The Templar Legion

by Paul Christopher

  “The trick is to make them kill their parents first. Beat their mothers’ brains in, slit their fathers’ throats, rape and then disembowel their sisters. Once they have done this for you to save their own lives they are yours, like property, like dogs. They will do anything for you and no order must need to make sense; it must only come from you like a man whistling for a dog that is his.”

  Holliday began looking around for some kind of weapon, even a rock would do, estimating his odds of poking the man’s eyes out of his head or tearing out his tongue before he was swarmed and torn apart by his childish minions.

  Only once or twice in his career—or in his life at all, for that matter—had he ever felt that sacrificing his life was a worthwhile and reasonable option; this was one of those times. To kill this man would be what Rafi called a mitzvah, an altogether good thing for the human race.

  They reached the river. There were several fishing boats tied together, led by one of the outboard-powered dugouts the child soldiers had used to reach the river. In the fishing boats, crowded to the gunwales, were the rest of the people of the village, mostly old men, old women and very young children of both sexes. Everyone in the boats was wailing, screaming and crying. The smell of kerosene drifted over the river and Holliday knew what was going to happen. All around the boats Holliday could also see the cruising, scaly backs of swarms of crocodiles, waiting for the delivery of their prey. Waiting on the bank of the river were the rest of the jeering swarm of boy soldiers, gathered to watch the show.

  “¡El bastardo sádica! ¡Se va a quemar a continuación, darles de comer a los cocodrilos! ¡Malos matar al puta madre!” Eddie muttered, furious, his dark eyes flashing with anger. His big fists clenched and the vein in his forehead was beating like a drum.

  “Not if I kill him first,” said Holliday.

  “With what?” Salamango laughed, overhearing them. “Do you know what those people out there in those boats said when we came into their village and began burning their houses and raping their daughters? They said that they were protected by the gods. They were protected by the umufo omhloshana; you know what that means?”

  “The pale strangers,” said Eddie.

  “That’s right, black man, Pale Strangers.” Salamango let out a huge rumble of laughter. “Well, my friends, you are the only pale strangers I see around here and I don’t see much protection going on.” He barked an order and the boy with Peggy’s camera came forward. Salamango gave another order and the boy reluctantly handed the camera over to Peggy and stepped back.

  “You take the pictures when I tell you and you don’t stop until I tell you; understand, little white woman? Don’t start or stop before I tell you or I’ll rip you in half where you stand.” He grinned. “I want to make postcards to send to the United Nations.”

  Rafi took a single lurching step forward but Holliday jammed his foot down painfully on the archaeologist’s instep. Peggy was crying now, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “Why do you want to do this?” she asked. “Why?”

  The man in the Knicks shirt stared down at her, lip curled. “I had a brother and his name was Felicianos and he was eight years old. They came into our village one night and killed almost everybody. They left Felicianos till the end and then they chopped off his orgao and threw it into the fire and then threw him in after it. They were FNLA, these people, Frente Nacional para a Libertação de Angola, Portuguese with American arms, because America was afraid that Angola would become Marxist.”

  “That was terrible, but no reason to do this,” pleaded Peggy.

  “I do terrible things to show how terrible I am,” Salamango explained. “More terrible than the pigs who killed my brother by a thousand times. I do it for a million Felicianos.”

  Eddie spit on the bloody ground. “You do it because you like it, cabrón,” he said. “I know your type; I’ve smelled them before. They stink of their own anger and take it out on the world.”

  “I’ll second that,” said Holliday.

  Salamango sneered. “You people with your democracies and your communism, you don’t understand how the game is played here. Here, in my Africa, the leader is the man who is feared among his tribe and any other tribe; the man who is feared is the man who kills; and the man who is feared most and has the most power is the man who kills most. It has been that way for ten thousand years and it will be that way for another ten thousand or until we are all dead. That is Africa, little girl, and anyone who tells you other than that is white or a liar, and probably both.”

  He turned and raised his fist. He called out a single word: “Kuf-wa!”

