Blood Pact (McGarvey)

by Hagberg, David

  “But not me,” María said.

  “No,” Dorestos said.

  María fired three shots, the small caliber unsilenced rounds making small pops.

  Dorestos immediately fired two rounds, silenced, but close enough so that McGarvey could make out the right direction, and he headed off to the left, not caring how much noise he was making.

  María fired two more shots, and Dorestos fired again. This time María cried out in pain. She’d been hit.

  The dark figure of a very large man darted impossibly fast from right to left about ten meters from McGarvey’s position, and disappeared.

  “María?” McGarvey called, but she didn’t answer.

  “She is dead,” Dorestos said, this time very close.

  McGarvey feinted left, and moving on the balls of his feet brought his pistol up, as the very large man—nearly seven feet tall, and built like an Olympic pentathlon athlete in his prime—stepped from behind a tree. He held a pistol pointed at the ground.

  “I mean you no harm,” he said, his voice high-pitched. But he wasn’t out of breath despite the speed with which he’d moved.

  “What do you want of me?” McGarvey asked, keeping his pistol trained center mass.

  “Only to provide you the opportunity to do your job.”

  “Which is?”

  “You know,” Dorestos said.

  “I’m retired.”

  Dorestos shook his head. “Not since those two children were murdered in the parking lot of your school.”

  “Were you there?”

  “No. But I saw the images. I was given the report, and I know how you must feel.”

  McGarvey glanced over his shoulder, his aim never varying. When he turned back the man was gone.

  “You owe that woman no allegiance.” The man’s voice came from the darkness to the left.

  McGarvey remained where he was, the bole of a reasonably sized tree a few feet on his left. “The monks in Mexico City stole the gold from Spain, who stole it from the natives, including Cubans. Your church has no claim.”

  “It is viewed differently in certain circles.”

  “Leave me alone,” McGarvey said. “Or the next time I see you I’ll kill you.”

  “Find the diary,” Dorestos said. “I’ll be close.” He was farther away, back toward the road and moving now.

  McGarvey started after him, but after a few steps he stopped, and held his breath to listen. The night was silent until a car started up and drove off. The man’s speed was incredible, almost supernatural.

  Holstering his pistol, he turned and hurried back to María who lay on her back, gasping for air. Blood oozed from a chest wound. She was conscious and she looked up at him, her eyes fluttering.

  “He’s gone,” McGarvey said. He placed her hands, one atop the other, over the wound. “Press down, it’ll help.”

  She did it, and immediately her breathing came a little easier. “Why are you doing this for me?” she wheezed.

  “Beats the hell out of me,” he said. “I’m going to have Louise call for an ambulance. I’ll be right back.”

  “I won’t move,” she said, blood seeping from the corners of her mouth. “You’ll have to put up with me for the duration.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  At Le Bourget airport outside of Paris, al-Rashid told his pilot, second officer, and a young, pretty attendant Alicia, to stand down, but to be ready at a moment’s notice should he need them again. It was nine in the morning, the day a little cloudy, and compared to Saudi Arabia, very cool.

  “As always, sir,” Muhammad Saeed, his pilot, said at the open cockpit door. Saeed had been his squadron vice commander in the Saudi Air Force. They’d been together with handpicked crews ever since.

  It was about money, of course, and prestige: working for al-Rashid was by extension working for Prince Saleh. Plus the freedom. Wherever they stopped, they were free to come and go and do as they chose, the only condition was that they were on call 24/7.

  Al-Rashid, wearing a double-breasted blue blazer, white linen slacks, and an open-collar off-white shirt, took a cab into town, and checked in at the Inter-Continental, the understated hotel near the Tuileries Gardens where he always stayed when in transit through France.

  Alain Baptiste, the day manager, came out of his office and shook hands. “It has been several months since we’ve last seen you, Monsieur Montessier. Welcome back.”

  “Thank you, Paris continues to be my favorite city.”

  “Will you be staying long?”

  “One or two days, perhaps a little longer. It depends on business.”

  “The suite is yours for as long as you need it. Will you require the aid of Mademoiselle Frery?” The woman was the hotel’s main concierge.

  “Not today,” al-Rashid said, and he shook hands again, a custom he’d always detested.

  Upstairs he gave the bellman who’d carried up his two bags a generous tip, and when he was alone he ordered up a pot of tea with lemon, and a bottle of chilled mineral water. He took a shower as he waited, and when his order arrived, he took a file from his carry-on bag and opened it on the coffee table.

  The man who’d gone to the United States to ask for McGarvey’s help finding the diary was Giscarde Petain, who had been one of the senior officers of the small and highly secretive banking group known for the last century and a half as the Voltaire Society. To this point al-Rashid had been unable to find exactly what this group’s avowed purpose was, except that it apparently had the means in place to find and plunder several caches of Spanish treasure buried in the desert of the American southwest. This apparently under the noses of the local authorities.

  Saudi intelligence had come up with the proper banking codes for the safety deposit box in Bern, at a branch of the Berner Kantonal Bank on Schwanengasse, apparently from a contact inside the bank’s main offices with strong financial ties to the Saudi Royal family through Prince Saleh.

