Blood Pact (McGarvey) (37 page)

“Just one, Señor Harris, about twenty minutes ago. Would you like to hear it?”

“Yes, please.” The prince would have called his cell phone, not the hotel.

The voice was unmistakably that of an American. An old friend, he said, but al-Rashid didn’t know who it could be, until the key was mentioned.

“… would like to meet with him for drinks sometime this evening. Here in the hotel.”

“Shall I say, a time?” the operator asked.

“Let’s say, eight. Tell him I have the key. He’ll understand.”

It suddenly came to al-Rashid that it was Kirk McGarvey, who had most likely got the Harris name from Dr. Vergilio, but the Americans knew that he was in this hotel too soon.

“Will there be anything else, señor?”

“No,” al-Rashid said, and he headed outside and went down the block and around the corner to an underground parking garage where he’d left the BMW, preferring to keep it there rather than with the valet for just such a circumstance.

Leaving the ramp he crossed to the broad Calle de San Pablo, and from there crossed the river on the Isabell II bridge and reached the Port of Seville’s warehouse district fifteen minutes later, well before the time of his appointment with the arms supplier Miguel Meolans.

He parked a half block away pulling between several stacks of shipping containers, rising twenty-five feet or more. The area was nearly deserted, which he found odd, unless the dock workers were heading toward the Murillo Gardens for tonight’s riot. It made sense because it was the working man who was bearing the brunt of the austerity measures.

He telephoned Dr. Vergilio at her office. “Do you know who this is?”

“Yes, do you have it?” she asked. She sounded excited.

“I’m on my way to pick it up now. Has the crowd begun to gather yet?”

“A few people are showing up, but the police are already here. Why don’t you come to my office?”

“No. We will meet at nine across the street in the Cathedral.”

“It may be too dangerous,” Dr. Vergilio objected, but al-Rashid cut her off.

“For you, if you do not bring the cipher key.”

“That wasn’t our agreement.”

“It is now. And, Adriana, do not tell anyone—not the policeman you spoke with outside of your apartment, and especially not Mr. McGarvey who is at the same hotel where I am staying.”

“There was no reason for you to kill my building manager to merely search my apartment,” Dr. Vergilio shot back angrily. “You found nothing, because nothing is there.”

“You took your laptop with you. Really very clever. Bring it tonight.”

“I do not have the cipher key.”

“You’re lying, of course. But tell me who the attractive dark-haired woman is? The one who was with you this morning at your apartment?”

“Just a friend.”

“Trust me, if something goes wrong, no matter what, I will kill you. The only reason you’re not dead yet is because you have access to the key. But I still have the diary, and if you won’t cooperate I’ll find someone to decrypt the thing. Who is the woman?”

Another woman came on. “My name is María León, I’m a colonel in Cuba’s intelligence service, and I’m here for the same reason you are. Is it possible that we could make a deal?”

Who she was did not come as a very big surprise. “What do you have that I might need?”

“Kirk McGarvey and his friend Otto Rencke, who is the special projects director with the CIA. I’m here with them, and I can divert them from you.”

“There is no need.”

“If you believe that, Mr. Harris, then you would be making the greatest mistake of your life.”

Al-Rashid chuckled. “You sound as if you are in love with him.”

“Puta,”
she swore.

He’d hit a mark, which did come as a surprise. “I have the diary, Dr. Vergilio has the cipher key, and you promise to divert McGarvey in exchange for what?”

“A copy of the journal and of the key. Some of that treasure belongs to us, and my government means to claim it in the international courts. To do that we need proof of its existence in the United States.”

“Nine o’clock across the street in the Cathedral,” al-Rashid said. “And Colonel?”

“Sí?”

“If McGarvey is anywhere close I will kill you.”

Al-Rashid shut off his cell phone, and headed around the corner to the rear of the building where the arms dealer had his office, workshop, and possibly even his apartment on the upper level. The trash-filled alley was barely wide enough for a forklift to pass, and in any event the warehouses here were more or less off the beaten path, away from the more up-to-date bonded facilities.