  On the dugout the boy at the outboard tossed something into the nearest of the fishing boats. There was no immediate flame, just a heat ripple in the air that distorted the screaming figures on the first boat. The dugout set the fishing boats adrift and the first people, their clothes and flesh on fire, leaped over the side to be devoured by the waiting crocodiles. Within less than a minute the water around the flaming boats was a frothing red horror of blood and snapping bones.

  And then it began.

  The first dart, whether by accident or design, struck Salamango in the right eye, burying itself in the orb, leaving nothing outside the body except a narrow white cone of what appeared to be ordinary paper. The second dart struck him in the cheek, the long metal tip piercing from side to side with the cone on the left and the flattened diamond-shaped point coming out the other side. The points appeared to be coated with some sort of black, tarry substance.

  Holliday turned on his heel and watched as all four of the armed children guarding them were also struck, each one more than once, the bright white cones appearing in faces, backs, chests and bellies.

  The effects of the darts were instantaneous: paralysis, choking, convulsions, a strychnine-like arching of the back, foaming at the mouth and then complete loss of sphincter control followed almost immediately by death.

  Holliday, Peggy, Rafi and Eddie were the only people left untouched. Out on the river, the dugout drifted. The boy who had torched the sailboats was draped over the gunwale as two crocodiles fought to pull his corpse into the water.

  The sailboats themselves were smoldering hulks, their occupants either burned to death or dragged down to the muddy bottom by the giant reptiles. The whole thing had been silent and from the first dart in Salamango’s eye to the last child’s death had taken only seconds. Not a word had been said; not a shot had been fired.

  With her camera Peggy began taking photos of the bizarre killing ground all around them. Suddenly she stopped; her hands were shaking too hard. Holliday followed her stunned gaze. Men began to appear from the jungle, scores of them, all dressed in ornately folded linen loincloths that looked like pleated kilts and sandals, their thongs crisscrossed up to the knee in a familiar design. They carried five- or six-foot-long bamboo tubes in their hands and short quivers on their belts for the long, cone-ended darts.

  Some of the men wore crested wooden helmets with leather cheek flaps, the crests made from some kind of stiffened animal-hair bristle, while others wore simple linen coifs to match the kiltlike loincloths. The strangest thing about them was their color—a tanned light brown like heavily creamed coffee. Their hair was dark and straight, their features definitely Caucasian rather than negroid. Most startling of all, Holliday could see that some of the oddly dressed men had blue eyes.

  “Umufo omhloshana,” Eddie said quietly.

  Holliday nodded. “The Pale Strangers.”

  22

  There was a knock on Sir James Matheson’s office door.

  “Enter!”

  Allen Faulkener stepped into the lavish office and stood in front of Matheson’s desk. “Leonhard Euhler is dead,” he said stiffly.

  “Christ!” Matheson said. “How?”

  “Some sort of homosexual tryst, as far as the Swiss police are concerned. Love letters, suicide note.”

  Matheson sat rigidly behind his desk, palms spread on its smooth em
pty surface. He thought for a moment, then leaned down, pulled open the humidor drawer of the desk and took out a Romeo y Julieta Short Churchill Robusto.

  He closed the drawer carefully, then took a gold Dunhill cutter-punch combination out of his waistcoat pocket and prepared the cigar for smoking. He sat back in his chair and lit the cigar with a matching Dunhill lighter, all the while trying to maintain his composure in front of Faulkener. It didn’t do to let the hired help see the master afraid, and for the first time in a long time that was exactly what Sir James Matheson was—afraid.

  Matheson wasn’t much of a believer in luck or happenstance. Whatever evidence the Swiss police had in hand he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that Euhler would pick this particular moment to snuff out his lights for some idiotic love affair. He could sense the first small cracks in his plan, but if his intuition was right, who was responsible, and how did he stop the cracks from getting worse?

  “No signs of foul play?”

  “Apparently not. Pills, the love letters, as I mentioned. The man who wrote the letters died in a car accident.”

