Blood Pact

TWENTY-NINE

The sleek Hawker 4000 biz jet touched down at Jeddah’s ultramodern new airport a few minutes after midnight and immediately taxied to a private hangar owned by Prince Saleh bin Abdulaziz, a third cousin in the Saudi royal family. Once the engines spooled down and the stairs were lowered, a man with a soccer player’s build, and the fair complexion of an Englishman — and the rich Oxford accent to match — thanked the flight crew and, carrying only a Louis Vuitton leather bag, stepped down and walked over to the Bentley coupe that had been sent for him.

He was a Saudi, born in Riyadh, and he’d been first a pilot in the air force, then a captain in the General Intelligence Presidency, and finally on his retirement five years ago when he turned thirty-four, he’d become a freelance enforcer for the Royal family.

He was dressed this evening in a British lightweight summer pinstripe in dove gray, with a Hermes tie, and hand-stitched Brazilian loafers. He was something under six feet, and moved like a cat, sure on his feet but seemingly in no hurry. He’d learned his deceptive moves playing soccer at Oxford, where he’d been sent to study international politics and to learn to speak flawless English and French. His real name was Mahd Ibn Khalden al-Rashid, but outside of the country he most often went under the name Bernard Montessier.

The driver, a dangerous-looking fireplug of a man, who had in fact been al-Rashid’s hand-to-hand combat and weapons instructor in the GIP, got out and opened the rear door. “Welcome home, Mahd.”

“It is good to be back, but I don’t suspect I’ll be here for long.” They spoke Arabic. “Will the prince see me this evening?”

“Yes, and he is most anxious. All went well?”

“To a point.” Al-Rashid settled in and sat back for the ten-kilometer drive down the Red Sea coast to Prince Saleh’s compound not far from Mecca. The aircraft and the car were luxuries he’d gotten well used to ever since he’d gone to work almost exclusively for the prince.

Saleh had never occupied any official post within the government, and yet his work, almost always done in complete secrecy, was perhaps the most important in all the kingdom — sometimes nearly equaling the oil industry itself. He was the Royal family’s money man, who worked with the drug cartels in Russia, China, and most importantly in Mexico and Colombia, to launder tens of billions in U.S. dollars and euros every year. He also dealt with the distributors in a dozen countries around the world — the biggest share of that business coming from the States.

It was he, working through several intermediary firms, a few in the United Arab Emirates, a couple in the United Kingdom, and five in Germany and Switzerland, who as often as possible had a huge effect on the price of oil via derivative and credit default swap trading. Almost all of it was so complicated that the transactions were completely under the radar of the American SEC.

Which made him among the most important men in the kingdom, with the anytime ear of the king himself.

But with the kinds of deals he was involved with, he’d often had to use the talents of men such as al-Rashid, to convince a cartel leader or businessman or some high ranking government functionary to cooperate. It took blackmail, extortion, and sometimes assassination by bomb, poison, pistol, knife, and even garrote when the need for silence and for a splashy effect was required.

Al-Rashid was a primary source for the prince’s secret intelligence issues, and therefore was highly paid and highly treasured throughout the kingdom though only a few men actually knew his name, or knew about his home in southern France.

Because of the hour, traffic was almost nonexistent on the highway inland across the desert and in less than fifteen minutes, the driver pulled down the long gravel driveway to a cluster of three low-slung buildings, which were barracks and a military administrative center, plus a guard tower that rose twenty meters above the floor of the desert. All of it was just inside a tall fence topped by razor wire, and an electrically operated gate manned by three guards armed with American-made Knight compact automatic assault carbines. Two of the guards came out, while the third stayed behind.

Al-Rashid powered down his window as they approached. “Good evening.”

“Good evening, sir,” the lieutenant said. They were expecting him, but the prince’s safety was paramount and they trusted no one. “Step out with your travel bag, please.”

Al-Rashid did as he was told, and his person and the bag were thoroughly searched. The gate was opened again, and an armored Hummer came out for him. His driver was directed just inside the gate where he was to park in front of the barracks, and wait for however long the meeting would take. It was SOP. Very few people ever actually got up to the prince’s palatial compound, which was another five kilometers away. Those who did were thoroughly vetted and closely watched.

The main house was a three-story building of nearly fifty thousand square feet complete with a crenelated roof line, minarets at the corners, and a dozen fireplace chimneys — though there were no fireplaces in the house. The indoor pool was made of marble with gold fixtures including several bare-breasted mermaids spouting water from all of their orifices, which was one of the prince’s many bits of humor that al-Rashid had found stupid: Nekulturny, as a Russian friend in the FSS had told him a couple of years ago.

At the house, a guard ran an airport security wand up and down his body, before he was escorted to a third-floor balcony at the rear of the estate where Prince Saleh was seated sipping champagne. The man, who was in his late forties and educated at Harvard, was obviously Royal family by his bearing. His color was dark, his nose prominent, and his lips and eyelids thick. He was not a pleasant man to be around, in part because of his temper, and in a large part because he thought that he was the smartest guy in any gathering in which he found himself. None of the other royals, including the king himself, bothered him about his attitude, because he made a lot of money.

The prince waved him to a chair. “What took you so long? A flight to Bern amounts to only a few hours, and you were given the passwords. Did you encounter any trouble?”

“None,” al-Rashid said. “But as I’ve already told you there were certain other considerations.”

“Yes, to save your precious skin.”

Al-Rashid shrugged. “If you wish me to martyr myself, simply say the word.”

The prince waved him off. “Did you get it?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Of course,” the prince shot back. He pursed his lips. “One day you will step over the line: Do you know that?”

“Then you will have to hire someone else. Only there isn’t anyone as good as me.”

Prince Saleh gave him a cold stare. “You said, other considerations. What considerations?”

“It’s a matter of translation,” al-Rashid said. He took the diary, wrapped in vellum, from his overnight bag, got up, and reached across the low table and handed it to the prince.

The book was about the size of a short novel, with thick leather covers containing a hundred parchment pages on which the priest Jacob Ambli had drawn maps and diagrams — some showing what appeared to be large mounds or hills, with buried entrances, others showing directions and distances complete with compass bearings on land mass features — as well as page after page of dense writing.

“At first I took the language to be Latin, but it is not that simple,” al-Rashid said.

Prince Saleh handled the book with fascination and a great deal of care. He looked up. “What then?”

“I think that it’s in a code of some sorts.”

“I’ll call in a decryption team.”

“I would advise against it.”

“Oh?”

“To advertise that the diary is in our possession would invite trouble.”

Again the prince gave him a cold look. “What trouble?”

“A car bomb went off in Sarasota, Florida, killing a member of the Voltaire Society, from whose bank vault we stole the book.”

“Who was responsible?”

“Spanish intelligence.”

The prince shrugged. “Why Florida?”

“Presumably the Society representative went to ask Kirk McGarvey to find the diary. The Spanish were waiting for just that to happen, and they killed the Frenchman.”

McGarvey was well known by Saudi intelligence. “Did he agree?”

“No. In fact he killed them all, and then disappeared.”

The prince thought about it for a moment. “How do you know that the Society asked for McGarvey’s help?”

“Speculation. But the timing was right.”

The prince tossed the diary on the table. “So now what? As it stands this is worthless to me.”

“Which still may be the case even if I manage to have it translated. At the very least this may be nothing more than an urban legend. But at the most the so-called Spanish treasure might amount to only a few billion Euros, all but inaccessible to us somewhere in New Mexico. Possibly in the middle of the military’s White Sands Missile Range. A hostile piece of landscape.”

The prince waved his hand out to the desert that surrounded them. “We are a desert people, Mahd. And don’t turn up your nose at a few billion. Or keeping it from the Americans.”

“Or from the Spanish, or the Vatican, or the Voltaire Society.”

“Of which we don’t know enough.”

“Very well, my Prince, what comes next?” al-Rashid asked, though he knew exactly what it would be.

“Have the diary translated, at which time we will plan an operation.”

“To retrieve the treasure?”

“No, of course not. I want merely to keep it from everyone else.”

Al-Rashid sat back, stunned for just a moment, but then he smiled. “We’ll need help, if I understand what you are suggesting.”

“Yes,” Prince Saleh said. “From the Iranians. There are certain back burner connections I have.”

“You would be playing with fire.”

“Indeed — if it comes to that.” The prince laughed because of the allusion.

THIRTY

Louise went upstairs to watch from one of the front bedrooms after she’d bandaged María’s slight neck wound. Otto took a position at the living room window and McGarvey and María went to the back of the house from where they could watch the woods. Everyone was in calling distance of one another.

Nothing moved out there, but McGarvey expected the shooter to return, though probably not until after dark.

“I only got a quick glimpse of the guy in the Tahoe, but he sure as hell didn’t look like a Cuban to me,” María said. She was armed with a lightweight 5.45 mm Russian made PSM semiautomatic pistol that was all but useless except at extremely short range. It had been taken from her four months ago, and Louise had given it back from the gun safe in the front closet.

“I don’t think he, was Cuban,” McGarvey said.

“Well, who is he, then? He didn’t open fire until I showed up.”

She was at the breakfast room window adjacent to the kitchen from where McGarvey was watching. “Anything out there?” he called up.

“Nothing yet,” Louise said.

“He’ll be back,” McGarvey said, and he looked at María, who was staring at him.

“Are you going to tell me who he is, and what his gripe with me is?”

“It was you in my apartment in Georgetown. How did you find out about it?”

“I have my sources, you know that. Anyway, how did you know I was there?”

“Your perfume, though you did a good job with my fail-safe on the lock. But what were you doing there?”

“Looking for you,” María said. “I knew that you’d be showing up either there, or here, after your little dance in Sarasota.” She smiled a little. “It’s Chanel, I wanted you to know that it was a woman who had come calling.”

“How’d you know about this place?”

“I had Louise followed from the day-care center.”

“When?”

“Two months ago.”

McGarvey looked away to study the woods again, not exactly sure what he was feeling other than nearly blind anger. Several months ago Cuban intelligence operatives had kidnapped Louise from in front of the day-care center where she’d dropped off Audie. In the process the woman who owned the school had been standing at the open door, children behind her, and had been shot to death. The bullet could easily have missed her and hit one of the kids. Audie.

The whole operation from start to finish had been a cocked-up mess in which María and the Cuban intelligence service had hatched an insane plan to find and steal the Spanish gold just across the border from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

A good many people had lost their lives, and at least two dozen Mexican drug cartel spies and spotters had managed to infiltrate the United States and lose themselves in the country somewhere. INS was still looking for them.

In the end she’d gone back to Cuba, presumably to either go to prison or be executed for her role in the operation, yet here she was.

Nothing moved yet in the woods, and McGarvey turned back to her. “The gold doesn’t exist,” he said. “I thought that you had that much figured out.”

“Not according to Dr. Vergilio,” María said. Adriana Vergilio was the curator of the Archivo General des Indias, in Seville where all of Spain’s records from the exploration and subjugation of the New World were stored. “Something happened a few weeks ago that got her excited enough to warn me that the CNI was on the hunt.”

“For the gold?”

“For you,” María said. “I didn’t think they’d get very far, so I ignored her. Until the car bombing at your university and the shoot-out with the CNI operatives next door to your house.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t not come.” She glanced out the window. “So who is this guy, someone from the CNI gunning for me now that I’ve come to offer my help?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Well, Dr. Vergilio thinks you know something, and so does the CNI. You must have talked to them. What’d they tell you, or what did they do that made you kill them? Last time I checked, Spain and the United States are not at war.”

“They left me no choice.”

“You’re saying you shot back in self-defense? Who was the guy in the car bombing? One of them?”

McGarvey didn’t answer. The entire situation was insane, and was already so out of hand that he couldn’t think of a way in which it could be ended in any reasonable way. And yet he knew that he couldn’t back away. In fact he’d just as soon put a bullet in María’s brain for the danger she and her operatives had put Louise and Otto in, and for the danger his granddaughter was facing right now.

“Goddamnit, I’m risking my life to help you,” María shouted.

“You’re still looking for the gold, and nothing’s changed — you’re still willing to pull the trigger on anyone who gets in your way.”

“Like the CNI on Casey Key? Was it them who planted the car bomb and killed whoever was—” María suddenly stopped. “Whoever it was had come to the college to talk to you, about the only thing the CNI was so interested in they set up a surveillance operation on you. When whoever it was showed up they killed him.”

“And two students who were innocent bystanders.”

“Collateral damage,” she said indifferently. “But what about this guy gunning for me now? He’s not Cuban or Spanish — I don’t think. But what’s his relationship to whoever got killed in the car bomb? Who is he working for?”

“Go back to Cuba, there’s nothing here for you,” McGarvey said.

“You need my help with the Spaniards. Especially with Dr. Vergilio. Believe me she’s the key, but she won’t talk to you. Especially not now.”

“Maybe I’ll call my friends in Miami to come get you,” McGarvey said.

“First we have to get me out of here. But all I came for was Cuba’s share of the treasure — if there is any — and I think you know by now that there are a lot of people willing to kill because they think there is. Just give us a shot in an international court to convince the judges that one-third should belong to us.”

McGarvey figured that since the Maltese operative hadn’t come in by now, he’d either left or was waiting until after dark. But if he was coming it was because María had shown up, and just like Petain she’d come because she wanted to help find the treasure. It was another factor that the Vatican didn’t want.

He went into the dining room, and before María could react he snatched the pistol from her hand. “Your purse is on the hall table. Leave now while you can. He’s not going to come after you until dark, and it’ll be through the woods. You’ll just have to take the chance that he’s not watching the front of the house.”

“I’m not going to walk away.”

“He’s probably gone anyway, figuring that either one of us or a neighbor called the police.”

“No sirens. Anyway, if he’s CNI he’s monitoring the police bands.”

McGarvey’s grip on his pistol tightened. What to do? Shooting her would be easy because of what she had already done to his people. She was a sociopath who didn’t give a damn about anyone other than herself. Much like her father had been. She claimed that she’d come to fight for Cuba, but he was almost one hundred percent certain that she’d come to fight for herself, to secure her position in Havana.

And yet in a lot of ways she was an underdog. She’d never had a father, no family, no friends from what he’d been able to gather, and almost all of the people she worked with and for were men in a machismo society that tended to trivialize women, even ones in her powerful position. She’d had to fight for every single thing she’d ever had in her entire life, with no one to help.

She read something of that from his eyes. “Cristo! I won’t have you feeling sorry for me. Shoot me if you must, but I don’t want your pity!”

McGarvey lowered his pistol, and handed the PSM back to her. “I’m not going to wait for him.”

He went back into the hall.

“What’s up?” Otto asked.

“He’s not coming in until after dark, which means he’s holed up somewhere safe until then. I’m going to find him.”

Louise came to the head of the stairs. “Watch your step,” she warned.

“I don’t think he wants me. He wants her.”

María had come to the stair hall. “We already know that. What I don’t know is who the hell he is.”

“He’s from the Vatican. The Malta Knights.”

María laughed without humor. “Why didn’t I think of that? They want the gold and they’re just as ruthless as we are.”

“Have you dealt with them before?”

“No. Have you?”

“Not till last night,” McGarvey said. “Go back to the kitchen and watch the woods.”

“What are you planning to do? Drive, keep a lookout, and shoot all at the same time? Two guns are better than one.”

“I’m not planning on killing him.”

“Maybe he has a different idea,” María said.

The house was silent for a beat. “I hate to admit it, but she could be right,” Louise said. “Otto will watch the front, and I’ll stay up here. If you get yourself killed I’ll never speak to you again.”

“Get your keys, you’re driving,” McGarvey told María, and he went to the front door and eased it open.

A blue BMW five hundred series sedan came into the cul-de-sac, and pulled into a driveway of a house across the circle down as the garage door opened.

“The Abbotts,” Otto said.

When the garage door came down, McGarvey stepped outside and got into the passenger seat of María’s rental Taurus and she slipped behind the wheel.

“The Knights,” she said. “They’re good.”

THIRTY-ONE

Dorestos, on foot, had just come to the opening of the cul-de-sac when McGarvey and the Cuban woman came out of the house. It was unexpected, but it was going to make his job easier than trying to storm the house and not get killed in the process, especially without taking McGarvey out. Though he hoped that day would come.

He ran back to his Tahoe, and drove two blocks away to the McDonald’s on Old Dominion Drive, in the opposite direction from the gas station. He parked in the rear, mostly out of sight from the road, and finding the number for the Fairfield Taxi Service called for a cab.

He stuffed the 9 mm SIG Sauer P226 in his belt at the small of his back. Next he unscrewed the long suppressor from the barrel of the compact Ingram MAC 10 and stuffed it in his belt and the two spare magazines of 9 mm ammunition into his jacket pocket. He held the submachine gun under his jacket with his elbow. It was awkward, but only had to do until he got into the taxi.

He waited in the Tahoe for a couple of minutes, then locked up and walked around to the front. A few minutes later the cab showed up and he got into the backseat, giving the driver the address of a five-story government building he’d noticed on the way in.

“The place is locked up by now,” the driver, a Pakastani, said.

“I’m meeting someone in the parking lot.”

The driver looked at him in the rearview mirror. “I don’t want any trouble.”

“Neither do I. That’s why we’re meeting there. So her husband won’t find out.”

The cabbie smiled. “I get it,” he said, and pulled out of the parking lot as the gray Taurus passed.

Dorestos thought that he could make out the figure of a woman driving. McGarvey was in the passenger seat; riding shotgun as it was called. He was about to tell the driver to turn left at the next intersection, but the Taurus turned right, which would take them to the park in the woods behind the Renckes’ house.

He’d been spotted in the Tahoe, probably by the Cuban, and she and McGarvey had figured that if an attack against them were to come it would be from that way. It also meant that McGarvey might have spotted the Chevy one too many times for coincidence on the way in from Andrews. The GLONASS real-time satellite system he’d used had made him sloppy.

