Blood Pact (McGarvey) (7 page)

The part he loved most about her were her long legs. Now they were bent at the knees. She had been kneeling when she’d been shot and she’d fallen backward. The image was more obscene in his mind than his vivid memory of her long legs spread for him.

He began to feel genuine hate.

“Think about it, Señor, I beg you,” he said. He turned to Cabello. “Get the boat ready.” They had a safe house on Siesta Key where they’d left a car and papers for an emergency just like this one tonight.

“What about our equipment upstairs?”

“It’s mostly encrypted, and the laptop is set to erase if anyone tampers with it.”

“What about Doni?”

“She and Emilio are dead.”

Cabello was moved. Like Huertas he had a crush on her. “We’re just going to run off, and let the bastard get away with it?”

“No,” Heurtas said, and he took another quick look into the house. McGarvey was nowhere to be seen. “Señor McGarvey, I’m still willing to talk if you are.”

“Throw your weapon down where I can see it,” McGarvey said.

“As you wish,” Heurtas said. He reached around the corner and tossed his pistol on the floor a couple of feet away from Donica’s body.

“Tell the other man with you to do the same.”

“He is gone.”

“Bullshit.”

“I sent him to your house to wait in case we couldn’t resolve our differences here like gentlemen. If you return alone he’ll know that I’m dead and he will kill you.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“To convince you of my sincerity.”

“Right,” McGarvey said. “Show yourself.”

Huertas turned back to Cabello. “Give me your gun, and make the boat ready. I’ll take care of McGarvey and then grab the laptop.”

Cabello was doubtful, but he handed over his pistol. “Emilio said he was good.”

“He shot Donica in cold blood, and I’m not going to let it go. Now get to the boat. If I’m not there in ten minutes, get back to Madrid and make your report. “

Cabello took off into the darkness on the other side of the pool to the stone path that led down to the dock that was just off the Intracoastal Waterway.

“Señor, I am coming in now,” Heurtas said. “Unarmed, so do not shoot.”

McGarvey didn’t answer.

Heurtas stepped around the corner, the pistol concealed behind his back, and stopped just within the sliding doors. “Señor?” he called out.

A moment later a tremendous crash of breaking glass came from somewhere in the house. Heurtas turned on his heel and raced outside, around the corner to the south side of the house where he figured McGarvey had broken one of the big windows to make his escape.

TWELVE

Standing across from the long table in the formal dining room, McGarvey had clear sight lines to the window through which he’d just tossed a chair and the corridor back to the pool kitchen. He didn’t want to get into another shoot-out with these people, but he did want to find out the extent of their surveillance operation on him.

For now he was simply buying a little time. With the woman and one man down, he thought the other two operatives would tread with care.

Huertas appeared briefly just outside the shattered window. McGarvey stepped back into the deeper darkness of the room, certain that he was invisible to the CNI operator, who turned and looked away, and then ran off toward the south.

McGarvey went back out into the corridor and followed it to the main staircase in the front entry hall and hurried upstairs. He figured that whatever surveillance equipment they had in place would be in an upstairs room facing south, toward his house. But he didn’t think it would take long for the pair of CNI operatives to realize that they had been tricked and come back.

At the top he hesitated for a moment, cocking an ear to listen for a sound, any sound that might indicate that there was a fifth or even sixth operative that he hadn’t seen, waiting for him to charge blindly into a trap. But the house was quiet.

Pistol at the ready McGarvey headed left to the first open door, where again he paused for just a moment before rolling inside, and quickly swinging his aim right to left. No one was here, but it was the room used for their surveillance operation.

The sliding glass window was open to a small balcony, across from which was a perfect sight line to his house. The twin beds had been stacked one atop the other and moved aside. A long table in the middle of the room, well away from the open slider so it couldn’t be seen from outside, held several pieces of electronic equipment. Among them was a small optical laser that could be used to detect vibrations on a windowpane from someone talking inside the house. They’d been able to listen to all of his telephone conversations.

