Red Templar

by Paul Christopher

  Paramahansa Kumar was the result of the illicit liaison, a responsibility unacknowledged by young Nedrick, who discreetly removed himself to St. Ann Parish as soon as Aishwarya Vrinda began to show evidence of her infidelity. In the old days back in Mangalore, Aishwarya Vrinda would almost certainly been whipped, either by her husband or by her own father, but considering his own inabilities, Rambhan Kundgolkar decided to accept the child as his own, despite the fact that the boy was several shades darker than anyone in the Aggarwal family had ever been.

  On the death of her husband when Aishwarya Vrinda was twenty-eight, she liquidated all of the older Aggarwal’s assets and moved to East 28th Street in New York City, where she opened an Indian grocery called Aggarwal’s. Five years later both she and her son were bona fide American citizens. Their red-and-gold Jamaican passports were ceremoniously burned in the trash barrel behind that first store. Soon, Aggarwal’s resided all over the state.

  At the age of eighteen, before enrolling in Harvard Law School and with his mother’s permission, Paramahansa Kumar Aggarwal legally changed his name to Brinsley Whitman Havers and left his past, and what was left of his Jamaican accent, behind. He casually let his fellow students know that he was actually Brinsley Whitman Havers III, cultivated the nickname “Whit” and never looked back.

  And here he was, summa cum laude from Harvard, a thirty-eight-year-old boy wonder in the White House coming down from the second floor of the West Wing for a meeting with his boss and the national security adviser himself.

  Whit Havers reached the bottom of the stairs, turned to his left and knocked on the door of the national security adviser’s office.

  “Enter,” came the gravelly voice of General George Armstrong Temple, the NSA himself. Whit did as he was told and stepped into the office. There were tall windows on two sides, to the north looking down the main drive from the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance, and to the west overlooking West Executive Avenue, now closed to public traffic. Like most of the windows in the White House, the panes in the national security adviser’s office were bulletproof.

  The general had no desk. Instead, he worked at a long conference table set with twelve armchairs. The general was in his shirtsleeves, which were rolled up to his elbows. His trousers were held up with braided leather suspenders. Bright red half-lens reading glasses sat on the end of his blown-out drinker’s nose.

  He was at least a hundred pounds overweight, smoked cigars constantly and wheezed when he talked. There was a pool on the second floor based on how many months into the term he’d last before keeling over. Whit hadn’t entered the pool; the general was like Dick Cheney-his heart was made of concrete and his liver was made of cheese, but he’d probably outlive all of them. People as mean and hard as that never died; death was too scared to come within a mile of them.

  The only other person in the room was J. Hunter Kokum, Whit’s boss, the assistant NSA. Kokum was in his sixties, pale as a ghost and thin as a scarecrow. In his spare time he raised Thoroughbreds in Kentucky. His last job had been as assistant director of plans at the CIA. Before that he was deputy director of the FBI.

  Always a deputy, or an assistant, never the thing itself, which was just the way J. Hunter Kokum liked it. He was an eminence grise and the power behind the throne. He’d discovered that in political life it was safer that way. His family were oil billionaires.

  “Sit,” said General Temple.

  Whit sat at the chair closest to him, which happened to be the farthest away from the general.

  “Tell the general about Pierre Ducos,” instructed Kokum.

  “Well,” began Whit. He didn’t make it any further than that.

  “Wait a second.” The general grunted. He lit a fresh cigar. “No iPad, no Zoom, no Android, no BlackBerry? Not even a goddamn file folder?”

  “Whit likes to keep things in his head,” murmured Kokum, his voice mild, a faint smile on his thin lips. “He feels it’s safer that way.”

  “Is that right?” Temple said, impressed. Kokum liked to show Whit off like a pet monkey, which the young man hated, but went along with because he knew that one of these days he’d have Kokum’s job. Not this president, maybe, or the next, but eventually.

  “Ducos,” repeated Kokum.

  “Pierre Armand Ducos, French. Parents Marie Yvette Ducos, deceased, and Andre Ducos de Saint Clair, one of the hereditary dukes of Burgundy, also deceased, making Pierre Ducos, their only child, heir to the dukedom and the title.”

