Blood Pact (McGarvey) (15 page)

“If it’s the Vatican they want me to lead them to the treasure.”

“By finding the diary,” Otto said. “But even if we went after it, we wouldn’t have an idea where to start, except for the bank employees in Bern. Getting inside a safety deposit would have been next to impossible.”

“Unless they had the passwords.”

“If I had been in charge of security I would have demanded personal recognition in addition to some password. I’d want to know who I was opening a safe deposit box for. Especially one that had been rented for more than a century and a half.”

“You’re both forgetting something,” Louise said. “All this depends on Mac actually taking the challenge and going after the thing. Neither of you really believes that any such treasure exists. So why go through the motions?”

“Because of the two kids on campus who were killed, for starts,” McGarvey said. “And because of the Italian who shot at the stuffed figure I’d set up in the kitchen. He told me that he’d known that it wasn’t me, but he took the shot anyway to get my attention. Which he did. And because the CNI put people on my case whose intention, when I broke in on them, was to kill me. Also because one of these days I’m going to miss. Law of averages.”

Louise leaned back against the counter. “That’s a cheery thought,” she said. “How about a little something to brighten up your spirits?”

McGarvey nodded.

“We don’t actually have to go looking for it, because the people who took it will find us once they think that we’re in the hunt.”

Rencke sat up. “Whoa, she’s right. The Voltaire Society guy comes to you for help, which is actually what the CNI thought was going to happen, so they took him out. The Spaniards would have been happy to let you take the next step so long as you didn’t look over your shoulder and spot them. The last thing they wanted was to take you out. But you forced their hand. At the very least the Society and the CNI are going to come back.”

“So will the guy from Malta,” Louise said. “You’re the magnet. If that’s what you want to be.”

“I don’t think I have much of a choice.”

“Just a mo,” Louise said. She went to the hall closet and when she came back she laid a compact Glock 29 semiauto on the counter next to Otto, and stuffed another in the waistband of her jeans. “None of us walks around unarmed. Just in case.”

“You’re not in this,” McGarvey said, but they both looked at him.

The doorbell rang. “That was quick,” Louise said, and she headed to the front stair hall.

“Too quick,” McGarvey said, suddenly alarmed. He pulled out his pistol.

“The pizza joint is just around the corner,” Otto said. “They come here usually twice a week, they know the way.”

McGarvey went to the kitchen door just as Louise looked through the peephole. She pulled the pistol out of her waistband and holding it behind her back with her right unlocked the door with her left.

“Louise,” McGarvey warned.

She glanced back. “It’s okay, I think, but you’re not going to believe this.” She opened the door and stepped aside.

María León, a colonel in Cuba’s intelligence agency, stood on the stoop, her hands spread away from her body, a tentative smile on her pretty face. She was thirty-six with a good figure. “I’m not who you expected,” she said, her English quite good. She was an illegitimate daughter of Fidel Castro’s and had been involved a few months ago in an elaborate plot to kidnap Louise to force Otto to come to Havana for Castro’s funeral, in order to dig McGarvey out of hiding on Serifos.

Her father’s deathbed request was for her to find McGarvey and ask for help finding the Spanish treasure, a portion of which Fidel thought belonged to the Cuban people. There were a lot of deaths, and in the end she’d been disappointed and had escaped back to Cuba. A one-million-dollar bounty put up by a well-to-do Cuban ex-pat in Miami was on her head. Her coming here like this was extraordinary.

She spotted McGarvey, gun in hand, standing in the kitchen doorway. “Are you going to shoot me, or let me in? It’s been a tough trip.”

Louise stepped back. “Come in, put your hands on the wall, and spread your legs.”

María did as she was told.

Louise took the purse from her shoulder, and handed it to McGarvey, who came forward.

“What are you doing here?” he asked as Louise stuffed the pistol back in the waistband of her jeans and did a thorough job of frisking the woman, who wore a nearly transparent scoop-necked white blouse, designer jeans, and low-cut soft leather boots. Her long black hair was done up in the back, and she wore an expensive Rolex watch in gold.

