Blood Pact (McGarvey) (6 page)

Cabello and Huertas had come around from the front of the house, but they’d looked over their shoulder when Emilio had ordered them to find McGarvey.

“Alive if possible. But I don’t want any more casualties here. We’re getting out as soon as possible.
Hacer comprender?
”

“Sí,”
both men said.

“I think he means to come inside to finish what he started,” Huertas said.

“Not against four guns,” Miranda disagreed. “He’s a killer, but he’s not a fool. Our primary mission of taking Petain out has been accomplished. But if you can run McGarvey down before he gets back to his house—which I believe he means to do—you might be able to reason with him.”

“At gunpoint?” Huertas asked.

“It’s something a man such as he would understand. Now, fly away and do as you were trained to do. With finesse.”

“We need to call a doctor for you,” Donica said when the two men were gone.

“We’re not compromising the mission,” Miranda told her.

“You’ll die.”

“If the bullet had hit anything vital I’d be dead by now.”

“There’s a lot of blood.”

“Nothing arterial,” Miranda said. “I told you that McGarvey was a dangerous man. A killer. Just the sort we need to help us.”

“Impossible,” Donica protested. She was not in love with the older man, but she’d been on three missions with him, and she had developed a great deal of respect. “This situation has no upside unless McGarvey is eliminated.”

“We need to reason with him. Apologize for those two kids. He’s been involved in operations where he caused the same sort of collateral damage. And his wife and daughter were killed in an operation that was meant for him. He understands mistakes.”

It all sounded crazy to Donica. She felt as if she were losing her mind. “At what cost? How important is this diary? More than our lives?”

“Yes.”

“I’m just supposed to stay here and let you die?” she asked, and she could hear an hysterical note creeping into her voice. She wanted to cry. “This is crazy. Everything has changed now. The kids at the school. You. The bastard is stalking us, and if he’s as good as you say he is we won’t have a chance unless we surrender.”

“Prison,” Miranda said.

“I don’t care, Emilio. I’d rather go to jail than die. We’d be exchanged sooner or later as political prisoners.”

“No. We have the blood of the two students on our hands, and they have the death penalty in this country.”

“Then call our handler in Madrid. Tell him what has happened. Ask what we need to do.”

“I already have my orders. The fact that the Voltaire Society knows about him, and was willing to send a man from Paris to talk to him, makes McGarvey potentially the most dangerous man to Spain.”

“Then call for help to kill him.”

“First we’ll try reason,” Miranda said. “The soft touch.”

It was as if she was in a slow-moving avalanche; she knew that it was coming, she could hear it, feel it, and she knew what it would do to her, to them all, once it reached them. But she couldn’t convince him. He wouldn’t listen.

“It’s my duty now, since you are incapacitated, to call for instructions,” she said. She could hear the desperation in her voice. “I don’t want you to die like this.”

Miranda’s expression softened. “I know about your brother. Nothing you could have done to save him.”

Sudden grief nearly overcame her. “I promised our parents.”

“I saw the police file. He was shot running from a robbery.”

“I could have stopped him. He was only fifteen.”

“Sí,
but you can’t save the world.”

Donica lowered her head, her eyes closed, tears welling up. It wasn’t fair.

Miranda suddenly rose up on one elbow with a grunt, the pistol in his hand.

“Don’t,” McGarvey said from the hallway.

Donica opened her eyes and looked up at the same moment Miranda fired one shot, the bullet plowing into the edge of a kitchen cabinet, and McGarvey fired back, hitting Miranda in the forehead, killing him instantly.

NINE

Felix Huertas, who’d taken the north side of the house, had reached the open garage first and tried the knob but it was locked. He was a trim man of thirty-five, whose movie-star good looks and black slicked back air and aquiline nose had earned him the nickname of Rudolph—for the twenties movie star Rudolph Valentino. As he started to back off he was sure that he heard something very soft, but unmistakable. Someone had fired twice. Silenced pistols, maybe the same caliber.

A moment later Donica cried out in pain, and Huertas’s gut clutched.

