“There are a great many stories about it being covered in gold with winged cherubim on the lid, but once again those are all hypothetical since the Ark was covered in a leather and wool parokta, or veil, at all times, and not even the priests were allowed to see it. At any rate, it was more than large enough to carry all the relics from Christ’s Crucifixion and later burial.”
“And you’re saying the Ark and all these relics within it were taken to the Amazon aboard the Santo Antonio de Padua? For what possible reason?” Grayle asked, laughing. “The whole thing’s just a load of tosh.”
Garibaldi continued his story. “The relics were taken by a group of dedicated and battle-hardened Templar warriors to the last secret stronghold of the Templar order deep in the jungles of northern Amazonia. The same place your grandfather and his White Gloves paid Percy Fawcett to find.” Garibaldi paused. “The same place these came from.”
He reached into the other pocket of his evening jacket and brought out a black velvet drawstring bag. He tipped the contents out onto the parquetry table beside Lord Grayle’s chair. A heap of diamonds cascaded out, some even larger than the single twenty-carat stone he’d shown Grayle before. “A kimberlite pipe so rich it has more stones than all of South Africa has mined in the last one hundred years. With this mine in your hands, you could corner the market in industrial-and gem-quality diamonds for the rest of time.”
“And if I was to believe this twaddle you’ve been handing me,” Grayle replied, “why on earth would I believe that you’d simply hand this enormously valuable asset to me on a platter, so to speak?”
“Because I’m appealing to your nature and your inclination as a businessman. You know as well as I do that the White Gloves, a latter-day version of the Templars, are just as much interested in money as the original Templars were.
“The Templars were no religious order, Lord Grayle. They were a power-accumulating and power-mongering bunch of thieves, murderers and blackmailers who used the Holy Mother Church and the Crusades as a rationale for plundering their way across the Middle East and back again. There’s really very little difference in our purposes here; the Vatican is as much in business as we are.”
“A business that’s been taking some bad hits on the public relations side of things. Child abuse, pedophiles, homosexuals and the like, I might add.”
“I assure you, Lord Grayle, we are quite aware of our own shortcomings, but like any business or any other organization, there are going to be bad apples. I’m also willing to lay odds that there are proportionately just as many so-called deviants among your own members of parliament and the House of Lords, or in the American House or Senate. People in glass houses really shouldn’t be throwing stones; there’s no telling what you might find underneath those particular rocks.”
“Touché, but why don’t we get down to brass tacks? What exactly do you want from me?”
“We need those relics; their discovery would go a long way toward bolstering the Church’s reputation.”
“What exactly do I get in return?”
“You tell me everything you know about Holliday’s expedition. I give you access to the diamonds, you give the relics to the Church and we both get Colonel John Holliday dead.”
12
Arriving in Georgetown after midnight, Father Francisco Garibaldi, traveling on his own passport once again, booked himself into a pleasant room at the Pegasus Hotel and got a good night’s sleep. Following breakfast he had a quick tour of the old Dutch Colonial city before heading to the airport and boarding an Air Guyana Cessna Caravan for the short trip to the town of Bartica at the mouth of the Essequibo River.
• • •
Dimitri Rogov, Steven Cornwell and Tashkin Akurgal waited above the trail in a blind Akurgal had built using mosquito netting, leaves and branches from the surrounding jungle. Beside them a thin stream trickled down from some unseen place above them, crossing the trail a hundred yards farther down the slope.
“Why don’t they move?” Cornwell said, irritated. The pinger on the GPS unit that lay at their feet kept giving out a steady, strong and unmoving signal. Somewhere on the long journey to this place in the jungle, Grayle’s people had managed to plant a GPS transponder in the thick nylon heel of Holliday’s sturdy, brand-new combat boot and into the tubing of the pack frame he used. If Holliday went anywhere on the planet, Rogov’s GPS unit would know it.
