"It was forty-five years ago. No one cares any longer."
"Simon Wiesenthal does."
"Before long all those old Nazis will be dead. As it is, most of them are already so old they can offer no threat."
"With a restored Germany?" Maria asked with emotion. "Think about it. They have the money, the power. They could become the core of a new government, or movement."
"I think not," McGarvey said.
"Christ!" she said. "What do I have to do to convince you to help us?"
"Us?" McGarvey asked.
"I'm not alone, Kirk," she said tiredly. "There aren't many of us, and people like Captain Esformes would like to see us destroyed because we upset the status quo here, but we are determined to continue."
"By doing what, exactly?"
"If we can find the submarine, and Roebling's book with the names, then we can expose whoever is left. They won't hold up to scrutiny, Kirk. They're bad men. Mass murderers, some of them. Doctors who experimented on children, pregnant women. Monsters."
"Old men now."
She laughed harshly. "Don't disparage the power of old men. Unless I miss my mark, your Dr. Hesse had something to do with them. And now he is dead."
McGarvey said nothing.
"I want you to meet someone," Maria said. "He is die assistant director of the Natural History 7 Museum of Buenos Aires. Tell him about Dr. Hesse, and about what you may have figured out."
"I'm leaving first thing in the morning."
"I know. But that doesn't prevent you from coming with me tonight. Please."
"And then what?"
"Then you can go back to your friends in Paris, or your ex-wife in Washington. Whatever."
McGarvey looked at her. One of his teachers at the Company training camp outside Williamsburg had told him that a good spy could spot the anomalies a mile away.
He'd never mentioned Kathleen to her. He'd never mentioned Washington or his past life. None of that.
"I'll meet you in the lobby," he said.
"Five minutes."
"Right."
She picked up her sandals, and at the door she looked back. "If you had touched me, I would have had to kill you eventually."
"Are you a lesbian?" A black widow spider," she said, and she left.
"His name is Albert Rothmann," Maria told him in the taxi.
It was a few minutes after nine and the city was starting to come alive for the evening. Traffic was heavy along the broad Boulevard Cordoba, and already there were long lines waiting outside the more popular restaurants and nightspots.
A co-conspirator of yours?" McGarvey asked. He was feeling irascible. He did not like being lied to, and he liked being spied on even less. Maria and whoever she worked for, or represented, had done both.
"He was a friend of my father's. Like an uncle to me. actually."
"Convenient."
"I need your help, Serior McGarvey. And I will take it any way I can get it. If taking shots at me is your price, then so be it. I'll not shoot back."
They rode the rest of the way in silence, turning ten minutes later down a tree-lined lane that led off the Avenida San Martin into a small park. The main section of the Natural History Museum was housed in a large, ornate building reminiscent of some of the neoclassic structures in Paris.
The cabbie left them off at a staff entrance that was open, and they took an elevator up to the fourth floor. The museum was long closed for the evening, and no one seemed to be around. The dinosaur displays were eerie in the darkness.
"He often works late," Maria explained.
"Does he know we're coming?"
'Tes. I called him earlier this evening. He's very interested in meeting you."
An office door at the end of the corridor was ajar. No light came from within.
"That's odd," Maria said as they approached. "He said he would wait for us."
McGarvey stopped her. "Was there supposed to be anyone else up here tonight?"
She looked at him in confusion and alarm. "No, just him."
McGarvey pulled out his gun and motioned for her to hold back. He cautiously approached the door, flattening himself against the wall to the right, and listened. There were no sounds.
He pushed the door open with his foot, and a moment later reached around the corner for the light switch. He flipped it on and rolled through the doorway, sweeping his pistol left to right.
There was no one in the small office except for a dark-haired man seated at the desk. He had been shot in the middle of the forehead with a small-caliber weapon. His head was flung back against the back of his chair, and his arms were outstretched in front of him as if he were propping himself up.
Maria let out a little cry from the door. McGarvey turned back to her.
"Rothmann?" he asked.
She nodded.
McGarvey went to the desk and felt for a pulse at the side of the mans neck. There was none, but the body was still warm, the skin still pliable.
"Is he dead?"
"Yes, but not a long time. Who else knew we were coming here tonight?"
"No one," Maria said. "Unless my telephone at the hotel was tapped ..."
They both heard sirens in the distance. "Esformes," McGarvey said.
"The bastard!"
"We'd better get the hell out of here," McGarvey said, hols-tering his gun and taking her by the arm.
Out in the corridor she pulled away from him. "You were going to tell us where the submarine might be."
"Later."
The sirens were already much closer.
"Now!" she cried, her eyes wild.
"Goddamnit!" McGarvey shouted. "Look, there were five Greek letters in the code, according to Mossburg's testimony: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and epsilon. Starting with the Rio de la Plata right here as alpha, the next place a submarine could make a rendezvous along the coast would be Bahia Blanca."
She stared at him open-mouthed.
"I can read a map too," he said. "Mossburg told his interrogators that alpha and beta were out for some reason. Which leaves gamma as the next possibility."
"Golfo San Matias," she said.
"That's what I figured. Can you get us there?"
