Templar Legion

by Paul Christopher

  Peggy let out a dry laugh. “A witch doctor with a degree in tropical diseases from the Université de Paris. That’s one well-educated witch doctor.”

  “So you know something about Amobe Limbani,” said the black man, a glimmer of humor in his tired old eyes. “What do you think you know from what you have seen of him?”

  “I think he’s really good at changing the subject,” said Rafi, biting into his fruit. “Why don’t you answer Doc’s question?”

  “Doc?” Limbani said quizzically. “You are also a doctor, then? You move very much like a trained soldier.”

  “You’re doing it again,” said Holliday, laughing.

  “Doing what?” Limbani said, eyes wide and innocent.

  “Changing the subject,” said Peggy.

  “What was the question?”

  “You know what the question was,” said Holliday. “How did you know who we were?”

  “That question? The answer to that question is very simple.” Limbani shrugged. “I had a spy.”

  “Who?” Holliday asked.

  “Think about it for a moment,” said Limbani. “It will come to you.”

  It was a basic lesson he’d taught to his lieutenants in his days at West Point; sometimes you got so involved with the day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute tactics of a focused situation you lost sight of the overall strategy, the big picture that was going to win you the battle or even the war.

  Ever since they’d landed at Umm Rawq the big picture had faded into the background as they dodged bullets and blowguns downriver. When he actually gave himself a moment to think about it, the identity of Limbani’s spy was pretty obvious.

  “Mutwakil Osman,” said Holliday. “He’s your spy.”

  “The floatplane guy?” Peggy said.

  “The floatplane guy.” Holliday nodded.

  “Quite right,” said Limbani. “He has been friend to the Umufo omhloshana since he first began flying upriver. A firm believer in leaving people alone, of letting them make their own destinies. He has brought medicine to us and some other necessities from time to time, but most important, he gives us an eye on what is going in the outside world that could impact us.”

  “Things like Archibald Ives.”

  “Precisely,” said Limbani with a sigh. “A mineral engineer and prospector on this land could very well signal the end of these people, the end of everything here.”

  “That may have started already,” said Holliday. “In case you aren’t already aware of it, Ives has been murdered and Sir James Matheson is interested in the land here. He owns one of the biggest resource development companies in the world.”

  “I know who he is,” said Limbani.

  “He’s also interested in us,” said Rafi. “He’s become aware that we were interested in the area as well, but for different reasons.”

  “I know your reasons, too,” said Limbani, sighing again and looking every inch the old man that he was. “King Solomon’s Mines, the queen of Sheba, perhaps even Mansa Musa and Timbuktu. A great Technicolor fantasy of history that belongs with George Lucas and Indiana Jones. Cowboy science.”

  Holliday waited for Rafi’s usual short-tempered answer to critics of his slightly more narrative and intuitive attitude toward archaeology but Rafi was remarkably polite.

  “I assure you, Doctor, it’s less about the mines and the legends than it is about the extraordinary people who followed those old stories. A tomb in Ethiopia led us here, not some ‘Secrets of the Rosetta Stone’ tract they give away for free on the Internet. The tomb was that of a Templar Knight named Julian de la Roche-Guillaume who searched for something that a Viking had searched for five hundred years before and which a Roman legionnaire had died for a thousand years before that. The stories and the legends get told and told again for a thousand years or two, but there’s always a little truth left, just enough truth sometimes for the dreamers to believe in. Heinrich Schliemann read Homer, another dreamer, and found Troy.” Rafi shook his head firmly. “I’m far more interested in the dreamers than the dream, Dr. Limbani.”

  Limbani gave him a slightly skeptical look, then shrugged. “A very nice little speech,” said the older man. “How often have you recited it?”

  “Once, to you.”

  Limbani scrutinized the young archaeologist for a long moment, then spoke. “If that is true, Dr. Wanounou, then you are in for a great surprise when we reach our destination, a very great surprise indeed.”

