Authors: David Hagberg
McGarvey was on him in three steps, kicking the empty gun away, and immediately the Cuban understood that he had lost, and though he was in pain, he laid his head back.
“Qué?”
“You’re going home, a cripple, but probably a hero. Mission accomplished. But if you return, for any reason at all, I’ll kill you. Understand?”
“Sí.”
“Medic!” McGarvey shouted, and he got on the phone to General Bogan.
EIGHTY-THREE
Unlike the other vaults, which were compartmentalized almost like hardened cubicles in a very large office, vault C was a big room behind a massive door that swung ponderously outward, a metal ramp sliding into place over the thirty-inch gap in the concrete floor.
The ten combination holders, four of them women, all of them fifty or older, most of them dressed in ordinary business clothes even though it was the middle of the night on a weekend, and all of them anonymous, had entered their personnel data into the computer system on the ground floor. To reach the actual vault, they went through the same procedure three more times, and were subjected to hand and retinal scans.
More than gold was and had been stored here at one time or another, including the original Declaration of Independence and Constitution during WWII, the reserves of several European countries, jewels given to American soldiers to keep them out of Soviet hands, one of four known copies of the Magna Carta, and before the invention of synthetic painkillers a vast supply of processed morphine and opium, in case our supplies of raw opium were to be interrupted.
When the door was fully opened, the two Mint cops who had accompanied the group stepped aside to let McGarvey and Martínez cross the ramp.
The room, a box actually of reinforced concrete and steel brightly lit with fluorescent fixtures recessed in the ceiling, measuring about twenty feet on a side, was totally empty and spotlessly clean except for a light coating of dust on the floor.
Martínez had gone first and left footprints. There was no treasure here, and nothing had been in this room for a long time, at least twenty or thirty years.
McGarvey started to laugh, and Martínez turned back to him.
“Where is it?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” McGarvey said.
Martínez looked again at the empty space. “Did it ever exist?”
“The gold and other stuff they found in Victorio Peak existed. Otto established that much. And it was moved.”
“But not here.”
McGarvey turned and looked at the Mint cops, whose expressions were neutral, and then to the combination holders, none of whom seemed the least bit surprised.
“Are you satisfied, Mr. McGarvey?” one of the women asked.
“Where is it?”
“If you’re talking about our gold reserves, some of it is here in the depository while a slightly larger amount—about five thousand metric tonnes—is stored in a vault beneath the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But if you mean some mythical Spanish treasure dug up somewhere in New Mexico, it does not exist here.”
“We could look inside the other vaults.”
“Yes, you could,” the woman said reasonably. “But still you would not find your treasure.”
“What do I tell the crowd?” Martínez asked.
“The truth, that it’s not here.”
“Or the truth, that it doesn’t exist, or never did?”
“Oh, it’s somewhere, tell them that,” McGarvey said. “And tell them that we’ll just have to keep looking.”
* * *
“It could have been good,” Martínez said before he went to talk to the people and to the media.
When McGarvey got to the dispensary, Otto was already out of bed and getting dressed, a thick bandage on the side of his head. He was worried.
“Louise doesn’t answer her cell phone, and no one in the Building can reach her.”
“Call security,” McGarvey said, but Otto shook his head.
“María León disappeared, and a passenger by the name of Ines Delgado flew to Atlanta last night, and caught the last flight to Washington, which landed just before one this morning. Delgado is the name she used to get out of Cuba.”
“There’s no reason to her to go to the McLean house.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Otto said. Anyway, this is something you and I have to handle. We get security or the Bureau involved, it could end up in a shoot-out. I’m counting on you, big-time, Kirk.”
“Call our pilot,” McGarvey said.
“Already have.”
EIGHTY-FOUR
It was nine in the morning by the time they touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, borrowed a plain blue Ford Taurus motor pool car and, McGarvey driving, headed the thirty miles on the Capital Beltway to McLean. Otto hadn’t said much on the flight, except to try Louise twice without luck before they touched down.