  “A duke.” The general wheezed, puffing on his cigar. “Goddamn royalty, what do you know?”

  “Ducos is an avocat, supposedly a simple lawyer living in the village of Domme in the Aquitaine region of France. The village has less than a thousand inhabitants. Seven hundred years ago the town was a Templar stronghold. There was even a rumor that the Holy Grail had once been hidden there.”

  “You said ‘supposedly a simple lawyer’? What does that mean?”

  “Ducos handles the estates of three men, trustees of a company called Pelerin and Cie. Pelerin is a front, a shell company controlled entirely by Ducos. It has majority holdings in three Swiss banks, two banks in the Caymans, major holdings in Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase amp; Co., MetLife and smaller holdings in several others. It has large holdings in the Standard Oil Investment Group, Halliburton, Exxon Mobil, LUKOIL. . ”

  “The big Russian oil combine?” General Temple said, staring.

  “Yes.”

  “Go on, son.”

  I’m not your son, Whit thought. I’m not anybody’s son except my mother’s. He smiled. “The list is almost endless, sir. Pelerin has effective assets of more than a trillion dollars in virtually every country in the world, including China.”

  “All controlled by some lawyer in west bum-bugger France? It makes no sense.”

  “No, sir, it does not.”

  “There is an explanation?”

  “There are rumors, sir.”

  “What rumors?”

  “Rumors of an organization for which Ducos is as much a front as Pelerin and Cie.”

  “The Rosicrucians, the Masons, Opus Dei, the Illuminati, the Dan Brown Fan Club, the goddamn Shriners?”

  “No, sir.”

  “The Bilderberg Group, the New World Order, the Republican National Committee? Spit it out, man; I don’t have all goddamned day.”

  “Yes, sir. I am aware of that, sir. The problem is, General, for a secret society to be secret, nobody outside the society can know about it.”

  “You said there were rumors. What rumors?”

  “There seems to be a connection with the Cambridge Five-Philby, Blunt, Burgess, Maclean, Cairncross and Leo Long.”

  “That’s six,” said Temple.

  “Yes, sir, there’re some who say there were even more. At any rate, they were in a club called the Apostles, and in the end, of course, they were all working for the KGB. It’s also interesting to note that Colonel John Holliday’s uncle, Mr. Henry Granger, knew Philby, Blunt and Burgess through his dealings with MI6 during the Second World War.”

  “I’m starting to get a bit of a brain freeze, lad. Remind me again who this Colonel Holliday is and his connection to Ducos.”

  Whit sighed. He’d written a dozen position papers and briefs about this for Kokum, but it seemed that the general hadn’t read any of them. “On some level Ducos is no more than a trustee for Pelerin and Cie. Holliday is the one who has all the accounts, codes, passwords and what have you to actually access the funds involved.”

  “And how did this colonel come by all these codes and passwords?”

  “He was given a notebook with all the information in it.”

  “Who gave it to him?”

  “A monk in the Azores named Helder Rodrigues.”

  “Why?”

  “We have no real idea, and Rodrigues is dead. Murdered by a German white supremacist named Kellerman whose father was a Nazi.”

  “A secret society so secret no one knows about it, a monk in the
Azores with a trillion-dollar notebook, Nazis and a Frenchman. Pull the other one, boy.”

  Whit bristled slightly at the use of the term “boy,” but he let it pass. Temple was old-school, and he was also his boss’s boss. “There is documentation for all of it, sir. I can bring it to you if you’d like.”

  “Jesus, no,” said the general. It was Temple’s turn to sigh. “Look-Mr. Kokum tells me that all our best intelligence says Putin and some of his pals are in a snit. We want to know why. No fifty-page essays, just put it in a nutshell and toss it down the table if you would. Pretend it’s a rebuttal at the Debate Society finals, Harvard Lion Kings against Tufts Half Vote. You’ve got thirty seconds. Go.”

  Whit was stunned. The rebuttal at the Lion Kings-Half Vote debate had been his moment of absolute triumph. How did Temple know about that? There was more to the general than met the eye. Which was why he was the national security adviser, of course.

  “Ten seconds gone, Mr. Havers.”

