The Sword of the Templars t-1

by Paul Christopher

  Holliday took a small Maglite from the pocket of his jacket. He went down two steps and turned it on. The steps were no more than a foot wide and very steep.

  “Careful,” he said, looking back over his shoulder. “Take it slow.”

  He went down the steps, holding the light high, the palm of his free hand against the stone wall for balance as he descended. Peggy followed cautiously. At the bottom of the steps there was a small vaulted vestibule and a formidable iron door. The door had four immense strap hinges on the left, secured with thumb-sized rivets, and an old-fashioned ward lock on the right with a latch above it. Peggy tried the door.

  “Locked.”

  “Nobody carries a key that big around with them,” said Holliday. He swept the beam of light around the small area. There was nothing. No potted plant, no convenient rock or welcome mat, no chink in the mortar of the close-set stones.

  “No key here,” said Peggy. “We’re out of luck.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Explain please.”

  “Benedict Arnold,” Holliday said suddenly, snapping his fingers.

  “Pardon?”

  Holliday stepped forward, using the Maglite to scan the hinges. They were set apart equally on the door, each hinge a good five inches wide, each with four giant rivets securing it. Except for the middle hinge, which had five rivets. An oversight? A later repair? Maybe. Then again.

  He poked each one of the rivets with the ball of his thumb. Nothing, but he felt the third rivet move slightly. Instead of pushing, he pulled. The rivet popped out an inch, and there was a satisfying clicking sound from inside the door.

  “Try it now,” said Holliday. Peggy tried the latch. The door opened.

  “Shazam. How’d you figure that out?”

  “Benedict Arnold commanded West Point before he turned traitor. After he fled they went through his residence and found a secret panel in the attic with a lock like this one.”

  “Crafty devil.”

  “Let’s not stand around too long,” said Holliday. “It’s gone beyond simple trespass now.”

  Peggy pulled open the door, and they stepped inside.

  Holliday swung the flashlight, and the beam picked up an old-fashioned metal toggle switch screwed to the wall beside the door. He flipped it to the ON position. The room lit up.

  “Holy Batcave, Doc! You weren’t kidding!”

  The cistern was a curved-roof chamber fifty feet long and twenty wide with a single horseshoe archway at the midpoint. The ceiling, walls, and floor were made with rectangular blocks of limestone so closely set that there was no need for mortar. Industrial pan lights dangled down from heavy electrical flex stapled to the roof stones. Four immense ceremonial banners were hung like tapestries on the wall at the end of the room. The designs of all four were remarkably similar.

  On the far left was the rune circle and sword insignia of the Ahnenerbe, the Nazi ancestral heritage organization. Beside it was the sword and ribbon symbol that Holliday had seen tattooed on the dead man’s wrist at Carr-Harris’s farm and cut into the stone above the doorway of the Schloss Kellerman. The third design showed another circle of runes containing a sword wreathed with heraldic dragons, and the fourth banner was stitched with the sword and a right-facing, curved-arm swastika of the Thule Society, the so-called Teutonic Order of the Holy Grail. All the banners were done in red, white, and black, the Nazi palette.

  “This guy Kellerman has a real thing about swords, doesn’t he?” Peggy commented, staring at the garish tapestries.

  “One sword in particular, I’m afraid,” said Holliday.

  The rest of the cavernous chamber was filled with displays like the museum in the Schloss. A case of weaponry included a boxed, gold-plated Mauser.32-caliber presentation automatic pistol marked “Meister Schieben”-Master Shooter-with the same sword and ribbon insignia carved into the grips, as well as a battered MP18 submachine gun with a wooden stock and even a Panzerfaust, the German version of the American bazooka.

  There were several uniforms on mannequins from SS General to the plain dress of a World War I Kaiserjдger infantryman with the rank of Gefreiter, or lance corporal, presumably meant to indicate Lutz Kellerman’s rise from the trenches to the Nazi General Staff.

