Blood Pact (McGarvey) (31 page)

“The curator?”

“Yes.”

“And how does one go about seeing her?”

“By appointment.”

“I see,” al-Rashid said, and he stepped back to let someone else look at the logs.

The main floor of the building was all but deserted except for the occasional staffer, and the security officer at the reception desk just inside the front doors. No one except for the tourists in the group wore identification badges on lanyards.

They had come full circle around the central courtyard back to their starting point in front, past some of the cataloging and restoration rooms, which had been surprisingly quiet. But as the guide explained very little new material was coming into the archives, and the real work of major restorations was done elsewhere.

“We’ll take a fifteen-minute break now, in the courtyard where we have provided refreshments,” the guide said. “There are many statues for you to see, or if you find that the morning is too warm there are places to sit in the shade.”

“May we smoke?” an Italian asked.

“I’m afraid that smoking is not allowed anywhere in the archives or on the grounds for obvious reasons. You may, however, leave the building and smoke. You’ll have to turn in your pass at the desk, and retrieve it when you return. But don’t be late.”

They went out into the expansive courtyard where the guide left them, promising to be back in fifteen minutes sharp. The Italian and a Frenchwoman went back to the main hall and crossed to the security desk.

Al-Rashid slipped out just behind them, and as a security officer was collecting their badges, he pocketed his, crossed to the stairs, and went up to the second floor.

Bookcases reaching nearly to the sixteen-foot ceilings were arranged perpendicular to the outer walls, windows looking down onto the street between each set. A young man wearing white gloves stood on an upper rung of a ladder down one of the aisles but he was so intent on his reading that he didn’t notice al-Rashid passing.

At the southwest corner of the building, several offices looked down on the courtyard. A nameplate at the last door read: Dr. Adriana Vergilio,
Curador
.

Al-Rashid knocked once, and went in. The tour guide from downstairs looked up from behind her desk where she was talking to someone on the phone. She said something and hung up.

“You’re obviously not lost, which means that you’re trespassing. Either you will give me your visitor’s pass and allow me to escort you out of the building, or I shall call the police.”

“I’m sorry, but this is the only way I knew how to meet with Dr. Vergilio without going through the customary appointments rigmarole.”

The woman lifted the telephone. She was angry, and al-Rashid considered killing her before she could make the call.

“This is very important to her and the archives,” he said. “Already several people have lost their lives, and there may be more.”

An older woman, under five feet, gray hair up in a bun, her face weathered and brown from too much time in the sun, appeared at the door to her inner office. She was scowling.

“Who are you?” she demanded in Spanish.

Al-Rashid understood her. “In English, please,” he said. “My name is Paul Harris, I’m a writer of historical fiction mostly, but I’ve come across an incredible story that I think a number of people have lost their lives over. At least that’s what I was told.”

“By whom?”

“A Frenchman who came to see me at my home in Greenwich. Claimed he was from an organization called the Voltaire Society, and he was in a fight for his life with some Americans. Maybe from the CIA.”

The tour guide, her mouth open, had not yet dialed a number.

“It’s all right, Louisa,” the woman in the doorway said.

“Dr. Vergilio, I presume?” al-Rashid said.

“Yes. And I have been expecting you or someone like you to be showing up.”

FIFTY-SEVEN

McGarvey and Rencke drove to the Georgetown University Dahlgren Chapel, parking in back and walking around front. The church was empty, but they found the office where McGarvey had seen a priest in civilian clothes coming out with the man in a wheelchair.

They knocked once and went in, finding themselves in a small ante-room, the receptionist’s desk empty. The door to the inner office was open and the same priest in civilian clothes looked up from his desk.

“Father Carl Unger?” McGarvey asked.

“Yes, may I help you?”

“It’s about the priest whose confession you heard yesterday. He’s dead.”

“Dear God in Heaven,” Fr. Unger said softly, but he didn’t seem surprised. “May I be told how it happened?”

“He came to a hospital here in Georgetown where he murdered four men in their beds, a nurse, several security officers, and would have killed another woman, herself a patient, except that she managed to hide herself.”

