Red Templar

by Paul Christopher

  “Stand perfectly still.” He looked ahead. Ivanov was twenty feet from the far door when he suddenly stopped and stared down at his feet. A hissing sound filled the air. Bubbles began appearing in the sand, racing back over the floor to where Genrikhovich stood transfixed. Holliday took three steps forward and grabbed the Russian’s collar and yanked him backward. Ahead of them Ivanov screamed. He was up to his thighs and sinking deeper with each passing second.

  “My God!” Genrikhovich moaned. “What is it?”

  Ivanov screamed again, arching his back and twisting back and forth, vainly trying to release himself. It only made things worse. It was incredibly fast. Within twenty seconds the sand had risen to the level of his shoulders, and a few seconds after that his head went below the surface and he disappeared. The hissing sound and the bubbles continued for another half minute and then there was silence.

  “Help him!” Genrikhovich yelled, staring horrified at the spot where the priest had vanished.

  “Too late-he’s gone,” said Holliday.

  Genrikhovich turned and looked at Holliday, dumbfounded. “What happened to him?” the Russian whispered.

  “I wondered about the sand,” murmured Holliday. “I knew it wasn’t right.”

  “What are you talking about?” Genrikhovich snapped.

  “You can find it naturally in the Qattara Depression in the Libyan Desert and in some places in the Sahara. It’s liquefied sand. Somewhere behind these walls there’s a piston that pushed air up through the sand, giving it the properties of a liquid. Stop the air and the sand becomes solid again. He could be twenty feet down, for all we know.” He shook his head and gave the Russian a cold look. “You were right, Genrikhovich: Taurus is an earth sign, and the earth just swallowed your friend Father Ivanov whole.” He turned away in disgust. “Come on, Eddie; we’re getting the hell out of here once and for all.”

  “I don’t think so, Colonel,” the Russian said quietly.

  “Who’s going to stop me?” Holliday said, turning angrily.

  “I am,” said Genrikhovich, the pearl-handled Tokarev semiautomatic pistol held in his fist aimed in the general direction of Holliday’s belly.

  35

  “Nice weapon,” said Holliday. “Looks like a presentation piece.” He seriously doubted that any pistol made during the Soviet era came stocked with pearl grips.

  “Yes, Khrushchev gave it to my father, along with the Order of Lenin and his Hero of the Soviet Union medal in 1962.” Genrikhovich sneered. “That and a postage stamp twenty years after his death was just about all he received for his good works. My mother and I lived from hand to mouth on the few rubles he gave us.”

  “I thought your father was a curator at the Hermitage?” Holliday said.

  “My father was probably the most famous and successful KGB agent the Soviet Union ever had,” said the Russian. “And they treated him like dirt.” Genrikhovich smiled thinly. “Since you are a historian I’m surprised that you don’t recognize the name, Colonel Holliday.”

  “In 1962 I was a kid and chasing girls,” said Holliday. “I wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on in Moscow except for the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

  “And if I mentioned a certain U-two spy plane pilot shot down over Soviet territory whose name was Francis Gary Powers?”

  Holliday stared at the thin, long-nosed Russian with the wire eyeglasses. Suddenly his memory kicked in and he had it. “My God!” he said softly. “Your father was Rudolf Abel, the atom-bomb spy.”

  “That was the alias he used when he was arrested after being betrayed by his assistant, the traitor Reino Hayhanen. My father’s real name was Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher. He was born in England but grew up in Russia, which is why I speak English-he thought it might be useful for me.” Genrikhovich laughed sourly. “He thought he would get me a job with the KGB, but they would have nothing to do with me. I even failed the physical tests for military service.”

  “This is all very interesting, but I don’t see what it has to do with our present situation,” said Holliday.

  “Our present situation, Colonel, is that I have my father’s pistol aimed at you,” said Genrikhovich.

  He might not have passed the physical for the army, but his grip on the Tokarev was firm. The safety was off and the knurled hammer was fully cocked. The slim, overpowered pistol could put a hole in Holliday’s spine the size of a bowling ball, and at this range Genrikhovich couldn’t miss. “You’re the boss,” said Holliday.

