Blood Pact

ONE

Sarasota was the center for the fine arts in all of Florida, with a bronze reproduction of Michelangelo’s statue of David as its symbol. Kirk Collough McGarvey back at his desk at the University of Florida’s New College, after too long an absence, stared out his window at the swimming pool — blue waters of Sarasota bay. Life had been easy here, but with an emptiness.

He wanted to be happy back teaching Voltaire to the bright kids in the semi-private liberal arts college, and yet he was without his wife who’d been assassinated, along with their daughter, when an IED meant for him went off right under the limo they were riding in.

And just this afternoon, his last class for the day finished, and his office hours over with, something else intruded on his thoughts. Some niggling worry at the back of his head; some red flag raised by his early warning system, which had been honed over twenty-five years working first as a field agent for the CIA, then rising to director of operations and for a brief stint director of the entire agency, and finally as a special operations officer, had been kicking into gear over the past several days.

At fifty, just under six feet, built like a rugby player he was in perfect condition in part because of the luck of the genetic draw, but also because of daily workouts in the gym, runs on the beach, and swims in the Gulf where he lived on Casey Key. He’d been one of the best field officers that the Company had ever known; a shooter in the parlance, which was well known in the business. What was not so well known, though it was rumored, was the number of people he had killed, or the heavy toll those ops had taken on him, physically as well as mentally.

That he’d been a killer and yet an academic fit him well for some odd reason. He was self-confident, intelligent, honest, and above all dependable. But he was a hard man in the right situation — made all the more decisive and deadly because of the manner of his wife’s and daughter’s deaths. In the old days he might have kneecapped an opponent to stop the man, but during the last few assignments he’d preferred the double tap to the head to make sure no one would be coming up on his six.

All in the past, he wanted to tell himself, though he’d thought about calling his old friend Otto Rencke who still worked at the CIA as its director of Special Projects to see if anything was in the wind. But rising from his desk and grabbing his briefcase he’d decided that he was being a little paranoid. In any event if something was coming his way it would show up when it showed up.

Later, he hoped, though over the past several months he’d become a little bit jumpy, even bored.

“Once a field agent, always a field agent,” a former deputy director of operations had told him a number of years ago. It was the same guy who’d called him an anachronism, his skills no longer needed in the new order of things. Until 9/11 and the necessity to find and kill bin Laden.

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 democracy 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?”

“Sometimes even good cops get it wrong.”

Forest shrugged. “Thanks for the compliment, if that’s what it was. But I think you’re lying. And I don’t like it.”

McGarvey tossed out the rest of his coffee. “Are we finished here?”

“For now. But let me know if you’re leaving town anytime soon.”

“Sure,” McGarvey said, and he got into his car.

“You’re up to something. I can see it in your eyes. It’s a specialty of mine, reading people.”

“Let me know if you catch the bad guys.”

“Bad guys?”

“The ones who planted the explosives in the Lexus. Semtex. You can smell it.”

Back at his two-story home on Casey Key, just across the island’s only road from the Gulf and less than a hundred feet up from the Intracoastal Waterway, which ran ten miles or so north to Sarasota Bay and fifty south to Fort Myers, McGarvey got out of the shower, and as he toweled off he padded to the sliding glass doors that looked down at the swimming pool.

Forest was right, trouble did follow him. Always had. At first because he’d been ordered to do things, but in the past several years it was because his reputation had caught up with him.

Wrapping the towel around his middle, he went downstairs, where at the wet bar in the family room he poured a snifter of Remy Martin XO, and walked to his study, where he powered up his computer and phoned Otto Rencke on encrypted Skype.

The two of them had a long history together, all the way back to a couple of operations in Germany and Chile in the early days when Rencke was nothing more than an archivist for the Company. But since then they’d become close personal friends. Otto, who was a genius and an odd duck, had married Louise Horn, almost as brilliant and odd as her husband. When McGarvey’s daughter and son-in-law were assassinated leaving Audrey, their two-year-old child, an orphan, Otto and Louise had adopted her, which in McGarvey’s estimation was a perfect fit. They were odd people — always had been — but they were loving and kind.

Nowadays Otto, whose specialty was computer operations, was the CIA’s chief of Special Projects, and Louise, who had been a chief photo analyst for the National Security Agency and now did freelance work for the CIA, lived in a two-story colonial in an all-American suburb outside of Washington, where the chief purpose in their lives had become McGarvey’s granddaughter.

Rencke picked up on the second ring, his long, almost always out-of-control frizzy red hair tied up in a neat ponytail, which was Louise’s doing. Her project after they’d gotten married a couple of years ago was to clean up her husband’s act. Now his jeans and sweatshirts were usually clean, he wore boat shoes instead of unlaced sneakers, and he’d stopped eating Twinkies and drinking heavy cream. Lately he’d seemed happier than McGarvey had ever known him, though he’d lost none of his genius, or his almost preternatural ability to see and understand things. Nor had he lost his almost constant boyish enthusiasm.

“Oh, wow, Mac, you weren’t hurt? You’re okay?”

“You heard about the car bomb on campus?” McGarvey asked, though he wasn’t surprised. A number of years ago, Rencke had put a tag on him. As long as he knew where McGarvey was, his computers would sift through every available bit of real-time information on that location.

“Of course. But you weren’t just a bystander.”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so. What do we have coming our way this time?”

McGarvey hesitated for just a moment. Early in his career he’d tried to distance himself from everyone he loved — even going so far as to leave his wife and child. He wanted to protect them from the bad people he’d had to deal with. He’d lived with the constant worry that someone, someday would retaliate against him by hurting his family. Which had happened, but not for the reasons he’d worried about. The bomb at the Arlington cemetery had been meant for him; their deaths had been an accident. In any event, Otto was a CIA employee, and he and Louise had always understood the risks.

“The guy in the Lexus that took the hit was Giscarde Petain. And he’d come to ask for my help with something having to do with a group called the Voltaire Society.”

“Just a sec,” Rencke said, and less than a minute later, he was back. “Okay, I’m getting thirteen million plus hits — everything from the Voltaire Society of America, which promotes what they call the spirit of enlightenment, to the University of Denver student honors organization. Lots of French philosophic and scientific groups, and even a Bible study organization in Geneva. None of them sounds like anything someone would be murdered for.”

“Anything on Petain? He gave me a business card that lists him as a vice president of special accounts with the International Bank of Paris.”

Rencke chuckled a half minute later. “Your reach is getting wider. I have more than forty-four million hits, but nothing that specific. There’s the ABC International Bank of Paris, and the International Bank of Paris and Shanghai. Is there an address?”

“Just a phone number that I haven’t tried yet.”

“Checking,” Rencke said, and he was back almost immediately. “The phone is an accommodations number, with an automatic message to leave a name and contact information. No e-mail address?”

“Just the number.”

“Give me a minute,” Rencke said, and this time his fingers flew over the keyboard and when he looked up he shook his head. “Lots of Giscarde Petains in Paris, but none associated with any bank whose name is even close to the International Bank of Paris. Nor am I coming up with that name in connection with any of the thirteen million Voltaire Societies.”

“How about the Company’s database?”

“I checked that first, along with the FBI, NSA, Homeland Security — everyone in town, plus Interpol. Not a thing, Mac. This guy under that name does not exist.”

“Let’s try Jacob Ambli, or Father Jacob Ambli.”

Again Rencke shook his head. “Nada.”

“Try him in the time frame of eighteen thirty to eighteen forty something. Mexico City.”

Rencke suddenly laughed. “As in Jornada del Muerto?”

“Ambli was supposedly a spy sent by the Vatican to hook up with the second Spanish military expedition to search for the treasure.”

“We came across some of that in the archives in Seville, but only two soldiers made it back to Mexico City, and I don’t remember the name Ambli. And both of those guys had been found robbed, and killed. No maps or journals.”

“According to Petain, Ambli was the expedition’s surveyor and mapmaker. It was the Voltaire Society who killed the soldiers and took their diaries — which were false. Ambli, who’d kept the real diary, made his way to Boston where he was met by another man from the Vatican. But both of them were killed by the Society and the real diary was stolen. Jacob’s diary.”

“I’ll check, but a lot of this stuff — if it exists — will probably be pigeonholed in some dusty library somewhere. Probably in Seville, or more likely in the Vatican Secret Archives. A lot of luck getting to either of them for any information. I’ll try, but why, Mac? It’s just a fairy tale.”

“A fairy tale that got Petain murdered,” McGarvey said. “He came to me because a friend at the DGSE recommended me, and because he knew that I’d been involved with the search a few months ago.”

“What’d he want, specifically?”

“Jacob Ambli’s diary, which the Society had hidden in a bank vault in Bern. Someone stole it. He wants me to get it back.”

“The diary with the location of the treasure caches?”

“Seven of them, of which, according to Petain, only four are left.”

“What happened to the other three?”

“I didn’t ask, and he didn’t say. I told him I wasn’t interested.”

“And he told you that the diary was of extreme importance and that your life was in danger,” Rencke said.

“Something like that,” McGarvey said. “He left my office, got into his car, and before it got ten feet it disintegrated.”

Rencke was suddenly serious. “Like Katy and Liz.”

“Yeah. And two kids who happened to be nearby were killed. I don’t give a damn about finding some diary or going on another treasure hunt. I want the bastards who assassinated Petain without caring about any collateral damage.”

“I understand,” Rencke said. “Anything else?”

“Might be a long shot, but a black Mercedes S550 was stopped at the parking lot exit, and it took off just a second or two before Petain’s car blew up. Florida plate, but all I got was E or F and seventy-six or maybe seventy-eight for the first three. But it got out of there in a big hurry.”

“Any idea who was inside? One or two people? Men, women?”

“Windows were too deeply tinted to see anything.”

“Bumper stickers, dents, dings?”

“None that I saw.”

“I’ll check into it. But get some rest, kemo sabe.”

McGarvey nodded. “How’s Audie?”

“Missing her grandfather.”

“The semester is just about over with. Soon I can get free I’ll come up for a visit.”

“Promise? She’s been asking about you.”

“Honest injun’,” McGarvey said. It was one of Rencke’s bon mots.

“I’ll tell her,” Rencke said

McGarvey was seeing Petain’s car going up in flames; he could feel the heat on his face and arms, see the piece of metal falling on the kids. He broke the connection and sat back with his Cognac, his vivid memories of Katy and Liz dying in the explosion at Arlington playing in his head, over and over.

FOUR

The Casey Key rental was a luxurious two story, with a formal dining room, library, snooker table, huge gourmet kitchen, sitting room, solarium, living room done up in bright nautical prints, and a formal staircase leading up to six palatial bedrooms, three of which looked over the Gulf and the others over the ICW.

Captain Emilio Miranda, thirty-six, whose work name was Juan Fernandez, came to the head of the stairs, and held up for just a moment to listen to the near absence of sound, before going down.

He was a slightly built man, more wiry than thin, with wide-set very black eyes, a dusky Spanish complexion, thin lips over which was a pencil-thin mustache. This evening he was dressed in jeans, sneakers, and dark T-shirt. He was a dangerous-looking man, which in fact he was. In his eighteen-year career as a field agent with the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia, the CNI, which was Spain’s central intelligence service, he had run successful operations, some of which included deaths, in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. His parents had both been English-language professors at the Carlos III University in Madrid, and subsequently his command of the language was nearly as good as that of his native tongue.

He crossed the main entry hall and went back to the small service kitchen that opened on the multitiered patio and pool. Donica Fonesca, dressed in a black bikini, was tossing a salad to go with some baguettes and a large plate of cheese. She’d already laid out a couple of bottles of Mourvedre, a nice Alicante red.

She was tall for a Spanish woman, with short black hair that revealed a long slender neck, pretty shoulders, and a more rounded than usual figure for a Flamenco dancer, which had been one of her covers. At twenty-six she’d never married, nor had any ambition for a family, though she’d never been shy about taking lovers — not since an affair with her college math teacher. She was a lieutenant in the CNI who along with lieutenants Felix Huertas and their second-story man, Alberto Cabello, made up the mission team. She was almost certainly having an affair with Huertas, but as long as it didn’t interfere with their orders, Miranda didn’t care.

She turned and smiled. “I hope you’re hungry, I’ve made plenty. Some wine?”

“Okay,” Miranda said, and he sat down at the counter. “Why the swimsuit?”

“I’m going in the pool after we eat, I expect that we’ll have some company.” She poured them both a glass. “I’m glad I wasn’t there today,” she said.

“It wasn’t pleasant, but you’re right, we may have the other problem coming our way. Señor McGarvey was right in the middle of it, as we suspected he might be.”

“Was he injured?”

“Alberto said he thought the man was on the ground, but we were moving too fast for him to be sure. In any event McGarvey is home. He just finished calling a number in Berwyn Heights. Encrypted Skype but the angles were wrong this time, so we didn’t get much.”

“Our Washington Bureau thinks that his friend Otto Rencke lives there.”

“That’s my assumption, but except for the town the number was blocked.”

Donica thought it over. “We suspected that Petain would come to see him sooner or later. It was only a matter of time before he left Paris, and no one was surprised that he came here, given McGarvey’s recent history — and the little theft from Bern.”

“We still don’t know who pulled it off, or even what was in the vault.”

“Jacob’s diary?”

“We can’t be certain,” Miranda said.

“The analysts in Madrid are being overcautious, don’t you think? The diary is the only logical possibility. Now we simply wait for Señor McGarvey to make his move and follow him.”

“If Petain came to ask him for help.”

“He did.”

“That’s another supposition,” Miranda said. “Wishful thinking.”

Donica was vexed. “I don’t understand.”

“We thought that Petain would come here to talk to McGarvey, to ask him for help. All we can say with certainty is that the Frenchman did come here, but we didn’t have the chance to bug McGarvey’s office so we have no idea what they talked about.”

“What else?”

“I don’t know. Maybe information about the Jornada del Muerto. But just because we thought Petain was coming to ask McGarvey for help finding the diary, doesn’t mean that’s what he did.”

Now Donica was frustrated. “Then why did we kill the man? Why did we take the risk?”

“Because those were our orders, my dear.”

“The Society will send someone else.”

“Perhaps,” Miranda said. “Or perhaps McGarvey will go in search of the diary, leaving us to follow him.”

Donica went back to her salad making.

“Where are the others?”

“Alberto went down to check something on the boat, and Felix is wandering around outside. Or at least I think he is.” She looked up. “What about the two students who were killed?”

“What about them?”

“From Señor McGarvey’s profile he comes across as an honorable man.”

“A contract killer.”

“He is a teacher, Emilio. Maybe he cares more for his students than you think he does. Maybe collateral damage means something to him.”

Miranda scowled. “Sentimentality has no place in this business.”

“They were innocent kids. You said so yourself.”

“I said they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He shrugged. “What’s done is done. From this point we concentrate on McGarvey to see what he does.”

“What if he stays put?”

“Then our job here is finished. We pack up and go home.”

Donica stopped what she was doing and looked at him, an odd expression in her eyes. “But you don’t believe that.”

“No,” Miranda said. “I too studied his profile. If Petain asked for help unraveling the mystery, it’s exactly what Señor McGarvey will do. It is in his nature.”

“And the deaths of the students? Won’t that give him pause?”

“On the contrary. Their deaths — senseless to his way of thinking — will spur him on.” Miranda shook his head. “Señor McGarvey will make his move, and it will be sooner than later, I suspect.”

FIVE

McGarvey dressed in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, went downstairs, and in the kitchen tried to figure out what he wanted for dinner — or even if he wanted anything to eat. He was unsettled not only because of the students’ deaths and how they had died, but about Petain’s story.

He’d always tried to keep as low-key as possible, below as many radars as he could. But his name had been front and center in the public’s eye because of the business with the Spanish treasure just north of El Paso, and the huge crowd of Mexicans and Cubans that had crossed the border to claim it. But it hadn’t ended until the second confrontation, this one at the Fort Knox federal gold depository, with another crowd, mostly of Cubans — these people expats living in Miami. Both times there’d been no gold or silver. No treasure.