She looked at him. The sirens were very close. "Why the change of heart again?"
"Him," McGarvey said, glancing at the door to Rothmann's office. "And Dr. Hesse. And Paris."
"There may not be a connection ..."
"I think there is," McGarvey said dangerously.
She studied his face for another second, then nodded. "I have access to a small airplane at the airport. If we wait until dawn to take off we won't attract any attention."
"We'll have to get out of here first."
The sirens were just outside now.
"There's a back way," Maria said, and together they hurried down the corridor, taking the stairs two at a time to the ground floor.
The night watchman or someone had let the police in the
front door. McGarvey and Maria could hear them coming through the museum, one of them shouting orders.
They slipped out into the corridor and had just managed to reach another door that led to a vast storage area and duck inside, when the staff entrance door at the end of the corridor banged open.
"This way," Maria whispered urgently. She took McGarvey's hand and guided him through the darkness, past big piles of wooden crates, pallets of what appeared to be fiberglass insulation or packing material, and something very large that loomed up on their left.
The sounds of pursuit faded, until they came to a window at the rear of the building. From there they could hear more sirens outside converging on the museum.
Maria quickly ran her fingers around the inside edge of the windowframe, stopping at a point halfway up on the left.
"Alarmed?" McGarvey asked.
'Tes," she said. "Give me a credit card, or something like it."
McGarvey took his American Express card out of his wallet and gave it to her
. Carefully she inserted it between the bottom of the windowframe and the casement, sliding it to the left until it stopped. She bent it forward, then slid it another quarter inch to the left.
"Open the window slowly," she said.
McGarvey unlocked the latch and slowly raised the window while she held the alarm system's trip switch in place. He climbed out the window, and once outside he reached back and held the credit card in place as she climbed out. Sliding the card almost all the way past the switch, he nodded to Maria, who lowered the window so he could pull the card out.
Straight across from the loading dock area and access road to their right was a heavily wooded park, evidently part of the museum's grounds.
Without a word he followed Maria across, and they reached the safety of the trees as several sets of lights came around from the front of the museum. Without looking back they hurried through the darkness, coming ten minutes later to a broad avenue filled with shops and cafes and people and traffic.
They hailed a taxi and told the driver to take them to the airport. As they sped away McGarvey wondered who set them
up. If it had been Esformes, he wondered exactly what the man's problem was with Maria. It was something, he suspected, that he would find out about sooner or later. That and the obvious fact that Maria was not an amateur. She'd had training somewhere. She'd known about the alarm on the museum window and how to bypass it. It was curious.
the sun was high in the morning sky when they flew over the Punta Rasa and got their first glimpse of the vast Golfo San Matias. Bounded on the south by the Valdes Peninsula, the bay was more than a hundred miles on a side, with few cities or settlements along its coast.
"Ten thousand square miles of water for a submarine to stay hidden," McGarvey said, looking up from a chart. "And no prying eyes ashore to see a thing."
Maria was an expert if somewhat distracted pilot. The plane was a twin-engine Cessna 310 that belonged to a company called International Traders, Ltd. She said it was a dummy corporation that had been set up by her and two others to funnel funds into their search efforts.
The explanation, like most of the others she'd given him,
seemed too pat to be entirely true. There was more to her and the mysterious group she represented than she was ready or able to reveal.
"If it's there we'll find it," Maria said with conviction. She had perked up since they'd gotten airborne. They'd spent the night in the commercial pilots' ready room at the airport, and neither of them had gotten much rest. McGarvey's mouth was foul from too much strong Argentinian coffee and too many cigarettes. Maria's complexion seemed sallow beneath her normal olive coloring.
"If it's not?"
"Then we'll go farther south to delta and epsilon. Sooner or later we'll find it, now that we know where to look."
"What if it never made it this far?" McGarvey asked, playing devil's advocate to her certainty. "It might never have got out of the North Atlantic."
"It did, Kirk," Maria said, glancing at him. "It must have."
"In the meantime you're a fugitive."
She nodded. In the distance they could see the town of Viedma on the Rio Negro. A couple of miles south of the city was the only airport on the gulf.
"What about your friends? You said there were others besides Rothmann."
"We have to stay away from them now. You can't believe how many bodies are buried in the hills around Buenos Aires and out on the pampas and in the jungles. It never stops. Now Esformes and his gang will be watching very closely."
"They killed Rothmann without hesitation," McGarvey said. "What's stopping them from killing the others? Or you and me, if they catch up with us?"
She said nothing, concentrating on her flying for the moment. She'd reduced their speed, and they began a slow descent toward the airport still twenty miles away.
"We could stay and fight them," McGarvey said. "I have friends who might be able to help."
She remained silent for a little while, but then she turned and looked into his eyes. "I still don't know what you're doing here, or why you decided to help me in the first place. But now I need you. I don't think I can do this alone. Albert would have come with me ... but ..."
"We've already covered that ground," McGarvey said, looking
out the window toward the gulf. The white-eapped waves looked like ripples on a tiny pond. Harmless at this distance. "If it gets too bad, and you want to leave, I'll understand." "We'll find your submarine," McGarvey said. "And we'll find whatever it was that Major Roebling brought with him."