The priest turned away, gathering his wits, and when he looked back his eyes were filled with a very great sadness. “I didn’t know.”

“I think you knew something. In fact I think he told you who and what he was when he confessed.”

“You were here in the chapel?”

“Yes, but I didn’t recognize him because he was in a wheelchair. What did he tell you in the confessional?”

Fr. Unger shook his head. “I can’t reveal that. Not to you, not to anyone, even to the police if that’s who you are.”

“But you must if the confessor tells you about a crime he’s going to commit,” Otto said.

“Are you a Catholic?”

“I was. Did he tell you that he had come here to kill people?”

“No.”

“But he was troubled,” McGarvey said.

“You met him?”

“Three times. He said that he’d been sent here to protect me.”

“He told me that, though he didn’t say who it was or why,” Fr. Unger said. “May I ask who you gentlemen are, and what your business with Father Dorestos was?”

“I think he worked for the Hospitallers. The Sacred Military Order of Malta. He came here to convince me to help find something that belonged to the Church. And last night he committed suicide in order to make me believe that he was telling the truth.”

It was almost too much for the priest and he started to rise, but McGarvey motioned him back.

“We work for the Central intelligence Agency, and you won’t believe the problems that your Father Dorestos has stirred up coming here, except that seven people lost their lives in Florida—two of them innocent young students who were not involved. That’s in addition to the others last night, and the priest himself, and most likely six more in Paris including the vice mayor and his mistress, and a mother and her son.”

“The butcher’s bill has always been high for the Mother Church,” Otto said bitterly. He’d walked away from the Church years ago under bad circumstances—of his own doing—but he’d been left with a scar. “And what the Vatican doesn’t need right now is another scandal. Pederasty is terrible, but murder is worse.”

“I don’t know what you want from me. Why have you come here?”

“For your help, Father,” McGarvey said “We want to prevent any further bloodshed.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Father Dorestos was a Hospitaller. Someone sent him here with orders to direct me to search for something.”

“Search for what?”

“A diary that was stolen from a bank vault in Bern. The point is none of what happened over the past days need never to have happened. I’m ready to help—we’re ready to help—but my government doesn’t want us to get involved.”

The priest was at a loss. “What can I do?”

“Contact the Hospitallers—the SMOM, and find out who directed Father Dorestos. Tell them their man is dead, and that we would like to come to Europe to discuss what needs to be done.”

Fr. Unger shook his head. “I’m just a college chaplain and a scholar. I’m not involved in things like this. And in the first place even if I thought I could help, I would have no idea who to call.”

“We need to be flown out of here on a private jet as American priests,” McGarvey said. He laid two passports on the desk—one for him and one for Otto—under the work names of Rupert Mann and Michael Rosenberg. “Whoever you contact in Malta will know how to check these to make certain there are no holds or queries.”

Fr. Unger made no move to touch the passports. “I’ll have to ask you to leave,” he said.

“We’ll wait just outside by the confessionals.”

“We want to help the Church,” Otto said, and he and McGarvey got up and left.

Back out in the nave they sat down in one of the pews about halfway to the entrance.

“You lied,” McGarvey said.

Otto got out his iPad and accessed one of his search engines on a CIA mainframe at Langley. “The Church has been doing it for a couple of thousand years, it’s used to hearing lies.” He nodded toward the confessionals. “It’s all about redemption. Raise hell all week, but come Saturday you can confess your sins, do a penance, and on Sunday go to mass with a clear conscience because the slate has been wiped clean, so on Monday you can start all over again.”

“It’s better than Islamic fundamentalists killing people and expecting to go straight to paradise as martyrs.”

Otto looked up. “Even murder can be forgiven by Jesus through a priest in the confessional.”

An image of Fr. Unger seated at his desk came up on the iPad. It looked as if he was typing on a keyboard just below the frame of view, and he was agitated.

“He’s found a number on Skype and he’s calling it now,” Otto said. “It’s European.” He brought up another program on a split screen. “Three-five-six. It’s the dialing code for Malta.”