  Getting his hands on the book had been as easy as strolling into the bank and presenting his credentials and the proper passwords. The surprise had come when he’d gotten back to his hotel and tried to read the thing. It was in Latin, a dead language he was reasonably proficient in as were almost all Oxford graduates, but it was in a code that someone within the Voltaire Society would know how to crack.

  The only lead to the Society was Petain himself, whose photograph had been identified by the banker in Bern as the man who’d come six months earlier with the proper passwords. He’d stayed one hour, during which time he’d required the use of a copy machine. When he was gone it was discovered that the copy machine’s internal mechanism had been tampered with in such a fashion that no record existed of what had been copied.

  Their contact did supply them with an address for Petain in Paris’s upscale, though mostly commercial, Second Arrondissement, just a few blocks north of the Louvre, and only a short taxi ride from the Inter-Continental.

  The banker’s written testimony was included in the dossier. “We are told that he has a wife, Sophie, and one boy, Edouard, who is thirteen.”

  The only photographs had been taken from two surveillance cameras at the bank on the day Petain had shown up and spent the hour.

  Al-Rashid sat back with his tea as he stared at the photos. Petain had appeared to be a tall man, slender, with a Gallic nose and angular cheek bones. In one he’d looked up at the camera, an almost arrogant sneer on his lips, as if to say that he knew something secret, that he was on a mission of importance.

  Now the man was dead, killed by Spanish intelligence agents who had set up shop in the United States for the sole purpose of stopping the Frenchman from bringing a message to Kirk McGarvey, the former director of the CIA.

  Intriguing, but the conclusion that al-Rashid had come to was that the CNI had failed, and that they would have been better served by capturing Petain and forcing the man to tell them about the diary and who he thought might have taken it from the bank. But of course the Frenchman could not have
known about the banker friendly to Prince Saleh because al-Rashid’s second task after retrieving the book was killing the banker.

  And now Paris. Sophie and Edouard.

  Al-Rashid finished his tea then laid down to sleep; the hours in the air over the past days through several times zones was tiring and he was exhausted. He did not dream. He never dreamed.

  * * *

  He got up around six in the afternoon, took another shower, then got dressed in the same blazer, but this time with a black Polo buttoned at the neck, dark slacks, and three-hole British-made black walkers, which were not only sturdy and comfortable, but reasonably fashionable, obviously expensive as was all his clothing.

  He went down to the lobby a few minutes after seven. Baptiste, Mme. Frery, and the others who’d been on duty when he’d checked in were gone for the day and he passed all but unnoticed out the front doors where the doorman hailed him a taxi.

  Madame Petain lived in a second-floor apartment facing the Rue Gaillon, as chance would have it, just a half a block from the Drouant restaurant and sidewalk café. He had the driver take him to the restaurant, passing the apartment, the windows of which were dark.

  The restaurant was mostly full, but al-Rashid’s French was perfect and the one hundred euro note he handed to the maître’d got him a sidewalk table from where he could watch the apartment building, including its front entrance.

  He ordered a bottle of sparkling mineral water, and a demi of Pinot Grigio to go with an order of warm oysters served with caviar that was one of the restaurant’s inside specialties, but from time to time might be served outside.

  The problem he faced was not one of squeamishness dealing with the widow and her son to find the name or names of other Society members—one of whom would hopefully have the key to the diary’s code—but of the possibility that she wouldn’t know.

  Her husband’s body, or what remained of it, was being held for now in the United States during the murder investigation, but if Madame Petain were to die, the people who came to her funeral would likely provide a clue.

  That possibility would take time, and could very well end up messy with him on the run from the French police. Neither outcome was particularly disturbing to him, except for the time it would waste.

  His drinks came first, and shortly afterward his meal on the heels of which a taxi pulled up in front of the apartment building. A slender woman got out, followed by a gangly boy and they went inside. A minute later the windows of the second-floor apartment were illuminated one by one. Madame Petain and her son were home, and no one else was with them.

  Al-Rashid took his time with his light meal, especially enjoying the saltiness of the caviar and the bite of the ice-cold wine. When he was finished he tipped well, got up, and strolled leisurely in the opposite direction of the Petain’s apartment.

  The fifteen minutes or so it would take for him to circle the block and come in from the other end of the Rue would give the woman and her son time to settle down, and him the time to make certain that no bodyguard or guards had been assigned to her by the Society.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  María had been taken to All Saints Hospital on a quiet street not far from Georgetown University Hospital. It was the go-to place that the CIA and many of the other U.S intelligence agencies in the area used when discretion was important. She’d been stabilized overnight and since noon had been in one of the operating rooms under the care of Dr. Alan Franklin. It was three in the afternoon now. McGarvey and Otto sat drinking coffee in the third-floor waiting room. It had been a long night.

  “Bambridge is going to raise all kinds of holy hell once he finds out she’s here,” Otto said. Marty Bambridge was the CIA’s deputy director of the National Clandestine Services, and was a by-the-book asshole, though he did run a tight ship.

  “He’ll get over it. In the meantime we still don’t know if she came up here on her own, or even what her situation is in Havana. She could be on the run.”