  “That is correct, Colonel; I am the boss, so you and your friend will turn around slowly and go back the way we came in.”

  “Whatever you say,” said Holliday. He and Eddie did exactly as they were told, heading slowly back along the sand-floored passageway and back out into the ornately painted antechamber. Holliday had seen the blank, distant look in the Russian’s eyes. Here in this strange place beneath the Kremlin the veil of normalcy had been removed once and for all. Holliday realized they were finally seeing the man as he truly was-completely insane, lost in a world of bitterness, anger and utter madness.

  “My grandfather would have loved this place,” said the Russian. “He had a great belief in the spiritual world. He was also a Chekist; you know what that means?”

  “The first version of the KGB.”

  “Yes, and before that he was with the Okhrana, the czar’s secret police. But he was a revolutionary at heart. Lenin himself enlisted my grandfather as a double agent. He reported directly to him on the activities of the czar’s henchmen in St. Petersburg. From the palace itself.”

  “Interesting,” said Holliday, wondering where all this was going. Eddie just rolled his eyes and kept his mouth shut.

  Genrikhovich looked around the circular chamber with its complex designs. “You said that astrologically north is south and south is north?”

  “According to my cousin Peggy.” Holliday shrugged. “But I can’t guarantee it.”

  “You’d better decide, Colonel, because your life depends on it.” The Russian turned and faced the two doors that said CAPRICORN and SAGITTARIUS. “Choose,” he said.

  From Holliday’s small store of knowledge about the constellations he vaguely recalled that Sagittarius lay almost exactly between the east and west quadrants of the sky, while Capricorn was very faint. He couldn’t imagine Ivan the Terrible choosing anything that could be described as faint, and besides, Sagittarius was an archer, a warrior. “Sagittarius,” he said.

  “Very good,” said Genrikhovich. “That was my choice as well.” He motioned with the pistol. “Open the door. Your friend goes through first, then you.”

  Holliday walked across the room and put his hand on the latch. It was stiff and resistant with age. He pressed harder and felt the latch begin to give and he paused. In his mind’s eye he saw a reconstruction of a medieval ballista, a huge, spring-operated crossbow that could deliver an immense spearlike projectile at incredible speeds. There were larger models that could fire as many as half a dozen arrows at a time.

  “I think the door is rigged,” said Holliday. “I suggest that you stand aside.”

  “You’re trying my patience, Colonel. I’ll shoot you without a second thought.”

  “Just a suggestion,” said Holliday.

  Genrikhovich eyed him thoughtfully, then stepped to the left, the gun never faltering. Eddie did the same. Holliday tugged hard on the latch, then stepped rapidly aside. There was a deep, thrumming resonance from the corridor beyond the open doorway, followed by a groaning metallic whirring, like some sort of mechanical device being released. An instant later four immense arrows, each one at least five feet long, hurtled out of the doorway, their eight-inch-long iron points crashing through the mosaic tile on the floor and embedding themselves into whatever was underneath. The projectiles jutted out of the floor at a forty-five-degree angle about three feet from the open door. If Holliday had been standing in front of the door he would have been skewered like a shish kebab.

  “Fascinatin
g,” said Genrikhovich. “Do you think that is the last of it?”

  “Who knows?” said Holliday.

  “There must have been a secret way to open the door, or a hidden mechanism.”

  “Maybe,” said Holliday.

  “The czar wouldn’t make it impossibly difficult to get at his treasure house,” said Genrikhovich.

  “Unless he had some other way,” said Eddie, looking at the door. “Una entrada privada.”

  “A private entrance.” Holliday nodded. “Makes sense.”

  “To me, too,” said Eddie.

  “Perhaps the negr is right,” said Genrikhovich.

  “Poshel na hui slishkom,” said Eddie blandly.

  “You mean Mr. Cabrera?” Holliday asked.

  Genrikhovich sighed and adjusted his spectacles with his free hand. “You are both becoming tedious,” he said.