Five minutes later the cabbie pulled into the nearly deserted Government Services Administration Satellite Office parking lot.

“She’ll be in the back,” Dorestos said, laying the MAC 10 on the seat and taking the silenced SIG from his belt.

The driver was nervous now but he did as he was told.

“There is no one here,” he said.

“No,” Dorestos said, and he placed the muzzle of the silencer against the back of the Pakastani’s head. “Drive over to the Dumpster, and park.”

The cabbie practically jumped out of his skin, his eyes wide. “Please, do not kill me. I have a wife and three children and my mother to support in Lahore. They will starve without me.”

“I’m not going to kill you. I just want to use your cab for a few minutes. Won’t take very long for the police to find it, if you promise not to call for help for one hour.”

“Take anything you want, please.”

“Just here,” Dorestos said, and they parked in the relative darkness next to a Dumpster. “Get out of the car, and start walking away, around to the other side of the building. But whatever happens do not look over your shoulder.”

“I promise.”

The cabbie got out and started away. But Dorestos also got out and shot the man once in the back of the head from a distance of less than ten feet and the man went down hard.

“May God go with you, my son,” Dorestos said, and he glanced up at the office windows, but so far as he could tell there were no witnesses.

He jammed the pistol back in his belt and, careful to keep the man’s blood off his clothes, picked up the body as if it were nothing much heavier than a pocket edition of the Ordinations, carried it over to the Dumpster, opened the lid partway with one hand, and rolled the body inside.

He transferred the MAC 10 from the backseat, screwed the silencer on the barrel, and stuffed the weapon between the driver’s seat and the transmission hump. He drove off toward the road that led to the park at the edge of the woods.

In his estimation his assignment thus far had made little or no sense. Of course he would never voice such an opinion to Msgr. Franelli; though he was still a little naive despite his experiences, he wasn’t stupid.

McGarvey was the key, always had been according to the monsignore. The Society had sent a man seeking his help, and the CNI operatives had killed him. Otherwise it would have been Dorestos’s job of work.

McGarvey himself had taken out three of the Spaniards leaving only the fourth.

Now the Cuban had come seeking help, and she was to be assassinated. From that point — should he be successful tonight — it would be a matter of following McGarvey and his friends the Renckes. But if that didn’t work, if for whatever reason McGarvey decided not to pursue the search, there was always his granddaughter as a force multiplier.

The deeper he got into this assignment the more he’d come to realize that everything he’d been tasked to do had almost certainly been ordered under desperation. Which was the part that made no sense to him. A few billions in gold and silver and other artifacts were but a drop in the bucket to the Mother Church. And considering the risks, it could turn out to be a public relations disaster much worse than had arisen over shielding pedophile priests.

But he was a son of the Holy Church that had given him a meaningful life.

At the park he slowed down as he approached the short turnoff. The gray Taurus was there, as he thought it would be, but neither McGarvey nor the woman were in sight. Expecting an attack from this direction they had left the car, announcing they were here, and had gone into the woods to wait. It was bait, and it rankled Dorestos just a little that McGarvey had assumed it would work.

They would be hiding just within sight of anyone coming from the parking area. The woman was the bait and McGarvey would be somewhere very close to her. But he figured that if they were smart they would have gone deeply enough into the woods to a spot where they could also watch the back of the house.

He parked just behind the Taurus, and stood for a long moment listening to the sounds of the deepening evening. A car passed on the road, and then a pickup truck. When they were gone he raised his head and drew a deep breath through his nose. Perfume. The same as he had detected at McGarvey’s apartment in Georgetown.

Taking the MAC 10, he walked away from the cab to the eastern end of the narrow parking lot and angled away from the road. Twenty meters in, he stopped again to listen for the sounds of movement somewhere ahead, but hearing nothing. He stashed the submachine gun in some brush and started back to where he figured they would be waiting for him. Only he was going to give them what would be a nasty surprise.

THIRTY-TWO

McGarvey stepped out from behind the bole of a tree at the edge of the Renckes’ backyard and waved at Louise, who appeared in an upstairs window. He stepped back to where María was waiting and they put their heads together.

“If he comes this way, which I think he might, he’ll want you, not me.”

“You’ve already said that, but why? Does he think I’m a distraction?”

“Probably exactly that,” McGarvey said, and he held up a hand. He’d thought he’d heard something to the left, in the direction of the park. But the slight noise, whatever it was, did not come again.

“Him?” she whispered.

“I’m going out about ten meters to the right, and you’re going to stay here in plain sight.”

She laughed. “I’m not going to let myself be a sitting duck. If I get the chance I’ll shoot the bastard.”

“I want him alive. He won’t take the shot until he knows where I am.”

“Then what?”

“I have a couple of questions for him,” McGarvey said, and he cocked an ear to listen again, but there was nothing except street sounds. He started away, but María touched his arm.

“I’m putting my life in your hands,” she said. “Again.”

“You should have stayed in Havana.”

“Not possible for me.”

McGarvey’s first instinct when she’d showed up had been to telephone Callahan and have the FBI arrest her. But he hadn’t done that because it was likely that any search for the diary would lead back to the archives in Seville, and María was the key to open that door for him. And it also occurred to him that the Knights had sent someone from Malta to keep him away from Spain — who had a claim on the treasure. And had ordered their man to keep Cuba out of it. Which left only the members of the Voltaire Society, if they could be found.

A bullet smacked into the tree just inches to their right, and McGarvey shoved María to the ground with one hand as he pulled off two shots in the direction he’d thought he’d heard the rustle of bushes a few minutes earlier.

“I’m not your enemy, Signore McGarvey,” Dorestos called softly. He was very close.

“Why did you come here?” McGarvey asked. The man was off to the left.

“To protect you.”

“From a woman?”

“From the Cuban intelligence apparatus in Washington that she controls. Move away from her and I will solve that problem for you.”

“Then what?” McGarvey asked. He motioned for María to keep her head down and he started away on hands and knees at right angles to where he thought the shooter stood.

“I will walk away and leave you in peace.”

McGarvey rose up a few inches and tried to pick out a darker shadow against the darkness. The only lights were of the houses behind him, and of the streetlights along the road, but none of that penetrated very deeply into the woods. Nothing moved.

“But not me,” María said.

“No,” Dorestos said.

María fired three shots, the small caliber unsilenced rounds making small pops.

Dorestos immediately fired two rounds, silenced, but close enough so that McGarvey could make out the right direction, and he headed off to the left, not caring how much noise he was making.

María fired two more shots, and Dorestos fired again. This time María cried out in pain. She’d been hit.

The dark figure of a very large man darted impossibly fast from right to left about ten meters from McGarvey’s position, and disappeared.

“María?” McGarvey called, but she didn’t answer.

“She is dead,” Dorestos said, this time very close.

McGarvey feinted left, and moving on the balls of his feet brought his pistol up, as the very large man — nearly seven feet tall, and built like an Olympic pentathlon athlete in his prime — stepped from behind a tree. He held a pistol pointed at the ground.

“I mean you no harm,” he said, his voice high-pitched. But he wasn’t out of breath despite the speed with which he’d moved.

“What do you want of me?” McGarvey asked, keeping his pistol trained center mass.

“Only to provide you the opportunity to do your job.”

“Which is?”

“You know,” Dorestos said.

“I’m retired.”

Dorestos shook his head. “Not since those two children were murdered in the parking lot of your school.”

“Were you there?”

“No. But I saw the images. I was given the report, and I know how you must feel.”

McGarvey glanced over his shoulder, his aim never varying. When he turned back the man was gone.

“You owe that woman no allegiance.” The man’s voice came from the darkness to the left.

McGarvey remained where he was, the bole of a reasonably sized tree a few feet on his left. “The monks in Mexico City stole the gold from Spain, who stole it from the natives, including Cubans. Your church has no claim.”

“It is viewed differently in certain circles.”

“Leave me alone,” McGarvey said. “Or the next time I see you I’ll kill you.”

“Find the diary,” Dorestos said. “I’ll be close.” He was farther away, back toward the road and moving now.

McGarvey started after him, but after a few steps he stopped, and held his breath to listen. The night was silent until a car started up and drove off. The man’s speed was incredible, almost supernatural.

Holstering his pistol, he turned and hurried back to María who lay on her back, gasping for air. Blood oozed from a chest wound. She was conscious and she looked up at him, her eyes fluttering.

“He’s gone,” McGarvey said. He placed her hands, one atop the other, over the wound. “Press down, it’ll help.”

She did it, and immediately her breathing came a little easier. “Why are you doing this for me?” she wheezed.

“Beats the hell out of me,” he said. “I’m going to have Louise call for an ambulance. I’ll be right back.”

“I won’t move,” she said, blood seeping from the corners of her mouth. “You’ll have to put up with me for the duration.”

THIRTY-THREE

At Le Bourget airport outside of Paris, al-Rashid told his pilot, second officer, and a young, pretty attendant Alicia, to stand down, but to be ready at a moment’s notice should he need them again. It was nine in the morning, the day a little cloudy, and compared to Saudi Arabia, very cool.

“As always, sir,” Muhammad Saeed, his pilot, said at the open cockpit door. Saeed had been his squadron vice commander in the Saudi Air Force. They’d been together with handpicked crews ever since.

It was about money, of course, and prestige: working for al-Rashid was by extension working for Prince Saleh. Plus the freedom. Wherever they stopped, they were free to come and go and do as they chose, the only condition was that they were on call 24/7.

Al-Rashid, wearing a double-breasted blue blazer, white linen slacks, and an open-collar off-white shirt, took a cab into town, and checked in at the Inter-Continental, the understated hotel near the Tuileries Gardens where he always stayed when in transit through France.

Alain Baptiste, the day manager, came out of his office and shook hands. “It has been several months since we’ve last seen you, Monsieur Montessier. Welcome back.”

“Thank you, Paris continues to be my favorite city.”

“Will you be staying long?”

“One or two days, perhaps a little longer. It depends on business.”

“The suite is yours for as long as you need it. Will you require the aid of Mademoiselle Frery?” The woman was the hotel’s main concierge.

“Not today,” al-Rashid said, and he shook hands again, a custom he’d always detested.

Upstairs he gave the bellman who’d carried up his two bags a generous tip, and when he was alone he ordered up a pot of tea with lemon, and a bottle of chilled mineral water. He took a shower as he waited, and when his order arrived, he took a file from his carry-on bag and opened it on the coffee table.

The man who’d gone to the United States to ask for McGarvey’s help finding the diary was Giscarde Petain, who had been one of the senior officers of the small and highly secretive banking group known for the last century and a half as the Voltaire Society. To this point al-Rashid had been unable to find exactly what this group’s avowed purpose was, except that it apparently had the means in place to find and plunder several caches of Spanish treasure buried in the desert of the American southwest. This apparently under the noses of the local authorities.

Saudi intelligence had come up with the proper banking codes for the safety deposit box in Bern, at a branch of the Berner Kantonal Bank on Schwanengasse, apparently from a contact inside the bank’s main offices with strong financial ties to the Saudi Royal family through Prince Saleh.

Getting his hands on the book had been as easy as strolling into the bank and presenting his credentials and the proper passwords. The surprise had come when he’d gotten back to his hotel and tried to read the thing. It was in Latin, a dead language he was reasonably proficient in as were almost all Oxford graduates, but it was in a code that someone within the Voltaire Society would know how to crack.

The only lead to the Society was Petain himself, whose photograph had been identified by the banker in Bern as the man who’d come six months earlier with the proper passwords. He’d stayed one hour, during which time he’d required the use of a copy machine. When he was gone it was discovered that the copy machine’s internal mechanism had been tampered with in such a fashion that no record existed of what had been copied.

Their contact did supply them with an address for Petain in Paris’s upscale, though mostly commercial, Second Arrondissement, just a few blocks north of the Louvre, and only a short taxi ride from the Inter-Continental.

The banker’s written testimony was included in the dossier. “We are told that he has a wife, Sophie, and one boy, Edouard, who is thirteen.”

The only photographs had been taken from two surveillance cameras at the bank on the day Petain had shown up and spent the hour.

Al-Rashid sat back with his tea as he stared at the photos. Petain had appeared to be a tall man, slender, with a Gallic nose and angular cheek bones. In one he’d looked up at the camera, an almost arrogant sneer on his lips, as if to say that he knew something secret, that he was on a mission of importance.

Now the man was dead, killed by Spanish intelligence agents who had set up shop in the United States for the sole purpose of stopping the Frenchman from bringing a message to Kirk McGarvey, the former director of the CIA.

Intriguing, but the conclusion that al-Rashid had come to was that the CNI had failed, and that they would have been better served by capturing Petain and forcing the man to tell them about the diary and who he thought might have taken it from the bank. But of course the Frenchman could not have known about the banker friendly to Prince Saleh because al-Rashid’s second task after retrieving the book was killing the banker.

And now Paris. Sophie and Edouard.

Al-Rashid finished his tea then laid down to sleep; the hours in the air over the past days through several times zones was tiring and he was exhausted. He did not dream. He never dreamed.

He got up around six in the afternoon, took another shower, then got dressed in the same blazer, but this time with a black Polo buttoned at the neck, dark slacks, and three-hole British-made black walkers, which were not only sturdy and comfortable, but reasonably fashionable, obviously expensive as was all his clothing.

He went down to the lobby a few minutes after seven. Baptiste, Mme. Frery, and the others who’d been on duty when he’d checked in were gone for the day and he passed all but unnoticed out the front doors where the doorman hailed him a taxi.

Madame Petain lived in a second-floor apartment facing the Rue Gaillon, as chance would have it, just a half a block from the Drouant restaurant and sidewalk café. He had the driver take him to the restaurant, passing the apartment, the windows of which were dark.

The restaurant was mostly full, but al-Rashid’s French was perfect and the one hundred euro note he handed to the maître’d got him a sidewalk table from where he could watch the apartment building, including its front entrance.

He ordered a bottle of sparkling mineral water, and a demi of Pinot Grigio to go with an order of warm oysters served with caviar that was one of the restaurant’s inside specialties, but from time to time might be served outside.

The problem he faced was not one of squeamishness dealing with the widow and her son to find the name or names of other Society members — one of whom would hopefully have the key to the diary’s code — but of the possibility that she wouldn’t know.

Her husband’s body, or what remained of it, was being held for now in the United States during the murder investigation, but if Madame Petain were to die, the people who came to her funeral would likely provide a clue.

That possibility would take time, and could very well end up messy with him on the run from the French police. Neither outcome was particularly disturbing to him, except for the time it would waste.

His drinks came first, and shortly afterward his meal on the heels of which a taxi pulled up in front of the apartment building. A slender woman got out, followed by a gangly boy and they went inside. A minute later the windows of the second-floor apartment were illuminated one by one. Madame Petain and her son were home, and no one else was with them.

Al-Rashid took his time with his light meal, especially enjoying the saltiness of the caviar and the bite of the ice-cold wine. When he was finished he tipped well, got up, and strolled leisurely in the opposite direction of the Petain’s apartment.

The fifteen minutes or so it would take for him to circle the block and come in from the other end of the Rue would give the woman and her son time to settle down, and him the time to make certain that no bodyguard or guards had been assigned to her by the Society.

THIRTY-FOUR

María had been taken to All Saints Hospital on a quiet street not far from Georgetown University Hospital. It was the go-to place that the CIA and many of the other U.S intelligence agencies in the area used when discretion was important. She’d been stabilized overnight and since noon had been in one of the operating rooms under the care of Dr. Alan Franklin. It was three in the afternoon now. McGarvey and Otto sat drinking coffee in the third-floor waiting room. It had been a long night.

“Bambridge is going to raise all kinds of holy hell once he finds out she’s here,” Otto said. Marty Bambridge was the CIA’s deputy director of the National Clandestine Services, and was a by-the-book asshole, though he did run a tight ship.

“He’ll get over it. In the meantime we still don’t know if she came up here on her own, or even what her situation is in Havana. She could be on the run.”

“She’s here to redeem herself.”

“Probably,” McGarvey said. It was hard for him to focus. He’d been here twice to have Dr. Franklin repair wounds, and again when his son-in-law had been assassinated. Remembering the look on Katy’s face, and the overwhelming grief on their daughter’s was almost more than he could bear.

“It’s not the same, kemo sabe,” Otto said, reading almost all of that from McGarvey’s posture. “She’s not your responsibility. She’s an intelligence officer from a foreign nation that we don’t have diplomatic relations with. She’s killed people and she’ll do it again.”

McGarvey looked up, suddenly realizing what Otto was getting at. “I was thinking about Todd and about Katy and Liz, not Colonel León. Trust me. She came here and got herself shot up, not my problem. What I need to know is why the bastard from the Church didn’t take me out too.”

“They want you to lead them to the diary. The one that supposedly doesn’t exist that shows the way to Cibola that also doesn’t exist. But the one that people are willing to kill for. And are willing to herd you toward finding it.”

“But why me?”

“Because you came damned close a few months ago. And once you get the bit in your mouth you never let go.”

“Not interested.”

“Sure you are. When Kim Jong Il called, you went to help. Same as when Fidel Castro sent his daughter. Now you’ll do it if for no other reason than the two kids who got killed on campus, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Otto looked up. “Anyway you better decide what you want to do because Marty’s here.”

Bambridge barged down the corridor from the elevator. He was short and thin with dark angry eyes and thick black hair, and he moved as if his feet hurt, and that fact, along with everything else, surprised him. He wore a dark blue old-fashioned three-piece suit

“We expected you on campus to be debriefed yesterday after the mess you created in Sarasota,” he said even before he reached the waiting room. “And now this.”

McGarvey almost laughed. “You’re going to have a heart attack one of these days.”

“You listen to me, we’ve had enough. Bringing an enemy intelligence agent here is nothing short of unconscionable. I want her gone.”

“Where to?”

A nurse scurried down the hall. “Please,” she said sternly. “This is a hospital.”

Bambridge turned on her. “You’ve admitted a woman with a gunshot wound. I want her moved immediately.”