Two low lux cameras mounted on short tripods were aimed at the house, along with what McGarvey took to be an infrared motion detector, and two other pieces of equipment that might have been some sort of a telephone intercept system—one for landlines, the other for cell phones.

All of it was connected to what looked like a military-grade laptop computer that was powered up and at this moment displaying a split screen with four images—two side views of his house, another of the front entryway and driveway, and the fourth a view of the rear, looking down across the pool and his study window.

The last two were from cameras mounted outside, and it vexed him that in the last three weeks he hadn’t spotted them, even though he’d had the growing feeling that something was coming his way, that someone was watching over his shoulder.

Maybe he was getting rusty after all. For a long time, especially after Katy and Liz had been killed at Arlington, he’d professed that he wanted out of the business. And just a few months ago he’d said as much to Otto and his wife Louise.

“I’m getting out,” he’d told them. “It’s over.” But Louise had disagreed.

“What about the rest of us?” she’d demanded. “What are we supposed to do? Me and Otto?”

He’d had no answer for her.

“You have a gift, Kirk. Rare and terrible as it is, we need you.”

“All the killing.”

“All the lives you’ve saved. What about them? Or don’t they count?”

“My wife and daughter were murdered because of my gift, as you call it,” he shot back. “I’m done.”

“What about your grandchild? Are you just going to walk away from whatever comes her way?”

“That’s not fair, goddamnit.”

“No it’s not,” Louise had told him. “But it was the hand you were dealt.”

And here he was in the middle of something again, and he knew that he could not walk away from it; it wasn’t simply because of the two students who’d been killed, it was because of who he was, who he’d always been.

Somewhere in the distance, down on the ICW, he thought he heard the sound of a boat motor starting up, but then it moved away, north perhaps, and was lost.

A portable phone was lying on the table beside the intercept equipment. McGarvey laid his pistol down, got a dial tone, and called Rencke, who answered on the first ring.

“The number is blocked, are you calling from the house next door?”

“They set up a surveillance operation. Laser aimed at my house, cameras front, back, and side, infrared detectors, what looks like telephone intercept equipment.”

“Have you neutralized the opposition?”

“Two, but there are at least two others.”

“How long before you have company?”

“Good question,” McGarvey said. “Matter of minutes, unless I have to shoot someone else.”

“Okay, all this gear has to run by something. Could be remote. Is there any sort of a computer nearby?”

“A laptop. Right now it’s showing four angles on my house.”

“Have you touched it, or anything else?”

“No.”

“Don’t,” Rencke said. “And don’t let anyone else near it for five minutes.”

“No guarantees,” McGarvey said, but Rencke was gone, and the split-screen images were replaced by a list of what appeared to be files, though they were in some script of squares, tiny circles, and other odd marks.

McGarvey picked up his pistol and went to the door, but no one was in the corridor, though he was certain it wouldn’t take them long to figure out what was going on and come looking for him.

A cursor moved quickly down the list, and back at the top the first file opened. A screen of a half-dozen photographs of McGarvey coming out of Café L’Europe on St. Armand’s Circle were quickly followed by many more screens of a dozen shots each showing McGarvey at New College, at Macy’s, swimming in the Gulf, working on his sailboat docked in the ICW behind his house. Then the images began to process so rapidly he could no longer make them out. It was clear that the CNI had not only closely monitored his movements, but they had been very professional about it. He’d never spotted them.

The next file consisted of what appeared to be audio recordings that showed up only as spectrum readouts. Then a very large file of more than fifty gigabytes, possibly of videos, came up.

“Still there, Mac?” Otto asked, his voice coming from the computer.

McGarvey picked up the phone. “Yes.”

“You don’t need the phone now. Are you still okay?”

“So far. Did you break their encryption system?”

“Piece of cake. It’s an old military one the Chinese developed about five years ago. But did you see the still shots in the first file?”

“Yes. They were watching me pretty closely, but I never spotted them.”

