Blood Pact (McGarvey) (12 page)

“Are you at home or at the campus?”

“Home,” Otto said. “Louise is here too. Is everything okay?”

“I think I picked up a tail, but whoever it is, is damned good. Check to see if there have been any private jets landing in the past few hours from Sarasota or any place within a few hours driving distance.”

“TSA only allows forty-eight private flights every twenty-four hours, so it should be easy,” Rencke said. “Who do you have in mind, the CNI?”

“I think it’s the guy who got away from me on the key. He was good.”

“The Hospitallers have the rep. Are you coming out here today?”

“Soon as I see Callahan. Has someone picked up Audie?”

“Later, after you get here. She wants to see you.”

“Goddamnit.”

Rencke said nothing.

McGarvey hung up and stayed leaning against the wall by the window for a long minute or so, trying to calm down. He’d never been really afraid of much except for the safety of his family; his wife and daughter, and now his granddaughter. He’d tried to insulate them by keeping his distance so when someone came gunning for him they’d been pretty much out of the line of fire.

But it had not worked to save Katy or Liz, and he was very much afraid that it wouldn’t work to keep Audie safe and that one thought drove him crazy.

He called Bill Callahan at FBI’s headquarters downtown and left a message that he was on his way, and then called the private garage where his Porsche Cayenne SUV was maintained and kept while he was out of town, and asked for it to be brought around.

TWENTY-THREE

The dark blue Chevy Tahoe with deeply tinted windows was parked on Dumbarton and Twenty-ninth Street nearly two blocks from McGarvey’s apartment. Traffic here had been light but steady for the twenty minutes Dorestos had bided his time, watching the images on his iPad’s Internet connection. He’d stopped by a Wendy’s to get a sandwich and a soda, and was eating now. It was cover. Everyone was in too much of a hurry to bother noticing a man sitting alone in a car eating his lunch.

As soon as he’d landed at Reagan National he’d gotten on a U.S. air traffic control restricted site that showed the traffic pattern for the entire country. Homing in on the Sarasota flight patterns north along the eastern seaboard he’d picked out the government Gulfstream flight to Andrews earlier this morning.

From there he’d brought up the Russian GLONASS GPS system, which had been recently augmented to display actual real-time satellite images of what their Federal Security Service—which was the renamed KGB—deemed as hot spots. Among them was Washington, D.C., and environs. The system was much like Google Earth only better because it was strictly focused as an intelligence tool.

He’d watched as the plane had landed and taxied to a hangar where a few minutes later a plain blue Air Force sedan came out and drove to the main gate where a man carrying a small overnight bag transferred to a waiting cab that immediately headed into the city.

The angles had been all wrong for Dorestos to make a positive identification, and the man had not looked up. But his build was right, and the aircraft that entered the hangar had come from Sarasota, which had to be more than coincidence.

He’d followed the cab at a safe enough distance that even a man of McGarvey’s tradecraft wouldn’t spot him, and followed him to a brownstone building, which still wasn’t decisive. But he had time, and he had patience, things he had learned at the Instituto Provinciale Assistenza Infanzia, which was the Catholic orphanage in Milan.

His mother had been a prostitute who’d given birth to him in a dark alley and had left him in a garbage bin where a policeman had found him and brought him to the nuns at the Chiese San Fedele, from where after a medical checkup he was taken to the IPAI.

But he never fit in. He was too big for his age, he had a sullen attitude that he’d inherited from his mother.

From the age of around nine or ten he began slipping out of the orphanage after dark, where he met up with a street gang, who after an initial initiation of knives and clubs, which he passed, set him to work first as a second-story man because of his youth and his size. By the time he was thirteen—and adept at street begging, breaking and entering, and even strong-armed robbery of old women—he’d graduated by killing his first man for a few hundred lira.

No matter what, no matter the situations he found himself in, no matter the trouble he’d gotten into, each morning before dawn he slipped back to the orphanage where he was safe. The Church was the mother he’d never known, and he loved Her with all of his heart.