Yet in the end Rencke had considered that there might be some truth to the legends. And so had María León, a colonel in the Cuban intelligence service.

The computer in his study chimed. It was Otto.

“You’ve got trouble coming your way,” he said, barely contained excitement in his voice.

McGarvey switched off the light. “From the beginning,” he said.

“The Voltaire Society exists and so does their bank in Paris. And oh, boy, what a fight those guys have been having with the Vatican and with the Spanish government.”

“Is María León involved?”

Otto was taken aback. “Has she contacted you again?”

“No. I was just thinking about her.”

“She’s not involved this time, at least her name hasn’t popped up. But the fight I’m talking about started in the early eighteen hundreds and has been going on ever since. And it’s intense, Mac. Honest injun’.”

“The Spanish treasure?”

“The one that everyone but you and I believe exists. Not only that, I found out that the Voltaire Society’s bank has actually been in existence since seventeen seventy-six when it was chartered by six businessmen who each put up the equivalent of one million dollars.”

“How did you find that out?”

“Through its transactions. At first they were on paper, of course, and only two actual documents exist in our Library of Congress from records of a Richmond, Virginia, bank that went under in eighteen sixty-five. Two money transfers that took place before the Civil War. In each case for the same amount: five million dollars, from the International Bank of Paris.”

“For what reason? Who was the payee?”

“The treasury of the United States of America. But that’s not all. The transfers came two years apart — one in eighteen forty-four, three years after Jacob Ambli and his diary disappeared, and in eighteen forty-eight. Time, if we’re to believe Petain, for the Society to reach New Mexico and retrieve some of the silver and gold.”

The story was far-fetched and coincidental, and McGarvey told Otto just that.

“I don’t believe in coincidences any more than you do,” Rencke said, and he sounded excited as he did whenever he had the bit in his mouth. “But Petain told you that besides propping up banks in Europe, the Society used the money to help fledgling democracies. Maybe they foresaw our Civil War and sent money to help.”

“To a bank in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy?”

“The Confederacy didn’t really exist at that point, and who knows, maybe someone in the Society had a sense of humor, just like its namesake Voltaire had.”

“Doesn’t make any sense,” McGarvey said, and yet there was a certain symmetry to the idea. Petain had come to him with his fantastical story and he was assassinated.

“A lot of things don’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense, Mac. And here’s another one for you. I ran the partial tag number you gave me, and came up with a hundred seventeen hits. Tampa, Miami, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, even one in the Keys. But the most interesting was for Juan Fernandez from an address just off the Calle Ocho in Miami. Little Havana. But Señor Fernandez only exists in a few places — Mercedes Benz of Miami, the dealership where the car was purchased for cash three weeks ago, and the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles. But no Fernandez lives at the address on the title. The man doesn’t exist in Miami. And the only other place his name pops up is for a three-month rental on Casey Key, right next door to you.”

“Fernandez is a work name,” McGarvey said, not terribly surprised.

“Be my guess. Probably the CNI. I’m working their mainframe in Madrid now, but this guy most likely is a NOC, so he’ll show up only as a coded entry somewhere that only his case officer would have access to.” In the parlance a NOC was an intelligence agent working in the field with No Official Cover.

“These people are team players, so there’ll be more than just him.”

“Exactamundo,” Rencke said. “Have you seen or noticed anything over the past few weeks? Met the neighbors? Been invited over for drinks? Anything like that?”

A good-looking girl in a bikini at the pool. She’d waved, and he’d waved back. A guy doing something with a small Boston Whaler center console at the dock. Another guy at a second-floor balcony — or maybe the same guy from the boat. Nothing unusual. Yet thinking about it now, maybe they had sent up an alarm; they were nothing out of the ordinary for Casey Key this time of the year, yet they were new.

“Three, maybe four people. Didn’t seem as if they were trying to hide.”

“And?”

“I don’t know,” McGarvey said. “But I’m going to check it out.”

“Watch yourself,” Rencke said.

McGarvey switched off, and upstairs he got a pair of night-vision binoculars from the hall table at the balcony sliders and took them back to the master bedroom, one side of which looked across at the house next door. He’d taught Katy to use them when she wanted to look for night feeding birds.

Lights spilled out onto the pool deck from what he thought was probably a kitchen. Other dim lights were on in other parts of the downstairs, but all of the upstairs windows were dark.

He watched for a full five minutes, but saw only one dark figure appear briefly at one of the open first-floor sliders and then disappear. Someone was home, but no one was in the pool or down at the dock by the boat. Nor could he spot movement at any of the upstairs windows or balconies. Nor could he detect any signs of surveillance equipment; cameras, parabolic dishes, microwave antennas.

Setting the binoculars aside, he got dressed in jeans, a lightweight dark long-sleeve pullover, and boat shoes. He took a 9 mm version of the Walther PPK from a drawer in his nightstand, screwed a silencer on to the end of the barrel, checked the load, and pocketing a spare magazine of ammunition, stuck the pistol into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back, and went downstairs where he slipped out of a side door out of view of the next-door house.

SIX

Donica had just finished laying out a bowl of blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries over which she had poured some Lepanto, a mild Spanish brandy from Jerez, when Alberto Cabello came to the doorway. He was twenty-four, thin, almost anorexic with long black hair and the eyes of a night cat. He was dressed in a bicycler’s black spandex shorts and top.

“He is on his way over,” he said in Spanish. His voice was soft, his manner unhurried.

“In English, please,” Donica corrected automatically. “Are we talking about Mr. McGarvey?”

“Yes.”

“Where is Felix?” Alberto asked.

“He just went upstairs to surveillance.”

“Make yourself ready, but stay out of sight unless the need arises.”

“He must suspect something. Perhaps his friend in Washington discovered your work name. It is no coincidence that he is coming here at this moment.”

“Is he armed?” Donica asked.

“I don’t know, but he’s dressed in dark clothing.”

Donica shrugged. “I suspect that he is no different than any American male,” she said. “I’ll go out to talk to him.” She took off her bikini top, her breasts small and firm.

“Maybe not,” Alberto warned. “Don’t provoke him.”

“That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

Cabello had disappeared into the darkness outside, and Miranda took a 9 mm Steyr GB pistol and silencer from a drawer in the kitchen desk. He’d always favored the unusual Austrian-made semiauto because it was very light — less than one kilo unloaded — carried an eighteen round magazine, and could be disassembled in under six seconds. All their weapons were fitted with silencers.

“I thought we needed him alive,” Donica said.

“The need to keep you alive is greater,” Miranda said. “And make no mistake, this man is dangerous. He is a killer.”

“So am I.”

“You are an amateur by comparison. And too ambitious.”

She was hurt, though it was true she was ambitious. When she’d first joined the CNI her primary training officer, Lieutenant Martinque Cordona, had skirted around two issues: The first, would she be willing to make a kill without hesitation, with no remorse? And the second, would she be willing to use her body if need be?

Donica had smiled. “Of course,” she’d said.

“Then you will go far, my little dove,” the lieutenant said.

That evening Donica went to his room where they made love. Within less than twelve months, her training completed, she went on her first assignment, posing as a high-priced call girl in Paris to seduce a German diplomat at a meeting of the G7. It went well enough that two weeks later the German resigned as finance minister, unable to stand up to the CNI’s blackmail demands. It was the outcome Madrid had wanted.

The good news was that Donica became a superstar overnight, but the bad news was that overnight she got an overinflated opinion of her own worth.

“You’re right, of course,” she told Miranda. “But before you start shooting let me see if I can calm him down. He’s better to us alive.”

“What will you tell him?”

“I’ll improvise.”

“It’s not necessary. It was only important that Petain came to see him. Finding that out and eliminating the man as a threat was our primary mission goal.”

Donica waved him off. At the open slider she flipped on the pool lights, but not the overheads, and outside she grabbed a towel from the cabinet and draped it over her shoulders before she padded across the patio to the water’s edge.

For several long seconds she stood unmoving, aware of the picture she made, and smiling a little because of it. But then she heard a noise to her right and she turned as the American appeared at the edge of the darkness. He had a pistol in his right hand, a silencer on the muzzle.

“Do you mean to shoot me, or is this a simple robbery?” she asked.

“Who are you, and what are you doing here?” McGarvey asked.

His manner and tone of voice seemed languid. “I think it is I who should be asking those questions,” Donica said. She smiled. “But you are my next-door neighbor. I’ve seen you in your backyard. On the dock.”

“Where are the others?”

“If you mean Juan, I think he’s somewhere in the house. We’re getting set to have a light supper. Won’t you join us?”

“The Mercedes registered to Juan Fernandez was involved in an incident at New College today,” McGarvey said, and he stepped into the light and stopped five feet away.

Donica wanted to back up, but she stood her ground. “Put the gun away, Señor McGarvey, we are not your enemy. In fact we’re after the same thing as you are.”

“She is telling the truth,” Miranda said from just inside the house. “We mean you no harm.”

McGarvey pointed his pistol directly at Donica’s head. “I won’t miss at this range.”

“There is no need for violence.”

“Listen to him,” Donica said, but McGarvey cut her off.

“Why has the CNI sent a team to watch me, and why did you kill the man at the university?”

Donica could see directly into McGarvey’s eyes, and all of a sudden she felt cold. “He’s an intruder, Juan. Shoot him. We will be within our rights here in Florida.”

“Because the man who came to ask for your help was the enemy,” Miranda said. “Yours as well as mine. Had the situation been reversed he would not have hesitated to kill either of us.”

“What about the two students who just happened to be there?”

Donica could see McGarvey’s jawline tighten, but she also spotted Alberto in the darkness behind a palm tree across the pool. “Too bad for them,” she said. “But then Americans are used to drive-by shootings and bombings.”

Miranda reached around the corner of the slider and pulled off a shot, but McGarvey had already stepped left, and he fired three shots at the house, turned and fired two shots over his shoulder at Cabello across the pool, and disappeared into the darkness.

SEVEN

Moving fast, and purposely making a fair amount of noise, McGarvey headed toward his house, but then doubled back and quietly made his way through the darkness to the front of the next-door property. Keeping close to the side of the building he threaded his way through the expansive landscaping — bushes, pineapple palms, several fruit trees including two very tall ones bearing avocados and mangoes — until he reached the driveway.

Besides the woman and the man in the house, McGarvey was fairly certain that there were at least two other CNI operatives on the property. They’d been expecting him, which meant they had a surveillance operation going on, watching his moves, listening to his phone calls and possibly even his encrypted Skype conferences with Otto. The pistol fired at him from the house had been silenced. They expected trouble but did not want to involve the local authorities if at all possible.

Somehow they’d known that Petain would come to talk to him, and they had waited until it had happened. But it made no sense that they would kill the man in such a public way, when it probably would have been easier and a lot less messy to assassinate the man in Paris before he came here. Except that they had wanted him to bring his request. In effect they wanted the same thing from McGarvey that Petain had come to ask for — help finding the diary stolen from the Voltaire Society.

The Spanish government believed the treasure was buried in New Mexico, and after nearly two hundred years they were still actively searching for it. But unlike the Cuban government that thought it could somehow negotiate for a part of the gold and silver, Madrid wanted the entire prize, and had sent agents to kill for it.

Which begged the question that if Petain had been telling the truth about the missing diary — and there was no reason for him not to have told the truth — who had taken it? Not the Spanish, maybe the Vatican. But that possibility raised the question why had they come here, and not to the Vatican?

The black Mercedes was parked in the driveway, the doors unlocked. McGarvey slipped behind the wheel and opened the glove box, which contained nothing more than the service and owner’s manuals, plus a contract from Mercedes-Benz of Miami in the name of Juan Fernandez at the fake address off the Calle Ocho.

A garage door opener was clipped to the visor. McGarvey pressed the button and got out of the car as the garage door started up. He left the car door open and sprinted past the front entryway to the opposite side of the house where he held up just around the corner.

A half minute later a slightly built man dressed in what looked like black spandex appeared at the open garage door. He was armed with a pistol, the big silencer tube visible even from where McGarvey stood in the shadows.

“The bastard’s not here,” the man said over his shoulder to someone in the garage. “Maybe he’s left.”

“It was a trick,” a man replied. “He’s gone around back again.”

The slightly built man turned. “We have to get help for Emilio,” he said, and he disappeared inside.

McGarvey waited a full ten seconds, about as long as he figured it would take the two men to return to the pool area, before he stepped around the corner and hurried to the open garage door, where he paused for just a moment to make sure one of them hadn’t stayed behind.

But the garage was empty, the house silent.

It would not take them long to realize they had indeed been tricked, only this time they would most likely split up, one covering each side of the house.

McGarvey went to the service door that led into the house and listened for a second or so, but hearing nothing he opened the door a crack. Someone toward the back of the house was talking, his voice low but urgent. The woman interrupted, her voice louder, her tone even more urgent, but McGarvey couldn’t make out the words.

Everything since the explosion had been nothing more than an exercise in futility, as far as he was concerned. These people had killed Petain, and they meant to kill him to find or protect some diary. But he was focused on the senseless deaths of the two students in the parking lot. He wanted to know why this team of CNI operatives didn’t care about inflicting that kind of collateral damage. In his estimation they were no better than common thugs; terrorists of the same stripe as al Qaeda.

Slipping inside to what was a short service hall that led straight to a large pantry, McGarvey closed and locked the service door — unless one of them had a key no one would be coming up on his six — and headed toward the back of the house.

EIGHT

Donica was on the tile floor just inside the sliders to the pool, holding a bath towel against the wound in Miranda’s chest, blood spreading under his shoulders and head. He was pale and obviously in pain, but he hadn’t lost consciousness nor had he lost his wits.

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.

The part he loved most about her were her long legs. Now they were bent at the knees. She had been kneeling when she’d been shot and she’d fallen backward. The image was more obscene in his mind than his vivid memory of her long legs spread for him.

He began to feel genuine hate.

“Think about it, Señor, I beg you,” he said. He turned to Cabello. “Get the boat ready.” They had a safe house on Siesta Key where they’d left a car and papers for an emergency just like this one tonight.

“What about our equipment upstairs?”

“It’s mostly encrypted, and the laptop is set to erase if anyone tampers with it.”

“What about Doni?”

“She and Emilio are dead.”

Cabello was moved. Like Huertas he had a crush on her. “We’re just going to run off, and let the bastard get away with it?”

“No,” Heurtas said, and he took another quick look into the house. McGarvey was nowhere to be seen. “Señor McGarvey, I’m still willing to talk if you are.”

“Throw your weapon down where I can see it,” McGarvey said.

“As you wish,” Heurtas said. He reached around the corner and tossed his pistol on the floor a couple of feet away from Donica’s body.

“Tell the other man with you to do the same.”

“He is gone.”

“Bullshit.”

“I sent him to your house to wait in case we couldn’t resolve our differences here like gentlemen. If you return alone he’ll know that I’m dead and he will kill you.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“To convince you of my sincerity.”

“Right,” McGarvey said. “Show yourself.”

Huertas turned back to Cabello. “Give me your gun, and make the boat ready. I’ll take care of McGarvey and then grab the laptop.”

Cabello was doubtful, but he handed over his pistol. “Emilio said he was good.”

“He shot Donica in cold blood, and I’m not going to let it go. Now get to the boat. If I’m not there in ten minutes, get back to Madrid and make your report. “

Cabello took off into the darkness on the other side of the pool to the stone path that led down to the dock that was just off the Intracoastal Waterway.

“Señor, I am coming in now,” Heurtas said. “Unarmed, so do not shoot.”

McGarvey didn’t answer.

Heurtas stepped around the corner, the pistol concealed behind his back, and stopped just within the sliding doors. “Señor?” he called out.

A moment later a tremendous crash of breaking glass came from somewhere in the house. Heurtas turned on his heel and raced outside, around the corner to the south side of the house where he figured McGarvey had broken one of the big windows to make his escape.

TWELVE

Standing across from the long table in the formal dining room, McGarvey had clear sight lines to the window through which he’d just tossed a chair and the corridor back to the pool kitchen. He didn’t want to get into another shoot-out with these people, but he did want to find out the extent of their surveillance operation on him.

