Blood Pact (McGarvey) Read online

  He walked out of his tiny, book-lined second-floor office, the philosophy department all but deserted as usual on a Friday afternoon at the end of spring term and the start of summer break, and headed for the stairs. But he stopped, and glanced over his shoulder as one of the young teaching assistants came out of an office and went to the restrooms at the end of the hall.

  He couldn’t quite put his finger on what was bothering him. Maybe a car or a van parked in an unusual spot. Maybe a chance encounter with someone who shouldn’t have been on campus. Maybe someone seated on a bench reading a paper who didn’t look up as Mac passed. Maybe a motorcycle following him through the end of the green light, chancing running the red.

  He went back to his office, laid his briefcase on the desk, and took a Walther PPK semiautomatic pistol, chambered for the small 7.65 cartridge, out of a locked drawer and put it in the front right pocket of his khaki slacks, along with an extra magazine of ammunition in his left. The pistol was lightweight, but compact and reliable. It was a spare, and a very old friend.

  Locking up again, briefcase filled with notes for a new Voltaire book in hand, he went downstairs and headed for the faculty parking lot where he’d left his rebuilt 1956 Porsche 356 Speedster convertible in gunmetal gray with red leather. An indulgence since he’d come back to Florida, and one he knew that Katy would have loved.

  His white Guayabera shirt was plastered to his back by the time he reached his car.

  At that moment a very tall, whip-thin man, dressed in an obviously expensive European-cut charcoal gray suit, white shirt, tie knotted, shoes well shined, got out of a Lexus SUV and came over.

  McGarvey looked up mildly and scanned the parking lot. No one else was out or about, nor had anyone followed him from his office. But he was alert, his senses humming.

  “Dr. McGarvey,” the man said as he approached. He spoke good English with a French accent. He was a head taller than McGarvey, his face narrow and pinched, his nose Gallic.

  “Actually it’s Mister,” McGarvey said.

  They shook hands. “Of course,” the man said. “I am Giscarde Petain, and I have come from Paris to discuss the Voltaire Society with you. It is my understanding that you are something of an expert on the philosopher and his teachings.”

  “I’ve written a book, but I don’t think I’ve run across any mention of a society.”

  “Not many have,” Petain said. “Do you have a few minutes to talk, perhaps somewhere out of the sun?”

  “Actually no. What do you want?”

  “Your help. Before there are more killings, and before everything that we’ve worked for over the last two centuries is lost.”

  “I’m sorry, monsieur, but you’ve come to the wrong man,” McGarvey said, and he reached for the Porsche’s door handle, but Petain shot out a hand and stopped him.

  “I need to make you understand the urgency of my being here.”

  McGarvey pulled his hand away and stepped back. “Turn around and spread your legs.”

  Petain didn’t seem surprised. He did as he was told, and moved his arms away from his torso, understanding that he was going to be searched. “I am not armed.”

  McGarvey put down his briefcase and quickly frisked the man, finding no weapons. But he did find a French passport and when the man turned around he compared the photograph with Petain’s face. They matched, and McGarvey returned it, but he was sure that he’d never seen the man before, or noticed the Lexus in the past few days.

  “You have two minutes to tell me who you are, how you know me, and exactly why you’re here.”

  “My name I’ve told you. I am a businessman—a stockbroker actually, with the Euronext Paris, which was the old Bourse before we merged with the markets in Amsterdam, Lisbon, and Brussels.”

  “I know the market.”

  “I learned of you by your reputation in certain intelligence circles. I have friends in the DGSE who when I made inquiries told me that you once lived in France, and had been of some service.”

  The DGSE was the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, France’s external intelligence service. While the organization wasn’t exactly in love with him, his sometimes presence in the country over the past few years had been tolerated.

  “And specifically we need your help to locate a diary that was stolen from us ten days ago.”

  “You said killings.”

  “Yes, starting in eighteen thirty-eight, the latest three days ago in Zurich,” Petain said. “And there is no reason for us to suspect they will stop now.”

  “Who is the they?”

  “The Catholic Church, we think. More specifically a faction of the Knights Hospitaller.”

  This group, including the Sacred Military Order of Malta, which was supposedly the militant arm of the Knights, McGarvey had heard of, though he’d never had any dealings with them. But his interest was piqued. “A nearly two-centuries-old war between the Vatican and your Voltaire Society. Why me?”

  “The Vatican knows your name as well as I do because of your involvement several months ago involving property they believe is rightfully theirs. With the diary missing, you’re next.”

  “Someone wants to kill me?”

  “That likelihood is very high, yes, monsieur.”

  “Who, specifically?”

  “I have a story to tell you first, though you already know many of the details.”

  TWO

  McGarvey brought the Frenchman back to his office in the Department of Philosophy building, the hallways deserted.

  They sat across the desk from each other, Petain’s coat still buttoned properly, and it didn’t seem as if he was sweating. “I won’t take much of your time,” he said. “But we do need your help.”

  “We?”

  “I represent the Voltaire Society, which is prepared to pay whatever fee you may ask for. But time is of the essence and as I told you outside, my life is in danger as is yours.”

  “By your coming here.”

