Blood Pact (McGarvey) (35 page)

It identified him as Fr. Robert Talbot, a special emissary from the Pope. Otto had been given a similar passport with his photo under the work name Fr. Bruce Ringers, also a Papal emissary.

“Three murders overnight in Seville in addition to the riot on the streets,” Otto said, looking up.

“Not unusual for a city that size,” McGarvey said.

“A husband stabbed his wife and the man he found in bed with her then called the police. And two hours ago an old woman was found dead in her bed by one of the neighbors. At first they thought she’d died of a heart attack, but when the ambulance crew arrived to pick up the body they found that her neck had been broken.”

“A burglary?”

“The woman was the manager in the building where Dr. Vergilio has an apartment.”

“Montessier,” McGarvey said.

“Looking for the cipher key in the doctor’s apartment. If he found it he’ll be gone by now.”

“
If
he found it,” McGarvey said, and he tried telephoning María but she didn’t answer.

Otto was watching. “Are you trying to reach her?”

“She’s not answering.”

Otto pulled up one of his computer programs that linked with a powerful telephone search engine at the National Security Agency, entered María’s number, and a half minute later her phone came up. “It’s switched on, but she probably has it on mute.”

“Could be she’s in the Archives right now and doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

“We’ll ask her,” Otto said, and he entered a couple of commands on his virtual keyboard, and a couple of seconds later her phone started ringing.

After four rings it went to voice mail.

Otto sent another set of commands and María’s phone started ringing again. “She’s at the Archives, but not on the ground floor, I think. The altitude function doesn’t work very well for small elevations.”

María’s phone went dead. She’d shut off the power.

“Insistent, isn’t she,” Otto said, and he sent another set of commands, switching her phone back on. “This time she’ll have to pull out the battery to shut down.”

The call went through and this time María answered on the second ring. “Who is this?” she demanded in Spanish.

“It’s me,” McGarvey said. “We have to talk right now.”

“I’m in the middle of a situation.”

“You’re in Doctor Vergilo’s office on the second floor of the Archives, but unless someone is pointing a gun at your head we need to talk. Now.”

“Just a minute.”

“This isn’t something that you need to keep from her, so put it on speaker phone. Otto is here with me.”

“Where are you?”

“Should be in Gibraltar in a couple of hours, and Seville an hour or so later. Make it six or seven.”

“Otto might get past passport control, but you won’t.”

“Both of us will. Can Doctor Vergilio hear my voice?”

“Yes,” the woman answered. She sounded subdued.

“Has Colonel León told you about Bernard Montessier, the man who we think managed to get his hands on Ambli’s diary?”

“Yes. He came to my office this morning and identified himself as a Paul Harris, a British writer of historical fiction. We checked him out on Google and he seemed legitimate to me.”

“We don’t know what his real name is, but he is an assassin, hired by a third party who wants the diary and the cipher key.”

“I know nothing about any such key. I’ve already told Colonel León as much.”

“If you told that to this guy, he almost certainly believes that you are lying. Have you heard from him again?”

“No.”

Otto was monitoring the call, and he’d brought up another of his sophisticated programs, this one a stress measure algorithm. He turned to McGarvey and shook his head.

“You’re lying, Doctor,” McGarvey said. “This man will not hesitate to kill you. This morning he killed the woman who managed your apartment building.”

“My God,” Dr. Vergilio said. “Why? There was no reason for it.”

“He needed to search your apartment and he wanted no witnesses. What did he find there?”

“Nothing.”

“Literally nothing?” McGarvey insisted.

“Nothing,” she repeated.

Otto hit a key on his computer. “How about the laptop with the book you’re writing about the diary and the key?” he asked reasonably.

“I keep it with me—” Dr. Vergilio said, realizing her mistake immediately.

“I think that he’s contacted you again, and told you that he had the diary and he would share it with you if you would provide the key.”

“Cristo,”
she said softly. “He called and told me that the diary was coming by courier tonight—sometime between six and ten. He wants to meet me across the street in the Cathedral.”

“You agreed?”

