The Sword of the Templars t-1

by Paul Christopher

  The intruder screeched and dropped one hand between his legs. Holliday staggered back, tripping over the slashed remains of the mattress. Suddenly the man was on top of him, straddling his chest, his free hand coming up underneath Holliday’s jaw, pushing his head back, leaving the throat open to attack.

  Holliday bucked frantically as the knife arced down toward him. He tipped the other man off his chest and slammed him into the iron bed, his knife hand snagging on the metal springs. Holliday ground his knee into the other man’s cheek, putting his weight into it.

  There was a wet cracking sound, and the man with the knife let out a muffled, choking scream. Holliday reached up and grabbed the man’s arm, pulling the wrist back over the edge of the iron bed, almost bending it back double on itself. The man let out a desperate groan, and the knife dropped out of his hand, clattering onto the floor.

  Somehow the man twisted out of Holliday’s grip and staggered to his feet. He was a lot larger than Holliday had originally estimated, and there was a frighteningly feral look about him. He was an attack dog, and even with a broken cheekbone and a nose gushing blood he looked as though he was in his element; this kind of thing was his business.

  A quick glance told Holliday that the knife was now behind him; to make a play for it would mean turning his back on the man in front. He also noticed that the man’s hands had a hard line of callus on the outer edge of the palm. He knew what that meant; Turner, one of the martial arts instructors at the Academy, had hands like that. The kind of hands that could slice through a three-inch board or a concrete block. Or crush an esophagus. This guy didn’t need a knife at all.

  Things suddenly got even worse. The man smiled through the mask of blood covering the lower half of his face, the teeth like dirty little yellow pearls.

  “Connard,” he murmured.

  His right hand swept back under his shirt and came out with a stubby little Beretta Tomcat, a mini-pistol from the late seventies. It sounded like a rat sneezing and was only.32 caliber, but a.32-caliber hole in your forehead was a hole nonetheless. He stepped forward, still smiling, bringing the gun up, his finger tightening on the trigger.

  From the right side Peggy swept in under Holliday’s arm, the long-bladed stiletto underhanded in her fist. She drove it like an uppercut up under his chin, the stainless steel spike cutting through throat, tongue, and soft palette, eventually lodging deep in the man’s midbrain.

  Peggy let go of the blade. The man collapsed like a venetian blind. He fell forward, his cheek resting on Holliday’s shoe. Peggy was shaking, her eyes like saucers.

  “Is he dead?” she whispered.

  “You’re kidding,” answered Holliday. “He couldn’t get any deader.” He shifted his foot. The man’s head thumped lightly against the floor. He was barely bleeding at all.

  “Oh, God,” groaned Peggy. “I killed him.”

  “About a millisecond before he was going to kill me,” said Holliday. He put his arm around her, squeezing hard. “You saved my life, kiddo.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  They both stared down at the body.

  Holliday crouched down and turned the man over on his back. He checked the man’s wrist. There was a tattoo: the same sword and ribbon insignia he’d seen on the man in England.

  “One of Kellerman’s people,” said Holliday. He checked the man’s wallet. His carte d’identitй said his name was Louis Renault, a citizen of Morocco, born in Casablanca. There was also a small leather folder that identified him as a captain in the elite Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale. “He’s a cop,” said Holliday. “Antiterrorist squad. We just stepped in it big time, I’m afraid.”

  26

  “How can he be a cop?” Peggy said, her eyes still glued to the body on the floor. The room was starting to smell like a slaughterhouse. It was high summer. The flies would be next. “You said he was Kellerman’s. He was trying to kill you.”

  “He’s still a cop.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Get out of here as quickly as we can. The desk clerk downstairs has our passport numbers. They know whose room this is.”

  “The old guy sits down there like a vulture. He sees everyone going in and out.”

  “He probably saw our cop come in. Kept his mouth shut about him being in the room. Took a bribe. We can’t let him see us leave.”

  “How do we manage that?”

  “Go back to your room. Get your things. I’ve got an idea. Meet me back here.”

