Blood Pact (McGarvey)

by Hagberg, David

  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.”

  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 o
perations, 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.”