Blood Pact (McGarvey)

by Hagberg, David

  “I looked at everyone who had traveled by air or train to Bern in the past two weeks, and compared those names with arrivals by air or train to Paris over the same period. I also took a look at rental car records on the off chance that he might have landed elsewhere and driven across borders.”

  “And you came up with Montessier?”

  “Actually I came up with a hundred twenty-seven names, half of which I dumped because of their ages. But then I went looking for little anomalies. The odd bits that seemed not to fit any sort of a pattern.”

  “And?”

  “Bernard Montessier. You’ll never guess where this guy has been during that time, and going back three years—all I could come up with in only a few hours. Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. All the dates match. He flies from Marsellies to Jeddah, then from there to Bern, and from there back to Marseilles and then Jeddah again, and to Paris just three days ago.”

  “Any background?”

  “No. Wherever he lands no one by that name shows up in any hotel registries—at least not at the bigger hotels where he would most likely stay. When he travels it’s always first class.”

  “He’s either staying with someone in those cities, or he’s using a work name,” McGarvey said.

  “But there’s the kicker. After Paris he showed up yesterday in Seville. Now there’s no way in hell that can be a coincidence. Bern for the diary, Paris for the Voltaires, and Seville for the archives.”

  “He got the diary and now he’s looking for the cipher key.”

  “Bingo. But in the meantime he runs home to Mama in Jeddah for orders.”

  “Does the Company have any assets on the ground there? Someone who might have heard something? Maybe mention of someone flitting in and out? Meeting with someone?”

  “Operators like that, if Montessier is our guy, don’t come cheap. So whoever he’s working for in Jeddah most likely belongs to the Royal family. I can check our NOC list.”

  “See what you can find without alerting Marty,” McGarvey said. “I’m going to warn María to watch her step in case you’re right about Montessier.”

  “I have a passport photo you can send to her, if she’s not already in the air.”

  María had been set to leave for Seville about this time to meet with Dr. Vergilio to pave the way before McGarvey went to talk to her. There was no telling what his reception would be, especially if the CNI got wind that he was in the country.

  He tried her cell phone but it was only accepting voice mail, so he called Louise, who answered on the fourth ring.

  “Are you guys in Malta yet?” she asked.

  “About an hour out,” McGarvey told her. “Has our guest already left?”

  “Dropped her off at the airport a couple of hours ago, but I waited to make sure she got through security okay.”

  She was traveling under her DI work name of Ines Delgado. Otto had checked before they left, and had found no flags on her Spanish passport.

  “I tried to reach her cell phone, but she must have turned it off.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Possibly. Call the airport in Madrid and have her paged. Tell her to call you. I’m sending you the passport photo of Bernard Montessier, who Otto thinks might be the guy who swiped the diary from Bern, and who might have been involved with the murders in Paris. He showed up in Seville yesterday.”

  “Peachy,” Louise said. “Bern, Paris, and now Seville. Can’t be a coincidence.”

  “No.”

  “Send me the picture. If she doesn’t answer the page she’ll turn her phone back on sooner or later. Maybe once she gets through customs in Madrid.”

  “Where is she staying in Madrid?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me.”

  “You’ve done your part, Louise. Now it’s time for you to hunker down, maybe go down to the Farm to be with Audie.”

  “Here in town Marty doesn’t know how to get to me. I’m going to stay put in case someone else interesting happens to show up.”

  “Watch yourself.”

  “Take care of Otto for me,” she said.

  “Will do,” McGarvey said. “I’m sending you the photo.”

  When it went through he broke the connection and looked up. The attendant was at the head of the aisle, looking at him. She was smiling pleasantly.

  “Would you like another cup of coffee, sir? Or perhaps something to eat?”

  “How soon to Malta?”

  “Fifty-five minutes.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  Otto turned his computer around so that McGarvey could see the screen. A photo of a large, hulking man with long curly hair and a thick salt-and-pepper beard filled half the screen, while the other half displayed details about his background. At the present he was the only NOC in Jeddah—most of the others were in Riyadh. He was posing as an engineer for the Swedish firm Andresen Pumps, specializing in “fluid solutions for oil and water.” His name was Bren Halberstrom, and he’d been in place for six years.

  “Do we have contact information?”

  “Yeah, but it could be dicey for him if someone is paying attention, which is a real possibility. The Saudi intel people are pretty good.”

  McGarvey didn’t want to put the man’s life at risk for no good reason, yet people had died. “Anything in his file about recalling him?”

  “He’s made three requests in the last eighteen months to call it quits.”

  “It’s time for Mr. Halberstrom to come home,” McGarvey said, and he dialed the man’s sat phone number.

  SIXTY

  Al-Rashid sat drinking coffee and reading the English language International Herald-Tribune at a small sidewalk café just up the street from the Alcazar fortress and within sight of the Archives. He was dressed in an open collar white polo shirt, jeans, and a black blazer.

  Last night the streets downtown had been filled with a mob of people angry about Spain’s latest austerity measures. The riot police had come in and beaten back the crowd with batons and tear gas, and the people had fought back with Molotov cocktails, bricks, and in at least two instances with guns. The story, along with similar protests in Greece, had made the front page because two police officers and four protesters had been seriously hurt. Dozens of others had been arrested.

