Blood Pact (McGarvey) (19 page)

Al-Rashid pocketed the wallet, but left the gun in place. He powered up the window, took the keys, and locked the doors. With no visible signs of an injury or a struggle, the man was just another drunk parked at the curb, sleeping it off.

A taxi passed, and when it was gone al-Rashid crossed the street and inside the entry hall of the apartment building pressed the button for 2A. Moments later Sophie Petain answered.

“Oui?”

“It is I, Ghjuvan from the street. A man has delivered papers for you.”

“What papers?”

“Concerning your husband, madame. From the Society.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about. But leave them in the mail slot downstairs and I’ll have my lawyer look at them in the morning. Good evening, monsieur.”

She was lying. Al-Rashid could hear it in her voice, though he didn’t know what she was lying about. “Please, madame, I may lose my job. I was ordered to bring these to you.”

The elevator door opened. “Come up if you must.”

Al-Rashid rode the elevator to the second floor and went to her apartment. The building was very quiet. He knocked on the door. “Madame?”

“Slip them under the door.”

“They will not fit such a narrow opening.”

“Merde,”
Madame Petain said. She unlatched the lock.

The moment the door was open far enough for al-Rashid to see that the foolish woman had not fitted a safety chain, he shoved it the rest of the way. Pushing her aside before she could resist, he stepped into the apartment’s entry vestibule, and closed and locked the door.

The boy appeared at the end of the short corridor into the living room.

“Edouard, telephone the police,” the woman cried.

Al-Rashid shoved her against the wall, clamped a hand on her mouth, and turned to the boy, who stood rooted to the spot. “I do not wish to harm your mother, but I will if you attempt to call for help. Do you understand?”

The boy nodded. “Are you the man who killed my father?”

“No. But I know who did, and I need your mother’s help to bring them to justice,
hein.”

The boy nodded again.

“Do not cry out,” al-Rashid told the woman, and she blinked her eyes. He took his hand away from her mouth and pulled her into the expensively furnished living room where he had her and her son sit together on the couch.

“You have brought no papers for me after all,” Madame Petain said. She looked haggard. It had only been a couple of days since her husband’s death and it showed.

“No, and forgive me for the little ruse, but I needed to speak with you about the Society, that your husband gave his life for.”

“I do not know what you are talking about. My husband was a private equity banker, nothing more. I knew that he was traveling out of France on business, but I had no idea where until I received word that he had died in an explosion.”

“Who brought you this news?”

“The police.”

“The Sûreté or the DGSE?” al-Rashid asked. The first were the civil police, the second France’s intelligence service.

“The man was from Interpol,” Madame Petain said. She’d gotten her second wind. “You are not a bodyguard. Who are you to come to me like this?”

“You are accustomed to bodyguards. Who arranged them for you?”

“My husband, whenever he was away,” she said defiantly. “Now I demand that you leave.”

“Indeed I will, and I apologize for the trouble I have caused you, madame,” al-Rashid said. “Where is your husband’s office?”

“I don’t know.”

Al-Rashid laughed. “Does he take a taxi or the Metro or does a car come for him?”

“Go!” the woman shouted.

Al-Rashid was on her in an instant and he slapped her very hard in the face, rocking her head back. “Answer me, you silly woman, or I will kill you.”

Madame Petain was speechless, and al-Rashid raised his hand against her again, but the boy cried out.

“My father’s office is in the next block. He walks to work each morning. I followed him once.”

“What is the number?”

The boy gave it to him.

The woman glanced toward the windows. She was frightened. “You have what you want, now leave,” she said.

“Oui,”
al-Rashid said. He leaned down over her as if he was going to kiss her forehead; instead he took her narrow face in both hands and twisted sharply to the right, breaking her neck.

The boy scrambled backward over the couch and reached the front vestibule before al-Rashid caught up with him and broke his neck.

He stood for a long half minute listening to the near absence of noise in the building, waiting for someone to come knocking at the door to find out what the fuss in 2A was all about, or for the sound of a distant police siren converging. But no alarm had been raised.

