The entire incident had been recorded on range surveillance video, and Dorestos had not been reprimanded though he’d heard later that the brief film clip was being used as a training exercise. What not to do in a weapons-hot situation in the presence of an unknown enemy.
Headlights flashed on the street at the front of the hospital, and moments later the cab pulled into the driveway. The cabbie beeped the horn once.
Dorestos counted off a full twenty seconds. By now all eyes inside the hospital would be on the front gate.
He scrambled to the end of the limb and leaped out over the spikes and dropped to the ground on all fours, almost like a cat landing.
He caught a fleeting glimpse of what he thought might be the figure of someone in a fourth-floor window, but then he was across the parking area and through the door to the rear reception area and emergency room, deserted at the moment.
FORTY-ONE
McGarvey watched from the front entryway as Kutschinski, his pistol out of sight at his back, walked down to the front gate.
“This your guy?” the CIA babysitter had asked.
“Not unless he’s hiding in the backseat, but watch yourself. I’ll back you up.”
The driver got out of his cab and handed something through the gate. It looked like an envelope.
The phone on the security console in the stair hall rang as McGarvey, his pistol in plain sight, stepped outside and walked down to the gate.
The driver stepped back a pace. “Shit,” he said. He turned to get back into his cab.
“Hold up,” McGarvey said.
The cabbie looked over his shoulder, his eyes wide. “I don’t want any trouble here. I’m just delivering a letter.”
“It’s addressed to you,” Kutschinski said.
McGarvey took the envelope. “Who gave this to you?”
“A big guy, didn’t give me his name. Said I was supposed to bring it here at midnight.”
“Where was this?”
“M Street, about a half hour ago.”
“How’d he sound?”
“Like a fag or a teenage girl,” the cabbie said without hesitation.
It was a diversion. “Get the hell out of here,” McGarvey told the cabbie, and he and Kutschinski raced back up the drive.
“Is it him?”
Ellerin was on the phone when they burst in. “Your girl called, said she saw someone come over the fence. I’m trying to get Pat but he’s not answering.”
“You didn’t see anything on the monitors?”
“I was watching the front gate.”
“Son of a bitch,” Kutschinski said, and he headed for the stairs in a dead run.
“I’ll clear the back,” McGarvey said. “But watch yourself, this guy will know we’re on the way up and he’s damned good. I’ve never seen anyone faster.”
Kutschinski didn’t reply as he took the stairs two at a time.
McGarvey hustled down the corridor where he held up at the door into the emergency room and cocked an ear to listen for a sound. Anything. But except for some piece of machinery running somewhere in the distance, the hospital was silent. Even Kutschinski bounding up the stairs was so light on his feet that he made no noise.
Moving with care, McGarvey crossed to the rear stairs where he spotted two wet footprints on the tile floor just inside the door from the parking area. The priest had walked through the woods in the back and had somehow gotten over the fence when all eyes inside the hospital had been watching the front gate. Everyone except for María.
He started up the stairs, stopping at the first floor long enough to check the corridor, which was dimly lit in red from the exit signs front and back.
He did the same on the second floor, with the same results, then moved to the third just as Nurse Randall came out of one of the rooms.
She stopped short, startled when he came through the door. She started to speak but he motioned for her to keep quiet, and when she spotted the pistol in his hand she looked over her shoulder into the room.
“We have an intruder, but I don’t think he’ll come after you or these four guys,” McGarvey, keeping his voice low, warned her. “He’s after the woman, but keep out of sight.”
She nodded and went back into the room and closed the door.
McGarvey headed up to the fourth floor, the corridor in near total darkness. Both exit lights had been turned off, and the only illumination came from what was probably a television set halfway down the hall in María’s room.
He eased the door open. “Morris,” he called softly.
The corridor remained silent.
He opened the door and moving fast, rolled left around the corner into the reception room. Pat Morris, a thin trickle of blood from a hole in his forehead, lay sprawled back on the couch.
McGarvey glanced over his shoulder but nothing moved in the corridor.
Morris’s pistol lay next to the Heckler & Koch on the coffee table, the magazines missing from both weapons.
Bambridge would not have sent amateurs out here, yet it looked as if Morris had been caught totally unawares. Yet he must have heard someone coming through the door from the stairs, he must have known that his life was in danger.
McGarvey stared at the weapons for a long moment, before he holstered his pistol. He fieldstripped the pistol, tossing all the parts behind the couch. Then he removed the receiver spring from the MP7, pocketed it, and laid the weapon back on the table.
He turned and dodged his way to María’s open door. He took a quick peek inside before he pulled back. The bed was empty. The bathroom door was open but no one was waiting there.
With his pistol in both hands up at chest height he rolled into the room, scanning left to right, but except for the picture on the television screen nothing moved. Nor was there any sign of violence.
María had evidently seen someone coming over the fence, had phoned Ellerin downstairs, and had presumably warned Morris that they had incoming. But she was gone and Morris was dead.
