Blood Pact

FIFTY-TWO

The afternoon on the Harrat Rahat, which was Saudi Arabia’s largest volcanic lava field between Jeddah and Medina, was brutally hot, topping 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Prince Saleh and al-Rashid rode a pair of magnificent Arabian stallions, the horses delicately picking their footing across the horrible terrain. To make a misstep here would cause them to break a leg after which they would have to be destroyed.

Which was the point the prince was trying to make. He often brought people who had displeased him out here to break their spirits. Many times he rode out onto the lava flow with a minion and came back alone.

But where the prince seemed to revel in this environment, al-Rashid endured the brutal circumstance with the same stoic indifference as he felt on the battlefield, whether it be in the city or out here.

They were dressed in Bedu white thobes, over which were sleeveless abas and kufeya headgear secured with wool ties. Al-Rashid felt only faintly ridiculous, though the traditional desert garb had been perfected over a couple of millennia to keep the desert nomads relatively safe from the sun.

The prince wore a curved dagger in his belt.

Overhead an American-made Predator drone, controlled by a Saudi Air Force unit outside Riyadh loyal to the prince, circled. At the slightest sign of trouble the unmanned aircraft, equipped with a 20 mm cannon, would obliterate any threat to Saleh.

“You have been a busy man on my behalf,” the prince said. They topped a small rise and stopped where they looked out across the fantastic swirls and ridges formed by molten rock nearly eight hundred years ago. This was truly a no-man’s-land.

“Yes, but I am not finished.”

“I know, my old and loyal friend. But you have created some complications that have come to the notice of the king, who actually sent a minor cousin to talk to me. It was an insult considering all that I have done for the family.”

“Better than recalling you to the palace,” al-Rashid said.

“Better that you watch your tongue,” Saleh shot back angrily. “France is not our enemy. Murdering Chatelet and his mistress was an incredible blunder on your part.”

“The Sûreté has not identified the killer, nor will they.”

“But the king’s spies know.”

“Which means you have an informer on your staff.”

Saleh sat back in his saddle and looked to the east, toward Medina, the Radiant City, where the tomb of the Blessed Muhammed lay under the green dome of the Al-Masjid an-Nabawi, in an obvious effort to control his temper.

Al-Rashid followed his gaze. The prince would be dead before a drone strike could be ordered. And riding with the body, the controllers would not shoot. In was an option, one of several he always kept open.

“You may be right,” Saleh said. “And if such is the case I will deal with it out here.” He turned back. “It still leaves us with the incident in France. It must never be traced back to us. It was suggested that you disappear permanently.”

“That can be arranged, if you wish it, my Prince. But it would leave you without my services.”

“There are others with your skills.”

“No,” al-Rashid said simply. “If that were actually the case you would have ordered my death sometime ago. And even now you know that I tell you the truth no matter how disagreeable it may be to you.” He smiled faintly. “In fact I may be the only man in the kingdom who does so. And without truth, you could not exist.”

Saleh paused again for several long beats. “You can never return to France. Not to Marseille.”

Al-Rashid was stunned. Among the very first lines of defense he’d created for himself was his background story as a French businessman with a home in Marseille. No one was to know for sure where he went to ground between assignments.

He had salted away a reasonable fortune of something more than twenty-five million euros that would, if the need arose, be enough to change his identity and hide for the remainder of his life. He would have to become frugal, but he knew that he could manage.

If the need did arise, his first act would be to kill the prince, but for now he kept any of those thoughts from changing his expression.

“The French will stop looking eventually, and classify the crime scene for what it appeared to be: the doorman attempted to rape Mademoiselle Laurent, who called for her lover’s help. When he arrived they had a falling out as lovers often do under extreme stress, and either the vice mayor killed her and then committed suicide, or it was the other way around. Sloppy, certainly, but the French have had experience with love triangles gone bad.”

Saleh eyed him coldly. “You will make a mistake one day.”

“Perhaps. But I accomplished more than that in Paris, which was what led me to the woman and her lover.”

“So you have said. But you did not find the cipher key without which the diary is useless to me.”

“No, but I have a very good idea where I may find it.”

“Back in Switzerland?”

“That is a possibility I’ll leave to the last.”

“Not back to Paris?”

“To the Archives of the Indies in Seville, where all the records of the Spanish plunder of the New World are kept. They were as bad as the Nazis; they kept records of all their slaughters.”

“You mean to go to this archives where someone will tell you how to find the cipher key?”

“It will not be that easy because I don’t believe that even they know they have it.”

“You’re making no sense,” the prince warned. “And I am certainly not going to authorize or pay for you to go on some wild-goose chase that has the likelihood of turning into another international incident that may get back to the family.”

Al-Rashid had considered the possibility that even the prince might get cold feet, and he had worked out another set of options for himself. A few billion euros did not mean much to Saleh. But it was a considerable sum of money that was of interest to the Spanish government as well as to the so-called Voltaire Society, either of whom might be willing to pay a considerable finder’s fee under the right circumstances.

“I’m at your service, my Prince,” al-Rashid said at length.

“Yes, you are, at the service of the Kingdom who paid for your training and your education. It is we who created you.”

It came to al-Rashid that whatever message the cousin had brought from Abdullah must have been a strong one for Saleh to have made such a sudden about-face. Evidently the prince was good, but he had probably been told that he was not indispensible. He was passing the warning along.

“What about the diary and the cipher code?”

“Where is the diary?”

“In a safe place. I didn’t think it would be wise for me to carry it around.”

Saleh nodded. “Is it here in the country?”

“No.”

“In France?”

“No.”

Saleh’s anger flared. “Don’t toy with me, Mahd. For now you will suspend your search for the key. I want you to get the diary and bring it to me for safekeeping.”

“And afterward?” al-Rashid asked, knowing for sure now what he would do next.

“I may have another assignment for you. We’ll see. But in the meantime you will not return to France ever again. You will stay here as my guest.”

FIFTY-THREE

For the next couple of days McGarvey shuttled between the CIA’s surveillance and information processing center called the Watch, which was on the seventh floor of the OHB where the situation in France was being closely monitored, and Callahan’s office in the FBI. The Bureau’s forensics people were trying, without luck, to identify the priest who McGarvey had shot to death. He’d gone back to the Renckes’ safe house.

The French had come to no definite conclusions about either the killing at the bank building or the deaths of Madam Petain and her son. Nor had they’d made connections yet between those crimes and the bloody scene at Mme. Laurent’s apartment.

But the French tabloids were all over the supposed love triangle between the vice mayor, the doorman, and the mistress, for which the Sûreté had no comment.

“They’re still looking for a fourth person who a passerby might have seen leaving the building from the rear courtyard about the time of the killings,” Otto had told him last night over dinner at his and Louise’s new safe house. “A slender man, but nothing else.”

“Anything yet from Seville?” McGarvey asked.

“The CNI have taken no special notice, so they’re either hiding in the bushes on the chance you’ll show up, or they’ve not made the connection. But you’re certain that the priest told you the answers were in Seville?”

“It was before I shot him. I told him that I didn’t know where to begin looking for the diary. And he said Seville.”

“Do you think he was lying, trying to throw you off?”

“I think that everything he did in Florida and then up here was to get me involved.”

Otto shook his head. “If he’d come to your apartment to kill you, why would he give you such a clue? Doesn’t make any sense.”

McGarvey had thought hard about that exact thing, and the only conclusion he’d come up with was totally nuts. “Could be at the end he was ordered to kill me, but rather than that he pointed me toward Seville and then to prove that he wasn’t lying committed suicide.”

“Jesus,” Otto said softly.

They were at the table in the kitchen, Louise seated across from McGarvey. “Only the Islamic fundamentalist crazies do that kind of stuff anymore,” she said.

“He could have been the same guy at the college chapel. His voice in the apartment was a little ragged. Could be he’d taken something to change it. If it was him, he’d apparently given his confession. I just saw him for a couple of seconds, but to me he looked happy.”

“Like he’d made a decision?” Louise said.

“Yeah. And Bill Callahan agreed with me. If this guy was from the Order he might just have martyred himself to push me to find the diary.”

“Then isn’t it likely that someone from the Order will be waiting for you in Seville?”

“I’m counting on it,” McGarvey said.

He’d wanted to go back to his apartment, but the FBI had mounted a tight surveillance operation around the place, looking specifically for Cuban intelligence operatives, who by now had to know where María León was being held, and that once again McGarvey had had something to do with her hospitalization.

The Bureau didn’t want him anywhere near the place, and he wanted to keep his distance from Otto and Louise in case the CNI or the SMOM or someone else traced him and wanted to try something.

“What are we waiting for?” Otto had asked. “If the answers are in Seville, let’s get going.”

“Soon,” McGarvey had said.

He’d cleared out first thing in the morning, before dawn, and had driven over to All Saints in time for the surveillance team’s shift change. Newman was back, and McGarvey made the scheduled trek around the perimeter fence with him.

“Anything we need to know?” he’d asked.

“Bill Callahan thinks it’s possible that Cuban intel might mount an ops to grab the colonel, but that’s fringe. They’re just guessing.”

They’d stopped at the back door, the woods behind the compound just beginning to take definition with the dawn. “What’s your gut telling you, sir?” Newman said.

“I’m going to ask her just that before I get her out of here.”

Newman was startled. “No shit, you’re springing her?”

“Yeah. You guys can stand down.”

The CIA security officer was wistful. “A lot of good people died here for no reason. Tell me she was the cause, and you can take her out in a body bag.”

“She’ll be more useful alive than dead,” McGarvey said.

“If you say so, sir,” Newman said, but he was skeptical.

McGarvey had waited until after breakfast was served to María, who was their only patient, and until the staff and surveillance guys were fed before he went upstairs to her fourth-floor room.

A bulky young kid with a shaved head who was a student at the Farm was seated on a chair in front of María’s room, the door closed, and when McGarvey got off the elevator he pulled his pistol from a shoulder holster and jumped up. He was nervous, and when he saw who it was he visibly relaxed.

“You gave me a start, sir,” he said as McGarvey came down the corridor.

“Everything okay?”

“Yes, sir, except she bitches nonstop about everything. Why I closed the door; I got tired of listening to her.”

“I’m taking her off your hands,” McGarvey said. He knocked on the door and went in.

María had just gotten out of the shower and was toweling off. She looked up without modesty. A small square bandage about the size and thickness of a pack of cigarettes was taped just above her left breast. She had been careful not to get it wet.

“If you’ve come to tell me I have to stay here another day, you might as well shoot me, because I’ve leaving.”

“Technically you’re under arrest,” McGarvey said. Louise had given him a bra and panties, a pair of jeans, and a white cotton blouse, in a paper grocery bag, which he handed to her. “Sizes are all wrong, but these should do until we can get your other things wherever you’ve stashed them.”

“In the rental car, wherever your people impounded it,” she said.

“I’ll send someone over. In the meantime do you feel good enough to travel?”

“Spain?” she said. “It’s why I came from Havana to see you in the first place.”

“But you have a lot of catching up to do before we go.”

“I’m listening,” she said. She tossed the towel aside and put on the panties, which more or less fit, but the bra was too small, so she laid it aside and put on the blouse. “Louise send these?”

“Yes, but I don’t know why after what you put her through four months ago.”

“Not me, just the idiots who worked for me. But she did it because she is a good woman.”

“The Vatican is not the only organization who thinks the treasure exists and who want it.”

“We do, and so does the CNI, which Dr. Vergilio warned me about. Something put them in high gear, and according to her they are seriously motivated. Who else? Your people?”

“The Company doesn’t believe in it. But what’s Vergilio’s take? I would expect she wants it for her own government.”

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

“Try me.”

“Her father was Castilian, but her mother was a Cuban. They met on some aide program in Zaire, I think. I never properly researched it. Thing is her father died when she was an infant, and her mother raised her alone. She still has relatives in Cuba, who I’ve looked after.”

María pulled on the jeans, which barely fit at the waist, but she had to roll up the cuffs.

“It was a priest who tried to kill you.”

“That figures.”

“Have you heard of a group that calls itself the Voltaire Society?”

She shook her head. “Like the French philosopher?”

“Yes. They have been in control of the seven caches of gold since the mid-eighteen hundreds. And they’ve already emptied three of them.”

“Jesus,” María said, and she came out of the bathroom. “Then it does exist.”

FIFTY-FOUR

Walt Page was chauffeured over to the White House first thing in the morning at the president’s behest and was immediately shown into the Oval Office. He had a reasonably good idea why he’d been called over, so he wasn’t surprised to see the attorney general, Stanley Blumenthal, seated in front of Joseph Langdon’s desk.

“Morning, Walt,” the AG said. Neither he nor the president seemed happy.

Page took a seat and a moment later Frank Shapiro, the president’s adviser on national security affairs, shambled in like an uncaged bear, closing the door and taking a seat.

Langdon picked up his phone. “No interruptions, Joyce,” he told his secretary.

“We have a brewing situation on our hands that needs to be dealt with before it spins totally out of control,” Shapiro said to Page.

“The incident with the Spanish intelligence officers who were shot to death in Florida,” Page replied. It was what he’d expected.

“By the former director of your agency,” Shapiro said. “The man needs to be kept on a leash and right now you’re the only one who can do it.”

“Has O’Connor briefed you yet this morning, Mr. President?” Page asked. Francis O’Connor was the president’s new director of the FBI. “There’ve been several developments overnight.”

“I got a call late last night from President La Rocca demanding the bodies of the three men and one woman who he claimed were tourists. Their ambassador has returned to Madrid for consultations and he all but suggested that our ambassador return to Washington to explain to me the delicacy of this business.”

“According to McGarvey it may be worse than that,” Page said.

“Here we go again,” Shapiro said.

The president silenced his NSA adviser with a motion. “I didn’t like what La Rocca said to me, nor did I like his tone. But I have a feeling that I’m going to like even less what you’re going to tell us.”

“It’s complicated, sir, because there’s a lot more involved than just Spain. And the four who were shot to death have been positively identified as Spanish intelligence agents. But McGarvey only shot three of them, the fourth’s body was found a few miles north. McGarvey thinks he was assassinated by a Catholic priest.”

The AG started to protest, but the president silenced him too. “Anything having to do with McGarvey doesn’t surprise me.”

“He’s done good things for this country, Mr. President, and paid a very heavy price for it.”

“I won’t argue the fact. Nonetheless the people who’ve had to pick up the pieces after him are practically a legion. Does this have something to do with the Spanish treasure supposedly buried in New Mexico?”

“I’m afraid it does, sir. And it may also have something to do with the death of Robert Chatelet.”

The Oval Office was suddenly deathly still. None of them had expected such a bombshell, and their reaction was the same as Page’s had been, incredulity to the point of outright disbelief. The problem he faced was how to convince the president of something that he himself was having a hard time swallowing.

“You have my attention, Walt,” the president finally said. “I want the situation in a nutshell for now. You can send over a written report later this morning.”

“And try to keep yours and McGarvey’s wild speculations to a minimum,” Shapiro said. He reminded Page of an angry Kissinger, who had been a dangerous man when riled.

“It began a few days ago in Florida when a man claiming to represent an organization of international bankers came to ask for McGarvey’s help finding a diary that was stolen from a bank vault in Bern. Mac turned him down and as the man was driving away his car blew up, killing him as well as a pair of bystanders. The diary, written in the mid-eighteen hundreds — before our Civil War — apparently pinpointed the locations of seven caches of Spanish treasure in New Mexico.”

“Urban legend,” Shapiro said.

“One that has resulted in the deaths of a number of people, and McGarvey doesn’t think it will end until the diary is found.”

“Go on,” the president said. His mood was impossible to read just then, except he seemed patient. Something this president had never been known for.

“The Bureau has definitely linked the car bombing to the CNI surveillance team that had been set up next door to McGarvey. That same evening when he went over to confront them there was a shoot-out in which three of them were shot to death. The fourth escaped. That same evening McGarvey was attacked by someone he said had a high-pitched voice, and who spoke English with a decidedly Italian accent. McGarvey has reason to believe the guy was a priest, who served as a soldier in the Sacred Military Order of Malta.”

“What’s become of this priest? Has McGarvey also assassinated him?” Shapiro asked.

“He showed up at McGarvey’s apartment in Georgetown and there was another shoot-out,” Page said. “But the night before that the priest — if that’s what he was — managed to penetrate All Saints’ security measures and murdered four wounded CIA officers lying in their beds, one of the nurses, and the security team.”

“What was he after? Or should I ask who—” Shapiro said, but then stopped. “McGarvey was there.”

“Yes, but the priest wasn’t after him, he was after Colonel María León — the same one from Havana who showed up several months ago looking for the Spanish treasure. She came back again for the same reason, and was wounded in a gunfight at a safe house maintained by my Director of Special Projects. She was taken to the hospital.”

“Otto Rencke,” Shapiro said.

He had a long-standing love/hate relationship with the CIA, for a reason or reasons that Page had never learned. In the early days he’d been one of the architects of the office of the director of national intelligence, which most professionals in the business thought was little more than another wasted layer of Washington bureaucracy.

“Yes.”

“A French banker comes to McGarvey, the CNI kills him, McGarvey kills the CNI team — all but one — who is killed by a priest, who tries to kill Colonel León, and who dies in a shoot-out with McGarvey. Is that about right?”

“So far,” Page admitted.

“But you’re going to tell us how all of that connects with the deaths of the leading candidate for the French presidency, along with his mistress and a doorman who according to the papers tried to rape the woman.”

“We think there is someone else involved. The man who came to ask for McGarvey’s help gave a phone number that Rencke was able to trace to what probably was an accommodations address in Paris. A night watchman there was killed, and the next morning we believe the pistol registered to the night watchman was used to kill the vice mayor and his mistress. It’s one fact that the French authorities have not yet made public, for the simple reason they don’t know what to make of it.”

“But McGarvey does.”

“He thinks so.”

“He thinks so,” Shapiro said sharply.

“You’ve obviously debriefed Mr. McGarvey,” the AG said.

“This morning.”

“Where is he at this moment?”

“I’m not sure,” Page admitted.

“At the least he should be in custody until we can get this mess straightened out,” Shapiro said. “What about Mr. Rencke?”

“He’s gone as well.”

“Vanished without a trace?” the AG asked.

Page nodded.

“And let me guess, Colonel León is missing as well.”

“Yes.”

The president, who had remained silent through most of this, sat forward. “Any idea who this fourth — or would it be fifth — party in Paris might be? Or what his purpose is?” he asked.