“We cannot wait here forever,” muttered Akurgal the Turk. He squeezed the head off a six- or seven-inch centipede, avoiding its flailing, long-pincered tail. “Stay much longer and we’ll be eaten alive.”
“If Holliday is going to follow in the footsteps of this Percy, he is going to have to get off his ass sometime.”
“Bloody hell!” Cornwell bellowed, slapping at his cheek. The bellow became a screech of agony. “Get it off! Get it off!”
“It is off,” said the Turk. He took out one of the foul-smelling cigars he favored, lit it with an old Ronson and puffed.
Rogov stared at Cornwell’s cheek: there was a bright red spot in the middle and a stream of puslike venom dripping out of the center.
The Turk leaned over casually and jammed the hot end of the cigar onto the spot, grinding it in. Cornwell’s screech turned into a bloodcurdling scream and he jerked away from the burning cigar tip. “What are you fucking doing!” Cornwell moaned.
“You struck an assassin bug. The bug struck back,” explained the Turk. “The longer the venom stays beneath your skin, the more it spreads. Some people who are allergic can die from the bite of such a creature. The only way to stop it from spreading is by burning it out. You should thank me, Englishman. I did you good favor.”
“What is that smell?” Rogov said, an urgent tone in his voice.
“My bloody roasting flesh!” Cornwell snarled, holding his neckerchief over the wound on his face.
“Not that smell, you idiot!” Rogov put his nose into the air. “That smell!”
The Turk sniffed loudly. Then his eyes widened with fear. “Fire!”
• • •
Holliday, never the most trusting of old friends, was particularly leery about friends who were still active mercenaries like Chang-Su Diaz, the ex-Ranger pilot who’d bought their supplies and flown them upriver to São João Joaquin. Holliday and Eddie had spent a lot of time on their upriver trek to the Gardens of Babylon going over the equipment with a fine-tooth comb.
Eddie found the first bug, buried in the pack frame, and after that it hadn’t been too difficult to find the one in the Magnum combat boot—the scratches around the heel had been a dead giveaway. Instead of destroying them, Holliday slipped them carefully into the pocket of his jacket. Knowing someone was trying to follow you was one thing; being able to fool them about your location was even better.
He assumed it was either Rogov or Grayle on his trail; not that it mattered—they were on the same team.
Early that morning Eddie and Holliday had scouted the way ahead looking for likely ambush positions, and it hadn’t taken them more than an hour or so to find the deep cut with the little stream running through it.
“This is it,” said Holliday.
Eddie nodded. “It is perfect,” he agreed. The tall Cuban slipped off the trail and up into the jungle. Holliday waited. Eddie reappeared a few minutes later.
“We were right, amigo. Twenty yards down the trail and above it, they have a . . . In Spanish it is an escondite de caza.”
“A hunting blind,” offered Holliday.
“Sí, and a blind man must have built it. The thing is very ugly.”
“Empty?”
“For now.” Eddie nodded.
• • •
From fifty feet above the hunting blind, Eddie watched as the fire he’d started with a can of outboard fuel and an emergency flare roared down on Rogov and his men. Eddie had the gas can in one hand, and on the unlikely chance that one of the men came uphill through the fire, he had one of the Stoner light machine guns in the other.
He could already hear them panicking in the blind as the thick gray smoke began to roll over them while the fire burned through the damp rain forest underbrush.
Below, on the trail, Holliday waited, kneeling on one leg, the futuristic Heckler & Koch MSG-90 sniper rifle balanced across his thigh. The smoke was getting thicker as it oozed down the hillside, and Holliday could hear the crackling of the flames.
He lifted the lightweight rifle to his shoulder and flicked off the safety, then thumbed the selector to single-shot fire. The flames were roaring now. He aimed, gauging roughly where their adversaries would appear. The rifle had a twenty-round box magazine and according to Eddie, the blind on the high ground was only large enough for four or five at the most.