“She’s in the operating room.”

“I don’t care—”

“You’re an idiot,” the nurse shot back. She turned to McGarvey. “Doctor Franklin is just finishing up. He says she’ll recover with nothing more than a scar.”

“When can she get out of here?” McGarvey asked.

“A couple of days. Maybe a week. Friend of yours?”

“In a manner of speaking,” McGarvey said, completely out of his funk.

The nurse gave Bambridge another sharp look and left.

Bambridge sat down across from McGarvey and Otto. “Look, I’m serious about this, and I have Walt’s backing. As soon as she’s able to move I want her out of here. This is a place for heroes — American heroes.”

“And in this case a wounded asset, Marty. She stays until she’s ready to move under her own power. If she’s transferred to another hospital or if you try to send her back to Cuba right now, the same guy who shot her will try again. And he was good enough to get past me.”

“All the more reason to dump her. If someone wants to take her down, it’d be fine with us.” Bambridge sat forward and appealed to Rencke. “She ordered the kidnapping of your wife during which a teacher was killed at the day school where your kid had just been dropped off. Do you think that she’d have any qualms about trying something just as nasty as that if she thought the need was there?”

“She released her unharmed after I went to Havana for the funeral and Mac showed up to answer her questions. It was a crazy stupid stunt she pulled, and people did get hurt, a lot of them.”

Bambridge turned back to McGarvey. “What did you mean, asset?”

“I’m going to take her to Seville with me as soon as she’s fit to travel.”

“Not a chance in hell. After what happened in Florida you’re not going anywhere near Spain. As it is the White House is all over us for an explanation because as it stands neither our government nor Madrid’s has any idea how to handle this mess you created.”

“I don’t expect they do. But I’ll make a deal with you. Send some babysitters over here to keep watch over her. There’s a possibility that the shooter will try to get to her as soon as I leave.”

“You’re not going to Spain—”

“First I’m going to talk to Bill Callahan about Cuba’s intel operations here in the Washington area. If Colonel León did show up to spearhead some operation I want to know about it before I provide her a cover. Could be the Bureau will arrest her as a spy and exchange her for one of ours in Havana.”

“We’re clean in Cuba for the moment,” Bambridge said.

“What else?”

“At the very least Walt wants you to come out to Langley for a chat and a debrief. We have to figure out some response for the Spanish situation. They’re accusing us of mounting a counter-intel ops that resulted in the deaths of four of their people. They mentioned your name.”

“They were spying on me, and when I found out about it I went over to talk to them. They opened fire first.”

“But you went over there armed.”

“It would have turned out differently had I not,” McGarvey said. “They were responsible for the car bombing at New College.”

“We’re interested in that event too. Like who the guy in the car was, and what was his connection to you?”

“Bring the babysitters and I’ll come out to Langley to tell you guys everything. But I’ll want Callahan in on my debriefing so I won’t have to go over the same material twice. I don’t have the time.”

Bambridge was frustrated even though he’d gotten just about everything he wanted, except for María’s immediate expulsion from the hospital. And McGarvey felt some pity for the poor bastard. He himself had worked briefly as the deputy director of the clandestine services, that in the old days had been called the directorate of operations, and understood the enormous pressures the man was under. Dealing with NOCs — who tended to be super-independent people — was like herding cats only with deadly consequences, not only physically but politically.

The Spanish mission to spy on a former DCI that had ended up in the deaths of four of their operatives was highly embarrassing to the Spaniards, who at the moment were depending not only on the EU for economic bailouts, but on the United States for serious financial help. It was one of the reasons, McGarvey supposed, that Madrid wanted a piece of the treasure. A few billions would help their bottom line.

“I’ll have Callahan on campus at five,” Bambridge said. “Walt’s office. I’ll expect you not only to show up but to cooperate.”

THIRTY-FIVE

The evening had turned chilly and standing at the corner from the Petain apartment al-Rashid turned up the collar of his jacket and put a Gauloises at the corner of his mouth. He didn’t have the habit, but he’d found that a man smoking a cigarette was a distraction. The cigarette itself became a focus.

He’d spotted the bodyguard behind the wheel of a white Citroën DS4 hatchback parked across the street. The driver’s window was open and the man was smoking a cigarette.

Crossing the Rue he meandered down the street where at the parked car he checked to make sure that no one was paying any attention to him and stepped around to the driver’s side. Music came from the restaurant and someone was singing some tune but terribly off-key.

The bodyguard looked up. “What do you want, then?” He was a very large man, possibly a Corsican hood, al-Rashid thought. They considered themselves bully boys.

“A light, monsieur, if you please.”

“Fuck off.”

Al-Rashid took the unlit cigarette out of his mouth and tossed it away. “Mind your manners, mate,” he said.

The Frenchman, realizing that something might be wrong, reached inside his jacket, but al-Rashid clamped a powerful hand around the man’s throat, cutting off his breath and the blood flow from his carotid arteries.

It took less than a minute for the big man’s desperate struggles to subside, but he’d been constrained by the narrow confines of the small car and had not been able to fight back effectively.

Al-Rashid released the pressure. “Who has sent you to keep watch on Madame Petain?”

The Corsican began to regain his senses and he reached again for his pistol, but al-Rashid batted his hand away.

“Quickly, who has sent you here? Was it someone from the Voltaire Society? I need a name.”

The bodyguard lunged forward, but al-Rashid clamped one hand around the man’s neck again. Almost instantly the Corsican settled back, and al-Rashid released his hold.

This time the guard slammed a meaty fist through the window, but al-Rashid slipped the punch, shoved the man’s head back against the headrest, and clamped a powerful grip around his neck. This time he did not let go.

“You are an ignorant salopard, and mine is the last face you’ll ever see.”

It did not take long for the Corsican’s struggles to cease. A minute later his heart stopped, and thirty seconds after that he was beyond reviving.

Al-Rashid took the cigarette from the man’s lap where it had burned a hole in his trousers, and tossed it away.

He looked around, but still no one had noticed anything untoward.

He searched the body, coming up with a wallet and French National Identity Card in the name of Ghjuvan Petrus, which was the Corsican equivalent of John Peters, along with an American-made Wilson tactical conceal .45 caliber pistol. It was only a nine-shot semiauto, but it was one of the most accurate handguns in the world. The pistol of a confident man.

Al-Rashid pocketed the wallet, but left the gun in place. He powered up the window, took the keys, and locked the doors. With no visible signs of an injury or a struggle, the man was just another drunk parked at the curb, sleeping it off.

A taxi passed, and when it was gone al-Rashid crossed the street and inside the entry hall of the apartment building pressed the button for 2A. Moments later Sophie Petain answered.

“Oui?”

“It is I, Ghjuvan from the street. A man has delivered papers for you.”

“What papers?”

“Concerning your husband, madame. From the Society.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about. But leave them in the mail slot downstairs and I’ll have my lawyer look at them in the morning. Good evening, monsieur.”

She was lying. Al-Rashid could hear it in her voice, though he didn’t know what she was lying about. “Please, madame, I may lose my job. I was ordered to bring these to you.”

The elevator door opened. “Come up if you must.”

Al-Rashid rode the elevator to the second floor and went to her apartment. The building was very quiet. He knocked on the door. “Madame?”

“Slip them under the door.”

“They will not fit such a narrow opening.”

“Merde,” Madame Petain said. She unlatched the lock.

The moment the door was open far enough for al-Rashid to see that the foolish woman had not fitted a safety chain, he shoved it the rest of the way. Pushing her aside before she could resist, he stepped into the apartment’s entry vestibule, and closed and locked the door.

The boy appeared at the end of the short corridor into the living room.

“Edouard, telephone the police,” the woman cried.

Al-Rashid shoved her against the wall, clamped a hand on her mouth, and turned to the boy, who stood rooted to the spot. “I do not wish to harm your mother, but I will if you attempt to call for help. Do you understand?”

The boy nodded. “Are you the man who killed my father?”

“No. But I know who did, and I need your mother’s help to bring them to justice, hein.”

The boy nodded again.

“Do not cry out,” al-Rashid told the woman, and she blinked her eyes. He took his hand away from her mouth and pulled her into the expensively furnished living room where he had her and her son sit together on the couch.

“You have brought no papers for me after all,” Madame Petain said. She looked haggard. It had only been a couple of days since her husband’s death and it showed.

“No, and forgive me for the little ruse, but I needed to speak with you about the Society, that your husband gave his life for.”

“I do not know what you are talking about. My husband was a private equity banker, nothing more. I knew that he was traveling out of France on business, but I had no idea where until I received word that he had died in an explosion.”

“Who brought you this news?”

“The police.”

“The Sûreté or the DGSE?” al-Rashid asked. The first were the civil police, the second France’s intelligence service.

“The man was from Interpol,” Madame Petain said. She’d gotten her second wind. “You are not a bodyguard. Who are you to come to me like this?”

“You are accustomed to bodyguards. Who arranged them for you?”

“My husband, whenever he was away,” she said defiantly. “Now I demand that you leave.”

“Indeed I will, and I apologize for the trouble I have caused you, madame,” al-Rashid said. “Where is your husband’s office?”

“I don’t know.”

Al-Rashid laughed. “Does he take a taxi or the Metro or does a car come for him?”

“Go!” the woman shouted.

Al-Rashid was on her in an instant and he slapped her very hard in the face, rocking her head back. “Answer me, you silly woman, or I will kill you.”

Madame Petain was speechless, and al-Rashid raised his hand against her again, but the boy cried out.

“My father’s office is in the next block. He walks to work each morning. I followed him once.”

“What is the number?”

The boy gave it to him.

The woman glanced toward the windows. She was frightened. “You have what you want, now leave,” she said.

“Oui,” al-Rashid said. He leaned down over her as if he was going to kiss her forehead; instead he took her narrow face in both hands and twisted sharply to the right, breaking her neck.

The boy scrambled backward over the couch and reached the front vestibule before al-Rashid caught up with him and broke his neck.

He stood for a long half minute listening to the near absence of noise in the building, waiting for someone to come knocking at the door to find out what the fuss in 2A was all about, or for the sound of a distant police siren converging. But no alarm had been raised.

He went back into the apartment and began his methodical search.

THIRTY-SIX

Washington’s rush hour traffic was in full swing when McGarvey took a cab from the hospital out to CIA headquarters in the wooded hills across the George Washington Parkway from the Potomac River. The weather, which had been clear for the past twenty-four hours, had clouded up, the heat and humidity oppressive; a thick wet blanket had been thrown over the capitol and surroundings, deepening moods and sharpening the tempers of anyone out in it.

A guard came out, gave the cabdriver a temporary visitor’s permit that would allow him to drive to the Original Headquarters Building, drop off his passenger, and immediately return to the gate, and then looked through the back-door window that McGarvey had lowered.

“Someone will be waiting for you in the lobby, Mr. Director,” he said. “Welcome back.”

“Thanks,” McGarvey said, and on the short curving drive through the woods and around the main parking lot to the seven-story OHB a lot of memories, some of them good but many of them bad, came back to him in living color.

Everything seemed the same, and yet so much had changed, especially the technology that had been developed — and continued to be developed — between the Company and the National Security Agency. Otto had explained some of what they already had and what was on the near horizon — completely unbreakable quantum effects encryption that tied in with QE computers that could work a million times faster than current microchip machines, and were by many definitions either already on the border with artificial intelligence, or just across it. Holographic memories that could not only accurately display a current time and place, but could remember the past as well as predict certain future events.

“All sci-fi to you,” Otto had said, not derisively. “But then you’re a people person. You see things that no machine in the pipeline is capable of. Instincts, hunches.”

“Sometimes wrong,” McGarvey had told his old friend.

Otto laughed. “You ever heard of a computer that never makes mistakes?”

“Even yours?”

“Especially mine. Why do you think I keep tinkering with them?”

The weapons and weapons systems were changing too; his old Walther PPK, the stuff of James Bond movies of the sixties, had evolved to weapons that fired smart bullets that could be guided to change directions in flight to seek out and kill a target — such as a human being — that emitted infrared radiation. Pulse weapons that sent a high-pitched pulse of sound so sharply focused and yet so loud that a human target could be stunned to unconsciousness. And if the pulse energy were raised by a factor of only two or three the target’s brain would develop an instantly fatal number of tiny hemorrhages. Or nearly silent unmanned drones carrying hellfire missiles that could be controlled from bases halfway around the world from their targets.

But all of that technology was of little use this time around because at issue was a mystery that had its beginning the moment Columbus had set foot in the New World and had discovered a native wearing a gold necklace.

Just as Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, had told reporters after the attacks on 9/11—none of our advanced weapons systems, our nuclear submarines and missiles and stealth fighters and aircraft carriers could have prevented this from happening.

Boots on the ground. Human assets, even if they only carried Walthers.

Bambridge was waiting for him in the very busy main lobby. It was quarter after five, right in the middle of the shift change. “You’re late,” he said, handing McGarvey a visitor’s badge.

“Yes.”

“What happened to Otto?”

“He moved Louise to another safe house.”

“Where?”

“You’ll have to ask him that. But thanks for sending someone out to keep watch on Colonel León. She could be important.”

Bambridge was clearly frustrated. He wanted to lash out.

They went through the guard points and then left down the broad corridor to a bank of elevators. “She’ll be discharged in a couple of days, but she won’t be in any shape to climb over walls with you. We’re going to send her back to Havana. She can recuperate there.”

McGarvey didn’t bother replying. From any realistic point of view Bambridge was correct. María León was no friend of the United States. She didn’t belong here.

Walter Page was waiting for them in his office, along with Bill Callahan and Carleton Patterson, a slender white-haired man in his early eighties who’d been the CIA’s general counsel forever. The only one missing was Fred Atwell, who was the new deputy director and who would almost certainly take over after Page left. He was a White House favorite, who’d worked as special adviser on foreign affairs to the current president but who’d campaigned hard to get his present job the moment Page had announced his intention to retire.

They all shook hands and sat around an oval coffee table after they got coffee from a silver service on a cart.

“Fred couldn’t join us this afternoon,” Page said. “He’s in Ohio campaigning with the president.”

“A good place for him to be,” McGarvey said, and the others, even Bambridge, chuckled. No one liked the man. From what McGarvey had heard Atwell was purely a political creature. The man knew absolutely nothing about intelligence gathering.

“The ball’s in your court, dear boy,” Patterson said. Of the others in the DCI’s office his was the most unflappable persona. He’d seen practically everything during his tenure. He and McGarvey had a mutual respect.

“Spanish gold buried in our desert southwest. Mostly New Mexico, maybe some in Texas.”

“A fairy tale,” Bambridge said. Page tried to hold him off, but he plowed on. “After the last debacle down at Holloman, we went through government records back as early as eighteen twelve. And I do mean with a fine-toothed comb. Some damned fine archivists were called in and did the work on a contract basis. Totally apolitical. Nothing was found. Not one piece of documentation that there is or ever was any cache of treasure brought up to New Mexico by disgruntled monks from Mexico City. Urban legend, every scrap of it.”

“The Cuban government was and is still interested,” McGarvey said.

Bambridge waved it off disparagingly.

“Spain is interested enough to send people to watch me.”

“Spanish treasure galleons sunk off the Florida coast, or even out in the Atlantic around the Azores. Spain has a legitimate claim, which has been worked out in courts of law. We’ve been that route. But not on dry land in the United States.”

“The Vatican is interested. They claim that the treasure belongs to the Church.”

Page was interested. “Was it someone from Rome who was blown up in the car?”

“No. But the person who killed the fourth CNI operative — the one who was found in the rental house on Siesta Key — was almost likely from the Church. The Knights Hospitallers.”

No one said a word. Even Bambridge was temporarily at a loss.

McGarvey explained what had happened at his house, and again in the woods behind the Renckes’ place. “He eliminated the last of the CNI operatives, and he meant to eliminate Colonel León, warning me that she was spearheading a Cuban intel op here in D.C.”

“Nothing is showing up on our radar at the moment,” Callahan said. “Which brings us back to your Voltaire Society.”

“I haven’t heard of this wrinkle,” Patterson said.

“The man who came to the college to see me identified himself as Giscarde Petain, said he worked for something called the Voltaire Society. Apparently it is a group of bankers who have been doing their damnedest to keep money away from the Vatican since the eighteen hundreds. Evidently it was something suggested by the philosopher just before his death. He hated the Church, and I think this was some sort of a joke — his parting shot.”

“And this Petain came to you for what reason?” Patterson asked. No one else seemed to want to speak up.

“According to him the Church sent one of its Maltese operatives as a spy on a Spanish military expedition to what’s now New Mexico to find and map the buried caches of gold and silver. Which he did as the expedition’s surveyor and mapmaker. He kept two journals — one of them false that he gave to the soldiers when they got back and the other a true account that he kept to bring back to Rome. He was lost at sea, killed by the Voltaires who took his diary.”

“Christ,” Bambridge said, but again Page held him off.

“You have our attention, dear boy,” Patterson said.

“The diary was brought back to Paris where it was studied, and then was locked up in a bank vault in Bern. Supposedly the Spanish expedition found seven caches of gold — the seven cities of Cibola — and since then the Voltaires have plundered three of them.”

“And did what with the treasure?”

“I don’t know. But Otto thinks they made at least one payment to a bank in Richmond well before the Civil War.”

Patterson smiled. “Well,” he said. He exchanged a glance with Page.

“The diary was stolen from the bank vault, and Petain was sent to ask for my help finding it,” McGarvey said, and the momentary silence that followed was in no way surprising to him.

Page was first. “Mac, you have to understand the great deal of respect that this agency owes you, the thanks the entire nation owes you.”

“The story is fantastic, Walt. I don’t know what to believe myself. But the fact is the Spanish government, possibly the Catholic Church, the Cuban government, something calling itself the Voltaire Society, which has already given our government money, are interested enough to kill for it. And among the dead are two young college students who were killed while I watched, and I couldn’t do a damned thing about it.”