  Whit closed his eyes. He could do this. “Somehow Ranger Lieutenant Colonel John Holliday, formerly of the West Point Military Academy, has stumbled onto a secret the Russians have kept quiet since before the Russian Revolution. Putin is about to make a move to consolidate his power and turn Russia into a superpower again. Holliday could ruin everything for him.”

  Temple turned to Kokum. “Do we want that?”

  “Definitely not, General. In five years or less Russia will be the largest source of foreign oil available to us. The Middle East and North Africa have gone to hell ever since people started getting smart and realized their leaders had rocks in their heads. We need Putin. We need to keep him happy.”

  “Do we have anyone in the area?” Temple asked blandly. He rolled his cigar around in the ashtray in front of him.

  “Do we?” Kokum asked, turning to Whit.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who?”

  “A man named John Bone.”

  “Any connection to us?”

  “No, sir, he’s a freelancer.”

  “American?”

  “Irish by birth. He lives in London. Right now he’s in Amsterdam on another assignment for us. That new WikiLeaks thing you wanted handled.”

  “A bit of preventive medicine, as I recall,” Kokum said.

  “Yes, sir.” Whit nodded.

  “What’s his record?” Temple asked.

  “Thirty-two professional fights, thirty-one wins, all KOs, one draw.”

  “What was the draw all about?”

  “The subject was hit by a car an hour and a half before the fight.”

  “All right,” said the general, sticking the cigar back into the corner of his mouth. “Blue message to this fellow.” He nodded down the table toward Whit. “Your man here pulls the strings. Let’s see if he’s as good as he thinks he is.”

  Kokum smiled thinly. “I don’t think Mr. Havers has the sort of experience required for this kind-”

  “He’s the case officer, Kokum. Over and out.”

  Jeezampeas! Whit thought to himself, reverting to his mother tongue. He loved the arcane beauty of West Wing language. A “blue message” didn’t mean anything at all-it could have been red, white or pink. “Message” was the operative word. “Message” with a color as a prefix was a euphemism as clear as the old-fashioned “terminate with extreme prejudice.” It was a kill order. Lieutenant Colonel John Holliday was as good as dead.

  20

  The public’s ideal of a professional assassin runs to one part Sean Connery in a toupee, two parts Daniel Craig and perhaps a dash of Matt Damon-handsome, muscular, unemotional, a magnet for women and a lover of all the finer things in life. Most important, one way or another, no matter which side he is on, the professional assassin is a patriot.

  John Bone was none of these things. He was fifty-six years old, tended to a middle-aged man’s potbelly, had thinning carroty hair, wore spectacles and liked nothing better than a nice cup of tea and a plate of eggs, chips and beans for brekkie. He loved cats, cried over certain rock-and-roll songs from the sixties, and ran a small, marginally profitable business designing and printing menus for restaurants, which he ran out of a tiny office above a sex shop on Dean Street in London’s Soho district. Academically, he had excelled only in languages, for which he had a great facility, and now spoke six quite fluently.

  He had been married for seventeen years to a simple, pleasant woman named Alice, had twin teenage girls, Hailey and Hannah, 3.2 million euros in a bank of the island of Guernsey and another 5.8 million euros in a bank in Liechtenstein.

  He regularly took his family to Torremolinos on the Costa del Sol, where he liked to sail Flying Junior-class dinghies. He generally sailed alone, since Alice was afraid of water and the girls had never really been interested. His favorite color was Lincoln green, his favorite song was “She’s Not There” by the Zombies, his favorite actor was George Clooney and his weapon of choice for close work was a pearl-handled straight razor he kept in his shaving kit when he traveled. Distance work-sniping, rockets and the like-he left to other experts. His wife, Alice, never asked about his frequent overseas trips, and Bone never offered any explanation.

  John Bone had no military service or training that anyone knew of, and no one knew very much about his background. He first came to the attention of intelligence in 1980 following the assassination of Walter Rodney, a Marxist candidate in the Guyana elections of that same year. Rodney was blown up in his car with a homemade bomb that he was about to plant at a local police station. According to witnesses Rodney was given the bomb by a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force named Gregory Smith. The Guyana Defence Force later insisted that they had never had a man named Gregory Smith in the GDF at any rank.