He went back into the apartment and began his methodical search.

THIRTY-SIX

Washington’s rush hour traffic was in full swing when McGarvey took a cab from the hospital out to CIA headquarters in the wooded hills across the George Washington Parkway from the Potomac River. The weather, which had been clear for the past twenty-four hours, had clouded up, the heat and humidity oppressive; a thick wet blanket had been thrown over the capitol and surroundings, deepening moods and sharpening the tempers of anyone out in it.

A guard came out, gave the cabdriver a temporary visitor’s permit that would allow him to drive to the Original Headquarters Building, drop off his passenger, and immediately return to the gate, and then looked through the back-door window that McGarvey had lowered.

“Someone will be waiting for you in the lobby, Mr. Director,” he said. “Welcome back.”

“Thanks,” McGarvey said, and on the short curving drive through the woods and around the main parking lot to the seven-story OHB a lot of memories, some of them good but many of them bad, came back to him in living color.

Everything seemed the same, and yet so much had changed, especially the technology that had been developed—and continued to be developed—between the Company and the National Security Agency. Otto had explained some of what they already had and what was on the near horizon—completely unbreakable quantum effects encryption that tied in with QE computers that could work a million times faster than current microchip machines, and were by many definitions either already on the border with artificial intelligence, or just across it. Holographic memories that could not only accurately display a current time and place, but could remember the past as well as predict certain future events.

“All sci-fi to you,” Otto had said, not derisively. “But then you’re a people person. You see things that no machine in the pipeline is capable of. Instincts, hunches.”

“Sometimes wrong,” McGarvey had told his old friend.

Otto laughed. “You ever heard of a computer that never makes mistakes?”

“Even yours?”

“Especially mine. Why do you think I keep tinkering with them?”

The weapons and weapons systems were changing too; his old Walther PPK, the stuff of James Bond movies of the sixties, had evolved to weapons that fired smart bullets that could be guided to change directions in flight to seek out and kill a target—such as a human being—that emitted infrared radiation. Pulse weapons that sent a high-pitched pulse of sound so sharply focused and yet so loud that a human target could be stunned to unconsciousness. And if the pulse energy were raised by a factor of only two or three the target’s brain would develop an instantly fatal number of tiny hemorrhages. Or nearly silent unmanned drones carrying hellfire missiles that could be controlled from bases halfway around the world from their targets.

But all of that technology was of little use this time around because at issue was a mystery that had its beginning the moment Columbus had set foot in the New World and had discovered a native wearing a gold necklace.

Just as Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, had told reporters after the attacks on 9/11—none of our advanced weapons systems, our nuclear submarines and missiles and stealth fighters and aircraft carriers could have prevented this from happening.

Boots on the ground. Human assets, even if they only carried Walthers.

Bambridge was waiting for him in the very busy main lobby. It was quarter after five, right in the middle of the shift change. “You’re late,” he said, handing McGarvey a visitor’s badge.

“Yes.”

“What happened to Otto?”

“He moved Louise to another safe house.”

“Where?”

“You’ll have to ask him that. But thanks for sending someone out to keep watch on Colonel León. She could be important.”

Bambridge was clearly frustrated. He wanted to lash out.

They went through the guard points and then left down the broad corridor to a bank of elevators. “She’ll be discharged in a couple of days, but she won’t be in any shape to climb over walls with you. We’re going to send her back to Havana. She can recuperate there.”

McGarvey didn’t bother replying. From any realistic point of view Bambridge was correct. María León was no friend of the United States. She didn’t belong here.

Walter Page was waiting for them in his office, along with Bill Callahan and Carleton Patterson, a slender white-haired man in his early eighties who’d been the CIA’s general counsel forever. The only one missing was Fred Atwell, who was the new deputy director and who would almost certainly take over after Page left. He was a White House favorite, who’d worked as special adviser on foreign affairs to the current president but who’d campaigned hard to get his present job the moment Page had announced his intention to retire.

They all shook hands and sat around an oval coffee table after they got coffee from a silver service on a cart.