McGarvey took ninety seconds to clear each of the other six rooms on the floor before he went to the front stairwell door and opened it a crack. If the priest had gone down to the third floor searching for María he would have run into Kutschinski. No one had heard gunshots, which meant that everyone including the priest was using silenced weapons.
But the man had to have good intelligence to know what this place was, that María was a patient, and had the balls to come here to what amounted to a CIA stronghold. He either had a death wish or he was even better than McGarvey thought he was, and arrogant enough to know it.
Silently closing the door McGarvey used the house phone on the wall a few feet down the corridor to call Ellerin. But the phone rang four times, before he hung up.
The priest was like a shadow or a ghost, flitting over the fence, then up here to kill Morris and then down to the ground floor to take out Ellerin. The son of a bitch was pulling the odds down to his favor by eliminating the opposition one-by-one. But if he’d gotten to Ellerin, it meant he must have passed right through Kutschinski.
At the stairwell door again, McGarvey listened for several seconds before he slipped through and started down, checking each course over the railing before he proceeded.
Just below the third floor landing he spotted Kutschinski, obviously dead, crumpled in a heap, a great deal of blood pooling under his body, and spreading several steps down. His pistol was still in his right hand.
He’d come charging blindly up the stairs and the priest had been waiting in ambush for him.
McGarvey eased open the third-floor door. Nurse Randall lay on her side outside one of the rooms. She too had been armed. A 9 mm standard U.S. military issue Beretta pistol lay on the floor a couple of feet from her outstretched right hand.
What had happened here was already done with.
The four CIA officers were dead, shot while they lay in their beds, two of them with IV drips and monitor wires still attached to their bodies. Those two at least had probably been un
conscious when the priest had assassinated them.
María was not in any of the rooms. Nor was there any obvious signs that she’d been here.
For a long moment McGarvey stood rooted to a spot just outside one of the rooms in which a helpless man had been murdered and he was nearly overwhelmed with an intense anger. For money? For gold, silver, for treasure? Some act like this could not be sanctioned by the Catholic Church. Nothing like this had happened, so far as he understood history, for several centuries. It was as if he were caught in the middle of some surreal dream that had begun with María León’s insane plot to kidnap Louise to force Otto to come to Cuba.
For some reason he focused on the white blanket that covered the dead officer, and he spotted what were flecks of something white, something granular. It made no sense at first, until a drop of blood fell from above and he looked up as a section of ceiling tile, a small splotch of fresh blood along the seam, suddenly collapsed and María León, the chest of her hospital gown red, came crashing down on top of the dead man.
FORTY-TWO
Dorestos was beside himself with rage. He had failed after all. He’d heard at least one other person scuttling around on the second floor like a mouse behind the wallboard, and yet he’d not been able to find out who it was, though he suspected it was one of the nurses.
He went to the main security console with its six monitors and pressed the button to open the gate when the woman he’d come to assassinate fell through the ceiling onto the body of one of the CIA officers. A second later McGarvey came into the frame, and helped her to sit on the edge of the bed. The front of her hospital gown was soaked with blood, but she was still awake.
McGarvey got a towel from the bathroom and placed it over the wound in her chest.
Dorestos flipped a switch for the sound.
“This’ll have to do until I can get the doctor back here.”
María was looking up at McGarvey. “If you had let me keep my gun I might have had the chance to end it.”
“You did the right thing. But how the hell did you get up into the ceiling?”
“It was Charlie’s idea,” she said, glancing at the officer’s body. “He even helped me climb up. He’d just got the tile back in place and had lain down when the bastard came to the room and shot him. There wasn’t a thing I could do about it.”
“If you had tried you’d be dead by now.”
María looked up at the camera. “Is he gone?”
“I don’t know, but for now you’re staying put.”
“Well, has someone at least called for help?”
“They’re on their way,” McGarvey said, and he leaned over to whisper something in the woman’s ear.
Dorestos cranked up the volume, but he couldn’t make out the words.
McGarvey straightened up. “He might still be in the building somewhere. I’m going to try to find him.”
“Are you nuts?”
“No. I’m pissed.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to start on the fourth floor again and work my way back down.”
Dorestos switched the view on the in-house monitor to the third-floor corridor as McGarvey walked past the nurse’s body and headed directly for the rear stairs, as he unscrewed the suppressor from a Walther PPK and pocketed it. He was on the hunt and he didn’t care how much noise he made.
The decision came down to flight or fight. It was possible that McGarvey would get the drop on him, and cut off any chance of escape. He didn’t think that after Casey Key the man would listen to reason, and his orders not to kill the former DCI were very specific.
But he had been ordered to eliminate the woman, along with anyone else who might get in the way. Job one. His immortal soul wasn’t at stake, but in the way the monsignor had put it, damnation for failure was possible.
He studied the console for a moment, and then with a few keystrokes erased the current video memory, and shut the recording system down. He stepped back, put a couple of silenced rounds into the main console, then took the batteries out of the keyboard. Turning on his heel he hurried down the hall to the emergency room and the rear stairs, where he stopped a moment to listen in case McGarvey had doubled back for some reason. But there were no sounds, so he started up, silently, taking the stairs three at a time.