  There were pictures of Lutz Kellerman everywhere. Lutz Kellerman with Rommel in North Africa, leaning on a massive Panzer 1 tank. Lutz Kellerman with Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer during the Fьhrer’s whirlwind three-hour tour of the French capital. Lutz Kellerman in a candid shot at the Vatican with Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the man who would become known as “Hitler’s Pope,” probably taken in 1933 just before or just after the signing of the Reichskonkordat between the Nazis and the Roman Catholic Church. Lutz Kellerman standing with SS-Obersturmbannfьhrer Martin Weiss, commandant of Dachau concentration camp, beneath the infamous ARBEIT MACHT FREI-“Work will give you freedom”-gateway.

  Most interesting of all, a much older Lutz Kellerman standing with his son on a hill across from the gigantic statue of Christ the Redeemer atop Corcovado Mountain overlooking the city of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. In the photograph Axel Kellerman looked to be about eighteen. The car behind them was a 1959 Chevy Impala, with its classic sweeping fins and cat’s-eye tail-lights. Proof that Lutz Kellerman had survived the war and lived at least that long afterward.

  Father and son were remarkably alike. Same long aristocratic nose, same fox-like face and widow’s peak, and same slightly feminine lips. The biggest difference between the two was the long, disfiguring Renommierschmiss or “bragging scar” that ran from just beneath Lutz Kellerman’s left eye down to his chin, earned in some long-ago saber duel where the object was not to inflict a wound but to receive one. The most perverted courage Holliday could think of, displayed not on a battlefield but in a fencing salon with celebratory champagne to follow.

  “Look at this,” said Peggy, from the far side of the room. She was standing in front of a large desk. On the wall above it was a framed photograph of Hitler, and on the desk itself was a family portrait in a silver frame-a handsome woman in a forties-style dress standing with a young girl, six or seven, and a baby in her arms. Behind them, as distinctive as the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio, was the rough claw shape of the snowcapped Matterhorn. The Kellerman family safe in Switzerland for the duration. On the desk was a leather-bound book. Embossed on its cover was the death’s-head insignia of the Totenkopf, the 33rd SS Division in charge of concentration camps.

  “A diary?” Holliday asked.

  Peggy flipped it open. Dates at the top of the page, inked entries in neat, small handwriting. Lutz Kellerman’s journal. It appeared to be for the year 1943.

  “Does that camera of yours take close-ups?”

  “Sure.”

  “As many pages as you can.”

  “Done.”

  Peggy took the camera out of her bag, opened up the journal to the first page, and got started. It took her the better part of twenty minutes. Holliday was wandering through the room, looking through the exhibits, trying to find some connection between Lutz Kellerman and the Templar sword Uncle Henry had hidden in his house.

  The only faintly relevant thing he could find was a picture of Himmler, Goebbels, and Lutz Kellerman standing on the balcony at the Berghof, coffee cups in hand, at least corroborating Drabeck’s story that Kellerman had actually been at Hitler’s summer house in the Bavarian Alps.

  “Finished,” said Peggy, joining him. “About two hundred pages. It’ll be fuzzy, but give me a decent computer and we’ll be able to read it.”

  There was the sound of a wooden match striking across rough stone. Holliday and Peggy turned.

  “Herr Doktor Holliday, Frдulein Blackstock,” said Axel Kellerman, standing in the doorway to the chamber. Two blond, uniformed men stood behind him. Both of them were armed with very modern looking Heckler amp; Koch G36 assault rifles. Kellerman lit his cigarette then blew out the match. He exhaled twin plumes of sm
oke through his nostrils and smiled. “How good of you to drop by.”

  “I told you we should have brought a gun,” muttered Peggy.

  15

  Handcuffed, Holliday and Peggy Blackstock were taken back down to the Schloss in a security golf cart. Peggy had been relieved of her camera and bag, and Holliday had the Maglite taken away from him. Arriving at the estate, Holliday saw that the big Mercedes sedan he’d seen leaving the property earlier was back in the parking lot. The guards pulled him and Peggy out of the golf cart and pushed them toward the car.

  Two more security guards came out of the service entrance, the hunched and handcuffed form of Rudolph Drabeck sagging between them. The first pair of men disappeared back inside the Schloss, taking Holliday’s Maglite and Peggy’s camera and shoulder bag with them. The guards with Drabeck were wearing sidearms. From where Holliday was standing they looked like bulky HK45 automatic pistols.