For now he was simply buying a little time. With the woman and one man down, he thought the other two operatives would tread with care.

Huertas appeared briefly just outside the shattered window. McGarvey stepped back into the deeper darkness of the room, certain that he was invisible to the CNI operator, who turned and looked away, and then ran off toward the south.

McGarvey went back out into the corridor and followed it to the main staircase in the front entry hall and hurried upstairs. He figured that whatever surveillance equipment they had in place would be in an upstairs room facing south, toward his house. But he didn’t think it would take long for the pair of CNI operatives to realize that they had been tricked and come back.

At the top he hesitated for a moment, cocking an ear to listen for a sound, any sound that might indicate that there was a fifth or even sixth operative that he hadn’t seen, waiting for him to charge blindly into a trap. But the house was quiet.

Pistol at the ready McGarvey headed left to the first open door, where again he paused for just a moment before rolling inside, and quickly swinging his aim right to left. No one was here, but it was the room used for their surveillance operation.

The sliding glass window was open to a small balcony, across from which was a perfect sight line to his house. The twin beds had been stacked one atop the other and moved aside. A long table in the middle of the room, well away from the open slider so it couldn’t be seen from outside, held several pieces of electronic equipment. Among them was a small optical laser that could be used to detect vibrations on a windowpane from someone talking inside the house. They’d been able to listen to all of his telephone conversations.

Two low lux cameras mounted on short tripods were aimed at the house, along with what McGarvey took to be an infrared motion detector, and two other pieces of equipment that might have been some sort of a telephone intercept system — one for landlines, the other for cell phones.

All of it was connected to what looked like a military-grade laptop computer that was powered up and at this moment displaying a split screen with four images — two side views of his house, another of the front entryway and driveway, and the fourth a view of the rear, looking down across the pool and his study window.

The last two were from cameras mounted outside, and it vexed him that in the last three weeks he hadn’t spotted them, even though he’d had the growing feeling that something was coming his way, that someone was watching over his shoulder.

Maybe he was getting rusty after all. For a long time, especially after Katy and Liz had been killed at Arlington, he’d professed that he wanted out of the business. And just a few months ago he’d said as much to Otto and his wife Louise.

“I’m getting out,” he’d told them. “It’s over.” But Louise had disagreed.

“What about the rest of us?” she’d demanded. “What are we supposed to do? Me and Otto?”

He’d had no answer for her.

“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,” he shot back. “I’m done.”

“What about your grandchild? Are you just going to walk away from whatever comes her way?”

“That’s not fair, goddamnit.”

“No it’s not,” Louise had told him. “But it was the hand you were dealt.”

And here he was in the middle of something again, and he knew that he could not walk away from it; it wasn’t simply because of the two students who’d been killed, it was because of who he was, who he’d always been.

Somewhere in the distance, down on the ICW, he thought he heard the sound of a boat motor starting up, but then it moved away, north perhaps, and was lost.

A portable phone was lying on the table beside the intercept equipment. McGarvey laid his pistol down, got a dial tone, and called Rencke, who answered on the first ring.

“The number is blocked, are you calling from the house next door?”

“They set up a surveillance operation. Laser aimed at my house, cameras front, back, and side, infrared detectors, what looks like telephone intercept equipment.”

“Have you neutralized the opposition?”

“Two, but there are at least two others.”

“How long before you have company?”

“Good question,” McGarvey said. “Matter of minutes, unless I have to shoot someone else.”

“Okay, all this gear has to run by something. Could be remote. Is there any sort of a computer nearby?”

“A laptop. Right now it’s showing four angles on my house.”

“Have you touched it, or anything else?”

“No.”

“Don’t,” Rencke said. “And don’t let anyone else near it for five minutes.”

“No guarantees,” McGarvey said, but Rencke was gone, and the split-screen images were replaced by a list of what appeared to be files, though they were in some script of squares, tiny circles, and other odd marks.

McGarvey picked up his pistol and went to the door, but no one was in the corridor, though he was certain it wouldn’t take them long to figure out what was going on and come looking for him.

A cursor moved quickly down the list, and back at the top the first file opened. A screen of a half-dozen photographs of McGarvey coming out of Café L’Europe on St. Armand’s Circle were quickly followed by many more screens of a dozen shots each showing McGarvey at New College, at Macy’s, swimming in the Gulf, working on his sailboat docked in the ICW behind his house. Then the images began to process so rapidly he could no longer make them out. It was clear that the CNI had not only closely monitored his movements, but they had been very professional about it. He’d never spotted them.

The next file consisted of what appeared to be audio recordings that showed up only as spectrum readouts. Then a very large file of more than fifty gigabytes, possibly of videos, came up.

“Still there, Mac?” Otto asked, his voice coming from the computer.

McGarvey picked up the phone. “Yes.”

“You don’t need the phone now. Are you still okay?”

“So far. Did you break their encryption system?”

“Piece of cake. It’s an old military one the Chinese developed about five years ago. But did you see the still shots in the first file?”

“Yes. They were watching me pretty closely, but I never spotted them.”

“They probably double- and triple-teamed you. But this doesn’t make any sense. Spain is not our enemy.”

“They’re looking for the gold and they’re in a fight to find it before the Voltaire Society drains the piggy bank.”

“The Vatican has to be right in the thick of it too,” Rencke said. “And everyone is after the diary, which is why the Voltaire Society came to you and the CNI mounted the surveillance operation, and why in all likelihood someone from the Vatican will be or already is on your trail.”

“Señor McGarvey,” Heurtas called from the corridor.

THIRTEEN

Heurtas stood next to the open bedroom door where they’d set up their surveillance equipment. He’d listened to everything the bastard Rencke told McGarvey and it made him sick to think that Emilio and Donica had died for nothing.

They knew about the Society, the Vatican, and even the diary, and on top of everything Rencke had apparently figured out how to hack their encryption algorithm and unless he was stopped the CIA would have everything.

“Sounds like you have company,” Rencke said. “Hold them off for another fifteen minutes. I’ve run into a problem with their auto-erase function.”

“Señor McGarvey, there is no way out for you. But if you come out with your hands above your head you have my word that you will not be harmed.”

“I shot the man and woman downstairs in self-defense,” McGarvey said.

“You were trespassing.”

“You’ve been prying into my business for the last three weeks. Why?”

“We do not want to kill you, but we will if we must.”

“Unless I miss my guess the fourth operator took off in a boat a couple of minutes ago. North, I think.”

Heurtas had heard the boat start up and leave, but it was exactly what Alberto needed to do. At all costs he had to get back to Madrid and make his report.

“You miss your guess.”

“What does the CNI want with me?”

“We can work something out,” Heurtas said. “You can’t imagine the danger. For all of us.”

“Tell me,” McGarvey said.

The bastard was stalling for time.

“I’m almost there,” Rencke said. “Ten minutes and I’ll have complete access to their files.”

“I can’t allow that to happen,” Heurtas said. He saw no way out, and he was starting to feel a sense of fate: whatever was coming his way would come no matter what he did. For no reason he could think of he had another erotic thought about Donica.

They were on a field exercise, in which the two of them plus one other officer were supposed to infiltrate an actual air force base and place mock explosives around the communications center. At one point he and Donica got separated from the third officer — who they learned later had been captured. A couple of hours before dawn they were holed up in a storage space at the rear of a hangar used for helicopter maintenance.

A siren had sounded and from their hiding spot they could hear the sounds of a meter-by-meter search.

“They’ll find us sooner or later,” he’d said.

“At least they won’t shoot us for spies.”

“Do you want to give up now, save us the wait?”

She had smiled and he remembered the set of her pretty mouth, as she shook her head.

They made love, as quietly as they could, though Doni had been a moaner, and it wasn’t until three hours later, when they were both too hungry to wait any longer, they came out with their hands up.

It was the best sex he’d ever experienced, because of the danger, he supposed. Had they been caught in the act they would have both been fired. But they hadn’t been, and now it was a memory that he could never share with her.

“Are you listening to me?” Heurtas asked.

“Yes,” McGarvey said.

Heurtas suddenly stuck his pistol around the corner and began firing, walking his aim left to right across the room.

FOURTEEN

McGarvey slid left and dropped to his knees as the barrel of the pistol came around the door frame and Heurtas opened fire. He’d heard the final desperation in the Spaniard’s voice, and as he moved he fired four shots at the wall eighteen inches to the left of the open door.

Heurtas grunted something, and dropped the pistol as he fell backward with a tremendous crash.

“Mac?” Rencke shouted.

“I’m okay,” McGarvey said, straightening up.

Heurtas was down on his back, a lot of blood welling up from a chest wound, and one in the side of his face just above his jawline. His arms were outstretched, the pistol he’d dropped just out of reach of his right hand. But he was alive, his eyes filled with pain and with hate.

“Bastardo,” he wheezed, and he tried to reach for his pistol, but McGarvey kicked it away.

“What was the sense of it?” McGarvey asked. “The one who left in the boat will get back to Madrid, if he’s lucky, and tell them what? Mission accomplished? Petain is dead?”

A sudden look of intense terror came into the Spaniard’s eyes. “Petain?” he said, coughing, and he went slack, his eyes open.

McGarvey bent down and felt for a pulse at the man’s neck, but there was none.

Otto was calling his name, and he went back into the surveillance room. “It’s okay,” he said. “Are you finished with the download?”

“Yes, it only took a couple of minutes. I was stalling to give you some time to defuse the situation. What happened?”

McGarvey was tired. “Three people are dead up at the college, and three more are dead here. The cops are going to have a hell of a time figuring it out, and the trouble is I’m not going to be able to help them, because I don’t know what this is all about.”

“Hopefully there’ll be something on the computer that sheds some light. But what do you want to do next?”

“I’m not going to let it go, if that’s what you mean.”

“I didn’t think so. But sooner or later the cops down there are going to find the mess and make the connection between the car bombing and the bodies and surveillance equipment and come knocking on your door. So what do you want to do, kemo sabe?”

“I’ll fly up in the morning and we’ll go over whatever you decipher on the laptop.”

“I’ll send a plane; I don’t think it’d be such a good idea right now if you flew commercial, in case the locals are keeping an eye on you.”

“Make it seven at Dolphin Aviation,” McGarvey said. “There’s usually not too many people around at that hour.”

“Don’t push your luck, Mac. Get out of there.”

“Do you want me to take the laptop?”

“No need, I’m going to fry it,” Rencke said. “Watch yourself.”

Before McGarvey could turn away the computer screen went blank, and the power light went out on it and all the surveillance equipment.

Pistol in hand, in case the fourth CNI operator had not left on the boat and was still somewhere in the house or on the property, McGarvey made a quick search of the other bedrooms, finding passports in the names of Juan Fernandez, Diego Cubrero, Rufo Tadena, and the woman Sophia de Rosas — who the man he’d killed downstairs had called Donica or Doni. The passport pictures matched the woman and the two men, only the fourth for Rufo Tadena was of a man he’d not seen.

More significantly was the fact he found only four sets of documents, four overnight bags, sets of clothing and toiletries in four separate bedrooms.

Pocketing the passports, he went downstairs and methodically made a search of the entire house, before he switched off the pool lights and stepped inside where he stood in the shadows for a long moment listening to the near absence of any sounds except for the call of some night hunting bird in the far distance. No boats were passing on the ICW, nor any car on the island’s single road, and the only light was the glow in the sky to the north from Sarasota.

The real world seemed a long ways off just at that moment, the deaths at the university and the three here that he’d killed weighed heavily. Senseless, all of them, especially because he still had no certain idea of the why of it, except for a diary that was a century and a half old.

Taking care with his movements McGarvey went down to the dock where a twenty-three-foot center-console Boston Whaler with a big outboard motor had been kept on a lift. He’d spotted it a couple of times out of the water and covered when he’d been working on his own boat. But he’d never seen it in the water. It was gone.

The fourth operator had not bothered to grab his passport. It likely meant that they’d set up an escape hole somewhere not too far north where they’d left more documents and everything they would need to travel back to Spain without arousing the suspicions of any TSA agent. Covering their asses. Standard tradecraft.

McGarvey debated going after him, but it would only result in another shoot-out. To prove what?

He stuffed the pistol in the waistband of his slacks and headed back to his house, the expression in the woman’s eyes as she knew that she would die stuck in his head.

FIFTEEN

Cabello shut off the engine just at the ICW green marker 49A, and listened for the sounds of someone following him. In addition to the sailboat, McGarvey had a RIB dinghy with a big outboard that was perfectly capable of coming this far this soon. But nothing was behind him.

Less than three miles north of the surveillance house, he was just off Siesta Key where a series of red and white private markers showed the narrow channel to the docks behind six rental properties, all but two of them vacant because of the low season. One of them, a small bungalow, had been set up as their escape route.

“Make no mistake about it, Señor McGarvey is an exceedingly dangerous man,” Major Pedrosa Prieto, their handler at Torrejón Air Force Battle Air Command outside Madrid, had warned them. “Tread with very great care, for he is a man supremely capable of killing you given the proper circumstances.”

But they had not tread with care. Accidentally killing the two students had been a serious mistake on Emilio’s part. Doni had been right; McGarvey had cared very much about the kids, so much so that he had refused to listen to reason about the danger he was in.

Because of it she and Emilio were dead, and most likely Felix too. Now it was up to him to get back to Madrid, though how he was going to explain losing their computer and surveillance equipment was beyond him at the moment.

He restarted the very quiet four-stroke Honda and slowly picked his way down the channel to libertad, freedom, what they called their escape route, stopping every fifteen or twenty meters to listen.

“Is he some kind of a hero, then?” Emilio had asked.

“More like an avenging angel,” Major Prieto said. “I don’t know all of the details, but apparently one of his first assignments for the CIA — a kill outside of Santiago, Chile — went bad through no fault of his, and his government left him hanging in the wind. When he got back home, his wife divorced him and he went to ground somewhere in Switzerland. From that point, for whatever arcane reason, Señor McGarvey became a champion of what were, in his mind, just causes.”

“Don Quixote,” Donica had offered, and everyone but the major had laughed.

“With respect, Lieutenant,” he’d said.

All six houses were dark when Cabello tied up at the dock, bow and stern, not bothering with spring lines because if all went well he would be on his way to Miami within less than a half hour.

He took a rag out of the port coaming box right at his elbow and wiped down everything he’d touched — steering wheel, shift lever, throttle, key and key float — and headed across the sloping lawn to the house. Clean khakis, white shirt, dark blazer, and loafers were waiting for him in one of the closets, along with an overnight bag of toiletries and changes of clothing, plus a passport under the name of Castaneda Trujillo, a wallet with matching documents — driver’s license, national health card, photographs of a nonexistent family, even a love letter from an old flame — and a Nokia cell phone with two dozen telephone numbers, all of them connecting to various CNI blind numbers that were answered by various recorded voices.

Up at the house he found the key under a potted plant and let himself in. Once he had the door closed and relocked he leaned back against it and closed his eyes. What an absolute cock-up. He knew that he was lucky to be alive, but he also understood that he was going to have to do a lot of explaining why the mission had failed so spectacularly.

They’d been trained as a team, but they’d also been through intensive drills in which one or even all of the other team members were down, in which case they would have to continue alone.

“Where are the others?” a man, or possibly a woman, with a high, soft voice asked in Spanish.

Cabello opened his eyes and reached for his gun.

“If you draw your weapon I will kill you,” the person said in a reasonable tone.

Cabello could only make out the figure of someone very large on the other side of the small kitchen. The room was nearly pitch-black and he couldn’t make out any details, except that he was sure now that it was a man and that his life was in immediate danger.

“Who are you?”

“My identity is of no concern. You have come here because there has been trouble. Where are the others? Dead?”

“Sí.”

“Tell me the manner in which they died, and do not lie to me, Señor Cabello, I will know.”

“Do you know about McGarvey?”

“Yes.”

“He shot the others.”

“Has he followed you?”