  “And you’re being rude.”

  “I do not have time for your petty liberal sensitivities, Colonel Holliday. My family’s search for Ivan the Terrible’s secret library was begun in 1916, almost a hundred years ago now. I intend to use the secret my grandfather passed down to me to find what Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev failed to discover even with all the powers of the Soviet Union at their disposal. My rudeness, as you deem it, is irrelevant to such an epic quest, and once again may I point out that I am the one who has the pistol?” He flicked the barrel of the old automatic to make his point. “Your friend Senor Cabrera first, if you please.”

  Eddie lifted his shoulders; then without hesitation the tall Cuban sidestepped between two of the heavy spears, ducked his head a little and entered the corridor. Holliday followed right behind him.

  The passageway here was covered in mosaics, like the floor of the chamber behind them; even the curved ceiling above them was covered with them, except for the wide, dark slit that was surely the source of the spears from the hidden ballista. The symbols were arcane, designs showing the alchemical triangles signifying air, earth and fire, the lightning bolt for water, snakes curled around staffs like an ancient doctor’s caduceus, eyes of Horus, more complex pentagrams and mandalas, a gruesome inlay of a skulled man riding on the back of a goat, even the magical square of abracadabra, the alchemist’s palindrome. It was a sorcerer’s dream brought to life, or perhaps the nightmare fantasy of a long-dead czar with a penchant for torture and the mass murder of his enemies.

  “Rasputin knew of this place, although he never came here,” said Genrikhovich from behind them. “He told my grandfather tales of it many times.”

  “I thought your grandfather was a spy for the Okhrana, a double agent for Lenin and his Cheka?” Holliday said.

  “He was. He was Rasputin’s bodyguard, in fact, assigned to him by the czarina Alexandra. The czar approved the choice because he knew that my grandfather actually worked for him; he provided the czar with the infamous ‘staircase notes’ of Rasputin’s activities. St. Petersburg was like that in those times before the revolution: a place of lies, deceit, betrayals, each man working for his own selfish ends.”

  “Like your grandfather?” Holliday asked as they continued down the long passageway.

  “Czar Nicholas knew the secret, as did the czarina. The secret that Rasputin stole and took with him onto the Moika Canal the night that he died. The secret my grandfather learned and took from him with his last breath.”

  “I thought it was the British agent Rayner who was there at the end,” said Holliday.

  “No, and that was the secret Oswald Rayner took with him to his grave. My grandfather was the last man to see Grigori Rasputin alive, and it was my grandfather who took matters into his own hands and pushed him under the ice.”

  “Why did Rayner lie?”

  “Because my grandfather knew he was pedik, a homosexual, and also a double agent acting for both the British and the Okhrana. He threatened Rayner with exposure to both organizations. Either would have had him killed or at least imprisoned.”

  “And so Rasputin died at your father’s hand.”

  “Using Rayner’s Webley pistol for the coup de grace, and finally drowning him. But not before retrieving the key.”

  “The key to Ivan the Terrible’s treasure house?”

  “The key to everything,” answered Genrikhovich. He began to hum something that sounded like a hymn of some sort, and then began to sing the words under his breath.

  “Can you make out what he’s saying?” Holliday whispered to Eddie as they continued on down the mysterious corridor somewhere deep beneath the Kremlin.

  “It is something religious, I think,” the Cuban said, listening to the mournful, chanting tune. “It is very old, too.” He listened again as Genrikhovich repeated what sounded like a chorus. “‘We who misticamente. . mystically? represent’. . ?el bebe angel?”

  “Cherubim?” Holliday suggested.

  “Si. . ‘cherubim, and singing to the life-giving Trinity the. . three-times-holy hymn, let us now lay aside all earthly care that we may. . receive the king of all, who comes invisibly’. . transmitido por. . ‘carried up. . borne up by angels. Aleluya! Aleluya! Aleluya!’”