  The Brocklebank property was enormous, hidden behind a gated ten-foot-high stone wall and sitting on at least five acres of gardens. The house itself was a massive combination Tudor and Arts and Crafts–style brick-and-plank mansion with twelve thousand feet of living space, eleven bathrooms, three kitchens, sixteen bedrooms, eight of which had their own wood-burning fireplace, and one hundred and sixteen leaded-glass windows, some with colored panes and some without.

  As the limousine drove through the gates and up the drive after being buzzed in, Saint-Sylvestre was astounded to see how well the gardens had been tended. Either the Brocklebank ladies had an army of gardeners or they were obsessively compulsive about flowering plants.

  The limousine went down the long drive and pulled up in front of the covered entranceway. Saint-Sylvestre leaned forward and spoke over the seat to the uniformed driver. “Wait here; I doubt if I’ll be more than twenty minutes, tops.”

  “Whatever you say, sir,” said the limo driver.

  Saint-Sylvestre grabbed the attaché case, stepped out of the limo, went up the flagstone steps of the covered entranceway and rang the doorbell. Inside he could faintly hear the echoing sound of Big Ben. A full minute later he heard the clicking of heels and the door opened. The old woman who stood there looked shocked and surprised at seeing the color of Gesler’s skin, but she recovered swiftly. A woman born in times when people of Saint-Silvestre’s skin color came to the back door, not the front.

  “Herr Gesler?” she asked. Her face was creased and pink with powder, her gray hair done up in a swirling bun that would have looked perfectly all right on a woman with a bustle dress and a big floppy hat. She was wearing half-heeled dark pumps and a perfectly tailored dark blue suit with white piping that had to be Chanel from the fifties. She had an enormous patent-leather purse over her arm. She bore a close resemblance to the late queen mother. No little old lady in a housedress here; this one was dressed to the nines.

  “Miss Brocklebank?” Saint-Sylvestre responded, with a little bow. He thought about kissing her outstretched hand but decided it would be a little over the top, but not by much. He shook it instead.

  “Indeed,” she said. “My sister, Margaret, is in the library; shall I fetch her?”

  “It occurred to me that we could finish up our business before we went to tea, Miss Brocklebank. We could make it a small celebration afterward, without any pressure.”

  “Well,” said the old woman, “I wouldn’t want us to be late. . . .” She didn’t sound eager to be denied her pleasure; the Brocklebanks were obviously not used to being told no, even when it was going to put large sums of money into their pockets.

  “Ten minutes is all it will require; I promise you,” said Saint-Sylvestre firmly. “I only need to countersign the check and have you initial and sign the agreements again.”

  “I thought we’d already done that—the agreements, I mean.”

  “You have,” said Saint-Sylvestre, purposely adopting the slightly condescending tone often used with the elderly and infirm. The old woman got the “a little forgetful, are we?” tenor of his voice immediately. She bristled but backed off.

  “If you insist, Herr Gesler,” she said, her voice brittle, then stepped aside.

  “I’ll make this as painless as possible, Miss Brocklebank,” he said, stepping into the house.

  Betty Brocklebank led him across a short foyer and into the grand hall, all glowing inlaid wood and parquetry with a gigantic fieldstone fireplace beside the twisting stairway, the severed heads of a
number of North American game animals hanging from the walls, glass eyes staring at nothing. The floor was covered by an enormous Persian carpet that was obviously the real thing.

  They turned right into a large room, floor covered by smaller throw rugs, two walls covered by built-in oak bookcases, the third wall holding another big fireplace, this one gas, and the fourth wall taken up by a picture window of leaded panes that looked out onto the front gardens.

  The outer row of windowpanes framed the view, with stained glass showing what had to be the Brocklebank coat of arms: a complicated device of swans, coronets and swords in blue, green, purple and gold.

  The furniture was colonial India or Siam with huge wicker fan chairs and bamboo side tables. A second old woman sat on a curving rattan couch set under the window and upholstered in a dark blue fabric set with huge, colorful magnolia blossoms.

  The old lady looked exactly like Betty except for her hair, which was permed into tight curls, the white shaded slightly blue, pink scalp showing underneath. Her suit was the same as Betty Brocklebank’s, the colors reversed, white with blue piping.