“She’s clean,” Louise said, stepping away. She took the purse from McGarvey and dumped the contents on the hall table, a passport and lipstick falling on the floor. There was no weapon.

“The same thing as you, I suspect,” María said. “Looking again for Cibola. I’ve come to help.”

“With what?” Otto asked over McGarvey’s shoulder. “I can call someone in Miami who’d love to know that you were here.”

“They’d come up and shoot me to death, or maybe take me back to the Calle Ocho and put me on trial. For what, being a true Cuban patriot?”

“Spare us,” Louise said.

María flared. “I didn’t run when the situation became difficult. I stayed and fought for my country.”

“Along with the Russians’ help until they pulled out.”

“Anyway, I thought that you might need an extra hand tonight.”

“With what?” McGarvey asked.

“A big guy in a blue Chevy Tahoe, looked like the Marathon man,” María said. “But don’t tell me that you guys didn’t spot him?”

Shots from a silenced automatic weapon slammed into the front door, and the narrow windows that flanked it, nicking María in the side of her neck.

“Down!” McGarvey shouted. He made it to the living room window in time to see the Tahoe disappear around the corner at the opening of the cul-de-sac.

PART

TWO

That night and the following days

TWENTY-NINE

The sleek Hawker 4000 biz jet touched down at Jeddah’s ultramodern new airport a few minutes after midnight and immediately taxied to a private hangar owned by Prince Saleh bin Abdulaziz, a third cousin in the Saudi royal family. Once the engines spooled down and the stairs were lowered, a man with a soccer player’s build, and the fair complexion of an Englishman—and the rich Oxford accent to match—thanked the flight crew and, carrying only a Louis Vuitton leather bag, stepped down and walked over to the Bentley coupe that had been sent for him.

He was a Saudi, born in Riyadh, and he’d been first a pilot in the air force, then a captain in the General Intelligence Presidency, and finally on his retirement five years ago when he turned thirty-four, he’d become a freelance enforcer for the Royal family.

He was dressed this evening in a British lightweight summer pinstripe in dove gray, with a Hermes tie, and hand-stitched Brazilian loafers. He was something under six feet, and moved like a cat, sure on his feet but seemingly in no hurry. He’d learned his deceptive moves playing soccer at Oxford, where he’d been sent to study international politics and to learn to speak flawless English and French. His real name was Mahd Ibn Khalden al-Rashid, but outside of the country he most often went under the name Bernard Montessier.

The driver, a dangerous-looking fireplug of a man, who had in fact been al-Rashid’s hand-to-hand combat and weapons instructor in the GIP, got out and opened the rear door. “Welcome home, Mahd.”

“It is good to be back, but I don’t suspect I’ll be here for long.” They spoke Arabic. “Will the prince see me this evening?”

“Yes, and he is most anxious. All went well?”

“To a point.” Al-Rashid settled in and sat back for the ten-kilometer drive down the Red Sea coast to Prince Saleh’s compound not far from Mecca. The aircraft and the car were luxuries he’d gotten well used to ever since he’d gone to work almost exclusively for the prince.

Saleh had never occupied any official post within the government, and yet his work, almost always done in complete secrecy, was perhaps the most important in all the kingdom—sometimes nearly equaling the oil industry itself. He was the Royal family’s money man, who worked with the drug cartels in Russia, China, and most importantly in Mexico and Colombia, to launder tens of billions in U.S. dollars and euros every year. He also dealt with the distributors in a dozen countries around the world—the biggest share of that business coming from the States.

It was he, working through several intermediary firms, a few in the United Arab Emirates, a couple in the United Kingdom, and five in Germany and Switzerland, who as often as possible had a huge effect on the price of oil via derivative and credit default swap trading. Almost all of it was so complicated that the transactions were completely under the radar of the American SEC.

Which made him among the most important men in the kingdom, with the anytime ear of the king himself.

But with the kinds of deals he was involved with, he’d often had to use the talents of men such as al-Rashid, to convince a cartel leader or businessman or some high ranking government functionary to cooperate. It took blackmail, extortion, and sometimes assassination by bomb, poison, pistol, knife, and even garrote when the need for silence and for a splashy effect was required.