“Keep trying,” McGarvey said when they crossed the river to Alexandria.
“I’m afraid,” Otto said. “She’s the only woman in my entire life who ever loved me for who I was. All the warts and dirty sweatshirts, even my Twinkies and heavy cream.”
“You’re not going to lose her, because the colonel wants the gold so that she can go home a redeemed apparatchik, and she knows that won’t happen if she does something to Louise,” McGarvey said. “And she knows that I would hunt her down and kill her, priority one. Try again.”
Louise answered on the first ring, and relief and joy spread across Otto’s face. He put the call on speakerphone. “We were worried about you. Are you okay?”
“Just dandy,” Louise answered, her voice obviously strained. “Where are you?”
“On the Beltway, maybe twenty minutes away.”
“Is Mac with you?”
“He’s driving, and you’re on speakerphone.”
“Just a minute,” Louise said, and the sound changed. “You’re on speakerphone, too. Mac, someone wants to talk to you.”
“Colonel León, I expect,” McGarvey said.
“We’ve been watching CNN,” María said. “No gold in Texas and none in Kentucky. Where is it?”
“I don’t know, but we’re still looking.”
“I want answers.” María’s voice rose a little. She sounded ragged. “I’ve come too far to go home empty-handed.”
“I think that we need to talk about that, figure out what’s best for all of us—because making it a DI mission to keep kidnapping the same woman won’t work.”
“Got your attention. It’s all I want.”
“Stand by, Louise, we’re almost there,” McGarvey said.
“We’re in the kitchen having some of your cognac—” Louise said, but the connection was broken.
“What do you think?” Otto asked.
“She’s running scared. If she goes home empty-handed, she’ll face a firing squad. If she stays here, she’ll spend the rest of her life in prison.”
“What’re her options?”
“She only has one,” McGarvey said. “Talk to us.”
* * *
It was Monday morning, and McLean’s residential streets were quiet, everyone was either at work or in school. Nothing moved on the cul-de-sac that backed into Bryn Mawr Park, and McGarvey pulled into the driveway of the Renckes’ secondary safe house and after a moment or two switched off the engine.
“Concentrate on Louise,” he told Otto. “Let me do the talking, and if you see an opening just bug out of the line of fire with her.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
McGarvey turned on him. “You’ll goddamn follow orders for once,” he said harshly. “I’m not losing any more people I care about.
Capisce?
”
Chastised, Otto nodded, and the two of them got out of the car and walked up to the house. The front door was unlocked, and McGarvey pushed it open with the toe of his shoe as he drew his pistol.
The place was deathly still.
“We’re here,” McGarvey called out.
“In the kitchen,” Louise responded.
“What’s your situation?”
“Pistol on the table. I think it’s a compact Glock.”
“Coming in,” McGarvey said, and taking the lead, his pistol pointed down at his side, he moved down the hall, where he stopped at the open doorway.
“Good morning, Kirk,” María said, making no move for the pistol on the table in front of her. She looked disheveled, as if she hadn’t slept in a couple of days, which she probably hadn’t.
“Pick up the gun, Louise,” McGarvey said, but María snatched it up first and switched the safety off.
“I can’t allow that,” she said. Her pistol was pointed a little to the left, not at Louise or at McGarvey, but she was wired.
“Will you allow Louise to leave the kitchen?”
“No. For the moment, she’s my only bargaining chip.”
The kitchen was large, with a lot of big windows that overlooked an expansive backyard with a swing set and elaborate-looking children’s play station, or gym, with slides and bars and even a tree house of sorts. McGarvey could see Audie playing here, and he could hear her laughter. And he was finally beginning to see himself back in the picture.
He stepped the rest of the way into the kitchen, and María stiffened when she saw he was holding a gun. But moving slowly, he holstered the Walther under his jacket at the small of his back and then sat down at the table across from her. Otto came in a moment later and sat down next to his wife, and put an arm around her shoulder.
“Okay?” he asked.
Louise was looking at his bandage. “They were a lousy shot, thank God.”
