The Templar throne t-3

by Paul Christopher

  Peggy brought up the Nikon and took a few quick shots. The two cops came to a stop directly in front of her, blocking her path. The crowd broke around them like the current of a river giving way to a boulder in midstream. Shopkeepers paused in the middle of their noisy sales pitches, sensing a bit of drama. Peggy was a little confused; as far as she knew there was no law in Israel against taking pictures of cops. It wasn't as though they were Mossad or anything.

  "Peggy Blackstock?" the male cop asked. Peggy noticed that the female had her hand on the holstered butt of the Jericho 915 on her hip. She also noted that neither one of them had any rank insignia.

  How the hell do they know my name? Peggy thought.

  "Yes," she said.

  "I am Pakad Yakov Ben- Haim of the Israeli Police, Headquarters Division."

  A pakad-what was such a high- ranking officer like a chief inspector doing wearing a patrolman's uniform?

  "What can I do for you, Chief Inspector? I hope you don't mind me taking your picture." The cop ignored the question.

  "Please come with us," said Ben-Haim quietly. "It's about your husband. I'm afraid there has been an accident."

  Their first sighting of the lonely island was nothing more than a distant smudge on the eastern horizon, balanced on the curving edge of the world, a frighteningly dark mass of clouds in the background, so dark at the spreading base that it was almost black.

  "Once we make landfall you're not going to have much time," cautioned Gallant. "A couple of hours at most." The burly lobsterman with the Groucho mustache shook his head. "Any longer than that, you're on your own and I'm gone."

  Holliday glanced at Meg, expecting some kind of plea or argument, but she said nothing, simply looking blankly and without expression through the windscreen of the Deryldene D's cabin, staring at the slowly forming smudge on the horizon. Holliday found himself hypnotized by the cold, black, roiling clouds that formed a background to the image of the island. It was like staring at a vision of the future, and the future wasn't good.

  They continued east for another hour and a half, the island growing steadily more visible as they approached. Meg had gone below, overcome by her seasickness. At first Sable looked much bigger than it actually was, an illusory desert island shaped in a long crescent, its narrowing arms pointing toward the New World, Arcadia.

  Slowly but surely the illusion faded; this was no island of palm trees and beautiful native girls; it was a windswept desolate sandbar, its back to the open sea, its center a spine of wandering dunes barely held together by the tough grasses and bushes that somehow clung to life through the seasons.

  A steady wind was blowing from the east, and nearing the shore Holliday could see the blowing wisps of sand rising from the crests of the dunes like wind-borne snow in the middle of a blizzard.

  The Deryldene D suddenly seemed to lurch in its onward course, the bow swinging abruptly to the south. Gallant cursed under his breath and turned the wheel hard back to port.

  "What was that?" Holliday asked.

  "That's the reason so many ships went down on Sable," said Gallant, grunting with effort as he dragged on the wheel, one eye looking ahead, the other focused on the digital depth finder. "It's called a gyre. Out west they call it a skookumchuck."

  "What on earth is a skookumchuck?"

  "A vortex," said Gallant, fighting the wheel.

  There are four main currents that flow around Sable Island. The Labrador Current, the St. Lawrence Outfall and the Nova Scotia Current running south along the island's southeastern shore, and the much more powerful and deeper Gulf Stream flowing north along the outer shore.

  As huge volumes of water race past the island they set up a whirling Coriolis effect, creating spinning currents of water just below the surface. Sailing ships of the past riding the Gulf Stream up from the Caribbean on their way home to Europe would suddenly find themselves torn off course and thrown up on the ocean- facing banks and bars, while ships heading along the Atlantic Coast to New York and points south would find themselves cast up on the inner beaches.

  A map of Sable Island shows hundreds of known wrecks almost evenly divided between the two shores with a slight advantage held by the Gulf Stream coast, probably caused by ships running before the storms. Gallant nodded toward the instruments in front of him as he struggled with the wheel.

  "Keep an eye on the echo sounder," he instructed. "Read me the depths every ten seconds. If you see a yellow-white patch ahead of us, call it out. Same for port and starboard, got that?"