The battered old steel door was unlocked and al-Rashid went in, finding himself to the left of the gun safes, just beneath the wooden stairs up to the balcony. One of them was open, and from where he stood he saw a dozen or more assault rifles in racks from the middle up, and twice as many pistols below. Shelves on the bottom two feet contained boxes of ammunition, and a couple of bins the contents of which he couldn’t make out.

The shop was mostly in darkness, the only light coming from outside through a row of dirty windows near the ceiling. But there was enough for him to spot a man on either side of the front door, their backs to him. Neither of them was Meolans.

Al-Rashid crept to the open gun safe where he picked out an old Generation One Glock 17 pistol, and a box of 9 mm ammunition, and keeping his eyes on the two men loaded the weapon’s seventeen-round magazine by feel. When he was finished he slammed the magazine into the handle and racked the slide back.

The men at the door turned, pistols in their hands, and al-Rashid fired five times, shoving both men backward against the front wall in sprays of blood.

The silence afterward was gloomy.

“I thought that you might try to rob me,” al-Rashid said. “But now that the odds have been evened, I still need the things I contracted for.”

He figured that the arms dealer was upstairs on the balcony, shotgun in hand just like earlier today.

“I have the remaining sixty-five thousand dollars, if we can come to an arrangement.”

“Your things are on the table in the middle of the room,” Meolans said from directly above. “Leave the money, and take them.”

Al-Rashid fired seven rounds up into the balcony floor, walking the rounds left and right.

Meolans cried out twice and fell to the floor with a heavy thud.

Al-Rashid waited for a full half minute until blood began dripping from the holes in the floor, and then went cautiously out to the stairs and took them slowly up to the landing.

Meolans lay on his side, the shotgun a couple of feet away, blood streaming from an oblique wound in his chest, and from two in his groin. He was in a great deal of pain, yet he tried to reach for a pistol in his belt beneath his leather vest.

“Actually it’s a bloody wonder that you lasted this long in the business,” al-Rashid said, and shot him in the forehead at nearly point-blank range.

He went back downstairs, wiped the pistol clean, and laid it on one of the workbenches. The Beretta, silencer, spare magazines, and the Semtex and pencil fuses had been set out in a neat row, along with two clear plastic bags, each about the size of a small loaf of bread filled with a coarse gray powder. The bags were marked “Mg.” Magnesium dust that burned with an intense white light. The perfect nonliquid accelerant.

But Meolans had laid out the things only for show, for bait, because he’d not provided anything to carry the things in.

It only took al-Rashid a couple of minutes to find an old canvas haversack into which he loaded the things after first checking the pistol to make sure that its firing pin hadn’t been removed, the bullets to make sure they were not blanks, and the Semtex and fuses to make sure that they were genuine.

He checked at the front door to make certain that no one was coming to find out about the gunshots, and then let himself out and went back to his car.

He would be on the road before ten this evening, heading for the border with Portugal. By morning he would be in the air for Jeddah, a man finally wealthy enough to disappear.

Before he drove off he made a call to a contact in the CNI.

SIXTY-NINE

McGarvey let Otto drive the rental Fiat 500L, but as he had expected the crowds radiating out from the Murillo gardens made it impossible to get any closer than a couple of blocks from the Archives. They pulled down a narrow side street and parked with two wheels up on the sidewalk.

“I want you to get down to the Archives as quickly as you can,” McGarvey said. “But don’t take any chances, do you understand?”

Otto nodded. He was a computer genius, not a field officer, and had never pretended to be one.

“If you get into a situation that looks dicey, make a one eighty and get the hell out of there.”

“Where will you be?”

“Around. But so will Montessier. I want you to try to talk Vergilio out of meeting with him. But no matter what goes down, I want her out of the Archives. Anywhere but there or the Cathedral.”

“What if she refuses?”

“Get the hell out of there and call me.”

“How about María? She has her own agenda, which means she’ll do whatever it takes to get the diary and the key. She’s already got a deal with the doctor, but she might try to make another deal with Montessier. And you know damned well that she’s armed. Probably got a gun from her people at the Cuban consulate here.”

