Blood Pact (McGarvey) (13 page)

Callahan sat back. “Go on,” he said.

McGarvey almost felt sorry for the man, who after all was just trying to do his job in an increasingly difficult world. Pressure came not only from the terrorist organizations he was charged with finding before another 9/11 occurred, but from the White House that wanted only good news, especially in an election year.

“You know what I was involved with a few months ago in Texas and then Fort Knox. It’s not over.”

“Our file is still open, as is, I suspect, DO’s.” The DO was the CIA’s directorate of operations, which had been peripherally involved with the situation that had started in Havana with Fidel Castro’s death.

“Walt Page would like to see it closed.” Page was the director of the CIA, and just as straight a shooter as Callahan.

“I’m sure he would. Are the Cubans involved again?”

“Not yet.”

“Let’s go back to the Frenchman who shows up at New College to ask for your help finding some diary. What’d you tell him?”

“That I wasn’t interested, and that he needed a private detective. He gave me a telephone number in Paris, but Otto couldn’t find out much except that if such a society existed, it was under the radar, except that a transfer of money was made to the United States just before the Civil War, apparently by the society. But why the payment was made, who accepted it, and what it was used for is still up in the air.”

“Another treasure hunt?”

“Yeah,” McGarvey said, a little troubled that he was letting the man hang in the wind, but he needed some time.

“That to this point has involved some French society—coincidental that you’re a Voltaire scholar—and Spanish intelligence, for which at least six bodies have piled up, possibly a seventh. Anyone else involved?”

McGarvey had debated the next point, because he didn’t know if it would help or hurt Callahan. But the man was one of the good ones in a very large pool that contained a lot of bureaucratic assholes. Washington was filled with them. Trouble is that it was hard to tell the good guys from the jerks until it was too late.

“The Vatican.”

Callahan was taken aback but for just a moment. “I see. Because the treasure was brought north by Catholic monks from Mexico City. They want it back. But Spain doesn’t want to share it. Nor does the Voltaire Society, who does what—write checks to us? Or sends the occasional shipment of gold and silver our way? And to this point it seems as if everyone is willing to kill whoever gets in their way. Does that about cover it?”

“Not quite.”

“The Cubans. But you said that they’re not involved this time.”

“Not yet, but I expect someone will be showing up.”

Callahan looked away, a pained expression in his eyes and knit brows and the set of his mouth. “I don’t know if I want to ask, but I’ve known you for too long not to: What’s your take on all of this?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t made any sense of it yet.”

“Jesus H. Christ, Mac, by your own admission you’ve gunned down three intelligence operatives from a friendly nation—one of them a young woman. How am I supposed to sell the director on the notion that you shouldn’t be arrested and buried somewhere? Give us the time to straighten out this mess?”

“Because you’d never get it straightened out that way. Believe me.”

“Save me your hunches,” Callahan said. “But from where I sit, apparently in the cheap seats, there is no gold treasure buried somewhere in New Mexico—nor was there ever any. It’s nothing but an urban legend, no different than Area 51 at Roswell with alien bodies and spaceships. Ghosts, hobgoblins, time travel, warp drive—beam me up, Scotty. My kids are into it, and my wife watches all the paranormal shows on cable—not because they believe in any of that shit, but because it’s entertaining. The problem is the bodies. The murders. Assassinations. Acts of terrorism, whatever you want to call what’s happened in the past twenty-four hours.”

“I need a little time, Bill. It’s all I’m asking.”

Callahan threw up his hands. “Why did I expect you were going to say something like that?”

“I’ll keep you in the loop.”

“Please do,” Callahan said. He stood up. “If I were hungry I’d have the steak sandwich, it’s pretty good for twenty-five bucks. But I’m not hungry.” He tossed down a fifty-dollar bill, and started away, but then turned back. “Are more people going to die over this thing?”

“Probably,” McGarvey said, and he regretted it deep in his bones.

TWENTY-FIVE

After speaking with his handler, Dorestos turned his attention back to the GLONASS real-time images on his iPad in time to catch McGarvey’s gray Porsche emerge from the J. Edgar Hoover Building and head back on Pennsylvania Avenue the same way it had come from Georgetown.

