Blood Pact (McGarvey) Read Online Free

is in danger, as are the lives of the other members of the Society.”
    “Send your own people to search for it.”
    “There aren’t many of us left,” Petain said. “In any event we are businessmen, not professionals.” He hesitated. “My life is in danger, and so is yours. Not because I came here to talk to you, but because you came so close on the Jornada del Muerto . Be careful with your movements, Mr. McGarvey. Trust no one.”
    Petain turned and left.
    McGarvey waited a couple of minutes before he got his briefcase and headed out. He didn’t want to catch up with the Frenchman. Even if the fantastical story were true McGarvey wanted no further part of it. Otto’s wife had been kidnapped by Cuban intelligence agents and held at gunpoint to force her husband to cooperate in a wild-goose chase that had ended badly, with a trail of bodies.
    Useless.
    He took his time walking the fifty yards or so back to his car, and when he reached it Petain had just gotten into his Lexus. Two students, a boy and a girl, were unlocking a couple of bikes from the rack nearby, and out of the corner of his eye McGarvey noticed a black Mercedes S550 with deeply tinted windows at the exit from the parking lot ready to turn toward the Ringling Administration Building and past it North Tamiami Trail—Sarasota’s main north-south thoroughfare.
    But the Mercedes was just sitting there not moving, not leaving the parking lot.
    Everything was wrong.
    Petain backed out of his parking spot and headed toward the exit at the same moment the Mercedes pulled out and turned to the right along Bayshore Road south toward the Ringling Museum.
    “Get down! Get down!” McGarvey shouted to the students who looked up but stood there like deer caught in headlights. He tossed his briefcase down, withdrew his pistol, and headed on a run at a diagonal toward the Mercedes, hoping to reach the road and block it before it was past.
    Petain’s Lexus exploded with a tremendous flash completely engulfing it in flames, flipping it up on to its roof, sending pieces of metal and burning plastic flying outward. A split second later the boom followed by the immensely hot blast wave knocked McGarvey off his feet, singeing his eyebrows, car parts flying all around him.
    The detached roof of the car, twisted and on fire, fell from the sky as if in slow motion, landing directly on top of the two students.
    The Mercedes sped past, as McGarvey managed to sit up, giving him just an instant to catch the first three digits of its Florida plate.
    He got to his feet, his ears ringing, his entire body numb. Stuffing the pistol back in his pocket he went to see if there was any possibility that the boy and girl could have survived.
    A couple of aides and a woman by the name of Carolyn on the Ringling Museum staff staggered out the front doors, blood smeared on their faces. The blast had taken out several windows in the two-story building.
    Other students and faculty came on the run from the direction of the bay.
    Petain was dead, nothing of his body left intact, and the students at the bike rack were dead as well. None of them had a chance. And whoever had placed the explosives in the Lexus and had set it off hadn’t given a damn what collateral damage they would inflict.
    Staring at the burning wreckage of the Lexus, McGarvey was brought back to the morning at Arlington National Cemetery where he and his wife and their daughter had gone to the funeral of Todd Van Buren, their son-in-law who’d been assassinated. Driving away from the graveside ceremony, he’d followed Katy and Liz riding in an SUV that had exploded, killing them instantly.
    He’d lost a lot of his ability to feel much of anything: compassion, remorse for the people he had eliminated in his work for the Company, and love for anyone or anything. And it had only been in the past few months, since the incident with the Cuban woman and the treasure that had been buried in the Texas and New Mexico deserts, that