“I’m already on it,” Rencke said. “It’s a Gulfstream V, same as the C37A we fly, with a range of right around six thousand miles—give or take. It can reach just about anywhere in South America and Europe, and it doesn’t need a major airport to land. Chances are we’re not going to find out until it’s back at its home strip.”
“Which is?”
“Executive Charters, London’s Heathrow. Except that the company doesn’t own an aircraft with that tail number.”
“It must have come from somewhere.”
“I haven’t found out where yet.”
“Try Malta first, and then Rome. My guess is it might be registered to a company with some sort of an arm’s length connection with the Church.”
“I’m on it. What about the hospital? Is María awake yet?”
“No, and the place has been closed down tight. No way he’s going to get past all that firepower.”
“Watch your back, Mac. This business is far from over.”
* * *
McGarvey found a parking spot a half a block from his apartment, and walked back, mentally cataloging the cars and SVUs parked on the street. It had been months since he’d stayed any length of time here, yet he remembered the cars from then and as recently as yesterday, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary to him now. No out-of-state plates, no diplomatic tags, no vans with deeply tinted windows, no vehicles with extra antennas.
He let himself in, and upstairs out of habit he stopped for a long moment on the landing to listen for any sounds, or this time odors, out of the ordinary. But nothing stood out.
At his door he checked the grease spot in the keyhole, which seemed undisturbed, yet that telltale had been defeated before and in the meantime he hadn’t taken the time to set another one in its stead. Sloppy, maybe, but he wasn’t going around unarmed. Not since the incident at Casey Key.
He pulled out his pistol and pushed the de-cocking lever to the up position, and eased the door open with the toe of his shoe.
The apartment was small, only the living room with the kitchen and small eating area to the right, and the single bedroom and bathroom to the left. A television and Bose stereo system were on a cabinet on one side of the room, bracketed by a couple of bookcases that held, in addition to books, some photos of his wife, their daughter, their son-in-law, and Audie.
He’d taken them down and put them in a drawer in the bedroom where they stayed for months, until he could finally bring them back out and face them every time he came through the door.
His heart still ached thinking about them, but he’d become a changed man. Harder, Louise told him some months ago. Easier to get angry, sharper, less patient, more content with being a loner than ever before.
In the old days, even when he’d hidden out in Lausanne after the assignment to kill a general in Chile had gone bad, and Katy had given him the ultimatum—her or the CIA, for which he chose neither—he’d not been content to live alone. But every woman, including his wife when he’d gotten back together with her, had lost their lives because of their association with him.
Now being alone was better.
He swept the living room with his pistol, then closed and relocked the door behind him. He took a quick look in the kitchen, then went back to his bedroom.
Nothing moved, nothing was out of place. The only light was the one in the bathroom. The door was still half open as he had left it. And he started to come down.
He safetied his pistol and tossed it on the bed, then took off his jacket and quick-draw holster at the small of his back, tossing them on an easy chair in the corner where he liked to read at the odd moment.
For just a split instant he almost froze in his tracks, but then he went across the room to the chest of drawers, where he got a pair of shorts and a T-shirt that lay on top of another fully loaded Walther PPK—the one he’d taken from Casey Key—which was fitted with a silencer.
He’d caught the odor from the bathroom of sweat and the faint but distinctive smell of a pistol that had been recently fired. The son of a bitch had tracked him here, and after everything that had happened—especially the senseless murders of the four wounded CIA officers and Nurse Randall—he was glad they would finally have it out.
McGarvey moved to the left into the deeper shadows in the corner, switched the safety lever to the off position, and pointed it at the bathroom door.
“You came here because you wanted me to help find the diary for the Church,” he said, keeping any trace of anger from his voice. “I’m listening.”
“Does the woman still live?” Dorestos asked. His voice was ragged, but still high-pitched.
“She bled to death before the doctor arrived,” McGarvey said. “It was you at the confessional.”
“It was a relief.”
“How do you expect me to help you?”
“The diary is the property of the Mother Church.”
“What about the claim of the Voltaire Society?”
“They are the devil’s handmaidens. They stole the diary.”
“The Church stole the treasure from the Spanish government.”
“Spain stole it from the Native Americans. The Church has been their bedrock for four centuries. We brought Jesus Christ to save their immortal souls. It was enough.”
The argument was circular just as all religious debates were in the end. McGarvey wasn’t an atheist—he’d seen too much senseless death in his career to be without some belief. But he had never found a religious system that fit him. Like almost every philosophy, established religions were failures in the end.
“I don’t know where to begin,” McGarvey said.
“Seville. But put down your gun and we will talk.”
“Face-to-face,” McGarvey said.
“Of course,” Dorestos agreed.
McGarvey lowered his weapon, and an instant later the figure of the priest darted out from the bathroom and crossed the room in a blur, his speed incredible.
Leading the big man, McGarvey fired off four shots as fast as he could pull the trigger.
Dorestos nearly made it to the bedroom door into the short corridor, managing to get off one shot over his shoulder that went wide, before he crashed against the wall with a loud bang and went down hard.