Cabello shook his head. “I don’t think so. I was ordered to get back to Interpol to file my report.”

“I said do not lie to me, Señor,” the man said, and he fired one shot from a silenced pistol.

The bullet slammed into Cabello’s left arm with an incredible bolt of pain. He cried out, clapping his left hand on the wound.

“I warned you, no lies.”

“What do you want with me?”

“The truth. The Voltaire Society in the person of Giscarde Petain came to talk to Señor McGarvey, and your team killed him. Why?”

“He was our enemy.”

“In what way?”

Cabello hesitated.

“Be quick.”

“You have come this far, you know about our operation, I suspect you know everything else.”

The figure moved closer so that Cabello could make out his features. He looked like a very large teenager, but with the calmness of a monk. He was dressed in black jeans and a black polo shirt.

“How close have you come? How close has McGarvey come?”

“We killed the Frenchman to keep the Society from learning the truth.”

“Yes, the diary of Jacob Ambli. But your people do not have it and now it appears that Mr. McGarvey has declined to help in your quest. But he knows about it?”

“Yes, at least I think so. He made a phone call to a friend at the CIA and discussed the incident at the college.”

“But your team has no idea where the diary is, or who may have stolen it?”

“No.”

“Nor does Mr. McGarvey?”

“No,” Cabello said.

The dark figure raised his pistol and a thunderclap burst inside of Cabello’s head.

SIXTEEN

It was after ten, and though McGarvey was tired he couldn’t shut down. Drink in hand he stood at the open sliders looking across his pool and down the sloping lawn to the gazebo that Katy had loved so much. But he had to keep reminding himself that even if she were here he wouldn’t have been able to explain to her what had happened today. In fact he would have probably moved her into a hotel in town before the flight up to D.C. tomorrow morning.

He had taken another shower and slipped on a T-shirt and shorts. At this moment Otto would be sifting through the computer’s memory that he’d downloaded, and possibly even hacking into the CNI’s database in Madrid. Tomorrow they would have some of the answers — hopefully enough to begin with or to step away and let the police and the FBI handle the mess.

His phone rang, startling him out of his thoughts. It was Otto.

“Do you know a Sarasota PD Lieutenant Jim Forest?”

“I talked to him at the college after the car bomb. He was sniffing around, pretty sure that I was somehow involved. Why?”

“He’s been parked down the road from your house for the past five minutes and he just now is pulling into your driveway.”

“How do you know?”

“I haven’t fried the CNI’s surveillance gear yet, just in case the fourth operator decides to come back. Anyway I spotted the Chevy Suburban from the camera in front of your house, and ran the tag. Thing is, it’s not a department car, it’s his own.”

McGarvey immediately thought of the Mercedes parked next door. “Could Sarasota PD have gotten the tag number and ran it the way you did?”

“First thing I checked, but there was nothing in their logs — leastwise not in their mainframe. Anyway, if they had anything they would have checked next door and found the mess. I can have a cleanup crew there first thing in the morning.”

“Someone on the seventh floor might take notice,” McGarvey said. The office of the CIA’s director Walter Page was on the seventh floor in the Original Headquarters Building. The man ran a tight ship unlike a lot of previous directors who were only political appointees and not professional intelligence officers like he was.

“We’ll see,” Rencke said. He ran the Company’s computers and he had more or less carte blanche, unless he did something totally outrageous.

“Keep tabs on the cops — the county guys too. If it looks like they’re getting involved, I want you to back off.”

“The Bureau has this. Sooner or later they’re going to put two and two together and come knocking at your door. How do you want to play it?”

“Depends on who asks and what they ask.”

“Watch your back tonight.”

“Will do.”

McGarvey hung up just as the doorbell chimed, and he went to answer it. He put the pistol in the drawer in the front hall table, flipped on the outside lights, and waited a few moments before he opened the door.

“A little out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you?” he said. “Or is this a social call?”

“Let’s say I’m here as a professional courtesy. Nothing official. May I come in?”

“Why not?” McGarvey said, and he led the lieutenant through the house to the pool patio. “Drink?”

“A beer would be okay.”

McGarvey got a couple of bottles of Dos Equis with pieces of lime. They sat at a small table from where they could look past the gazebo to the dock and out to the ICW.

“Nice place you have here,” Forest said. He was dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved pullover, a puzzled look on his face. “Thing is we don’t generally get the kind of trouble we had today around here. It’s out of our league, if you want to know the truth.”

“Has the FBI sent someone from Tampa?”

“A couple of forensics people are going through what’s left of the Lexus. And someone will be coming down tomorrow to talk to you. Thought you might like a heads-up.”

“I’ll be in Washington.”

“I could hold you as a material witness.”

“Tell Mullholland that I’ll be checking in with Bill Callahan, he’s the deputy assistant director for Counter-Terrorism.” Lloyd Mullholland was the Bureau’s special agent in charge of the Tampa office.

Forest smiled a little. “Pulling rank?”

“A little, but I have a couple of ideas I want to check out.”

“Care to share them with me?”

“Wouldn’t do you any good, believe me. Because whatever this was all about this afternoon will probably be a job for the Company, or at the very least Interpol. It’d be a waste of your time to get in the middle of it. To start with, the Bureau is going to take over.”

“Like I said, they already have.”

“So why are you here, Lieutenant?”

“Name is Jim. And I know that whoever the guy was in the Lexus came to talk to you about something that got him blown up. I’d like to know what he had to say.”

McGarvey looked away for a moment, sorry that he was involved, and yet curious. “The guy’s name was Giscarde Petain, from a bank in Paris, but we’ve not been able to find such a bank or anyone by that name involved with the banking business in Paris.”

“We?”

“He came to ask for my help searching for something that he said had been stolen from a safety deposit box in an affiliate bank,” McGarvey said, sidestepping Forest’s direct question.

“What was it?”

“Doesn’t matter, because I told him that I wasn’t interested.”

“But you were in the parking lot when his car blew up, with him in it. Now that must have gotten to you.”

“The deaths of those two students got to me,” McGarvey shot back. “Senseless.”

“And you’re going to fight back,” Forest said. “I have a few connections too. Enough to know some of your background, including how your wife and daughter and son-in-law were killed.”

McGarvey held him off. “I’m not trying to pull rank, but you’re out of your league with this. Trust me; back off, let the Bureau handle it.”

“I’m not going to back off, goddamnit! My daughter is a freshman at New College. It could have been her killed this afternoon. And I fucking well want to know what the hell is going on. What the hell might be coming her way next. Do I pull her out of school or can you tell me that she’ll be safe? Absolutely safe? Your word as a father who’s already lost a child.”

It hurt. “They’re after me now.”

“You’re going to run.”

“I want them to follow me away from here.”

Forest got to his feet. “Trouble finds you, McGarvey. Maybe it would be for the best if you didn’t come back.”

SEVENTEEN

The CNI safe house on Siesta Key was a winter rental in a group of similar properties. Since it was out of season the entire neighborhood was all but empty. It was why the Spaniard infidels had rented this place, and the bigger house on Casey Key, and after his initial search Fr. Dominigue Dorestos proved who they were watching and why they had found a safe haven such as this one so necessary.

His handler had warned him at the contact house in Rome that he should expect Kirk McGarvey to be somehow involved because of the Cuban intelligence service’s search for the treasure. What had been unexpected was the presence of the man who’d come to the college, apparently to speak to McGarvey, and the CNI’s reaction to the meeting. Previous to this afternoon the Spaniards had been content merely to watch the former American CIA director, presumably to see what his next moves might be. And especially to watch for someone from Havana to show up.

“This is a delicate situation, as you may well understand, Father,” Augusto Franelli had briefed him two days ago. “The Voltaires have evidently lost something of great import. Very likely the diary. Our first guess would be Cuban intelligence — except we do not believe they have the expertise for such an operation. The Spanish do, but they have been sent to America presumably to either contact McGarvey or wait to see if the Cubans do so.”

“Which would suggest that he might be the thief?” Dorestos asked.

“Not the man’s style. Nor do we believe that even if the Cubans showed up would he agree to help.”

Then this afternoon just after Dorestos had arrived here, Franelli had called his cell phone to advise him about the car bombing.

“Perhaps the man at the college was a Voltaire, come to ask for McGarvey’s help,” Dorestos had said. “And perhaps it was CNI who destroyed him.”

Franelli — a tall, ascetic man who’d been in the military arm of the Hospitallers since he’d left the Italian army’s Ninth Parachute Assault Regiment as a captain eleven years ago — was silent for a beat. “Perhaps you are right.”

“It would make sense, sir.”

“So, it is something that you will find out.”

“Shall I attempt to make contact with McGarvey to see if he knows of the existence of the diary? It might be important. Because if he does know, then mightn’t he continue the search on his own?”

“That’s not likely,” Franelli said. “He would have no motivation. He’s a reasonably wealthy man even by American standards, and after the business a few months ago with the Cubans first in Texas and then at Fort Knox, he was done with it.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Yes, necessarily. He went back to his home in Florida. When you find out exactly what the Spaniards are up to you will return here at once. Do you understand, Father Shadow?”

“Perfectly,” Dorestos said.

“And what else you may have to do when you learn what there is to be learned? Because make no mistake, the infidel Spaniards are the enemies of the Church in this.”

“Sí.”

On the flight over from Rome to New York and then to Tampa where he’d rented a car, now parked in the garage, he’d had plenty of time to work out all of the ramifications of his assignment, especially what it would ultimately mean for the well-being and continued strength of the Church.

The treasure, lost for a century and a half, rightfully belonged to the Vatican from whom it had been stolen, and it was his job, as a defender of the faith, a soldier for Christ, to recover it, even if it meant he had to take a life or lives again. But only for the grace of God’s glory, and only at the behest of the Jesuit’s Superior General, who was known as the Black Pope because his robes were black by contrast to the white robes of his Holiness.

Standing in the deeper shadows a few feet from the man he’d shot to death he watched and listened for someone else to come, but the night was silent.

He recognized the man on the floor as Alberto Cabello, but his showing up here had come as a complete surprise. It had to mean the CNI had run into trouble this evening. Probably of McGarvey’s doing, if the SMOM files he’d been allowed to read were anywhere representative of the man.

He phoned Franelli and explained what he’d found, what he had done, and his speculation that something must have gone wrong at the CNI’s surveillance house.

“I can think of no other reason for Cabello to have shown up,” he said.

“You may be right, but you must make sure that McGarvey has not agreed to work with them.”

“Immediately.”

“Under no circumstances must you allow an interaction with the authorities, especially not with the FBI who will almost certainly become involved because of the car bombing.”

“I understand,” Dorestos said.

“We need the information, and you are the only man who can get it,” Franelli said, and Dorestos’s heart swelled. “God be with you, my son.”

“And with you, Monsignor.”

Pocketing the telephone, Dorestos let himself out of the house, carefully locking up, and went down to the boat. For a long time he stood stock-still, in the deeper shadows, as was his usual preference, and listened to the night sounds.

Somewhere to the north, up island, he could hear music from one of the clubs, and out on the ICW a barge slowly glided up the waterway toward Sarasota. But there were no other sounds.

He got in the boat, started the engine, and slowly motored out the private channel and into the ICW and headed south, a slight, almost beatific smile creasing his boyish features. He was most happy when doing God’s work.

EIGHTEEN

After Jim Forest left, McGarvey took his silenced pistol from the hall table, got a box of 9 mm ammunition and a cleaning kit from a locked cabinet in the pantry, and walked back to the poolside table where he got to work.

He laid out a towel, unscrewed the suppressor, and laid it down. Next he switched the pistol’s decocking lever down to the safe position and ejected the nearly half-empty magazine, setting it aside. He cleared the chamber of the one round then, pulling the front of the trigger guard down and pressing it sideways, he jacked the slide back and removed it. He took the recoil spring off the front of the barrel and set it aside with the magazine and slide.

With care for a task he’d done a thousand times he cleaned the barrel of firing debris, and wiped down the weapon frame and all the parts with an oily rag. Once the pistol was reassembled, he removed the cartridges from the magazine, wiped it down with the rag, and reloaded it.

When he was finished he washed his hands at the kitchen sink, made a ham and cheese sandwich, and opened another bottle of beer and sat listening for boat traffic on the ICW, the loaded pistol on the table in front of him.

He’d been thinking about the fourth CNI operative who had taken the boat and headed north. It was possible, even likely, that the man would come back to find out what happened to his team, and perhaps try to finish the job here.

But after a half hour when only three boats had passed, all of them heading north, he took his pistol and went upstairs where he packed a light bag with a few toiletries and a pair of jeans, a shirt, and a few other things. Anything else he might need was at his Georgetown apartment, along with his go-to-hell kit that was stacked with a pistol, money in U.S. dollars, British pounds, and Euros totaling about ten thousand dollars, along with a half-dozen Krugerrands, several valid passports in different names, driver’s licenses, medical insurance cards, untraceable credit cards, photographs of nonexistent families, even letters from friends. It was everything a man on the run needed to cross national frontiers and get lost for a reasonable period of time.

He had the same sort of kit here at the house, and he’d considered leaving it behind. But even though he would be flying up to D.C. aboard the CIA jet, he still had to get from Joint One Andrews Air Base to his Georgetown apartment, between which just about anything could happen.

The CNI had gone to great lengths to keep tabs on him, and deny him further contact with the man from the Voltaire Society, so it took no stretch of imagination to think that somehow they might be waiting to intercept him in Washington. And he never went anywhere under the sole protection of another man or men, another agency. Never.

He took the money and papers from the concealed floor safe in his walk-in closet and stuffed them into his overnight bag and took it downstairs to the garage where he put it on the front passenger seat of his Porsche.

Again he stood for a few seconds, thinking about what he was getting himself into, and exactly the why of it. He wasn’t sure, except that he kept seeing the falling piece of burning debris from Petain’s Lexus falling out of the sky onto the two students at the bike rack. They hadn’t a clue what was about to happen to them. And it wasn’t fair. Someone had to account for their senseless deaths; someone beyond the CNI team who apparently had been sent to stop him from making a deal with the Voltaire Society.

He’d never considered himself a do-gooder, assassins never thought of themselves in that vein. Yet the truly evil people of the world — the bin Ladens, the Hitlers, the Mussolinis, the Stalins — deserved to die. Or at least he’d come to believe that philosophy, though sometimes he’d had his doubts, his serious reservations that sometimes caused him nightmares. But in the end he was who he was.

An avenging angel someone, somewhere, had called him, only they hadn’t meant it as a positive comment on what he did.

All the lights inside the house were off, and in the kitchen he turned off the pool lights and the lights on the gazebo and down at the dock, as well as the small, colored spots that illuminated the palm trees and other landscaping elements around the house.

He laid the pistol on the pass-through counter from the kitchen to the pool deck and set down on a stool inside the house to wait.

The phone rang at the same time he heard a boat coming from the north down the ICW, but he couldn’t make out its lights.

The number was blind — out of area on the caller ID screen — and McGarvey answered on the fourth ring, waiting to hear the signal that the Blackburn Point Bridge was about to open.

“I hoped I’d catch you before you went to ground,” Bill Callahan said. They were old acquaintances, if not friends. Callahan was more or less a by-the-book FBI assistant deputy director who’d considered guys like McGarvey renegades. Useful, he grudgingly admitted once, but a renegade none the less.

“What makes you think that I’m going to ground?”

“You were involved with a car bombing, and I’m assuming it was meant for you.”

“Not this time.”

“Our Tampa SAC seems to think you belong at the head of the list, and he wants to talk to you first thing in the morning.”

“I won’t be here,” McGarvey said. “I’m flying up to Washington first thing in the morning.” The Blackburn Point Bridge hadn’t made a signal yet. “Are you at the office?”

“Home.”

“How’re Mary and the kids?”

“Just fine,” Callahan said. He’d been there for McGarvey after the funeral for Katy and Liz even though the Bureau had him in custody. He was a family man and he understood Mac’s pain. “Do you want to talk to me about what happened? The local police report has you as a prime witness, but they say that you told them nothing.”