“Fred couldn’t join us this afternoon,” Page said. “He’s in Ohio campaigning with the president.”

“A good place for him to be,” McGarvey said, and the others, even Bambridge, chuckled. No one liked the man. From what McGarvey had heard Atwell was purely a political creature. The man knew absolutely nothing about intelligence gathering.

“The ball’s in your court, dear boy,” Patterson said. Of the others in the DCI’s office his was the most unflappable persona. He’d seen practically everything during his tenure. He and McGarvey had a mutual respect.

“Spanish gold buried in our desert southwest. Mostly New Mexico, maybe some in Texas.”

“A fairy tale,” Bambridge said. Page tried to hold him off, but he plowed on. “After the last debacle down at Holloman, we went through government records back as early as eighteen twelve. And I do mean with a fine-toothed comb. Some damned fine archivists were called in and did the work on a contract basis. Totally apolitical. Nothing was found. Not one piece of documentation that there is or ever was any cache of treasure brought up to New Mexico by disgruntled monks from Mexico City. Urban legend, every scrap of it.”

“The Cuban government was and is still interested,” McGarvey said.

Bambridge waved it off disparagingly.

“Spain is interested enough to send people to watch me.”

“Spanish treasure galleons sunk off the Florida coast, or even out in the Atlantic around the Azores. Spain has a legitimate claim, which has been worked out in courts of law. We’ve been that route. But not on dry land in the United States.”

“The Vatican is interested. They claim that the treasure belongs to the Church.”

Page was interested. “Was it someone from Rome who was blown up in the car?”

“No. But the person who killed the fourth CNI operative—the one who was found in the rental house on Siesta Key—was almost likely from the Church. The Knights Hospitallers.”

No one said a word. Even Bambridge was temporarily at a loss.

McGarvey explained what had happened at his house, and again in the woods behind the Renckes’ place. “He eliminated the last of the CNI operatives, and he meant to eliminate Colonel León, warning me that she was spearheading a Cuban intel op here in D.C.”

“Nothing is showing up on our radar at the moment,” Callahan said. “Which brings us back to your Voltaire Society.”

“I haven’t heard of this wrinkle,” Patterson said.

“The man who came to the college to see me identified himself as Giscarde Petain, said he worked for something called the Voltaire Society. Apparently it is a group of bankers who have been doing their damnedest to keep money away from the Vatican since the eighteen hundreds. Evidently it was something suggested by the philosopher just before his death. He hated the Church, and I think this was some sort of a joke—his parting shot.”

“And this Petain came to you for what reason?” Patterson asked. No one else seemed to want to speak up.

“According to him the Church sent one of its Maltese operatives as a spy on a Spanish military expedition to what’s now New Mexico to find and map the buried caches of gold and silver. Which he did as the expedition’s surveyor and mapmaker. He kept two journals—one of them false that he gave to the soldiers when they got back and the other a true account that he kept to bring back to Rome. He was lost at sea, killed by the Voltaires who took his diary.”

“Christ,” Bambridge said, but again Page held him off.

“You have our attention, dear boy,” Patterson said.

“The diary was brought back to Paris where it was studied, and then was locked up in a bank vault in Bern. Supposedly the Spanish expedition found seven caches of gold—the seven cities of Cibola—and since then the Voltaires have plundered three of them.”

“And did what with the treasure?”

“I don’t know. But Otto thinks they made at least one payment to a bank in Richmond well before the Civil War.”

Patterson smiled. “Well,” he said. He exchanged a glance with Page.

“The diary was stolen from the bank vault, and Petain was sent to ask for my help finding it,” McGarvey said, and the momentary silence that followed was in no way surprising to him.

Page was first. “Mac, you have to understand the great deal of respect that this agency owes you, the thanks the entire nation owes you.”

“The story is fantastic, Walt. I don’t know what to believe myself. But the fact is the Spanish government, possibly the Catholic Church, the Cuban government, something calling itself the Voltaire Society, which has already given our government money, are interested enough to kill for it. And among the dead are two young college students who were killed while I watched, and I couldn’t do a damned thing about it.”