  “Recently?”

  “Six years ago.”

  Why would a man, poof or not, kill himself over the death of a lover six years ago? It was making less and less sense. Everything was pointing to the Kolingba operation.

  “I’ll want to see the autopsy report, the police file and any surveillance tapes that were made.”

  “I’ve already checked, Sir James. There were no cameras at his residence but there are interior and exterior cameras at the bank.”

  “Speak to Herr Gesler personally; tell him that since Euhler was handling some delicate business for us I would very much appreciate receiving copies of the tapes as soon as possible. If he balks, lean on him a little; remind him of the dossier on his personal affairs that is in our possession. Get the tapes for the day before the man’s death and for the day after.” Matheson paused. “He was supposed to get the proxies on the mining company you found; did he do so?”

  “Not that I am aware of, Sir James.”

  No, of course not; there’d be no point in killing him if the proxies had been exchanged. Someone else was trying to get them. But who? Nagoupandé? He didn’t have the brains of a gnat, and Matheson seriously doubted that the man would be able to imagine such a conspiracy, let alone orchestrate it.

  Kolingba was probably incapable as well, but his personal Rasputin, this Oliver Gash, might, although he doubted it somehow; Gash’s dossier portrayed him as a criminal with a criminal’s shrewdness and without the real sophistication to manage a massive short-selling stock fraud. It simply wasn’t his thing. He took another puff on the cigar, enjoying its rich, sweet flavor for a few brief seconds. Time to get down to brass tacks. The proxies.

  “Find out the position of the proxies. If Euhler did not have them signed you will go to British Columbia yourself and obtain them. I have copies here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have we heard from Harris and Mrs. Sinclair’s hooligans in Africa?”

  “No, sir. Not a word.”

  “Then presume that he’s been wiped off the slate and that Holliday and his archaeologist friend are still at large. We’re looking at far too much media exposure if they’re allowed to survive. Find someone better than Harris to stop them.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How much longer for our Austrian friend Lanz?”

  “The new moon is next week.”

  “His minders are keeping an eye on him?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right, get me those tapes and find out about the proxies. Without them I might as well be investing in a dustbin full of ashes.”

  “Yes, sir.” Faulkener left the room.

  Matheson sat back in his chair. He was breaking half the securities and exchange laws in this country and any others where he expected to trade Silver Brand Mining, and if he was caught at it they’d put him behind bars for the rest of his life. His financial crimes made Bernie Madoff look like an amateur. On top of that he could be charged with conspiring to commit murder both before and after the fact, not to mention toppling a foreign head of state and bribing his replacement. To make things worse it now looked like there was some mysterious competitor for Kukuanaland’s spoils.

  His smile widened and he pulled heartily on the stubby little Churchill Robusto. He hadn’t been this sick with fear and this excited since he’d lost his virginity to his father’s mistress at the age of fourteen. He took the sweet-tasting cigar out of his mouth and blew a plume of aromatic smoke toward the ornate plaster ceiling of his office. These were the moments a man lived for!

  A single figure stepped out of the jungle, his face covered by an ornate wooden mask, its edges trimmed with stiffened gold rattan like a lion’s mane, a round cockerel crest topped with rigid bristle, bloodred like that of a helmet worn by a Roman centurion.

  The red wooden eyes of the face bulged and the mouth was a boxy square, wooden bars where the teeth should be, much like a gladiator’s protective head covering. He wore the same white cloth kilt as the others, complete with a short quiver full of darts, but this man’s skin was coal black. His feet were covered in heavy sandals, leather strips crisscrossed almost to his knees.

  In one hand he carried one of the long blowgun tubes and in his right hand he carried something very much like the crook and flail of an Egyptian pharaoh: sacred signs of power, divinity and kingship. Like the scepters found in King Tutankhamen’s arms, these were also solid gold. A heavy gold arm ring was set with enormous uncut diamonds and emeralds.