  This morning the area still smelled like gasoline and the sharper, irritating odor of phenacyl chloride, the major component in the tear gas the police used last night. Workmen were still on the streets cleaning up debris, and others were installing window glass, though many merchants had decided to board up their windows. The Tribune was reporting that further rioting was likely in the coming days.

  A sharp unease had settled over the city, and this morning even the desk clerks at the upscale Gran Melia Colon hotel seemed gloomy though they tried to hide it.

  “Are you checking out, Señor Harris?”

  “Not at all. I’ve worked in Baghdad, Kabul, and Tripoli, so I understand violence. But last night the crowd was foolish.”

  “But then it is a matter of money. Pardon me, but it is the common family man who has the most to lose, and he does not understand the government’s claim that we are a nearly bankrupt nation, despite our palaces and museums and—”

  “History?” al-Rashid suggested. He didn’t know why he was going on with the silly man because he’d always found stupidity to be boring.

  “Precision!”

  “Actually I’ve come to rent a car for the next several days. Will you arrange it?”

  “Certainly. Do you have a model in mind?”

  “Maybe a little sports car. Something fast. I’m going out in the country to see the sights.”

  “It will be here within the hour. I’ll just need to see your driving license and passport, of course.”

  Al-Rashid handed them over, and after an excellent breakfast of croissants and cheese, he’d picked up the dark blue BMW Z4 convertible in front, and had driven back to the Centro area downtown where he’d gotten lucky with a parking spot just around the corn
er from the Archives.

  Around nine o’clock Dr. Vergilio showed up on a Vespa motor scooter and slowly circled the building before pulling up on the sidewalk and parking just across the street from the Cathedral.

  She seemed cautious to al-Rashid, almost as if she expected to see the rioters still lurking somewhere around a corner, ready to do damage to her Archives, which had come out unscathed so far.

  He waited for a full fifteen minutes after she went inside before he paid his bill and walked back to where he’d parked the car. Traffic was normal for a workday, and once he was away from the Centro section of the city he headed north to the Barrio de la Macarena, which was a huge neighborhood covering most of Seville’s historic section. Here were market squares, churches and convents, little gardens and pocket parks, plus Dr. Vergilio’s apartment on the ground floor of an ancient four-story building just one block off the river.

  Parking a block and a half away, he walked past the building. A tall archway enclosed by tall iron gates, open at this hour of the day, gave access to a narrow cobblestone walkway that ran straight to an outdoor courtyard at the rear of the building. Just inside the gates an old woman sat on a wooden chair smoking a cigarette and cleaning mushrooms with a brush. No one else was around, and back here only the occasional car passed on the street.

  Al-Rashid turned around and walked back to the woman, who looked up curiously when he appeared at the open gate.

  “May I help you?” she asked, her voice raspy from years of smoking.

  “Yes, please, Señora,” al-Rashid said in his rudimentary Spanish. “But I am looking for the building of Dr. Adriana Vergilio. I was told this was the address.”

  “Yes, this is the correct number. But she has already left for the Archives.”

  “I was just there. I must have missed her.”

  “Well, she’ll be there by now.”

  “But I haven’t the time. May I leave a message for her with you?”

  The old woman hesitated, but then shrugged. “I am an old woman with a terrible memory. So if it is complicated you will have to make the time to return to her office.”

  “I’ll write it down. If you have a pencil and a piece of paper.”

  The woman sighed, but put her cigarette in a small tin can at her feet and led him into her apartment, where she got a pad of paper from a small table beneath a wall phone.

  Before she could turn around, al-Rashid was on her, breaking her neck, her body convulsing once before she went limp.

  He carried her into the bedroom at the rear of the small apartment, and covered her with the blanket, arranging her body with her head turned away from the window so that it would look as if she were merely taking a nap.

  He checked at the front door to make certain that no one was around, and he got her chair, the bowl of mushrooms and brush, and the tin can and brought them inside. A set of seven keys were on hooks next to the phone. He took the set marked AV, and again checking at the door to make sure that the passageway was still empty he went back to Dr. Vergilio’s place and let himself in.

  Standing just inside an entry vestibule, al-Rashid listened for any sign that someone might be here, or for a dog or some other animal, but the apartment was silent and he went the rest of the way into a very large living room.

  Tall bookcases, with a wooden ladder on brass rails, lined three walls. The shelves were overstuffed with books, most of them very old. More books and piles of newspapers and magazines were stacked on the one couch, and on a big wingback chair. Books were stacked in the corners, on the coffee table in front of a second wingback chair, beside which were even more books.

  A large map of the New World, which looked as if it had been drawn by hand a very long time ago, was framed and hung on a wall between a pair of windows, the heavy drapes drawn.

  A small kitchen with a two chairs and a butcher block table were to the left just beyond a dining room, the table of which was piled with maps and what appeared to be a half-dozen expedition journals, these in modern field notebooks. The cover of each was marked with a date, starting in November 12, 1984, along with what were likely the names of archaeological digs Vergilio had been on, in various spots around Mexico City and north.

