Blood Pact (McGarvey)

by Hagberg, David

“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.

  “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.

&
nbsp; 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.