“They probably double- and triple-teamed you. But this doesn’t make any sense. Spain is not our enemy.”

“They’re looking for the gold and they’re in a fight to find it before the Voltaire Society drains the piggy bank.”

“The Vatican has to be right in the thick of it too,” Rencke said. “And everyone is after the diary, which is why the Voltaire Society came to you and the CNI mounted the surveillance operation, and why in all likelihood someone from the Vatican will be or already is on your trail.”

“Señor McGarvey,” Heurtas called from the corridor.

THIRTEEN

Heurtas stood next to the open bedroom door where they’d set up their surveillance equipment. He’d listened to everything the bastard Rencke told McGarvey and it made him sick to think that Emilio and Donica had died for nothing.

They knew about the Society, the Vatican, and even the diary, and on top of everything Rencke had apparently figured out how to hack their encryption algorithm and unless he was stopped the CIA would have everything.

“Sounds like you have company,” Rencke said. “Hold them off for another fifteen minutes. I’ve run into a problem with their auto-erase function.”

“Señor McGarvey, there is no way out for you. But if you come out with your hands above your head you have my word that you will not be harmed.”

“I shot the man and woman downstairs in self-defense,” McGarvey said.

“You were trespassing.”

“You’ve been prying into my business for the last three weeks. Why?”

“We do not want to kill you, but we will if we must.”

“Unless I miss my guess the fourth operator took off in a boat a couple of minutes ago. North, I think.”

Heurtas had heard the boat start up and leave, but it was exactly what Alberto needed to do. At all costs he had to get back to Madrid and make his report.

“You miss your guess.”

“What does the CNI want with me?”

“We can work something out,” Heurtas said. “You can’t imagine the danger. For all of us.”

“Tell me,” McGarvey said.

The bastard was stalling for time.

“I’m almost there,” Rencke said. “Ten minutes and I’ll have complete access to their files.”

“I can’t allow that to happen,” Heurtas said. He saw no way out, and he was starting to feel a sense of fate: whatever was coming his way would come no matter what he did. For no reason he could think of he had another erotic thought about Donica.

They were on a field exercise, in which the two of them plus one other officer were supposed to infiltrate an actual air force base and place mock explosives around the communications center. At one point he and Donica got separated from the third officer—who they learned later had been captured. A couple of hours before dawn they were holed up in a storage space at the rear of a hangar used for helicopter maintenance.

A siren had sounded and from their hiding spot they could hear the sounds of a meter-by-meter search.

“They’ll find us sooner or later,” he’d said.

“At least they won’t shoot us for spies.”

“Do you want to give up now, save us the wait?”

She had smiled and he remembered the set of her pretty mouth, as she shook her head.

They made love, as quietly as they could, though Doni had been a moaner, and it wasn’t until three hours later, when they were both too hungry to wait any longer, they came out with their hands up.

It was the best sex he’d ever experienced, because of the danger, he supposed. Had they been caught in the act they would have both been fired. But they hadn’t been, and now it was a memory that he could never share with her.

“Are you listening to me?” Heurtas asked.

“Yes,” McGarvey said.

Heurtas suddenly stuck his pistol around the corner and began firing, walking his aim left to right across the room.

FOURTEEN

McGarvey slid left and dropped to his knees as the barrel of the pistol came around the door frame and Heurtas opened fire. He’d heard the final desperation in the Spaniard’s voice, and as he moved he fired four shots at the wall eighteen inches to the left of the open door.

Heurtas grunted something, and dropped the pistol as he fell backward with a tremendous crash.

“Mac?” Rencke shouted.

“I’m okay,” McGarvey said, straightening up.

Heurtas was down on his back, a lot of blood welling up from a chest wound, and one in the side of his face just above his jawline. His arms were outstretched, the pistol he’d dropped just out of reach of his right hand. But he was alive, his eyes filled with pain and with hate.

“Bastardo,”
he wheezed, and he tried to reach for his pistol, but McGarvey kicked it away.