Holliday watched the fire’s progress; he could see an orange glow from the dense smoke less than fifty feet above the trail; it wouldn’t be long now. A billow of smoke wafted across the clearing, and Holliday tensed. Suddenly a crouching shadow appeared, a moving, scuttling object almost invisible in the screening fog.
Holliday squeezed the trigger, aiming for what he hoped was center mass. A crack of sound reverberated from the rifle, but the crouching figure made it to the other side of the trail and vanished.
A second figure appeared, stumbling and coughing in the haze. This target was much larger than the one before—Holliday fired a second time and there was a scream, but it was the sound of a man barely hit, perhaps no more than a graze. The third man was obviously confused; Holliday could see his arms flailing in the smoke. Holliday took his time. The first shot hit high, throwing the man into a spin that took him halfway to the other side of the trail.
Holliday adjusted his aim and fired again and the man dropped. There was a flurry of movement as the wounded man was dragged away and a rattle of gunfire sounded from an automatic weapon. Holliday recognized the tooth-chattering drumroll of an AK-47 on full auto and dropped to the right, knee-and-elbowing his way backward down the trail, so close to the ground he could almost taste the rot-richness of the thick black soil. He found a tree and rolled behind it. There was a pause as the shooter changed clips and then another spray of fire howled along the trail. Then there was silence.
13
“So, what is your plan?” Akurgal said, staring down at the groaning man lying on the ground in the middle of their camp. Wisps of smoke trailed all around them, some of it drifting down around the floats of the beached airplane and out over the river. “Unless he gets to a hospital, he is going to die.” Akurgal ignored the blood dripping from his own torn ear where the bullet had clipped him, but there was no ignoring the wounds to Cornwell’s shoulder and right side. There was blood everywhere, and the blood on the Englishman’s side was dark and arterial—probably from his liver.
“Dear Christ, get me out of here,” whispered Cornwell, his eyes pleading, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps.
“Come with me,” said Rogov to Akurgal. The two men walked down to the beach and looked back up toward the trail. He kept his voice low. “If we take him back to Bartica, not only will we have to answer awkward questions about how he was shot, but we will lose Holliday and any chance of finding Fawcett’s treasure.”
“He will die if we leave him here,” Akurgal said.
“He might die anyway,” said Rogov. “We cannot wait on this forever.”
“No,” said Akurgal. “This is true.”
“Then we are agreed?”
“Yes.”
They went back up to Cornwell. The bleeding was even worse now, but he was still conscious.
“What are you doing?” Cornwell groaned as the huge Turk gathered the much smaller man into his arms. He took him thirty feet or so down to the edge of the river while Rogov, following, rummaged around in his pack.
“Taking you to the hospital, of course,” answered Akurgal. “Mr. Rogov has to prepare the aircraft for you.” He laid the injured Englishman down in the mud and stood back.
Rogov screwed the TROS Diplomat-II suppressor to the HK P9S from his pack and shot Cornwell twice in the face. His nose and mouth disintegrated, and the back of his head blew out into the mud. Together Rogov and Akurgal dragged the body into the water and pushed it into the current.
• • •
Cardinal secretary of state Arturo Bonnifacio Ruffino sat at the long table in the conference room of the euphemistically and somewhat evasively named Institute for the Works of Religion—popularly and more accurately known as the Vatican Bank—and stared up at the ceiling. It wasn’t quite a typical ceiling for a bank; in fact, most shareholders in an ordinary bank would have tossed out the CEO for wasting so much money on a space with such a poor location. The Vatican was housed in the Apostolic Palace in a building that once served as a jail for heretics and other nonsecular prisoners. Fast-forward several hundred years, and the ceiling of what was now used as a conference room was a good runner-up to the Sistine Chapel for exuberant decoration.
A single gigantic allegorical painting stretched across the ceiling, showing the Virgin Mary somewhat improbably wearing a papal tiara and holding a model of a church. Another holy lady offered the mother of Jesus a gold plate laden with crowns, a gold chain and an honorific decoration. In the background, Neptune emerged from the sea on a chariot, while in the foreground a snake wound its way through a patch of mushrooms.