Cabello appeared at the garage door. “No sign of him on the south side,” he said.

“He came this way and locked the door from the inside. But he’s got Donica.”

Cabello started to turn away, but Heurtas stopped him.

“It’s probably already too late. He has to know that we’re out here somewhere and he’s waiting for us.”

“But it’s Donica.”

“I know,” Huertas said, his heart aching, but at this point he had no idea what he should do.

“Are we just going to stand here?” Cabello demanded. “Or maybe run away like frightened schoolchildren?”

Huertas, who was number two on the mission, had the second of two sat phones. He called their handler, who was at a CNI safe house in Washington. “We have been compromised,” he said.

“What is the nature of it?” the senior agent asked. Huertas did not know his identity, nor had Miranda.

“Our primary target is down.”

“Yes, we know this.”

“Señor McGarvey has become a problem, for which I need immediate instructions.”

“Since it is you calling, I assume that Emilio is dead or incapacitated.”

“Sí,”
Huertas said, and he quickly related everything that had happened since the car bomb exploded not only killing Petain but two students, and McGarvey’s interference here.

“Is he still on the property?”

“Yes.”

“Are you alone?”

“I have Alberto.”

“Your primary mission is to kill Señor McGarvey, after which you will dismantle the surveillance equipment and physically remove every memory device. No traces must be left. Is that clear?”

“Emilio thought that McGarvey would listen to reason.”

“Shots were exchanged,” the handler said. “It is too late for reason. Kill him and get out of there. No other considerations. Do you understand?”

“What about bodies?”

The handler did not hesitate. “Leave them.”

“They’ll be traced to us.”

“That is not your consideration,” the handler said, and he was gone.

For a long moment Huertas listened for other sounds from inside the house, but there was nothing.

“What are our orders?” Cabello asked.

“We are to kill Mr. McGarvey, destroy the surveillance equipment, and leave,” Huertas said. Donica had been nothing more than a frolic, but he did care for her, and he hoped that she still lived. Emilio, on the other hand, had been a mentor from the start, almost a big brother.

“We’ll take the same way around back, catch the bastard in a cross fire,” Cabello said and started to turn away again, but again Huertas stopped him.

“Goddamnit, wait a minute. If you run back there blindly and get into a shoot-out, you’ll end up dead.”

“What the fuck do want to do, Rudy? Stay right here in the garage where it’s safe?”

“No, you little prick, but this time you’re going to use your head, and not make the same mistake Emilio made, by opening fire on the bastard. The guy is a pro, and we’re going to treat him as one.”

“What do you want to do, talk to him? Get him to see reason?”

“That’s exactly what I’m going to do, and when he shows himself you’re going to shoot him dead. But we’re going to move slowly and with care.”

TEN

McGarvey stood at the entrance to the poolside kitchen, listening to the sounds of the house, and of the young woman kneeling next to the dead man. She was sobbing, the noise mostly at the back of her throat, her narrow shoulders hunched, the nipples of her small breasts erect.

There were at least two other men on the property and it wouldn’t take them long to figure out that whatever was going on was happening at this end of the house.

“Why did Spanish intelligence send you here to spy on me?” he asked.

Donica didn’t look up or reply. She stared at Miranda’s eyes, which were still open, his mouth twisted in a grimace of pain and surprise. Blood had stopped leaking from the wound in his chest.

“What do you people want with me?” McGarvey said.

She shook her head. “He wanted to talk to you.”

“He shot at me by the pool.”

“To protect me.”

“Spare me.”

Donica looked up, grief stricken, yet there was something else in her eyes. “We came to ask for your help.”

“You came to kill a man who came to ask for my help, and in the process you killed two innocent young people.”

Donica looked at Miranda’s face. “He was sorry for it.”

“The man you killed told me that he was from the Voltaire Society. What do you know about it?”

“Nothing.”

“You were briefed. You’ve been here, watching me, for at least three weeks. You were expecting Petain to come to see me, and your mission brief was to kill him. Why? What is the Voltaire Society to the Spanish government?”