  “She’s here to redeem herself.”

  “Probably,” McGarvey said. It was hard for him to focus. He’d been here twice to have Dr. Franklin repair wounds, and again when his son-in-law had been assassinated. Remembering the look on Katy’s face, and the overwhelming grief on their daughter’s was almost more than he could bear.

  “It’s not the same, kemo sabe,” Otto said, reading almost all of that from McGarvey’s posture. “She’s not your responsibility. She’s an intelligence officer from a foreign nation that we don’t have diplomatic relations with. She’s killed people and she’ll do it again.”

  McGarvey looked up, suddenly realizing what Otto was getting at. “I was thinking about Todd and about Katy and Liz, not Colonel León. Trust me. She came here and got herself shot up, not my problem. What I need to know is why the bastard from the Church didn’t take me out too.”

  “They want you to lead them to the diary. The one that supposedly doesn’t exist that shows the way to Cibola that also doesn’t exist. But the one that people are willing to kill for. And are willing to herd you toward finding it.”

  “But why me?”

  “Because you came damned close a few months ago. And once you get the bit in your mouth you never let go.”

  “Not interested.”

  “Sure you are. When Kim Jong Il called, you went to help. Same as when Fidel Castro sent his daughter. Now you’ll do it if for no other reason than the two kids who got killed on campus, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Otto looked up. “Anyway you better decide what you want to do because Marty’s here.”

  Bambridge barged down the corridor from the elevator. He was short and thin with dark angry eyes and thick black hair, and he moved as if his feet hurt, and that fact, along with everything else, surprised him. He wore a dark blue old-fashioned three-piece suit

  “We expected you on campus to be debriefed yesterday after the mess you created in Sarasota,” he said even before he reached the waiting room. “And now this.”

  McGarvey almost laughed. “You’re going to have a heart attack one of these days.”

  “You listen to me, we’ve had enough. Bringing an enemy intelligence agent here is nothing short of unconscionable. I want her gone.”

  “Where to?”

  A nurse scurried down the hall. “Please,” she said sternly. “This is a hospital.”

  Bambridge turned on her. “You’ve admitted a woman with a gunshot wound. I want her moved immediately.”

  “She’s in the operating room.”

  “I don’t care—”

  “You’re an idiot,” the nurse shot back. She turned to McGarvey. “Doctor Franklin is just finishing up. He says she’ll recover with nothing more than a scar.”

  “When can she get out of here?” McGarvey asked.

  “A couple of days. Maybe a week. Friend of yours?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” McGarvey said, completely out of his funk.

  The nurse gave Bambridge another sharp look and left.

  Bambridge sat down across from McGarvey and Otto. “Look, I’m serious about this, and I have Walt’s backing. As soon as she’s able to move I want her out of here. This is a place for heroes—American heroes.”

  “And in this case a wounded asset, Marty. She stays until she’s ready to move under her own power. If she’s transferred to another hospital or if you try to send her back to Cuba right now, the same guy who shot her will try again. And he was good enough to get past me.”

  “All the more reason to dump her. If someone wants to take her down, it’d be fine with us.” Bambridge sat forward and appealed to Rencke. “She ordered the kidnapping of your wife during which a teacher was killed at the day school where your kid had just been dropped off. Do you think that she’d have any qualms about trying something just as nasty as that if she thought the need was there?”

  “She released her unharmed after I went to Havana for the funeral and Mac showed up to answer her questions. It was a crazy stupid s
tunt she pulled, and people did get hurt, a lot of them.”

  Bambridge turned back to McGarvey. “What did you mean, asset?”

  “I’m going to take her to Seville with me as soon as she’s fit to travel.”

  “Not a chance in hell. After what happened in Florida you’re not going anywhere near Spain. As it is the White House is all over us for an explanation because as it stands neither our government nor Madrid’s has any idea how to handle this mess you created.”

  “I don’t expect they do. But I’ll make a deal with you. Send some babysitters over here to keep watch over her. There’s a possibility that the shooter will try to get to her as soon as I leave.”

  “You’re not going to Spain—”

  “First I’m going to talk to Bill Callahan about Cuba’s intel operations here in the Washington area. If Colonel León did show up to spearhead some operation I want to know about it before I provide her a cover. Could be the Bureau will arrest her as a spy and exchange her for one of ours in Havana.”

  “We’re clean in Cuba for the moment,” Bambridge said.

  “What else?”

  “At the very least Walt wants you to come out to Langley for a chat and a debrief. We have to figure out some response for the Spanish situation. They’re accusing us of mounting a counter-intel ops that resulted in the deaths of four of their people. They mentioned your name.”

  “They were spying on me, and when I found out about it I went over to talk to them. They opened fire first.”

  “But you went over there armed.”

  “It would have turned out differently had I not,” McGarvey said. “They were responsible for the car bombing at New College.”

  “We’re interested in that event too. Like who the guy in the car was, and what was his connection to you?”

  “Bring the babysitters and I’ll come out to Langley to tell you guys everything. But I’ll want Callahan in on my debriefing so I won’t have to go over the same material twice. I don’t have the time.”