  “Margie,” said Betty Brocklebank, “this is Mr. Gesler from the bank in Switzerland. Mr. Gesler, my sister, Margaret Brocklebank.”

  “She was born three and a half minutes before me, which makes her the elder, so she thinks she’s also the wiser, Mr. Gesler.” Margie Brocklebank gave him a curious look. “I didn’t know they had Negroes in Europe now. I don’t remember seeing any there before the war.”

  “My mother was from Alexandria in Egypt. She met my father at the University of Zurich. He was taking mathematics; her degree was in physics,” Saint-Sylvestre said blandly, pulling the lies out of the air like plucking cherries off a tree.

  “I see,” said Margie Brocklebank, obviously not seeing at all. A black man in her living room was difficult enough to fathom; a black woman taking a degree, let alone getting it, was too far out of the box for her to conceive. Saint-Sylvestre sat down in one of the fan-backed chairs opposite the couch, a bamboo-and-glass coffee table between them.

  “I’ll fetch the papers, then, shall I?” Betty Brocklebank said. She didn’t wait for an answer and left the room, her footsteps clattering as they crossed the parquet between the carpets.

  “I was valedictorian at Crofton House, you know,” said Margie Brocklebank, whispering. “Betty was only salutatorian.”

  “Is that so?” Saint-Sylvestre said. He didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about.

  “Yes, it is,” said Margie Brocklebank.

  Betty Brocklebank came back into the room with an accordion file in her hands. She sat down on the couch beside her sister and put the file case on the coffee table. “Has she been telling you her ‘I was the valedictorian’ story, Mr. Gesler?”

  Saint-Sylvestre said nothing. Margaret Brocklebank blushed. Her sister removed her hat, smiling triumphantly.

  “Of course she was,” said Betty Brocklebank. “It’s her favorite except for the one about Mickey Hill standing me up at the Crofton House–St. George’s Prom.”

  “Well, he did stand you up.” The younger sister pouted.

  “At least I was invited,” said Betty Brocklebank sourly. She turned to Saint-Sylvestre. “Shall we get down to business, Mr. Gesler?”

  “Of course,” said Saint-Sylvestre. He lifted the attaché case onto the coffee table, unsnapped the locks and opened the case. He reached inside, took out the H&K P30 and shot both women twice in the chest. True to his word he’d made his business as painless as possible.

  Never one for half measures, he stood up, went around the coffee table and shot the women again, one round to the head each. He wiped down the pistol carefully using the hem of Betty Brocklebank’s skirt and laid it on the coffee table. When they ran the pistol’s serial number it would slowly but inexorably lead back to Allen Faulkener, and from there to Matheson, hopefully putting the cat among the pigeons. That done, he emptied the contents of the accordion file into the attaché case, closed the case up and got down to work. The entire fate of Silver Brand Mining was now in his hands.

  Fifteen minutes later Saint-Sylvestre stood on the covered porch of the Brocklebank house and breathed in a lungful of fresh air. In another fifteen minutes, with the gas jets wide-open and the pilot lights snuffed out in the kitchen and the fireplaces throughout the house, the simple cigarette-and-matchbox fuse he’d left behind would turn the entire downstairs of the old house into an inferno. It would take the local fire department another ten minutes to answer the call, and ten minutes after that for the news stations to receive the news.

  This gave him a forty-minute window to take the limousine back to the Hotel Vancouver and get a taxicab to the airport. If everything went reasonably well the limousine driver wouldn’t connect his last passenger to the fire on the Crescent for at least an hour or so, and by then the inimitable Leonhard Euhler would have been put to rest for good.

  By the time Saint-Sylvestre reached the bottom of the steps the limousine driver was out of the car and standing beside the open rear door.

  “Thank you,” said Saint-Sylvestre.

  The limo driver dipped into his pocket and handed the policeman what appeared to be a fairly clean, crumpled tissue.

  “Got a spot of something on your tie,” said the man.

  “Thanks again,” said Saint-Sylvestre. He dipped his head and sat down, the limo driver closing in behind him. Saint-Sylvestre lifted his tie and wiped the small gelatinous blob of Margie Brocklebank’s brain tissue off the silk with the tissue. The limo driver climbed behind the wheel and they headed off.

