“Your perfume, though you did a good job with my fail-safe on the lock. But what were you doing there?”
“Looking for you,” María said. “I knew that you’d be showing up either there, or here, after your little dance in Sarasota.” She smiled a little. “It’s Chanel, I wanted you to know that it was a woman who had come calling.”
“How’d you know about this place?”
“I had Louise followed from the day-care center.”
“When?”
“Two months ago.”
McGarvey looked away to study the woods again, not exactly sure what he was feeling other than nearly blind anger. Several months ago Cuban intelligence operatives had kidnapped Louise from in front of the day-care center where she’d dropped off Audie. In the process the woman who owned the school had been standing at the open door, children behind her, and had been shot to death. The bullet could easily have missed her and hit one of the kids. Audie.
The whole operation from start to finish had been a cocked-up mess in which María and the Cuban intelligence service had hatched an insane plan to find and steal the Spanish gold just across the border from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
A good many people had lost their lives, and at least two dozen Mexican drug cartel spies and spotters had managed to infiltrate the United States and lose themselves in the country somewhere. INS was still looking for them.
In the end she’d gone back to Cuba, presumably to either go to prison or be executed for her role in the operation, yet here she was.
Nothing moved yet in the woods, and McGarvey turned back to her. “The gold doesn’t exist,” he said. “I thought that you had that much figured out.”
“Not according to Dr. Vergilio,” María said. Adriana Vergilio was the curator of the Archivo General des Indias, in Seville where all of Spain’s records from the exploration and subjugation of the New World were stored. “Something happened a few weeks ago that got her excited enough to warn me that the CNI was on the hunt.”
“For the gold?”
“For you,” María said. “I didn’t think they’d get very far, so I ignored her. Until the car bombing at your university and the shoot-out with the CNI operatives next door to your house.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t not come.” She glanced out the window. “So who is this guy, someone from the CNI gunning for me now that I’ve come to offer my help?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Well, Dr. Vergilio thinks you know something, and so does the CNI. You must have talked to them. What’d they tell you, or what did they do that made you kill them? Last time I checked, Spain and the United States are not at war.”
“They left me no choice.”
“You’re saying you shot back in self-defense? Who was the guy in the car bombing? One of them?”
McGarvey didn’t answer. The entire situation was insane, and was already so out of hand that he couldn’t think of a way in which it could be ended in any reasonable way. And yet he knew that he couldn’t back away. In fact he’d just as soon put a bullet in María’s brain for the danger she and her operatives had put Louise and Otto in, and for the danger his granddaughter was facing right now.
“Goddamnit, I’m risking my life to help you,” María shouted.
“You’re still looking for the gold, and nothing’s changed—you’re still willing to pull the trigger on anyone who gets in your way.”
“Like the CNI on Casey Key? Was it them who planted the car bomb and killed whoever was—” María suddenly stopped. “Whoever it was had come to the college to talk to you, about the only thing the CNI was so interested in they set up a surveillance operation on you. When whoever it was showed up they killed him.”
“And two students who were innocent bystanders.”
“Collateral damage,” she said indifferently. “But what about this guy gunning for me now? He’s not Cuban or Spanish—I don’t think. But what’s his relationship to whoever got killed in the car bomb? Who is he working for?”
“Go back to Cuba, there’s nothing here for you,” McGarvey said.
“You need my help with the Spaniards. Especially with Dr. Vergilio. Believe me she’s the key, but she won’t talk to you. Especially not now.”
“Maybe I’ll call my friends in Miami to come get you,” McGarvey said.
“First we have to get me out of here. But all I came for was Cuba’s share of the treasure—if there is any—and I think you know by now that there are a lot of people willing to kill because they think there is. Just give us a shot in an international court to convince the judges that one-third should belong to us.”
McGarvey figured that since the Maltese operative hadn’t come in by now, he’d either left or was waiting until after dark. But if he was coming it was because María had shown up, and just like Petain she’d come because she wanted to help find the treasure. It was another factor that the Vatican didn’t want.
He went into the dining room, and before María could react he snatched the pistol from her hand. “Your purse is on the hall table. Leave now while you can. He’s not going to come after you until dark, and it’ll be through the woods. You’ll just have to take the chance that he’s not watching the front of the house.”
“I’m not going to walk away.”
“He’s probably gone anyway, figuring that either one of us or a neighbor called the police.”
“No sirens. Anyway, if he’s CNI he’s monitoring the police bands.”
McGarvey’s grip on his pistol tightened. What to do? Shooting her would be easy because of what she had already done to his people. She was a sociopath who didn’t give a damn about anyone other than herself. Much like her father had been. She claimed that she’d come to fight for Cuba, but he was almost one hundred percent certain that she’d come to fight for herself, to secure her position in Havana.
And yet in a lot of ways she was an underdog. She’d never had a father, no family, no friends from what he’d been able to gather, and almost all of the people she worked with and for were men in a machismo society that tended to trivialize women, even ones in her powerful position. She’d had to fight for every single thing she’d ever had in her entire life, with no one to help.