  Kellerman stood beside the open driver’s-side door of the big sedan.

  “We are, as the saying goes, taking you for a ride,” he said. “You will please get in the backseat, both of you.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Holliday. One of the guards separated himself from Drabeck and grabbed Holliday by the arm, dragging him toward the rear door of the vehicle. Holliday tried to jerk out of his grip, then stumbled, barging into Drabeck and almost knocking him over. The old man grunted with surprise. Holliday saw that Drabeck’s face had been beaten raw, his nose broken, the nostrils crusted with blood.

  “Please, Doctor, I would rather not resort to violence,” chided Kellerman. “Yet.”

  The guard pulled Holliday upright. Kellerman gestured with his chin.

  “Take off their handcuffs,” he ordered. The guard did as he was told. Peggy and Holliday rubbed their wrists.

  “Ich flehe dich an!” groaned the old man, pleading, “Bitte, ich flehe dich an!”

  “What’s he saying?” Peggy asked, turning to Holliday.

  “He’s begging for his life,” translated Kellerman, his voice flat, without emotion. “Now, please, get in the car. We’re already behind schedule.”

  “Where are you taking us?” Peggy asked.

  Kellerman sighed.

  “To a place where no one will hear you screaming and where bloodstains will not mar my expensive carpeting,” responded Kellerman. “Ein schweinbetrieb, a pig abattoir I own a short distance from here. Eminently suitable, I think. You will be tortured while Doctor Holliday watches. When he tells me where he has hidden the sword that your grandfather stole the torture will stop.”

  “Uncle Henry didn’t steal the sword and you know it,” said Holliday.

  “I don’t have time to argue semantics with you, Doctor. Get in the car.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  Kellerman sighed theatrically again.

  “Then I’ll have no choice but to ask Stefan to break Miss Blackstock’s fingers, one by one,” said Kellerman. There was no arguing with that; the logic was impeccable.

  “All right,” said Holliday. He ducked into the backseat of the car with Peggy right behind him, prodded by Stefan. The door slammed. Kellerman got behind the wheel. Outside there was a sound like a sharp, barking cough. Turning, Holliday saw Drabeck drop to the gravel surface of the parking lot.

  Stefan the security guard unscrewed the fat suppressor from his pistol, reholstered the weapon, and picked up Drabeck’s feet while the other man lifted his shoulders. They carried the dead man to the back of the car, and Kellerman popped the trunk. The two security guards hoisted the body of the old man up and in, and then slammed the trunk lid. Stefan got into the backseat beside Peggy, and the other man climbed into the front seat beside Kellerman. Stefan unhol stered the squat, heavy-looking automatic again and held it in his lap, his thick index finger curled around the trigger.

  “You didn’t have to kill him,” said Peggy, her teeth gritted and her eyes wet with tears.

  Kellerman glanced at her in the rearview mirror. His face was expressionless.

  “He was of no further use to me.”

  Kellerman turned to the guard in the seat beside him.

  “Zeit in die Heia zu gehen, jawohl?”

  “Dein Wunsch ist mir Befehl, Mein Herr,” the guard said and laughed. Kellerman turned the key in the ignition and dropped the transmission into reverse. They backed and filled, then headed off down the winding tree-lined driveway to the main road. The car turned right, away from Friedrichshafen, and Kellerman drove into the darkness, north toward the nearby mountains.

  “Maybe you should tell me why the sword is so important to you,” said Holliday from the backseat. He tried the door handle. Kellerman had locked it remotely. “I know you’re crazy, but even a crazy man doesn’t kill over a piece of memorabilia.”

  “I assume you’re trying to irritate me,” said Kellerman as he drove the big car along the dark road. “A rather juvenile tactic. Frankly, I had expected more from a man like you.”

  “I’m stressed at the moment,” answered Holliday dryly.

  “The sword belongs to me,” said Kellerman. “It is my family legacy.”

  “It’s just a sword. Not even a very good one,” responded Holliday. “They’re not hard to come by. Try eBay next time instead of murdering innocent people.”

  “Derek Carr-Harris was hardly innocent,” laughed Kellerman, the sound hollow and utterly without humor. “He was a cold-blooded murderer, as was your uncle.”