  25

  They reached Kazaba Falls and the valley of the Pale Strangers at sunset the following day. They stood on the cliffs beside the smooth, hypnotic curve of the water as it raced over the precipice with a thunderous, all-consuming roar, a veil of mist rising like rainbow-tinted fog all around them, dampening the stone. The lowering sun had tinted all that it touched a shade of copper-gold.

  “This is it!” Holliday said, raising his voice above the hammering bellow of the waterfall. “Your Templar Knight’s vision of Eden.”

  It was the mural in the tomb on the island brought to life—the three separate cascades of the falls, each one flanked by a jutting prow of dark stone, the valley broken by the silver snake of the river far below and the three hills rising out of the jungle like the humped torsos of gigantic prehistoric beasts. It was the vindication of everything Rafi had speculated on since they’d left Jerusalem.

  “The only things missing are those high-sided dugouts in the river and the miners with their baskets of ore winding down the middle hill.” Rafi nodded.

  “You sound as though you have been here before,” said Limbani, who had been standing behind them, listening.

  “A Templar Knight came here five hundred years ago,” said Rafi. “He painted this place as a fresco on the walls of his tomb. His name was . . .”

  “Julian de la Roche-Guillaume,” said Limbani, nodding.

  Rafi turned to him, startled. “Now, don’t tell me you learned that from Osman, our Catalina flier, because I never mentioned it around him.”

  “I knew the name long before I ever met Osman,” said Limbani with a wistful smile. “I knew it as a child when my father brought me here.”

  “Your father knew of this place?” Holliday said.

  “And his father before him.” Limbani nodded. “For more than a hundred years our family has been to the Umufo omhloshana what Mutwakil Osman, my spy, has been to me—their only connection with the present day and the outside world. It was because of that my father became governor of Vakaga province; this part of the country was prime to be developed: roads through the jungle, talk of damming the river and even using the Kazaba Falls for hydroelectric power. ”

  “The Umufo omhloshana would have been discovered and all their secrets and their legacy destroyed forever. A proud people turned to government handouts and squalor. When my father was murdered by t
he government I took his place. It is my sacred duty. To the people of this valley I am the Umlondolozi, the Protector.”

  “Conan Doyle’s Lost World,” said Rafi.

  “More like Turok, Son of Stone,” said Holliday.

  “What on earth is that?” Peggy said.

  “A comic book I used to read when I was a kid,” answered Holliday. “Uncle Henry used to buy them for me when I visited during the summer. You’re way too young.”

  “Come,” said Limbani. “We must hurry now; the sun will set soon and the pathway down the cliffs is narrow and quite treacherous in the darkness.”

  They made their descent slowly, the path no more than eight or nine feet wide at best, some pounded earth but most of the way was wide stone steps worn smooth by uncounted centuries of travelers’ feet.

  “The steps were carved by the slaves of Dinga Cisse, first warrior king of Wagadou in the seventh century,” said Limbani, reading Holliday’s mind as he led the way downward. “Although the warrior kings, or ‘ghanas,’ had mined the hills in the valley for a thousand years before that.”

  “What about King Solomon?” asked Peggy, walking behind Holliday in the long file down the cliff.

  “The ghanas of what became Mali were eventually overthrown by the ‘mansas,’ or kings of that empire, one of whom was Sogolon Djata, or in English, King Solomon, and no relation at all to Solomon, king of the house of David. I am afraid that Christians, Jews and Muslims think history began with the Old Testament, but I can assure you, Africa’s history is a great deal older than that.”

  They continued down the precarious cliff trail, which fortunately began to widen slightly. Staring down at the jungle far below them Holliday was suddenly aware that there were strange shapes in the landscape that didn’t quite seem to make sense. He also realized that it was only the setting sun that was giving the secret away, throwing hard shadows where there shouldn’t have been any. Going lower still, perhaps fifty feet from the jungle floor, he saw that it was. “That’s incredible,” he said admiringly. “You’ve got half the valley camouflaged! What are you hiding down here?”