She read something of that from his eyes. “Cristo! I won’t have you feeling sorry for me. Shoot me if you must, but I don’t want your pity!”
McGarvey lowered his pistol, and handed the PSM back to her. “I’m not going to wait for him.”
He went back into the hall.
“What’s up?” Otto asked.
“He’s not coming in until after dark, which means he’s holed up somewhere safe until then. I’m going to find him.”
Louise came to the head of the stairs. “Watch your step,” she warned.
“I don’t think he wants me. He wants her.”
María had come to the stair hall. “We already know that. What I don’t know is who the hell he is.”
“He’s from the Vatican. The Malta Knights.”
María laughed without humor. “Why didn’t I think of that? They want the gold and they’re just as ruthless as we are.”
“Have you dealt with them before?”
“No. Have you?”
“Not till last night,” McGarvey said. “Go back to the kitchen and watch the woods.”
“What are you planning to do? Drive, keep a lookout, and shoot all at the same time? Two guns are better than one.”
“I’m not planning on killing him.”
“Maybe he has a different idea,” María said.
The house was silent for a beat. “I hate to admit it, but she could be right,” Louise said. “Otto will watch the front, and I’ll stay up here. If you get yourself killed I’ll never speak to you again.”
“Get your keys, you’re driving,” McGarvey told María, and he went to the front door and eased it open.
A blue BMW five hundred series sedan came into the cul-de-sac, and pulled into a driveway of a h
ouse across the circle down as the garage door opened.
“The Abbotts,” Otto said.
When the garage door came down, McGarvey stepped outside and got into the passenger seat of María’s rental Taurus and she slipped behind the wheel.
“The Knights,” she said. “They’re good.”
THIRTY-ONE
Dorestos, on foot, had just come to the opening of the cul-de-sac when McGarvey and the Cuban woman came out of the house. It was unexpected, but it was going to make his job easier than trying to storm the house and not get killed in the process, especially without taking McGarvey out. Though he hoped that day would come.
He ran back to his Tahoe, and drove two blocks away to the McDonald’s on Old Dominion Drive, in the opposite direction from the gas station. He parked in the rear, mostly out of sight from the road, and finding the number for the Fairfield Taxi Service called for a cab.
He stuffed the 9 mm SIG Sauer P226 in his belt at the small of his back. Next he unscrewed the long suppressor from the barrel of the compact Ingram MAC 10 and stuffed it in his belt and the two spare magazines of 9 mm ammunition into his jacket pocket. He held the submachine gun under his jacket with his elbow. It was awkward, but only had to do until he got into the taxi.
He waited in the Tahoe for a couple of minutes, then locked up and walked around to the front. A few minutes later the cab showed up and he got into the backseat, giving the driver the address of a five-story government building he’d noticed on the way in.
“The place is locked up by now,” the driver, a Pakastani, said.
“I’m meeting someone in the parking lot.”
The driver looked at him in the rearview mirror. “I don’t want any trouble.”
“Neither do I. That’s why we’re meeting there. So her husband won’t find out.”
The cabbie smiled. “I get it,” he said, and pulled out of the parking lot as the gray Taurus passed.
Dorestos thought that he could make out the figure of a woman driving. McGarvey was in the passenger seat; riding shotgun as it was called. He was about to tell the driver to turn left at the next intersection, but the Taurus turned right, which would take them to the park in the woods behind the Renckes’ house.
He’d been spotted in the Tahoe, probably by the Cuban, and she and McGarvey had figured that if an attack against them were to come it would be from that way. It also meant that McGarvey might have spotted the Chevy one too many times for coincidence on the way in from Andrews. The GLONASS real-time satellite system he’d used had made him sloppy.
Five minutes later the cabbie pulled into the nearly deserted Government Services Administration Satellite Office parking lot.
“She’ll be in the back,” Dorestos said, laying the MAC 10 on the seat and taking the silenced SIG from his belt.
The driver was nervous now but he did as he was told.
“There is no one here,” he said.
“No,” Dorestos said, and he placed the muzzle of the silencer against the back of the Pakastani’s head. “Drive over to the Dumpster, and park.”
The cabbie practically jumped out of his skin, his eyes wide. “Please, do not kill me. I have a wife and three children and my mother to support in Lahore. They will starve without me.”
“I’m not going to kill you. I just want to use your cab for a few minutes. Won’t take very long for the police to find it, if you promise not to call for help for one hour.”
“Take anything you want, please.”
“Just here,” Dorestos said, and they parked in the relative darkness next to a Dumpster. “Get out of the car, and start walking away, around to the other side of the building. But whatever happens do not look over your shoulder.”
“I promise.”
The cabbie got out and started away. But Dorestos also got out and shot the man once in the back of the head from a distance of less than ten feet and the man went down hard.
“May God go with you, my son,” Dorestos said, and he glanced up at the office windows, but so far as he could tell there were no witnesses.