  The Central Intelligence Agency, which had Walter Rodney under surveillance at the time, could well believe it; there were very few Guyanese citizens with flaming red hair, pale, sunburned skin and freckles who spoke with a pronounced Dublin lilt in their voice. John Bone was twenty-four years old at the time. It was later discovered that Bone had been in the employ of the incumbent president, Forbes Burnham, and the military leaders of the People’s National Congress. It was unclear whether this was Bone’s first assignment, but the CIA and a number of other agencies followed his career with great interest, using him on a number of occasions.

  On this particular October evening he was in Amsterdam standing at the Chipsy King on the Damstraat enjoying a large paper cone of garlic fries smothered in mayonnaise. Years ago, when he’d first come here, the thought of chips with mayo was quite revolting, but now he’d rather acquired a taste for it-at least while he was in Amsterdam. Putting mayo on his chips back home would give Alice a heart attack. He smiled, thinking of Alice. Everything a man could want, she was-kept a good house, handled the money, kept his books at the office and raised the twins, who’d been a handful from day one. On top of that she was still a cracker in bed, even after seventeen years. A treasure.

  He ate a few more chips, picking up the saltshaker on the outside counter and giving the cone another shake. Stupid, really, considering his age and his blood pressure. Eating more chips, he kept his eyes on the entrance to the Doria hotel across the narrow street. Like a lot of Amsterdam hotels, the lobby was on the first floor, not the ground, the entrance squeezed in between a pizzeria and a Mexican grill named Gaucho’s.

  He’d been given the assignment by his usual contact in the Netherlands-Guido Derlagen, a shaved-headed “security consultant” with hands like hammers and a face like an ax. Bone liked him, but he didn’t trust him. When you got right down to it, Bone didn’t trust anyone when it came to business, but so far the Dutchman’s word had been good. Bone wasn’t entirely sure where Guido had sprung from, but he was willing to give odds on its being the AIVD-the General Intelligence and Security Service, like marbles in your mouth if you tried to pronounce it in Dutch.

  This time he was fairly sure he wasn’t working for the Netherlands, though. The target was a top executive
in the WikiSpout organization, one of six who knew where the main servers were located and how to access them. She was the pro tem leader, named Caroline Halle Muller, a Dane. According to Derlagen she lived on the fourth floor of the Doria hotel, directly across from him.

  She finally appeared, looking just like the photograph Derlagen had shown him: a few years on the wrong side of thirty, hair pulled harshly back off her unsmiling face and done in cornrows that were far too young for her, a skirt too short for heavy thighs. She wore Birkenstocks, of course, and held a giant old-fashioned briefcase clutched in her hand. Oversize glasses on a chain bounced on a pendulous chest covered by a blouse, a tweedy cardigan. No romance in this woman’s life and never likely to be any. She had a Cause with a capital C, and that was better than acting like rabbits any day of the week.

  She turned in under the small red awning over the narrow doorway and headed for the fourth floor. Bone continued to plow through the cone of chips until he reached the last little crispy bits in the bottom. He crumpled the cone and looked around for a trash bin. There wasn’t one, so he put the greasy bit of paper into his Windbreaker pocket. It was past due for the laundry anyway, and he didn’t like to litter, especially when his DNA was involved. Funny thing, that: he came out of a time when fingerprints were the only real worry, and since his weren’t on any official record, that was that; but now they could track you down from a bit of belly button lint or a fleck of dandruff. It was sad, really. Science and accountancy seemed to have taken over the world-it was all bits and bytes and double helixes. He sighed and headed across the street, hanging back to let a flock of bicyclists go by.

  He went up the stairs. There was a cramped little registration desk on the first floor, but there was no one on duty, which was a blessing. He continued all the way up to the fourth floor, stopping at the top to catch his breath. He could feel his heart pounding away in his chest, and he calmed himself by thinking about the fact that’d he never been a smoker, so that was one thing in his favor, at least. He reached into the right-hand pocket of his Windbreaker and took out a single latex glove. He slipped the glove onto his right hand, then reached back into the pocket for his razor, which he opened and locked.