“They wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it, and if they start to seriously poke around someone else will get hurt.”

Callahan was silent for a beat, and when he was back he sounded resigned. “Why did I think that you might say something like that? I could have you pulled in, but I doubt if it’d do us much good.”

“I’ll come over to your office tomorrow, as soon as I can. I’m going to need the Bureau’s help.”

“With what?”

“Start by keeping your SAC in Sarasota. I don’t want him poking around down here. You can depose me yourself. It’s a long story.”

“All your stories are long. I’ll keep the SAC reined in for now, but what else do you want?”

“Time.”

“Christ, Mac. Three dead so far. What the hell are you into now?”

The bridge had not signaled that it was opening, and McGarvey thought that he heard the highly muffled sound of an outboard motor at dead slow somewhere very close.

“I’ll tell you tomorrow. You’ll just have to trust me until then.”

Callahan hesitated. “You’ve never lied to me.”

“No, and not this time either.”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

“I’ll be there,” McGarvey said.

He took his pistol and went upstairs to the widow’s walk on the roof, where keeping below the railing so he didn’t present a silhouette, he was in time to see a dark figure flitting from shadow to shadow from the dock next door up to the house.

In his bedroom he grabbed a pillow from the bed and one of his dark sweatshirts from a bureau drawer. Downstairs at the kitchen pass-through he stuffed the pillow into the shirt and propped it on the stool he’d been sitting on. He pulled the stool a little back from the counter so that it was in deeper darkness, then headed outside around the pool and down to the gazebo.

The fourth CNI officer had come back, as he thought the man might, and this one he did not want to kill. He wanted some answers.

NINETEEN

Fr. Dorestos stood just outside the doorway into the pool kitchen of the CNI’s surveillance house, all of his senses hyper alert for any sign that the killer — who he assumed was Kirk McGarvey — was lurking somewhere inside.

An attractive young woman lay on her back, her neck and bare chest covered in blood. The body of a man, also shot to death, lay a couple of feet away. The woman had a silenced pistol in her hand. A shoot-out had occurred here. But noiseless so as not to attract the attention of neighbors, though the house to the south was dark, and the one just to the north had only its outside landscaping lights on.

These people and their killer had been careful. Professionals, something Dorestos respected.

Taking care not to step in the blood, with his pistol, a SIG Sauer P226 9 mm with the Osprey silencer that reduced sound by a respectable 125 dB, in hand he crossed the kitchen and set out to search each room on the first floor.

A window in the dining room had been broken out, a chair lying on its side nearby. Dorestos glanced over his shoulder the way he had come from the kitchen. There’d been an altercation in which two of the four CNI officers had been taken down. He looked at the window again.

McGarvey had fled deeper into the house, to this room, pursued by the other officers, and he used a dining room chair to break a window.

To make it seem as if he had escaped. But it had been a ruse, because McGarvey had not been finished here.

Dorestos went upstairs, careful at the top to make certain no one was waiting in ambush. A body lay outside an open door in the corridor to the left. Even in the relative darkness he could see the blood pooled on the wood-planked floor, see the blood splattered on the wall across from the door and the damage to the wall next to the door frame.

Stupid on the part of the dead man to hide behind a flimsy plasterboard wall.

He remained standing stock-still in the dark for a full fifteen seconds before he made his way down the corridor, sure that whatever had happened here was long over with, and that McGarvey had come to find out what he wanted, got into a shoot-out, and left.

At the door frame he held up for just a moment before he rolled around the corner and swept the room with his pistol. After a beat he lowered his gun and stepped back.

The table held some sophisticated surveillance equipment all connected to a laptop computer. Laying down his pistol he booted up the laptop, which opened with nothing but a black screen, a blinking white cursor at the upper left corner. The machine’s memory had been erased, probably automatically when McGarvey, or whoever, had tried to access it.

He gingerly approached the window and hanging back out of sight from anyone on the ground, he had an excellent sight line to the house next door — the one to the south that showed no lights, not even outside lights on the palm trees. McGarvey’s. All the surveillance equipment was pointed in that direction.

Dorestos started to go when something in his peripheral vision caught his attention and he turned back. For a long second or two he didn’t know what it was, until all of a sudden he spotted a small green light on one of the cameras pointed out the window.

Instinctively he stepped into a pool of deeper shadows to one side of the open door. The computer had been disabled, but at least one camera was still powered up. It came to him that McGarvey knew there were four CNI officers here, and that one of them had escaped — to the north — by boat. It was also possible, even likely, that McGarvey might be expecting the officer to return.

The priest saw the error he’d made. McGarvey had been waiting for the boat to return. It was possible that he’d heard it coming down the ICW to a low-slung swing bridge. But the tender had not signaled an opening.

McGarvey knew that someone had come back, and whoever was controlling the surveillance equipment was waiting for someone to show up next door.

Dorestos glided across the room and pulled the camera’s plug, and methodically pulled the wires from all the other equipment. McGarvey might be alerted, but he would have to suspect that it was the fourth CNI officer.

Out in the corridor Dorestos stepped over the body, and at the head of the stairs phoned his controller. They used the Australian-based GSM Thuraya encrypted satellite network, immune to interception by any governmental agency.

“You must be at the surveillance location now,” Msgr. Franelli said. “What is your exact situation?”

Dorestos explained what he had found, including the blank laptop and especially the live camera pointed at the house next door.

“The deaths are Señor McGarvey’s work, without doubt,” Franelli said. “And now he will be expecting someone to come for him.”

“I do not believe that the Spaniards convinced him to help,” Dorestos said, meaning no humor.

But his handler chuckled. “No. The question you have called to ask then is: What must come next?”

“Sí.”

“At this moment Mr. McGarvey will be very dangerous, not likely to be approachable by any ordinary means, and certain that whoever comes his way this night means to kill him. But in this we might have a slight advantage.”

“He cannot be convinced to help us?”

“Not tonight. But he will want some answers, which he figures you might have for him. It means that he will not want you dead.”

“I don’t understand, Monsignor. Do you want me to kill him, or try to talk to him? Perhaps I might surrender myself; go in without my weapon and with my hands up.”

“No. At this point he must not know the Hospitaller’s involvement.”

“What then?”

“Listen carefully, because what you must do next will be extremely difficult and dangerous,” Msgr. Franelli said, and he explained what he wanted. “A delicate but necessary illusion.”

“I still do not understand.”

“It is simple, Father. We still need his help, and he will give it to us in such a way that he doesn’t know he has. You will drive him like a quarry to its hunter.”

“What if the opportunity you suggest does not present itself?” Dorestos asked.

“Then you will create one, or you will have failed.”

Pocketing his sat phone, Dorestos went downstairs to the dining room, and flattening himself against the wall peered out of the shattered window. The house next door was still in darkness, and he had to assume that McGarvey was now waiting for someone to show up. Probably the fourth CNI officer.

He had no earthly idea what he should do next that would fit with his orders, but he wasn’t frightened. At least not of McGarvey, not even of death because surely there would be salvation for him on the right hand of God. Each time he went out on a mission he was given absolution from his sins by the unit’s priest. But this time he’d been given Extreme Unction, which was usually reserved for a person in extremis—on the verge of death. At this moment it was a comfort.

Something moved in the nearly absolute darkness alongside a pair of cabbage palms. He couldn’t make out a figure, but he’d seen a slight shifting of patterns. McGarvey was waiting there, at the rear of the house with a view not only across his pool deck, but of the rear of the Spaniards’ rental.

Dorestos stepped back. McGarvey had set a trap for someone coming up from the dock, or across the backyard. Presumably whoever was monitoring the camera trained on the front of the house would have warned him if someone were to come that way. But that option was off the table now.

Letting himself out the front door he hesitated for only a moment between the Mercedes parked in the driveway and the open garage door as he tried to work out the meaning of the two facts. But whatever might have happened here earlier this evening made no difference now.

He made his way through a line of flowering bushes that separated the two properties, then hurried silently down the north side of the house to the rear corner overlooking the pool and pool deck.

From where he stood he could make out the two cabbage palms where he thought he’d seen McGarvey, but from this angle nothing was there. It had either been a play of shadows or the CIA assassin had moved.

Keeping low and moving fast he darted fifteen feet to the relative safety of a grouping of three tall palm trees, hoping to draw fire, but the night remained silent. If McGarvey were out there somewhere he was biding his time, waiting to see. What?

Farther down the backyard a small gazebo just above the ICW, where a large sailboat was docked, a tender with an outboard motor out of the water on a lift was in darkness. It would make for a good firing position, though quite a long distance to the rear of the house for a pistol shot. But McGarvey’s file warned that the man was reputed to be an expert marksman of “outstanding abilities,” who should be approached with extreme caution.

Dorestos turned to search the pool deck and open sliders into what from here appeared to be a kitchen with an open pass-through to a counter with four stools on the pool deck. To this point he still had no idea how he would comply with his orders, until he suddenly saw the solution.

Something dark was seated at the pass-through inside the house. But the figure didn’t move and it was crude, certainly not a human, though evidently meant to look as if a person were seated there. It meant that McGarvey was within firing range of whoever took a shot.

Dorestos suddenly sprinted back the way he had come, pulling off three quick shots at the seated dummy as he ran.

Reaching the corner of the house two shots smacked into the stucco concrete block behind him, but low enough so had they not missed they would have hit him in the legs.

Then he raced toward the front of the house, his mission for this night accomplished. He’d gotten McGarvey’s attention.

TWENTY

The two silenced pistol shots at a distance of seventy feet were impossible even under the best of conditions, but McGarvey figured that he’d had a fifty-fifty chance of catching the CNI operator low, in the legs.

He waited for just a second or two in the lee of Katy’s gazebo in case the Spaniard intel officer was waiting for him, but then ran to the south side of the house hoping to catch the guy in front.

It was clear the man had come back to finish the job. Presumably he’d stopped at the surveillance house and found his people dead, which made him a motivated man.

McGarvey’s phone buzzed in silent mode in his pocket as he reached the front. He ignored it, holding up to take a quick look around the corner.

He was in time to see a ghost-like dark figure heading south through a thick line of orange, lemon, and lime trees next door. The agent was moving fast, but it was more than likely that he would pull up short or even double back and wait in the shadows to shoot anyone coming up on his six. For sure he had not been hit.

Across the street, which was the long, narrow island’s only road, was a narrow strip of beach and the open Gulf of Mexico. Nowhere to run and hide. The Spaniards’ Mercedes was in the driveway, but the agent had headed south.

McGarvey went next door to the Mercedes where he popped the hood, yanked off the engine’s plastic shroud, and ripped out all the spark plug wires. He tossed them aside, closed the hood, and headed around to the rear of the house where he would be in a position to intercept the CNI agent if he tried to make it back.

At the corner of the house he looked and listened for any sign that the man was heading this way, but he could detect nothing, and he went down to the dock where the CNI’s boat was tied up, the key in the ignition.

One way or another he thought it was reasonable to suspect that the man would to try to make it back here, either to the car or to the boat to make his escape north where there would be another safe house and transportation.

He took the key from the ignition and pocketed it, then headed south just above the waterline. It was at least five hundred yards to the Blackburn Point Bridge across to the mainland, and a fair hike after that back up to Tamiami Trail — Highway 41—which led north to Sarasota.

He stopped now and then to make sure that he wasn’t running blindly into a trap. Once he thought he heard something just ahead, but four doors down from his house he came to one of the several compounds on the island that was protected by a high concrete block wall, only a wooden gate opening to a path down to the ICW.

Lights illuminated the property and McGarvey spotted smudges near the top of the ten-foot wall, and for just a second he puzzled them out, realizing all of a sudden that someone had climbed up and over. The man was large but he had to be very agile, an athlete. It was a feat that McGarvey couldn’t duplicate.

He stepped aside, out of the likely path of a ricocheting bullet fragment, and fired a shot into the lock at the gate to no effect. The mechanism was made of case hardened steel as he thought it might be.

A slight scuffling noise came from the southern end of the compound and McGarvey was in time to see a dark figure at the top of the wall for just an instant before it disappeared. He fired on the run, knowing he’d missed.

At the corner he was again in time to see the CNI agent disappearing in the darkness. This time he did not fire. Instead he ran across to the next property, this one whose sloping lawn led from a long dock, up to a cantilevered infinity pool just below a very large house.

He stopped in the darkness for just a second, searching for movement somewhere up on the pool deck, but he was in time to see the dark figure leaping up the wall of the next compound to the south and disappearing on the other side.

The man’s speed was nearly impossible. He was nothing more than a shadow.

McGarvey reached the walled compound and ran immediately to the southern side, where he stopped again to listen and to watch the top of the wall.

“We are not your real enemy, signore,” a high-pitched voice, either that of a young boy or a woman, called from the other side of the wall. The accent was Italian, not Spanish.

“You tried to kill me,” McGarvey said. He leaned against the wall at the southern corner.

“Merely to get your attention. I knew the dummy in the chair was a ruse and that you were hiding somewhere very close with the intention of doing me harm.”

“Get my attention for what purpose? You’re not with the CNI.” If whoever it was came over the wall, McGarvey would have a clear shot.

“Be careful who you talk to. Someone else will be coming to ask for your help, but trust no one. Believe me, Signore McGarvey, I have taken a vow never to lie.”

“I’ll put my pistol down, and you do the same. Come out and we’ll talk.”

There was no answer.

McGarvey waited a full minute then started along the wall to the front of the compound. But no one was there; nothing moved in either direction on the road.

His phone vibrated again. It was Otto.

“You okay, Mac?”

“I’ve been chasing after the fastest guy I’ve ever met, and I think I’ve lost him.”

“It has to be one of the CNI operators, because the one video feed I left open was shut down.”

“I don’t think so,” McGarvey said. “He spoke to me. Called me signore. He said that he wasn’t my enemy and warned me that I wasn’t to trust anybody. And he said something else damned curious. He said that he’d taken a vow never to lie.”

“SMOM — Sacred Military Order of Malta.”

“That’s what I figured. The Spanish government wants the treasure, and so does the Vatican, along with the Voltaire Society. So who stole the diary? Whoever it was wouldn’t be snooping around here.”

“You’re right,” Otto said. “So what’s next?”

“I’m not sure. But I’m getting a little tired of people who talk to me getting blown up, or people next door watching my every move, or someone from the Church taking potshots, so I’m going to find out what the hell is going on.”

A boat roared to life on the ICW a couple of doors away.

“Got to go,” McGarvey said, and he headed in a dead run back north to the CNI’s surveillance house and the boat tied up to the dock.

The boat that had just started came up the ICW at full throttle and was well past when McGarvey reached the CNI’s boat. He jumped aboard and turned the key to start the engine but nothing happened.

He turned to check the outboards, but the fuel lines were missing. He leaned back against the back of the seat, and shook his head.

The son of a bitch was not only fast, he was good.

TWENTY-ONE

Dorestos tied a loop of line from the stern of the powerboat he’d stolen to a cleat on the dock at the CNI’s Siesta Key safe house, put it in gear at idle throttle, and pointed out toward the ICW. As it strained against the tether, he stepped up onto the dock and released the line.

The boat slowly made its way up the narrow private channel, hesitated as it touched bottom, but then broke free and the torque of the spinning prop gradually eased it to the south into the deeper water of the ICW. It was unlikely that the boat would be associated with this place, giving him an extra margin of time to get away.

Nothing had been disturbed in the house since he’d left earlier this evening, and once he made sure that no traffic was moving on the road, he opened the garage door and headed north in the Chevrolet Malibu rental car. He tossed the garage door opener over the roof and into the ditch beside the road.

In ten minutes he was off the island and heading to I-75, which would take him up to the Tampa International Jet Center where he’d rented the car from Hertz and where the chartered Embraer Lineage that had brought him from New York earlier today was parked, its crew waiting at a nearby motel.

He’d not heard another boat coming from the south, and he was reasonably certain that McGarvey wasn’t following him. Nevertheless he changed lanes often, and kept glancing in the rearview mirror to make sure no one was on his tail, until he was on the interstate highway at Clark Road heading north.