“You came here to get my attention,” McGarvey said. “What’s next?”
“Where’s the treasure?”
“I don’t know if we’ll ever find out.”
“But it exists.”
“I’m almost certain of it,” McGarvey said. “But none of it will ever get to Havana, at least not to the government.”
“Which you think you can bring down.”
“Not me alone,” McGarvey said.
María nodded. “You are a man at once formidable and
pavoroso
.”
“What?”
“She means fearful,” Louise said, and she looked at María. “You can’t imagine the half of it.”
“Yes, I can.”
“So I’ll ask again, what’s next?” McGarvey said.
“If you don’t know where the treasure lies, or are unwilling reveal it, then there is nothing left for me.”
“Nothing in Havana, but if you agree to be extensively debriefed on DI operations and long-range planning, something might be worked out. Maybe a plea bargain.”
But María was shaking her head, a sudden infinite sadness in her large dark eyes. “I could never do such a thing, never stay here for the rest of my life in or out of jail.” She looked out the windows at the swing set. “I am what I am. A product of my genes and my upbringing, my training. I’m a Cuban, and the only man who ever wrote that he loved me was my father.”
For a long time her statement seemed to hold in the air, but then she turned again and smiled wistfully.
“You are a formidable and
pavoroso
man among men, Kirk McGarvey. In another time and place, under different circumstances, I could have loved you more than my country. More than my life itself.”
“Whatever you do next, just no more killing, no more blood,” McGarvey said. “Something can be worked out.”
María got to her feet. “Give me the keys to your car.”
“They’re in the ignition.”
“If you try to follow me, or send the police after me, I’ll defend myself. And I am a very good shot.”
“I’m sure you are.”
She gave him another long, searching look and then, keeping her pistol trained in their general direction, backed out of the kitchen and disappeared down the front hall and out the door.
“Aren’t you going after her?” Otto demanded.
McGarvey shook his head, and it seemed to him that he hadn’t slept in days, maybe not in years, maybe not since his first kill in Santiago when he was nothing more than a very young husband with a baby daughter at home. Now they were all dead and buried, just as so many others who’d become close to him were.
“We’re just going to let her go?”
“She has nowhere to run,” McGarvey said.
And maybe he’d finally had his fill of it all. Maybe if he thought hard enough about it, his life had been pretty much a waste.
Otto and Louise were watching him. And after a beat, Louise reached across the table and put her hands on his.
“Think about Audie,” she said.
“I do all the time.”
“Then it should be enough.”
“I’m not following you.”
“You’re feeling sorry for yourself—I can see it in your eyes from a mile away.”
Coming from Louise just now it stung. “You’re probably right. And it’s why I let her go. I’m tired of the blood. Up to my neck in it, and it’s time for me to back off.”
“Go back to your Greek island to lick your wounds?”
“Something like that.”
“And then what?”
McGarvey wanted to look away, but he couldn’t. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead.”
“There’ll be something else for you,” Louise said. “You do know that much at least.”
“I’m getting out.”
“No,” Louise blurted.
“It’s over.”
“What about the rest of us, what are we supposed to do? Me and Otto?”
McGarvey held his silence.
“You have a gift, Kirk. Rare and terrible as it is, we need you.”
“All the killing.”
“All the lives you’ve saved. What about them, or don’t they count?”
“My wife and daughter were murdered because of my gift, as you call it,” McGarvey shot back. His anger was rising. “I’m done.”
“What about your grandchild? Are you going to just walk away from whatever comes her way?”
“That’s not fair, goddamnit.”
“No it’s not,” Louise said. “But it’s the hand you were dealt.”
She was right, of course. He knew it in his heart of hearts, just as he knew that he would have to go back to Serifos at least for a little while. A month or two, before he could work up the courage to come back to Casey Key, reopen the house he’d shared with Katy, and pick up the threads of his life. If he had the courage.
But Louise was smiling gently now, sadly. “Anyway, Happy Birthday, kemo sabe,” she said.