“It may be impossible. The police are expecting another mob of rioters tonight.”

“But you agreed to the meeting?”

“Yes.”

“To which you will bring the cipher key?”

“I do not have such a key,” she said.

McGarvey gave Otto a questioning look, but Otto shrugged. It was impossible to tell if she had lied.

“He’ll expect it,” McGarvey said. “Are you willing to risk your life?”

“I don’t give a damn about some treasure buried in your desert, though Madrid is desperate. I want the historical record. I want completion of something I’ve worked my entire life on. Do you understand scholarship, Señor McGarvey? Do you know what it means to have questions without answers? Have you any conception about the moment of discovery—when you find a glimmer, just a hint of something that could possibly point you in the right direction? Do you know the meaning of ecstasy? Or its opposite, that of profound loss?”

“I do.”

“Then how can you ask if I’m willing to risk my life? Of course I am.”

“For what gain?” Otto asked.

“Knowledge,” Vergilio said.

“María, are you armed?” McGarvey asked.

“No. I didn’t think there was any need.”

“Tonight, if we are late, I want you and the doctor to lose yourselves in the mob. Don’t try to barricade yourself inside the Archives. It won’t work. This guy is too good. If he could crack a bank vault, he certainly won’t have any trouble getting inside a museum.”

“If we give him what he thinks is real, he’ll give us the diary—or at least a copy.”

María was playing both ends against the middle. It was obvious to McGarvey. She had her own agenda, her own intel, and she’d come to the states for no other reason than to use whoever she could to get to this point. No way was she going to back off now.

“We’ll be there as soon as we can,” McGarvey said, and he broke the connection.

“She’s lying,” Otto said. “But Doctor Vergilio wasn’t at the end.”

“Doesn’t matter,” McGarvey replied, resigned. “They’ve got a real chance of getting themselves killed tonight.”

SIXTY-FIVE

Al-Rashid drove across the river, and headed south into the commercial section of the city, with its docks and cargo ships in sight of the soaring Puente del V Centenario looming over the railroad swing bridge that squatted over the water. He’d plugged the address he’d been given by one of his contacts in Madrid into the car’s GPS and followed the directions to a small building in the warehouse district.

The types of men he’d dealt with over his career—the ones who could supply weapons, explosives, or just about anything else illegal under the laws of most countries—always seemed to live in the seedier sections of any big city, where anonymity was easy to come by. They were almost always under the radar and nearly impossible to find unless you knew where to look.

He parked in the rear and went through a steel door into a large workroom, about twice the size of a two-car garage. Workbenches and power tools and supplies—everything from lengths of steel pipe, rebar, rolls of wire, and bins of miscellaneous nuts, bolts, screws, and other odd bits—filled nearly every available square foot of floor space. Along a back wall were four tall metal cabinets secured with large combination locks, and in a corner two very large gun safes.

Stairs went up to a balcony on the second floor. A short man with an enormous belly, wearing filthy jeans and a black leather vest, tattoos covering most of his chest and arms, came out of a door, a shotgun in his hand.

“Who the fuck are you, and what the fuck are you doing here?” he said in guttural Spanish.

“A man with money come to purchase something from you. A friend in Madrid gave me this address.”

“Who is this man?”

“Señor Garbajosa, and he warned me that although you could help, to watch my ass because you are a cheating son of a bitch.”

“Did he give you my name?”

“The Supplier.”

The man laughed. “Son of a bitch.” He came down the stairs, the shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm. “You may call me Miguel, for now. Let me see your passport.”

Al-Rashid handed it over, and Miguel stepped back just out of reach and briefly looked at it. “Paul Harris. You sound like a Brit, but this is a forgery. Damned good, but a fake nevertheless. Is your money counterfeit as well? I would not be happy if it was. I would have to kill you and fence the bills for whatever I could get. Not my specialty.”

“American dollars.”

Miguel nodded. He returned the passport, and held out his hand.

Al-Rashid took a one-hundred-dollar bill from his jacket pocket and handed it over.

Miguel stepped back again and raised the bill to the light so that he could examine the water marks, leaving himself open for just a moment, long enough for al-Rashid to step to the left and snatch the shotgun.