“You know damned well what it is. They want the same thing that we want—what’s rightfully ours.”

“The Vatican might have a different opinion.”

“They stole it from us,” Donica flared, but still there was something else going on.

“Your people stole it from the natives.”

“In exchange for civilization.”

McGarvey stood in the relative shadow at the end of the corridor from the formal dining room. The pool’s underwater lights were on, but the patio deck was in darkness, and the surrounding landscape was in even deeper shadow. “The Cubans want a piece of it.”

She laughed.

“What do you know about Jacob Ambli’s diary?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“According to Petain the Voltaire Society has had it since the mid-eighteen hundreds. But someone stole it from a bank vault in Bern. He was sent to ask for my help finding it.”

Donica said nothing.

“Supposedly it has the directions to four caches of gold and silver in southern New Mexico.”

“Seven,” Donica blurted angrily, but then, caught out, she looked away.

“You know damned well what I’m talking about,” McGarvey said. “But if your people don’t have the diary, who does? And why were you ordered to kill Petain in such a public way?”

Donica looked at Miranda’s face and she hung her head. “I’m just a field agent. I follow orders.”

“Orders to kill Petain. What about me? What orders were you given?”

She looked up. “We wanted to find out what Petain told you and convince you to help us instead.”

“What made you think that would ever happen?”

“The Society is your enemy, we aren’t.”

She was stalling for time, of course. McGarvey stepped a little farther back into the corridor. By now the other two CNI operatives had to be just outside. “The police are on their way, maybe we’ll wait and you can explain it to them.”

“You did not call them.”

“A friend did.”

“Señor Rencke at the CIA? But if you’d wanted the police to become involved you would have talked to them after the explosion. But there’ve been no warrants issued. No one is coming here.”

“A witness gave them a description of your car and the tag number, registered in the name of Juan Fernandez. They’ll trace it here, just like I did. I was faster because I have access to better computers.”

“Cristo!”
Donica suddenly cried. She fell forward onto Miranda’s body at the same time someone from just outside in the darkness called out.

“Señor McGarvey, we want to talk to you. No more shooting.”

Donica suddenly rose up, Miranda’s pistol awkwardly in her left hand, and began firing, the first three shots going wild.

McGarvey fired one shot, aiming it at her left shoulder, but at the last instant the woman moved in that direction and the bullet crashed into her neck just below her chin.

She sat back, dropped the pistol, and raised both hands to the wound, but she was drowning in her own blood and she knew that there was nothing to be done. She opened her mouth to say something, but couldn’t speak.

“Goddamnit,” McGarvey shouted. “What’s wrong with you people? All this for some treasure?”

ELEVEN

Huertas was just left of the open slider, his back pressed against the stucco cement block wall, his pistol in both hands raised to chest level. Cabello was a couple of feet away, his pistol also up.

The night was very still, only the sounds of the pool pump around the corner.

“It is more than just the money, you must know that,” Huertas called. “It’s our cultural heritage. That’s all we want.”

“A heritage that your people stole, and now five more lives have been lost because of it,” McGarvey replied. “When will it end?”

“The start will be here, tonight, if you will listen to me,” Heurtas said. “You cannot believe how important this is.”

“There was no real reason for this. The gold and silver, if it exists, is buried on U.S. soil. Your government can make a claim through the court system, just as it has done in the past. There was never any need for what happened today.”

“We can’t simply turn our backs on the situation and walk away.”

“That’s exactly what you’re going to do.”

“If we refuse?” Heurtas asked.

“Then you will die here,” McGarvey said.

“Or you will die, Señor. And perhaps you might ask yourself why.”

“The two kids at the college.”

“This is not your fight,” Heurtas said. He took a quick look around the corner then ducked back out of sight. Donica was down, next to Emilio, her chest covered in blood. He had an instant vision of her two months ago back in Madrid while they were training for this operation. They’d taken a room in a hotel off base because no one was supposed to be together during an assignment, but they’d not been able to keep their hands off each other.