He had fallen on his side, his gun hand underneath his body, and he tried to pull it out when McGarvey reached him. He looked up, obviously dying and obviously knowing it. But he didn’t seem in much pain or distress.
“Thank you,” he whispered, his voice still ragged.
“The people you killed: why?”
Dorestos’s eyes fluttered. “My mother was there,” he said.
“What?” McGarvey demanded. “I don’t understand.”
Dorestos smiled. “Go with God, my son,” he said, and he died.
FIFTY-ONE
“Seville,” McGarvey said to Otto just before they went into Walt Page’s seventh-floor conference room of the CIA’s Original Headquarters Building on the campus.
“Are we sharing that this afternoon?” Rencke asked.
“No.”
Including the DCI at the head of the narrow table, Bambridge and Carlton Patterson were on his left, Bill Callahan at the opposite end, and two chairs were open on the right.
Pete Boylan, the Company’s senior debriefer, sat at the far corner next to Callahan, an understanding smile on her pretty face. She was thirty-three, with short dark hair, bright blue eyes, and the voluptuous good looks and figure of a Hollywood superstar. She had worked with McGarvey on the operation that had sprung from the deaths of his wife, daughter, and son-in-law, getting wounded in a gun battle near the end.
“Mr. Director, good to see you again,” she said.
McGarvey gave her a smile, but turned to the others. “None of this will be taped.”
“Why is that?” Bambridge demanded.
“Because you won’t like what you’re going to hear, and you won’t want it on record.”
“May I take notes?�
� Pete asked.
“Sure,” McGarvey said, and he and Otto sat down.
“You’re no longer connected in any official capacity with this agency, so you will not be conducting this debriefing,” Bambridge said.
“Marty, from what I’ve seen you’re a damned fine DDO, but you need to guard against bombast.”
Patterson chuckled. “Would you like to begin with the dead body in your apartment?” he asked. “We assume that he’s the man who attacked All Saints last night.”
“I’ll make it brief, and you can decide the ramifications, because this is going to involve the State Department and the White House. And if it goes public you’re going to have a very large mess on your hands.”
Rencke had brought an iPad and he powered it up.
“That won’t work in this building,” Bambridge said.
Rencke shrugged. “This one will.”
“A Frenchman claiming to represent something called the Voltaire Society came to see me at New College. He said that a diary that belonged to them had been stolen from a bank vault in Bern, and he wanted me to help find it.”
“We’ve heard all that,” Patterson said.
“The diary apparently pinpoints the locations of what were seven caches of gold and silver buried somewhere in New Mexico, what is now military testing grounds. Near the same place we tested our first nuclear weapon in nineteen forty-five. Supposedly the Voltaires have already emptied three of the caches, converted the metal into hard currency, and spent it.”
“On what?”
“According to the Frenchman, they spent it to help democracies in trouble.”
“Christ, spare us,” Bambridge said.
“We uncovered a fairly substantial payment to us shortly before the Civil War. There may be others, Otto’s working on it.”
“Payment to who exactly?” Patterson asked.
“To the U.S. Treasury via a bank in Richmond.”
“That can be researched,” Patterson said to Page.
“I’ll give you what I found,” Otto said, looking up from his iPad. “But from what I’ve come up with so far someone began burying these sorts of transactions shortly afterward. There could have been more payments, but digging them out might be tough. My suggestion would be to start within the last ten years or so, to find income to the U.S. Treasury that has no line items. Not taxes, not seizures of property, not donations left by little old ladies. A few billions of dollars here and there unexplained.”
“You want to sift through tens of trillions of dollars? More?”
“Yes, and you might match it with crises points, where we were cash-strapped as a nation.”
“Like the bank bailouts?” Bambridge asked sarcastically.
“Where did all that money come from?” Otto asked.
“This Frenchman came to you because of your involvement with the Cuban government in the person of Colonel León, I assume,” Patterson said.
“I turned him down, and as he was leaving the parking lot his car blew up, killing him, and killing two kids who were standing at a bike rack.”
“And then the CNI surveillance operation on you,” Bambridge said. “You’ve already told us that it was they who killed the Frenchman—”
“And the two students.”
Bambridge nodded. “Unfortunate. But you got into a shoot-out killing all four of them. Would you care to go into more detail? I’m sure that the Bureau is most interested.”
Callahan said nothing, which seemed to disappoint the DDO.
“Only three, in self-defense,” McGarvey said. “The fourth was killed by the man in my apartment.”
“And you maintain that this person—possibly a Catholic priest—managed to breach the perimeter at All Saints, kill four of our wounded officers in their beds, a nurse, the on-duty security officer, and the two bodyguards from Housekeeping who you’d requested be sent over to guard Colonel León, who herself had been wounded in a shoot-out behind a previously unknown safe house that Mr. Rencke maintained. We weren’t able to retrieve any of this from surveillance tapes at the hospital,” Bambridge said. “Does that about sum it up?”
“He was good.”