This part of Argentina was Patagonia, desolate, windswept, and cold year-round. Steep cliffs plunged into the sea from a landscape that was nearly desert until the thick forests began some distance inland, beyond which were the Andes, South America's spine.
Twenty-five years ago Viedma had been a cowtown struggling for its existence in the bleak region. But when the former president of Argentina, Raul Alfonsin, had suggested that the federal capital be moved there because of what were believed to be untapped mineral and oil deposits in the region, the town had begun to grow.
Now, with a population of nearly fifty thousand, Viedma was in stasis. No minerals or oil had been found yet.
A clerk at the airport told them, "We are a city waiting to become a capital. We have the libraries, the office buildings, the shopping centers, the hospitals, and the cultural facilities. All we need is the government."
They'd arranged to store the plane and McGarvey had rented a Ford export-model Escort with yellow headlights and a loud muffler.
"We'll need a boat and equipment," McGarvey said on the way into the city.
"I've been thinking about that," Maria said. "There's no real harbor here at Viedma. Most of the fleet that operates within the gulf is based in Puerto Madryn behind the Valdes Peninsula."
"The navy is still there, isn't it?" McGarvey asked. He thought he remembered that from some CIA briefing years ago.
'Tes, it is," she said, looking at him. "Which is one of the reasons I picked Viedma. There are some boats to be had here. But what's more important, there are Europeans who will have access to the equipment we're going to need, as well as the skill to use it and the good sense to keep their mouths shut."
"What about money?"
"I have plenty," she said.
"Are these 'Europeans' expatriates or Argentinians?"
"Expatriates, a lot of them. Waiting for the big boom."
"In the meantime?" McGarvey asked.
Maria shrugged. "I don't know much about this place. I've heard it described as a pocket of poverty in the middle of an oasis. A few tourists come here from time to time, I suppose to gawk at Argentina's answer to Brasilia."
"That never quite was."
"No one will bother us here, I think."
"Esformes will find us."
"Perhaps," Maria said. They had come to a small boat basin just upriver from the sea. The docks were on floats because of the huge tidal range, and the tidal flats stretched nearly a mile on either side of the river before they were contained by levees.
The marina had the scruffy, down-at-the-heels look of work-boat harbors the world over. Almost all the boats here were utilitarian. Not many pleasure cruisers.
Even the shabbiest boats, however, were equipped with radar. It was a good sign.
"We'll get our boat here," Maria said. "Pull in."
McGarvey turned off the main highway, went through an open gate hanging on one hinge, and bumped across a broad field down a rutted dirt track to the marina office. A dog was sleeping in the sun, and a hundred or more sea gulls were perched on the ends of the docks. There seemed to be no other life.
"These are my kind of people, Kirk," Maria said when they pulled up. "Unless you've had experience dealing with them, let me do it."
"It's your country," McGarvey said, watching her eyes. There was no reaction he could see.
"Get us rooms at the Hotel Matias. Downtown. I'll meet you there as soon as I can."<
br />
There was much about her that was extraordinary. McGarvey was struck with the notion that she was not South American, though her Spanish seemed authentic. Perhaps it was her English. The accent was wrong, somehow.
"We're going to need clothing," McGarvey said. He looked up at the perfectly clear blue sky. There was a metallic tang to the air, and it was windy by the water. "Unless I miss my guess, it's going to be cold out on the gulf."
"I'm a thirty-eight tall," she said. "Forty shoe or boot. But don't go overboard. Don't get conspicuous."
He just looked at her.
"Sorry," she said. "I'm very nervous now that we're this close."
"We may not be."
She looked out the window. "We are," she said. "I can smell it."
"It's your show," McGarvey said.
'Tes, it is." She got out of the car and headed down to the docks.
"He's a fellow North American," Maria said, introducing the blond-haired, husky man she'd brought with her. It was nearly three in the afternoon. They were in the hotel's pleasant coffee shop. "Captain Steven Jones, Kirk McGarvey."
They shook hands. Jones's grip was iron hard, his hand roughly calloused. McGarvey figured him to be in his mid-to late thirties, with the too-early-to-be-burned-out look of the roustabout and professional adventurer.
"I'm an oil engineer by trade," he explained in a Texas drawl. "Leastways I used to be. Came down to work the Tierra del Fuego fields on the big island."
"What happened?" McGarvey asked.
"It got a little rough for my blood, what with the fight going over Chile's claim. And the goddamned weather—" He glanced at Maria. "Sorry, ma'am," he apologized. He was like an overgrown puppy. "The weather started to get to me, so I cashed in, bought a boat, and set up shop here in the gulf."
"Doing what?" McGarvey asked, amazed that he was believing what he was hearing.
Jones smiled broadly. "Well, now, the marlin fishing ain't so bad in the right season, if you know what you're doing. And I do. And if you got the connections with the fat cats up in Dallas and Houston who like that sort of thing. And I do. Then you can make a respectable living."
Crossfire (Kirk McGarvey 3) Page 14