Passing the second and third floors, he emerged on the fourth and retrieved the magazines of ammunition for the dead babysitter’s SIG and the MP7 from under the couch, and loaded the submachine gun, pulling the slide back to charge it. But the weapon had been tampered with. The slide would not snap back into place. The spring was missing.
He looked down the corridor, the flickering light from the television still coming from the woman’s room.
McGarvey had been here, and had sabotaged the weapon. Dorestos realized that he had underestimated the former CIA officer.
Laying the weapon aside he also realized that the pistol was gone as well, which left him only with his handgun and two magazines and a partial. And he understood that he might have made a mistake leaving his own MP7 behind; the extra firepower might be needed after all.
He headed down the corridor to the front stairwell, keeping low and close to the wall and moving fast, pausing only long enough to put a round into the television set.
He cracked the door open and stopped again to listen.
Colonel León was badly wounded and still on the third floor. But McGarvey presented several possibilities. He could have been aware that he was being watched. It would explain why he had whispered something to the woman. It could be that he was staying on the ground floor, waiting in ambush, or he had told the woman the truth and was already on his way up here.
Dorestos slipped into the stair hall and gently eased the door closed.
He waited for a full minute, watching the rear stairwell door through the small square window, but when McGarvey didn’t appear, he started down the stairs, taking extreme caution not to make the slightest noise.
He stopped at the third floor door and looked out the window. Nothing moved, and the corridor was mostly in shadows, the only light coming from outside, through the windows in the rooms and the open doors.
“Protect me, Virgin Mary,” he mumbled. He slipped out of the stairwell and raced to the room where McGarvey had left the woman, but the door was closed and wouldn’t budge even though the handle moved when he tried it.
The woman had barricaded herself inside, knowing that he was coming for her. It was a trap but he still had time because he had a feeling that McGarvey had been lying when he’d told the woman that help was on the way.
The man had an ego, he would want to do this himself. It’s why he hadn’t called for help at the Renckes’ house.
Dorestos put his shoulder to the door and it gave a couple of inches.
“Stand down,” McGarvey said from the end of the corridor.
Dorestos looked up, keeping only his profile as a target. “I mean you no harm, signore,” he said.
“We’re past that. You killed some good people here. Innocent people.”
“They were America’s soldiers, and it is war.”
“Between us and the Vatican?”
Dorestos was distressed. All of this misunderstanding was his fault, and he didn’t know how he was going to face the monsignor. “No, of course not. We are not your enemy. Only Colonel León is.”
“Why did you kill the nurse?”
“It was a mistake,” Dorestos said. As was staying here any longer.
He fired two shots down the corridor, above where he thought McGarvey was standing in the darkness, and then sprinted toward the other end of the corridor, firing continuously over his shoulder.
McGarvey got off three shots, one of them plucking at his sleeve, but then he was through the door and racing downstairs, sick at heart at the disaster he’d created here, and almost believing that it might be best if he lost his life this night. Jesus would accept him, sins and all. He could feel the Lord
’s love washing over him. But the Order wouldn’t be so forgiving.
On the ground floor he darted past the security console, out the front door and down the three steps to the driveway, moving faster now than he’d ever moved in his life.
He reached the open gate and flitted around the corner as McGarvey fired two shots, both of them hitting the tall brick wall.
In the next block he crossed over a narrow canal and threw the pistol away. The Tahoe he intended to leave behind, along with his bag at the hotel.
He used his cell phone to call his aircrew. “We leave within the hour. File a flight plan for San Juan. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” the pilot said.
Three blocks later on R Street he found a VW Jetta that had been left unlocked. He forced the ignition switch and drove off, wondering what would happen to him next. He’d never failed before, so he could only guess at the consequences.
But if he were given another chance he would move heaven and earth to see that McGarvey succeeded, and that the Cubans were kept out of his way.
FORTY-THREE
Mme. Laurent was not as tall as she appeared in the photographs al-Rashid had seen, but she was every bit as elegant as he pictured she would be. She came out of her apartment building at ten minutes before eight, saying something to the old doorman who smiled and saluted her. She’d made his day. There wasn’t a straight Frenchman who didn’t appreciate the attention of a pretty woman.
She’d gotten a half block down the street when al-Rashid got up and followed her.
Dressed in a lightweight trench coat, belted at the waist, she wore a brightly patterned Hermes head scarf, and carried a Louis Vuitton bag over her shoulder.
She walked slowly, her hips swaying. Traffic had picked up and she was a woman who knew the attention she was creating, and she didn’t want to rush it. Al-Rashid almost felt sorry for monsieur the vice mayor, who undoubtedly gave up a great deal every day to have her as his mistress. And this day the man would have to give up even more.
For a block or so al-Rashid had no idea where she was headed, unless it was to find a taxi on the much busier Boulevard Malesherbes, but the doorman would have gladly called for one. On the other hand if she was to use the Metro, a station was in the park practically across the street from her apartment.
Blood Pact (McGarvey) Page 18