He figured it was likely that McGarvey would either go back to his apartment, or probably cross the river either on the Roosevelt or Key Bridge and head up the George Washington Parkway to the CIA headquarters.

He was betting on the CIA, so he pulled away from the curb and drove down to M Street and turned right, away from where Pennsylvania Avenue ended, keeping one eye on the iPad.

Just past the touristy shops at Georgetown Park, and two blocks before the Key Bridge he got lucky with a parking spot and pulled over to wait and see where McGarvey, still in traffic, was going.

He was having a hard time letting go of the scent of the perfume, which the monsignor said was Chanel—the same scent his mother had worn. She was long dead by now, he’d found out that much, but until today he’d had no real memory of her. But now he could see her in that tiny office at the orphanage. He couldn’t make out her face, or even her shape, only her general outline, but her scent stuck in his mind. It was comforting to him, and yet frightening, one of the unconscious reasons, he supposed, that made him want to get out of McGarvey’s apartment without searching it. He was afraid of the perfume.

The loneliness and sense of abandonment that he’d felt until he’d joined the street gang came back at him strong. Had his mother not come to visit him, he suspected that he might have adjusted much sooner, and yet intellectually he understood that such thoughts were probably beyond the ken of a two-year-old. But he felt the sense of loss now deep in his chest, and he wanted to cry.

The naivete was long gone—knocked out of him on the street, and later when he was sixteen and woke up early in the morning with one of the older priests at the orphanage kneeling beside his bed.

“It is all right, my son,” the priest had whispered. He’d pulled the covers away, and pulled Dorestos’s pajama bottoms down.

“I don’t understand,” Dorestos said softly, but he had lost his virginity with the whores two years earlier, and he knew damned well what oral sex was all about.

One of the Catholic jokes inside the orphanage had been: “How do you get a nun pregnant? Just dress her up as an altar boy.”

The priest gently fondled Dorestos’s penis until it was erect and then took it in his mouth, the sensation pleasurable, and Dorestos relaxed and enjoyed it, coming quickly to orgasm.

When it was over the priest smiled. “Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“Bastard,” Dorestos said, and he clamped his powerful hands around the old man’s throat, and strangled him.

The priest, whose name Dorestos never knew, did not struggle, and after the light had faded from the old man’s eyes, Dorestos got out of bed and put the body under the covers.

He got dressed, took his possessions, including a comb, a safety razor, and a few items of clothing and slipped out of the orphanage into the early morning hours, back to his gang without the slightest idea what they did or where they lived during the day.

McGarvey turned onto Constitution Avenue, and just past the Lincoln Memorial turned onto the Roosevelt Bridge, across the river where he headed north on the GWM Parkway that led up to the CIA in Langley.

Waiting for an opening in traffic, Dorestos pulled out and caught a break on the Key Bridge, reaching the parkway about a quarter mile behind the Porsche.

The first week had been tough. He’d connected with the street gang but they’d been following him each morning and when he didn’t return to the orphanage they wanted to know who the hell he really was. They believed that he might even be a snitch for the cops, and when he told them what had happened and why he’d left, they’d sentenced him to death.

“We want no fags among us,” the gang leader Cristobol had said, and he’d pulled a knife and came up from behind.

Dorestos sidestepped the attack and defended himself with only his size, his speed, and his instinct for survival.

When it was over, Cristobol’s left arm broken, three ribs cracked, his jaw dislocated, and his right knee dislocated, Dorestos had run away. He snatched purses for money to eat, he slept under bridges, he ran away from the cops, and that fall he walked nearly fifty kilometers out into the countryside where he found a vacation cottage on Lake Varese very close to the Swiss border. No one would be back until summer, nevertheless the pantry was reasonably well stocked with canned goods, and a closet in the back was filled with several dozen bottles of wine.

He’d spent most of the winter out there, finally getting bored enough to walk all the way back to Milan, where the first night he’d been picked up by the police because he’d made the mistake of going back to the street the orphanage was on, merely to take a look.