Fifteen minutes after the man had entered the brownstone building he came out at the same moment a metallic blue-gray Porsche SUV pulled up to the curb and a man in a black jacket got out. The two of them greeted each other.

The angle was low enough that Dorestos managed to get a tag number, which he ran, coming up with McGarvey’s name.

A minute later a Ford Taurus pulled up, the man who’d delivered the Porsche got in, and they left.

McGarvey waited for a couple of minutes at the curb, as if he were expecting someone—the Tahoe, Dorestos had the nasty thought—then got in and drove away.

Giving McGarvey a head start, Dorestos pulled away and followed the Porsche to Pennsylvania Avenue, and into the city past the White House to the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, where the car disappeared.

For just a minute Dorestos was confused, until he cautiously drove past the Bureau’s headquarters complex, spotting the entrance to the underground VIP parking garage. He’d taken a chance that the American knew he was being followed and had laid a trap. But the simple truth was that McGarvey had come to Washington to report to the FBI what had happened. He might suspect, though that was far-fetched, but he didn’t
know
that he was being followed.

Half a block away he got lucky with a parking spot where he waited a full five minutes to see if McGarvey came out, before he turned around and drove back to Georgetown, parking a block away from the brownstone, and going the rest of the way in on foot.

This morning he was dressed in neatly pressed khaki slacks, boat shoes with no socks, a yellow Polo shirt, and a lightweight blue blazer, all American with a European flair of side vents on the jacket.

No one paid him the slightest attention as he let himself in to the brownstone’s unattended lobby. Six mail slots were along the wall between the elevator and the stairwell, ground-floor apartment doors left and right down a short hall.

He studied the name plates, until 3A, which was for T. Van Buren, and he shrugged. McGarvey’s tradecraft may have been legendary, but he was apparently a man of sentimentalities. A fool even. T. Van Buren was the name of his son-in-law who’d worked for the CIA, and had been assassinated in the line of duty. No one would come looking for the apartment of a dead man.

Dorestos easily loped up the stairs to the third floor, where he stopped a moment at the landing to listen for anything out of the ordinary. Sentimental or not, McGarvey wasn’t a stupid man. If he’d had the slightest inkling that he’d been followed from Andrews he might have stationed a CIA officer or two here to keep watch. But if someone were here they were making absolutely no noise.

At the door to the Van Buren apartment, Dorestos studied the hinges and door frame, especially the lintel for a proximity device, and the threshold for a pressure plate that might be connected to a silent alarm, or perhaps a small, narrowly directed explosive device that would be effective only at close range to avoid collateral damage.

But he detected nothing until he took out a lock pick set and bent down to inspect what turned out to be an ordinary PLY205 High Security front entry lock, that was pickable by any decent operator. Only the mushroom pin might present some difficulty to an amateur, and for just a moment Dorestos was a little disappointed, until he spotted a minute trace of what looked like black grease, or perhaps ordinary shoe polish.

It had not been disturbed, nor would it have been noticed by anyone but a professional. A little better, he thought, though not much, and at this point his estimation of McGarvey’s abilities had dropped.

Scooping up a bit of the black grease with one of the picks in his set, he used two others to pick the lock in under fifteen seconds, and once the door was open he replaced the grease from where he’d removed it, and stepped inside.

The apartment was neat, but a little dust had accumulated on top of the coffee table and the flat panel television as if no one had lived here in weeks or perhaps months.

But something felt out of the ordinary, and walking across the living room Dorestos pulled out his pistol. An overnight bag lay on the bed, but the bathroom had not been used, and in the kitchen an empty glass sat on the counter next to a bottle of Remy Martin.

McGarvey had come here only long enough to drop off his overnight bag, have a quick drink, and call for his car.

But someone else had been here too.

Dorestos raised his head and sniffed delicately. It was a woman’s perfume, vaguely familiar. He’d smelled it the moment he’d walked in the door. But McGarvey had come here alone.

At the window he looked down at the traffic along Twenty-seventh, as well as on the Rock Creek Parkway, but there was no sign of McGarvey’s Porsche.

Deciding that searching the apartment would probably tell him nothing important, but might alert McGarvey that someone had been here, he holstered his pistol, let himself out, and walked back to his car.