  Peggy left. Holliday took the man’s gun, his wallet, and his identity card. With nothing on him it might slow down the identification process and buy a little more time. Peggy returned with her bag over her shoulder. Holliday led the way out of the room and back down the stairs.

  Instead of going through the lobby he stopped on the second floor and turned in the other direction. There was a window at the far end of the hall that looked out onto the alley. Ten feet below the window there was a small lean-to shed for keeping the wheeled plastic garbage bins used by the hotel. Holliday boosted Peggy up onto the windowsill. She turned and dropped onto the little shed, then down to the ground. A few seconds later Holliday joined her.

  “Now what?”

  “We get away from here.”

  They tidied their clothes, then walked down the little alley and out onto the rue Latran. Nobody paid them the slightest attention; it was as though nothing had happened, which of course it hadn’t at least as far as the people on the street were concerned.

  Peggy and Holliday walked down to the rue Saint-Jacques, then turned right and headed for the Seine and the Petit Pont. They walked past rue de la Huchette and reached the bridge. On the other side was the immense block of the Prefecture of Police and across from it the familiar shape of Notre Dame Cathedral.

  Halfway across the bridge Holliday stopped and looked upriver. There were bookstalls set up against the stone embankment to his left. Down below on the quai by the river half a dozen homeless people huddled. A glass-topped tour boat slid under the bridge and headed west. A few fluffy clouds rolled peacefully through a mid-afternoon summer sky. Without a dead body decomposing in his hotel room, it would have been a perfect day to be in Paris.

  “Somebody’s on our tail,” said Holliday.

  “Who?” Peggy asked, gripping her shoulder bag and trying not to look nervous.

  “We’re being double-teamed. They’re almost certainly with Renault,” answered Holliday. “There’s a guy back there in a leather bomber jacket even though it’s about ninety degrees out, and there’s another one who’s supposed to be a tourist, but he just doesn’t look right.”

  “Most tourists don’t look right,” said Peggy. “I’ve taken a million pictures that prove it.”

  “Tourists in Hawaiian shirts and fatigue hats with cameras around their necks don’t usually travel alone. They come in groups, pairs at least. And he’s too young for the whole Ugly American outfit.”

  “More cops?”

  “Cop or not, Monsieur Renault back there was working for Kellerman. We have to assume these two mooks are his men, too.”

  “How do we get rid of them?”

  “You know Paris better than I do. East and west, where will the subway get you?”

  “The RER, the regional express, can get you out to Poissy and Cergy le Haut in the west, Chessy in the east-that’s Disneyland.”

  “And the regular Metro?”

  “La Dйfense in the west, Porte de Vincennes and the Paris Zoo in the east.”

  “Where’s the closest Metro interchange, where the most lines cross?”

  “Chвtelet, just across from here. A few blocks away. All the main lines cross there, including the RER.”

  “Then that’s where we’ll lose them,” said Holliday.

  The Chвtelet Metro station was built in 1900, and over the next century it expanded and grew up, down, and sideways, connecting the four main lines of the original Metro plus the high-speed lines of the RE
R located below the main lines.

  The station has eleven access points, stairs, elevators, escalators, and even two moving sidewalks called “tapis roulants” or rolling carpets. You can go north, south, east, or west, get to the airport and any one of four major train stations, including the TGVs into Europe and under the English Channel to England, buy everything from condoms to croissants, have a glass of wine, eat pommes frites, or buy any one of a dozen newspapers.

  At any one time during an average day in the summer there are between five and eight thousand people moving through the intricate web of platforms, corridors, and gateways into the station. Trains pull in, trains pull out, horns sound, recorded voices make announcements, beggars beg, and licensed chamber musicians play Johann Pachelbel’s entire Canon. Rock ensembles do all seventy-four minutes of Tommy, the rock opera by The Who.

  With Peggy in the lead they slipped into the Metro at one of the three entrances on avenue Victoria, bought a carnet of tickets next to one of the turnstiles, and started up and down a dizzying array of walkways and corridors, trying to leave their surveillance behind.