Page spread his hands. “What do you want?”

“Stay out of my way.”

“I don’t know if we can do that,” Bambridge said. “There’s to be at least a coroner’s hearing in Sarasota.”

McGarvey got up. The reaction was about what he’d expected, and he couldn’t honestly blame them. The story was at the very least far-fetched. But the bodies were real, and someone would have to answer for them. He headed for the door.

“What will you do now?” Patterson asked after him.

“Find the diary,” McGarvey said without turning back.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Giscarde Petain had been a careful man, a precise man. His walk-in closet, separate from his wife’s, was in perfect order. Trousers left to right in color sequence, light to dark. His shirts all facing left, the same with his suit coats. His ties were on an ingenious rack, as were his shoes in their own — at least two dozen pairs. His hats were in boxes, and his sweaters were arranged in cedar-lined drawers. Even his stockings and linens were ironed and set in order.

Al-Rashid stood in the middle of the master suite trying to get a sense of the man, and by extension perhaps, of the Voltaire Society. The apartment was quiet. No noises from the rest of the building or from outside on the street intruded. This was a serene place. An inner sanctum. A castle keep where a man with his family under siege could maintain if not his personal safety at least his secrets.

He’d made a cursory search of the place, finding nothing but the man’s super-organized closet. This time he started again in the living room, ignoring Madame Petain’s and the boy’s bodies, and looked for what he had missed. Perhaps the obvious.

An hour and a half later, after going through the living room, dining room, kitchen and pantry, three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, all the closets, and the laptop in the man’s study, which yielded absolutely nothing except that Petain had a penchant for pornography involving very young girls all of them prepubescent, he found himself back where he’d started from.

Frustrated, he went to the broad windows looking down on the street, parted the curtains a little to watch the sparse traffic, but then let them fall and perched on the window ledge that was wide enough to be used as a seat.

The seat was loose.

Al-Rashid got to his feet. Everything else in the apartment had been in perfect order, nothing had been out of place. Now this. Either someone else — Madame Petain or the boy — had pulled the ledge up, or this was a booby trap; open the lid and the apartment would blow. But that made no sense.

Getting down on his knees he examined the length of the ledge and spotted what could have been two spring-loaded catches, only one of which was engaged. He pressed the other and the ledge rose up on hinges.

Inside was a narrow compartment about three feet deep, at the bottom of which was a leather-bound case about the size of a slim hardcover book.

Making sure that the case wasn’t itself booby trapped, al-Rashid pulled it out and opened it. The thing was an ordinary iPad. He powered it up and the first page contained a couple of lines of what appeared to be Latin in the same sort of code as the diary was written in. Below that was a blank box, obviously meant for a password. But in the bottom right-hand corner was an address on the Rue Gaillon.

Al-Rashid looked at the body of the boy lying in the corridor. The kid had lied to him. The address he’d given for his father’s office was different from the one on the iPad. It probably meant that Madame Petain had also known the truth not only about where her husband worked but what he did. She’d known about the Society.

After the boy had blurted out his father’s address the woman had looked at the window. At the time al-Rashid thought that she was perhaps looking for help, maybe the flashing lights of a police unit. But it had been the secret window ledge compartment, which she’d opened and failed to properly close.

Turning off the iPad, he stuffed it in his belt at the small of his back, closed the ledge, and left the apartment, someone up the street still singing terribly off tune.

The Second Arrondissement along with the Eighth and Ninth constituted one of the city’s most important business districts, where a great number of bank headquarters along with the Greek-styled building that had once held the Paris Bourse — the stock exchange — were located.

During the day the area was as busy as was New York’s Wall Street, but at this hour of the evening only the restaurants and the Opéra-Comique concert hall were open, and the streets were mostly quiet, except for the occasional taxi or police patrol.

Al-Rashid headed up the street, arriving at the address on the iPad in five minutes. The boy had probably not lied when he’d said that his father walked to work, which was clever of him, mixing one truth with a lie. Made the story more believable.

The building was a very narrow three-story wedged between two commercial banks, solid with tall arched windows on the first. Only the Society’s number on a brass plaque over a plain green door distinguished it from its neighbors.

A streetlight at the corner cast long shadows, but lent enough illumination that allowed al-Rashid to get a good look at the door as he passed. He could open the lock without a problem, but he would need time to first find and then disable the alarm system that certainly would be armed. But the chance that a car, likely even a police patrol, would pass before he was inside was too great for him to take the risk.

He turned left at the end of the block and around the corner on the street paralleling the Rue Gaillon he found a pass-through back to a narrow courtyard that had at one time been used as a mews with stables that had since been converted into million-euro apartments.

A few windows were lit, but for the most part the space was in shadows. The rear windows of the Society’s building were protected by bars, and the sturdy-looking metal door was covered by a pull-down mesh security barrier.

Taking a small penlight with a red lens from his jacket pocket, al-Rashid studied the lock on the mesh, the track on which it was lowered and raised and the roller bearings at the top, but he could detect no signs of an alarm mechanism. Nor could he see any video surveillance equipment. The Voltaires likely thought that their almost complete anonymity was protection enough, beyond ordinary locks and probably a basic alarm system.

Using a pair of case-hardened steel picks that extended from the handle of a Swiss Army penknife, he opened the lock on the mesh gate in under twenty seconds. Looking around to make certain that no one was looking out any of the windows, he slowly eased the gate up against the stiff resistance of a long time of neglect. No one had come this way in months if not years. But the grease had not completely dried up and raising the gate had been nearly soundless.

Nor was any alarm mechanism visible around the frame of the door, and especially not on the hinges. This lock, however, was stronger and it took a full minute before he’d defeated it.

The rear vestibule was nearly pitch-black. The air smelled dry, musty, like an antique bookstore in Nice that he went to from time to time. Ancient. As if business had been conducted from this location for a very long time. A century and a half or more, al-Rashid mused.

He lowered the mesh gate then closed the door and made his way to a narrow corridor that led to the front entrance and stair hall. An umbrella stand was next to a tall mirror and hat rack that looked as if they should be in a museum.

One door on the right was open to a reception area with a secretary’s desk and an IBM Selectric typewriter. A small two-drawer file cabinet was placed in a corner behind the desk, and two side chairs were placed on either side of the doorway.

The file cabinet was not locked, but both drawers were filled with file folders stuffed with blank paper, newspaper pages folded to file size and magazines, most of them French.

Al-Rashid stepped back into the stair hall and held his breath for a long moment to listen, and then to smell and try to sense the meaning of the building. The age of it. The purpose of the place.

He was not carrying a pistol. And in fact he rarely went out armed, he’d seldom found the need. If he were stopped by the police he could offer up his Swiss Army penknife, but nothing else. And in the rare instances when he needed to use force, he’d most often found that his hands were enough.

Nor did he feel any uncertainty now, except that nothing about this place seemed right. He felt as if he had walked onto a movie set that had been made to look real, but on closer examination everything was a sham, an elaborate prop.

He checked out the front window but there was no traffic, and he started up the stairs moving softly on the balls of his feet, already convinced that he was not going to find the name of a translator for the diary here. The Society, if it actually existed, which he was convinced it did, was not as simple as he’d first suspected. There was more here, though. A clue if he was smart enough and patient enough to find it.

Near the head of the first flight of stairs al-Rashid suddenly froze. He thought that he’d heard a slight noise just to the left three or four meters away, as if someone had shuffled his feet.

Al-Rashid waited for a long time, listening, trying to gauge what it was he sensed, until he realized he was smelling a man’s cologne. Faint, and he could not immediately place it. But whoever was just around the corner was not making a noise.

“Giscarde, mon ami, c’est tu?” al-Rashid said, and he went the rest of the way up to the landing.

A very large man, possibly the twin of the Corsican in front of the Petain apartment, stepped out of the deeper shadows just a couple of meters away, illuminated from a reflection of the streetlight at the corner. He held a silenced pistol in his left hand. A SIG Sauer, boxy but effective.

“We were expecting you,” he said in badly accented French.

“What is wrong?” al-Rashid said, moving closer, his hands spread. “No one tells me anything. Sophie and Edouard are dead, for God’s sake. And now Giscarde does not answer his cell phone.”

“What are you talking about?” the man demanded. He was alarmed.

“I don’t know who to call. I don’t have an emergency number other than Giscarde’s and he does not answer.”

“He is dead.”

Al-Rashid let his shoulders slump, and his face fell. “My God, I didn’t know. I’ve been in Switzerland following up a lead.”

The Frenchman was suspicious. “Why did you come here, of all places?”

“I couldn’t think of anything else. But I have information about the diary, and I need instructions how to proceed.”

“Tell me. I’ll see it gets to the right person.”

The man had made a mistake by admitting he knew a Voltaire other than Petain. “I was told only to report to Giscarde.”

“He’s dead, Monsieur McGarvey, as you well know.”

Al-Rashid laughed. “Do I look like an American spy, you idiot,” he said. “Merde.” He turned away.

The Frenchman stepped forward. “Don’t move.”

Al-Rashid turned back and grabbed the pistol, his hand so fast that the man had no chance to react.

“All I want is a name and a telephone number so that I can make my report.”

“Fuck you.”

“Give me that much and I’ll leave you in peace. Otherwise I’ll shoot you in the head and find another way. But understand me, mon ami, this business is of supreme importance to the Society. We are under attack, and I will not permit someone to stand in my way.”

The Frenchman hesitated, no longer sure of himself.

Al-Rashid pressed the muzzle of the pistol to the man’s forehead. “One name is all.”

“I report to Monsieur Chatelet,” the man said. “Robert Chatelet.” He gave a telephone number.

Al-Rashid stepped back as if he were leaving, but then turned when he was certain that he would be out of the range of blood spatter and pulled the trigger, driving the Corsican backward off his feet. He stuffed the pistol in his belt under his jacket then went downstairs and let himself out the front door after making certain that the street was empty.

Three blocks later he found a cab to take him to the Moulin Rouge nightclub, and from there another back to the Inter-Continental.

Chatelet was the vice mayor of Paris, and one of the leading candidates for president of France. A sharp critic of the United States, and one of the leaders of the Socialist Party, he nevertheless was a strong advocate of keeping the EU and therefore the euro intact, whatever the cost.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Otto and Louise had settled into an upscale three-bedroom condo just off Dupont Circle in the heart of Embassy Row that was used from time to time as a safe house for visiting VIP intelligence assets. Pulling through the iron gates onto the All Saints Hospital Compound around eight in the evening, McGarvey could see the look of resignation on their faces when he’d left them, and he’d felt for them. But in this business a normal life was never normal, and if you wished for something like that you would be disappointed.

“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” Louise had told him at the door after dinner. She’d made a pot roast with mashed potatoes and gravy, and even a loaf of bread machine whole wheat. It was her stab at normalcy.

Otto had gone into his temporary office where he’d gotten busy trying to figure out what the Cuban DC intelligence apparatus was up to. So far there’d been absolutely no reaction to María suddenly dropping out of sight.

A cleanup crew had gotten rid of her rental car and had repaired the bullet damage to the front of the house. And with Otto’s help they made sure that the surveillance system in place would also keep a sharp eye on the neighbors’ houses.

“It won’t always be this way,” McGarvey had told her, but neither of them believed it.

“For the foreseeable future,” Louise said.

McGarvey gave her a hug. “Make sure he keeps his head down. I don’t know about this one.”

She’d smiled. “That’s about as likely as you doing a sudden one eighty.”

The hospital’s iron gate was electrically controlled from a security station just inside the front doors. Entrance was by recognition only. The place was secure. There’d never been a breach in its forty-eight-year history, which this evening was something else McGarvey worried about. There was a first time for everything.

He parked in the rear and was buzzed through the door by Ms. Randall — Randi to her friends — the same nurse from this afternoon.

“Good evening, Mr. Director,” she said.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” McGarvey asked.

“Who has the time?” she said. “She’s awake and had a light dinner, but she’s insisting that she needs to talk to you.”

“Where are the babysitters?”

“Pat is outside her room on four, and Ron is in security.”

McGarvey caught a slight hesitation. “But?”

“I don’t think their hearts are in it. I guess the woman is a piece of work.”

“That she is,” McGarvey said. “I’ll go up in a minute.”

“Yes, sir.”

The ground floor was made up of a staff lounge, the pharmacy, a small but brilliantly equipped laboratory, the food prep area where the chef, sous chef, and dietician could prepare anything from Cream of Wheat to boeuf Bourguignon with truffled asparagus, and the security station. All Saints could handle as many as twenty-five patients, but McGarvey could never remember more than a handful at any time. This evening in addition to María León there were only four other officers — all of them CIA — who’d been transferred from Afghanistan via the hospital at Ramstein AFB in Germany where they’d been stabilized.

McGarvey went to the security desk, which was manned 24/7 by men who were weapons and martial arts experts — many of them ex — Navy SEALs. This evening the hospital’s on-duty security officer, Steve Ellerin, had been joined by Ron Kutschinski, a Chicago ex-cop who’d worked as muscle for the CIA for nine years, ever since he’d been wounded on duty. He was a bulky man, and handy with his fists.

“Good evening, Mr. Director,” Kutschinski said, getting to his feet. He’d been perched on the edge of the desk from where Ellerin had access to more than a dozen low lux cameras around the hospital and grounds. Anyone coming within a few feet of the gates would show up on the screens no matter what the weather was doing.

“Anything doing?” McGarvey asked.

“Just you, sir.”

“Keep your eyes open, there’s a good chance we’ll have some company tonight.”

Ellerin looked interested. “How do you see it, sir? A team effort? A loner?”

“One big guy, but I’ve never come across anyone faster. The bastard is like a shadow; now you see him, now you don’t.”

Kutschinski grinned. “He’s a lucky bastard, then. Coming up against you, and still being alive and kicking.”

“Keep that in mind,” McGarvey said.

“Sir?”

“He’s not lucky, just good.”

McGarvey walked back to the elevator and took it up to the fourth floor. Dr. Franklin, who’d operated on María, had finally gone home after a thirty-six-hour stint, leaving only three trauma nurses on duty. But he and two other doctors were on call 24/7 should the need arise. The lab tech and cooks wouldn’t be back until five in the morning, and except for the security team and five patients the hospital was empty, and very quiet.

Nurse Randall was waiting for the elevator to take her down to three, where the four wounded CIA officers had been moved after Dr. Franklin ordered María to be kept in isolation. “Just in case,” he’d told McGarvey. “These guys were in pretty tough shape. I don’t want anything bothering them.”

“How’s the patient?”

“Bitchy,” Randall said.

Pat Morris, the other CIA babysitter, was sitting in the darkness in the visitor’s lounge at the end of the hallway from where he had a clear sight line to María’s room.

McGarvey walked down to him. “If something’s going to happen it’ll probably be after midnight.”

Morris nodded. “He won’t get past Elias.” He’d been a Navy SEAL and his primary weapon of choice now was the same as then: a Heckler & Koch MP7 submachine gun with a suppressor, which lay on the coffee table in front of him. He also carried a standard SEAL 9 mm SIG Sauer P226 pistol fitted with a suppressor in a shoulder holster. His jacket was lying over the arm of a chair.

“Keep frosty, this guy is good.”

“May I speak plainly, sir?”

“Yes.”

“This assignment sucks shit, if you know what I mean. I don’t mind putting my life on the line for one of our own, but from what we were told in our briefing this broad is a colonel in Castro’s secret police.”

“That she is,” McGarvey said from the doorway. “But she’s an important asset for the moment. The guy coming our way to take her out has some answers I need.”

“She’s bait?”

McGarvey shrugged. “If that’s how you want to see it. Thing is I want him alive, if possible.”

“If not?”

“His life is not worth yours.”

“I hear you, sir,” Morris said. Like many SEALs he was not a particularly large man, but he had the look in his eyes.

McGarvey went down the hall to María’s room and knocked on the door frame before he went in. She was watching television with the sound very low. It was the Tchaikovsky violin concerto in D minor live from Avery Fischer Hall at Lincoln Center. At first she was lost in it, a look almost of rapture on her pretty oval face, until suddenly she looked up and scowled.

“I want to get the hell out of here,” she said, her voice still a little croaky as if she had a bad cold.

“Not for another day or two. How do you feel?”

“Like hell, and not just from a hole in my chest. I want to know why pretty boy is sitting there in the dark at the end of the hall. Is he keeping me in, or trying to keep somebody out?”

“Both.”

“He’s coming back.” She said it as a statement, not a question.

“I think so. But if he gets this far, which I don’t think he will, shoot to stop not to kill.”

María laughed harshly. “Give me my pistol and I can protect myself, or give me a telephone and I can have ten operatives who’ll close up this place tighter than a gnat’s ass.”

“We saved your life.”

“After you put me in jeopardy.”

“You did that by coming back,” McGarvey said, and before she could say anything else he held up a hand, tired of her bullshit. “He probably won’t try to get in until sometime after midnight. By then the lights on this floor, including your room, will be out.”

“Where will you be?”

“Close.”

THIRTY-NINE

The CyberCafe du Monde, a few blocks from the Jardin du Luxembourg, was one of the very few Internet cafés in all of Paris that was open 24/7. Seedy with a dozen old and slow computers, it was the sort of place whose clerks didn’t give a damn why you wanted to go online. They only wanted their 2.80 euros per hour.

When al-Rashid, who’d found the place listed on his iPhone, showed up a few minutes after three in the morning only four of the machines were in use, three of them displaying kiddy porn.

He paid for two hours, took a machine near the back door, and when it was connected brought up the website for Agence France-Presse and entered Robert Chatelet, histoire. Every man had a vulnerable spot, an Achilles’ heel, and al-Rashid figured that the vice mayor of Paris and the leading candidate for president of France was no exception.

For thirty minutes he plowed through two dozen speeches and position papers published on behalf of the Parti socialiste, the PS, when Chatelet had switched from the center-right Union for Popular Movement because of what was being called the growing Muslim problem, which had come to the fore when a law had been passed banning the burqa — the facial covering for women.