“No, sir.”

“Well then, I would like to have a word with Mr. McGarvey. As you say he has done many great things for this country, and has suffered for it. I’d like to get his views on what’s going on. And have Mr. Rencke come along, and the Cuban colonel.”

“That might not be such a good idea,” Shapiro said. “We might have to put some distance between him and this office, in case there is a French connection after all.”

“I want them here as soon as possible,” the president said. “This afternoon at the latest.”

“But you don’t know where they are,” Shapiro said to Page.

“Rencke monitors any number of intelligence nets. I’ll get word to him as soon as I return to my office.”

“I hear a but in there, Walt,” the president said.

“I can get word to them, but if they’re in the middle of something they may ignore the summons.”

“Even from me?” Langdon demanded.

“Yes, sir, even from the president.”

FIFTY-FIVE

At the Renckes’ safe house just off Dupont Circle Otto and Louise were seated around the breakfast nook with McGarvey and the star of the evening, María León, who looked pale, but not like a woman who’d been shot in the chest forty-eight hours ago.

“So the priest is dead, if that’s what he was, where does that leave us?” Louise asked.

They were having drinks — beer for Otto and Louise, a Cognac for McGarvey, and a glass of rum neat for María.

“Still with the problem of the missing diary,” María said.

“Which you believe will lead us to the treasure. Same story as before and it didn’t work the first time. What makes you think it’ll work this time?”

McGarvey was content for the moment to let them hash it out as he tried to work out all the ramifications, because nothing seemed to fit; there was no pattern to the events here and in Europe that he could see. And yet what they were facing was anything but random.

“Because there’re a lot more people interested enough in it to commit murder.”

“Is that why you came here, Colonel?” Louise asked, her voice and manner suddenly sharp. “From where I sit I’m looking at some serious past history with you and your fellow countrymen.” She looked to McGarvey. “Call Bill and have the Bureau send someone over to take her into custody. Protective custody, whatever you want to call it. She can be deported later, or maybe set loose on the Calle Ocho. I know some people who would like that.”

“I came here because my government still has a stake in what Spain stole from us.”

“Save me. There’s more Spanish in you than native Carib. You’re no mestizo by a long shot.”

“More important why did you come here just now of all times?” Otto asked. “Why not last month, or next month? And what did you come hoping to find?”

“Raul sent me.”

“Who told you about the diary?” McGarvey asked, looking up. “Was it Dr. Vergilio? Are you and she bosom buddies? She calls or texts from time-to-time?”

McGarvey watched her for a reaction, and when she finally broke eye contact he got up and went to the counter where he poured another small Cognac. He stood drinking it, his back to the table, and when he was finished he turned back.

“The problem is the fifth man — and for the moment I’m assuming it’s a man. He’s probably the one who somehow got access to the safety deposit box in Bern — if we are to believe Monsieur Petain — and stole the diary.”

“Dr. Vergilio thought the same thing,” María said. “But if he has the diary then why did he take the risk of going to Paris to find someone from the Voltaire Society, which for some reason — according to you — led him to the vice mayor of Paris and his mistress? Doesn’t make any sense.”

“I didn’t think so until just a minute ago when I realized that the diary was no good to him because he couldn’t read it.”

“Probably church Latin,” Otto suggested.

“Translatable, unless it was in code.”

“For which he needed someone from the Society to provide him with the key.”

“But they wouldn’t or couldn’t so he killed them,” McGarvey said. “Which raises two questions. If the diary was so valuable wouldn’t they have made a copy? And if the people the guy confronted didn’t know the key why didn’t they tell him where it could be found? Shunt him away. Maybe misdirect him. Why give their lives? To save what?”

“To save it from the Vatican,” María suggested.

“According to Petain, the Society has already plundered three of the caches, which means they have the key, or at the very least had it at one time. And they certainly wouldn’t deal with the Vatican.”

“Seville?” Louise said.

María shook her head. “Adriana would have known if it was there.”

“Maybe,” McGarvey said. “But without the key the diary is worthless.”

“And without the diary, the key is worthless,” Otto said. “So what do you suggest?”

“The CNI won’t stop and neither will the Vatican nor the Voltaires. But we know something about them. We don’t know anything about the guy in Paris who was willing to kill the possible future president right under the noses of his bodyguard. And I’d like to know something about him — or her — before I show up in Seville.”

María’s eyes were suddenly very bright. “You’re going after it?”

McGarvey had thought long and hard about that over the past few days. He didn’t give a damn about some historical treasure whether it was in a Spanish galleon sunk in a hurricane off Florida’s coast, or buried somewhere in Arizona. Nor did he care about the deaths of the priest or of the CNI operatives — who were not much different than María in terms of their disregard for collateral damage.

It was the deaths of the two students in the parking lot at New College, the four wounded CIA officers lying helpless in their hospital beds, and the nurse. The Company security officers were a different story, however. They’d died in the line of duty, and they would get stars on the granite wall in the lobby of the OHB in Langley. He felt sorry for them and for their families, but they were soldiers who’d fallen in the field doing what they’d been trained to do.

It was the senseless murders of the innocents and the helpless that always got to him. Though a number of terrorists he had personally faced — including Osama bin Laden — had all argued that no one was innocent.

At length he nodded. “But not for the reasons you might want.”

“But you need my help,” María said, and it was perfectly clear that she had her own agenda, and she was willing to trade her aid for McGarvey’s. “You’ll have to figure out a way to get into Spain clean. The CNI catches one whiff of your presence and they’ll be all over you.”

“I think that we might need to go to Bern first. Assuming the killer in Paris is the same guy who managed to steal the diary from a bank vault, he’ll have left traces.”

“Lots of banks in Bern,” Otto said. “How’re going to find out which one?”

“I’m going to start knocking on doors and making noise. But quietly as if I’m trying not to be noticed.”

“But you will be,” Louise said, getting it. “By the killer himself, or the organization he works for. Or the CNI, or the Church, or the Voltaire Society who wanted to hired you in the first place.”

“What about me?” María asked.

“You’re going to stick it out here with Louise — if she’ll have you — until it’s time to go to Seville, if that’s where we need to be.”

“We’ll be just peachy here,” Louise said. “I need to catch up on my girl talk.”

“No,” María said.

“It’s either here, your word on it, or I’ll have the Bureau put you in a holding cell until I need you,” McGarvey told her, and he didn’t really give a damn what she chose.

“Cristo!”

“Maybe the holding cell would be better,” Otto said, concerned.

Louise grinned. She was enjoying herself. “She can’t defeat the alarm. And if she tried something she wouldn’t get to the end of the block before she was nailed. Anyway, she wants what she figures is Cuba’s part of the treasure, because whether she gets it or not, she’ll go home a hero for trying. And there are big things on the horizon in Havana for heroes of the people.”

“Nobody knows where we are for the moment,” Otto said. “The first problem is getting out of the country without the Bureau or the Company finding out until it’s too late.”

“You’re staying behind to work the Internet.”

“Not a chance in hell, Mac. Where you go, I go, because I have a stake in this too. Louise and I do. Audie. Anyway, I can work the Internet from anywhere.”

McGarvey turned to Louise. “Convince him.”

“Nope. He’s right. But how are you going to get out?”

“The Church is going to help.”

FIFTY-SIX

The Archivo General de Indias was housed in a magnificent building begun in 1584 to hold the merchant’s exchange, because of complaints from the Mother Church. Directly across the street was the Cathedral where businessmen would retreat from the heat of the Andalusian day. Catholic officials were not pleased and pressure was brought to bear on King Philip II to create a home for the tradesmen who were so vital to the prosperity of Seville.

The ornately decorated two-story building enclosed a central patio where oftentimes archives staff personal would go to eat their lunches and mingle with the few tourists who bothered to visit such a musty place that contained nothing more than five and a half miles of shelving that held forty thousand plus books of eighty million pages.

Here were all the records of the Spanish conquest and administration of the New World, including the journal of Christopher Columbus (it was from Seville he sailed down the Guadalquivir River on his voyage across the Atlantic), the records and dispatches from the first conquistadors all the way to the end of the nineteenth century, including military expeditions, numbers of indigents captured and converted or killed, detailed maps of the countryside showing all the major trails and pathways that had been used by the natives for a thousand years, sailing routes and directions not only across the Atlantic but across the Pacific to Manila. Also on the shelves was a record of every single ounce of gold or silver that had ever been mined or appropriated from the natives, and the disposition of the wealth including losses from storms as well as from piracy, theft, and graft.

Occasionally a guide would bring a small group of tourists, many of them Europeans visiting Spain via bus or boat up the river, for a tour that seldom lasted for more than an hour. The stacks themselves were open for viewing, as were the few artifacts on display, but nothing could be handled except by staff or the ocassional scholar. The offices and preliminary restoration and preservation labs were at one end of the building on the second floor and off-limits to the public.

Al-Rashid, dressed in a lightweight linen suit, was in a group of a dozen tourists, many of them Germans, but some Italians, and a couple of Americans. They’d stopped at a glass case in which was displayed a handwritten log.

“These are the logs of Cristoforo Colombo, as he was known in his native Genoa,” the pretty tour guide told them. “But we know him as Cristóbal Colón, because it was the Spanish crown that financed his four expeditions to the new world.” She spoke English, as a lingua franca.

An American woman was in front. “To us he is Christopher Columbus, the discoverer of our country. We even have a national holiday in his name.”

“Actually he never reached the North American continent, the nearest he reached was the Bahama Islands.”

Someone in the group chuckled.

“Are these the actual logs?” al-Rashid asked. He was traveling as a writer under the name Paul Harris, with a British passport, one of his several work names. His name, a brief biography, and a list of historical books he’d never written were listed in Google.

The young woman smiled faintly. “Heavens no,” she said. “The actual logs are in hermetic storage as are many of the original documents from that early era.”

“Will we be able to see them?”

“No, nothing from that period is available to the public, though scholars with accredited projects are given certain limited access.”

“Is anything here real?” one of the Germans asked.

“Oh, yes, nearly everything from the sixteen hundreds and forward are genuine — that’s to say the items that are on display. No one but staff, however, are allowed to actually remove items from the shelves.”

“No exceptions?” al-Rashid asked.

The guide gave him a sharp look. “That would be up to Dr. Vergilio.”

“The curator?”

“Yes.”

“And how does one go about seeing her?”

“By appointment.”

“I see,” al-Rashid said, and he stepped back to let someone else look at the logs.

The main floor of the building was all but deserted except for the occasional staffer, and the security officer at the reception desk just inside the front doors. No one except for the tourists in the group wore identification badges on lanyards.

They had come full circle around the central courtyard back to their starting point in front, past some of the cataloging and restoration rooms, which had been surprisingly quiet. But as the guide explained very little new material was coming into the archives, and the real work of major restorations was done elsewhere.

“We’ll take a fifteen-minute break now, in the courtyard where we have provided refreshments,” the guide said. “There are many statues for you to see, or if you find that the morning is too warm there are places to sit in the shade.”

“May we smoke?” an Italian asked.

“I’m afraid that smoking is not allowed anywhere in the archives or on the grounds for obvious reasons. You may, however, leave the building and smoke. You’ll have to turn in your pass at the desk, and retrieve it when you return. But don’t be late.”

They went out into the expansive courtyard where the guide left them, promising to be back in fifteen minutes sharp. The Italian and a Frenchwoman went back to the main hall and crossed to the security desk.

Al-Rashid slipped out just behind them, and as a security officer was collecting their badges, he pocketed his, crossed to the stairs, and went up to the second floor.

Bookcases reaching nearly to the sixteen-foot ceilings were arranged perpendicular to the outer walls, windows looking down onto the street between each set. A young man wearing white gloves stood on an upper rung of a ladder down one of the aisles but he was so intent on his reading that he didn’t notice al-Rashid passing.

At the southwest corner of the building, several offices looked down on the courtyard. A nameplate at the last door read: Dr. Adriana Vergilio, Curador.

Al-Rashid knocked once, and went in. The tour guide from downstairs looked up from behind her desk where she was talking to someone on the phone. She said something and hung up.

“You’re obviously not lost, which means that you’re trespassing. Either you will give me your visitor’s pass and allow me to escort you out of the building, or I shall call the police.”

“I’m sorry, but this is the only way I knew how to meet with Dr. Vergilio without going through the customary appointments rigmarole.”

The woman lifted the telephone. She was angry, and al-Rashid considered killing her before she could make the call.

“This is very important to her and the archives,” he said. “Already several people have lost their lives, and there may be more.”

An older woman, under five feet, gray hair up in a bun, her face weathered and brown from too much time in the sun, appeared at the door to her inner office. She was scowling.

“Who are you?” she demanded in Spanish.

Al-Rashid understood her. “In English, please,” he said. “My name is Paul Harris, I’m a writer of historical fiction mostly, but I’ve come across an incredible story that I think a number of people have lost their lives over. At least that’s what I was told.”

“By whom?”

“A Frenchman who came to see me at my home in Greenwich. Claimed he was from an organization called the Voltaire Society, and he was in a fight for his life with some Americans. Maybe from the CIA.”

The tour guide, her mouth open, had not yet dialed a number.

“It’s all right, Louisa,” the woman in the doorway said.

“Dr. Vergilio, I presume?” al-Rashid said.

“Yes. And I have been expecting you or someone like you to be showing up.”

FIFTY-SEVEN

McGarvey and Rencke drove to the Georgetown University Dahlgren Chapel, parking in back and walking around front. The church was empty, but they found the office where McGarvey had seen a priest in civilian clothes coming out with the man in a wheelchair.

They knocked once and went in, finding themselves in a small ante-room, the receptionist’s desk empty. The door to the inner office was open and the same priest in civilian clothes looked up from his desk.

“Father Carl Unger?” McGarvey asked.

“Yes, may I help you?”

“It’s about the priest whose confession you heard yesterday. He’s dead.”

“Dear God in Heaven,” Fr. Unger said softly, but he didn’t seem surprised. “May I be told how it happened?”

“He came to a hospital here in Georgetown where he murdered four men in their beds, a nurse, several security officers, and would have killed another woman, herself a patient, except that she managed to hide herself.”

The priest turned away, gathering his wits, and when he looked back his eyes were filled with a very great sadness. “I didn’t know.”

“I think you knew something. In fact I think he told you who and what he was when he confessed.”

“You were here in the chapel?”

“Yes, but I didn’t recognize him because he was in a wheelchair. What did he tell you in the confessional?”

Fr. Unger shook his head. “I can’t reveal that. Not to you, not to anyone, even to the police if that’s who you are.”

“But you must if the confessor tells you about a crime he’s going to commit,” Otto said.

“Are you a Catholic?”

“I was. Did he tell you that he had come here to kill people?”

“No.”

“But he was troubled,” McGarvey said.

“You met him?”

“Three times. He said that he’d been sent here to protect me.”

“He told me that, though he didn’t say who it was or why,” Fr. Unger said. “May I ask who you gentlemen are, and what your business with Father Dorestos was?”

“I think he worked for the Hospitallers. The Sacred Military Order of Malta. He came here to convince me to help find something that belonged to the Church. And last night he committed suicide in order to make me believe that he was telling the truth.”

It was almost too much for the priest and he started to rise, but McGarvey motioned him back.

“We work for the Central intelligence Agency, and you won’t believe the problems that your Father Dorestos has stirred up coming here, except that seven people lost their lives in Florida — two of them innocent young students who were not involved. That’s in addition to the others last night, and the priest himself, and most likely six more in Paris including the vice mayor and his mistress, and a mother and her son.”

“The butcher’s bill has always been high for the Mother Church,” Otto said bitterly. He’d walked away from the Church years ago under bad circumstances — of his own doing — but he’d been left with a scar. “And what the Vatican doesn’t need right now is another scandal. Pederasty is terrible, but murder is worse.”

“I don’t know what you want from me. Why have you come here?”

“For your help, Father,” McGarvey said “We want to prevent any further bloodshed.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Father Dorestos was a Hospitaller. Someone sent him here with orders to direct me to search for something.”

“Search for what?”

“A diary that was stolen from a bank vault in Bern. The point is none of what happened over the past days need never to have happened. I’m ready to help — we’re ready to help — but my government doesn’t want us to get involved.”

The priest was at a loss. “What can I do?”

“Contact the Hospitallers — the SMOM, and find out who directed Father Dorestos. Tell them their man is dead, and that we would like to come to Europe to discuss what needs to be done.”

Fr. Unger shook his head. “I’m just a college chaplain and a scholar. I’m not involved in things like this. And in the first place even if I thought I could help, I would have no idea who to call.”

“We need to be flown out of here on a private jet as American priests,” McGarvey said. He laid two passports on the desk — one for him and one for Otto — under the work names of Rupert Mann and Michael Rosenberg. “Whoever you contact in Malta will know how to check these to make certain there are no holds or queries.”

Fr. Unger made no move to touch the passports. “I’ll have to ask you to leave,” he said.

“We’ll wait just outside by the confessionals.”

“We want to help the Church,” Otto said, and he and McGarvey got up and left.

Back out in the nave they sat down in one of the pews about halfway to the entrance.

“You lied,” McGarvey said.

Otto got out his iPad and accessed one of his search engines on a CIA mainframe at Langley. “The Church has been doing it for a couple of thousand years, it’s used to hearing lies.” He nodded toward the confessionals. “It’s all about redemption. Raise hell all week, but come Saturday you can confess your sins, do a penance, and on Sunday go to mass with a clear conscience because the slate has been wiped clean, so on Monday you can start all over again.”

“It’s better than Islamic fundamentalists killing people and expecting to go straight to paradise as martyrs.”

Otto looked up. “Even murder can be forgiven by Jesus through a priest in the confessional.”

An image of Fr. Unger seated at his desk came up on the iPad. It looked as if he was typing on a keyboard just below the frame of view, and he was agitated.

“He’s found a number on Skype and he’s calling it now,” Otto said. “It’s European.” He brought up another program on a split screen. “Three-five-six. It’s the dialing code for Malta.”

“Hello, this is Father Unger, I’m the senior chaplain at Georgetown University in the United States. I need to talk to someone about Father Dominigue Dorestos.”

“Of course, Father,” a man with a heavily accented Italian voice replied in English. “Please wait.”

Otto split the screen again so that they were seeing Fr. Unger on one side, and on the other a man in a monk’s robes with a tonsured haircut. The monk was seated in what appeared to be a small office.