  "Got it," Holliday said and nodded.

  With Holliday calling out the numbers they moved steadily toward the island, Gallant guiding them toward the starboard end of the crescent-shaped strip of sand. At some point Meg came up from the cabin, but Holliday barely noticed. She looked toward the shore, then went back down into the cabin and retrieved the two metal detectors and their backpacks. Holliday kept reading off the numbers.

  The hidden sandbars threatening to ground them were all at right angles to the shore, which Holliday found strange, but this was no time to ask questions; Gallant was concentrating hard on the approaching coast. The water beneath them became shallower and shallower. Two hundred yards from shore it was barely eight feet. At a hundred yards it was six feet, and at twenty-five yards it was barely four.

  "What's the draft on this thing?" Holliday asked.

  "Three feet three inches," said Gallant. "We'll ground in a few seconds."

  "Aren't you afraid of getting stuck?" Meg asked cautiously.

  "This time of day the tide's coming in, not going out," said Gallant, grinning.

  There was a rough grating sound as the Deryldene D pushed up on the sand. Gallant pushed the throttle forward, beaching them even more firmly, then switched off the engine.

  They had arrived.

  27

  Cardinal Antonio Niccolo Spada, Vatican secretary of state, sat beside the large pool at his villa just beyond the north end of the Rome Ring Road. He was wrapped in a thick white terry-cloth robe with the crossed keys and double-headed phoenix of his family coat of arms. It was one of the odd twists of fate that fascinated Spada.

  The present Pope was the son of a Bavarian village policeman, while Spada was descended directly from the Borgias. Yet the policeman's son and onetime member of the Hitler Youth was the Pope, and Spada was only the Pontiff's second in command. Oh, well; true power often rested behind the throne, even if it was the Cathedra Petri, the Chair of St. Peter.

  Spada wrapped the robe more tightly around his shrunken chest. He still loved to swim each day, but even though the afternoon was warm he felt a chill. Another sign that he was getting on in years, the first being that his oldest friends were beginning to die around him.

  He wondered if he would go to hell for his transgressions when he died. Established Catholic doctrine said that if he made a final confession and was given extreme unction he would go to heaven but he wasn't sure he believed in either heaven or hell. Sometimes the old man hoped that death would be more straightforward, a simple end to consciousness and then the everlasting dark.

  For Cardinal Spada, Catholicism was far more political than it was spiritual. A true Catholic of the Holy Cross should, almost by definition, have no more personal ambition than to be a humble parish priest. Spada smiled at that.

  As a trained lawyer his first appointment to the Holy See had been as an assistant to Cardinal Pietro Ciriaci, head of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, the interpretive body for canon law. That had been the beginning, and he'd never looked back and never once regretted his long, sometimes vicious rise to the Red Hat and a seat in the College of Cardinals.

  Father Thomas Brennan, head of Sodalitium Pianum, the Vatican Secret Service, came out through the open French doors of the villa and walked across the patio to where Spada was resting after his brief swim. It was early afternoon and the bright sun had turned the breeze-ruffled surface of the azure pool into a field of sparkling diamonds.

 
; The pool area was absolutely secure, swept for electronic devices every day by Brennan's people and surrounded by a tall hedge on three sides; the villa itself was protected by a high, spiked stone wall, security cameras, and armed members of the Corpo della Gendarmeria, the Vatican police.

  As usual the pallbearer figure of the Irish priest was slightly hunched, as though the burdens of the world rested on his sloping shoulders like some cosmic coffin, and as usual he was smoking, a trail of cigarette ash sprinkled over the lapels of his cheap black suit. He sat down at Spada's glass-topped, wrought iron patio table.

  A servant appeared with a tray, a heavy ceramic ashtray and two tall glasses. One was a raspberry-colored negroni and the other was a rusty- looking Long Island iced tea. The servant placed the Long Island iced tea and the ashtray in front of Brennan and the negroni in front of the cardinal. The servant bowed slightly to the cardinal and then withdrew. The two men at the table sat silently for a moment, watching the chips of light dancing randomly across the swimming pool. Finally, with a certain regret in his voice, the cardinal spoke.