Chatelet’s position had not been unique: France for the French, purity of the language and customs, individuals on the world stage. Second to no people, to no nation.

Switching to the AFP’s photo archive, he scanned shots of Chatelet as early as December 2004 in one of a group dedicating the opening of the stunning Millau Bridge over the River Tarn in the Massif Central mountains of Southern France, and as late as groundbreaking for the Lavallette Dam in Saint-Etienne in 2012, and La Tour Bois-le-Pretre, which was a public housing project at the edge of Paris later the same year.

Al-Rashid brought up France 24, the global television news channel owned mostly by TF1—which was akin to CBS in the United States — but its archives yielded little more than what he’d picked up from AFP, except that he saw and heard the man. Chatelet was typically French, more or less undistinguished in stature and looks, but with a lovely wife who’d been a minor movie actress and model. His voice was rough, that of a smoker, and his French, to al-Rashid’s ear, was southern country, not at all refined.

But neither the politician nor the husband had made even the smallest of missteps, which after more than an hour of searching the Internet was the most interesting conclusion al-Rashid had come to. The man was lily-white. Too pure, too clean. It was as if he was either exceedingly careful, or extraordinarily lucky. No politician was that without sin.

He scanned the archives of France Diplomatie, which was a site hosted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Le Monde Diplomatique, which was a left-wing monthly magazine, and even some of the English, ex-pat-oriented news outlets such as Paris Voice, Radio France Inernationale, Expatica.com-France, and the International Herald Tribune.

Until the Metropole Paris—which was a weekly that included pictures, cartoons, and the occasional bit of gossip. In a brief photo spread Chatelet was dedicating some Paris street project, and beside him was a tall, slender woman, beautiful, with luxurious hair, high delicate cheekbones, and full sensuous lips. She was identified merely as Mme. Laurent, an engineer in the city planning department.

They were holding a golden shovel, their hands touching, and Chatelet was smiling as if he were the cat who’d got the cream.

Al-Rashid brought up more photo spreads in the Metropole from 2009 until just a couple of months ago showing the two of them together dedicating various city public works projects. In one photo their hips were actually touching, and in still another she was standing slightly behind him to his left, an arrondissement manager just forward, and Chatelet was actually touching her ass. In this photo she was identified as Mme. Adeline Laurent, City Works Special Projects Manager.

Five minutes later, he was inside the public area of the City Public Works Department, where he verified that a woman of that name did indeed work there, with an office in the Hotel de Ville, which was city hall. It was a prestigious location for the office of a simple city engineer, but then French politicians tended to keep their mistresses close at hand.

He ran into some difficulty when he went looking for her address in the city directory. Seven women by the same name were listed, but within five minutes he’d narrowed his choice to only one of them who had a place in the northwest corner of the Eighth Arrondissement a few blocks above the Boulevard Haussmann and across from the Parc Monceau, where even very small apartments listed for more than one million euros.

Al-Rashid backed out of the program, erasing his steps, and left the café walking all the way up to the Boulevard St. Germain where he was able to find a cab to take him over to the Gare d’Austerlitz, and from there another cab to within a block of the woman’s apartment.

The streets were starting to come alive with service traffic — street cleaners, delivery vans and trucks, garbage collectors, road maintenance crews making minor repairs overnight before rush hour began.

A bakery was just opening when al-Rashid walked through the park and stopped a moment to light a cigarette. The street was fashionable without being overly ostentatious as many Paris addresses could be, the building was four stories and well maintained with her apartment on the ground floor at the rear, in all likelihood opening on a rear courtyard garden.

Crossing the street he passed the front entrance, which was flanked by tall windows made up of small square panes of lightly colored glass, and inside he spotted the night doorman seated behind a small desk just within the entry hall. The image was distorted, but he was certain the man was asleep. The doormen in places such as these were mostly for decoration and not for security.

Crossing the street again he bought the early edition of Figaro from a newsstand that had just opened and walked down to the bakery where he ordered a café au lait and a warm croissant with a small container of raspberry confit. He sat by a window from which he had an oblique view of Mme. Laurent’s apartment.

Chatelet was a member of the Voltaire Society, which made it likely that he either had the key to translate the diary or he knew the person or persons who did. Mme. Laurent was in turn the key to the mayor.

Which was the next problem. Vice mayors of large cities, and Paris was no exception, usually did not travel alone. They were almost always accompanied by aides and very often bodyguards. In Chatelet’s case al-Rashid had spotted at least one bodyguard in nearly every photo taken of him at a public gathering.

The two exceptions, of course, would be when he arrived home, or when he showed up at the apartment of his mistress — especially if Mme. Laurent told him that it was important he come to her immediately. That they had a problem needing his attention.

Madame Chatelet herself would be the problem.

FORTY

Parking the blue Tahoe on Thirty-eighth Street a couple of blocks north of the sprawling Georgetown University grounds, Dorestos, dressed in a jacket, jeans, and a dark green dress shirt walked down to T Street and headed east. The neighborhood here was almost completely residential. It was a little after 11:30 P.M., and the bars down on M Street were still busy, though here only the occasional car passed.

He hesitated at the corner of Thirty-seventh, which was also NW Wisconsin Avenue, All Saint’s Hospital a block and a half away on a narrow side street that connected with Whitehaven Parkway NW. Traffic was heavier here, and he had to wait for the light before he could cross.

Colonel León had been taken to the hospital by ambulance with no siren or escort, which could have meant she was dead and they were merely transporting her body, or she was wounded but still alive and there’d been no siren because they wanted to bring no attention to themselves.

“The thing is you have to make certain,” Msgr. Franelli had told him.

“There is the chance that they may be expecting me. The risks would be great.”

“Yes, I know this. But the woman is very important to Mr. McGarvey.”

“Then I do not understand. If she is so important to his search, then why don’t we allow her to help — if she is still alive? Won’t he find the diary much sooner?”

“Perhaps, but we do not want the Cuban intelligence apparatus to become involved. Just as we do not want the CNI butting their noses into Church business. The only outsider’s help we need or want is McGarvey’s.”

“What if I am captured?”

“See that you’re not. But at all costs you must find out if Colonel León is dead, and if she still lives you must kill her.”

“I don’t see how—”

“You are our finest soldier, my son, you will seek God’s help and He will show you the way.”

God’s help, Dorestos allowed himself a bitter thought. God had never once been mentioned during his actual training exercises. Prayers were said before a mission for its success, and afterward for the souls of those who had lost their lives, but never during a battle.

There are old warriors and there are bold warriors. The Order wishes for boldness. Go with God, but remember what you have learned.

The hospital fronted on Thirty-fifth Place, but Thirty-sixth Street dead-ended at an expanse of trees that grew to within a few yards of the rear iron fence that was twelve feet tall, the tops of each rung ending in spikes. Climbing over it would not be impossible, though almost certainly security cameras would be trained on the entire perimeter.

Earlier in the evening, after making sure where the ambulance had taken the woman, he’d raced back out to the jet parked at Reagan National where he’d talked to the monsignor, and afterward studied the layout of the hospital on one of his databases. The fact of its existence wasn’t a secret, only the fact that its patients were exclusively operators from the U.S. intelligence community was.

He’d come up with a plan to create a diversion that would hopefully last long enough for him to get inside, find the woman, make certain that she was dead, and get out. Only he knew that it couldn’t work if it included his escape with his own life intact.

He packed a small overnight bag with a couple of shirts, and several magazines of ammunition for his pistol, and drove back to Washington where he checked in at the Georgetown Suites under his work name of Albert Thomas.

A half hour ago, he’d written a note on hotel stationery to Kirk McGarvey apologizing for the incident in the woods behind the Renckes’ house, but that the death of Colonel León was necessary. He sealed it in a hotel envelope on which he wrote the All Saints address, and taking only his handgun and spare magazines, leaving the overnight bag behind, slipped out of the hotel, and found a taxi in a queue on M Street waiting for customers from the bars.

“I would like you to deliver this letter for me,” he told the driver who was skeptical.

“Get in, I’ll take you wherever you want to go, and you can deliver it in person.”

“That isn’t possible,” Dorestos said. He held out a hundred-dollar bill. “It’s not far from here. Should only take you a few minutes.”

“Whatever you say, pal,” the driver said. He took the money and the envelope.

“One other thing, though. I don’t want you to take it up there until midnight.”

“What the hell is this supposed to be, some kind of a gag?”

“Exactly that,” Dorestos said. “But the money is real.”

“I can’t guarantee I won’t be taking a fare somewhere across town. So I’ll either deliver it right now, or you’ll have to take your chances that I’ll be on time.”

Dorestos pulled another hundred-dollar bill from his pocket. “Midnight.”

The driver only hesitated for a moment, before he took the money. “Midnight,” he said.

Dorestos glanced at the driver’s taxi license. “I sincerely hope that I have not wasted my money, Mr. Singh, three-two-eight P-L-sixteen. I believe it’s called double-dipping.”

Lights illuminated the rear parking lot and emergency entrance, and standing in the darkness behind a tree a few yards from the fence Dorestos spotted three cameras — one at each corner covering the fence line and one in the middle trained on the entrance. Even if someone did make it over or through the fence they would be spotted in the parking lot and tracked to the door.

If someone were watching the monitors.

The tree limbs had been cleared so that the lowest one was at least ten or fifteen feet overhead, good enough to stop someone from climbing up unless they’d brought a ladder, or a grappling hook and line. But something like that would almost certainly attract attention.

Keeping the trunk between him and the fence line, Dorestos stepped back ten yards and sprinted forward, leaping off the ground at the last moment, his big hands outstretched above his head. He easily caught the lowest branch and hauled himself up into the deep foliage of what he thought was probably an oak tree.

He remained absolutely still for a full thirty seconds, watching for any sign that someone in the hospital had spotted him, and would sound the alarm or come running. But nothing changed. The only noise was from a garbage truck on Whitehaven Parkway just to the north.

It was ten minutes before midnight and Dorestos worked his way up to a stout limb that stretched almost to the fence line, about five feet higher than the tops of the spikes where it had been trimmed back.

He waited another thirty seconds to make certain he hadn’t been detected and then eased into a position from where he could see the east quarter of the front gate where the taxi driver would show up to deliver the letter. If he didn’t, Dorestos hoped that the man was at peace with his god.

Early in his small-arms training, he was on the two-hundred-inch pistol range, firing a variety of semiautos, among them the SIG Sauer, a variety of Glocks, and a few other more exotic weapons of Russian and Chinese manufacture. The stress was on learning what weapons were currently in use in the field, so that if chance found him needing to scavenge a pistol he would understand not only how to shoot it, but how to fieldstrip it.

The man at the position next to his right was a veteran of a number of SMOM missions. Out of the corner of his eye Dorestos noticed that the man had turned left, carelessly holding his weapon in such a way that if it were to fire it could injure someone.

“Watch it,” Dorestos said.

The priest grinned. “What’s your problem? It’s on safe.” He raised the pistol.

Dorestos reached over with lightning speed and grabbed the pistol, yanking it up and to the right. It discharged into the air.

“Bastard,” the priest said, and he came at Dorestos, who stepped to the side and laid both pistols on the stand.

He didn’t remember what he said, or exactly what he did next, but in an instant the range supervisor and a couple of instructors were running his way, the priest lying on the ground, his chest caved in.

The entire incident had been recorded on range surveillance video, and Dorestos had not been reprimanded though he’d heard later that the brief film clip was being used as a training exercise. What not to do in a weapons-hot situation in the presence of an unknown enemy.

Headlights flashed on the street at the front of the hospital, and moments later the cab pulled into the driveway. The cabbie beeped the horn once.

Dorestos counted off a full twenty seconds. By now all eyes inside the hospital would be on the front gate.

He scrambled to the end of the limb and leaped out over the spikes and dropped to the ground on all fours, almost like a cat landing.

He caught a fleeting glimpse of what he thought might be the figure of someone in a fourth-floor window, but then he was across the parking area and through the door to the rear reception area and emergency room, deserted at the moment.

FORTY-ONE

McGarvey watched from the front entryway as Kutschinski, his pistol out of sight at his back, walked down to the front gate.

“This your guy?” the CIA babysitter had asked.

“Not unless he’s hiding in the backseat, but watch yourself. I’ll back you up.”

The driver got out of his cab and handed something through the gate. It looked like an envelope.

The phone on the security console in the stair hall rang as McGarvey, his pistol in plain sight, stepped outside and walked down to the gate.

The driver stepped back a pace. “Shit,” he said. He turned to get back into his cab.

“Hold up,” McGarvey said.

The cabbie looked over his shoulder, his eyes wide. “I don’t want any trouble here. I’m just delivering a letter.”

“It’s addressed to you,” Kutschinski said.

McGarvey took the envelope. “Who gave this to you?”

“A big guy, didn’t give me his name. Said I was supposed to bring it here at midnight.”

“Where was this?”

“M Street, about a half hour ago.”

“How’d he sound?”

“Like a fag or a teenage girl,” the cabbie said without hesitation.

It was a diversion. “Get the hell out of here,” McGarvey told the cabbie, and he and Kutschinski raced back up the drive.

“Is it him?”

Ellerin was on the phone when they burst in. “Your girl called, said she saw someone come over the fence. I’m trying to get Pat but he’s not answering.”

“You didn’t see anything on the monitors?”

“I was watching the front gate.”

“Son of a bitch,” Kutschinski said, and he headed for the stairs in a dead run.

“I’ll clear the back,” McGarvey said. “But watch yourself, this guy will know we’re on the way up and he’s damned good. I’ve never seen anyone faster.”

Kutschinski didn’t reply as he took the stairs two at a time.

McGarvey hustled down the corridor where he held up at the door into the emergency room and cocked an ear to listen for a sound. Anything. But except for some piece of machinery running somewhere in the distance, the hospital was silent. Even Kutschinski bounding up the stairs was so light on his feet that he made no noise.

Moving with care, McGarvey crossed to the rear stairs where he spotted two wet footprints on the tile floor just inside the door from the parking area. The priest had walked through the woods in the back and had somehow gotten over the fence when all eyes inside the hospital had been watching the front gate. Everyone except for María.

He started up the stairs, stopping at the first floor long enough to check the corridor, which was dimly lit in red from the exit signs front and back.

He did the same on the second floor, with the same results, then moved to the third just as Nurse Randall came out of one of the rooms.

She stopped short, startled when he came through the door. She started to speak but he motioned for her to keep quiet, and when she spotted the pistol in his hand she looked over her shoulder into the room.

“We have an intruder, but I don’t think he’ll come after you or these four guys,” McGarvey, keeping his voice low, warned her. “He’s after the woman, but keep out of sight.”

She nodded and went back into the room and closed the door.

McGarvey headed up to the fourth floor, the corridor in near total darkness. Both exit lights had been turned off, and the only illumination came from what was probably a television set halfway down the hall in María’s room.

He eased the door open. “Morris,” he called softly.

The corridor remained silent.

He opened the door and moving fast, rolled left around the corner into the reception room. Pat Morris, a thin trickle of blood from a hole in his forehead, lay sprawled back on the couch.

McGarvey glanced over his shoulder but nothing moved in the corridor.

Morris’s pistol lay next to the Heckler & Koch on the coffee table, the magazines missing from both weapons.

Bambridge would not have sent amateurs out here, yet it looked as if Morris had been caught totally unawares. Yet he must have heard someone coming through the door from the stairs, he must have known that his life was in danger.

McGarvey stared at the weapons for a long moment, before he holstered his pistol. He fieldstripped the pistol, tossing all the parts behind the couch. Then he removed the receiver spring from the MP7, pocketed it, and laid the weapon back on the table.

He turned and dodged his way to María’s open door. He took a quick peek inside before he pulled back. The bed was empty. The bathroom door was open but no one was waiting there.

With his pistol in both hands up at chest height he rolled into the room, scanning left to right, but except for the picture on the television screen nothing moved. Nor was there any sign of violence.

María had evidently seen someone coming over the fence, had phoned Ellerin downstairs, and had presumably warned Morris that they had incoming. But she was gone and Morris was dead.

McGarvey took ninety seconds to clear each of the other six rooms on the floor before he went to the front stairwell door and opened it a crack. If the priest had gone down to the third floor searching for María he would have run into Kutschinski. No one had heard gunshots, which meant that everyone including the priest was using silenced weapons.

But the man had to have good intelligence to know what this place was, that María was a patient, and had the balls to come here to what amounted to a CIA stronghold. He either had a death wish or he was even better than McGarvey thought he was, and arrogant enough to know it.

Silently closing the door McGarvey used the house phone on the wall a few feet down the corridor to call Ellerin. But the phone rang four times, before he hung up.

The priest was like a shadow or a ghost, flitting over the fence, then up here to kill Morris and then down to the ground floor to take out Ellerin. The son of a bitch was pulling the odds down to his favor by eliminating the opposition one-by-one. But if he’d gotten to Ellerin, it meant he must have passed right through Kutschinski.

At the stairwell door again, McGarvey listened for several seconds before he slipped through and started down, checking each course over the railing before he proceeded.

Just below the third floor landing he spotted Kutschinski, obviously dead, crumpled in a heap, a great deal of blood pooling under his body, and spreading several steps down. His pistol was still in his right hand.

He’d come charging blindly up the stairs and the priest had been waiting in ambush for him.

McGarvey eased open the third-floor door. Nurse Randall lay on her side outside one of the rooms. She too had been armed. A 9 mm standard U.S. military issue Beretta pistol lay on the floor a couple of feet from her outstretched right hand.

What had happened here was already done with.

The four CIA officers were dead, shot while they lay in their beds, two of them with IV drips and monitor wires still attached to their bodies. Those two at least had probably been unconscious when the priest had assassinated them.

María was not in any of the rooms. Nor was there any obvious signs that she’d been here.