“I’m counting on it. With any luck she’ll provide a diversion for me.”

They were standing by the car, a few people passing by on foot, a couple of them holding signs protesting cuts in teachers’ salaries. They seemed determined, even angry.

“Whatever you do don’t push her,” McGarvey warned emphatically. “You know what she’s capable of. Deliver your message, and then get the hell out of there with or most likely without Vergilio. Whatever happens call me.”

They separated in the next block, Otto heading directly toward the Archives while McGarvey angled around to the Alcazar fortress, which was a massive Moorish castle that nowadays served as a part-time residence of the royal family. It, along with the Cathedral and the Archives, made up a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The gathering crowd flowed around the buildings, gathering on the narrow streets that were blocked by the police to motor traffic surrounding them. No one seemed to be in charge of the mob, and there was no sense of a front line. But many of the people chanted the same slogan—something to the effect of returning to the old days—thus the second night of gathering in the city’s historical district.

Most of the sidewalk cafés were still open for business, though the antiques stores and souvenir shops were closed, their metal security shutters down. Young people were crowding around a fountain in one of the small plazas; some of them sat on painted tile benches and played guitars. Just like those in the cafés, the people not on the streets marching were observers not participants.

McGarvey more or less went with the flow of the crowd until he found a spot at a café within sight of the Cathedral and the Archives, just in time to see Otto show up and go inside.

He was one row of tables back and in a corner under an awning as much in the shadows as possible. It would be difficult for someone passing on the street, or even someone nearby in the Cathedral or at one of the windows in the Archives, to spot him. But he could almost feel the presence of Montessier, who planned on meeting Dr. Vergilio sometime this evening. The guy was a pro; he would show up early to make sure that the opposition hadn’t taken up positions to wait for him.

But from what little McGarvey knew of the woman, and from what he knew about María he didn’t think that any force on earth would stop them from making the rendezvous. And it was almost certain that María would be the one hiding in the shadows to wait for him. If she did it, it was very likely that she would get herself and the doctor killed.

Unless Otto could talk some sense into them.

The waiter came and he ordered an espresso. Two minutes after he got his coffee his phone chirped.

“Otto?”

“No, Monsieur McGarvey, this is not your associate Monsieur Rencke, but my name is no importance, except I am on the board of directors of the Voltaire Society, and since you are in Seville I assume that you are on the track of the man who managed to acquire the diary. For that we wish you
bon chance
.”

“The vice mayor was a member?”

“The woman was. And as you have found out our office in the banking district was a sham, nor did Madame Petain and her son have any importance to the Society.”

“How did you get this number?”

“We have contacts in the United States, but believe me when I assure you that we are not your enemy.”

“Neither am I your friend,” McGarvey said. “The diary you claim is yours was stolen from the Catholic Church.”

“Yes, the Order, who meant to plunder the fortune for itself.”

“A fortune that doesn’t belong to them or to you.”

“Who then?”

“Native Americans and Caribs.”

“Almost all of whom are an extinct people. To whom do you suggest the treasure belongs today? The Church who stole it from Spain? Spain who stole it from the natives?”

“Or you?” McGarvey asked.

“Yes, us. Because we have done good with it, and will continue to do good providing the Saudis do not get their hands on the diary and the cipher key and plunder it first.”

“What does Saudi Arabia have to do with this?”

“The man you have identified as Bernard Montessier and who I presume you’ve traced to his travels to and from Jeddah, we think works for a member of the Saudi Royal family. He is a finance minister, who controls an immense amount of wealth, and not merely from oil revenues, but from other dealings in the international arena. He would like to get his hands on the treasure; it is why, we suspect, that he contracted Montessier to find the diary and the cipher key.”

“Do you know Montessier’s real name?”

“Unfortunately we have not been able to learn it, though by now you must realize that he is a professional, and a ruthless man. If he manages to get the diary and the key there will be little we could do to stop him. At that point it would be up to your government.”