The screen froze for several seconds, until the monk’s face was replaced by the image of another man, this one much older, with a broad forehead and wide serious eyes beneath a normally cut head of hair. Nothing other than his image from the shoulders up was visible.

The man spoke, his English nearly without accent. “You have news of our son, Father Dorestos?”

“I’m afraid that I have bad news for you, I have been informed that Father Dorestos is dead. He may have committed suicide.”

The man on the split screen had no reaction. “Who told you this?”

“Two men are waiting outside in the nave at this moment, waiting for me to call someone to say that they are willing to help with the mission Father Dorestos came here to accomplish.”

“Did they say how they meant to help?”

“They’ve given me passports, in different names. The CIA has forbidden them to become involved, so they want us — your order — to provide them with a jet out of the country.”

“To where?”

“They didn’t say.”

“We have a jet standing by at Reagan National Airport. I will alert the crew. Tell them that they may come to the airport at any time within the next two hours. If you give me the names and numbers off their passports, I will also alert the airport authorities.”

“I will tell them.”

“One more thing, Father, ask them to bring Father Dorestos’s body with them if at all possible. Even as a suicide he is our son.”

FIFTY-EIGHT

The day was bright, the sun streaming through the windows, and yet Dr. Vergilio’s inner office seemed stuffy because it was crammed with books, manuscripts, papers, scientific journals, and many maps showing current archaeological projects around the globe. But the woman was anything but stuffy.

“Be brief, Señor Harris, I am a busy woman,” she said.

“Would you like to check my background?” al-Rashid asked.

“No, because I think that everything you’ve come to tell me, and everything else about you, is almost certainly an elaborate lie. So let’s just get on with it. You said that a Voltaire came to see you in England.”

“Yes, about two weeks ago. He identified himself as Giscarde Petain and wanted to hire me for a job of research. His organization had lost a very rare diary that was a record of a Spanish military expedition from Mexico City to what is now New Mexico in the United States.”

“Señor Petain was murdered a few days ago, and his wife and child were killed just two days ago in Paris.”

“Yes, I saw both stories in the news. It’s why I decided to come here.”

“For what?”

“Answers.”

Dr. Vergilio gave him an appraising look. She was irritated. “Do not play games with me, Señor Harris. As I’ve said, I have expected you or someone like you to come here asking damn fool questions about caches of Spanish treasure, the locations of which are supposedly pinpointed in this diary you were told about. But it’s not true. It is a lie.” She waved a hand at the books and maps in her office. “Millions upon millions of words and maps and reports — detailed reports. Mind-numbing bureaucratic documents. And nowhere have I ever found direct evidence of Spanish treasure in the United States except at the bottom of the ocean mostly around the coasts of Florida. The Nuestra Señora de Atocha being the most famous, of course. One of its salvaged and restored cannons is downstairs.”

“I’m not familiar with the story,” al-Rashid said, though he was. He wanted to keep the woman talking, betting that she would make a mistake. A hint, even the slightest of references to a cipher key was all he needed.

“I thought that you were an historical writer.”

“Of fiction. But my expertise is in research, including the Spanish Thirty Years’ War. Mention was made of financial losses that forced the crown to borrow money, but I pursued the war more than its financing. I told that to Monsieur Petain.”

“The Atocha sank in sixteen sixty-two off the Florida Keys in a storm, and she was carrying so much gold, silver, and other treasure that it took two months to load it aboard. And that, Señor Harris, is no urban legend. It is a fact that an American treasure hunter by the name of Mel Fisher managed to find the ship and recover the gold and silver, and a few of the cannons.”

Al-Rashid held his silence. The woman was worked up.

“In fact the contents of that ship belonged to Spain, if for nothing else than its historical value. Yet we got nothing.”

“Except for the cannon.”

“You came looking for answers.”

“Yes,” al-Rashid said. “Petain told me that the diary had been stolen but that it would be of no use to anyone because it was in code.”

Dr. Vergilio was suddenly very interested though she tried to hide it. “Did you find the diary?”

“After I learned of Petain’s death, I backed off. But when his wife and child were murdered my curiosity began to get the better of me. So I came here to find out if you could tell me anything about the diary or about its code. I thought that perhaps with my investigative journalism background and your archaeological resources here at the Archives we might make a good partnership.”

“And you would share the treasure with Spain?”

“Urban legend,” al-Rashid reminded her. “In fact I’m not a treasure hunter, I’m looking for a good story to tell.”

“I’m sorry that you came all this way, Señor Harris,” Dr. Vergilio said, getting to her feet. “There were journals from many Spanish military expeditions to the New World, of course. Most of them are here in the Archives. But none of them were ever written in a cipher or any sort — most of them were written in Spanish, and some written by priests or monks in Latin. Of those many of the originals are in the Vatican’s library.”

Al-Rashid remained seated. “I’m sure that what I have come looking for is in the Vatican’s archives, but those collections are closed to someone like me. From what I understand a priest managed to join an expedition to New Mexico, and the diary he kept — in code — was stolen by the Voltaires before he could return to Rome.”

“And you came to tell me that it was stolen from the Voltaires?”

“Yes.”

Dr. Vergilio held out her hand. “Give me your passport.”

Al-Rashid handed it over, and the woman went to the door and gave it to the tour guide. “Find out who this man is, please, before you return to your group,” she said, and she came back to her desk. “Are you an intelligence officer with New Scotland Yard or MI6?”

“Just a writer onto what I think might become a good story. Murders, intrigue between the Vatican, the Spanish government, almost certainly the U.S. government, and some sort of secret society that I’m assuming was either began by or at least named after the philosopher Voltaire.” Al-Rashid shrugged depreciatingly. “And throw in a secret diary written in a mysterious code and an ancient treasure buried somewhere, and I can’t miss.”

“The treasure is a myth.”

“One that someone is willing to kill for.”

“People have been killed for a lot less.”

The tour guide was back in under a minute. “One hundred twenty thousand hits on Google,” she said, handing the passport back to al-Rashid. “Mr. Harris shows up on the third page in a Wikipedia article, which describes him as a minor British novelist, six books to his credit, most notably one published three years ago under the title Trouble in Paradise. Formerly a journalist with the BBC, and before that with Reuters. Oxford. Parents deceased, no wife or children.”

“Thanks, Louisa, but no more strays, please.”

“I’ll try.”

When the young woman was gone, Dr. Vergilio gave al-Rashid an appraising look. Her attitude had changed. “You have my attention, Señor Harris, what exactly is it that you want?”

“The diary, for starts.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea where it is.”

“Petain told me that it had been in a bank vault in Bern. He suggested that I start there.”

“And did you?”

“No, I wanted to talk to you first. If the diary is in a code, I suspect that the cipher may be somewhere here, but hidden.”

“It’s not here, I’ve already told you.”

Al-Rashid suppressed a smile. She believed enough in the treasure stories and the diary that she had already searched the archives. “Maybe it’s in some of the documents from that military expedition. Could be in plain sight, unrecognizable for what it was without the diary in hand.”

“Or it could be in the Vatican’s archives, which is more likely.”

Al-Rashid shrugged. “In which case I’d have to try Rome. But for now I’m betting that if I can come up with the diary, we’ll find the cipher key here.”

Dr. Vergilio’s eyes widened. “Do you already have it?” She was excited.

“No. But I have the name of a man in Bern. I think he might be a good lead, but as I said I wanted to come here first to see if we could make a deal. You and I working together.” He laughed. “You can have the gold — I’d take a finder’s fee — but what I’m after is the story.”

Dr. Vergilio laughed too. “I don’t believe a word you’ve said, but in actuality I have nothing to lose. Bring the diary here, and we’ll see if we can find the cipher key if one exists.”

FIFTY-NINE

As soon as the Gulfstream had taken off from Washington National Airport and reached its cruising altitude of thirty-five thousand feet above the Atlantic, Otto powered up his laptop and connected via a National Reconnaissance Office satellite to his mainframe at the CIA. He’d worked through the night and when McGarvey woke from a couple of hours of sleep he was grinning.

“I think I came up with a lead on the guy who may have swiped the diary from the bank in Bern, and then did his thing in Paris just a few days ago. But it gets even better, and you’re not going to believe how.”

The attendant brought McGarvey a cup of coffee. “I’m told that you wanted a little brandy in it, sir,” she said.

“You needed a pick-me-up,” Otto said after the attendant went forward. “This guy — if it’s our man — goes by the name of Bernard Montessier and lives somewhere in Marseilles. He runs a small international legal affairs consulting firm with only a secretary.”

“How in the hell did you come up with that?”

“Tedious but simple. It’s what my little darlings back home are so good at,” Otto said.

His little darlings, as he called them, were his specially designed search engines that piggybacked on thousands of computers — most of them government or university mainframes — without leaving any traces. Multiplexing to vastly increase the speed and scope of his search algorithms, he could scan millions of terabytes per second of information, from nearly an unlimited number of sources simultaneously.

“I looked at everyone who had traveled by air or train to Bern in the past two weeks, and compared those names with arrivals by air or train to Paris over the same period. I also took a look at rental car records on the off chance that he might have landed elsewhere and driven across borders.”

“And you came up with Montessier?”

“Actually I came up with a hundred twenty-seven names, half of which I dumped because of their ages. But then I went looking for little anomalies. The odd bits that seemed not to fit any sort of a pattern.”

“And?”

“Bernard Montessier. You’ll never guess where this guy has been during that time, and going back three years — all I could come up with in only a few hours. Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. All the dates match. He flies from Marsellies to Jeddah, then from there to Bern, and from there back to Marseilles and then Jeddah again, and to Paris just three days ago.”

“Any background?”

“No. Wherever he lands no one by that name shows up in any hotel registries — at least not at the bigger hotels where he would most likely stay. When he travels it’s always first class.”

“He’s either staying with someone in those cities, or he’s using a work name,” McGarvey said.

“But there’s the kicker. After Paris he showed up yesterday in Seville. Now there’s no way in hell that can be a coincidence. Bern for the diary, Paris for the Voltaires, and Seville for the archives.”

“He got the diary and now he’s looking for the cipher key.”

“Bingo. But in the meantime he runs home to Mama in Jeddah for orders.”

“Does the Company have any assets on the ground there? Someone who might have heard something? Maybe mention of someone flitting in and out? Meeting with someone?”

“Operators like that, if Montessier is our guy, don’t come cheap. So whoever he’s working for in Jeddah most likely belongs to the Royal family. I can check our NOC list.”

“See what you can find without alerting Marty,” McGarvey said. “I’m going to warn María to watch her step in case you’re right about Montessier.”

“I have a passport photo you can send to her, if she’s not already in the air.”

María had been set to leave for Seville about this time to meet with Dr. Vergilio to pave the way before McGarvey went to talk to her. There was no telling what his reception would be, especially if the CNI got wind that he was in the country.

He tried her cell phone but it was only accepting voice mail, so he called Louise, who answered on the fourth ring.

“Are you guys in Malta yet?” she asked.

“About an hour out,” McGarvey told her. “Has our guest already left?”

“Dropped her off at the airport a couple of hours ago, but I waited to make sure she got through security okay.”

She was traveling under her DI work name of Ines Delgado. Otto had checked before they left, and had found no flags on her Spanish passport.

“I tried to reach her cell phone, but she must have turned it off.”

“Trouble?”

“Possibly. Call the airport in Madrid and have her paged. Tell her to call you. I’m sending you the passport photo of Bernard Montessier, who Otto thinks might be the guy who swiped the diary from Bern, and who might have been involved with the murders in Paris. He showed up in Seville yesterday.”

“Peachy,” Louise said. “Bern, Paris, and now Seville. Can’t be a coincidence.”

“No.”

“Send me the picture. If she doesn’t answer the page she’ll turn her phone back on sooner or later. Maybe once she gets through customs in Madrid.”

“Where is she staying in Madrid?”

“She wouldn’t tell me.”

“You’ve done your part, Louise. Now it’s time for you to hunker down, maybe go down to the Farm to be with Audie.”

“Here in town Marty doesn’t know how to get to me. I’m going to stay put in case someone else interesting happens to show up.”

“Watch yourself.”

“Take care of Otto for me,” she said.

“Will do,” McGarvey said. “I’m sending you the photo.”

When it went through he broke the connection and looked up. The attendant was at the head of the aisle, looking at him. She was smiling pleasantly.

“Would you like another cup of coffee, sir? Or perhaps something to eat?”

“How soon to Malta?”

“Fifty-five minutes.”

“I’ll wait.”

Otto turned his computer around so that McGarvey could see the screen. A photo of a large, hulking man with long curly hair and a thick salt-and-pepper beard filled half the screen, while the other half displayed details about his background. At the present he was the only NOC in Jeddah — most of the others were in Riyadh. He was posing as an engineer for the Swedish firm Andresen Pumps, specializing in “fluid solutions for oil and water.” His name was Bren Halberstrom, and he’d been in place for six years.

“Do we have contact information?”

“Yeah, but it could be dicey for him if someone is paying attention, which is a real possibility. The Saudi intel people are pretty good.”

McGarvey didn’t want to put the man’s life at risk for no good reason, yet people had died. “Anything in his file about recalling him?”

“He’s made three requests in the last eighteen months to call it quits.”

“It’s time for Mr. Halberstrom to come home,” McGarvey said, and he dialed the man’s sat phone number.

SIXTY

Al-Rashid sat drinking coffee and reading the English language International Herald-Tribune at a small sidewalk café just up the street from the Alcazar fortress and within sight of the Archives. He was dressed in an open collar white polo shirt, jeans, and a black blazer.

Last night the streets downtown had been filled with a mob of people angry about Spain’s latest austerity measures. The riot police had come in and beaten back the crowd with batons and tear gas, and the people had fought back with Molotov cocktails, bricks, and in at least two instances with guns. The story, along with similar protests in Greece, had made the front page because two police officers and four protesters had been seriously hurt. Dozens of others had been arrested.

This morning the area still smelled like gasoline and the sharper, irritating odor of phenacyl chloride, the major component in the tear gas the police used last night. Workmen were still on the streets cleaning up debris, and others were installing window glass, though many merchants had decided to board up their windows. The Tribune was reporting that further rioting was likely in the coming days.

A sharp unease had settled over the city, and this morning even the desk clerks at the upscale Gran Melia Colon hotel seemed gloomy though they tried to hide it.

“Are you checking out, Señor Harris?”

“Not at all. I’ve worked in Baghdad, Kabul, and Tripoli, so I understand violence. But last night the crowd was foolish.”

“But then it is a matter of money. Pardon me, but it is the common family man who has the most to lose, and he does not understand the government’s claim that we are a nearly bankrupt nation, despite our palaces and museums and—”

“History?” al-Rashid suggested. He didn’t know why he was going on with the silly man because he’d always found stupidity to be boring.

“Precision!”

“Actually I’ve come to rent a car for the next several days. Will you arrange it?”

“Certainly. Do you have a model in mind?”

“Maybe a little sports car. Something fast. I’m going out in the country to see the sights.”

“It will be here within the hour. I’ll just need to see your driving license and passport, of course.”

Al-Rashid handed them over, and after an excellent breakfast of croissants and cheese, he’d picked up the dark blue BMW Z4 convertible in front, and had driven back to the Centro area downtown where he’d gotten lucky with a parking spot just around the corner from the Archives.

Around nine o’clock Dr. Vergilio showed up on a Vespa motor scooter and slowly circled the building before pulling up on the sidewalk and parking just across the street from the Cathedral.

She seemed cautious to al-Rashid, almost as if she expected to see the rioters still lurking somewhere around a corner, ready to do damage to her Archives, which had come out unscathed so far.

He waited for a full fifteen minutes after she went inside before he paid his bill and walked back to where he’d parked the car. Traffic was normal for a workday, and once he was away from the Centro section of the city he headed north to the Barrio de la Macarena, which was a huge neighborhood covering most of Seville’s historic section. Here were market squares, churches and convents, little gardens and pocket parks, plus Dr. Vergilio’s apartment on the ground floor of an ancient four-story building just one block off the river.

Parking a block and a half away, he walked past the building. A tall archway enclosed by tall iron gates, open at this hour of the day, gave access to a narrow cobblestone walkway that ran straight to an outdoor courtyard at the rear of the building. Just inside the gates an old woman sat on a wooden chair smoking a cigarette and cleaning mushrooms with a brush. No one else was around, and back here only the occasional car passed on the street.

Al-Rashid turned around and walked back to the woman, who looked up curiously when he appeared at the open gate.

“May I help you?” she asked, her voice raspy from years of smoking.

“Yes, please, Señora,” al-Rashid said in his rudimentary Spanish. “But I am looking for the building of Dr. Adriana Vergilio. I was told this was the address.”

“Yes, this is the correct number. But she has already left for the Archives.”

“I was just there. I must have missed her.”

“Well, she’ll be there by now.”

“But I haven’t the time. May I leave a message for her with you?”

The old woman hesitated, but then shrugged. “I am an old woman with a terrible memory. So if it is complicated you will have to make the time to return to her office.”

“I’ll write it down. If you have a pencil and a piece of paper.”

The woman sighed, but put her cigarette in a small tin can at her feet and led him into her apartment, where she got a pad of paper from a small table beneath a wall phone.

Before she could turn around, al-Rashid was on her, breaking her neck, her body convulsing once before she went limp.

He carried her into the bedroom at the rear of the small apartment, and covered her with the blanket, arranging her body with her head turned away from the window so that it would look as if she were merely taking a nap.

He checked at the front door to make certain that no one was around, and he got her chair, the bowl of mushrooms and brush, and the tin can and brought them inside. A set of seven keys were on hooks next to the phone. He took the set marked AV, and again checking at the door to make sure that the passageway was still empty he went back to Dr. Vergilio’s place and let himself in.

Standing just inside an entry vestibule, al-Rashid listened for any sign that someone might be here, or for a dog or some other animal, but the apartment was silent and he went the rest of the way into a very large living room.

Tall bookcases, with a wooden ladder on brass rails, lined three walls. The shelves were overstuffed with books, most of them very old. More books and piles of newspapers and magazines were stacked on the one couch, and on a big wingback chair. Books were stacked in the corners, on the coffee table in front of a second wingback chair, beside which were even more books.

A large map of the New World, which looked as if it had been drawn by hand a very long time ago, was framed and hung on a wall between a pair of windows, the heavy drapes drawn.