For a long moment McGarvey stood rooted to a spot just outside one of the rooms in which a helpless man had been murdered and he was nearly overwhelmed with an intense anger. For money? For gold, silver, for treasure? Some act like this could not be sanctioned by the Catholic Church. Nothing like this had happened, so far as he understood history, for several centuries. It was as if he were caught in the middle of some surreal dream that had begun with María León’s insane plot to kidnap Louise to force Otto to come to Cuba.

For some reason he focused on the white blanket that covered the dead officer, and he spotted what were flecks of something white, something granular. It made no sense at first, until a drop of blood fell from above and he looked up as a section of ceiling tile, a small splotch of fresh blood along the seam, suddenly collapsed and María León, the chest of her hospital gown red, came crashing down on top of the dead man.

FORTY-TWO

Dorestos was beside himself with rage. He had failed after all. He’d heard at least one other person scuttling around on the second floor like a mouse behind the wallboard, and yet he’d not been able to find out who it was, though he suspected it was one of the nurses.

He went to the main security console with its six monitors and pressed the button to open the gate when the woman he’d come to assassinate fell through the ceiling onto the body of one of the CIA officers. A second later McGarvey came into the frame, and helped her to sit on the edge of the bed. The front of her hospital gown was soaked with blood, but she was still awake.

McGarvey got a towel from the bathroom and placed it over the wound in her chest.

Dorestos flipped a switch for the sound.

“This’ll have to do until I can get the doctor back here.”

María was looking up at McGarvey. “If you had let me keep my gun I might have had the chance to end it.”

“You did the right thing. But how the hell did you get up into the ceiling?”

“It was Charlie’s idea,” she said, glancing at the officer’s body. “He even helped me climb up. He’d just got the tile back in place and had lain down when the bastard came to the room and shot him. There wasn’t a thing I could do about it.”

“If you had tried you’d be dead by now.”

María looked up at the camera. “Is he gone?”

“I don’t know, but for now you’re staying put.”

“Well, has someone at least called for help?”

“They’re on their way,” McGarvey said, and he leaned over to whisper something in the woman’s ear.

Dorestos cranked up the volume, but he couldn’t make out the words.

McGarvey straightened up. “He might still be in the building somewhere. I’m going to try to find him.”

“Are you nuts?”

“No. I’m pissed.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to start on the fourth floor again and work my way back down.”

Dorestos switched the view on the in-house monitor to the third-floor corridor as McGarvey walked past the nurse’s body and headed directly for the rear stairs, as he unscrewed the suppressor from a Walther PPK and pocketed it. He was on the hunt and he didn’t care how much noise he made.

The decision came down to flight or fight. It was possible that McGarvey would get the drop on him, and cut off any chance of escape. He didn’t think that after Casey Key the man would listen to reason, and his orders not to kill the former DCI were very specific.

But he had been ordered to eliminate the woman, along with anyone else who might get in the way. Job one. His immortal soul wasn’t at stake, but in the way the monsignor had put it, damnation for failure was possible.

He studied the console for a moment, and then with a few keystrokes erased the current video memory, and shut the recording system down. He stepped back, put a couple of silenced rounds into the main console, then took the batteries out of the keyboard. Turning on his heel he hurried down the hall to the emergency room and the rear stairs, where he stopped a moment to listen in case McGarvey had doubled back for some reason. But there were no sounds, so he started up, silently, taking the stairs three at a time.

Passing the second and third floors, he emerged on the fourth and retrieved the magazines of ammunition for the dead babysitter’s SIG and the MP7 from under the couch, and loaded the submachine gun, pulling the slide back to charge it. But the weapon had been tampered with. The slide would not snap back into place. The spring was missing.

He looked down the corridor, the flickering light from the television still coming from the woman’s room.

McGarvey had been here, and had sabotaged the weapon. Dorestos realized that he had underestimated the former CIA officer.

Laying the weapon aside he also realized that the pistol was gone as well, which left him only with his handgun and two magazines and a partial. And he understood that he might have made a mistake leaving his own MP7 behind; the extra firepower might be needed after all.

He headed down the corridor to the front stairwell, keeping low and close to the wall and moving fast, pausing only long enough to put a round into the television set.

He cracked the door open and stopped again to listen.

Colonel León was badly wounded and still on the third floor. But McGarvey presented several possibilities. He could have been aware that he was being watched. It would explain why he had whispered something to the woman. It could be that he was staying on the ground floor, waiting in ambush, or he had told the woman the truth and was already on his way up here.

Dorestos slipped into the stair hall and gently eased the door closed.

He waited for a full minute, watching the rear stairwell door through the small square window, but when McGarvey didn’t appear, he started down the stairs, taking extreme caution not to make the slightest noise.

He stopped at the third floor door and looked out the window. Nothing moved, and the corridor was mostly in shadows, the only light coming from outside, through the windows in the rooms and the open doors.

“Protect me, Virgin Mary,” he mumbled. He slipped out of the stairwell and raced to the room where McGarvey had left the woman, but the door was closed and wouldn’t budge even though the handle moved when he tried it.

The woman had barricaded herself inside, knowing that he was coming for her. It was a trap but he still had time because he had a feeling that McGarvey had been lying when he’d told the woman that help was on the way.

The man had an ego, he would want to do this himself. It’s why he hadn’t called for help at the Renckes’ house.

Dorestos put his shoulder to the door and it gave a couple of inches.

“Stand down,” McGarvey said from the end of the corridor.

Dorestos looked up, keeping only his profile as a target. “I mean you no harm, signore,” he said.

“We’re past that. You killed some good people here. Innocent people.”

“They were America’s soldiers, and it is war.”

“Between us and the Vatican?”

Dorestos was distressed. All of this misunderstanding was his fault, and he didn’t know how he was going to face the monsignor. “No, of course not. We are not your enemy. Only Colonel León is.”

“Why did you kill the nurse?”

“It was a mistake,” Dorestos said. As was staying here any longer.

He fired two shots down the corridor, above where he thought McGarvey was standing in the darkness, and then sprinted toward the other end of the corridor, firing continuously over his shoulder.

McGarvey got off three shots, one of them plucking at his sleeve, but then he was through the door and racing downstairs, sick at heart at the disaster he’d created here, and almost believing that it might be best if he lost his life this night. Jesus would accept him, sins and all. He could feel the Lord’s love washing over him. But the Order wouldn’t be so forgiving.

On the ground floor he darted past the security console, out the front door and down the three steps to the driveway, moving faster now than he’d ever moved in his life.

He reached the open gate and flitted around the corner as McGarvey fired two shots, both of them hitting the tall brick wall.

In the next block he crossed over a narrow canal and threw the pistol away. The Tahoe he intended to leave behind, along with his bag at the hotel.

He used his cell phone to call his aircrew. “We leave within the hour. File a flight plan for San Juan. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” the pilot said.

Three blocks later on R Street he found a VW Jetta that had been left unlocked. He forced the ignition switch and drove off, wondering what would happen to him next. He’d never failed before, so he could only guess at the consequences.

But if he were given another chance he would move heaven and earth to see that McGarvey succeeded, and that the Cubans were kept out of his way.

FORTY-THREE

Mme. Laurent was not as tall as she appeared in the photographs al-Rashid had seen, but she was every bit as elegant as he pictured she would be. She came out of her apartment building at ten minutes before eight, saying something to the old doorman who smiled and saluted her. She’d made his day. There wasn’t a straight Frenchman who didn’t appreciate the attention of a pretty woman.

She’d gotten a half block down the street when al-Rashid got up and followed her.

Dressed in a lightweight trench coat, belted at the waist, she wore a brightly patterned Hermes head scarf, and carried a Louis Vuitton bag over her shoulder.

She walked slowly, her hips swaying. Traffic had picked up and she was a woman who knew the attention she was creating, and she didn’t want to rush it. Al-Rashid almost felt sorry for monsieur the vice mayor, who undoubtedly gave up a great deal every day to have her as his mistress. And this day the man would have to give up even more.

For a block or so al-Rashid had no idea where she was headed, unless it was to find a taxi on the much busier Boulevard Malesherbes, but the doorman would have gladly called for one. On the other hand if she was to use the Metro, a station was in the park practically across the street from her apartment.

Before he approached her he wanted to make certain that she wasn’t on her way to some rendezvous — either with Chatelet, or perhaps with someone else. Another secret lover?

She crossed the very busy Boulevard de Courcelles and made directly for the Metro entrance near the end of the Avenue de Villiers, which he realized would take her on a more direct route to her office.

He caught up with her just before she was about to descend in to the station. “Mademoiselle Laurent, si’l vous plait?”

The woman stopped and turned, curiosity, but no alarm on her oval face. Her chin was agreeably narrow, her cheekbones delicate and high, and her dark eyes very large. Her looks, figure, and bearing were movie-star quality. “Oui?”

“Permit me. I am Pierre Gaulette. You do not know my name, but I have some information for you that may be distressing.”

She smiled. “You are perhaps a paparazzo with information to sell to me about my employer?” She looked around. “Where is your cameraman?”

“Actually I’m a private detective, who was hired not by your boss Monsieur Chatelet, but by Madame Chatelet.”

Her lips tightened. “I am sorry, but I have no idea what you are talking about,” she said disdainfully, and she turned to go.

“We have information about an organization that the mayor may somehow be involved with.”

She turned back.

“It may be a subversive organization that has no friends in the Élysée Palace. The fallout could spread.”

“What has this to do with me, or with Madame Chatelet?”

“You are the vice mayor’s mistress. Madame Chatelet knows this, of course, and she has asked me to approach you as a friend not as an enemy. I am here to help.”

“You’re making no sense,” Mme. Laurent said, and again she turned to go.

“This has to do with a great deal of money controlled by a secret society from which an extremely important document was stolen recently. The vice mayor can save himself. But naturally it would be impossible for me to approach him personally, and his wife wants to avoid a scandal and to keep her husband out of prison.”

Mme. Laurent had gone two steps down, but she looked up, morning commuters brushing past her. She didn’t look as certain as she had at first. “What document?”

Al-Rashid shook his head. “I’ve already said too much in public. We need to go somewhere so that we can talk. I’ll tell you everything I know, including who stole the document and its current location.”

Something else came into the woman’s eyes but just for a moment, and then she nodded. “My apartment isn’t far.”

“We may have to call the vice mayor.”

“You may be right, Monsieur—?”

“Gaulette.”

“From which agency?”

“That will have to wait, for the moment,” al-Rashid said, stepping aside for her.

When she came up he took her arm and they headed across the avenue, workday morning traffic now in full swing. She said nothing, nor did he wish to prompt her, though they could have discussed in details the plans for building a nuclear weapon and no one on the street would have paid them the slightest attention. And he had a feeling that she understood this as well as he did. Which was somewhat bothersome. Yet in his mind only another professional would not try to at least get a hint about what was happening.

The doorman’s name was Henri, and face-to-face he didn’t look anywhere near as old as al-Rashid had guessed from a distance. He accepted a kiss on the cheek from Mme. Laurent, but didn’t ask why she’d returned, or who the man with her might be.

Al-Rashid got the feeling that the doorman’s eyes were on his back as he and Mme. Laurent went down the corridor to the rear apartment. But when he turned around as she was unlocking her door, the man was looking at something on the street.

Her garden apartment was small, but exquisitely furnished with what to al-Rashid’s eye looked like genuine antiques mostly from the Louis XIV period. At least one of the paintings on the wall was a Renoir and another in the corridor to the left was a Picasso — the only jarring note in the place other than an ultramodern and very expensive Bang & Olufsen flat-screen television and sophisticated sound system at one end of the living room. The garden courtyard was alive with flowers and small trees that looked almost like Bonsai. Herbs grew in a long planter box outside the kitchen door.

Mme. Laurent laid her purse and coat on the end of a couch and sat down. She took a cigarette from a silver box, and lit it with a matching lighter.

“So, Monsieur Gaulette, please tell me what this is all about. And forget the fiction that Madame Chatelet has my best interest in mind.”

“I think we need to telephone the vice mayor, have him come here. Tell him that it’s an emergency with his wife.”

“In that case the nursing home would be the one to call. It is Alzheimer’s.”

“I didn’t know,” al-Rashid said. It was sloppy on his part. “Then we will invent another fiction to get him here.”

“Perhaps I will tell him the truth. That a private detective has shown up to ask questions about a secret society of millionaires who have lost a document. And he has resorted to kidnapping his mistress.”

Al-Rashid went to the French doors and looked out at the garden. “Perhaps you should.” Even in the winter this would be a pleasant room. A porcelain fireplace in the corner opposite the television would be nice, especially at the holidays. He’d never had such a safe haven, and he’d never missed what he’d never had until now.

“He’s bound to ask if I am in any danger.”

“You are not.”

“But he’ll want to know about the document. You’ve said that you know where it is. He’ll definitely want me to tell him that part. He’s a very bright man, a careful man who does not make decisions quickly. Sometimes I find that trait in him charming, but at other times it’s irritating. Do you know what I mean, Monsieur—?”

Al-Rashid came to the realization that what had bothered him about her out on the street was a professionalism. She was no mere mistress, or city engineer. And when he turned he wasn’t surprised that she held a subcompact Glock 29 pistol in the 10 mm version pointed at him.

FORTY-FOUR

At All Saints, Dr. Franklin had been the first to show up, and after he’d made a quick examination of the four CIA officers dead in their beds on the third floor, and of Nurse Randall, Morris, Ellerin, and Kutschinski, he’d found the other two nurses frightened but unharmed and they’d taken María into the operating room.

Bill Callahan had arrived a couple of minutes before the cleanup and removal crew from the Company along with four babysitters from the Office of Security. All of it was low-key enough that none of the neighbors had any inkling that something unusual had happened while they’d slept.

The front gate had been closed and technicians had set up a temporary terminal to monitor and control the hospital’s security measures.

Deep in thought McGarvey stood at the front door looking out the windows at the street that was quiet for now.

Callahan had been on the phone for the past fifteen minutes mobilizing a special task force that would search for the priest. They were keeping the local cops out of it because some of them would almost certainly get killed if they came up against him.

“What’re the chances this guy will try to come after her again?” Callahan asked, hanging up his cell phone. “Tonight maybe?”

“I wouldn’t put it past him,” McGarvey said. He turned around. “That’s twice the son of a bitch has gotten past me. There won’t be a third time.”

“You think that he’s from the Vatican?” Callahan asked skeptically. He was a devout Catholic.

“Sacred Military Order of Malta.”

“That’s a myth.”

“Tell it to Nurse Randall, who was just trying to help save lives,” McGarvey said bitterly.

“If it’s true he’ll be able to go into any Catholic church or monastery anywhere in the world and be home free. We won’t be able to touch him.”

“Convenient, isn’t it? But it doesn’t apply to me.”

Callahan gave him an odd look. “No, I suppose it wouldn’t,” he said. “Do you believe in anything?”

The question hurt, but McGarvey understood it. “Yes,” he shot back. “Saving lives is more important to me than the sanctity of a church. And if there is a God I think He’d understand.”

“I’m in the same business, Mac. Always have been. But if this guy is as good as you say he is, he must have been trained somewhere.”

“The Hospitallers.”

“Leaving them aside for a moment, how about the military? You said he spoke with an Italian accent. Have you asked the Italian army for help? The Ninth Parachute Assault Regiment, for one. They’re like the British SAS. Could be this guy trained with them at one time.”

McGarvey had turned his cell phone back on a few minutes ago. He’d missed a call from Otto. He hit the callback number, and Otto answered on the first ring.

“Are you okay?”

“My ego is a little bruised, but he did a lot of damage here,” McGarvey said. “And this entire business is making less sense every step I take.” He briefly brought Otto up to speed.

“Why would he kill the four guys in their beds? At least one of them was critical. And what about the nurse? There was no reason for it, unless the guy is nuts.”

“Or dedicated,” McGarvey mumbled. He was missing something. They all were. “Bill Callahan is here, he wants to know if we could run a check with the Italian special forces, see if someone like this guy ever trained in the Ninth Parachute.”

“Checked them, along with the Fourth Alpine Parachutists, the 185th Recon Target Regiment, and their Navy and Air Force units, plus the Carabinieri special units and the State Police NOCS, their Central Security people. Some fairly close matches for size, but no one with that voice.”

“His voice wasn’t in any database.”

“You’d be surprised, kemo sabe, but I have a friend in Rome who owed me a favor. He’s got connections, and he won’t make anything of my request, even though he knows about the SMOM.”

“Why?”

“Official Rome is scared shitless of them. So goes the Vatican, so goes Italy. And the Malta order provides the muscle. All of it under the table.”

“Anything else?” McGarvey asked. He glanced over at Callahan, who had stepped aside and was talking on his cell phone.

“Could be he’s not coming back any time soon. I tracked a private jet from Sarasota to Reagan yesterday. Executive Charters International from London. No passenger manifest, but it filed a flight plan for San Juan, Puerto Rico, direct and took off sixty-five minutes ago, again with no passenger manifest other than the flight crew.”

“Did they list their names and nationalities?”

“Yes, all Brits. But the thing is the aircraft disappeared from radar fifteen minutes ago. No Mayday, no transponder codes.” The three emergency codes that a pilot could send from his aircraft included 7500, which meant the plane had been hijacked; 7600, which meant they’d lost communications abilities; and 7700, which meant an emergency — they were going down.

“No one’s looking for them.”

“They were outside U.S. airspace when they decided for whatever reason to change their flight plan. Happens all the time.”

Callahan was excited.

“He’s gone,” Otto said.

“I’m not so sure,” McGarvey said. “How’s Louise?”

“Believe it or not she wants to know how Colonel León is doing.”

“She’s in the operating room. Franklin came in.”

“I’ll let her know. In the meantime?”

“See what’s going on with the CNI, especially in Seville.”

“The West Indian Archives?”

“I don’t think that Dr. Vergilio told us the truth the last time. Could be we’ll have to pay her another visit.”

Otto chuckled. “Now why didn’t I think of that?” he asked. “I’m on it.”