The cardinal could figure most of it out, all except the mushrooms. The only time mushrooms appeared in the Bible was in Exodus when manna from heaven was being described, but a snake in the manna? It didn’t seem like much of an allegory.
The marble table was almost as ornate as the ceiling—intertwining vines and snakes, women carrying vases and floral motifs. It was twenty feet long, seven feet wide and was actually a leftover slab of flooring from the Siena Cathedral. Around the table were thirteen men, including the president of the Vatican Bank, the vice president and the chief financial officer, as well as accountants and members of the cardinal’s oversight committee. There was a fourteenth chair at the far end of the table reserved out of respect for the Holy Father, but as far as anyone knew he’d never occupied it.
“So, Cardinal Ruffino, how goes it with the negotiations with Lord Grayle and his White Horse Resources?” The query came from Francisco Neri, the most powerful member of the so-called Black Nobility—aristocrats with either a direct family connection to the papacy or ones owed a number of favors by the Vatican.
“Well enough, Signor Neri,” Ruffino answered. “One must step carefully when walking with dangerous men.”
“And he is, of course, Templarii, as we all know.”
“Grayle is a man of business before he is a Templar,” said the cardinal, “and he does not take it kindly that you have purchased every available share of his corporation you could get your hands on.”
“It has always been this bank’s practice to keep its enemies close, Your Eminence. What better way to keep him close than to buy him?”
“Or to make him suspicious of our motives.”
“You sit in your office and think lofty thoughts about foreign policy, and all the while the Church is the next best thing to bankrupt. Somebody has to think of the finances of Holy Mother Church or it will cease to exist.”
“And you think an interest in White Horse Resources will give the Church that sort of relief?” asked Cardinal Ruffino.
“A holding interest would give us a foothold.”
“Grayle will never allow it.”
“Then perhaps we should try for a hostile one. We don’t have the capital, but we are friends with enough banks to get it.”
“He’d strip his assets and dissolve the company before you made your first telephone call.”
Neri gave Ruffino a scornful look. “And thus destroy an enemy. It seems worth a phone call, Your Eminence.”
“Should I really take you for such a fool, Signor Neri,” the cardinal replied, “or your friend Archbishop Abanndando beside you?”
Abanndando was an immensely fat
man with a taste for handsome young priests, or even younger altar boys, when he could get them. More than once Ruffino had thought of placing an anonymous call to the press about this pig of a man. He knew nothing of real love, only satisfying his lusts. Abanndando suffered from asthma and wheezed when he spoke.
“Your predecessor Cardinal Spada knew his place in the order of things. He always followed the advice of this institution. He did not profess to know the ins and outs of his finance, Your Eminence,” chided the fat man.
Ruffino gave him a sour look. “He knew the ins and outs of this bank better than you know the ins and outs of an altar boy, Ab.” There was dead silence around the table. Abanndando turned the color of a ripe tomato and he began to wheeze and gasp so violently Neri had to guide him from the room.
“There was no need for that, Your Eminence,” said Vincent Lamberto, the chairman of the bank.
“There was every reason for it, Lamberto. Settling lawsuits about creatures like Abanndando is one of the things that have put the bank in this position. From my lofty ivory tower I can sometimes see the larger picture, and this I know already—a little more than seven hundred years ago we took Grayle’s forebears, and we excommunicated, imprisoned, tortured and eventually burned them at the stake, all because of money, all because a king would not pay his debts. This man and others like him have been our enemies for the better part of a millennium. A hostile takeover would only rain God knows what kind of horrors on the Church.”
Federico Mancini, the vice president of international banking, spoke up. Mancini was a force to be reckoned with despite his mild appearance and soft voice. Perhaps he was the snake in the mushrooms—the reptile at your feet you don’t see until it’s too late. “So what are you suggesting?”
“Extend the hand of friendship,” said Ruffino. “The Church needs allies now, not enemies.”
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