A small kitchen with a two chairs and a butcher block table were to the left just beyond a dining room, the table of which was piled with maps and what appeared to be a half-dozen expedition journals, these in modern field notebooks. The cover of each was marked with a date, starting in November 12, 1984, along with what were likely the names of archaeological digs Vergilio had been on, in various spots around Mexico City and north.

Al-Rashid quickly leafed through them, but nowhere was New Mexico, or Cibola, or the Mother Church, or treasure mentioned. If she had been looking for the gold — which she claimed did not exist — there was no evidence here.

A short corridor led back to a bathroom and two bedrooms, one of which was used as a filing room mostly for maps in long flat drawers. Nothing here gave any hint of an expedition or expeditions to anywhere near the U.S. border.

The corridor’s walls were covered with dozens of framed photographs showing Vergilio and others out in the field at various digs. None of the photos were captioned, but most of them appeared to be in dense jungle settings out of which had been hacked clearings where trenches were being dug by hand. In one shot, a younger Dr. Vergilio, a broad-brimmed hat in hand, stood atop a small Aztec or Mayan ruin looking down at what had to be more than a hundred workmen ringing the pyramid and looking up at her. She had a broad smile on her face. Triumphant.

More books were stacked beside her bed, and on the nightstand, and even on the floor beside the tall, ornate wooden wardrobe.

For a long moment or two al-Rashid stood very still, his head cocked to one side, trying to absorb the place, trying to see Dr. Vergilio working here alone every night. There’d been no television in the living room and none here, only a small radio on a shelf in the kitchen. Here was not a home; it was nothing but an office away from the Archives. She worked all day downtown then came back here to work more.

He walked back out into the corridor and looked at the photograph of Vergilio standing atop the pyramid, a broad smile on her face. The only time she was free to enjoy herself was out in the field.

Turning, he looked in the map room again, then walked back to the living room and into the dining room and kitchen.

She had written several books. It was all here in her apartment; all the journals and maps and references that she would need.

But there was no typewriter, and more important there was no computer.

Al-Rashid smiled. The woman was hiding something.

SIXTY-ONE

The same sort of aluminum coffin used to transport the bodies of American soldiers killed in the field was taken from the hold of the Embraer by two men, who loaded it onto a wheeled cart and brought it over to a waiting hearse.

McGarvey and Otto, who’d been told to remain aboard, watched as a tall man in jeans and a military styled khaki shirt, the sleeves rolled up and buttoned above the elbows, accompanied the casket from the plane and before it could be loaded into the hearse he blessed it.

When it was aboard and the men drove away, the man in the jeans turned and came back to the airplane.

He hesitated just inside the hatch and asked the crew if they wouldn’t mind waiting outside for a few minutes. They agreed and left.

The interior of the Gulfstream was laid out with several very large and plush leather seats on swivels all within reach of a highly polished cherrywood table. It was obviously used to transport VIPs, and was fitted out with a luxurious bathroom at the rear, and a small but complete galley, including a credible wine stock, just aft of the cockpit. A flat-panel television dropped down from the ceiling, and in the armrest of each chair was a telephone. The plane was equipped with its own sophisticated communications system.

The man sat down across the table. “Gentlemen, thank you for bringing home the body of our son,” he said, his English nearly accentless.

McGarvey recognized him from the Skype call Otto had intercepted. “Monsignor Franelli, you must know the circumstances under which he died.”

“Father Unger told me that he committed suicide, which is a terrible crime for those of our faith. Do you know the circumstances of his death?”

“He was in my apartment, and I was forced to shoot him.”

“Pardon me, Señor McGarvey, but that would not have been possible under normal circumstances. He was much younger than you, and in superb physical condition. If he’d wanted to defend himself it would be you who was dead.”

“I know. He was waiting for me when I came home, and he could have killed me the moment I walked in the door. But he didn’t. He told me that he’d been sent to help me find the diary. I told him that I didn’t know where to begin.”

“You lied.”

“I wanted to see what he would tell me.”

Msgr. Franelli nodded. “Did he mention Seville or Bern first?”

“Seville.”

“Then why have you come here?”

“To deliver Father Dorestos’s body to his controller and to find out why the Order came to me for help. What do you think that I can do for you, that your soldiers and trained assassins can’t?”

Msgr. Franelli’s lips pursed. He was irritated. “Certain restrictions have recently been placed on the Order.”

McGarvey sat forward. “Bullshit. Your priest killed a Spanish intelligence officer in Florida.”

“You killed the three others.”

“But I didn’t kill four helpless men in their hospital beds, or an unarmed trauma room nurse whose only job was to help save lives, not take them.”

Msgr. Franelli held McGarvey’s gaze. “Mistakes were made. Father Dorestos was not completely stable. Terrible things happened to him when he was young, and by the time he came to us he was a damaged soul.”

“That you used,” Otto said angrily.

The priest turned to him. “You’re Otto Rencke, a computer genius, I’m told, who once worked for the Church until you were excommunicated. I think for some sexual dalliance, so don’t judge lest you yourself are judged.”

“But then there has always been that element within the Church that condoned murder and torture to further its own aims and its own power. The Spanish Inquisition comes to mind.”

“Strictly speaking at the hands of the Spanish government.”

“Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisicion espanola.”

“Yes, established by Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. The king and queen of Spain, if I might remind you, Señor Rencke. Play with your computers but leave the history of the Church to us.”

The priest had a sharp edge to his voice and his manner, and McGarvey realized all at once that the man was being defensive because he was frightened. “You sent Father Dorestos to the States to help me. It wasn’t meant to be an assassination mission.”

“We weren’t sure who was watching you, though I suspected it was Spanish intelligence. They want the treasure, which they believe belongs to the government, and they were willing to kill for it.”

“What can you tell me about the Voltaires?”

Msgr. Franelli’s temper flared. “They are apostates.”

“It is their diary.”

“Our diary, written by one of our priests who went on the second Spanish expedition to find the gold and silver.”

“A treasure that the Church stole from the Spanish authorities in Mexico City.”

“It’s a moot point, Mr. McGarvey. The treasure, if it exists in your New Mexican desert, is being claimed by a host of people, all of whom are ready to kill for it. My Order was merely trying to direct you.”

“The man who was killed in the college parking lot was a Voltaire who came to ask for my help. His wife and son were murdered two days ago in Paris.”

“Yes, I know. Their souls will also burn in hell.”

“Was it one of your operators in Paris who did it?” McGarvey asked.

“No.”

“Who then? Do you have any ideas?”

“Not the Spaniards. It is some someone else, but we’re not sure who.”

“Another treasure hunter?”

“Presumably. The Cuban government is interested. Maybe the same agent who you worked with several months ago.”

“No,” McGarvey said.

Msgr. Franelli was about to say something but he stopped, and cocked his head. “You know who it is?”

“We have a possibility.”

“Are you going to tell me?”

“I want the use of this jet and crew for the next few days.”

“In return for what?”

“Your Father Dorestos was correct. The answer is in Seville.”

“At the Archives. But what answer?”

“We think that the diary was written in code, and the cipher key is either at the Archives in Seville, or in a vault in the Vatican.”

“It’s not in the Vatican, I can tell you that much. If it were I would not have sent Father Dorestos to help you.”

“You need the diary itself to make the cipher key worth anything.”

“You’ll have to trust me that we do not have the key. But I agree that the diary or the key alone are worthless.”

“And then what?” McGarvey asked. “If we find the diary and the key and we make the translation, then what?”

“We find the treasure.”

“It does not exist,” McGarvey said.

“If that’s the case, then why are you doing all of this? Why are you risking your lives?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

“For two innocent kids who were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” McGarvey said. “But we’re also here for help getting to Seville.”

“The aircraft and crew are yours for as long as you need them. But the Spanish authorities will place you under arrest the moment you step off the plane.”

“Which is how you can help,” McGarvey said, and he told the monsignor what he had in mind.

SIXTY-TWO

Al-Rashid drove back downtown where he parked a couple of blocks from the Archives and walked to the Cathedral directly across the street from where Dr. Vergilio had chained her motor scooter to a light pole.

Cleanup efforts were still going on, and police were setting up barricades, blocking the streets leading from the open space of the Murillo Gardens where the crowd had gathered last night, and from where they had marched to the Archives, the Cathedral, the Alcazar, and the Hospital de los Venerables.

Killing the old woman manager at the apartment building had been a necessity, though once her body was discovered any further cooperation with Dr. Vergilio would be impossible. But he’d needed to search the good doctor’s apartment on the chance she had taken records of the second Spanish military expedition to New Mexico. She hadn’t, nor had she left her computer, which could only mean that the cipher key, if it existed at all — and now he thought it did — would be in the Archives.

He had considered breaking in and looking for the expedition’s documents, but merely finding the right files and then interpreting them would take too long. Perhaps weeks, even for a trained historian. But Dr. Vergilio would know exactly where they were shelved. All she needed was the incentive to get them.

He telephoned her office and she answered on the second ring. “Hello.” She sounded harried.

“Good morning, Doctor. This is Paul Harris. I’m calling you about the diary.”

“Do you actually have it?”

“I will by this evening. It’s coming by courier.”

“From where?” Dr. Vergilio demanded.

“Out of the country, but we’ll need to meet as soon as I have it. Perhaps first thing in the morning in your office?”

“No. I don’t want to wait that long. We can meet tonight.”

“The police are expecting another riot tonight, so maybe someplace else would be better.”

“Someplace neutral, Señor Harris.”

Al-Rashid smiled. “You still do not trust me?”

“Of course not. In any event before we can make any sort of a deal I’ll have to see the document to determine if it’s genuine or merely a clever fake. And believe me that will take less than one minute.”

“And the cipher key?”

“For that you will have to trust me. But I can guarantee you your story and the Archives will certainly pay you a finder’s fee if it’s the real thing.”

“That’s all I ask,” al-Rashid said. “You can expect my call between six and ten this evening. We’ll meet in the Cathedral across the street from you.”

“That’s hardly a neutral spot,” Dr. Vergilio objected.

“On the contrary. With a riot most likely going on, and armed police officers everywhere, the Cathedral will be the safest spot in all of Seville for us to meet.”

“As you wish.”

“Bring the cipher key.”

“I don’t have it,” Dr. Vergilio said.

Al-Rashid pushed the end button, pocketed the phone, and stood for a long half minute staring at the Archives, and the centuries-old secrets it held.

He started to turn away when a taxi pulled up at the rear entrance, and an attractive woman with long dark hair, wearing jeans and a fashionable white top, got out, and went inside. He got only a brief glance of her profile, but something about her self-assured manner, the way she walked, the way she held herself erect, almost with a military bearing, struck him. She was not the usual visitor to the Archives, and it bothered him that he should know who she was, and did not.

He walked away, reaching his car that was parked well outside the police control zone. Traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, was as normal as was possible under the circumstances of the blocked roads. But the people seemed to be taking it all in stride.

His cell phone rang as he settled in behind the wheel. He expected it might be Dr. Vergilio calling him back, but the caller ID was blocked. It was Prince Saleh from Jeddah.

“Where are you at this moment?” the prince demanded brusquely.

“Seville.”

“Do you have the cipher key yet?”

“Tonight. But you didn’t call to ask me about that. Is there trouble?”

“There may be,” the prince said. “But you’ve actually found it? Where?”

“Tell me about the trouble.”

Saleh hesitated for only a moment. “I got a call a half hour ago from General Abd al-Yasu.” The general was the head of the General Investigative Directorate, known as the Mabaheth, which was Saudi Arabia’s interior police and internal security agency.

“I’m listening.”

“A man who has been identified as likely agent of the Central Intelligence Agency got a phone call on his cell phone, after which he began making inquiries about me.”

“This has happened before,” al-Rashid said. “You are a very high-profile man, near the top of the Americans’ watch list.”

“Yes. But never in connection with your Montessier persona.”

Al-Rashid’s grip tightened on the cell phone, and he looked out the windshield at the buildings on either side of the street, and in his rearview mirror at the people and the traffic. All of it seemed normal. But if the CIA knew his work name, had his description or even a photo, and if they had somehow traced him here to Seville there might even now be an assassin’s rifle trained on him.

But that wasn’t possible. Not so soon. And yet the dark-haired woman entering the Archives through a rear door bothered him, though he didn’t know exactly why.

“Do you have this man in custody?”

“The order was given but he had left his office and he was not at his home. He’s disappeared.”

“What is his name?”

“Bren Halberstrom. He traveled under a Norwegian passport.”

The name meant nothing to al-Rashid. “Do we know who called him?”

“It was from a cell phone but the number was blocked, although the general believes that the call originated in Malta.”

For just a moment al-Rashid was at a loss, but suddenly it struck him. He held the excitement from his voice. “Was the call recorded?”

“It was encrypted. The technical people don’t know how it was done, because Halberstrom’s phone was not capable of encryption, though how the general’s people knew this is beyond me. The fact of the matter is that someone has made a connection between you and me.”

“Do you wish me to withdraw?”

“I’ve thought about it. But what do you think?”

“The CIA makes random sweeps from time to time, looking for the stray bits of intelligence. This Halberstrom may have been nothing more than a Norwegian businessman who cooperated with the CIA, or more likely he was a deep-cover agent, maybe stationed in Jeddah merely to watch you. Such a possibility should not come as a surprise to you.”

“No, of course not. But what about you?”

“I’ll either have the cipher key tonight, or it will have been destroyed. Either way I’ll be leaving first thing in the morning.”

“Your name has come up, the airport may be watched.”

“I won’t be taking a commercial flight out of here. I’ve made other arrangements.”

“You know what’s at stake.”

“Yes, I do,” al-Rashid said, but he was certain that Prince Saleh did not.

“Then go with Allah.”

Al-Rashid ended the call. Halberstrom was almost certainly a CIA NOC. The call had come from Kirk McGarvey. And the fact that it had been placed from Malta made it a very real possibility that the Catholic Church was not only involved in the search for the diary, but had agreed to help.

Which still left him with the mysterious dark-haired woman.

SIXTY-THREE

María León showed the pass that Dr. Vergilio had given her several months ago to one of the security officers who’d happened be near the rear stairway as she started up. He smiled nervously but nodded.

“Looks like it was a big night here,” she said to him in Spanish.

“Sí, señora, and tonight promises to be just as bad or perhaps even worse.”

“Was any damage done to the Archives? I didn’t see any from the outside.”

“Oh, no. The police were mindful, and whatever the people think of our government, they have respect for history. They weren’t hoodlums.”

“Let’s hope that their regard for this place holds. Is Dr. Vergilio here?”

“Yes, she arrived earlier. Shall I escort you up?”

“No, that’s not necessary. I know the way.”

The guard nodded and left.

Upstairs María walked down the corridor past the stacks, a couple of researchers at work, until she reached the doctor’s suite of offices, but instead of going in she turned and sat at one of the small tables by a window looking down on the street. If anyone arrived or left the offices they would pass by in plain sight.

In Madrid just after she’d passed through passport control and picked up her single bag, she’d been paged. It had been Louise needing to reach her before she caught the flight to Seville.

“Mac and Otto were in Malta, but by now they’re on their way to Gibraltar. I’m sending you a photograph. Hang on.”

A moment later what was obviously a passport photo came through. She did not recognize the man. “Who is he?”

“We don’t know his real name, this was from a French passport under the name Bernard Montessier. Otto is sure it’s a work name. And he’s pretty sure that this was the guy who managed to swipe the diary from the bank in Bern. Apparently he’s a hired gun of a Saudi prince in Jeddah. A big money player.”

“Do we know anything about him?”

“Just that he was in Bern when the diary went missing, after which he returned to Jeddah. From there he went to Paris where Otto thinks he killed the vice mayor and his mistress and most likely several others — possibly Voltaires.”

“He’s looking for the cipher key, and anyone who doesn’t cooperate gets killed,” María said. “Nice.”

“Thing is it’s likely that he’s in Seville for the same reason you’re headed there, so Mac says for you to watch your back. He and Otto should be there later this afternoon or early this evening.”

“I’m not armed.”

“I’m sure that you can arrange something,” Louise said dryly. “You have more connections in Spain than we do. Especially right now.”

She’d made one call to the Special Interests Section duty officer at the Cuban embassy on Paseo de la Habana in Madrid where she’d explained who she was and what she needed. And when she arrived at the airport in Seville a man waiting with his taxi opened the rear door for her.

On the seat was a small package, the contents of which were a Glock 29 subcompact pistol, a silencer, and three spare magazines of 10 mm ammunition. She’d loaded the pistol, screwed the silencer on the threaded muzzle, and put it and the extra magazines in her big shoulder bag. She ordered the driver to take her to the Archives and when they’d arrived she paid him the standard fare. Nothing else was said between them.

During the cab ride into the old city she’d phoned Manuel Campos, her new chief of staff at DI headquarters in Havana, and sent him the photo of Montessier. “He’s evidently a player, though probably not French. A freelance for a Saudi prince in Jeddah. Find out who he is.”

Sitting by the window now, her telephone chimed softly. It was Campos. “He’s a French importer/exporter with an office in Marseilles, but beyond that he comes up clean. Almost too clean.”

“Do you have an address?”

Campos gave it to her.

“Keep digging. Because if he’s who we think he is, he’s probably been involved in any number of incidents. He’ll have left footprints somewhere.”

“I’ll keep on it,” said Campos. “The president called earlier this afternoon asking for a progress report.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Not that you were wounded. How are you doing, Colonel?”

Campos had risen from a working man’s family in Havana, but he had none of the Hispanic male macho attitude toward women, or at least he’d never treated her that way. So far as she could tell his comments were always truthful, on the mark, and sincere.

“I’ve been better, but I’ll live. The doctor was damned good.”

“Watch your back,” he said, and rang off.

It struck her as curious that he would use the same boyish American expression as Louise had used.

Dr. Vergilio, dressed in baggy khaki slacks and a short-sleeved safari shirt, passed by the two stacks, her head down. She was in a hurry, and her concentration was elsewhere.

After a moment María muted her cell phone because she did not want to be disturbed at this point, then got up and went to the end of the stacks in time to see the doctor disappear between another set of bookcases one-third of the way to the other end of the building.

She waited a little while longer before she went down the corridor, pulling up just at the edge of the aisle that Vergilio had gone down for just a second before she peeked around the corner.

Vergilio was up on a ladder pulling a leather-bound box about six inches thick from a top shelf. When she had it she started down, but it wasn’t until she had reached the bottom and had turned that she noticed María standing there, and she reared back.

“Is everything okay?” María asked.

