Blood Pact (McGarvey) (25 page)

“If you cannot accept a simple truth then it is not my fault. But what is your second question for Robert?”

“The missing document.”

Mme. Laurent said nothing.

“It is the diary of a Catholic priest who apparently went on an expedition somewhere north of Mexico City with a troop of Spanish soldiers. This would have been sometime in the early or mid-eighteen forties.”

The woman was shaken, but she covered her sudden discomfort well. “What is such a thing to Robert? I’m not sure that he is a man interested in history.”

“This part I’m not very certain of, but I have read some history and some of it concerned the Spanish plunder in the New World, from the early fifteen-hundreds—mostly silver but a lot of it gold.”

Mme. Laurent laughed, but she wasn’t sincere. “Fantasy.”

“The plunder?”

“No. I too have read about caches of treasure in the mountains around Mexico City, or in Cuba, or Hispaniola. But so far as I know the only real treasure ever found to date was from Spanish galleons sunk in storms—most of them off the east coast of Florida. So, if you are after sunken treasure off the U.S. coast, what are you doing here? What does the so-called Voltaire Society have to do with it? And what about this priest’s diary?”

“You admitted that you knew about the Society.”

“I lied. I wanted to see how far you would go with this fantastic tale.”

Al-Rashid leaned forward to put out his cigarette in the ashtray on the coffee table. “Let me tell you about this diary. In it are the exact locations of Spanish treasure that was buried in the deserts of the southern U.S., in New Mexico. Are you familiar with this fantastic tale?”

She watched him, her expression neutral, but her eyes were slightly widened.

“The diary was written in Latin, but it is in a cipher. And that is a problem for my client, and by extension for you as well as your lover.”

She held her silence.

“The first name I found was for Giscarde Petain, who was blown up by the Spanish intelligence service in Florida. They want the treasure—they believe it belongs to Spain. The second name I found was for Madame Petain and her son. They would not cooperate, so unfortunately I killed them. That led me to the sham office, and the night watchman who gave me the name of Robert Chatelet, which led me to you.”

Mme. Laurent’s right forefinger on the trigger of the Glock began to turn white.

“Do you understand where I am going with this?” al-Rashid asked. He raised his right hand as a distraction, and her eyes followed it. “I need the code to decipher the diary, and your vice mayor is my current best hope.”

“Bete,”
the woman said. She raised the pistol.

Al-Rashid’s right leg was hooked over his left, his right foot under the coffee table. He upended the table onto her lap the moment she fired, the unsilenced shot deafeningly loud in the confines of the small living room. The bullet slammed into the tabletop, and he was on her in an instant, snatching the Glock out of her hand.

She struggled to upright the table, but he clipped her in the chin with his fist. Her head snapped back against the cushions, her eyes fluttering.

Pistol stuffed in his jacket, al-Rashid went to the door, turned the lock, and stepped aside.

A second later the doorman was there. “Mme. Laurent,
qu’est que c’est
?”

The woman was starting to come around, and she cried out something indistinct.

The door slammed open and the doorman burst into the hallway, a big Glock 17 in his left hand.

Before the bulkier man could react, al-Rashid closed the door and broke his neck. He allowed the doorman to slump to the floor, slowly suffocating to death.

FORTY-SIX

Dr. Franklin came down on the elevator, pulling off his surgical cap as he got out of the car. His gown was splattered with a little blood, but not much, though he looked as if he’d been in the operating room twenty-four hours straight. His complexion was pale, his eyes bloodshot.

A cleanup detail had Kutschinksi’s body, the last of the casualties, on a gurney heading for the back door, and almost all of the blood and bullet damage throughout the hospital had been cleaned up or repaired. Technicians were working on replacing the main security console, and Tommy Newman, a new man from the Company, was on the desk. He looked anything but friendly.

“I actually like patching up our guys. But when it’s all undone, and I end up working on the only survivor who happens to be an enemy agent I have to ask myself what the hell I’m doing here.” He looked at McGarvey. “Can anyone tell me that?”

“How is she doing?” McGarvey asked.