He jammed the pistol back in his belt and, careful to keep the man’s blood off his clothes, picked up the body as if it were nothing much heavier than a pocket edition of the Ordinations, carried it over to the Dumpster, opened the lid partway with one hand, and rolled the body inside.
He transferred the MAC 10 from the backseat, screwed the silencer on the barrel, and stuffed the weapon between the driver’s seat and the transmission hump. He drove off toward the road that led to the park at the edge of the woods.
In his estimation his assignment thus far had made little or no sense. Of course he would never voice such an opinion to Msgr. Franelli; though he was still a little naive despite his experiences, he wasn’t stupid.
McGarvey was the key, always had been according to the monsignore. The Society had sent a man seeking his help, and the CNI operatives had killed him. Otherwise it would have been Dorestos’s job of work.
McGarvey himself had taken out three of the Spaniards leaving only the fourth.
Now the Cuban had come seeking help, and she was to be assassinated. From that point—should he be successful tonight—it would be a matter of following McGarvey and his friends the Renckes. But if that didn’t work, if for whatever reason McGarvey decided not to pursue the search, there was always his granddaughter as a force multiplier.
The deeper he got into this assignment the more he’d come to realize that everything he’d been tasked to do had almost certainly been ordered under desperation. Which was the part that made no sense to him. A few billions in gold and silver and other artifacts were but a drop in the bucket to the Mother Church. And considering the risks, it could turn out to be a public relations disaster much worse than had arisen over shielding pedophile priests.
But he was a son of the Holy Church that had given him a meaningful life.
At the park he slowed down as he approached the short turnoff. The gray Taurus was there, as he thought it would be, but neither McGarvey nor the woman were in sight. Expecting an attack from this direction they had left the car, announcing they were here, and had gone into the woods to wait. It was bait, and it rankled Dorestos just a little that McGarvey had assumed it would work.
They would be hiding just within sight of anyone coming from the parking area. The woman was the bait and McGarvey would be somewhere very close to her. But he figured that if they were smart they would have gone deeply enough into the woods to a spot where they could also watch the back of the house.
He parked just behind the Taurus, and stood for a long moment listening to the sounds of the deepening evening. A car passed on the road, and then a pickup truck. When they were gone he raised his head and drew a deep breath through his nose. Perfume. The same as he had detected at McGarvey’s apartment in Georgetown.
Taking the MAC 10, he walked away from the cab to the eastern end of the narrow parking lot and angled away from the road. Twenty meters in, he stopped again to listen for the sounds of movement somewhere ahead, but hearing nothing. He stashed the submachine gun in some brush and started back to where he figured they would be waiting for him. Only he was going to give them what would be a nasty surprise.
THIRTY-TWO
McGarvey stepped out from behind the bole of a tree at the edge of the Renckes’ backyard and waved at Louise, who appeared in an upstairs window. He stepped back to where María was waiting and they put their heads together.
“If he comes this way, which I think he might, he’ll want you, not me.”
“You’ve already said that, but why? Does he think I’m a distraction?”
“Probably exactly that,” McGarvey said, and he held up a hand. He’d thought he’d heard something to the left, in the direction of the park. But the slight noise, whatever it was, did not come again.
“Him?” she whispered.
“I’m going out about ten meters to the right, and you’re going to stay here in plain sight.”
> She laughed. “I’m not going to let myself be a sitting duck. If I get the chance I’ll shoot the bastard.”
“I want him alive. He won’t take the shot until he knows where I am.”
“Then what?”
“I have a couple of questions for him,” McGarvey said, and he cocked an ear to listen again, but there was nothing except street sounds. He started away, but María touched his arm.
“I’m putting my life in your hands,” she said. “Again.”
“You should have stayed in Havana.”
“Not possible for me.”
McGarvey’s first instinct when she’d showed up had been to telephone Callahan and have the FBI arrest her. But he hadn’t done that because it was likely that any search for the diary would lead back to the archives in Seville, and María was the key to open that door for him. And it also occurred to him that the Knights had sent someone from Malta to keep him away from Spain—who had a claim on the treasure. And had ordered their man to keep Cuba out of it. Which left only the members of the Voltaire Society, if they could be found.
A bullet smacked into the tree just inches to their right, and McGarvey shoved María to the ground with one hand as he pulled off two shots in the direction he’d thought he’d heard the rustle of bushes a few minutes earlier.
“I’m not your enemy, Signore McGarvey,” Dorestos called softly. He was very close.
“Why did you come here?” McGarvey asked. The man was off to the left.
“To protect you.”
“From a woman?”
“From the Cuban intelligence apparatus in Washington that she controls. Move away from her and I will solve that problem for you.”
“Then what?” McGarvey asked. He motioned for María to keep her head down and he started away on hands and knees at right angles to where he thought the shooter stood.
“I will walk away and leave you in peace.”
McGarvey rose up a few inches and tried to pick out a darker shadow against the darkness. The only lights were of the houses behind him, and of the streetlights along the road, but none of that penetrated very deeply into the woods. Nothing moved.
Blood Pact (McGarvey) Page 13