“I wasn’t expecting you so soon, you startled me.”

“I came early because I found out something that you must know. It’s important.”

“Tomorrow, Colonel.”

“Right now. This could mean your life if you reveal the cipher key.”

“What are you talking about, what cipher key?” Vergilio asked. She held up the box. “You mean this?”

María inclined her head. Either the doctor was a damned good liar or what she’d fetched from the top shelf of the bookcase did not involve any cipher key.

“This is Pope Alexander VI’s Papal Bull dividing the New World between us and Portugal. A researcher in Leipzig wants copies.”

“You have assistants,” María suggested, not believing her.

“Easier for me to do it myself. I know where practically everything is located here.”

The lie hung in the air between them

“We need to talk.”

“Not today.” Vergilio was stubborn. “You have no authority here, Colonel. Nor does Cuba have any rightful claim to whatever may be discovered from the Ambli diary.”

“Without the information from my father’s journals in Mexico City before the revolution you would be nowhere. I thought that we had an agreement to find the caches for their historical value and then let our governments decide what came next.”

“Leave or I will call the police.”

“No you won’t,” María said. She pulled out her cell phone, brought up the photograph of Montessier, and walked back to where Dr. Vergilio stood clutching the book box to her bosom, her eyes wide, her expression angry.

“Leave…”

María held up the phone. “Has this man been here?”

Dr. Vergilio wilted. “His name is Paul Harris.”

“He’s almost certainly an assassin, and likely the one who managed to steal the diary from a bank vault in Bern.”

SIXTY-FOUR

They’d finally gotten out of Malta about an hour ago and were in the air en route to Gilbraltar’s North Front Airport. Otto was on his computer trying to find out if there’d been any unusual occurrences in Seville overnight or anytime today, and McGarvey took out his Vatican passport that Msgr. Franelli’s people had made for him.

It identified him as Fr. Robert Talbot, a special emissary from the Pope. Otto had been given a similar passport with his photo under the work name Fr. Bruce Ringers, also a Papal emissary.

“Three murders overnight in Seville in addition to the riot on the streets,” Otto said, looking up.

“Not unusual for a city that size,” McGarvey said.

“A husband stabbed his wife and the man he found in bed with her then called the police. And two hours ago an old woman was found dead in her bed by one of the neighbors. At first they thought she’d died of a heart attack, but when the ambulance crew arrived to pick up the body they found that her neck had been broken.”

“A burglary?”

“The woman was the manager in the building where Dr. Vergilio has an apartment.”

“Montessier,” McGarvey said.

“Looking for the cipher key in the doctor’s apartment. If he found it he’ll be gone by now.”

“If he found it,” McGarvey said, and he tried telephoning María but she didn’t answer.

Otto was watching. “Are you trying to reach her?”

“She’s not answering.”

Otto pulled up one of his computer programs that linked with a powerful telephone search engine at the National Security Agency, entered María’s number, and a half minute later her phone came up. “It’s switched on, but she probably has it on mute.”

“Could be she’s in the Archives right now and doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

“We’ll ask her,” Otto said, and he entered a couple of commands on his virtual keyboard, and a couple of seconds later her phone started ringing.

After four rings it went to voice mail.

Otto sent another set of commands and María’s phone started ringing again. “She’s at the Archives, but not on the ground floor, I think. The altitude function doesn’t work very well for small elevations.”

María’s phone went dead. She’d shut off the power.

“Insistent, isn’t she,” Otto said, and he sent another set of commands, switching her phone back on. “This time she’ll have to pull out the battery to shut down.”

The call went through and this time María answered on the second ring. “Who is this?” she demanded in Spanish.

“It’s me,” McGarvey said. “We have to talk right now.”

“I’m in the middle of a situation.”

“You’re in Doctor Vergilo’s office on the second floor of the Archives, but unless someone is pointing a gun at your head we need to talk. Now.”

“Just a minute.”

“This isn’t something that you need to keep from her, so put it on speaker phone. Otto is here with me.”

“Where are you?”

“Should be in Gibraltar in a couple of hours, and Seville an hour or so later. Make it six or seven.”

“Otto might get past passport control, but you won’t.”

“Both of us will. Can Doctor Vergilio hear my voice?”

“Yes,” the woman answered. She sounded subdued.

“Has Colonel León told you about Bernard Montessier, the man who we think managed to get his hands on Ambli’s diary?”

“Yes. He came to my office this morning and identified himself as a Paul Harris, a British writer of historical fiction. We checked him out on Google and he seemed legitimate to me.”

“We don’t know what his real name is, but he is an assassin, hired by a third party who wants the diary and the cipher key.”

“I know nothing about any such key. I’ve already told Colonel León as much.”

“If you told that to this guy, he almost certainly believes that you are lying. Have you heard from him again?”

“No.”

Otto was monitoring the call, and he’d brought up another of his sophisticated programs, this one a stress measure algorithm. He turned to McGarvey and shook his head.

“You’re lying, Doctor,” McGarvey said. “This man will not hesitate to kill you. This morning he killed the woman who managed your apartment building.”

“My God,” Dr. Vergilio said. “Why? There was no reason for it.”

“He needed to search your apartment and he wanted no witnesses. What did he find there?”

“Nothing.”

“Literally nothing?” McGarvey insisted.

“Nothing,” she repeated.

Otto hit a key on his computer. “How about the laptop with the book you’re writing about the diary and the key?” he asked reasonably.

“I keep it with me—” Dr. Vergilio said, realizing her mistake immediately.

“I think that he’s contacted you again, and told you that he had the diary and he would share it with you if you would provide the key.”

“Cristo,” she said softly. “He called and told me that the diary was coming by courier tonight — sometime between six and ten. He wants to meet me across the street in the Cathedral.”

“You agreed?”

“It may be impossible. The police are expecting another mob of rioters tonight.”

“But you agreed to the meeting?”

“Yes.”

“To which you will bring the cipher key?”

“I do not have such a key,” she said.

McGarvey gave Otto a questioning look, but Otto shrugged. It was impossible to tell if she had lied.

“He’ll expect it,” McGarvey said. “Are you willing to risk your life?”

“I don’t give a damn about some treasure buried in your desert, though Madrid is desperate. I want the historical record. I want completion of something I’ve worked my entire life on. Do you understand scholarship, Señor McGarvey? Do you know what it means to have questions without answers? Have you any conception about the moment of discovery — when you find a glimmer, just a hint of something that could possibly point you in the right direction? Do you know the meaning of ecstasy? Or its opposite, that of profound loss?”

“I do.”

“Then how can you ask if I’m willing to risk my life? Of course I am.”

“For what gain?” Otto asked.

“Knowledge,” Vergilio said.

“María, are you armed?” McGarvey asked.

“No. I didn’t think there was any need.”

“Tonight, if we are late, I want you and the doctor to lose yourselves in the mob. Don’t try to barricade yourself inside the Archives. It won’t work. This guy is too good. If he could crack a bank vault, he certainly won’t have any trouble getting inside a museum.”

“If we give him what he thinks is real, he’ll give us the diary — or at least a copy.”

María was playing both ends against the middle. It was obvious to McGarvey. She had her own agenda, her own intel, and she’d come to the states for no other reason than to use whoever she could to get to this point. No way was she going to back off now.

“We’ll be there as soon as we can,” McGarvey said, and he broke the connection.

“She’s lying,” Otto said. “But Doctor Vergilio wasn’t at the end.”

“Doesn’t matter,” McGarvey replied, resigned. “They’ve got a real chance of getting themselves killed tonight.”

SIXTY-FIVE

Al-Rashid drove across the river, and headed south into the commercial section of the city, with its docks and cargo ships in sight of the soaring Puente del V Centenario looming over the railroad swing bridge that squatted over the water. He’d plugged the address he’d been given by one of his contacts in Madrid into the car’s GPS and followed the directions to a small building in the warehouse district.

The types of men he’d dealt with over his career — the ones who could supply weapons, explosives, or just about anything else illegal under the laws of most countries — always seemed to live in the seedier sections of any big city, where anonymity was easy to come by. They were almost always under the radar and nearly impossible to find unless you knew where to look.

He parked in the rear and went through a steel door into a large workroom, about twice the size of a two-car garage. Workbenches and power tools and supplies — everything from lengths of steel pipe, rebar, rolls of wire, and bins of miscellaneous nuts, bolts, screws, and other odd bits — filled nearly every available square foot of floor space. Along a back wall were four tall metal cabinets secured with large combination locks, and in a corner two very large gun safes.

Stairs went up to a balcony on the second floor. A short man with an enormous belly, wearing filthy jeans and a black leather vest, tattoos covering most of his chest and arms, came out of a door, a shotgun in his hand.

“Who the fuck are you, and what the fuck are you doing here?” he said in guttural Spanish.

“A man with money come to purchase something from you. A friend in Madrid gave me this address.”

“Who is this man?”

“Señor Garbajosa, and he warned me that although you could help, to watch my ass because you are a cheating son of a bitch.”

“Did he give you my name?”

“The Supplier.”

The man laughed. “Son of a bitch.” He came down the stairs, the shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm. “You may call me Miguel, for now. Let me see your passport.”

Al-Rashid handed it over, and Miguel stepped back just out of reach and briefly looked at it. “Paul Harris. You sound like a Brit, but this is a forgery. Damned good, but a fake nevertheless. Is your money counterfeit as well? I would not be happy if it was. I would have to kill you and fence the bills for whatever I could get. Not my specialty.”

“American dollars.”

Miguel nodded. He returned the passport, and held out his hand.

Al-Rashid took a one-hundred-dollar bill from his jacket pocket and handed it over.

Miguel stepped back again and raised the bill to the light so that he could examine the water marks, leaving himself open for just a moment, long enough for al-Rashid to step to the left and snatch the shotgun.

“You bastard,” Miguel said.

“I don’t like guns pointed at me,” al-Rashid said. He unloaded the shotgun, tossed the shells across the room, and laid the weapon on the workbench to his left. “Nor do I like the men who do the pointing. Do we understand each other?”

After a moment, Miguel pocketed the bill and nodded. “What do you want?”

“A handgun, semiautomatic, no lighter than nine millimeter. A silencer, and three magazines of ammunition.”

“Do you have a preference? A Glock? A SIG? I can give you a Beretta. It’s only nine millimeter, but it’s accurate and easily suppressed.”

“The Beretta will do. And I’ll need four one-kilo bricks of Semtex and pencil fuses. And an accelerant, but not liquid.”

“You’re going to destroy something, then to make sure you’re going to burn it down, and you’re expecting some resistance.”

Al-Rashid shrugged.

“The Guardia will be all over this, so I’ll need to know what you’re going to hit, when, and why?”

“It’ll be tonight, downtown, during the riot. But that’s all you need to know.”

“I have to cover my own ass.”

“Do you have what I need?”

A shrewd look came into the man’s eyes. “That will depend on the money.”

“Name a price.”

“Fifty thousand.”

“Do you have what I need?”

“Do you agree to my price?”

“Actually I was prepared to pay more, but you haven’t answered my question.”

“Normally an order like that, especially during these difficult times, could take several days, up to a week. But you want these items this evening.”

“I’ll be here at seven.”

“Sixty thousand.”

“Seventy-five thousand,” al-Rashid said. He pulled two banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills from his jacket pocket, and laid them on the workbench beside the shotgun. “Ten thousand as a down payment. I’ll bring the rest this evening.”

“Agreed,” Miguel said without hesitation.

Al-Rashid turned and started to leave, but then turned back. “Do not cross me, Señor Meolans. I found you here, I could find you anywhere.”

If the man was surprised that al-Rashid knew his real name, he didn’t let on. He glanced at the money on the workbench. “Seven sharp,” he said.

Back at his suite in the Gran Meliá Colón, al-Rashid ordered a couple of Heinekens and a small plate of tapas for a late lunch. While he waited for room service to arrive he phoned Prince Saleh.

“Any word on Halberstrom?”

“He’s disappeared. Where are you?”

“I’m getting ready to leave Seville tonight. It’s too bad your people didn’t find the American. I would have liked to know why he suddenly started asking about you.”

“Do you have the key?”

“I will by this evening.”

“And then you will bring it to me,” Prince Saleh said.

“Of course,” al-Rashid said, and he hung up. He went out on the balcony that looked down on the busy Calle Canalejas, and watched the traffic. The hallmark of his tradecraft had been precision from the beginning. Attention to details. Awareness of even the smallest, most insignificant of details. The stray van parked across the street, the Vespa in his rearview mirror, a man’s eyes — the way they looked, what they were seeing, and the reactions in them.

Not many men in his profession — what he had come to accept as a fixer, which was a more civilized term than assassin — lived to retire. He had set aside something under forty million euros, and his retirement was something he had thought about for the past several years. But each year the prince had come up with something new, something needing fixing, and he’d always been generous with his rewards.

Time to get out now? he wondered. Already the risks he had taken were mounting to unacceptable levels. And tonight the situation could easily spin out of control.

One last fix, and then he would leave.

But it was the dark-haired woman he’d seen going into the Archives that bothered him. The Voltaires, he understood. The CNI of course, along with McGarvey and the CIA, also were understandable.

Which left who?

The room service waiter came. Al-Rashid signed for the bill, added a few euros in cash, and when the man was gone, he called for his car to be brought around, and he went downstairs.

SIXTY-SIX

María rode pillion on Dr. Vergilio’s Vespa back to the apartment building. The uniformed police were still there, along with an evidence van and several plainclothes detectives. They were stopped at the open gate.

“You may not enter,” a cop told them.

“I live here,” Dr. Vergilio said. “What has happened?”

A few civilians were watching from across the street. A second uniformed police officer came over.

“Let me see your identification,” the first cop said. He was a nervous, skinny kid who looked like he was still in his teens.

Dr. Vergilio dug out her driver’s license from her backpack, and María handed the cop her passport. She still had the pistol in her shoulder bag, but leaving the Archives she hadn’t wanted to go anywhere unarmed.

The second, much older cop came over. “What is going on here?”

The young cop handed over the IDs.

“I’m Dr. Vergilio, I live here.”

“Yes, I know,” the older cop said. He looked at María’s passport, then compared the photo with María’s face. “Ms. Delgado, what are you doing here?”

“Dr. Vergilio is the curator of the Archivo General de Indias. I’m here searching the records with her gracious help.”

“Sí, but what are you doing here?”

“Someone phoned and said there were police at my building,” Dr.Vergilio said. “I have valuable books and maps in my apartment.”

“I came as a friend,” María said.

“Wait here,” the older cop said. He went through the gate to the open door into the manager’s apartment.

A moment later an older man, in civilian clothes, who was tall, very dark, and suave looking, came out, took the driver’s license and passport, and came back to Dr. Vergilio and María, and handed them back their papers.

“I am Policía Nacional Detective Lieutenant Zubaro. I’m sorry to say, Doctor Vergilio, that something dreadful has happened here. Do you have personal knowledge of Mrs. Vallalpandro?”

“Yes, she is the building manager.”

“We know that. But are you aware of any family, or perhaps friends — men friends?”

“Lady friends here in the neighborhood, but I believe that she was childless and her husband passed away years ago.”

“No nephews, nieces?”

“Not that that I am aware of,” Dr. Vergilio said. “What has happened here?”

“The poor woman was murdered sometime this morning.”

“My God.”

María stiffened. Vergilio was not a very convincing actress, and the detective’s eyes narrowed a little.

“In fact I was just about to telephone your office,” he said. “There didn’t seem to be a robbery in Mrs. Vallalpandro’s apartment, nor in any of the others. We looked at yours, naturally, because yours was the only place that contained anything of real value.”

“Was anything missing?”

“Frankly, we cannot tell. It is why I was about to telephone to ask you to take a look.”

“I have a lot of historical documents.”

“Would any of them be worth stealing?” the cop asked. “By that I mean to ask, is there anything in your apartment that, say, an antiquities thief might be interested in?”

“Probably.”

“Then my question is: Why aren’t these items kept at the Archives?”

“I often work at night,” Vergilio said. “It is more comfortable to do so in my own home.”

The cop stepped aside. “Leave your scooter here, and I will walk with you.”

María walked with them through the gate back to Vergilio’s apartment, half expecting the detective to stop her. But he said nothing until they got inside.

“We touched nothing,” he said.

“I appreciate that,” Vergilio told him, obviously distracted.

María hung just behind the cop, as the doctor went immediately into the second bedroom where she opened several of the map drawers and examined the contents of each.

“Is there anything missing?” the lieutenant asked.

“Not yet,” Vergilio said. She turned and brushed past them and walked back out to the dining room, where she looked at several files in thick accordion folders.

For several long moments she stood almost as if in a trance, before she went to her bedroom, where she idly flipped through several other files, and a couple of rare books. When she was done she turned to the cop.

“Nothing has been disturbed,” she said.

“And nothing is missing?”

“No. I doubt that he was here.”

María winced inwardly, careful to keep her expression neutral, but she stood just to the left of the detective, and she could see that he had reacted to the mistake.

“He?” the cop asked. “Do you know who may have killed your building manager, and left no mark of searching for something here?”

Dr. Vergilio shook her head. “I don’t understand what you mean. I have no enemies. I’m just a simple archaeologist.”

“Famous in certain circles lately.”

“What does that have to do with someone coming here to commit murder?”

The detective shrugged. “There is a row of keys in Mrs. Vallalpandro’s apartment. For the apartments. The only key missing was for yours. So whoever killed the poor woman was here. Something here was his motive for the crime. And you said ‘he’ as if you knew someone who might do this thing, and why.”

“I don’t know. It was just a figure of speech. Isn’t it usually men who commit such crimes?”

“That is true,” the detective said. “But then there are exceptions.” He glanced at María, who held his momentary gaze.

“Nothing was disturbed here,” Dr. Vergilio said, digging herself a deeper hole in front of the cop.

“We know he took your key, so the natural assumption is that either he is a very careful professional who doesn’t leave traces of his comings and goings, or you are lying, or both.”

“I am not lying!” Dr. Vergilio shouted. “Nothing was disturbed here. Beyond that I know absolutely nothing, except that after last night’s riot right outside of the Archives and now this horrible crime I am shook up and frightened. You cannot imagine what an inestimable loss it would be for Spain if the Archives were to be seriously damaged.”

“I understand,” the detective said sympathetically. “But you must also understand, Doctor, that I am trying to do my job, which among other aspects is assuring your personal safety. Someone wants something that you have, and I think that you know who it is, and I think that your life may be in danger. Please help me to help you, and Spain’s priceless treasures.”