  “That’s a lie!” Peggy said hotly.

  “My uncle was a medieval historian,” said Holliday. “During World War Two he was attached to the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Branch. It was an extension of the Roberts Commission set up by FDR. Their job was to protect objects of cultural value from plundering and destruction. Even German ones.”

  “True,” said Kellerman, “but the MFAA was also a cover for a variety of independent, intelligence-related actions by the British and the Americans at the end of the war.” Kellerman paused. A truck swept by in a rush of sound, washing the interior of the car for a moment with the beams from its headlights. “You’re something of a military historian, Doctor. Have you ever heard of something called Operation Werewolf by any chance?”

  “Sure,” said Holliday. “It was a last-ditch defense plan organized by Himmler and run by an SS-Obergruppenfьhrer named Prutzmann. It was a left-behind partisan organization.”

  “Oddly, very much like the so-called Tribulation Force described in a series of popular Christian novels in your country,” nodded Kellerman. “But the Operation Werewolf I am referring to was a joint operation devised by a number of high-ranking intelligence officials in both America and the United Kingdom. It was jokingly referred to by Winston Churchill as the Kammerjдger Brigade. Do you know what a Kammerjдger is, Doctor?”

  “I can guess.”

  “It means vermin exterminator, Doctor Holliday. The Kammerjдger Brigade’s mandate was to find, hunt down, or otherwise discover the locations of names on a list of various high ranking SS officers and other important members of the Reich, and having found them their further instructions were to assassinate them.” Kellerman paused, and then spoke again. “ ‘What we do in life will echo in eternity,’ ” he quoted. “You know those words, Herr Doktor Holliday?”

  Who was this guy?

  “Russell Crowe in the movie Gladiator.”

  “Good words, Doctor, and true ones. Your uncle and his English friend wrote them in blood in the spring and summer of 1945. My father was one of the names on Churchill’s death list, Doctor, and both your uncle and Derek Carr-Harris were killers in the Kammerjдger Brigade. To my sure knowledge they were responsible for the assassinations of more than two dozen good men in Germany, Austria, and in Rome. They very nearly caught my father, and if they had, they would have killed him on the spot.”

  “You’re a liar!” Peggy snarled. “Grandpa never killed anyone!”

  The road ahead was completely dark. There was forest on either side of th
em. No traffic, not even distant headlights. There was no way to tell how long it would be before they reached their destination.

  Now or never.

  Holliday leaned forward slightly. The guard in the front seat tensed, his hand going toward his holstered weapon.

  “Kellerman?”

  “Yes?”

  Holliday whispered in his ear.

  “Fick’ dich selber, du Arschloch.”

  He let the pencil he’d palmed from Drabeck’s pocket in the parking lot drop down his sleeve and into his right hand. He swept his arm up back-handed across Peggy’s front, plunging the sharpened point of the pencil into Stefan’s right eye and deep into the frontal portion of his brain, killing him instantly. A single shriek died half-stillborn in Stefan’s throat. Fluid from the burst eyeball drained down his cheek.

  Leaving the pencil in place, Holliday dropped his hand into the dead man’s lap, prying the big automatic from his nerveless fingers. He thumbed down the safety, and, twisting his body while leaning over Peggy, covering her, he fired repeatedly into the rear of the front seat.

  Upholstery exploded and the bullets took the security guard in the groin and belly, the concussions from each shot filling the interior of the car with a sound like raging thunder. The man twisted and jerked, screaming as he flopped back against the dashboard. Lifting the heavy pistol above the back of the seat, Holliday fired twice more, hitting the security guard in the throat and face. There was a humpty-dumpty instant as the man’s head burst open, spraying the front seat and the windshield with blood, brains, and bone chips. Kellerman swerved, tires squealing as the car almost went off the road. Holliday jammed the muzzle of the pistol under Kellerman’s collar.

  “Pull over,” he ordered. “Now.”

  Silently, Kellerman did as he was told, guiding the big car onto the gravel shoulder. The inside of the car smelled like blood and gunpowder. Holliday worked his jaw back and forth; his ears were ringing. Adrenaline was rushing through his system, and his stomach was roiling. Most other times and places he would have been sick. He swallowed bile.