He called his handler and explained what had happened.

“You’re sure that you got away clean?”

“Sí.”

“Then you have done a good night’s work, and the fact that you actually spoke to him, I think bodes well. But tell me, Father, what were your exact words?”

“I told him that we were not his real enemy. And I told him to be careful who he talked to, and not to trust anyone.”

“What else? Exactly.”

“I said: ‘Believe me, Signore McGarvey, I have taken a vow never to lie.’”

“Then he knows who you are.”

Dorestos didn’t see it at first, but all of a sudden he realized the mistake he had made. “He can’t know that I am a Hospitaller.”

“Perhaps not, but considering the scope of the issue he will have to guess that you are from the Vatican. It was an error on your part, Father, but not a grave one.”

“I will make a penance when I get home.”

“As you must, but it will have to wait. Where are you at this moment?”

Dorestos told him.

“Good. Your aircraft will be waiting for you in Tampa, but you are not returning just yet. First you are flying to Washington, where you will get a motel room under your work name, of course, and rent a car with tinted windows.”

“Do you believe that Mr. McGarvey will be there?”

“A government aircraft is to pick him up in Sarasota at eight in the morning, almost certainly to take him to Andrews where you will be waiting to follow him.”

Dorestos knew better than to question how the monsignor knew this as a fact, because the Church had people on the ground in just about every city large or small in at least all of the western world — both hemispheres.

“Somebody else will almost certainly try to reach him; in this you were correct. Perhaps the CNI, perhaps someone else from the Voltaire Society, perhaps someone from his own government because we have an idea where some of this treasure that rightfully belongs to us has gone, though we don’t yet know why. So it will be up to you to find out who he meets with.”

“Shall I intercept whoever it might be?”

“No,” Msgr. Franelli said sharply. “You have driven him to act. It is exactly what I wanted. Now I want to know not only who he sees, but what his next moves might be.”

“Do you believe that he will lead us to the treasure?”

“Almost certainly. And we will be there to take it from him when he finds it.”

TWENTY-TWO

The CIA’s Gulfstream touched down at Joint One Andrews under a cloudless sky a couple of minutes before eleven, and taxied directly into a hangar. McGarvey gathered his bag, thanked the crew, and walked off the plane where a young-looking master sergeant named Andersen in ODUs was waiting with a plain blue sedan.

“Welcome to Andrews, Mr. Director, may I give you a lift into town?”

“Just somewhere I can catch a cab.”

“Main gate, sir. There’s always a couple there. If not we can call for one.”

McGarvey hadn’t slept very well last night, nor had he gotten much rest on the short, bumpy flight up. He’d called Rencke on the way out to the private aviation terminal at SRQ and told him that no escort was necessary.

“No problem,” Otto said. “Louise was planning on picking you up. Audie’s staying home from day care and she wanted to come along.”

Audie was McGarvey’s granddaughter. And sometimes thinking about her, seeing her face in the photographs and videos Louise sent him made his heart heavy; she was the spitting image of her mother, Liz, who had been a spitting image of her mother, McGarvey’s wife, Katy.

“Could be I’m going to pick up a tail, so I’m going to cab it to my place in Georgetown. Make it easy for them. But I don’t want you or Louise in the line of fire. And it might be best if you sent Audie down to the Farm for the time being.”

The CIA’s training base for new recruits and for some missions was at a place called the Farm on the York River south of Washington. His daughter and son-in-law had been codirectors of training and Audie had been adopted by the entire staff. She’d been sent down to stay out of harm’s way twice; once just after her parents had been murdered and again a few months ago when Louise had been kidnapped and Otto had been forced to fly to Cuba for the funeral of Fidel Castro.

“Okay, but not until she sees you first. She’s practically going crazy, looking at your pictures and videos.”

McGarvey had seen his wife and daughter murdered in front of his eyes when the limo they were riding in exploded. And thinking that Audie could be exposed to the same kind of danger sometimes drove him to the brink. Sometimes it was nearly impossible to think rationally about her. “I don’t want to take the chance.”

“She’s our daughter now, kemo sabe,” Otto said tenderly. “Which means we get the final say.”

“I’ll be a couple of hours,” McGarvey said, not wanting to press the argument. But less than twenty-four hours into a situation six people were already dead, and he expected the body count to rise.

McGarvey maintained an apartment on the third floor of a brownstone in Georgetown on Twenty-seventh Street with a view of Rock Creek Park where he ran every morning when he was in residence. He’d bought the place as a refuge after Katy had died, and before he could face returning to their house on Casey Key.

He dismissed the cab a couple of blocks from his place, and walked the rest of the way. Georgetown was in full swing with a lot of tourists especially along M Street, which lent the place an anonymity. Nevertheless he tried to come in clean each time.

On the ride in from Andrews he’d sat in the front passenger seat from where he could watch his six in the door mirror, but if anyone had tailed him from the base they were very good. A blue Chevy Tahoe with deeply tinted windows had been interesting from the time they’d turned onto State 4 into the District, but then he passed and turned north on Twenty-third at Washington Circle.

Standing now on Dumbarton at Twenty-eighth, waiting for traffic to clear so that he could cross, he thought he spotted the Chevy passing through the intersection one block north, but he couldn’t be sure. When it didn’t show up in the next block, he put it down to jumpy nerves, thinking about Audie.

A Grey Line tour bus rumbled past, and McGarvey walked across the street, stopping for a moment at a corner shop selling magazines, water, and flowers, so that he could look at the reflections in the window. He was jumpy, and almost certain that he’d been followed from Andrews, but no one was behind him. And the Tahoe was gone.

Around the corner a half block away, McGarvey let himself into the brownstone, and used the stairs to reach his third-floor apartment. The building housed mostly professional singles or couples without children and Bill Tyrone, an older man who spent most of his time away on cruises in the Caribbean and Europe. He’d once told McGarvey that there were three women he met on most of the trips who had more or less adopted him.

“Why stay home alone when I have all that attention?” he’d said, laughing.

McGarvey’s fail-safe, which was a small bit of black shoe polish just inside the door lock opening, was intact. Nevertheless he drew his gun, unlocked the door, and eased it open with the toe of his shoe. Nothing moved inside, there were no sounds, and he rolled around the corner, sweeping his pistol left to right.

But someone had been here. He smelled the subtle lingering odor of a woman’s perfume, probably expensive, but so faint it was impossible for him to guess how long ago whoever had worn it had been here.

Closing and locking the door behind him he made a quick search of his small one-bedroom place, but so far as he could tell nothing had been disturbed. He glanced back at the door. Whoever had been here was a professional. They’d not missed the fail-safe, and yet they’d worn perfume.

At the window he looked across at Rock Creek Park with its jogging paths, single road, picnic benches, and the creek itself, which wandered down from the national Zoological Park, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Nor was traffic below on Twenty-seventh Street out of the ordinary.

But someone was there. He could feel it in his bones. Maybe the CNI or perhaps someone else from the Voltaire Society. Or the man with the high-pitched voice from Casey Key who’d called him signore.

He retrieved his bag from where he’d dropped it just inside the door and brought it into his bedroom, where he laid his pistol down and took off his jacket. It was early but in the kitchen he poured a stiff measure of Cognac, downed it neat, and then phoned Otto on his landline. Several years ago Rencke had come up with a back-scatter encryption system that could scramble both sides of a phone conversation even though the encryption equipment was located only at one end. It worked especially well with landlines.

“Are you at home or at the campus?”

“Home,” Otto said. “Louise is here too. Is everything okay?”

“I think I picked up a tail, but whoever it is, is damned good. Check to see if there have been any private jets landing in the past few hours from Sarasota or any place within a few hours driving distance.”

“TSA only allows forty-eight private flights every twenty-four hours, so it should be easy,” Rencke said. “Who do you have in mind, the CNI?”

“I think it’s the guy who got away from me on the key. He was good.”

“The Hospitallers have the rep. Are you coming out here today?”

“Soon as I see Callahan. Has someone picked up Audie?”

“Later, after you get here. She wants to see you.”

“Goddamnit.”

Rencke said nothing.

McGarvey hung up and stayed leaning against the wall by the window for a long minute or so, trying to calm down. He’d never been really afraid of much except for the safety of his family; his wife and daughter, and now his granddaughter. He’d tried to insulate them by keeping his distance so when someone came gunning for him they’d been pretty much out of the line of fire.

But it had not worked to save Katy or Liz, and he was very much afraid that it wouldn’t work to keep Audie safe and that one thought drove him crazy.

He called Bill Callahan at FBI’s headquarters downtown and left a message that he was on his way, and then called the private garage where his Porsche Cayenne SUV was maintained and kept while he was out of town, and asked for it to be brought around.

TWENTY-THREE

The dark blue Chevy Tahoe with deeply tinted windows was parked on Dumbarton and Twenty-ninth Street nearly two blocks from McGarvey’s apartment. Traffic here had been light but steady for the twenty minutes Dorestos had bided his time, watching the images on his iPad’s Internet connection. He’d stopped by a Wendy’s to get a sandwich and a soda, and was eating now. It was cover. Everyone was in too much of a hurry to bother noticing a man sitting alone in a car eating his lunch.

As soon as he’d landed at Reagan National he’d gotten on a U.S. air traffic control restricted site that showed the traffic pattern for the entire country. Homing in on the Sarasota flight patterns north along the eastern seaboard he’d picked out the government Gulfstream flight to Andrews earlier this morning.

From there he’d brought up the Russian GLONASS GPS system, which had been recently augmented to display actual real-time satellite images of what their Federal Security Service — which was the renamed KGB — deemed as hot spots. Among them was Washington, D.C., and environs. The system was much like Google Earth only better because it was strictly focused as an intelligence tool.

He’d watched as the plane had landed and taxied to a hangar where a few minutes later a plain blue Air Force sedan came out and drove to the main gate where a man carrying a small overnight bag transferred to a waiting cab that immediately headed into the city.

The angles had been all wrong for Dorestos to make a positive identification, and the man had not looked up. But his build was right, and the aircraft that entered the hangar had come from Sarasota, which had to be more than coincidence.

He’d followed the cab at a safe enough distance that even a man of McGarvey’s tradecraft wouldn’t spot him, and followed him to a brownstone building, which still wasn’t decisive. But he had time, and he had patience, things he had learned at the Instituto Provinciale Assistenza Infanzia, which was the Catholic orphanage in Milan.

His mother had been a prostitute who’d given birth to him in a dark alley and had left him in a garbage bin where a policeman had found him and brought him to the nuns at the Chiese San Fedele, from where after a medical checkup he was taken to the IPAI.

But he never fit in. He was too big for his age, he had a sullen attitude that he’d inherited from his mother.

From the age of around nine or ten he began slipping out of the orphanage after dark, where he met up with a street gang, who after an initial initiation of knives and clubs, which he passed, set him to work first as a second-story man because of his youth and his size. By the time he was thirteen — and adept at street begging, breaking and entering, and even strong-armed robbery of old women — he’d graduated by killing his first man for a few hundred lira.

No matter what, no matter the situations he found himself in, no matter the trouble he’d gotten into, each morning before dawn he slipped back to the orphanage where he was safe. The Church was the mother he’d never known, and he loved Her with all of his heart.

Fifteen minutes after the man had entered the brownstone building he came out at the same moment a metallic blue-gray Porsche SUV pulled up to the curb and a man in a black jacket got out. The two of them greeted each other.

The angle was low enough that Dorestos managed to get a tag number, which he ran, coming up with McGarvey’s name.

A minute later a Ford Taurus pulled up, the man who’d delivered the Porsche got in, and they left.

McGarvey waited for a couple of minutes at the curb, as if he were expecting someone — the Tahoe, Dorestos had the nasty thought — then got in and drove away.

Giving McGarvey a head start, Dorestos pulled away and followed the Porsche to Pennsylvania Avenue, and into the city past the White House to the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, where the car disappeared.

For just a minute Dorestos was confused, until he cautiously drove past the Bureau’s headquarters complex, spotting the entrance to the underground VIP parking garage. He’d taken a chance that the American knew he was being followed and had laid a trap. But the simple truth was that McGarvey had come to Washington to report to the FBI what had happened. He might suspect, though that was far-fetched, but he didn’t know that he was being followed.

Half a block away he got lucky with a parking spot where he waited a full five minutes to see if McGarvey came out, before he turned around and drove back to Georgetown, parking a block away from the brownstone, and going the rest of the way in on foot.

This morning he was dressed in neatly pressed khaki slacks, boat shoes with no socks, a yellow Polo shirt, and a lightweight blue blazer, all American with a European flair of side vents on the jacket.

No one paid him the slightest attention as he let himself in to the brownstone’s unattended lobby. Six mail slots were along the wall between the elevator and the stairwell, ground-floor apartment doors left and right down a short hall.

He studied the name plates, until 3A, which was for T. Van Buren, and he shrugged. McGarvey’s tradecraft may have been legendary, but he was apparently a man of sentimentalities. A fool even. T. Van Buren was the name of his son-in-law who’d worked for the CIA, and had been assassinated in the line of duty. No one would come looking for the apartment of a dead man.

Dorestos easily loped up the stairs to the third floor, where he stopped a moment at the landing to listen for anything out of the ordinary. Sentimental or not, McGarvey wasn’t a stupid man. If he’d had the slightest inkling that he’d been followed from Andrews he might have stationed a CIA officer or two here to keep watch. But if someone were here they were making absolutely no noise.

At the door to the Van Buren apartment, Dorestos studied the hinges and door frame, especially the lintel for a proximity device, and the threshold for a pressure plate that might be connected to a silent alarm, or perhaps a small, narrowly directed explosive device that would be effective only at close range to avoid collateral damage.

But he detected nothing until he took out a lock pick set and bent down to inspect what turned out to be an ordinary PLY205 High Security front entry lock, that was pickable by any decent operator. Only the mushroom pin might present some difficulty to an amateur, and for just a moment Dorestos was a little disappointed, until he spotted a minute trace of what looked like black grease, or perhaps ordinary shoe polish.

It had not been disturbed, nor would it have been noticed by anyone but a professional. A little better, he thought, though not much, and at this point his estimation of McGarvey’s abilities had dropped.

Scooping up a bit of the black grease with one of the picks in his set, he used two others to pick the lock in under fifteen seconds, and once the door was open he replaced the grease from where he’d removed it, and stepped inside.

The apartment was neat, but a little dust had accumulated on top of the coffee table and the flat panel television as if no one had lived here in weeks or perhaps months.

But something felt out of the ordinary, and walking across the living room Dorestos pulled out his pistol. An overnight bag lay on the bed, but the bathroom had not been used, and in the kitchen an empty glass sat on the counter next to a bottle of Remy Martin.

McGarvey had come here only long enough to drop off his overnight bag, have a quick drink, and call for his car.

But someone else had been here too.

Dorestos raised his head and sniffed delicately. It was a woman’s perfume, vaguely familiar. He’d smelled it the moment he’d walked in the door. But McGarvey had come here alone.

At the window he looked down at the traffic along Twenty-seventh, as well as on the Rock Creek Parkway, but there was no sign of McGarvey’s Porsche.

Deciding that searching the apartment would probably tell him nothing important, but might alert McGarvey that someone had been here, he holstered his pistol, let himself out, and walked back to his car.

He phoned Msgr. Franelli. “I followed McGarvey to the FBI’s headquarters building, and then came back to his apartment.”

“I expected he would talk to someone at the FBI. He has friends there, and the Bureau is very much interested in the bombing in Sarasota. But tell me, Father, did you find anything of interest in the man’s apartment?”

Dorestos told his handler about the fail-safe on the lock, and his decision not to carry out a search for fear of missing another booby trap. “But someone had been there before me. A woman. I smelled her perfume.”

“Describe it.”

Dorestos was at a complete loss, and he said so.

“Break it down. Was it strong or weak?”

“Very faint, but distinctive. Perhaps something like orange or lemon blossoms, but not so sweet, and maybe something else — acid with sugar, maybe a woman’s body lotion.” Dorestos remembered something. It was at the back of his mind, a smell, a place, maybe a room. But he couldn’t put his finger on it. “I don’t know.”