“Surprisingly well. Mostly just a few pulled staples. The woman is nothing short of resilient. I only had her under a local anesthetic, and as soon as I was done she asked for you.”

“How soon can she be moved?”

“Immediately,” Franklin said. He glanced at Newman on the desk, and the other muscle that had come in from Langley. “Are we going to come under attack again?”

“Not if I can help it,” McGarvey said. “When will she be mobile enough to get dressed and walk out of here on her own?”

“I’d say one week. But from what little I’ve learned about her, she’d just as likely get dressed right now and join the fight. The only way I was going to keep her here for the next twenty-four was to sedate her, and she fought me on that, until I promised that if she tried to get out of bed again she would bleed to death.”

“Would she?”

“Probably not,” Franklin admitted. “Now if there’s nothing more for me to do, I’m going upstairs to get some sleep.”

“Everything’s going to be okay here, Doc.”

“If you say so, Mac,” Franklin said, and he left.

Callahan got off the phone with his people and he came over. “You were right about the Tahoe. The team found nothing on the first pass. But they’re having it towed to the lab where they’re going to tear it apart.”

“He didn’t walk to the airport,” McGarvey said.

“No cabs missing, but a VW Jetta was reported stolen sometime overnight, five blocks from here. It just turned up in the outdoor lot at National. It looks like he’s gone.”

“No,” McGarvey said. “Have your people check all the rental car companies, the bus line, and every cabdriver who came back into the city—anywhere in the vicinity, not just Georgetown. A tall, very fit man who speaks with a high-pitched voice.”

“That’s going to take a fair amount of time,” Callahan said.

“Before dark. And have your people check all the motels and hotels in the vicinity. The cabdriver who delivered the letter to me was parked on M Street, near the shops.”

“He’d be stupid to try to come back here,” Callahan said.

“That’s what he means to do, but we’re going to take the fight to him before he gets the chance,” McGarvey said. “Tell your people to tread with care. If he’s cornered he’ll fight. Just let me know where he is.”

“I’ll call in a SWAT team, our guys are good.”

“I want him alive if all possible.”

Callahan turned away and got on his cell phone to start issuing orders.

Mac phoned Otto, and explained what the FBI was gearing up to do. “His voice is going to give him away.”

“What are you going to do in the meantime?”

“I want a list of all the Catholic churches here in Georgetown.”

“Sanctuary,” Otto said. “Just a sec.”

McGarvey was at the front door. He glanced over his shoulder at Callahan, who was watching him with a pained expression on his face, but he said nothing, and ten seconds later Otto was back.

“Including the Dahlgren Chapel on the university campus, there are four of them: St. Helen’s on University Avenue, Holy Trinity on N Street, and Epiphany on Dunbarton. I’m sending them to your phone.”

When he got them, McGarvey said thanks and was about to ring off.

“These people take stuff like this seriously, honest injun’,” Otto said. He’d worked for a Catholic diocese at the very beginning of his career, before he came to the CIA.

“I know, but I have a feeling that’s where he’s holing up until tonight.”

“It’d be a good move on his part, if he’s planning on hitting you again. But listen, there’ve been cases where nuns have stood as a human shield around someone who’d claimed sanctuary. And if this guy is actually a priest on orders from the SMOM, they would give up their lives to make sure he wasn’t taken.”

“Unless he fired first.”

Otto was silent for a beat. “Step easy, Mac. If he’s in a church, he’ll have everything going for him.”

“I’m getting out of here now. I want to take it to him this morning when he’s least expecting me to come for him.”

Callahan was finished on the phone when McGarvey broke the connection with Otto and pocketed his own phone.

“If he did come back and you trace him to one of the churches, call us and I’ll mount a surveillance operation so tight it’ll be impossible for him to get out.”

“Do you want to take a chance that he’d shoot his way out and that some innocent bystander might get in the way? It happened in Sarasota. Two kids were killed when the car bomb went off.”

“That was a CNI action, not his.”

“They both have the same goal.”

