Blood Pact (McGarvey) (28 page)

“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 brought 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.

“You may be right,” Saleh said. “And if such is the case I will deal with it out here.” He turned back. “It still leaves us with the incident in France. It must never be traced back to us. It was suggested that you disappear permanently.”

“That can be arranged, if you wish it, my Prince. But it would leave you without my services.”

“There are others with your skills.”

“No,” al-Rashid said simply. “If that were actually the case you would have ordered my death sometime ago. And even now you know that I tell you the truth no matter how disagreeable it may be to you.” He smiled faintly. “In fact I may be the only man in the kingdom who does so. And without truth, you could not exist.”

Saleh paused again for several long beats. “You can never return to France. Not to Marseille.”

Al-Rashid was stunned. Among the very first lines of defense he’d created for himself was his background story as a French businessman with a home in Marseille. No one was to know for sure where he went to ground between assignments.

He had salted away a reasonable fortune of something more than twenty-five million euros that would, if the need arose, be enough to change his identity and hide for the remainder of his life. He would have to become frugal, but he knew that he could manage.

If the need did arise, his first act would be to kill the prince, but for now he kept any of those thoughts from changing his expression.

“The French will stop looking eventually, and classify the crime scene for what it appeared to be: the doorman attempted to rape Mademoiselle Laurent, who called for her lover’s help. When he arrived they had a falling out as lovers often do under extreme stress, and either the vice mayor killed her and then committed suicide, or it was the other way around. Sloppy, certainly, but the French have had experience with love triangles gone bad.”

Saleh eyed him coldly. “You will make a mistake one day.”

“Perhaps. But I accomplished more than that in Paris, which was what led me to the woman and her lover.”

“So you have said. But you did not find the cipher key without which the diary is useless to me.”

“No, but I have a very good idea where I may find it.”

“Back in Switzerland?”

“That is a possibility I’ll leave to the last.”

“Not back to Paris?”

“To the Archives of the Indies in Seville, where all the records of the Spanish plunder of the New World are kept. They were as bad as the Nazis; they kept records of all their slaughters.”

“You mean to go to this archives where someone will tell you how to find the cipher key?”

“It will not be that easy because I don’t believe that even they know they have it.”

“You’re making no sense,” the prince warned. “And I am certainly not going to authorize or pay for you to go on some wild-goose chase that has the likelihood of turning into another international incident that may get back to the family.”

Al-Rashid had considered the possibility that even the prince might get cold feet, and he had worked out another set of options for himself. A few billion euros did not mean much to Saleh. But it was a considerable sum of money that was of interest to the Spanish government as well as to the so-called Voltaire Society, either of whom might be willing to pay a considerable finder’s fee under the right circumstances.

“I’m at your service, my Prince,” al-Rashid said at length.

“Yes, you are, at the service of the Kingdom who paid for your training and your education. It is we who created you.”

It came to al-Rashid that whatever message the cousin had brought from Abdullah must have been a strong one for Saleh to have made such a sudden about-face. Evidently the prince was good, but he had probably been told that he was not indispensible. He was passing the warning along.

“What about the diary and the cipher code?”