  They faked taking a ride on one of the westbound trains, but got off at the last second, doubled back, and finally climbed onto a train heading for Chвteau de Vincennes just as the doors were hissing closed. The horn gave its warbling warning, and they moved off. At the far end of the car a young woman with a clarinet started doing an excellent rendition of Benny Goodman’s “One O’Clock Jump.”

  “Did they get on?” Peggy asked.

  “American Tourist did, I think; three or four cars back. We ditched Bomber Jacket.”

  “Presumably they’ll have cell phones. They’ll be in contact.”

  “Where’s the best place to get off?” Holliday asked.

  “To leave American Tourist behind?” Peggy shrugged. “Nation. It’s the next big multiple-line station, just this side of the Pйriphйrique, the ring road we took in from the airport, like the Beltway in D.C.”

  “And after that?”

  “Saint-Mandй, on the other side of the ring road.”

  “What’s there?”

  “Old apartment buildings. Upper middle class, doctors, lawyers. There’s some kind of farmers’ market there; I don’t know what days.”

  “Taxis?”

  “There should be a taxi stand right outside the Metro.”

  Holliday looked up at the Metro diagram above the doors a few feet away. There were seven stations between Chвtelet and Saint-Mandй.

  “How long to Nation?” he asked.

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Saint-Mandй?”

  “Three minutes more. What are you thinking?”

  “Get off at Nation. Make him believe it. Then get back on again. If we shake him, great. If we don’t, we get a taxi at the Saint-Mandй stop and see if we can lose him that way.”

  “Okay,” she nodded.

  Holliday looked at his watch. Three in the afternoon. The train was half-filled with tired looking civil service types. Men in jackets and ties, women in dresses and high heels. These people were going home.

  A baguette was sticking out of a woman’s shopping bag, and Holliday realized that the only thing he’d eaten since getting off the plane had been a single slightly greasy sausage roll. Neither he nor Peggy had slept since leaving Jerusalem. If they didn’t find somewhere to go to ground soon they were both going to collapse.

  The train pulled into Nation with a roar and shuddered to a screeching stop. The doors sucked open, and they stepped out onto the platform. The train was emptying almost completely. Three cars up they saw American Tourist, and they suddenly had a bit of luck. Somebody made a grab for the Nikon prop around the fake tourist’s neck and in the process dragged American Tourist off balance. They fell together in a tangle just as the warning horn sounded. Peggy and Holliday stepped back into the train. The doors shut, and they moved off, leaving American Tourist behind.

  At Saint-Mandй they climbed up into daylight again. The farmers’ market, a double row of tent-like booths set up in a parking area, was winding up. The air smelled like fresh cabbage and chicken blood. Across from the Metro exit and the farmers’ market there was an intersection of two main streets with a florist on one side and a cafй with an awning and a red, glowing neon sign: LA TOURELLE.

  They crossed to the cafй, picked a table where they could keep an eye on the Metro exit and sat down. A waiter came and sneered silently. They both ordered Kronenbourgs and a sandwich jambon with fries. The sneering waiter disappeared.

  “We can’t stay exposed like this for too long. We have to get off the street.”

  “Another hotel?”

  “If Captain Renault was really with the Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale he’ll have the hotels covered. Every registered guest is on a police report somewhere. They’ve gotten even tighter since 9/11. They’ll find us within hours.”

  “So what do we do?” Peggy asked.

  The beer and sandwiches arrived. The sneering waiter served them and then disappeared again.

  “I’ll think of something,” said Holliday. They began to eat.

  Holliday was always fascinated by the way the French took their food so seriously. Here he was in the Parisian equivalent of a New York diner, and the food was worthy of a four-star bistro in the Village. The crusty bread was unbelievably fresh, the butter was sweet, the ham was lean, thinly sliced, and smoked to perfection, and the fries were hand-sliced and golden brown. No wonder the waiter sneered; he had a right to. He was serving the perfect sandwich to people who were used to something vaguely pinkish being slipped between two slices of Wonder Bread and sprinkled with shredded green cellulose that said it was lettuce.