Dr. Vergilio shook her head. “I need to get back to my office. There may be another riot tonight and I want to prepare my security people and staff.”

The detective stepped aside. “I will provide an escort for you.”

Outside they passed through the iron gate to where the Vespa was parked when María spotted a man in the crowd across the street. She only caught a momentary glimpse before he turned and walked away. But she was almost certain that it was the man whose passport photo McGarvey and Otto had sent her.

“Is it possible for us a get a ride back to the Archives?” she asked the detective. “I don’t think Dr. Vergilio is up for driving her scooter back just now.”

“It’s not necessary,” Vergilio protested, but the detective disagreed.

“I think Ms. Delgado may be right,” he said.

SIXTY-SEVEN

They landed at Gibraltar’s International Airport in late afternoon, and taxied over to a private aviation terminal where they were picked up in a Land Rover by an older man with a badly pockmarked face in the black robes of a priest, who identified himself as Father Aguero.

“It was probably a very good idea that you are entering Spain from here, rather than flying to Madrid first,” the priest said. “Monsignor Franelli thought it would be best.”

“I’m known in Spain,” McGarvey said.

“But not as a representative of His Holiness.”

“Do you know about our mission?”

“No, nor do I wish to know. I’m here simply to get you across the border without being searched, and then take you to your hotel in Seville.”

They drove to the border crossing where they stopped at the back of a line of a half dozen other cars, a couple of them taxis. When it was their turn, a passport control officer in uniform came over. “Father,” he said respectfully. He looked at McGarvey and Otto in the backseat. “May I see your passports?”

They handed them out the open window, and the officer studied both. When he looked up, he nodded. “Do either of you have anything to declare?”

“No,” McGarvey said.

“You’re an American.”

“Cleveland Diocese, actually,” Fr. Aguero said.

“Their business here?”

“They are emissaries from the Pope, but their mission is classified. You understand, señor.”

The officer was getting suspicious, and the priest lowered his voice. “His Holiness will be making a visit to Spain, specifically to Seville in six months. These gentlemen are here to begin making the arrangements.” He shrugged. “In the present climate one cannot be too careful.”

Spain, like many other countries on the Continent, was beginning to have a Muslim problem — not with law-abiding people, but those with ties to Islamic militant groups. Elsewhere there had been threats on the Pope’s life.

“I understand completely,” the officer said. He handed back the passports. “But why didn’t you fly directly to Seville?”

“That’s the other part of the secret mission. His Holiness wants to visit here first and then make a pilgrimage, if you will, by motorcade.” Fr. Aguero shrugged. “Sometimes the will of a Pontiff is not for us to understand.”

The border guard nodded. “Go with God, then,” he said, and stepped aside so that they could pass through.

Once clear of the border crossing and past the rows of condominiums and tourist attractions on both the Mediterranean and the Bahía de Algecira sides of the narrow peninsula at the town of La Linea de la Concepción, they headed north to the N340 at San Rogue and then east until they reached C339, which was a narrow country road with very little traffic.

The day was waning, and Fr. Aguero kept glancing in his rearview mirror, as if he expected to pick up a tail.

“Anyone following us?” McGarvey asked.

Otto was on his computer getting them hotel reservations and arranging for a car in Seville.

“Not so far. Monsignor Franelli suggested I take this route rather than the main highway so that if we were followed from Gibraltar it would become evident almost immediately and we could deal with it.”

“Are you in the Order?”

The priest glanced at McGarvey’s image in the rearview mirror. “No.”

“Just a parish priest?”

“Something like that.”

Otto looked up. “We’re in,” he said. He turned the computer so that McGarvey could see that they had a two-bedroom suite at the Gran Meliá Colón, under the names Joseph Burton and James Schwartz.

“Anything on the police net we need to know about?”

“They’re setting up for another night of riots in the Barrio de Santa Cruz.”

“Lots of places in which to get lost,” McGarvey said, thinking of how he would do it if he were Montessier. The area had been the old Jewish quarter and was a rat warren of narrow, twisting streets and alleys.

The riot would provide a diversion, but if his mission was to get the cipher key from Dr. Vergilio he would need something more than that. Something more compelling, something that would force her to bring the key in exchange for the diary.

They went through several small forests that were broken up by small farm fields, some of wheat and some of grasslands for cattle. But most of the eighty miles or so up to Seville was open land of scrub brush and near deserts, until just south of the city the first olive groves growing up the hillsides started to appear.

Fr. Aguero held his silence. He was on a mission for the Church that he neither liked nor disliked. He was merely following ecclesiastical orders.

Traffic picked up a little after five when they reached the N334 highway outside of El Arahal, which turned into a divided highway about ten miles outside of the city, and Fr. Aguero began to relax a little.

“What hotel do you wish to be taken to?”

McGarvey told him, and twenty minutes later they pulled up in front of the grand hotel, and a bellman opened the doors for them and took their single bags. Otto hung on to his laptop.

“Thank you, Father,” McGarvey said to the priest through the open driver’s side window. “This is important. Lives are at stake.”

“They very often are with the Order.”

McGarvey stepped back and the priest drove off without looking back.

Seville smelled like Spain — olive oil, fish, maybe sardines, wood smoke, in the distance the spice saffron, and just now a hint of burnt gasoline and something else, maybe vinegar, maybe tear gas left over from last night’s riots.

Otto went ahead up the stairs into the central lobby under the stained glass dome, and checked them in while McGarvey picked up a house phone. “Paul Harris, please.”

“One moment, sir,” the operator said. The room number rang several times, before the operator came back. “There is no answer, sir. Would you care to leave a message?”

“Yes, please. Tell him that an old friend is in town, and would like to meet with him for drinks sometime this evening. Here in the hotel.”

“Shall I say a time?”

“Let’s say, eight. Tell him I have the key. He’ll understand.”

“Yes, sir.”

McGarvey hung up and went to the front desk and handed his passport to the clerk, who took an impression, and then handed it back.

They took their bags from the bellman, McGarvey gave him a generous tip, and he and Otto went upstairs. When they were in their suite, McGarvey checked the windows, which looked down on the street, traffic light at this hour. Later tonight things would pick up, especially if a riot materialized down in the barrio near the museum.

Otto had connected to one of his programs back at Langley.

“He’s here,” McGarvey said.

Otto looked up, his eyes round.

“In the hotel. The bastard checked in under the Paul Harris name he gave Dr. Vergilio.”

“Arrogant.”

“Yeah,” McGarvey said. “He thinks that he’s the smartest guy in the room. And probably the toughest, because if anyone catches up with him, he’s sure that he can take them down. He’s evidently never failed before.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Show him the error of his ways.”

SIXTY-EIGHT

Al-Rashid finished an early dinner of filet of sole, with a good potato salad and a half bottle of a local white wine he’d never heard of downstairs at the hotel’s El Burladero bar and restaurant. It was just before six-thirty when he signed for the bill. On the way out he passed a house phone, and for no reason he could think of, picked it up and asked if he’d had any messages.

“Just one, Señor Harris, about twenty minutes ago. Would you like to hear it?”

“Yes, please.” The prince would have called his cell phone, not the hotel.

The voice was unmistakably that of an American. An old friend, he said, but al-Rashid didn’t know who it could be, until the key was mentioned.

“… would like to meet with him for drinks sometime this evening. Here in the hotel.”

“Shall I say, a time?” the operator asked.

“Let’s say, eight. Tell him I have the key. He’ll understand.”

It suddenly came to al-Rashid that it was Kirk McGarvey, who had most likely got the Harris name from Dr. Vergilio, but the Americans knew that he was in this hotel too soon.

“Will there be anything else, señor?”

“No,” al-Rashid said, and he headed outside and went down the block and around the corner to an underground parking garage where he’d left the BMW, preferring to keep it there rather than with the valet for just such a circumstance.

Leaving the ramp he crossed to the broad Calle de San Pablo, and from there crossed the river on the Isabell II bridge and reached the Port of Seville’s warehouse district fifteen minutes later, well before the time of his appointment with the arms supplier Miguel Meolans.

He parked a half block away pulling between several stacks of shipping containers, rising twenty-five feet or more. The area was nearly deserted, which he found odd, unless the dock workers were heading toward the Murillo Gardens for tonight’s riot. It made sense because it was the working man who was bearing the brunt of the austerity measures.

He telephoned Dr. Vergilio at her office. “Do you know who this is?”

“Yes, do you have it?” she asked. She sounded excited.

“I’m on my way to pick it up now. Has the crowd begun to gather yet?”

“A few people are showing up, but the police are already here. Why don’t you come to my office?”

“No. We will meet at nine across the street in the Cathedral.”

“It may be too dangerous,” Dr. Vergilio objected, but al-Rashid cut her off.

“For you, if you do not bring the cipher key.”

“That wasn’t our agreement.”

“It is now. And, Adriana, do not tell anyone — not the policeman you spoke with outside of your apartment, and especially not Mr. McGarvey who is at the same hotel where I am staying.”

“There was no reason for you to kill my building manager to merely search my apartment,” Dr. Vergilio shot back angrily. “You found nothing, because nothing is there.”

“You took your laptop with you. Really very clever. Bring it tonight.”

“I do not have the cipher key.”

“You’re lying, of course. But tell me who the attractive dark-haired woman is? The one who was with you this morning at your apartment?”

“Just a friend.”

“Trust me, if something goes wrong, no matter what, I will kill you. The only reason you’re not dead yet is because you have access to the key. But I still have the diary, and if you won’t cooperate I’ll find someone to decrypt the thing. Who is the woman?”

Another woman came on. “My name is María León, I’m a colonel in Cuba’s intelligence service, and I’m here for the same reason you are. Is it possible that we could make a deal?”

Who she was did not come as a very big surprise. “What do you have that I might need?”

“Kirk McGarvey and his friend Otto Rencke, who is the special projects director with the CIA. I’m here with them, and I can divert them from you.”

“There is no need.”

“If you believe that, Mr. Harris, then you would be making the greatest mistake of your life.”

Al-Rashid chuckled. “You sound as if you are in love with him.”

“Puta,” she swore.

He’d hit a mark, which did come as a surprise. “I have the diary, Dr. Vergilio has the cipher key, and you promise to divert McGarvey in exchange for what?”

“A copy of the journal and of the key. Some of that treasure belongs to us, and my government means to claim it in the international courts. To do that we need proof of its existence in the United States.”

“Nine o’clock across the street in the Cathedral,” al-Rashid said. “And Colonel?”

“Sí?”

“If McGarvey is anywhere close I will kill you.”

Al-Rashid shut off his cell phone, and headed around the corner to the rear of the building where the arms dealer had his office, workshop, and possibly even his apartment on the upper level. The trash-filled alley was barely wide enough for a forklift to pass, and in any event the warehouses here were more or less off the beaten path, away from the more up-to-date bonded facilities.

The battered old steel door was unlocked and al-Rashid went in, finding himself to the left of the gun safes, just beneath the wooden stairs up to the balcony. One of them was open, and from where he stood he saw a dozen or more assault rifles in racks from the middle up, and twice as many pistols below. Shelves on the bottom two feet contained boxes of ammunition, and a couple of bins the contents of which he couldn’t make out.

The shop was mostly in darkness, the only light coming from outside through a row of dirty windows near the ceiling. But there was enough for him to spot a man on either side of the front door, their backs to him. Neither of them was Meolans.

Al-Rashid crept to the open gun safe where he picked out an old Generation One Glock 17 pistol, and a box of 9 mm ammunition, and keeping his eyes on the two men loaded the weapon’s seventeen-round magazine by feel. When he was finished he slammed the magazine into the handle and racked the slide back.

The men at the door turned, pistols in their hands, and al-Rashid fired five times, shoving both men backward against the front wall in sprays of blood.

The silence afterward was gloomy.

“I thought that you might try to rob me,” al-Rashid said. “But now that the odds have been evened, I still need the things I contracted for.”

He figured that the arms dealer was upstairs on the balcony, shotgun in hand just like earlier today.

“I have the remaining sixty-five thousand dollars, if we can come to an arrangement.”

“Your things are on the table in the middle of the room,” Meolans said from directly above. “Leave the money, and take them.”

Al-Rashid fired seven rounds up into the balcony floor, walking the rounds left and right.

Meolans cried out twice and fell to the floor with a heavy thud.

Al-Rashid waited for a full half minute until blood began dripping from the holes in the floor, and then went cautiously out to the stairs and took them slowly up to the landing.

Meolans lay on his side, the shotgun a couple of feet away, blood streaming from an oblique wound in his chest, and from two in his groin. He was in a great deal of pain, yet he tried to reach for a pistol in his belt beneath his leather vest.

“Actually it’s a bloody wonder that you lasted this long in the business,” al-Rashid said, and shot him in the forehead at nearly point-blank range.

He went back downstairs, wiped the pistol clean, and laid it on one of the workbenches. The Beretta, silencer, spare magazines, and the Semtex and pencil fuses had been set out in a neat row, along with two clear plastic bags, each about the size of a small loaf of bread filled with a coarse gray powder. The bags were marked “Mg.” Magnesium dust that burned with an intense white light. The perfect nonliquid accelerant.

But Meolans had laid out the things only for show, for bait, because he’d not provided anything to carry the things in.

It only took al-Rashid a couple of minutes to find an old canvas haversack into which he loaded the things after first checking the pistol to make sure that its firing pin hadn’t been removed, the bullets to make sure they were not blanks, and the Semtex and fuses to make sure that they were genuine.

He checked at the front door to make certain that no one was coming to find out about the gunshots, and then let himself out and went back to his car.

He would be on the road before ten this evening, heading for the border with Portugal. By morning he would be in the air for Jeddah, a man finally wealthy enough to disappear.

Before he drove off he made a call to a contact in the CNI.

SIXTY-NINE

McGarvey let Otto drive the rental Fiat 500L, but as he had expected the crowds radiating out from the Murillo gardens made it impossible to get any closer than a couple of blocks from the Archives. They pulled down a narrow side street and parked with two wheels up on the sidewalk.

“I want you to get down to the Archives as quickly as you can,” McGarvey said. “But don’t take any chances, do you understand?”

Otto nodded. He was a computer genius, not a field officer, and had never pretended to be one.

“If you get into a situation that looks dicey, make a one eighty and get the hell out of there.”

“Where will you be?”

“Around. But so will Montessier. I want you to try to talk Vergilio out of meeting with him. But no matter what goes down, I want her out of the Archives. Anywhere but there or the Cathedral.”

“What if she refuses?”

“Get the hell out of there and call me.”

“How about María? She has her own agenda, which means she’ll do whatever it takes to get the diary and the key. She’s already got a deal with the doctor, but she might try to make another deal with Montessier. And you know damned well that she’s armed. Probably got a gun from her people at the Cuban consulate here.”

“I’m counting on it. With any luck she’ll provide a diversion for me.”

They were standing by the car, a few people passing by on foot, a couple of them holding signs protesting cuts in teachers’ salaries. They seemed determined, even angry.

“Whatever you do don’t push her,” McGarvey warned emphatically. “You know what she’s capable of. Deliver your message, and then get the hell out of there with or most likely without Vergilio. Whatever happens call me.”

They separated in the next block, Otto heading directly toward the Archives while McGarvey angled around to the Alcazar fortress, which was a massive Moorish castle that nowadays served as a part-time residence of the royal family. It, along with the Cathedral and the Archives, made up a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The gathering crowd flowed around the buildings, gathering on the narrow streets that were blocked by the police to motor traffic surrounding them. No one seemed to be in charge of the mob, and there was no sense of a front line. But many of the people chanted the same slogan — something to the effect of returning to the old days — thus the second night of gathering in the city’s historical district.

Most of the sidewalk cafés were still open for business, though the antiques stores and souvenir shops were closed, their metal security shutters down. Young people were crowding around a fountain in one of the small plazas; some of them sat on painted tile benches and played guitars. Just like those in the cafés, the people not on the streets marching were observers not participants.

McGarvey more or less went with the flow of the crowd until he found a spot at a café within sight of the Cathedral and the Archives, just in time to see Otto show up and go inside.

He was one row of tables back and in a corner under an awning as much in the shadows as possible. It would be difficult for someone passing on the street, or even someone nearby in the Cathedral or at one of the windows in the Archives, to spot him. But he could almost feel the presence of Montessier, who planned on meeting Dr. Vergilio sometime this evening. The guy was a pro; he would show up early to make sure that the opposition hadn’t taken up positions to wait for him.

But from what little McGarvey knew of the woman, and from what he knew about María he didn’t think that any force on earth would stop them from making the rendezvous. And it was almost certain that María would be the one hiding in the shadows to wait for him. If she did it, it was very likely that she would get herself and the doctor killed.

Unless Otto could talk some sense into them.

The waiter came and he ordered an espresso. Two minutes after he got his coffee his phone chirped.

“Otto?”

“No, Monsieur McGarvey, this is not your associate Monsieur Rencke, but my name is no importance, except I am on the board of directors of the Voltaire Society, and since you are in Seville I assume that you are on the track of the man who managed to acquire the diary. For that we wish you bon chance.”

“The vice mayor was a member?”

“The woman was. And as you have found out our office in the banking district was a sham, nor did Madame Petain and her son have any importance to the Society.”

“How did you get this number?”

“We have contacts in the United States, but believe me when I assure you that we are not your enemy.”

“Neither am I your friend,” McGarvey said. “The diary you claim is yours was stolen from the Catholic Church.”

“Yes, the Order, who meant to plunder the fortune for itself.”

“A fortune that doesn’t belong to them or to you.”

“Who then?”

“Native Americans and Caribs.”

“Almost all of whom are an extinct people. To whom do you suggest the treasure belongs today? The Church who stole it from Spain? Spain who stole it from the natives?”

“Or you?” McGarvey asked.

“Yes, us. Because we have done good with it, and will continue to do good providing the Saudis do not get their hands on the diary and the cipher key and plunder it first.”

“What does Saudi Arabia have to do with this?”

“The man you have identified as Bernard Montessier and who I presume you’ve traced to his travels to and from Jeddah, we think works for a member of the Saudi Royal family. He is a finance minister, who controls an immense amount of wealth, and not merely from oil revenues, but from other dealings in the international arena. He would like to get his hands on the treasure; it is why, we suspect, that he contracted Montessier to find the diary and the cipher key.”

“Do you know Montessier’s real name?”