“Good enough to do all of that, and still break into your apartment without your being aware of the fact until he attacked you. Yet you beat him. You took him down. You shot him to death.”
“Yes.”
Bambridge looked at the others and spread his hands. “You’re right, I don’t like any of it. Particularly the business with the Spanish government. My concern is what happens next, because from where I sit this is nothing but a fantasy that has gotten a whole lot of people killed for no reason.”
Page interrupted. “Go on, Mac.”
“Fantasy or not, the Spanish CNI is involved in searching for the diary to such an extent that it was willing to assassinate an agent of some society who’d come to me for help. For the treasure that Spain believes is theirs.”
“And the man in your apartment?” Page asked.
Otto was suddenly busy on his iPad, his fingers flying over the virtual keyboard.
“I think that he was an agent of a Catholic order—whether officially or not I can’t say—to eliminate the Spanish operation against me, so that I would be free to find the diary. The church claims that the treasure is theirs.”
“The Spanish government wants the treasure,” Patterson said. “As does something called the Voltaire Society—philanthropists if we are to believe the story—as does some Catholic quasi-military order, and as does the Cuban government again in the person of Colonel León. Do I have it all?”
“The priest came to Otto’s safe house to kill not me, but Colonel León. And he came to the hospital to try to finish the job.”
“You had a guardian angel,” Bambridge said. “So why did he suddenly show up at your apartment to eliminate you?”
“Son of a bitch,” Otto muttered.
“I don’t know,” McGarvey said, and they all turned to Rencke.
“Unless I’m smoking something and have gone more delusional than normal, someone else is after the diary.”
“What is it?” McGarvey said.
Rencke inclined his head. “Share?” he asked.
“Damned right you’ll share whatever you came up with inside this building,” Bambridge said.
“IPads don’t work here.”
McGarvey nodded.
“The Frenchman who came to see Mac in Sarasota gave us a business card with the name Giscarde Petain and a phone number. The number matches an office in the Second Arrondissement of Paris—where lots of banks have their headquarters. A night watchman there was found murdered. And a couple of hours later, just two blocks away, a woman and her son were found shot to death with the guard’s pistol. Their names were Petain.”
“Does Sûreté have any leads?”
“They’re a little busy right now, kemo sabe. Robert Chatelet and his mistress were found shot to death in her apartment. The doorman was also found dead, his neck broken. He was bare from the waist down, and it looked as if the woman—Adeline Laurent—might have been raped.”
“The vice mayor of Paris?” Bambridge asked.
“Yeah, and a leading candidate for the French presidency.”
“I don’t see the connection.”
“But it’s there,” Rencke said. “I can smell it.”
“So can I,” McGarvey said. “The ante has just been raised.”
PART
THREE
The following days
FIFTY-TWO
The afternoon on the Harrat Rahat, which was Saudi Arabia’s largest volcanic lava field between Jeddah and Medina, was brutally hot, topping 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Prince Saleh and al-Rashid rode a pair of magnificent Arabian stallions, the horses delicately picking their footing across the horrible terrain. To make a misstep here would cause them to break a leg after which they would have to be destroyed.
Which was the point the prince was trying to make. He often brough
t people who had displeased him out here to break their spirits. Many times he rode out onto the lava flow with a minion and came back alone.
But where the prince seemed to revel in this environment, al-Rashid endured the brutal circumstance with the same stoic indifference as he felt on the battlefield, whether it be in the city or out here.
They were dressed in Bedu white thobes, over which were sleeveless abas and kufeya headgear secured with wool ties. Al-Rashid felt only faintly ridiculous, though the traditional desert garb had been perfected over a couple of millennia to keep the desert nomads relatively safe from the sun.
The prince wore a curved dagger in his belt.
Overhead an American-made Predator drone, controlled by a Saudi Air Force unit outside Riyadh loyal to the prince, circled. At the slightest sign of trouble the unmanned aircraft, equipped with a 20 mm cannon, would obliterate any threat to Saleh.
“You have been a busy man on my behalf,” the prince said. They topped a small rise and stopped where they looked out across the fantastic swirls and ridges formed by molten rock nearly eight hundred years ago. This was truly a no-man’s-land.
“Yes, but I am not finished.”
“I know, my old and loyal friend. But you have created some complications that have come to the notice of the king, who actually sent a minor cousin to talk to me. It was an insult considering all that I have done for the family.”
“Better than recalling you to the palace,” al-Rashid said.
“Better that you watch your tongue,” Saleh shot back angrily. “France is not our enemy. Murdering Chatelet and his mistress was an incredible blunder on your part.”
“The Sûreté has not identified the killer, nor will they.”
“But the king’s spies know.”
“Which means you have an informer on your staff.”
Saleh sat back in his saddle and looked to the east, toward Medina, the Radiant City, where the tomb of the Blessed Muhammed lay under the green dome of the Al-Masjid an-Nabawi, in an obvious effort to control his temper.
Al-Rashid followed his gaze. The prince would be dead before a drone strike could be ordered. And riding with the body, the controllers would not shoot. In was an option, one of several he always kept open.
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