McGarvey hung up.

“We found your blue Tahoe abandoned three blocks from here,” Callahan said. “A forensics team is on the way.”

“They won’t find anything. But in the meantime see if anyone’s reported a stolen car, or if any cabdriver has turned up missing this morning. I’ll be back in five.”

McGarvey walked to the emergency room and out the back way across the parking lot to the rear fence, which was tall and topped with sharp iron spikes at eight- or ten-inch intervals. Impossible to scale or leap over in the short time that Ellerin had been distracted from watching the rear monitors.

The recorders from all the surveillance cameras had been erased, though he suspected that given time Otto might be able to retrieve some of them. But this was the way the priest had come. A tall oak tree, its lower limbs pruned to within at least ten feet of the fence, was the nearest object. No ladders, no rope and grappling hook had been left behind. The priest had left through the front gate, and he certainly would not have run around back to retrieve any of that equipment.

He’d climbed the tree, no mean feat in itself, had crawled to the end of one of the branches, and when he’d seen the lights of the cab show up in front had leaped across ten feet of air, clearing the top spikes and landing within the compound.

The priest was impressive. McGarvey could think of no other term for the man’s athletic prowess, or for his stick-to-it attitude.

He would come back for María. Nothing could keep him away. Unless he wasn’t given the chance.

FORTY-FIVE

Al-Rashid sat down on a wingback chair, a heavy coffee table between him and the woman. He was seething that he had made such an elementary mistake about the vice mayor’s wife, but there’d been nothing in the media about her illness. Yet he should have picked up on the fact that nothing about her had appeared in the media over the past couple of years.

None of that showed on his face. He motioned to the cigarette box. “May I?”

“Yes,” Mme. Laurent said, her aim never wavering.

Al-Rashid got a cigarette, lit it, then sat back and crossed his legs. “It seems as if you and I are at an impasse now. You’re not about to shoot me, at least not yet, and I’m not about to leave until your lover shows up.”

“I will shoot you, though not at the moment,” she said. She was collected. Nothing was apparent on her features except for a slight interest, and a hint of amusement. “But tell me who you really are, and what your interest is in whatever society you think Robert is involved with.”

“It’s called the Voltaire Society and from what I’ve been able to learn it’s been in existence for a century and a half or more, though I’m not really sure what its purpose is.”

“Who are you?”

“I’ve been hired to find out about it.”

“Why?”

“My employer did not share that with me.”

“You’re lying, of course.”

Al-Rashid shrugged. “We all do from time to time. But now that I’m here it won’t do any harm to call the vice mayor. I won’t hurt him, I’m not armed, and in any case you have the advantage.”

“What makes you think that Robert is involved with the Society?”

“I spoke to a man last night who gave me his name. Under the circumstances I had placed him under he was in no position to lie to me.”

“I don’t believe you, and if you don’t start making sense I will shoot you as an intruder. And believe me, Monsieur Gaulette, or whatever your actual name is, I am a very good marksman.”

“I’m sure you are. He was a night watchman at a small office on the Rue Gaillon. I had been led to believe that it was the headquarters of the Society, and I went there to meet with Monsieur Petain, who I thought was a Voltaire. But he wasn’t there, and the office was a sham.”

“You killed him?”

“There was a scuffle, it was an accident. Believe me I don’t mean any harm. I just want some answers that I think the vice mayor has. And also believe me I wouldn’t dream of injuring him — I’d be a hunted man in all of France and I value my life more than that.”

“I won’t call him here.”

“Because you love him?”

Mme. Laurent inclined her head slightly.

“Then I have wasted my time this morning. I’ll have to find another way.” He started to rise, but she motioned for him to sit down.

“I will not ask him to walk into a trap, but perhaps I can exchange information if you agree to leave. I know about the Society. I’ve heard things. But believe me I will not hesitate to shoot.”

“You’ve already said that. But if you want a deal, then we can at least try. Tell me what you know about the group. For instance, who else is involved besides the vice mayor and Monsieur Petain, that man I was to meet?”

“First you tell me how you came to hear about it, and where you got the name Petain.”

“From a man who works in the Bernar Kantonal Bank,” al-Rashid said, and he watched for a reaction. “Do you know this name?”

Mme. Laurent’s lips pursed only slightly. “I’m not sure. But the point is how did you come to this particular man in this particular bank?”

“That I can’t say. Except that he was helpful. He led me to Petain and to the Paris office, and then to you through the vice mayor.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It was obvious at least to me that something was going on between you.”

She shook her head.

“From news photographs. You were practically grafted on to his hip in some of them. But I have only two questions for Monsieur Chatelet. What has been the purpose of the Voltaire Society?”

“To do good.”

Al-Rashid laughed, though it wasn’t the answer he’d expected. “Spare me. From what I understand a fair amount of money may be at stake if it involves a Swiss bank such as the Bernar Kantonal.”

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

“The missing document.”

Mme. Laurent said nothing.

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

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

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

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

“The plunder?”

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

“You admitted that you knew about the Society.”

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

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

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

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

She held her silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FORTY-SIX

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

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

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

“How is she doing?” McGarvey asked.

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

“How soon can she be moved?”

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

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

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

“Would she?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I want him alive if all possible.”

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

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

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

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

“Sanctuary,” Otto said. “Just a sec.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Unless he fired first.”

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

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

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

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

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

“That was a CNI action, not his.”

“They both have the same goal.”

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

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

“And then what?”

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

“The treasure.”

“There’s more,” McGarvey said.

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

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

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

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

FORTY-SEVEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re insane.”

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

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

“Perhaps. Where is the telephone?”

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

“Who has the key to the cipher?”

“I don’t know.”

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

“No.”

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

“I don’t have one,” she said.

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

“I will not involve him.”

“He’s already involved.”

“No.”

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

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

“I am not a gentle man, mademoiselle.”

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

Al-Rashid pulled out the silenced Glock that he had taken from the guard at the sham Voltaire Society office and pointed it at her head from a distance of less than two feet. “With care,” he said.

“Robert, it is me,” she said. “There has been some trouble at my apartment.”

Whatever Chatelet said caused her grip to tighten on the phone.

“It is the doorman. He’s dead.”

She looked up.

“No, I’m okay, just frightened. I need your help right away.”

Again she listened.

“Now,” she said. “He’s in my apartment. Dead.”

Al-Rashid snatched the phone from her hand and brought it to his ear in time to hear the vice mayor say that he would be there in ten minutes. “No sirens.”

Switching off, he removed the back plate and took out the battery and SIM card, which he pocketed, and tossed the phone aside.

“There is no need for this,” Mme. Laurent said. She pulled the material of the shredded blouse over her bare breasts. “I do not have the key to the cipher nor do I know who has it.”

“Let’s hope that the mayor knows.”

“He’s not a member of the Society. I’ve already told you.”

“Yes, and you’ve also told me that you love him, and you would do anything for him.”

A little glimmer of understanding came into her eyes, but she shook her head. “No matter what you do to me, I cannot give you information I do not have.”

“We’ll see,” al-Rashid said.

He stuffed the pistol in his belt again then fieldstripped Mme. Laurent’s gun and that of the doorman’s and tossed the bullets and parts aside. Next he dragged the doorman’s body into the living room where he turned it over. He unbuckled the man’s belt, undid his trousers, and pulled them off along with his underwear and tossed them aside.

“You’re sick,” Mme. Laurent said.

“From your point of view, I am indeed sick. But such a judgment is relative, wouldn’t you say?”

“The Society means no harm to anyone, only good.”

“You’re a charity, is that it?” al-Rashid asked. He went to the door. “Does the vice mayor have a key?”

“No,” Mme. Laurent said.

He turned in time to see her fumbling with the lock on the French doors to the garden, and he was on her before she could get them open. Pulling her back to the couch he shoved her down, yanked her blouse away, shredding even more of the material so that there was little or nothing left to cover her breasts.

“Does Chatelet have a key?”

“Oui.”

“Very well, then we wait for him to arrive. And the moment I find out what I need I shall leave you in peace. As I said, I do not wish to harm the mayor, and be hunted for the rest of my life. As it turns out I think that he would make a fine president.”

“You bastard.”

“If you try to warn him I will kill both of you. Do you understand this?”

She looked away, but she nodded.

FORTY-EIGHT

In the office at Dahlgren Chapel, Dorestos sat facing Fr. Alvin Norman, who’d explained that he normally celebrated mass in the Thomas Moore Chapel at the Law Center. Only a few students and a couple of faculty members were out in the nave, praying or lighting candles at the Virgin Mother’s statute. Or just sitting.

“I don’t think that I can help you, my son,” the round-faced priest said. He was in a suit and tie, his hair white.

“It’s Father Dorestos, and I have come for sanctuary, perhaps for only this day and a night.”

“I’m just a chaplain.”

“Then may I suggest that you call your superior, because I have something that is extremely important to the Holy Father that cannot wait. Do you understand?”

“Yes, of course,” Fr. Norman said, and he started to get up from behind his desk.

“Telephone him.”

“He is on his morning walk, and unfortunately does not carry a cell phone with him. But it’ll be just a minute, he’s somewhere on the quad.”

“Go with God,” Dorestos said.

The chaplain was momentarily startled but he hurried out, softly closing the door behind him.

Dorestos got up and opened the door a crack in time to see the priest scurrying down the aisle to the front doors. None of the handful of people in the nave looked up. But just as he withdrew the main door opened and a man came in. He was backlit by the sun, and for a moment as he stood on the threshold his features were indistinct. But then the door closed and Dorestos shrank back.

It was Kirk McGarvey. Somehow the man had traced him this far. Dorestos leaned against the wall, trying to work out what should have been a near impossibility.

The woman still lived, and they thought that another attempt would be made on her life. Assuming that much, it meant that McGarvey would have reasoned that Dorestos was close. Someone in or near Georgetown. In a motel under an assumed identity.

Or seeking sanctuary in a church if McGarvey had made the assumption that the Vatican had become involved. The Order.

He phoned the monsignor, and explained his situation.

“Are you certain that it is Mr. McGarvey?” Msgr. Franelli asked. He sounded impatient. It was afternoon in Malta.

“Sí.”

“How did he trace you to the chapel?”

“I’m not sure unless he’s somehow discovered that I work for the Order, and that I’ve come here seeking sanctuary.”

“The Cuban woman is not dead?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Tell me everything,” Msgr. Franelli said.

Dorestos did so, leaving out no detail. “I plan on going back in this evening. They wouldn’t be expecting me to return.”

“No,” Franelli said. “It is far too late for that. All that we can do now is mitigate the damage that you have already done.”

“I am at your eternal service, Monsignor.”

“Yes, you are, Father. Give me just a moment.”

Dorestos sat back and breathed in the scent of the office, of the church. Oiled wood, mixed with the lingering odors of incense from high mass, starched surplices, maybe old books and freshly cleaned carpet runners. Places like these were the only home he’d ever known, and the scents represented order and comfort and safety to him.

Franelli was back. “The Senior Chaplain there is Fr. Carl Unger. He has his doctorate in psychology so he will be a difficult man to fool. He’ll see right through you unless you are careful.”

“What am I to do?”

“He’ll give you sanctuary, but you will have to tell him the truth, or at least enough of it to ask for his blessings and help and God’s forgiveness.”

“Confession?”

“Yes. But in such a way that McGarvey will see and hear you and yet will be confused.”

“I think I understand,” Dorestos said.

But Franelli explained it to him.

“Do you wish to speak with Father Unger?”

“No. I leave that as well as the other to you. Go with God, my son.”

“And you, Monsignor.”

McGarvey was halfway up the aisle when Fr. Norman came in with another man, who was also dressed in civilian clothes. They passed the CIA officer.

Dorestos closed the door, got down on his hands and knees beside the desk, and took a small vial from his pocket and drank its contents — less than an ounce — and instantly the somewhat diluted but still strong combination of Serrano and cayenne peppers constricted his throat.

He bowed his head, closed his eyes, and clasped his hands in front of him.

The door opened, and for a moment nothing was said.

“Leave us, Father,” a man said, and the door was shut.

Dorestos stayed in position for a full minute, but then he finally looked up into the eyes of Fr. Unger, the university’s senior chaplain. “I am in trouble,” he said. “I have come for your help.”

“Yes, I understand,” Fr. Unger said. He was a man of medium height with a sharply receding hairline, thick glasses, and a pleasant manner that made you want to tell him your sins. As a psychologist he was the perfect father confessor.

“Will you hear my confession?” It was hard for Dorestos to speak, his throat was constricted by the peppers.

“Yes, of course. But I am told that you are a priest. Is this a problem of faith?”

“I am a priest, but it is not faith.”

“What then?”

“My order is the Hospitallers. More specifically the Sacred Military Order of Malta and I need Christ’s forgiveness for what I have done.”

Fr. Unger was momentarily taken aback. “I think that I understand. You are not an American?”

“No.”

“Are you a fugitive from law enforcement?”

“Not yet, but I may be. I have killed a man who was an apostate. A true enemy of the Mother Church. I had orders, but it was a mistake nonetheless, and I don’t know what to do. It’s why I came here.” Dorestos bowed his head and closed his eyes. “Please help me, Father. I don’t want to offend my Church and yet I do not want to offend my God.”

“I will hear your confession, my son, and afterward we will decide together what your next step should be,” Fr. Unger said, and he pulled a chair around from behind the desk so he could sit near.

Dorestos looked up in anguish. “This must be outside in the confessionals. Where everyone else opens their souls.”

“It’s not necessary—”

“It is, for me. Please, Father.”

“As you wish,” Fr. Unger said.

“But I will need some help. My legs have gone numb. I think that it is probably psychosomatic. But I cannot walk. I’ll need a wheelchair.”

Fr. Unger looked at him for a beat, but then went into a back room and returned shortly with a wheelchair, which he helped Dorestos into.

Outside in the nave they turned left to a line of three confessional booths along the outer wall.

McGarvey stood two rows back from the front, and he met Dorestos’s eyes, but didn’t move.

“Here will be fine, Father,” Dorestos said, raising his ragged voice.

Fr. Unger bent over. “It’s okay, Father, you do not have to speak so loudly,” he whispered. “I will hear you and so will God.”

FORTY-NINE

“Cry out and I will kill both of you,” al-Rashid said from the short corridor, the silenced SIG Sauer in his hand. From this angle he could see Mme. Laurent sitting on the edge of the couch, and their eyes met. She was frightened, but determined.

“Leave now before it is too late for you,” she said defiantly.

“Not until I get what I came for.”

“Robert is not a member of the Society, I am. And I don’t know who has the cipher key you’re looking for. You’ve wasted your time.”

“I know where the diary is.”

“You’ve already said this. But you have to know that the book is of only historical significance to us. We have made copies.”

“Who has them?”

“I don’t have a copy, and I do not know who does.”

“We’ll see.”

Someone came down the hall from the building entrance and rapped on the door. Al-Rashid took up the same position he had before so that when the door opened he would be behind it.

Mme. Laurent sat forward and al-Rashid pointed the pistol at her and she shook her head.

A key grated in the lock and the door swung open.

“Adie?” the mayor said, and he came into the corridor. He spotted her seated on the couch, her breasts bare, and the body of the half-naked man on the floor. “My God,” he said, and he rushed toward her.

Al-Rashid had half a second to make certain that the mayor’s bodyguard had not come with him, before he shut and locked the door.

Vice Mayor Chatelet pulled up short and looked over his shoulder as al-Rashid came into the living room.

“Call for help and I will shoot you,” al-Rashid said, his tone reasonable.

Chatelet opened his mouth to speak, but then looked again at the man on the floor and at his mistress.

“The man on the floor did not rape the mademoiselle, nor did I. In fact other than a blow to her mouth, the only indignity she has suffered is a torn blouse. Now, be so kind as to sit down next to her.”

Mme. Laurent moved over and Chatelet sat down beside her. “Is this a robbery, or do you mean to embarrass me politically?”

“Neither, actually. I’m here simply for some information, that Mme. Laurent assures me that neither of you have.”

“Then go. I’ll give you twenty-four hours before I report this to the Sûreté.”

“I appreciate the offer, but I still need one piece of information.”

Chatelet turned to his mistress. “Do you know what this man is talking about?”

She nodded. “I’m a member of a secret philanthropic society. We have some historic documents that are in code. He wants to have the key to the code. But I don’t have it, nor do I know who does.”

“I don’t understand.”

Mme. Laurent laid a hand on his. “It’s not important that you do,” she said. She looked up at al-Rashid. “Your contact at the bank in Bern. Is he still alive, or have you murdered him?”

“He is alive.”

“Then return to him. He has the cipher key.”

“Only the diary was in the safety deposit box.”

“There is another box. If you give me a piece of paper and a pen or pencil I shall write the password.”

“No need to write it down, tell me, I’ll remember.”

She recited a mix of eleven numbers and letters that al-Rashid recognized.

“You have at least proved that you are a member of the Society,” he said. The password for the supposed second safety box was only two letters and one number different from the password their contact had supplied them.

“Then leave us in peace, you have what you came for.”

Chatelet was confused, it was written all over his face, but also written in the corners of his eyes and his mouth was a calculation of what damage something like this incident could do to his presidential bid, and perhaps even more important where there might be an advantage.

“Before you leave — and you have my word that I will give you a twenty-four-hour head start — what are we talking about here?” He looked at his mistress, and then back at al-Rashid. “A philanthropic society for which evidently people have lost their lives over, if I am understanding you correctly. Including the unfortunate doorman. That makes no sense.”

“It’s not what you think, Robert,” Mme. Laurent said. “Henri did nothing but try to come to my rescue.”

“Nor does your whore make much sense,” al-Rashid said harshly, and the vice mayor rose half up off his seat.

Al-Rashid pointed the gun at Chatelet. “I am done with the fantasy.”

“I gave you want you wanted,” Mme. Laurent cried.