“God help me, Mac, I should throw your ass in jail right now till all of this shit blows over. Because I know damn well this won’t end even if you do take this guy down. There’s more to it. The Spaniards and the so-called Voltaire Society. And even if the guy who attacked here last night is actually a priest, and even if the SMOM actually does exist as a para-military force, or at the very least an intelligence agency for the Vatican, don’t you think they’ll send another operative? And keep sending operatives either until you’re dead or they find what they’re looking for?”

McGarvey agreed. “All I can do is take them one at a time.”

“And then what?”

“We find out what the hell is really going on that’s so goddamned important a lot of people are willing to kill for it.”

“The treasure.”

“There’s more,” McGarvey said.

He got his Cayenne in back and Newman opened the front gate for him. The first of the churches on Otto’s list was the Dahlgren Chapel of the Sacred Heart on the Georgetown University campus. It was one of the four anchors on the quad that included Healy Hall—that was a large ornate building that housed academic and administrative offices as well as the Riggs Library and Gaston Hall—along with Old North and Maguire Hall.

Just off Thirty-seventh Street NW he turned into the campus along O Street NW, passing Gaston Hall where he parked just around the circle in front of Healy, and got out.

The campus was busy at this hour of the morning, students and faculty alike on foot, on bikes, skateboards, and even two girls on roller blades. The church was on the north side of the quad, its wide double doors closed. Above the entry was a huge ornate stained glass window in the shape of a circular triangle over which was a solid bell tower.

He hesitated. For just a moment he was back on campus in Sarasota, trying to warn the two students to get out of the way. He didn’t want a repeat of that incident here, among all these kids. But he simply could not let the priest walk away to kill again.

FORTY-SEVEN

Al-Rashid sat on the edge of the coffee table, which he had tipped upright, watching the woman trying to hide the fact that she was fully awake and completely aware of her situation. The side of her jaw where he had hit her had turned red and was beginning to swell. A little blood trickled from the corner of her mouth.

“Here we are, another casualty. Hopefully there will not be others because of your stupid attitude.”

“It will be of no use to you for me to telephone Robert and ask for him to come here,” she said, her voice awkward. “He’ll know that something is wrong, and his chauffeur and bodyguard will come with him.”

“I expect they will. But I also think that they will not come into the apartment of his mistress. They’ll wait outside on the street.”

“Henri will not be at the door. Robert will know that there has been trouble here.”

“Exactly,” al-Rashid said. He glanced over his shoulder at the body of the doorman. “Poor bastard saw you every day, leaving in the morning, coming home at night. He’d built up quite an affection for you, that along with his fantasies—and what Frenchman doesn’t have his fantasies—finally got out of hand. As you were leaving for your office this morning, he lured you back into your apartment on some pretense and he tried to rape you. In his haste you managed to kill him by twisting his head away as he tried to kiss you. Unfortunately you were so strong that his neck broke, and he is dead. You didn’t know what to do except call for Robert, Monsieur le Vice Mayor, to come help you out of a dreadful situation. The publicity certainly would not be good for his campaign.”

“You’re insane.”

“Possibly,” al-Rashid said. “Where is your telephone?”

“Robert is not involved with the Society. It is I who am the Voltaire.”

“Perhaps. Where is the telephone?”

“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

“Who has the key to the cipher?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you are a Voltaire then you certainly know who does have it.”

“No.”

Al-Rashid nodded, understanding and patience in his manner. “Your telephone.”

“I don’t have one,” she said.

Al-Rashid hadn’t seen one anywhere in the living room. He went to her purse where he found an iPhone and he handed it to her.

“I will not involve him.”

“He’s already involved.”

“No.”

Al-Rashid was on her in an instant, one hand clamped around her throat, cutting off her air, while with his other he ripped her blouse and black lacy bra away. He let go and stepped back. “Perhaps to make the situation here look more realistic I shall rape you myself.”

She looked up at him, fear now in her eyes.

“I am not a gentle man, mademoiselle.”

She picked up the telephone. “You will never leave Paris alive, monsieur,” she said with venom. She brought up a number on the screen and touched it.