Blood Pact (McGarvey) Read Online Free PDF

room done up in bright nautical prints, and a formal staircase leading up to six palatial bedrooms, three of which looked over the Gulf and the others over the ICW.
    Captain Emilio Miranda, thirty-six, whose work name was Juan Fernandez, came to the head of the stairs, and held up for just a moment to listen to the near absence of sound, before going down.
    He was a slightly built man, more wiry than thin, with wide-set very black eyes, a dusky Spanish complexion, thin lips over which was a pencil-thin mustache. This evening he was dressed in jeans, sneakers, and dark T-shirt. He was a dangerous-looking man, which in fact he was. In his eighteen-year career as a field agent with the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia, the CNI, which was Spain’s central intelligence service, he had run successful operations, some of which included deaths, in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. His parents had both been English-language professors at the Carlos III University in Madrid, and subsequently his command of the language was nearly as good as that of his native tongue.
    He crossed the main entry hall and went back to the small service kitchen that opened on the multitiered patio and pool. Donica Fonesca, dressed in a black bikini, was tossing a salad to go with some baguettes and a large plate of cheese. She’d already laid out a couple of bottles of Mourvedre, a nice Alicante red.
    She was tall for a Spanish woman, with short black hair that revealed a long slender neck, pretty shoulders, and a more rounded than usual figure for a Flamenco dancer, which had been one of her covers. At twenty-six she’d never married, nor had any ambition for a family, though she’d never been shy about taking lovers—not since an affair with her college math teacher. She was a lieutenant in the CNI who along with lieutenants Felix Huertas and their second-story man, Alberto Cabello, made up the mission team. She was almost certainly having an affair with Huertas, but as long as it didn’t interfere with their orders, Miranda didn’t care.
    She turned and smiled. “I hope you’re hungry, I’ve made plenty. Some wine?”
    “Okay,” Miranda said, and he sat down at the counter. “Why the swimsuit?”
    “I’m going in the pool after we eat, I expect that we’ll have some company.” She poured them both a glass. “I’m glad I wasn’t there today,” she said.
    “It wasn’t pleasant, but you’re right, we may have the other problem coming our way. Señor McGarvey was right in the middle of it, as we suspected he might be.”
    “Was he injured?”
    “Alberto said he thought the man was on the ground, but we were moving too fast for him to be sure. In any event McGarvey is home. He just finished calling a number in Berwyn Heights. Encrypted Skype but the angles were wrong this time, so we didn’t get much.”
    “Our Washington Bureau thinks that his friend Otto Rencke lives there.”
    “That’s my assumption, but except for the town the number was blocked.”
    Donica thought it over. “We suspected that Petain would come to see him sooner or later. It was only a matter of time before he left Paris, and no one was surprised that he came here, given McGarvey’s recent history—and the little theft from Bern.”
    “We still don’t know who pulled it off, or even what was in the vault.”
    “Jacob’s diary?”
    “We can’t be certain,” Miranda said.
    “The analysts in Madrid are being overcautious, don’t you think? The diary is the only logical possibility. Now we simply wait for Señor McGarvey to make his move and follow him.”
    “If Petain came to ask him for help.”
    “He did.”
    “That’s another supposition,” Miranda said. “Wishful thinking.”
    Donica was vexed. “I don’t understand.”
    “We thought that Petain would come here to talk to McGarvey, to ask him for help. All we can say with certainty is that the Frenchman did come here, but we didn’t have the chance to