“You bastard,” Miguel said.

“I don’t like guns pointed at me,” al-Rashid said. He unloaded the shotgun, tossed the shells across the room, and laid the weapon on the workbench to his left. “Nor do I like the men who do the pointing. Do we understand each other?”

After a moment, Miguel pocketed the bill and nodded. “What do you want?”

“A handgun, semiautomatic, no lighter than nine millimeter. A silencer, and three magazines of ammunition.”

“Do you have a preference? A Glock? A SIG? I can give you a Beretta. It’s only nine millimeter, but it’s accurate and easily suppressed.”

“The Beretta will do. And I’ll need four one-kilo bricks of Semtex and pencil fuses. And an accelerant, but not liquid.”

“You’re going to destroy something, then to make sure you’re going to burn it down, and you’re expecting some resistance.”

Al-Rashid shrugged.

“The Guardia will be all over this, so I’ll need to know what you’re going to hit, when, and why?”

“It’ll be tonight, downtown, during the riot. But that’s all you need to know.”

“I have to cover my own ass.”

“Do you have what I need?”

A shrewd look came into the man’s eyes. “That will depend on the money.”

“Name a price.”

“Fifty thousand.”

“Do you have what I need?”

“Do you agree to my price?”

“Actually I was prepared to pay more, but you haven’t answered my question.”

“Normally an order like that, especially during these difficult times, could take several days, up to a week. But you want these items this evening.”

“I’ll be here at seven.”

“Sixty thousand.”

“Seventy-five thousand,” al-Rashid said. He pulled two banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills from his jacket pocket, and laid them on the workbench beside the shotgun. “Ten thousand as a down payment. I’ll bring the rest this evening.”

“Agreed,” Miguel said without hesitation.

Al-Rashid turned and started to leave, but then turned back. “Do not cross me, Señor Meolans. I found you here, I could find you anywhere.”

If the man was surprised that al-Rashid knew his real name, he didn’t let on. He glanced at the money on the workbench. “Seven sharp,” he said.

*   *   *

Back at his suite in the Gran Meliá Colón, al-Rashid ordered a couple of Heinekens and a small plate of tapas for a late lunch. While he waited for room service to arrive he phoned Prince Saleh.

“Any word on Halberstrom?”

“He’s disappeared. Where are you?”

“I’m getting ready to leave Seville tonight. It’s too bad your people didn’t find the American. I would have liked to know why he suddenly started asking about you.”

“Do you have the key?”

“I will by this evening.”

“And then you will bring it to me,” Prince Saleh said.

“Of course,” al-Rashid said, and he hung up. He went out on the balcony that looked down on the busy Calle Canalejas, and watched the traffic. The hallmark of his tradecraft had been precision from the beginning. Attention to details. Awareness of even the smallest, most insignificant of details. The stray van parked across the street, the Vespa in his rearview mirror, a man’s eyes—the way they looked, what they were seeing, and the reactions in them.

Not many men in his profession—what he had come to accept as a fixer, which was a more civilized term than assassin—lived to retire. He had set aside something under forty million euros, and his retirement was something he had thought about for the past several years. But each year the prince had come up with something new, something needing fixing, and he’d always been generous with his rewards.

Time to get out now? he wondered. Already the risks he had taken were mounting to unacceptable levels. And tonight the situation could easily spin out of control.

One last fix, and then he would leave.

But it was the dark-haired woman he’d seen going into the Archives that bothered him. The Voltaires, he understood. The CNI of course, along with McGarvey and the CIA, also were understandable.

Which left who?

The room service waiter came. Al-Rashid signed for the bill, added a few euros in cash, and when the man was gone, he called for his car to be brought around, and he went downstairs.

SIXTY-SIX

María rode pillion on Dr. Vergilio’s Vespa back to the apartment building. The uniformed police were still there, along with an evidence van and several plainclothes detectives. They were stopped at the open gate.

“You may not enter,” a cop told them.

“I live here,” Dr. Vergilio said. “What has happened?”