“Do you think that you will remember it if you smell it again?” Franelli asked.

Dorestos brightened. “Yes, Monsignor, without a doubt.”

“You’ve encountered it before?”

“I’m not sure. Perhaps.”

“Can you remember when or where? “

Dorestos racked his brain, but all he could dredge up was a small room, with a desk and two chairs. A nun was seated behind the desk and someone else, maybe a woman, was seated across from her. He described the scene as best he could to his handler.

“You were very young. Maybe two or three. And the perfume was Chanel.”

Dorestos was astounded. “How can you know this?”

“The office was in the orphanage, and the woman was your mother, who came only once to visit you. She wore Chanel.”

TWENTY-FOUR

McGarvey waited in the ground floor visitors’ lounge of the FBI headquarters building for a full fifteen minutes before Bill Callahan, the Bureau’s deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, finally came down to get him. He was a large, athletic-looking man in his mid-forties, who in fact had played football for the Green Bay Packers for a couple of years.

“Good to see you, Mac,” he said. “And I’d ask how are you doing, but I already have a pretty good idea.”

“Your people found out anything interesting yet in Sarasota?”

“Let’s take a walk and get some lunch,” Callahan said. He took the security badge from around his neck and put it in his jacket pocket.

“Fair enough,” McGarvey agreed, and they walked out of the building, and crossed Ninth with the light where a half block away they went into the Caucus Room, which was an upscale steak house.

Callahan was known here, and the maître d’ showed them to a booth near the rear of the main room, where he ordered a mineral water with a twist, and McGarvey a Pils Urquell beer.

“I won’t ask the questions I’d need to ask in my office, and in turn you’re going to tell me everything because besides the three dead at the university, we found three more dead in the house next to yours. We think that they worked for Spanish intelligence, and that they were running a fairly sophisticated surveillance operation on you.”

“They were CNI, and there’s a fourth one, possibly dead.”

Their drinks came, but Callahan told the waiter they’d order lunch later.

“You killed the three, including the woman?”

“Yes,” McGarvey said, and he went over the entire day beginning with Petain’s visit at the college, though not what he wanted, until the arrival of Jim Forest the Sarasota detective. “Otto downloaded everything from the computer and then fried it.”

“Yes, we found out right away that the hard disk drive had been cleaned out. I expect that you’ll share it with us. But why, what the hell is going on that the CNI wants to keep tabs on you and if you’re right, killed the Frenchman?”

“And the two students,” McGarvey said.

Callahan nodded tightly. “Josh starts college in a couple of years, and he’s been thinking about New College. Maybe not such a good idea.”

“There was Kent State, and the high school at Columbine, and others. We can’t protect them all the time.”

“You know that better than most. So tell me what the hell is going on, starting with the Frenchman.”

“He told me that he’d been sent by the Voltaire Society to ask for my help finding a hundred-and-sixty-year-old diary that had been stolen from a bank vault in Bern. It supposedly has the locations of seven caches of gold and silver buried somewhere in southern New Mexico, by Spanish monks from Mexico City. Actually only four, because three of them have already been emptied, and he warned me that my life was in danger because of what I already knew, or thought I knew.”

Callahan sat back. “Go on,” he said.

McGarvey almost felt sorry for the man, who after all was just trying to do his job in an increasingly difficult world. Pressure came not only from the terrorist organizations he was charged with finding before another 9/11 occurred, but from the White House that wanted only good news, especially in an election year.

“You know what I was involved with a few months ago in Texas and then Fort Knox. It’s not over.”

“Our file is still open, as is, I suspect, DO’s.” The DO was the CIA’s directorate of operations, which had been peripherally involved with the situation that had started in Havana with Fidel Castro’s death.

“Walt Page would like to see it closed.” Page was the director of the CIA, and just as straight a shooter as Callahan.

“I’m sure he would. Are the Cubans involved again?”

“Not yet.”

“Let’s go back to the Frenchman who shows up at New College to ask for your help finding some diary. What’d you tell him?”

“That I wasn’t interested, and that he needed a private detective. He gave me a telephone number in Paris, but Otto couldn’t find out much except that if such a society existed, it was under the radar, except that a transfer of money was made to the United States just before the Civil War, apparently by the society. But why the payment was made, who accepted it, and what it was used for is still up in the air.”

“Another treasure hunt?”

“Yeah,” McGarvey said, a little troubled that he was letting the man hang in the wind, but he needed some time.

“That to this point has involved some French society — coincidental that you’re a Voltaire scholar — and Spanish intelligence, for which at least six bodies have piled up, possibly a seventh. Anyone else involved?”

McGarvey had debated the next point, because he didn’t know if it would help or hurt Callahan. But the man was one of the good ones in a very large pool that contained a lot of bureaucratic assholes. Washington was filled with them. Trouble is that it was hard to tell the good guys from the jerks until it was too late.

“The Vatican.”

Callahan was taken aback but for just a moment. “I see. Because the treasure was brought north by Catholic monks from Mexico City. They want it back. But Spain doesn’t want to share it. Nor does the Voltaire Society, who does what — write checks to us? Or sends the occasional shipment of gold and silver our way? And to this point it seems as if everyone is willing to kill whoever gets in their way. Does that about cover it?”

“Not quite.”

“The Cubans. But you said that they’re not involved this time.”

“Not yet, but I expect someone will be showing up.”

Callahan looked away, a pained expression in his eyes and knit brows and the set of his mouth. “I don’t know if I want to ask, but I’ve known you for too long not to: What’s your take on all of this?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t made any sense of it yet.”

“Jesus H. Christ, Mac, by your own admission you’ve gunned down three intelligence operatives from a friendly nation — one of them a young woman. How am I supposed to sell the director on the notion that you shouldn’t be arrested and buried somewhere? Give us the time to straighten out this mess?”

“Because you’d never get it straightened out that way. Believe me.”

“Save me your hunches,” Callahan said. “But from where I sit, apparently in the cheap seats, there is no gold treasure buried somewhere in New Mexico — nor was there ever any. It’s nothing but an urban legend, no different than Area 51 at Roswell with alien bodies and spaceships. Ghosts, hobgoblins, time travel, warp drive — beam me up, Scotty. My kids are into it, and my wife watches all the paranormal shows on cable — not because they believe in any of that shit, but because it’s entertaining. The problem is the bodies. The murders. Assassinations. Acts of terrorism, whatever you want to call what’s happened in the past twenty-four hours.”

“I need a little time, Bill. It’s all I’m asking.”

Callahan threw up his hands. “Why did I expect you were going to say something like that?”

“I’ll keep you in the loop.”

“Please do,” Callahan said. He stood up. “If I were hungry I’d have the steak sandwich, it’s pretty good for twenty-five bucks. But I’m not hungry.” He tossed down a fifty-dollar bill, and started away, but then turned back. “Are more people going to die over this thing?”

“Probably,” McGarvey said, and he regretted it deep in his bones.

TWENTY-FIVE

After speaking with his handler, Dorestos turned his attention back to the GLONASS real-time images on his iPad in time to catch McGarvey’s gray Porsche emerge from the J. Edgar Hoover Building and head back on Pennsylvania Avenue the same way it had come from Georgetown.

He figured it was likely that McGarvey would either go back to his apartment, or probably cross the river either on the Roosevelt or Key Bridge and head up the George Washington Parkway to the CIA headquarters.

He was betting on the CIA, so he pulled away from the curb and drove down to M Street and turned right, away from where Pennsylvania Avenue ended, keeping one eye on the iPad.

Just past the touristy shops at Georgetown Park, and two blocks before the Key Bridge he got lucky with a parking spot and pulled over to wait and see where McGarvey, still in traffic, was going.

He was having a hard time letting go of the scent of the perfume, which the monsignor said was Chanel — the same scent his mother had worn. She was long dead by now, he’d found out that much, but until today he’d had no real memory of her. But now he could see her in that tiny office at the orphanage. He couldn’t make out her face, or even her shape, only her general outline, but her scent stuck in his mind. It was comforting to him, and yet frightening, one of the unconscious reasons, he supposed, that made him want to get out of McGarvey’s apartment without searching it. He was afraid of the perfume.

The loneliness and sense of abandonment that he’d felt until he’d joined the street gang came back at him strong. Had his mother not come to visit him, he suspected that he might have adjusted much sooner, and yet intellectually he understood that such thoughts were probably beyond the ken of a two-year-old. But he felt the sense of loss now deep in his chest, and he wanted to cry.

The naivete was long gone — knocked out of him on the street, and later when he was sixteen and woke up early in the morning with one of the older priests at the orphanage kneeling beside his bed.

“It is all right, my son,” the priest had whispered. He’d pulled the covers away, and pulled Dorestos’s pajama bottoms down.

“I don’t understand,” Dorestos said softly, but he had lost his virginity with the whores two years earlier, and he knew damned well what oral sex was all about.

One of the Catholic jokes inside the orphanage had been: “How do you get a nun pregnant? Just dress her up as an altar boy.”

The priest gently fondled Dorestos’s penis until it was erect and then took it in his mouth, the sensation pleasurable, and Dorestos relaxed and enjoyed it, coming quickly to orgasm.

When it was over the priest smiled. “Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“Bastard,” Dorestos said, and he clamped his powerful hands around the old man’s throat, and strangled him.

The priest, whose name Dorestos never knew, did not struggle, and after the light had faded from the old man’s eyes, Dorestos got out of bed and put the body under the covers.

He got dressed, took his possessions, including a comb, a safety razor, and a few items of clothing and slipped out of the orphanage into the early morning hours, back to his gang without the slightest idea what they did or where they lived during the day.

McGarvey turned onto Constitution Avenue, and just past the Lincoln Memorial turned onto the Roosevelt Bridge, across the river where he headed north on the GWM Parkway that led up to the CIA in Langley.

Waiting for an opening in traffic, Dorestos pulled out and caught a break on the Key Bridge, reaching the parkway about a quarter mile behind the Porsche.

The first week had been tough. He’d connected with the street gang but they’d been following him each morning and when he didn’t return to the orphanage they wanted to know who the hell he really was. They believed that he might even be a snitch for the cops, and when he told them what had happened and why he’d left, they’d sentenced him to death.

“We want no fags among us,” the gang leader Cristobol had said, and he’d pulled a knife and came up from behind.

Dorestos sidestepped the attack and defended himself with only his size, his speed, and his instinct for survival.

When it was over, Cristobol’s left arm broken, three ribs cracked, his jaw dislocated, and his right knee dislocated, Dorestos had run away. He snatched purses for money to eat, he slept under bridges, he ran away from the cops, and that fall he walked nearly fifty kilometers out into the countryside where he found a vacation cottage on Lake Varese very close to the Swiss border. No one would be back until summer, nevertheless the pantry was reasonably well stocked with canned goods, and a closet in the back was filled with several dozen bottles of wine.

He’d spent most of the winter out there, finally getting bored enough to walk all the way back to Milan, where the first night he’d been picked up by the police because he’d made the mistake of going back to the street the orphanage was on, merely to take a look.

The police had turned out to be from the Vatican, who’d been on the lookout for him ever since the murder. They did not hand him over to the local authorities, instead they’d brought him to the Hospitallers.

“You’re just the sort of young man we’ve been looking for,” his first instructor had told him. “You have finally found a home among people who respect and love you.”

That was in Malta, and over the coming years he’d been trained not only in Catholic ritual — he’d been ordained a priest at the age of twenty — he’d been taught English, French, and German, how to shoot just about any man-portable weapon in existence — including the American Stinger and the Russian Grail missiles — hand-to-hand combat techniques in which his own body could be used as a lethal weapon. But most importantly they’d taught him how to think, how to reason, how to analyze.

He became an assassin, a tool for the SMOM. In all he’d successfully accomplished seven missions, but, as Msgr. Franelli had briefed him in Malta: “This is your most important assignment. Of supreme importance to the Church as well as to our order.”

“I will not fail you.”

“Of course you won’t.”

Dorestos took his eyes away from the iPad and nearly missed McGarvey, who’d turned off the parkway on Dolly Madison Boulevard just short of the entrance to the CIA, and he had to suddenly switch lanes to make the turn and still keep well enough back that he would not be spotted.

He called his handler, and told him the situation. “Perhaps it’s a back entrance,” he suggested.

“It’s possible. But it’s also possible that you have been spotted.”

“I don’t think so. Where else might he be heading?”

“Unknown,” the monsignor said after a brief hesitation, and it was the very first time Dorestos had ever heard even the slightest doubt in his handler’s voice. It was disquieting.

“I will find out.”

“With care, Father. You understand what’s at stake.”

Not completely, Dorestos wanted to say, but he did not. “Yes, Monsignor.”

The boulevard went directly through the small town of McLean, where McGarvey turned north on a side street and after a half-dozen blocks, turned left again and then down a cul-de-sac where he parked in the driveway of a pleasant-looking two-story colonial, in a neighborhood of similarly well-kept homes. A tricycle with a pink basket was parked on the walkway to the front door.

Dorestos pulled over a block away and watched as McGarvey got out of his car, and looked back toward the street that passed the cul-de-sac for a long moment, before he closed the door and headed up the walk.

He was a suspicious man, but Dorestos could not bring himself to believe that McGarvey had spotted him.

He made a U-turn and drove back to a gas station and convenience store on a corner that whoever coming or going from the cul-de-sac would have to pass. He bought a Diet Coke and a sandwich and sat eating his second lunch, debating if he should try to approach the house on foot.

TWENTY-SIX

Before McGarvey could ring the bell, Louise opened the door, a warm smile on her long, narrow face. She was tall for a woman — over six feet — and whip thin, but her eyes were her best feature, very large, very wide, very dark brown, and very expressive.

“Windows into a woman’s soul,” she’d once told Mac. “No artifice here. What you see is what you get.” She and Otto were head over heels.

“Did you come in clean?” she asked, though she knew he had. She was just overprotective of Mac’s granddaughter, Audrey.

McGarvey shrugged. “Who can ever be sure,” he said. He pecked Louise on the cheek and she stepped aside to let him into the stair hall, and locked the door behind him.

Otto, his red frizzy hair neatly tied in a ponytail, was fairly jumping out of his skin with excitement. It had been several months since they’d seen each other, and he considered Mac more than just a brother in arms. Their lives were deeply intertwined, and they’d been through a fair number of battles, the outcomes of which had not always been so certain. Otto had been there when Mac had been wounded and lay fighting for his life in a hospital, and Mac had been there when Otto had been held in badland, forced there because Louise had been kidnapped.

Standing next to him, Audie barely came up to his waist. She was slender with her mother’s blond hair and Katy’s pretty eyes and delicate mouth. She bounced on her tiptoes, one hand behind her back, the other at her chin as if she was a miniature philosopher trying to work out a difficult problem. But she looked uncertain, and when McGarvey approached she shied away, closer to Otto.

“It’s okay, he’s your grandfather,” Otto told her.

Louise was beaming, practically in tears. It had been more than a year since McGarvey had last seen Audie, and he was nervous that she would reject him.

“Grampyfather?” Audie said in a small voice.

McGarvey hunched down to her level a few feet away. “Do you remember me?”

“You brought me Piggy.” It was a small stuffed pig that McGarvey had got for her. Otto said she loved it.

“Yes.”

She smiled and came forward. “Did you bring me another present?”

“Next time,” McGarvey said.

“It’s okay, I forgive you,” she said seriously, and she gave him a kiss on the cheek and a hug before she went back to Otto.

McGarvey straightened up. “She’s beautiful.”

“Yes, she is,” Louise said, and she turned to Audie. “But now it’s time to pack your bag and get Piggy, before Uncle Brax and Aunty Terry come for you.”

Audie’s eyes lit up. “I’m going to the Farm?”

“Just for a few days,” Louise said.

The child bounced on her tiptoes. “It was so terrible good to see you again, Grampyfather,” she told McGarvey, and Louise led her up the stairs.