  Holliday looked down the long, tree-lined street on his left. According to the plaque high on the wall of the florist’s across from the cafй it was avenue Foch. Probably named by some developer a hundred years ago hoping to confuse it with the much more prestigious avenue Foch that led away from the Arc de Triomphe on the other side of town.

  This avenue Foch looked like a good, solid middle-class place to live: trees neatly trimmed and unbroken lines of faintly Edwardian-looking apartment buildings butt-ended together to form a solid block, protected by well maintained wrought iron fences. Here and there along the row of buildings Holliday could see the gleaming brass plaques beside some of the doors discreetly advertising doctors, dentists, and maybe even a few lawyers.

  Five doors down on the other side of the street a domestic drama was unfolding that caught Holliday’s attention for a moment. A man in his thirties was loading up a pale blue Peugeot Partner, a compact minivan that looked vaguely cartoonish. The trunk was filled to overflowing, and he was working on the roof rack, building a precarious pile of cardboard boxes and suitcases.

  The man was dressed in gray flannels and a white shirt, but the shirt had the sleeves rolled up and he wasn’t wearing a tie. The shoes on his feet were open-toed sandals; a man preparing to go on vacation. The front door of the building opened and a pretty dark-haired woman appeared with three small children in tow, all girls. Two of the girls had suitcases while the youngest one had a pink overnight case wedged into a doll’s baby carriage.

  There was a brief argument about the baby carriage, and the youngest girl began to cry. A moment later the second youngest started crying, too, while the oldest, a girl of about twelve or so, simply looked bored. Eventually the man in the gray flannels realized he was outnumbered four to one, and he capitulated, putting the baby carriage on the roof rack. The youngest girl, still crying, then took it upon herself to prolong the melodrama and bolted for the door of the apartment building, wailing in full voice. A drill sergeant’s bark from the mother stopped her dead in her tracks.

  “Marie-Claire Allard! Viens ici im-med-i-ate-ment!”

  The little girl stood her ground for a moment. Her mother stamped her foot once. Marie-Claire realized that further resistance was useless. Head bowed, the little girl trudged
down the sidewalk and climbed into the minivan, followed by her two sisters. The mother got into the passenger seat, the man got behind the wheel. The Peugeot pulled away from the curb, heading east, out of the city.

  “Parenthood,” said Peggy, who’d been watching, as well. She popped the last pomme frite on her plate into her mouth. “No ketchup,” she said mournfully. “Typical.”

  “You done?” Holliday asked.

  “Yup,” said Peggy. “You figured anything out yet?”

  “Absolutely,” nodded Holliday. “Little Marie-Claire Allard just gave me an idea.”

  They paid the bill, then crossed avenue Foch and went down the street to number ten. They went through the main door and stepped into a marble-tiled foyer. There was a brass plate array of apartments and buzzers. They scanned the names, but there was no Allard listed.

  Holliday heard a faint creaking sound. A breeze was gently moving another door at the end of the hallway. The door was inset with a panel of frosted glass. Behind it Holliday saw a square of what appeared to be natural light. A courtyard? They went down the hallway, and Holliday pushed open the door.

  They stepped out onto a flagstone path in a vest-pocket garden that led to the front door of a two-story stone house with a red-tiled roof. Once upon a time the house had probably been the original number ten avenue Foch, but over the years it had become enclosed by a looming canyon of apartments.

  They went down the walk to the front door. The door was dark oak, deeply carved with decorative squares. The keyhole was ancient, big enough to stick an index finger into. Holliday could have picked the lock with a bent nail. He reached up to the lintel above the door and felt along it. He pulled down a huge iron key and slipped it into the lock. He turned the key and the door opened. They stepped inside.

  The house was a far cry from the hotel on rue Latran. To the left was a large, paneled library with a fireplace, a giant antique globe on casters, and an enormous plasma TV nestled in a wall of books. There was a leather couch, a couple of comfortable-looking leather chairs, and a heavy oak desk that matched the front door.