  “Yes, and by your involvement in an affair in Southern Texas involving a lost cache of gold that legend has was hidden by Spanish monks from Mexico City.”

  “It never existed,” McGarvey said. But a lot of other people had believed it did, including María León, an officer in Cuba’s intelligence service—who was one of Fidel Castro’s illegitimate daughters—and had been willing to kidnap Otto Rencke’s wife and commit murder to find it.

  “Oh, but it does, as do four of the other seven,” Petain said, and he let it hang for a long second or two, as if he’d expected McGarvey to argue the point.

  The operation with Castro’s daughter had led McGarvey on a bloody chase from Havana to Mexico City and Seville and eventually to a desert site just across the Mexican border in Texas where a huge crowd of Cubans and Mexicans—many of whom were involved with the drug cartels—had gathered in search of a fabulous treasure of Spanish gold and silver. If it had ever existed it had been moved by the U.S. government to a vault at Fort Knox. But when that vault had finally been opened it was empty.

  “Let me give you a little more of the background so this will make some sense to you. In seventeen seventy-six, two years before Voltaire’s death, the society was formed at his urging, by a group of businessmen—primarily bankers—in Paris, and eventually in London and even Rome. It was to be an insurance agency of sorts by which the major banks of every major European nation would safeguard each other’s assets against coups, wars, inflations, market crashes, and even natural catastrophes. And fledgling democracies—such as your own.”

  “Never had anything to do with Voltaire,” McGarvey said.

  “It has more to do with him and his philosophies and his feelings about democracy than you might guess.”

  “To his way of thinking democracy did little more than support the idiocy of the masses.”

  “Consider his world—your revolution had just begun, and France would not be far behind. He actually thought that an ideal form of government was in fact a d
emocracy tempered with a little assassination,” Petain said. “Don’t you agree?”

  “No.”

  “But it has been your business for twenty-five years.”

  “If you’ve come to hire me as a shooter, you’ve wasted your time and mine,” McGarvey said, and he started to rise, but Petain waved him back.

  “The fund for our endeavors originally came from the four charter banks and from the personal wealth of the dozen founding men, but since the mid-eighteen hundreds the money has come from the seven caches of gold in your southwestern desert. Voltaire himself thought the idea to plunder the treasure that the Vatican believed was rightfully its was rich—which was his word—though it was many years after his death before we were able to find it.”

  “I’m still not understanding why you’re here.”

  “Spain also believes the treasure belongs in Madrid. Catholic monks had been siphoning off gold and silver that had been bound back to Madrid through Havana, or to the far east via Manila. So two military expeditions were sent north from Mexico City to find what had already become a legend. The first disappeared, no trace of the men ever found. But the second in eighteen thirty-eight was stronger and better equipped. Even so only two soldiers managed to return with maps and a journal of their trip. The locations of the seven caches had been found and marked on the maps and in the journal, and even a few gold coins and silver bars were brought back.”

  “I was at the archives in Seville and nothing was mentioned about any journal or maps.”

  “That’s because they never reached Madrid. Our agents killed the two soldiers and took all the evidence.”

  “And this is what has been stolen from your bank vault?” McGarvey asked. “You need a private detective, not me.”

  “The maps and journal were fakes, as we suspected they might before. But one of the members of the Spanish expedition was the surveyor and mapmaker. His name was Jacob Ambli, and he’d been sent by the Vatican as a spy. It was he who drew the false maps, while he kept the real journal, in which the actual locations were pinpointed.

  “Five days after the two Spanish soldiers were eliminated, Ambli made it back to Mexico City and from there to Veracruz where he took a ship to Havana and another to Boston. He was met there by another man sent from the Vatican to protect him, and save the journal.”

  “SMOM.”

  “Oui,” Petain said. “They boarded the paddle wheel steamship Britannia, bound for Liverpool. But both men disappeared overboard.”

  “Your agents?”

  “Oui. We couldn’t allow the journal to reach the Vatican. If the Church—or Spain for that matter—had known where the treasure was buried all of it would have disappeared, and either been squandered to prop up the corrupt government in Madrid or used to build dozens of gold-encrusted cathedrals around the world. A useless waste, then as well as now.”

  “The Voltaire Society got the diary, and over the past hundred and eighty years or so, you’ve dug up at least three of the caches and used the money for what?”

  “For good, I can tell you that much.”

  “Spare me,” McGarvey said, getting to his feet. “Now if you don’t mind, monsieur, get the hell out of my office.”

  Petain jumped up. He was distressed. “Please, you don’t understand.”

  “Your society committed murder to grab this journal, and now someone has stolen it, and you want me to get it back for you. As I said, you need a private detective.”

  “Jacob’s diary, and it was in a very secure vault in Bern. We need you to find it because both the Vatican and the Spanish government have been searching for years, and the point is they’re still searching.”

  McGarvey opened the door. “You’ve come to the wrong place. I’m not in the business of hunting for treasure.”

  Petain handed him a business card. “You cannot imagine how important this is. If you change your mind call me anytime night or day.” He stepped out into the hallway but then turned back. “My life is in danger, as are the lives of the other members of the Society.”

  “Send your own people to search for it.”