“Unfortunately we have not been able to learn it, though by now you must realize that he is a professional, and a ruthless man. If he manages to get the diary and the key there will be little we could do to stop him. At that point it would be up to your government.”

“It comes back to why should I help you?”

“Because you are an honorable man—“

McGarvey cut him off. “Bullshit. I want the real reason.”

“You have found out that the Society made a substantial payment to your government through a bank in Richmond, Virginia, before the start of your country’s Civil War. Without its help for the Union it is possible that the war could have been lost, or at the very least have dragged on for years shattering an already precarious economy. We sent the money to help your democracy. As we have at other times of crises.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Why? Because you no longer believe in altruism? Even though your stated motive in pursuing this matter was to avenge the needless deaths of those two students? Or because Monsieur Rencke could find the records of no other payments? Though I assure you more were made: During the First World War, and the second, and Korea — though not Vietnam because we believed you were wrong. You have not been able to find the traces because we have a banking system in place that screens such transfers.”

McGarvey wasn’t accepting any of it, and he said so, and yet he could detect no artifice in the Frenchman’s voice, only an apparent sincerity.

“You have become a cynic, and rightly so considering your past. But think about America’s role in the world — especially in the Western hemisphere in the last two centuries. People don’t immigrate to China, or Saudi Arabia, or Iran or Iraq. Poor Mexicans don’t usually head south to Guatemala, Belize, or Honduras — they cross the Rio Grande by the tens of thousands to find a better life for their children who when they are born in the United States automatically become citizens.”

“I know the history of my country,” McGarvey shot back, when two men in plainclothes got out of a dark car and crossed the sidewalk directly toward him. He broke the connection, enabled the password protection, and laid the phone on the table, his hands in plain sight.

“Señor McGarvey,” the taller of the two said politely. He held up his credentials wallet, while the other shorter, squatter man remained a step behind and to the left. “I am Captain Eduardo de la Rosa, of the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia. You are under arrest, charged with murder.”

SEVENTY

María went with Dr. Vergilio across the broad corridor through the stacks to a window on the opposite side of the building that looked across the street at the Cathedral, colored lights already illuminating its façade and bell tower. At just a few minutes before eight the crowds had grown dramatically, but so far it didn’t look as if any confrontations with the police had begun. A lot of people carried signs, and even up here they could hear some of the chanting.

Vergilio stepped directly in front of the window to get a better look, and María pulled her back.

“Bad idea,” María said. “If this guy wants to take you out you don’t have to make it easy for him.”

“Our meeting isn’t until nine.”

“He’s here already, believe me.”

Vergilio gave her a sharp look. “He’s not going to do anything to me as long as he thinks I have the cipher key to trade with him.”

“But you do, and so long as you hold out he’ll bargain.”

“But I don’t have it. I’ve been telling you and McGarvey and anyone who wants to listen that I simply do not have the key. Never did.”

“Then what use would the diary be to you?”

“Not much beyond the historical record. The government will probably be interested, though. And they’ll make copies and bring in the encryption experts, all in secret of course.” She shook her head and looked María in the eye. “When I was younger I would have fought for the rights to make an expedition to New Mexico, fought my government, the U.S. government, anyone I could. But now?”

“A lot of people have given their lives for this.”

“A lot of people’s lives were taken.”

They’d left the office doors open, and they heard the distant jangle of a ringing telephone. Dr. Vergilio turned away from the window and walked back across the corridor, María right behind her.

The Archives was deserted now, only she and the doctor, plus three security people downstairs were in the building at this hour. But the three were old men, only here to keep the tourists in line. The real security tonight was the police presence outside, and mission one for them, so far as she understood it, was to protect the Archives, the Cathedral, and the Alcazar from harm by the mob.

She reached the office right behind Vergilio as the doctor picked up the telephone.

“Sí?”

María tried to gauge Vergilio’s reaction, but the doctor only seemed a little perplexed.

“I don’t know a priest named Ringers. If he wants to see me tell him to come back in the morning. We’re closed now. And when he’s gone make sure that all the doors are locked.”

María held up a hand.

“Just a minute,” Dr. Vergilio said, and she held her hand over the telephone’s mouthpiece.

“Can you bring up an image on the security cameras downstairs?” María asked.

Dr. Vergilio brought up the program on her desktop computer, and Otto Rencke stood at the security desk looking up in to the lens.

María wasn’t much surprised. “Send him up,” she said.

Dr.Vergilio relayed the order and hung up. “Do you know him?”

“He’s a friend of McGarvey’s.”

“I’ll send him away,” Dr. Vergilio said, and she reached for the phone.

“No. I have a better idea.”

Otto showed up at the door a minute later. “We thought you might still be here,” he said. He came in, and looked around. “Neat place.”

“Is Mac with you?” María asked.

“He’s watching the Cathedral, I suspect waiting for the guy you know as Paul Harris to show up.”

“Won’t be there for another hour,” Vergilio blurted.

“That’s what he told you, but it’s a good bet he’s already there, or somewhere very close.”

“So it’s going to be a shoot-out between them?” María asked.

“If it comes to it,” Otto said, and he blinked. “Because sure as hell if you go over there and try to get the jump on him with whatever weapon your embassy supplied you with you’ll get yourself and Dr. Vergilio killed.”

“You don’t give me much credit.”

“And you’re not giving this guy his due. He’s a professional gun, probably working for the Saudis. He’s already killed the vice mayor of Paris and his mistress, along with the wife and teenage son of the Voltaire who came to see Mac in Florida. The one the CNI took out.”

“But he has the diary,” Dr. Vergilio said. She was angry.

“He won’t give it to you,” Otto said. “Think about it. This guy was the one who killed your building manager. Broke her neck, according to the cops. If you bring him the cipher key, he’ll kill you.”

“Puta, I don’t have it!”

Otto grinned. “I’m not a whore, or even a son of a whore. If he believes you, he’ll kill you, and then break in over here and steal your laptop. The one he was looking for at your apartment.”

Vergilio instinctively glanced at the computer where she’d laid it atop a pile of papers on the credenza behind her desk.

“Yes, that one,” Otto said.

“What do you suggest?” María asked.

“Mac wants both of you to get out of here right now.”

“To the Cathedral?”

“Anywhere but there. Go down to the train station, or even a police precinct station, but just get the hell away from here. And take your laptop with you.”

“It contains no cipher key!” Vergilio shouted. “And I’m not leaving the Archives, not with that mob outside, except to go across the street.”

“They’re not here to harm this place or the Cathedral or the Alcazar. Anyway, there are enough cops out there to make sure nothing happens tonight.”

“I want the diary.”

“He won’t give it to you, and you’ll end up dead,” Otto said. “And so will you,” he told María.

He turned away and took an iPhone from his pocket.

María pulled the Glock from the waistband of her jeans, and pointed it at him. “I won’t allow you to call Mac.”

“Shoot me and the guards downstairs will hear it.”

“If need be I’ll shoot them as well.”

Dr. Vergilio’s eyes widened in surprise. “What are you talking about?”

“You and I are going to meet with Señor Harris. You’re going to give him your laptop, after we load a flash drive with the cipher key, just in case. But when he produces the diary I will kill him and we’ll come back here and make copies.”

“If she gets her hands on the diary, she’ll kill you too,” Otto said.

Dr. Vergilio stepped back. “You’re both so stupid. I’ll tell you for the last time, I do not have the cipher key.”

“Close the office doors,” María said.

Vergilio was confused.

“Now,” María said.

“Don’t you understand what’s going on?” Otto asked.

But Vergilio went past him and closed the outer door into the corridor and then came back and closed the inner door to her office.

“Toss the phone on the floor,” María told Otto.

Otto did it.

“Are you armed?”

“You know Mac well enough to know that he doesn’t much trust me with guns.”

“Call the guards,” María told Vergilio. “Tell them that you spoke to the police, who want all of us to leave once they’ve locked up.”

Dr. Vergilio did so, and even though she was the curator it took her a minute to convince the man she was talking to to do as he was told. She hung up. “They’re going,” she said.

María switched aim and fired one shot into the woman’s forehead, sending her sprawling backward against her desk.

SEVENTY-ONE

Al-Rashid had worked his way down the street between the Cathedral and the Archives in the middle of the mob, which he estimated to have grown to at least ten thousand people or more in the last half hour. He’d picked up a protest sign someone had dropped, and no one, including the police, paid him any attention — his was just one face in a sea of faces. Even the haversack he carried elicited no attention.

About twenty minutes earlier two men had gotten out of a car in front of a sidewalk café and moments later they led a man in handcuffs from the restaurant, stuffed him in the backseat, and drove off.

He’d been too far away to make out who it was they had arrested, and he decided that in any case it wouldn’t matter. Whoever it was, he was out of circulation for now.

The problem of getting into the Archives was twofold. The first were the security guards inside, and a few minutes after eight three of them came out of one of the side doors, checked the lock, and walked away.

The second issue was the police, but none of them seemed to be paying any attention to the building, only to the mob. But a civilian carrying a sign and taking the time to pick the lock would stand out.

He turned and started after the three guards, who almost immediately split up and walked in three different directions.

The largest of the three, the one who’d locked up, headed left directly past the Cathedral and made his way through the mob, bucking the flow until he reached the nearby Avenida de la Constitución, where he passed through the police barricades and headed straight across toward the river.

Al-Rashid discarded his sign, and keeping his head down, crossed the police line and hurried across the broad avenue until he caught up with the guard a half a block later just at the entrance to a very narrow side street that was already in deeper shadows. Traffic here was almost nonexistent and at the moment no pedestrians were about, and all the shops were shuttered because of the demonstration.

“Señor,” he said softly.

The older man turned around. His face was broad, his hair beneath his cap white. He wore dark trousers and a coat with the Archives insignia on its breast. “Sí?”

“I have a pistol beneath my jacket and if you call for help I will kill you.”

The old man stepped back in alarm. “Is this a holdup? I have nothing of any value.”

“We’ll see. Down the alley, please, and you will come to no harm. I promise you.”

The Archives’ guard backed up a step, and looked around, but no one was here.

“Please,” al-Rashid said politely.

Resigned, the old man shuffled around the corner and into the alley. About fifty feet in, he stopped and turned, his eyes widening when he spotted the silenced pistol in al-Rashid’s hand. “What do you want?”

“Take off your jacket.”

For several beats the guard was confused, but then he realized something and he raised a hand.

“Your jacket or I will kill you. Be quick about it.”

The guard reluctantly took his jacket off and held it out.

Al-Rashid took it then shot him in the heart. The man fell back, dead before he reached the cobblestones.

Stuffing the pistol in his belt, he dragged the body ten feet farther down the alley and manhandled it behind several trash cans before any blood could leak onto the cobbles. Because of the effects of the suppressor the bullet had penetrated the heart but had not exited out the back.

He found a ring of keys in a trousers pocket, but not much else. No weapon, nor had he expected one.

A car passed on the street they’d come down, but no one was around, no alarms had been raised. Al-Rashid put the old man’s jacket on, walked to the opposite end of the alley, and headed back toward the far side of the Alcazar by a completely different route.

The crowd had not turned ugly yet; no one had started throwing Molotov cocktails like they had last night. The police stood their ground, but did not offer any sort of provocation.

Al-Rashid reached the plaza where earlier kids had been playing guitars and singing, but it was mostly empty, only stragglers arriving to join the mob. In five minutes he was back at the Archives, where he went up to the side door and waved at the nearest cops, who merely glanced over but then ignored him.

The door lock was old, and of the keys on the guard’s ring the largest one was the most obvious, and he was inside the building, in ten seconds, immediately locking up.

For a long time he stood stock-still in the deeper shadows away from the windows, listening for sounds, any sound that might indicate someone was still here. But the Archives building was deathly still, the only noise coming from the low murmurs and occasional laughter of the people outside.

Their silence was unexpected and somewhat ominous as if it were the calm before a very large storm. He had counted on more noise to mask the sounds of any trouble he might run into here.

At the far corner of the first floor, a large area was filled with long steel cabinets, slender drawers filled with maps starting in the fifteen hundreds. He opened several of the drawers at random, took out the maps, all of them protected by clear plastic sleeves and dumped them in a pile. He took a brick of Semtex out of the haversack and laid it on the pile of maps. He stuck one of fuses into the plastique but did not set the time. Then he spread several handfuls of the magnesium dust accelerant around the area. The fire when it started would be very bright and hot.

Walking around the long open corridor to the opposite corner that looked back toward the main stairs, he pulled armloads of books from the dozen or so tall stacks and dumped them on the floor, making another pile of what he knew had to be priceless material. He set another brick of Semtex with a fuse and spread more magnesium dust, then headed to the second floor noiselessly, taking the broad marble stairs two at a time.

If it came to it, which he expected it might, he would set the fuses and step back out of the blast radii. His intent here was to cause enough damage and make enough noise so that Dr. Vergilio would come on the run to save the one artifact she valued the most, which was almost certainly the cipher key for the diary. He was indifferent to the damage, though he didn’t consider himself callous enough to bother destroying the entire Archives, though if it happened he could see himself walking away with an untroubled conscience.

Upstairs he went to the side of the building that looked across at the Cathedral. The street was packed with people, but from his vantage point he could see the entire front façade of the large building, including its bell tower and its main entrance and the iron gates that were slightly ajar.

Dr. Vergilio had taken the bait, she was already there. He was sure of it.

Her suite of offices occupied one corner of the building. He walked to the opposite corner, and pulled a large number of books from the stacks and piled them on the floor in front of a window that would be clearly visible from the Cathedral. He laid another brick of Semtex on the pile and inserted a fuse but did not crimp it.

Halfway back to the offices, he piled another twenty or thirty books in front of a window, and set his last brick of Semtex and acid fuse but no accelerant. If he was caught up here he didn’t want to risk a large fire.

It was quarter to nine, and by now the woman would be getting nervous. Somewhere with her would be the Cuban intelligence officer he’d seen at the doctor’s apartment and had spoken with on the phone. She would be somewhere across the street in the Cathedral, but watching from a safe distance for him to show up.

She would come on the run with the doctor, but separately, when the fires started, and he would kill her. Once Dr. Vergilio had retrieved the cipher key, he would kill her and take it.

When the fire department arrived, he would continue his masquerade as a security guard and slip away into the mob.

He looked down at the Cathedral. Fifteen minutes.

“Do you mean to destroy this place for the key?” María asked from behind him.

SEVENTY-TWO

The police station housed in a squat unattractive building across the river from the Jardines del Guadalquivir had been nearly deserted when McGarvey was brought through a rear sally port and taken immediately to a small interrogation room.

His pistol, cell phone, Vatican passport, and everything else in his pockets had been taken from him, but once he was in the windowless room furnished only with a metal table and two chairs, all bolted to the concrete floor, the handcuffs were removed.

The arresting officer, Captain de la Rosa, sat down across from him. “You are working for the Vatican police now?”

“No,” McGarvey said. In less than a half hour the situation was going to come to a head, and he needed to get the hell out. “Nor am I working for the CNI, who wanted me dead.”

“On the contrary, Señor McGarvey, Spain is not your enemy.”

“In that case give my things back and let me out of here.”

“You shot four of our people to death, you son of a bitch! You’re not going anywhere!”

“Then let me talk to someone in authority. Someone from the CNI. Before it’s too late.”

“Before what’s too late?” de la Rosa asked. McGarvey’s pistol, spare magazines, and silencer were gone, but his cell phone was on the table. The cop picked it up and pushed several buttons. He looked up. “Nothing.”

“Seven-seven-Q-nine.”

“Is this going to blow up in my hands?”

“I’m expecting a call. The phone is password protected.”

De la Rosa entered the numbers, and immediately the phone chirped. He answered it. “Sí?” After a moment, he shook his head. “No one,” he said.

“Put it on speaker phone,” McGarvey said.

After a moment the cop did it.

“I’m in a police building not too far from you,” McGarvey said. “What’s your situation? We’re on speaker phone.”

“Are you under arrest?” Otto asked.

“Yes.”

“You need to get out of there post haste, kemo sabe, ’cause the shit is about to hit the wall at the Archives.”

“What happened?”

“Dr. Vergilio is dead, María shot her. She means to make the rendezvous herself, with the doctor’s laptop, which she thinks contains the cipher key. Or at least she’s going to offer it to Montessier as such.”

A very tall, ascetic-looking man, thin with wide eyes, a severe white sidewalls haircut, beak of a nose, and a long angular face, came into the room. He was dressed in a crumpled suit and white shirt but no tie. He seemed angry.

“Who is on the telephone?” he demanded. “Is it Señor Rencke?”

“Yes, and I expect that you may be Major Prieto, from the sound of your voice, and from the images Mac’s phone is picking up.”

De la Rosa reached to shut it off, but Prieto waved him away.

“Dr. Vergilio I know, but who is María?” the CNI officer asked.

“Colonel María León, Cuban intelligence. She’s here looking for the same thing you’re looking for. The diary,” McGarvey said. “Any sign of Montessier?”

“No,” Otto said. “After she sent the guards away, she shot the doctor and told me to leave. It was a present, she said, to Louise and Audie.”

“Where are you exactly?”

“In the crowd about twenty yards from the front entrance to the Cathedral. The iron gates are open. But listen, Mac. A guy wearing a security guard jacket showed up and went inside.”

“Montessier?”

“That’s what I figured. He was carrying a haversack.”

“Christ,” McGarvey said. “Keep your head down, we’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Otto canceled the call.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Prieto said. “Who is Montessier?”

“He’s an assassin working for the Saudi government, maybe for a member of the Royal family. We think that he managed to steal the diary from a bank vault in Bern. But it was written in code, and he came here looking to make a deal with Dr. Vergilio for the cipher key. At this moment he’s inside the Archives and unless I miss my guess he’s going to destroy the place rather than let the key fall into the wrong hands.”

“Whose hands?”

“Yours. The Vatican’s. Mine.”

“But you’re working for the Vatican.”

“Despite what it looks like, no. I’m working for no one. But, Major, unless you get your ass in gear you’re going to lose a lot of priceless historical documents.”

“Send a couple of your men over to check it out,” Prieto told de la Rosa.

“Almost everybody is doing crowd control,” the cop said.

“Then you go.”

“If he goes over there alone he’ll wind up dead,” McGarvey warned.

“Take your partner.”

“They’ll both die,” McGarvey said.

De la Rosa got to his feet, but he looked uncertain.

“Then what do you suggest?” the major demanded.