The police had turned out to be from the Vatican, who’d been on the lookout for him ever since the murder. They did not hand him over to the local authorities, instead they’d brought him to the Hospitallers.

“You’re just the sort of young man we’ve been looking for,” his first instructor had told him. “You have finally found a home among people who respect and love you.”

That was in Malta, and over the coming years he’d been trained not only in Catholic ritual—he’d been ordained a priest at the age of twenty—he’d been taught English, French, and German, how to shoot just about any man-portable weapon in existence—including the American Stinger and the Russian Grail missiles—hand-to-hand combat techniques in which his own body could be used as a lethal weapon. But most importantly they’d taught him how to think, how to reason, how to analyze.

He became an assassin, a tool for the SMOM. In all he’d successfully accomplished seven missions, but, as Msgr. Franelli had briefed him in Malta: “This is your most important assignment. Of supreme importance to the Church as well as to our order.”

“I will not fail you.”

“Of course you won’t.”

Dorestos took his eyes away from the iPad and nearly missed McGarvey, who’d turned off the parkway on Dolly Madison Boulevard just short of the entrance to the CIA, and he had to suddenly switch lanes to make the turn and still keep well enough back that he would not be spotted.

He called his handler, and told him the situation. “Perhaps it’s a back entrance,” he suggested.

“It’s possible. But it’s also possible that you have been spotted.”

“I don’t think so. Where else might he be heading?”

“Unknown,” the monsignor said after a brief hesitation, and it was the very first time Dorestos had ever heard even the slightest doubt in his handler’s voice. It was disquieting.

“I will find out.”

“With care, Father. You understand what’s at stake.”

Not completely, Dorestos wanted to say, but he did not. “Yes, Monsignor.”

The boulevard went directly through the small town of McLean, where McGarvey turned north on a side street and after a half-dozen blocks, turned left again and then down a cul-de-sac where he parked in the driveway of a pleasant-looking two-story colonial, in a neighborhood of similarly well-kept homes. A tricycle with a pink basket was parked on the walkway to the front door.

Dorestos pulled over a block away and watched as McGarvey got out of his car, and looked back toward the street that passed the cul-de-sac for a long moment, before he closed the door and headed up the walk.

He was a suspicious man, but Dorestos could not bring himself to believe that McGarvey had spotted him.

He made a U-turn and drove back to a gas station and convenience store on a corner that whoever coming or going from the cul-de-sac would have to pass. He bought a Diet Coke and a sandwich and sat eating his second lunch, debating if he should try to approach the house on foot.

TWENTY-SIX

Before McGarvey could ring the bell, Louise opened the door, a warm smile on her long, narrow face. She was tall for a woman—over six feet—and whip thin, but her eyes were her best feature, very large, very wide, very dark brown, and very expressive.

“Windows into a woman’s soul,” she’d once told Mac. “No artifice here. What you see is what you get.” She and Otto were head over heels.

“Did you come in clean?” she asked, though she knew he had. She was just overprotective of Mac’s granddaughter, Audrey.

McGarvey shrugged. “Who can ever be sure,” he said. He pecked Louise on the cheek and she stepped aside to let him into the stair hall, and locked the door behind him.

Otto, his red frizzy hair neatly tied in a ponytail, was fairly jumping out of his skin with excitement. It had been several months since they’d seen each other, and he considered Mac more than just a brother in arms. Their lives were deeply intertwined, and they’d been through a fair number of battles, the outcomes of which had not always been so certain. Otto had been there when Mac had been wounded and lay fighting for his life in a hospital, and Mac had been there when Otto had been held in badland, forced there because Louise had been kidnapped.

Standing next to him, Audie barely came up to his waist. She was slender with her mother’s blond hair and Katy’s pretty eyes and delicate mouth. She bounced on her tiptoes, one hand behind her back, the other at her chin as if she was a miniature philosopher trying to work out a difficult problem. But she looked uncertain, and when McGarvey approached she shied away, closer to Otto.

“It’s okay, he’s your grandfather,” Otto told her.

Louise was beaming, practically in tears. It had been more than a year since McGarvey had last seen Audie, and he was nervous that she would reject him.