  “There aren’t many of us left,” Petain said. “In any event we are businessmen, not professionals.” He hesitated. “My life is in danger, and so is yours. Not because I came here to talk to you, but because you came so close on the Jornada del Muerto. Be careful with your movements, Mr. McGarvey. Trust no one.”

  Petain turned and left.

  McGarvey waited a couple of minutes before he got his briefcase and headed out. He didn’t want to catch up with the Frenchman. Even if the fantastical story were true McGarvey wanted no further part of it. Otto’s wife had been kidnapped by Cuban intelligence agents and held at gunpoint to force her husband to cooperate in a wild-goose chase that had ended badly, with a trail of bodies.

  Useless.

  He took his time walking the fifty yards or so back to his car, and when he reached it Petain had just gotten into his Lexus. Two students, a boy and a girl, were unlocking a couple of bikes from the rack nearby, and out of the corner of his eye McGarvey noticed a black Mercedes S550 with deeply tinted windows at the exit from the parking lot ready to turn toward the Ringling Administration Building and past it North Tamiami Trail—Sarasota’s main north-south thoroughfare.

  But the Mercedes was just sitting there not moving, not leaving the parking lot.

  Everything was wrong.

  Petain backed out of his parking spot and headed toward the exit at the same moment the Mercedes pulled out and turned to the right along Bayshore Road south toward the Ringling Museum.

  “Get down! Get down!” McGarvey shouted to the students who looked up but stood there like deer caught in headlights. He tossed his briefcase down, withdrew his pistol, and headed on a run at a diagonal toward the Mercedes, hoping to reach the road and block it before it was past.

  Petain’s Lexus exploded with a tremendous flash completely engulfing it in flames, flipping it up on to its roof, sending pieces of metal and burning plastic flying outward. A split second later the boom followed by the immensely hot blast wave knocked McGarvey off his feet, singeing his eyebrows, car parts flying all around him.

  The detached roof of the car, twisted and on fire, fell from the sky as if in slow motion, landing directly on top of the two students.

  The Mercedes sped past, as McGarvey managed to sit up, giving him just an instant to catch the first three digits of its Florida plate.

  He got to his feet, his ears ringing, his entire body numb. Stuffing the pistol back in his pocket he went to see if there was any possibility that the boy and girl could have survived.

  A couple of aides and a woman by the name of Carolyn on the Ringling Museum staff staggered out the front doors, blood smeared on their faces. The blast had taken out several windows in the two-story building.

  Other students and faculty came on the run from the direction of the bay.

  Petain was dead, nothing of his body left intact, and the students at the bike rack were dead as well. None of them had a chance. And whoever had placed the explosives in the Lexus and had set it off hadn’t given a damn what collateral damage they would inflict.

  Staring at the burning wreckage of the Lexus, McGarvey was brought back to the morning at Arlington National Cemetery where he and his wife and their daughter had gone to the funeral of Todd Van Buren, their son-in-law who’d been assassinated. Driving away from the graveside ceremony, he’d followed Katy and Liz riding in an SUV that had exploded, killing them instantly.

  He’d lost a lot of his ability to feel much of anything: compassion, remorse for the people he had eliminated in his work for the Company, and love for anyone or anything. And it had only been in the past few months, since the incident with the Cuban woman and the treasure that had been buried in the Texas and New Mexico deserts, that he had begun to get anywhere close to normal. Enough to read a book, see a movie, or watch a sunset over the Gulf of Mexico and not feel guilty about enjoying it.


  Now this senseless thing. Petain had been at war. But the boy and girl at the bike rack were innocents.

  A siren sounded somewhere in the distance and then another. The Vatican or the Spanish government or the so-called Voltaire Society or some fabulous treasure meant nothing to him. All that mattered was finding the people who had killed a boy and a girl. That he would do. Guaranteed.

  THREE

  Within a half hour the fires had been put out and the bodies of the students had been loaded aboard an ambulance, but it had taken much longer to find anything identifiable as human remains in the totally destroyed Lexus. And by six a crane had loaded the frame and other parts, including the engine block, onto a flatbed truck to be taken to the police garage where it would be examined.

  A skeptical Sarasota police detective who knew something of McGarvey’s background had briefly questioned him. “Any idea what happened here?” he’d asked. His name was Jim Forest, and he looked like a kid, with dark features and a wide smile. But he seemed to be good at what he did and McGarvey had respect for him.

  “Not really. I was getting into my car when the Lexus blew.”

  “Didn’t see anything, talk to anyone?”

  “Saw those two kids get killed, and some people in the admin building cut up with falling glass. But it could have been a lot worse if it had happened a few hours earlier.”

  Forest shrugged. “Trouble does seem to follow you.”

  “Not anymore,” McGarvey said. “I’m retired. Just here teaching kids a little philosophy.”

  The crowd had mostly thinned out by now, and the flatbed truck driver was securing the Lexus’s chassis, leaving only a couple of police cars plus the crime scene investigator’s panel truck. McGarvey, drinking a cup of coffee someone had brought over, leaned against his car.

  “Why do you suppose I have this hunch that whoever was in the Lexus came here to talk to you about something?”