  Behind them Genrikhovich repeated the chorus over and over again, lost within the hymn and whatever it meant to him. A few moments later the passageway ended in a wrought-iron gate with six rusted bars that was closed, but not locked. Eddie cautiously pushed open the gate and waited.

  “Step through into the chamber,” said Genrikhovich.

  “What do you see?” Holliday asked, standing a couple of feet behind his friend. “Any wires, traps, anything out of place in the doorway?” Eddie scanned the iron frame of the gate, paying particular attention to the hinges, the bottom of the frame and the lintel overhead.

  “Nada,” said the Cuban.

  “What about the room beyond?”

  “A circle, a dome in the ceiling. There are two other gates and a door. There is a great deal of dust everywhere. The floor is in mosaic. Circles one inside another, red and black, and there are mosaic pictures over the gates.”

  “Pictures of what?”

  “A saint in one, the Holy Mother above the other.”

  Holliday smiled faintly. You could spend a lifetime under Fidel, but once a Catholic, always a Catholic. “Anything else?”

  “Directly across the room there is ?un. . pulpito??Un altar?”

  “An altar?”

  “Si,” said Eddie. “Un altar de oro. A golden altar.”

  “A golden altar?” Genrikhovich asked, excitement rising in his voice.

  “Yes,” replied Holliday.

  “The Holy Altar of the Ninth Sanctuary,” breathed the Russian. “The old stories were true!”

  “What old stories?” Holliday asked.

  “Step through!” Genrikhovich demanded. “Step through! I must see for myself!”

  “Go through,” said Holliday to Eddie, his voice soft. “But stay close to the wall.”

  “Si, compadre. I understand,” the Cuban replied. He stepped through into the room and shuffled quickly to the left, keeping his back close to the wall. Holliday followed, his eyes scanning the room in the light from his helmet. Genrikhovich stepped through the gateway, the big lantern in his left hand, the Tokarev still firmly gripped in his right.

  “It is true,” he whispered. “All true.” He walked forward, hypnotized by the gleaming vision of the gold altar on the far side of the room.

  “I think you’d better stop,” advised Holliday. Genrikhovich ignored him and continued forward toward the altar. “Stop!” Holliday said, speaking like a drill instructor.

  Genrikhovich stopped and turned, blinking like a man coming out of sleep. “What did you say?” the Russian asked. Holliday noticed that the hand with the gun had dropped slightly. Not enough to do anything about, not yet, at least.

  “Look at the floor,” said Holliday. “There are four circles of red, four of black and one red circle in the center. Between the last circle of black and the red one in the center it looks as though the
dust has settled into some sort of crack.”

  “What are you talking about?” Genrikhovich asked, suspicion rising in his tone along with the pistol in his hand.

  “It’s a tiger trap,” said Holliday.

  “What?” Genrikhovich asked, looking confused. “What is that?”

  “Your weight springs a trapdoor and you fall into a pit with twenty or thirty bamboo stakes jutting up. In Vietnam they used to cover the sharpened ends of the bamboo with human feces; if the spikes didn’t kill you the sepsis would.”

  “You think those deeper lines in the floor could signify such a thing?” Genrikhovich asked.

  “Positive.” Holliday turned to Eddie. “Give me the shovel.”

  Eddie handed him the entrenching tool, and Holliday walked forward until he stood just outside the large crimson center ring. He knelt down, raised the shovel above his head, then brought it down hard. There was a cracking noise, the rusty groan of old hinges, and then the gallows thump of two semicircular doors six feet across dropping downward. Holliday edged forward and looked into the pit. It was twenty feet down, and the stakes were made of what appeared to be the pointed blades of upended broadswords. The entire bottom of the pit was covered with a piled litter of bones. One of the sword stakes had slid between the old sepia-colored bones of an intact rib cage. Holliday counted at least twenty human skulls.

  “Looks like your friend Ivan had a few practice runs,” said Holliday.

  Genrikhovich came cautiously forward and looked down into the pit, keeping one eye on Holliday and Eddie. He stepped back quickly, his lip curled in distaste. “No doubt he had the workmen and artisans who worked here killed to keep his secret.”