sat in the front passenger seat from where he could watch his six in the door mirror, but if anyone had tailed him from the base they were very good. A blue Chevy Tahoe with deeply tinted windows had been interesting from the time they’d turned onto State 4 into the District, but then he passed and turned north on Twenty-third at Washington Circle.

Standing now on Dumbarton at Twenty-eighth, waiting for traffic to clear so that he could cross, he thought he spotted the Chevy passing through the intersection one block north, but he couldn’t be sure. When it didn’t show up in the next block, he put it down to jumpy nerves, thinking about Audie.

A Grey Line tour bus rumbled past, and McGarvey walked across the street, stopping for a moment at a corner shop selling magazines, water, and flowers, so that he could look at the reflections in the window. He was jumpy, and almost certain that he’d been followed from Andrews, but no one was behind him. And the Tahoe was gone.

Around the corner a half block away, McGarvey let himself into the brownstone, and used the stairs to reach his third-floor apartment. The building housed mostly professional singles or couples without children and Bill Tyrone, an older man who spent most of his time away on cruises in the Caribbean and Europe. He’d once told McGarvey that there were three women he met on most of the trips who had more or less adopted him.

“Why stay home alone when I have all that attention?” he’d said, laughing.

McGarvey’s fail-safe, which was a small bit of black shoe polish just inside the door lock opening, was intact. Nevertheless he drew his gun, unlocked the door, and eased it open with the toe of his shoe. Nothing moved inside, there were no sounds, and he rolled around the corner, sweeping his pistol left to right.

But someone had been here. He smelled the subtle lingering odor of a woman’s perfume, probably expensive, but so faint it was impossible for him to guess how long ago whoever had worn it had been here.

Closing and locking the door behind him he made a quick search of his small one-bedroom place, but so far as he could tell nothing had been disturbed. He glanced back at the door. Whoever had been here was a professional. They’d not missed the fail-safe, and yet they’d worn perfume.

At the window he looked across at Rock Creek Park with its jogging paths, single road, picnic benches, and the creek itself, which wandered down from the national Zoological Park, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Nor was traffic below on Twenty-seventh Street out of the ordinary.

But someone was there. He could feel it in his bones. Maybe the CNI or perhaps someone else from the Voltaire Society. Or the man with the high-pitched voice from Casey Key who’d called him
signore.

He retrieved his bag from where he’d dropped it just inside the door and brought it into his bedroom, where he laid his pistol down and took off his jacket. It was early but in the kitchen he poured a stiff measure of Cognac, downed it neat, and then phoned Otto on his landline. Several years ago Rencke had come up with a back-scatter encryption system that could scramble both sides of a phone conversation even though the encryption equipment was located only at one end. It worked especially well with landlines.