He phoned Msgr. Franelli. “I followed McGarvey to the FBI’s headquarters building, and then came back to his apartment.”

“I expected he would talk to someone at the FBI. He has friends there, and the Bureau is very much interested in the bombing in Sarasota. But tell me, Father, did you find anything of interest in the man’s apartment?”

Dorestos told his handler about the fail-safe on the lock, and his decision not to carry out a search for fear of missing another booby trap. “But someone had been there before me. A woman. I smelled her perfume.”

“Describe it.”

Dorestos was at a complete loss, and he said so.

“Break it down. Was it strong or weak?”

“Very faint, but distinctive. Perhaps something like orange or lemon blossoms, but not so sweet, and maybe something else—acid with sugar, maybe a woman’s body lotion.” Dorestos remembered something. It was at the back of his mind, a smell, a place, maybe a room. But he couldn’t put his finger on it. “I don’t know.”

“Do you think that you will remember it if you smell it again?” Franelli asked.

Dorestos brightened. “Yes, Monsignor, without a doubt.”

“You’ve encountered it before?”

“I’m not sure. Perhaps.”

“Can you remember when or where? “

Dorestos racked his brain, but all he could dredge up was a small room, with a desk and two chairs. A nun was seated behind the desk and someone else, maybe a woman, was seated across from her. He described the scene as best he could to his handler.

“You were very young. Maybe two or three. And the perfume was Chanel.”

Dorestos was astounded. “How can you know this?”

“The office was in the orphanage, and the woman was your mother, who came only once to visit you. She wore Chanel.”

TWENTY-FOUR

McGarvey waited in the ground floor visitors’ lounge of the FBI headquarters building for a full fifteen minutes before Bill Callahan, the Bureau’s deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, finally came down to get him. He was a large, athletic-looking man in his mid-forties, who in fact had played football for the Green Bay Packers for a couple of years.

“Good to see you, Mac,” he said. “And I’d ask how are you doing, but I already have a pretty good idea.”

“Your people found out anything interesting yet in Sarasota?”

“Let’s take a walk and get some lunch,” Callahan said. He took the security badge from around his neck and put it in his jacket pocket.

“Fair enough,” McGarvey agreed, and they walked out of the building, and crossed Ninth with the light where a half block away they went into the Caucus Room, which was an upscale steak house.

Callahan was known here, and the maître d’ showed them to a booth near the rear of the main room, where he ordered a mineral water with a twist, and McGarvey a Pils Urquell beer.

“I won’t ask the questions I’d need to ask in my office, and in turn you’re going to tell me everything because besides the three dead at the university, we found three more dead in the house next to yours. We think that they worked for Spanish intelligence, and that they were running a fairly sophisticated surveillance operation on you.”

“They were CNI, and there’s a fourth one, possibly dead.”

Their drinks came, but Callahan told the waiter they’d order lunch later.

“You killed the three, including the woman?”

“Yes,” McGarvey said, and he went over the entire day beginning with Petain’s visit at the college, though not what he wanted, until the arrival of Jim Forest the Sarasota detective. “Otto downloaded everything from the computer and then fried it.”

“Yes, we found out right away that the hard disk drive had been cleaned out. I expect that you’ll share it with us. But why, what the hell is going on that the CNI wants to keep tabs on you and if you’re right, killed the Frenchman?”

“And the two students,” McGarvey said.

Callahan nodded tightly. “Josh starts college in a couple of years, and he’s been thinking about New College. Maybe not such a good idea.”

“There was Kent State, and the high school at Columbine, and others. We can’t protect them all the time.”

“You know that better than most. So tell me what the hell is going on, starting with the Frenchman.”

“He told me that he’d been sent by the Voltaire Society to ask for my help finding a hundred-and-sixty-year-old diary that had been stolen from a bank vault in Bern. It supposedly has the locations of seven caches of gold and silver buried somewhere in southern New Mexico, by Spanish monks from Mexico City. Actually only four, because three of them have already been emptied, and he warned me that my life was in danger because of what I already knew, or thought I knew.”