“She’s going to grow up just like her mother,” Otto said.

“And like you and Louise.”

They went back to the kitchen. “Have you had lunch yet?” Otto asked.

“A sandwich.”

Otto opened a couple of beers and they sat down at the counter. “What’d Bill Callahan have to say?”

“The Bureau’s not happy about the mess in Sarasota and next door to my house, but he’s agreed to give me a little time.”

“Marty stopped the cleanup crew, sorry,” Otto said.

“Can’t be helped,” McGarvey said. Marty Bambridge was the chief of clandestine services.

“Did Bill know the guys next door were CNI?”

“He guessed and I confirmed it. Has it reached Page?”

“He talked to Medina this morning, who admitted that some of his people might have been in Florida on vacation.” Eduardo Medina was the director of the Spanish intelligence service. “Page told him that apparently they’d caught burglars in the act and all three of them had been shot to death.”

“What was Medina’s reaction?”

“Nada. Just asked if their bodies could be returned.”

“There was a fourth operator. Any sign of him yet?”

“He’s probably out of the country by now, or is on the way out. Could be he made his report to his boss, which is why Medina had no reaction. Which brings us to why they were watching you, something they had to know was very stupid and dangerous. And don’t tell me they expected you to lead them to Cibola in New Mexico.”

“It’s why they killed Petain,” McGarvey said. “They knew that sooner or later he or someone like him would be coming to talk to me. And just like Petain they warned me that my life was in danger.”

“From who and why?” Otto asked. “It doesn’t make any sense. The treasure does not exist.”

“Petain thought it did.”

“Nor is there any such organization as the Voltaire Society. At least not the one the Frenchman claimed he represented.”

“The CNI operators killed him for some reason.”

“Nothing on their computer but you,” Otto said. “Christ, we’re all grabbing at straws. It’s nuts.”

The phone rang and Louise caught it upstairs.

Otto waited until she called down. “They’re around the block,” she said.

She came down with Audie and a small pink backpack, from which poked the stuffed pig’s head, just as a Cadillac Escalade with government plates pulled in behind McGarvey’s SUV.

Terry Sweeney, who was chief of security at the CIA’s training facility, came to the door. She was a small woman, with tiny hands and a ready smile.

Audie ran to her. “Aunty Terry.”

“Ready to come play for a few days?” Sweeney asked, and she spotted McGarvey and Otto, who’d come from the kitchen. “Everything okay, Mr. Director?” she asked.

“Things could start to get a little dicey around here,” McGarvey said. Lying to someone in Sweeney’s sensitive position was not done. The woman needed to know if something was coming her way, for the sake of the installation as well as the child. “Who’d you bring with you?”

“Braxton Ezell.” Ezell was the director of weapons training. He’d retired from the field as a NOC — which was a field officer under Non-Official Cover — when his left hand and most of his right were blown off in a firefight outside of Vientiane six years ago.

“Good man,” McGarvey said.

“Keep us informed,” Sweeney said, and she took Audie’s hand.

At the open door Audie turned back. “Good-bye Mommy and Daddy, and Grampyfather.”

When they were gone, Louise locked up and they went back into the kitchen. “I’m not cooking, so how does pizza for dinner grab you?”

“Fine,” McGarvey said. “You guys are doing a good job with her.”

“It’s easy,” Louise said. She opened them beers. “So what happened in Florida — or rather what’s the upshot? Otto’s told me some of what went down, but not all of it.”

“The Spanish treasure in New Mexico,” Otto said.

Her left eyebrow rose. “Are the Mexican drug cartels involved again?”

“They were stung last time, I don’t think they’ll buy into it again,” McGarvey said, and he went into some detail for her from the moment Giscarde Petain had shown up at New College.

“At least the Bureau is off my back for the moment.”

“That’s a good thing,” Otto said. “But I don’t think Marty wants to cut you any slack. He wants to talk to you.”

“Page should be able to run some interference.”

“Not likely. This is election year and no matter who wins, Page figures that he’s out. I look for him to resign within the next month or so, and he’s not going to want to leave the agency with something like this hanging over his head.”

“Politics,” Louise said with some distaste. “But I want to know more about the perfume in your apartment. Have you smelled it before? An old girlfriend?”

“I don’t know, but whoever she was, she was a pro. The perfume was the only thing she left behind.”

“A message?” Louise suggested.

“Could be.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

It was nearly five, a couple of hours since the man and woman had shown up in a Cadillac SUV and had taken a child away with them. In the meantime Dorestos had driven around the neighborhood, coming to the edge of a strip of woods that bordered the rear of the house. Several picnic tables were set up just within a small park with children’s swings and slides and monkey bars.

It was a weekday and the wrong time for parents with their kids to be here, and he’d parked and made his way through the trees to the edge of the property. But there’d been nothing to see, except for a large backyard, equipped with a lot of toys for the girl. A lucky child, he’d thought.

He’d stayed at the park for as long as he thought he wouldn’t stand out, and then drove back to the gas station where he parked in the rear, out of sight of the clerks inside.

It was late at night in Malta but the monsignor had promised that he was available no matter the hour. “It will be as if you were praying to God, he has answers for those who need Him, whenever they need Him.”

Msgr. Franelli answered on the first ring as he always did. “Was it the back gate to the CIA? I’d hoped to hear from you before now.”

“He didn’t go there. Instead he came to a house in McLean.”

“Is he still there?”

“Yes, but I can find no information on the address, it comes up a blank in all of my search engines.”

“Tell me what you have seen all afternoon. Every detail.”

Dorestos told him everything, including the little girl who’d been picked up by a man and woman driving a black Cadillac Escalade with government plates, and about the woman who’d met them at the door.

“Describe this woman.”

“Tall, thin, jeans, sweatshirt. The angle was fair, but I couldn’t make out much more than that. She never came fully outside of the house, nor did she look up.”

“Standard tradecraft, but I think you’re on to something. Unless I miss my guess the woman is Louise Horn, who used to work for the National Reconnaissance Office, which puts up and runs the American constellation of communications and spy satellites. Her husband is Otto Rencke, the CIA’s Special Projects director, and a close personal friend of McGarvey’s.”

“I’ll wait until McGarvey leaves, and then go in to question them. It could prove valuable if Rencke is such a good friend. McGarvey will have told him everything.”

“Rencke is a genius. Quite possibly the smartest man on the planet when it comes to encryption techniques and information retrieval and collection. He makes connections. If you went to him you would have to kill him and his wife. If that were to happen Signore McGarvey would hunt you down to the ends of the earth, and there would be nothing we could do to protect you. You will make no physical contact with Rencke or his wife.”

“Such dedication.”

“Yes,” Franelli said. “For now you will merely watch. And when McGarvey leaves you will follow him wherever he goes.”

Dorestos glanced in his rearview mirror as a dark gray Ford Taurus passed on the street and turned the corner toward the cul-de-sac. He got a very brief glimpse of someone behind the wheel, but no one in the passenger seat.

“Father?” Franelli prompted.

“One moment, please, Monsignor, there may be a development.”

“Tell me.”

“A car has just headed in the direction of Rencke’s house.”

“Government plates?”

“I couldn’t make them out.”

“Driver, passengers?”

“No passengers, but I think the driver might have been a woman. One moment, please.”

The GLONASS image on his iPad was directed tightly on the house. He pulled back to a slightly wider view and spotted the Taurus stop at the curb in front of a house a half a block before the entrance to the cul-de-sac.

Now the satellite’s angle was too high to read a license plate number, nor could he detect any reaction from the neighbors or anyone in Rencke’s house. He relayed this information to the monsignor.

“This woman has not gotten out of her car? She’s just sitting there?”

“Sí.”

“Does she have a sight line on Rencke’s house?”

“I don’t think so, but she’s in a position to intercept anyone leaving.”

“I want you to get the license number.”

“Sí, Monsignore,” Dorestos said.

He switched his cell phone to the camera mode and headed down the street toward the entrance to the cul-de-sac. As he passed the Taurus, he beeped the horn, and as the woman turned around to look out the rear window he snapped a picture of her face and the license plate.

Circling around the next block, he pulled up again at the gas station, and called his handler. “I managed to get a photo not only of the license plate but of her face. I’m sending it to you.”

Franelli said something that Dorestos couldn’t quite catch, but then he was back. “Give me a minute while I check something. In the meantime are you in a secure position?”

“Yes,” Dorestos said. He’d heard excitement in the monsignor’s voice. It was out of the ordinary, and his heart sped up a pace.

Traffic was beginning to build, and three cars were getting gas. A McLean police car passed, but did not slow down. Finally the monsignor was back.

“The situation has changed. I have identified the woman, and I believe I know why she is there, though it is extremely dangerous for her. She must know it, which means she is in a position to help in the search.”

“For the diary?”

“For the treasure.”

“What are my orders?” Dorestos asked, and he had a feeling that he knew the answer. But ultimately it’s why he’d been sent here; it was what he’d believed would come to pass.

“If the woman tries to make contact with McGarvey, I want you to kill her.”

“It could create a problem in broad daylight.”

“She’ll wait until after dark, on the off chance that McGarvey will come out alone.”

“And if he does?”

“I’ll make that decision then.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

McGarvey was watching the woods out one of the rear windows when Otto brought down one of his laptops and set it up on the kitchen counter as Louise was phoning their pizza order. He connected with one of his powerful search engines on the mainframe at the Original Headquarters Building, and within a few keystrokes he was inside the FBI’s Tampa Office.

“What’s on the other side of the woods?” McGarvey asked. They were vulnerable here to someone coming up that way. Especially after dark.

Louise hung up and came over. “A road about fifty meters away, a park there for kids, hardly ever used so far as I know.”

“Have you guys set up motion detectors back there?”

Otto looked up. “I didn’t think we needed it. This location is secure. No way someone is going to trace ownership back to us.”

“Unless someone followed me here,” McGarvey said. He’d been having the same feeling ever since he’d left Andrews, and especially after smelling the perfume in his apartment.

“Do you want me to call for some muscle?”

“I don’t want to get the Company involved yet. There’re too many legitimate questions that I don’t have the answers for. And I don’t want them looking over my shoulder.”

“Anyway, Audie’s safe,” Louise said softly. “Thanks to your hunches.”

McGarvey nodded. Every time he thought about her, he was afraid. But going to ground again like he had in the beginning in Switzerland, and most recently in Greece on the island of Serifos, had done nothing to stop the violence that had been inflicted on his family, and the danger that he’d placed Audie in by coming here today. With Otto and Louise it was different. They were trained intelligence officers who’d known the risks when they’d raised their right hands.

“Look,” Otto said turning his laptop around. “FBI Tampa reports a body of a fourth CNI agent in a rental on Siesta Key just a few miles north of the surveillance house on Casey. Your doing?”

McGarvey looked at the preliminary crime scene report and the photos of the body of a man shot to death, lying in a pool of blood. “No.”

“Who then? Your Olympian able to leap walls at a single bound?”

“That’s exactly who I think it was. I heard a boat heading north.”

“But why was this guy protecting you?” Louise asked. “He has a reason.”

“If it’s the Vatican they want me to lead them to the treasure.”

“By finding the diary,” Otto said. “But even if we went after it, we wouldn’t have an idea where to start, except for the bank employees in Bern. Getting inside a safety deposit would have been next to impossible.”

“Unless they had the passwords.”

“If I had been in charge of security I would have demanded personal recognition in addition to some password. I’d want to know who I was opening a safe deposit box for. Especially one that had been rented for more than a century and a half.”

“You’re both forgetting something,” Louise said. “All this depends on Mac actually taking the challenge and going after the thing. Neither of you really believes that any such treasure exists. So why go through the motions?”

“Because of the two kids on campus who were killed, for starts,” McGarvey said. “And because of the Italian who shot at the stuffed figure I’d set up in the kitchen. He told me that he’d known that it wasn’t me, but he took the shot anyway to get my attention. Which he did. And because the CNI put people on my case whose intention, when I broke in on them, was to kill me. Also because one of these days I’m going to miss. Law of averages.”

Louise leaned back against the counter. “That’s a cheery thought,” she said. “How about a little something to brighten up your spirits?”

McGarvey nodded.

“We don’t actually have to go looking for it, because the people who took it will find us once they think that we’re in the hunt.”

Rencke sat up. “Whoa, she’s right. The Voltaire Society guy comes to you for help, which is actually what the CNI thought was going to happen, so they took him out. The Spaniards would have been happy to let you take the next step so long as you didn’t look over your shoulder and spot them. The last thing they wanted was to take you out. But you forced their hand. At the very least the Society and the CNI are going to come back.”

“So will the guy from Malta,” Louise said. “You’re the magnet. If that’s what you want to be.”

“I don’t think I have much of a choice.”

“Just a mo,” Louise said. She went to the hall closet and when she came back she laid a compact Glock 29 semiauto on the counter next to Otto, and stuffed another in the waistband of her jeans. “None of us walks around unarmed. Just in case.”

“You’re not in this,” McGarvey said, but they both looked at him.

The doorbell rang. “That was quick,” Louise said, and she headed to the front stair hall.

“Too quick,” McGarvey said, suddenly alarmed. He pulled out his pistol.

“The pizza joint is just around the corner,” Otto said. “They come here usually twice a week, they know the way.”

McGarvey went to the kitchen door just as Louise looked through the peephole. She pulled the pistol out of her waistband and holding it behind her back with her right unlocked the door with her left.

“Louise,” McGarvey warned.

She glanced back. “It’s okay, I think, but you’re not going to believe this.” She opened the door and stepped aside.

María León, a colonel in Cuba’s intelligence agency, stood on the stoop, her hands spread away from her body, a tentative smile on her pretty face. She was thirty-six with a good figure. “I’m not who you expected,” she said, her English quite good. She was an illegitimate daughter of Fidel Castro’s and had been involved a few months ago in an elaborate plot to kidnap Louise to force Otto to come to Havana for Castro’s funeral, in order to dig McGarvey out of hiding on Serifos.

Her father’s deathbed request was for her to find McGarvey and ask for help finding the Spanish treasure, a portion of which Fidel thought belonged to the Cuban people. There were a lot of deaths, and in the end she’d been disappointed and had escaped back to Cuba. A one-million-dollar bounty put up by a well-to-do Cuban ex-pat in Miami was on her head. Her coming here like this was extraordinary.

She spotted McGarvey, gun in hand, standing in the kitchen doorway. “Are you going to shoot me, or let me in? It’s been a tough trip.”

Louise stepped back. “Come in, put your hands on the wall, and spread your legs.”

María did as she was told.

Louise took the purse from her shoulder, and handed it to McGarvey, who came forward.

“What are you doing here?” he asked as Louise stuffed the pistol back in the waistband of her jeans and did a thorough job of frisking the woman, who wore a nearly transparent scoop-necked white blouse, designer jeans, and low-cut soft leather boots. Her long black hair was done up in the back, and she wore an expensive Rolex watch in gold.

“She’s clean,” Louise said, stepping away. She took the purse from McGarvey and dumped the contents on the hall table, a passport and lipstick falling on the floor. There was no weapon.

“The same thing as you, I suspect,” María said. “Looking again for Cibola. I’ve come to help.”

“With what?” Otto asked over McGarvey’s shoulder. “I can call someone in Miami who’d love to know that you were here.”

“They’d come up and shoot me to death, or maybe take me back to the Calle Ocho and put me on trial. For what, being a true Cuban patriot?”

“Spare us,” Louise said.

María flared. “I didn’t run when the situation became difficult. I stayed and fought for my country.”

“Along with the Russians’ help until they pulled out.”

“Anyway, I thought that you might need an extra hand tonight.”

“With what?” McGarvey asked.

“A big guy in a blue Chevy Tahoe, looked like the Marathon man,” María said. “But don’t tell me that you guys didn’t spot him?”

Shots from a silenced automatic weapon slammed into the front door, and the narrow windows that flanked it, nicking María in the side of her neck.

“Down!” McGarvey shouted. He made it to the living room window in time to see the Tahoe disappear around the corner at the opening of the cul-de-sac.