Al-Rashid was a primary source for the prince’s secret intelligence issues, and therefore was highly paid and highly treasured throughout the kingdom though only a few men actually knew his name, or knew about his home in southern France.

Because of the hour, traffic was almost nonexistent on the highway inland across the desert and in less than fifteen minutes, the driver pulled down the long gravel driveway to a cluster of three low-slung buildings, which were barracks and a military administrative center, plus a guard tower that rose twenty meters above the floor of the desert. All of it was just inside a tall fence topped by razor wire, and an electrically operated gate manned by three guards armed with American-made Knight compact automatic assault carbines. Two of the guards came out, while the third stayed behind.

Al-Rashid powered down his window as they approached. “Good evening.”

“Good evening, sir,” the lieutenant said. They were expecting him, but the prince’s safety was paramount and they trusted no one. “Step out with your travel bag, please.”

Al-Rashid did as he was told, and his person and the bag were thoroughly searched. The gate was opened again, and an armored Hummer came out for him. His driver was directed just inside the gate where he was to park in front of the barracks, and wait for however long the meeting would take. It was SOP. Very few people ever actually got up to the prince’s palatial compound, which was another five kilometers away. Those who did were thoroughly vetted and closely watched.

The main house was a three-story building of nearly fifty thousand square feet complete with a crenelated roof line, minarets at the corners, and a dozen fireplace chimneys—though there were no fireplaces in the house. The indoor pool was made of marble with gold fixtures including several bare-breasted mermaids spouting water from all of their orifices, which was one of the prince’s many bits of humor that al-Rashid had found stupid:
Nekulturny,
as a Russian friend in the FSS had told him a couple of years ago.

At the house, a guard ran an airport security wand up and down his body, before he was escorted to a third-floor balcony at the rear of the estate where Prince Saleh was seated sipping champagne. The man, who was in his late forties and educated at Harvard, was obviously Royal family by his bearing. His color was dark, his nose prominent, and his lips and eyelids thick. He was not a pleasant man to be around, in part because of his temper, and in a large part because he thought that he was the smartest guy in any gathering in which he found himself. None of the other royals, including the king himself, bothered him about his attitude, because he made a lot of money.

The prince waved him to a chair. “What took you so long? A flight to Bern amounts to only a few hours, and you were given the passwords. Did you encounter any trouble?”

“None,” al-Rashid said. “But as I’ve already told you there were certain other considerations.”

“Yes, to save your precious skin.”

Al-Rashid shrugged. “If you wish me to martyr myself, simply say the word.”

The prince waved him off. “Did you get it?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Of course,” the prince shot back. He pursed his lips. “One day you will step over the line: Do you know that?”

“Then you will have to hire someone else. Only there isn’t anyone as good as me.”

Prince Saleh gave him a cold stare. “You said, other considerations. What considerations?”

“It’s a matter of translation,” al-Rashid said. He took the diary, wrapped in vellum, from his overnight bag, got up, and reached across the low table and handed it to the prince.

The book was about the size of a short novel, with thick leather covers containing a hundred parchment pages on which the priest Jacob Ambli had drawn maps and diagrams—some showing what appeared to be large mounds or hills, with buried entrances, others showing directions and distances complete with compass bearings on land mass features—as well as page after page of dense writing.

“At first I took the language to be Latin, but it is not that simple,” al-Rashid said.

Prince Saleh handled the book with fascination and a great deal of care. He looked up. “What then?”

“I think that it’s in a code of some sorts.”

“I’ll call in a decryption team.”

“I would advise against it.”

“Oh?”

“To advertise that the diary is in our possession would invite trouble.”

Again the prince gave him a cold look. “What trouble?”

“A car bomb went off in Sarasota, Florida, killing a member of the Voltaire Society, from whose bank vault we stole the book.”

“Who was responsible?”

“Spanish intelligence.”

The prince shrugged. “Why Florida?”

“Presumably the Society representative went to ask Kirk McGarvey to find the diary. The Spanish were waiting for just that to happen, and they killed the Frenchman.”