“You gave me a clever password, which I would have to return to Bern to use. But even if it were a valid number, Interpol would be waiting for me. I want the truth this time.”

“I’m telling the truth.”

“No.”

“I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I’ll give you whatever you want to make this situation disappear,” Chatelet said. “For Christ’s sake, Adie, give the man what he wants.”

“I have.”

“No,” al-Rashid said.

“What is it worth?”

Mme. Laurent lowered her eyes for a moment. “More than you can possibly imagine, my dear Robert.” She looked up. “It is all I have to say.”

Al-Rashid stepped forward and jammed the muzzle of the silencer against the vice mayor’s forehead. “The truth.”

Mme. Laurent said nothing.

“Where is the cipher key?”

“I don’t know.”

“I will kill him,” al-Rashid said. The dynamic was interesting.

Mme. Laurent looked up. “You’ll kill us anyway.”

“You cannot know that for sure.”

“For God’s sake, Adie,” Chatelet said, gripping her hand.

“Robert,” she said softly.

“Please.”

Mme. Laurent looked away. “I don’t know who of us has the key, and that’s the truth. But the original is in Seville. Has been from the first.”

“What’s in Seville?” al-Rashid asked.

“The Archivo General de Indias.”

Al-Rashid knew of this place. It was the repository of original documents from the Spanish Empire’s interests in the Americas and the Philippine Islands. And this was the first thing she’d told him — other than her love for Chatelet — that had the ring of truth to it.

“That is a very large, complicated place, unless you know your way through it.”

“Dr. Vergilio is the curator,” Mme. Laurent said. “Or at least she was during the last trouble several months ago involving a pair of agents from the American CIA.”

She’d piqued al-Rashid’s interest. “What trouble?”

“I’m not sure, but it had to do with the treasure,” she said. She glanced at Chatelet. “I am truly sorry, Robert. None of this has anything to do with you, or with France.”

Chatelet started to say something, but al-Rashid fired one shot, driving the vice mayor’s head back in a spray of blood.

“No!” Mme. Laurent screeched, and she lunged over his body.

Al-Rashid switched aim and fired one shot into the top of her head, and she fell forward, her head bouncing on the coffee table, her legs twitching violently for several seconds before her entire body went slack.

For a full ten seconds al-Rashid remained perfectly still, waiting for the sounds of alarm, but the building was quiet.

He stood up, wiped down the pistol, laid it on the floor in front of the couch, then left through the French doors into the courtyard, and through an old wooden door onto the mews and then to the avenue, where two blocks later he hailed a cab for the Hotel Inter-Continental and had a well-deserved bath and full breakfast.

FIFTY

It was late in the afternoon by the time McGarvey got back to All Saints. The place had been put back together, no battle damage visible anywhere. A team of security technicians had come down from Langley and installed dual motion/infrared detectors around the perimeter of the entire hospital, including the woods at the back. In addition four heavily armed combat training officers and four of their students had come up from the Farm and stood guard.

Callahan was at the security station in the front hall with Tommy Newman. He broke off when McGarvey came down the hallway from the rear entrance. “He checked in yesterday at the Georgetown Suites just off M Street.”

“He wasn’t there?” McGarvey asked. He thought it was probably a dead end. The priest might have checked in, but he would not have gone back there after last night.

“No. The cleaning crew said it appeared as if he’d slept in the bed, but when we interviewed the night staff, they remembered him, high-pitched voice and all, but he’d left around ten and no one saw him come back. I just found out, otherwise I would have called you earlier. What about the churches?”

“No one would admit that anyone had asked for sanctuary, though I had my doubts about the university chapel. The father superior was hearing someone’s confession when I came in, but the guy was in a wheelchair and his voice was all wrong.”

“Could it have been your man?”

“Except for the voice, but he looked me in the eye and nodded. Seemed that he was relieved about something.”

“He confessed his sins. A lot of Catholics feel that a burden has been lifted off their souls.”

“Then they go out and do the same thing the next day.”

Callahan nodded. “So what’s next, Mac? It’s your call.”

McGarvey’s instincts were humming in high pitch. His tradecraft, most of which he’d learned on the run, and his understanding of what motivated just about every son of a bitch he’d ever faced told him that the priest was coming back to kill María. The hell with the odds.

Yet all the facts pointed in the opposite direction. He’d abandoned the Tahoe and the hotel room. He had stolen a car, driven it out to National, and shortly after that the same charter Gulfstream that had brought him up from Sarasota had filed a flight plan for San Juan but then had disappeared somewhere over the Atlantic just outside U.S. airspace.

The guy was gone. Yet McGarvey couldn’t shake the fact that in his gut he knew the priest was not on that plane.

“I’m going home to get something to eat, take a shower, and get some sleep,” he said. He turned back to Newman. “Anything comes up give me a call.”

Newman, who’d been good friends with Kutschinski, nodded and smiled viciously. “Yes, sir. I’ll let you know when we stuff him in a body bag.”

McGarvey stopped himself from saying that he wanted the priest alive. “See you in the morning.”

He gave Callahan a nod and went back outside to his car and drove around front where he was buzzed through the gate. His apartment was less than a mile away just off Dunbarton across from Rock Creek Park. In the morning he would go for a ten-K run along the creek. It seemed like months since he’d stretched himself. He was getting a little rusty, especially after witnessing the priest’s antics on Casey Key and imagining how the bastard had made it over the fence at the hospital.

Sometimes like this he felt old, but then he reminded himself that self-pity was the start of a downward spiral, especially for people in this business. The ones who lost their mental edge were their own worst enemies.

As soon as he was away he phoned Otto. “I’m on my way home to take a break. That Embraer has to land sooner or later somewhere. Track it to its destination and see if we can put some boots on the ground to find out who gets off.”

“I’m already on it,” Rencke said. “It’s a Gulfstream V, same as the C37A we fly, with a range of right around six thousand miles — give or take. It can reach just about anywhere in South America and Europe, and it doesn’t need a major airport to land. Chances are we’re not going to find out until it’s back at its home strip.”

“Which is?”

“Executive Charters, London’s Heathrow. Except that the company doesn’t own an aircraft with that tail number.”

“It must have come from somewhere.”

“I haven’t found out where yet.”

“Try Malta first, and then Rome. My guess is it might be registered to a company with some sort of an arm’s length connection with the Church.”

“I’m on it. What about the hospital? Is María awake yet?”

“No, and the place has been closed down tight. No way he’s going to get past all that firepower.”

“Watch your back, Mac. This business is far from over.”

McGarvey found a parking spot a half a block from his apartment, and walked back, mentally cataloging the cars and SVUs parked on the street. It had been months since he’d stayed any length of time here, yet he remembered the cars from then and as recently as yesterday, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary to him now. No out-of-state plates, no diplomatic tags, no vans with deeply tinted windows, no vehicles with extra antennas.

He let himself in, and upstairs out of habit he stopped for a long moment on the landing to listen for any sounds, or this time odors, out of the ordinary. But nothing stood out.

At his door he checked the grease spot in the keyhole, which seemed undisturbed, yet that telltale had been defeated before and in the meantime he hadn’t taken the time to set another one in its stead. Sloppy, maybe, but he wasn’t going around unarmed. Not since the incident at Casey Key.

He pulled out his pistol and pushed the de-cocking lever to the up position, and eased the door open with the toe of his shoe.

The apartment was small, only the living room with the kitchen and small eating area to the right, and the single bedroom and bathroom to the left. A television and Bose stereo system were on a cabinet on one side of the room, bracketed by a couple of bookcases that held, in addition to books, some photos of his wife, their daughter, their son-in-law, and Audie.

He’d taken them down and put them in a drawer in the bedroom where they stayed for months, until he could finally bring them back out and face them every time he came through the door.

His heart still ached thinking about them, but he’d become a changed man. Harder, Louise told him some months ago. Easier to get angry, sharper, less patient, more content with being a loner than ever before.

In the old days, even when he’d hidden out in Lausanne after the assignment to kill a general in Chile had gone bad, and Katy had given him the ultimatum — her or the CIA, for which he chose neither — he’d not been content to live alone. But every woman, including his wife when he’d gotten back together with her, had lost their lives because of their association with him.

Now being alone was better.

He swept the living room with his pistol, then closed and relocked the door behind him. He took a quick look in the kitchen, then went back to his bedroom.

Nothing moved, nothing was out of place. The only light was the one in the bathroom. The door was still half open as he had left it. And he started to come down.

He safetied his pistol and tossed it on the bed, then took off his jacket and quick-draw holster at the small of his back, tossing them on an easy chair in the corner where he liked to read at the odd moment.

For just a split instant he almost froze in his tracks, but then he went across the room to the chest of drawers, where he got a pair of shorts and a T-shirt that lay on top of another fully loaded Walther PPK — the one he’d taken from Casey Key — which was fitted with a silencer.

He’d caught the odor from the bathroom of sweat and the faint but distinctive smell of a pistol that had been recently fired. The son of a bitch had tracked him here, and after everything that had happened — especially the senseless murders of the four wounded CIA officers and Nurse Randall — he was glad they would finally have it out.

McGarvey moved to the left into the deeper shadows in the corner, switched the safety lever to the off position, and pointed it at the bathroom door.

“You came here because you wanted me to help find the diary for the Church,” he said, keeping any trace of anger from his voice. “I’m listening.”

“Does the woman still live?” Dorestos asked. His voice was ragged, but still high-pitched.

“She bled to death before the doctor arrived,” McGarvey said. “It was you at the confessional.”

“It was a relief.”

“How do you expect me to help you?”

“The diary is the property of the Mother Church.”

“What about the claim of the Voltaire Society?”

“They are the devil’s handmaidens. They stole the diary.”

“The Church stole the treasure from the Spanish government.”

“Spain stole it from the Native Americans. The Church has been their bedrock for four centuries. We brought Jesus Christ to save their immortal souls. It was enough.”

The argument was circular just as all religious debates were in the end. McGarvey wasn’t an atheist — he’d seen too much senseless death in his career to be without some belief. But he had never found a religious system that fit him. Like almost every philosophy, established religions were failures in the end.

“I don’t know where to begin,” McGarvey said.

“Seville. But put down your gun and we will talk.”

“Face-to-face,” McGarvey said.

“Of course,” Dorestos agreed.

McGarvey lowered his weapon, and an instant later the figure of the priest darted out from the bathroom and crossed the room in a blur, his speed incredible.

Leading the big man, McGarvey fired off four shots as fast as he could pull the trigger.

Dorestos nearly made it to the bedroom door into the short corridor, managing to get off one shot over his shoulder that went wide, before he crashed against the wall with a loud bang and went down hard.

He had fallen on his side, his gun hand underneath his body, and he tried to pull it out when McGarvey reached him. He looked up, obviously dying and obviously knowing it. But he didn’t seem in much pain or distress.

“Thank you,” he whispered, his voice still ragged.

“The people you killed: why?”

Dorestos’s eyes fluttered. “My mother was there,” he said.

“What?” McGarvey demanded. “I don’t understand.”

Dorestos smiled. “Go with God, my son,” he said, and he died.

FIFTY-ONE

“Seville,” McGarvey said to Otto just before they went into Walt Page’s seventh-floor conference room of the CIA’s Original Headquarters Building on the campus.

“Are we sharing that this afternoon?” Rencke asked.

“No.”

Including the DCI at the head of the narrow table, Bambridge and Carlton Patterson were on his left, Bill Callahan at the opposite end, and two chairs were open on the right.

Pete Boylan, the Company’s senior debriefer, sat at the far corner next to Callahan, an understanding smile on her pretty face. She was thirty-three, with short dark hair, bright blue eyes, and the voluptuous good looks and figure of a Hollywood superstar. She had worked with McGarvey on the operation that had sprung from the deaths of his wife, daughter, and son-in-law, getting wounded in a gun battle near the end.

“Mr. Director, good to see you again,” she said.

McGarvey gave her a smile, but turned to the others. “None of this will be taped.”

“Why is that?” Bambridge demanded.

“Because you won’t like what you’re going to hear, and you won’t want it on record.”

“May I take notes?” Pete asked.

“Sure,” McGarvey said, and he and Otto sat down.

“You’re no longer connected in any official capacity with this agency, so you will not be conducting this debriefing,” Bambridge said.

“Marty, from what I’ve seen you’re a damned fine DDO, but you need to guard against bombast.”

Patterson chuckled. “Would you like to begin with the dead body in your apartment?” he asked. “We assume that he’s the man who attacked All Saints last night.”

“I’ll make it brief, and you can decide the ramifications, because this is going to involve the State Department and the White House. And if it goes public you’re going to have a very large mess on your hands.”

Rencke had brought an iPad and he powered it up.

“That won’t work in this building,” Bambridge said.

Rencke shrugged. “This one will.”

“A Frenchman claiming to represent something called the Voltaire Society came to see me at New College. He said that a diary that belonged to them had been stolen from a bank vault in Bern, and he wanted me to help find it.”

“We’ve heard all that,” Patterson said.

“The diary apparently pinpoints the locations of what were seven caches of gold and silver buried somewhere in New Mexico, what is now military testing grounds. Near the same place we tested our first nuclear weapon in nineteen forty-five. Supposedly the Voltaires have already emptied three of the caches, converted the metal into hard currency, and spent it.”

“On what?”

“According to the Frenchman, they spent it to help democracies in trouble.”

“Christ, spare us,” Bambridge said.

“We uncovered a fairly substantial payment to us shortly before the Civil War. There may be others, Otto’s working on it.”

“Payment to who exactly?” Patterson asked.

“To the U.S. Treasury via a bank in Richmond.”

“That can be researched,” Patterson said to Page.

“I’ll give you what I found,” Otto said, looking up from his iPad. “But from what I’ve come up with so far someone began burying these sorts of transactions shortly afterward. There could have been more payments, but digging them out might be tough. My suggestion would be to start within the last ten years or so, to find income to the U.S. Treasury that has no line items. Not taxes, not seizures of property, not donations left by little old ladies. A few billions of dollars here and there unexplained.”

“You want to sift through tens of trillions of dollars? More?”

“Yes, and you might match it with crises points, where we were cash-strapped as a nation.”

“Like the bank bailouts?” Bambridge asked sarcastically.

“Where did all that money come from?” Otto asked.

“This Frenchman came to you because of your involvement with the Cuban government in the person of Colonel León, I assume,” Patterson said.

“I turned him down, and as he was leaving the parking lot his car blew up, killing him, and killing two kids who were standing at a bike rack.”

“And then the CNI surveillance operation on you,” Bambridge said. “You’ve already told us that it was they who killed the Frenchman—”

“And the two students.”

Bambridge nodded. “Unfortunate. But you got into a shoot-out killing all four of them. Would you care to go into more detail? I’m sure that the Bureau is most interested.”

Callahan said nothing, which seemed to disappoint the DDO.

“Only three, in self-defense,” McGarvey said. “The fourth was killed by the man in my apartment.”

“And you maintain that this person — possibly a Catholic priest — managed to breach the perimeter at All Saints, kill four of our wounded officers in their beds, a nurse, the on-duty security officer, and the two bodyguards from Housekeeping who you’d requested be sent over to guard Colonel León, who herself had been wounded in a shoot-out behind a previously unknown safe house that Mr. Rencke maintained. We weren’t able to retrieve any of this from surveillance tapes at the hospital,” Bambridge said. “Does that about sum it up?”

“He was good.”

“Good enough to do all of that, and still break into your apartment without your being aware of the fact until he attacked you. Yet you beat him. You took him down. You shot him to death.”

“Yes.”

Bambridge looked at the others and spread his hands. “You’re right, I don’t like any of it. Particularly the business with the Spanish government. My concern is what happens next, because from where I sit this is nothing but a fantasy that has gotten a whole lot of people killed for no reason.”

Page interrupted. “Go on, Mac.”

“Fantasy or not, the Spanish CNI is involved in searching for the diary to such an extent that it was willing to assassinate an agent of some society who’d come to me for help. For the treasure that Spain believes is theirs.”

“And the man in your apartment?” Page asked.

Otto was suddenly busy on his iPad, his fingers flying over the virtual keyboard.

“I think that he was an agent of a Catholic order — whether officially or not I can’t say — to eliminate the Spanish operation against me, so that I would be free to find the diary. The church claims that the treasure is theirs.”

“The Spanish government wants the treasure,” Patterson said. “As does something called the Voltaire Society — philanthropists if we are to believe the story — as does some Catholic quasi-military order, and as does the Cuban government again in the person of Colonel León. Do I have it all?”

“The priest came to Otto’s safe house to kill not me, but Colonel León. And he came to the hospital to try to finish the job.”

“You had a guardian angel,” Bambridge said. “So why did he suddenly show up at your apartment to eliminate you?”

“Son of a bitch,” Otto muttered.

“I don’t know,” McGarvey said, and they all turned to Rencke.

“Unless I’m smoking something and have gone more delusional than normal, someone else is after the diary.”

“What is it?” McGarvey said.

Rencke inclined his head. “Share?” he asked.

“Damned right you’ll share whatever you came up with inside this building,” Bambridge said.

“IPads don’t work here.”

McGarvey nodded.

“The Frenchman who came to see Mac in Sarasota gave us a business card with the name Giscarde Petain and a phone number. The number matches an office in the Second Arrondissement of Paris — where lots of banks have their headquarters. A night watchman there was found murdered. And a couple of hours later, just two blocks away, a woman and her son were found shot to death with the guard’s pistol. Their names were Petain.”

“Does Sûreté have any leads?”

“They’re a little busy right now, kemo sabe. Robert Chatelet and his mistress were found shot to death in her apartment. The doorman was also found dead, his neck broken. He was bare from the waist down, and it looked as if the woman — Adeline Laurent — might have been raped.”

“The vice mayor of Paris?” Bambridge asked.

“Yeah, and a leading candidate for the French presidency.”

“I don’t see the connection.”

“But it’s there,” Rencke said. “I can smell it.”

“So can I,” McGarvey said. “The ante has just been raised.”