“Get me down there right now, and watch the doors and windows to make sure he doesn’t get past me.”

“You’re a murderer!” Prieto roared.

“Self-defense. Your people shot at me first when I went to ask them why the hell they had me under surveillance.”

The major knew that it was not a lie and McGarvey saw it in his eyes.

“I have a car and driver outside,” Prieto said. “We’ll go.”

“What about me?” de la Rosa asked.

“Organize the people already down there to watch the Archives as well as the crowd. Now, move it!”

“Better call the fire brigade to stand by,” McGarvey said, pocketing his phone.

Prieto nodded, and on the way out McGarvey’s pistol and spare magazines were returned to him.

Outside they got into the back of a black C-class Mercedes and the major told the driver to get them as close to the Archives as he could, as fast as he could.

Traffic was light this far away, but McGarvey didn’t think they would be able to get within a block or two of the place by car. He phoned Otto.

“I’m on my way. Anything yet?”

“No, as far as I know he and María are still inside. It’s possible they’re making a deal, because if the cipher key does exist — though Dr. Vergilio swore up and down that it didn’t — it’ll be on her laptop.”

“Once he finds that out he’ll kill her.”

“If he actually has the diary, I think she means to kill him. And she’s not bad.”

“Are you still in the mob?”

“Yeah, a little closer to the Cathedral entrance. But it looks as if it’s going to get ugly around here pretty quick. Don’t dawdle.”

“No,” McGarvey said, and he hung up.

“What about your Vatican passport?” Major Prieto asked.

“It was one of their soldiers from Malta who took out one of your people in Florida. Like you he was sent to help me look for the diary. They still hope that I’ll find it and the key and share it with them.”

“Will you?”

“I’ll share it with anyone who wants the damned thing. Let your people work it out, along with the Cubans, and the Voltaire Society — one of whose people your agents killed in Sarasota. Along with two innocent students.”

Prieto didn’t turn away. “I’m truly sorry it happened that way.”

“Your surveillance team weren’t sorry.”

SEVENTY-THREE

Al-Rashid held up at the end of the stacks, the Beretta in his right hand, a little blood seeping from the flesh wound high on his left arm. He hadn’t thought that the bitch would fire. She wanted the diary above everything else and she was evidently ruthless enough to do whatever it took.

“We can still make a deal, if you have the cipher key,” he said.

“I have the key,” María said from somewhere to the right, down the corridor in the direction of the offices. “But you said that you didn’t bring the diary with you.”

“No, but it is very close at hand. Produce the key and I will produce the book.”

“The deal is no longer that simple, Señor Harris, or whatever your real name is.”

“What are your terms? I am listening.”

“We each have something that the other wants. But you came here intending to kill me and Dr. Vergilio.”

“Only if you couldn’t provide the key.”

“You’re a liar.”

“Your terms?” al-Rashid said. He laid the pistol on one of the shelves, and began pulling books just below eye level and quietly laying them on the floor. “What do you propose?”

“Throw out your pistol and we’ll go get the diary.”

“I won’t do it. There’d be no reason for you not to kill me.”

“There’s every reason in the world. I want the diary and you’re the only one who can lead me to it.”

Al-Rashid had cleared about two feet of books from the shelf, exposing the row face in, on the opposite shelf. “I’ll take you to the diary, what’s to prevent you from killing me?”

“We’ll meet someplace public, where neither of us will have the advantage, for the exchange.”

Al-Rashid picked up his pistol. “What did you say?” he asked, but before she could answer, he shoved the books on the opposite side off the shelf.

María stood just beyond the end of the next stack, and al-Rashid fired three shots in rapid succession.

She fell back with a cry and fired four shots in return, all of them slamming harmlessly into the spines of the books on either side of the opening, before she disappeared around the corner.

The building fell quiet, except for the noise of the crowd outside. They had begun chanting something about fair wages, fair prices, fair humanity. Like most mob-led slogans, this one made no sense to al-Rashid.

“You missed,” María called from around the corner.

“Perhaps I’ll go over to the Cathedral and meet with Dr. Vergilio after all,” al-Rashid said. He was becoming frustrated. Job one was killing the Cuban bitch. “Perhaps she’ll be a little more cooperative.”

One of the bricks of Semtex landed on the floor at the end of the stack not five feet away from where he was hiding. He stepped back reflexively until he realized that the acid fuse had been removed.

María laughed. A moment later the long, thin pencil fuse landed a couple of feet away from the plastique and two seconds later it popped off like a flare.

“Cristos! My aim was off. Maybe I’ll get luckier next time.”

Al-Rashid reached around the corner and emptied the Beretta’s fifteen-round magazine. He ducked back, ejected the spent magazine, slammed another in the handle, and charged the weapon.

“Tell you what, I’m getting out of your way for the moment,” María called. She had moved farther down the corridor. “You might want to take a look in the doctor’s office. I’ll wait for you downstairs, and we can get serious about our options. The deal is still possible.”

Al-Rashid eased to the end of the stacks and looked down the corridor just as the woman disappeared down the main stairs. He waited another ten seconds then made his way after her, stopping just short of the landing. Again he was just in time to see her disappear around the corner into the gloom.

A few drops of blood had dripped on the first step, and more two steps farther down. She had been hit, but not badly.

He glanced down the corridor in the direction of Dr. Vergilio’s suite of offices. The outer door was open, and he suspected that some sort of a trap had been laid for him. But he knew that she was downstairs, and even if she’d found a second brick of Semtex and had placed it in the office, she would have had no idea how much time to set on the fuse.

In any event she wanted the diary, and she meant for him to see whatever was waiting for him in the doctor’s offices. She was using whatever it was as a bargaining chip.

And he figured that he knew what it was.

Glancing again toward the darkness at the base of the stairs to make sure she hadn’t come back, he sprinted down to the open office door. A few more drops of blood had fallen on the tile floor, which didn’t make sense unless she had been hurt earlier. But again there wasn’t much of it, so her wound was slight.

He eased around the corner, and swept the small outer office with his pistol, but nothing moved. Nor was anything or anyone behind the door, nor did he see anything that would indicate she’d laid a trap for him.

At the door to the doctor’s inner office, which was also open, he hesitated before he looked in.

Dr. Vergilio, a small hole in her forehead, lay crumpled on her knees, her head back against the front of the desk. The Cuban had shot the doctor at close range, but it made no sense unless she’d taken the cipher key for herself because the doctor had refused for some reason at the last minute to cooperate.

Back out in the corridor he returned to the head of the stairs to listen. But the only sounds were those of the crowd outside.

He turned on his heel and sprinted noiselessly past the stacks he had hidden behind to the rear service stairs that he took cautiously to the ground floor, where he held up again. Tall book stacks lined the rear corridor, framing the back door that opened onto the side wall of the Alcazar. To the right were display cases and around the corner toward the front were the rows of map cases and one of the bricks of Semtex he’d set.

Someone in that direction was talking. It was the woman and she sounded urgent.

Al-Rashid crept to the corner and made his way almost to the map cases, when he spotted María crouched behind one of them, her attention to the right, toward the main staircase. He slipped behind the last of the book stacks.

“… I don’t know where he’s hiding, but I’m telling you he killed Dr. Vergilio, I saw her body with my own eyes.”

Al-Rashid ducked back just as María turned and looked over her shoulder, a cell phone to her ear.

“I was hiding just around the corner and soon as he left I checked on her, but it was too late.”

She had to be talking to McGarvey. It was very possible, even likely, that he was the man arrested at the sidewalk café because of the tip al-Rashid had called to the CNI. But if that was him, it meant he’d been released. Or at the least had convinced someone to get back here. Time was running short.

“Yes, Otto’s right, he’s wearing a guard’s uniform. But he’s gone now.”

Al-Rashid had eased around the corner intending to shoot her, but he stopped.

“Listen to me, goddamnit, I’m across the street in the Cathedral. I followed him over. And I talked to him. I have a flash drive on which I downloaded the cipher key from Dr. Vergilio’s laptop. I told him we could make a trade, the key for a copy of the diary.”

Al-Rashid didn’t move.

“Of course we weren’t face-to-face. He would have killed me, and taken the key. I told him that I’d wait for the copy.”

The woman was playing both ends against the middle.

“I don’t know where it is, but he said he would photograph the key pages with his cell phone. He’s supposed to be back in ten minutes. And no, I don’t want you barging in over here, for all I know he never left. He could be hiding somewhere inside the church to take the photos. I want you guys to back off. I don’t want another shoot-out. I want the diary.”

Al-Rashid watched as she pocketed her phone and he stepped out from around the stacks. “I’ll have the flash drive, if you please,” he said.

SEVENTY-FOUR

Two blocks out they stopped at the edge of the crowd, got out, and headed the rest of the way on foot. Prieto was talking on a handheld radio, ordering the police to keep a close eye on every door and window of the Archives and the Cathedral.

“She could have been lying about where she was,” he said when he finished the transmission.

“That’s possible,” McGarvey said. “You and your people take the Cathedral, I’m going into the Archives. But I’ll need one of the cops to help me get in, because I’m sure that it’s locked up.”

Prieto relayed the order. “Someone will meet you at the front door.”

“Tell him not to go inside, because if Montessier is there your man will find himself in a shoot-out. And I want the guy alive. He’s probably hidden the diary somewhere and if he’s dead we may never find it.”

Prieto gave that order as well. “We don’t know what he looks like.”

McGarvey brought up the passport photo on his phone, showed it to Prieto, and then sent it to the major’s cell phone.

At the police line Prieto held up his open credentials wallet and they were passed through.

Before they separated the major gave McGarvey a hard look. “I have a feeling that you’re lying to me, that the Cathedral is a ruse. You want to take the bastard yourself.”

“Just in case, watch yourself.”

“If you find what you’re looking for don’t run, señor, because wherever you go I will come after you.”

“You already tried it in Florida.”

Prieto nodded tightly. “The next time it won’t be a simple surveillance mission.”

McGarvey angled left, working his way through the surging crowd that was starting to get ugly. A lot of the demonstrators held bottles half filled with gasoline, the necks of which were stuffed with rags.

In some spots the people had got to within fifteen or twenty feet of the police line, and the cops in the riot gear, batons at the ready, clear Lexan shields up, were clearly nervous. The chanting had grown louder and more urgent than earlier.

A cop in riot gear was waiting at the main door of the Archives. He had a Heckler & Koch MP7A1 slung over his shoulder by a strap. The small weapon, which could be used either as a pistol or as a submachine gun, carried a ninety-round magazine of 4.6X30 mm ammunition, the same as the older MP5, Room Broom.

“Señor McGarvey?” he asked. He was a sergeant.

McGarvey nodded. “I need to get in right now: do you understand English?”

“Yes, but the door is locked. I don’t have the key.”

“Shoot out the lock.”

The cop hesitated.

“Do it!” McGarvey shouted.

The cop reluctantly unslung the MP7, switched off the safety, and fired several rounds into the lock.

McGarvey pulled his pistol and shoved the door open with his foot. “Stay here,” he told the cop, and dropping to the tile floor just inside, he rolled left so that he would not be framed by the lights outside.

Except for the crowd noise the interior of the museum was quiet. Behind him the door slowly swung closed. To the left were display cases, straight ahead beyond the reception desk the main stairs led up to the second floor, and down the long corridor to the right low cabinets were lined up in precise rows and columns.

McGarvey lay quiet for a full minute, absorbing the sounds and smells of the place. It dawned on him that he was smelling something other than the dusty books and records, something modern and even sweet. Perfume. Chanel. María.

Someone to the right called out, but softly, the voice ragged.

“Kirk.”

McGarvey got to his feet, and sprinted down the corridor, making as little noise as possible, all his senses alert for Montessier.

María lay on a pile of what looked like manuscripts or maps, all of the pieces encased in plastic sleeves. Black dust, what almost looked like gunpowder, was spread all over the place. Blood streamed from wounds in both shoulders, both knees and her chest, just above her left breast. She was in a great deal of pain.

“No,” she cried. “Stay back.” She tried to move, but couldn’t because of her wounds.

“I’ll get an ambulance.”

“No, get back now.”

McGarvey looked over his shoulder to make sure that Monstessier wasn’t standing in the shadows nearby, waiting to kill both of them.

“Please, Kirk, get away before it’s too late,” she said, her voice only a whisper. She was desperate. “I’m lying on a brick of plastique and he’s cracked the fuse. It’s going off any second now.”

McGarvey holstered his pistol and went to her.

“No,” she moaned.

“Easy,” he said. He moved her aside as gently as possible, but still she whimpered in pain.

The Semtex was a one-kilo brick, an acid fuse stuck in one end. McGarvey yanked the fuse out of the plastique and a split second later it sparked, burning his fingers as he tossed it away. “Jesus.”

María said something in Spanish that he couldn’t quite make out.

“I’ll get help.”

She tried to reach for him but she couldn’t move her arm.

McGarvey took her hand in his. It was icy cold. “It’ll be okay.”

“He’s still here,” she whispered. “He took the flash drive with the key. But he can’t get out because of the cops.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs, I think. Be careful—” she said, and she died in mid-sentence, all the light going out of her eyes, her chest rising and then falling as if she was a tire that had been punctured.

McGarvey stared at her face for a long time. Hers had been an uneasy life, yet she was a product of the Cuban state. She was her father’s daughter, had been even before she had come face-to-face with him on his deathbed just a few months ago. A liar, devious, a manipulator, a user, a sociopath, a killer.

Now that she was dead he felt some pity for her. Some sorrow. Whatever she deserved, this wasn’t it, and yet he knew that he was being a maudlin fool.

On the roof, al-Rashid had spotted McGarvey appear out of the crowd and with the help of a uniformed cop shoot his way through the front door. He glanced at his watch. The digital timer was more than one minute past zero, and still there had been no explosion from below.

The woman could not have moved her arms to defuse the Semtex, so it had to have been brave McGarvey. The champion of the underdog. Yet Colonel León was an intelligence officer of an enemy state. It made no sense to his way of thinking.

His plan was for the explosion to occur, and when the fire department showed up he would descend to the ground floor where he would pretend to be a victim. Once outside he would discard the guard’s jacket and walk away. He had the diary, and now he had the cipher key. Once he delivered them to Prince Saleh, he would be paid and he would disappear into the woodwork. Maybe Thailand. Maybe even the Czech Republic where life after the Russians had become good.

All that had suddenly changed. First he would have to deal with the problem of McGarvey, and then he would have to set the fuses on the remaining two bricks of Semtex.

Only a small delay.

“You shouldn’t have left the ladder down,” McGarvey said from behind him.

McGarvey, crouched on the second to the top rung of the wooden fold-down ladder, his head and shoulders just above the access door to the roof, hadn’t expected Montessier to simply throw down his pistol and turn around.

“Ah, Monsieur McGarvey. You found the woman, and disarmed the plastique. How clever. And now you have me. So what’s next? Will you shoot me, or will you arrest me? Or are you open for a deal? Anything you need or want?”

“The flash drive you took from Colonel León.”

Al-Rashid reached into his pocket.

“Easy.”

He took the flash drive out of his pocket and tossed it down. “And the diary too?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t have it on my person this evening, but I’ve already made a copy and sent it to my employer. Surely you must have guessed that by now.”

“Put your hands together behind your head and lace your fingers together.”

Al-Rashid did as he was told, but slowly, measuring each movement.

McGarvey climbed the rest of the way up. He was less than ten feet away from the man, an easy shot even under the poor light conditions. He took out his cell phone. “María was willing to make a deal, so why did you shoot her?”

“I had no use for her. She had the cipher key and I took it. Except for you my work is finished here. I merely need to get out of this building.”

McGarvey dialed Prieto’s number, but there was no answer and after four rings he called Otto.

“Yes?”

“I have him on the roof of the museum. Major Prieto is in the Cathedral, tell him to get over here now.”

“You might have to hold on for a bit. It’s starting to get ugly down here. What about María and the doctor?”

“They’re dead.”

“Hang on, Mac, we’ll get to you.”

An explosion below on the street lit up the night sky, followed immediately by a volley of gunshots.

Al-Rashid turned to look over the railing at the edge of the roof, and in a flash leaped over it and disappeared.

By the time McGarvey reached the edge and cautiously looked over, al-Rashid had already climbed down to the level of the second-story windows. A shot from this angle was impossible, because if he missed he would hit someone on the street below that was shoulder to shoulder with people — most of them men, but many of them women and even a few children.

Al-Rashid, hanging on with one hand, fired six shots up, all of them slamming into the stonework, a piece of which caught McGarvey in the jaw as he ducked back. The caliber was small, almost certainly María’s pistol, a Russian-made 5.54 PSM, with only an eight-round magazine.

“You won’t get out of here alive,” McGarvey called.

Al-Rashid fired two more shots, and a moment later the sound of a lot of breaking glass came from just below.

McGarvey looked over the edge again, but al-Rashid had disappeared through the second-floor window.

Unless the assassin had a spare magazine the pistol was dry.

Al-Rashid got to his feet and raced out to the corridor and headed in a dead run to where the wooden ladder from the roof came out of the ceiling in one of the restoration rooms adjacent to Dr. Vergilio’s office.

He held up at the doorway and looked inside. He’d expected to see McGarvey climbing down the ladder, but the man wasn’t there.

Getting away from the museum was contingent on two things: First of all he had to eliminate McGarvey and then he had to set a fire.

“A deal is still possible,” he called.

“You’re not leaving here tonight,” McGarvey said from the shadows to the left. “I want you alive.”

“Then you’ll get your wish,” al-Rashid said. He fired three shots into the darkness, and ducking behind a cabinet fired two more shots in the same direction, when something slammed into his shoulder.

He turned in time to see Otto Rencke, with a pistol in hand just a few feet down the corridor, a cop with an MP7 a few feet behind.

Otto fired a second shot, catching al-Rashid in the mouth, driving him backward before he could switch aim and return fire. A third shot entered his brain through his right eye, and he fell back dead.

“Mac?” Otto called.

McGarvey stepped out of the shadows in the corner, blood dripping from his chin. He held his left hand over a wound in his right arm. “Damned good shooting.”

“Louise said I ought to practice up a bit if I was going to continue to hang around you.”

The cop had come to the open door, but he just looked from Otto to McGarvey and to the body on the floor.

“What about Major Prieto?”

“No way I was going to make it across to the Cathedral, so I figured it’d be better if I came here and lent a hand. Did I do right?”

McGarvey nodded. “You did right.”