  "Have you discovered anything new?"

  "After escaping from the lake property they took a train to Halifax, Nova Scotia."

  "A train?" Spada asked, surprised.

  "Quite smart, really," replied Brennan. The priest took a long swallow of his drink. "No airport security, no identification required to purchase tickets, no railway police to speak of, not on the trains at any rate."

  "Are they still there?"

  "They met with a man named Gallant."

  "Who is he?" Spada asked.

  "A fisherman. A lobster catcher, to be specific."

  "A fisherman?"

  "This man Gallant has a somewhat dubious reputation," said Brennan. He butted his cigarette in the ashtray and lit another. "He is rumored to smuggle things between Maine and Nova Scotia: cigarettes, cheap Canadian pharmaceuticals and the like. Now he's vanished along with his boat. So have Holliday and the woman."

  "Could he be smuggling them into the United States?"

  "It's a possibility. The normal crossings have become much more difficult to breach with everyone needing passports on both sides of the border."

  "But why now?" Spada asked. "To give up their quest at this stage doesn't seem logical."

  "Perhaps they were frightened off by the attack at the lake property," suggested Brennan.

  Spada sipped his mouth-puckering drink and shook his head. "There is the fundamental problem of why they went to Canada in the first place," said the cardinal. "And why this Braintree?"

  "Braintree was a colleague of Holliday's uncle. He's helped Holliday before."

  "Ah, yes," Spada said and nodded. "The infamous Henry Granger, spy, Nazi killer, academician and the last of the Templars all in one."

  Brennan's thin lips twisted into a grimace. He spoke darkly. "Not the last Templar, we know that much at least, thanks to the efforts of his nephew, Lieutenant Colonel Holliday."

  The expression on Brennan's face was enough to draw a smile from Cardinal Spada, something that rarely occurred these days.

  "Stare calme, Tomasso, stare calme. Holliday bested you, so accept it. You'll have your chance at retribution, I assure you." The cardinal thought for a moment, then spoke again. "Do you think Holliday has the slightest idea of what he's involved with, its scope?"

  "I doubt it," replied Brennan. "He may well believe that he's dragged the woman into his troubles rather than the other way around."

  "They have come under fire on six separate occasions since joining forces. The man who followed them in Prague, the Peseks in Venice, St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall, the attempted kidnapping on Iona, and finally the attack in Canada. Surely he's not so naive that he'd think we were responsible for all of that?"

  "He's run into the Peseks before, that unfortunate series of events in Libya last year, if you'll recall."

  "Vividly."

  Brennan lit another cigarette. "So he puts the Peseks at our doorstep and perhaps that CIA hireling in Prague. He'd almost certainly assume that the police intervention in Cornwall was concocted by the Company as well; they're the only people who could orchestrate a thing like that so quickly."

  "And the rest?"

  "He knows the failed kidnapping was by the Blackhawk people. Like an idiot the man he disposed of was carrying identification. The police questioned the man he wounded, so undoubtedly MI- 5 and hence the CIA know of their involvement."

  "Would he know about Rex Deus's involvement with them?"

  Brennan shook his head. "Blackhawk is small, nothing near the size and profile of groups like Halliburton or Blackwater."

  "Sadly, of course, we do know of them," murmured the cardinal. "All too well, in fact."

  "You shouldn't have allowed the bank to do it," said Brennan. "If you'll recall, I advised you of that at the time, Your Eminence."

  "There was nothing that I could do about it," explained Spada. "RhineHydraulik and Aquadyn were both European companies and heavily invested in us. There was no way that the IOR could know that there would be a hostile takeover and consolidation of both of them by Sinclair's company."

  "The Vatican Bank should know," replied Brennan harshly.

  "Did you?" Spada snapped. "The Istituto relies on you for such intelligence."

  "No," said Brennan. "But I knew that RhineHydraulik was weak and Aquadyn was vulnerable. Again, I told you that at the time, just as I told Bertone at the bank." The Irishman shook his head sadly.