“Hello, this is Father Unger, I’m the senior chaplain at Georgetown University in the United States. I need to talk to someone about Father Dominigue Dorestos.”

“Of course, Father,” a man with a heavily accented Italian voice replied in English. “Please wait.”

Otto split the screen again so that they were seeing Fr. Unger on one side, and on the other a man in a monk’s robes with a tonsured haircut. The monk was seated in what appeared to be a small office.

The screen froze for several seconds, until the monk’s face was replaced by the image of another man, this one much older, with a broad forehead and wide serious eyes beneath a normally cut head of hair. Nothing other than his image from the shoulders up was visible.

The man spoke, his English nearly without accent. “You have news of our son, Father Dorestos?”

“I’m afraid that I have bad news for you, I have been informed that Father Dorestos is dead. He may have committed suicide.”

The man on the split screen had no reaction. “Who told you this?”

“Two men are waiting outside in the nave at this moment, waiting for me to call someone to say that they are willing to help with the mission Father Dorestos came here to accomplish.”

“Did they say how they meant to help?”

“They’ve given me passports, in different names. The CIA has forbidden them to become involved, so they want us—your order—to provide them with a jet out of the country.”

“To where?”

“They didn’t say.”

“We have a jet standing by at Reagan National Airport. I will alert the crew. Tell them that they may come to the airport at any time within the next two hours. If you give me the names and numbers off their passports, I will also alert the airport authorities.”

“I will tell them.”

“One more thing, Father, ask them to bring Father Dorestos’s body with them if at all possible. Even as a suicide he is our son.”

FIFTY-EIGHT

The day was bright, the sun streaming through the windows, and yet Dr. Vergilio’s inner office seemed stuffy because it was crammed with books, manuscripts, papers, scientific journals, and many maps showing current archaeological projects around the globe. But the woman was anything but stuffy.

“Be brief, Señor Harris, I am a busy woman,” she said.

“Would you like to check my background?” al-Rashid asked.

“No, because I think that everything you’ve come to tell me, and everything else about you, is almost certainly an elaborate lie. So let’s just get on with it. You said that a Voltaire came to see you in England.”

“Yes, about two weeks ago. He identified himself as Giscarde Petain and wanted to hire me for a job of research. His organization had lost a very rare diary that was a record of a Spanish military expedition from Mexico City to what is now New Mexico in the United States.”

“Señor Petain was murdered a few days ago, and his wife and child were killed just two days ago in Paris.”

“Yes, I saw both stories in the news. It’s why I decided to come here.”

“For what?”

“Answers.”

Dr. Vergilio gave him an appraising look. She was irritated. “Do not play games with me, Señor Harris. As I’ve said, I have expected you or someone like you to come here asking damn fool questions about caches of Spanish treasure, the locations of which are supposedly pinpointed in this diary you were told about. But it’s not true. It is a lie.” She waved a hand at the books and maps in her office. “Millions upon millions of words and maps and reports—detailed reports. Mind-numbing bureaucratic documents. And nowhere have I ever found direct evidence of Spanish treasure in the United States except at the bottom of the ocean mostly around the coasts of Florida. The
Nuestra Señora de Atocha
being the most famous, of course. One of its salvaged and restored cannons is downstairs.”

“I’m not familiar with the story,” al-Rashid said, though he was. He wanted to keep the woman talking, betting that she would make a mistake. A hint, even the slightest of references to a cipher key was all he needed.

“I thought that you were an historical writer.”

“Of fiction. But my expertise is in research, including the Spanish Thirty Years’ War. Mention was made of financial losses that forced the crown to borrow money, but I pursued the war more than its financing. I told that to Monsieur Petain.”

“The
Atocha
sank in sixteen sixty-two off the Florida Keys in a storm, and she was carrying so much gold, silver, and other treasure that it took two months to load it aboard. And that, Señor Harris, is no urban legend. It is a fact that an American treasure hunter by the name of Mel Fisher managed to find the ship and recover the gold and silver, and a few of the cannons.”