  As he approached Holliday and the others the man in the ornate mask slipped the gold flail and crook into the waistband of his kilt and raised his hand to remove the mask. As he did so one of the lighter-skinned men stepped forward, head bowed, and took the mask from him almost reverentially. Like the flail and crook, the mask, too, was clearly some sign of high office.

  The face of the man, now unmasked, was dark eyed and intelligent. He smiled, and as he did so Holliday could see an old-fashioned silver amalgam filling in his left bicuspid. Whoever he was, this man was no jungle savage.

  He stopped in front of Holliday and extended his hand. “Good afternoon, Colonel Holliday, my name is Dr. Amobe Barthélemy Limbani. Perhaps you could introduce me to your friends.”

  23

  Captain Jean-Luc Saint-Sylvestre’s experience of the United States was limited to a fourteen-day package holiday to Miami he took out of simple curiosity one August. His experience of Canada and Vancouver amounted to even less: a few satellite TV interviews he’d seen shot on rainy city streets during the recent Winter Olympics.

  Getting off the Air Canada 747 he was pleasantly surprised to find a modern, clean and reasonably efficient airport terminal. The customs agents, while obviously naive about the ways of the world, were at least polite, which was a step up from the uniformed gorillas he’d dealt with at Miami International.

  He had purchased a Vancouver travel guide during the brief layover in Paris, and picked an appropriately lavish downtown Vancouver hotel in case his plan B required taking the elderly ladies out for tea. He booked a suite online using one of Euhler’s credit cards, so when he picked up a taxi outside the arrivals terminal he simply told driver, “Hotel Vancouver.”

  As he left the airport it quickly became apparent that Vancouver was very much a city of water and bridges. The airport itself was on an island in a river delta, and on his left he could see the Pacific Ocean.

  They traveled down Granville Street, a wide boulevard lined with pink-and-white blossoming cherry trees. There were mountains in the distance, cloaked in evergreens, and even more water as they passed over something called False Creek that seemed to be some sort of tourist shopping attraction.

  Within fifteen minutes of leaving the airport the taxi arrived at the Hotel Vancouver. It was a city block–sized structure built like a French château, with a distinctive copper roof, long since gone green wit
h age and the elements. He signed in using one of Euhler’s credit cards again. Unlike most European hotels, there was no requirement to hand over or even show a passport, and no one seemed to care that a black man who spoke English with a decidedly French accent would have such an obviously Germanic name as Euhler. Saint-Sylvestre smiled.

  Back in the Cold War days, and even now, Canadian passports were the document of choice among intelligence agencies, since they offered visa-free entry into 157 countries and visa on arrival for most others. In the sixties it was said that there were more spies entering the United States on shuttle flights from Ottawa and Toronto than there were ordinary passengers, and even as late as 1997 the Mossad used Canadian passports in their botched assassination attempt on Khaled Mashal, the infamous Hamas leader. Very naive, these Canadians, Saint-Sylvestre thought for the second time that day.

  An aging busboy took his suitcase up to the small suite he’d booked and he gave the man a five-dollar tip from the multicolored wad he’d changed his Swiss francs into before leaving the airport.

  The suite was beige, conservative and came with all the bells and whistles, including big-screen TVs, Wi-Fi, a jet tub and bathrobes. Like advertisements in the Sunday New York Times for four-thousand-dollar A.P.O. Jeans and thirty-thousand-dollar purses from Marc Jacobs, this was the kind of luxury that provided the seeds of revolution to the masses, something that his esteemed superior, General Solomon Kolingba, with his bumblebee Range Rovers, his diamond-encrusted Rolex President and his three-thousand-dollar Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses, seemed to have forgotten.

  And now, it seemed, his forgetfulness was catching up with him. Sadly, the fat, bullet-headed president of Kukuanaland was not the Robin Hood he’d pretended to be at first. The wealth he earned by the criminal enterprises he oversaw with Gash rarely went much farther than the garrison walls in Fourandao or beyond the front doors of the bank directly below Saint-Sylvestre’s offices. Certainly none of it reached the impoverished people of the country.