  "Now a fundamentalist Christian organization that has a private army of its own is a business partner of the Holy See. If we withdrew our interest in Rhine-Aqua in this market we'd lose billions. If Rex Deus sold their interest there would be a run on the stock and we'd lose billions again. If they want to, Rex Deus can put the entire Catholic Church into a vise."

  "I am aware of all of this," answered Spada. "Which is precisely why we need some leverage with them. They must be controlled or dealt with some other way."

  Brennan looked mildly amused at the cardinal using such strong language.

  "You'll have to be clearer than that," said the priest. "It's not as though I've got too many Antonin Peseks out there. I can't order up assassinations like a meal in a restaurant."

  "Forget that for the moment," said the cardinal, abruptly changing the subject. "We were talking about Holliday. What about the Canadian incident?"

  Brennan shrugged. "At this point it is still unclear. The group that abducted Holliday and the woman has not been identified, although it is likely that their attackers at the lakefront property were Blackhawk." Brennan drained the last of his drink and began crunching ice cubes between his teeth.

  "We're missing something," said the cardinal. "This is too great a concentration of force from too many directions to be about a semi- mythical religious relic." The old man frowned, his thin lips drawn down, his eyes cold and thoughtful.

  A sudden gust of wind shook the branches of the hedge around the pool. As a child Spada was sure that sound was the voices of the dead whispering and heralding disaster. He shivered, shrinking into the heavy robe. Maybe he still believed it. "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten."

  "Begging your pardon, Eminence?" Brennan said, confused.

  "A verse from the Holy Scripture, Father Brennan. James, chapter five to be precise."

  "I'm not sure I take your meaning."

  "This whole thing is about money. I can smell it." The cardinal thought for a moment, his head bowed, almost as though he was at prayer, something he hadn't done in a very long time. "A year or so ago you heard a rumor making the rounds in Washington about something called Ironstone. Sinclair's name was involved. Did you ever discover anything else about it?"

  "A little, and it wasn't about money. As far as I know it was the code name for some kind of military response to the threat of a major act of terrorism on American soil."<
br />
  "Nothing that would affect us, though."

  "Not directly, no," said Brennan.

  A young priest appeared in the doorway into the villa. He stood hesitantly for a moment and then came forward to where Spada and Brennan were sitting. One of Brennan's boys, certainly, if his dark good looks were anything to go by. He stopped and bowed to Spada and then turned to Brennan.

  "Is ea anois, an bhfeadaim cunamh leat, Michael?" Brennan asked. Spada smiled for the second time since Brennan had arrived. The Irishman was speaking Gaelic, a requirement for all his couriers. A nice touch for keeping secrets, even from a cardinal, like the Navaho Windtalkers used by the U.S. Marines during World War Two. The young man responded, speaking rapidly. Spada couldn't understand a word. The message was brief. When the young man was done he bowed respectfully to Spada and then departed.

  "What was that all about?" Cardinal Spada said as the young man disappeared into the darkness of the villa beyond the French doors. "Or am I allowed to ask?"

  "The situation regarding Holliday has changed direction. His cousin Peggy and her husband have vanished into thin air."

  28

  Holliday turned the elapsed time bezel on his old Luminox wristwatch for two hours and then he and Sister Meg inputted their position into the two GPS handhelds, using the larger unit on the Deryldene D as a base guide. According to the big unit, Lake Wallace was located a mile and a half down the beach and six hundred yards inland across the low scruffy dunes.

  The weather station, which employed five of the six permanent residents of Sable Island, was a mile farther down the curving arm of the crescent. There were a small handful of offshore oil rigs in the ocean several miles away from the island, but with the sandbar already evacuated in the face of the coming hurricane it was unlikely they would be interrupted.

  It took them almost half an hour to reach the turn point indicated by the GPS. The fine dark sand was more difficult to walk in than either one of them had expected. It would take another ten minutes to reach the lake. That in turn meant it would take the same amount of time, if not longer, to make the return journey, and they still hadn't reached the lake.