  Al-Rashid quickly leafed through them, but nowhere was New Mexico, or Cibola, or the Mother Church, or treasure mentioned. If she had been looking for the gold—which she claimed did not exist—there was no evidence here.

  A short corridor led back to a bathroom and two bedrooms, one of which was used as a filing room mostly for maps in long flat drawers. Nothing here gave any hint of an expedition or expeditions to anywhere near the U.S. border.

  The corridor’s walls were covered with dozens of framed photographs showing Vergilio and others out in the field at various digs. None of the photos were captioned, but most of them appeared to be in dense jungle settings out of which had been hacked clearings where trenches were being dug by hand. In one shot, a younger Dr. Vergilio, a broad-brimmed hat in hand, stood atop a small Aztec or Mayan ruin looking down at what had to be more than a hundred workmen ringing the pyramid and looking up at her. She had a broad smile on her face. Triumphant.

  More books were stacked beside her bed, and on the nightstand, and even on the floor beside the tall, ornate wooden wardrobe.

  For a long moment or two al-Rashid stood very still, his head cocked to one side, trying to absorb the place, trying to see Dr. Vergilio working here alone every night. There’d been no television in the living room and none here, only a small radio on a shelf in the kitchen. Here was not a home; it was nothing but an office away from the Archives. She worked all day downtown then came back here to work more.

  He walked back out into the corridor and looked at the photograph of Vergilio standing atop the pyramid, a broad smile on her face. The only time she was free to enjoy herself was out in the field.

  Turning, he looked in the map room again, then walked back to the living room and into the dining room and kitchen.

  She had written several books. It was all here in her apartment; all the journals and maps and references that she would need.

  But there was no typewriter, and more important there was no computer.

  Al-Rashid smiled. The woman was hiding something.

  SIXTY-ONE

  The same sort of aluminum coffin used to transport the bodies of American soldiers killed in the field was taken from the hold of the Embraer by two men, who loaded it onto a wheeled cart and brought it over to a waiting hearse.

  McGarvey and Otto, who’d been told to remain aboard, watched as a tall man in jeans and a military styled khaki shirt, the sleeves rolled up and buttoned above the elbows, accompanied the casket from the plane and before it could be loaded into the hearse he blessed it.

  When it was aboard and the men drove away, the man in the jeans turned and came back to the airplane.

  He hesitated just inside the hatch and asked the crew if they wouldn’t mind waiting outside for a few minutes. They agreed and left.

  The interior of the Gulfstream was laid out with several very large and plush leather seats on swivels all within reach of a highly polished cherrywood table. It was obviously used to transport VIPs, and was fitted out with a luxurious bathroom at the rear, and a small but complete galley, including a credible wine stock, just aft of the cockpit. A flat-panel television dropped down from the ceiling, and in the armrest of each chair was a telephone. The plane was equipped with its own sophisticated communications system.

  The man sat down across the table. “Gentlemen, thank you for bringing home the body of our son,” he said, his English nearly accentless.

  McGarvey recognized him from the Skype call Otto had intercepted. “Monsignor Franelli, you must know the circumstances under which he died.”

  “Father Unger told me that he committed suicide, which is a terrible crime for those of our faith. Do you know the circumstances of his death?”

  “He was in my apartment, and I was forced to shoot hi
m.”

  “Pardon me, Señor McGarvey, but that would not have been possible under normal circumstances. He was much younger than you, and in superb physical condition. If he’d wanted to defend himself it would be you who was dead.”

  “I know. He was waiting for me when I came home, and he could have killed me the moment I walked in the door. But he didn’t. He told me that he’d been sent to help me find the diary. I told him that I didn’t know where to begin.”

  “You lied.”

  “I wanted to see what he would tell me.”

  Msgr. Franelli nodded. “Did he mention Seville or Bern first?”

  “Seville.”

  “Then why have you come here?”

  “To deliver Father Dorestos’s body to his controller and to find out why the Order came to me for help. What do you think that I can do for you, that your soldiers and trained assassins can’t?”

  Msgr. Franelli’s lips pursed. He was irritated. “Certain restrictions have recently been placed on the Order.”

  McGarvey sat forward. “Bullshit. Your priest killed a Spanish intelligence officer in Florida.”

  “You killed the three others.”

  “But I didn’t kill four helpless men in their hospital beds, or an unarmed trauma room nurse whose only job was to help save lives, not take them.”

  Msgr. Franelli held McGarvey’s gaze. “Mistakes were made. Father Dorestos was not completely stable. Terrible things happened to him when he was young, and by the time he came to us he was a damaged soul.”

  “That you used,” Otto said angrily.

  The priest turned to him. “You’re Otto Rencke, a computer genius, I’m told, who once worked for the Church until you were excommunicated. I think for some sexual dalliance, so don’t judge lest you yourself are judged.”

  “But then there has always been that element within the Church that condoned murder and torture to further its own aims and its own power. The Spanish Inquisition comes to mind.”