The Templar Cross t-2

by Paul Christopher

  Using a map of Rome and Vince Caruso's familiarity with the city, they concocted a Robert Ludlum-Jason Bourne, cat-and-mouse, hither-and-yon, hares-and-hounds game across the city that would supposedly lead the priest and his men to where the exchange of Peggy for the location of the bullion would take place. In fact, it would all be a figment of their collective imaginations, the moves and countermoves orchestrated with generic, throwaway cell phones and overseen by Lieutenant Caruso driving his Italian girlfriend's Dragon Red Vespa GTS-250 scooter. With the paper chase concentrating Father Thomas and his colleagues, Holliday, Rafi and Tidyman would meet at the Marconi Bridge on the downstream River Tiber, then board a river sightseeing cruiser down to the old ruins at Ostia Antica, Rome's original port, now two miles inland after the deposit of three thousand years' worth of accumulated river silt.

  If things went according to plan they would discover a speedboat left for them by Vince Caruso at the marina where the sightseeing boat docked, which they would then use to reach the fishing shack where Peggy was being held hostage.

  Like most rescue plans it looked perfect on paper, and like most rescue plans, as Holliday well knew, it would be anything but perfect in its execution. Still, it wasn't bad for something put together in a hurry. In every theater of war Holliday had fought in, he'd seen much worse plans generated by entire committees of so-called experts, and over the years he'd developed a basic rule of thumb: in war, just like cooking, too many cooks just screwed things up. In his own mind it was all pretty straightforward. Find Peggy, kill anybody who got in their way, grab her and get the hell out of town as quickly as possible.

  The Ponte Guglielmo Marconi crossed the Tiber River south of Rome in a surprisingly rural area, especially on the southern side. The dock for the sightseeing boats was located a little downstream of the wide modern bridge on the bank of the river, squeezed in between a junior league rugby field and some fenced- off public tennis courts. The only way to get to it was down a dirt road that seemed to peter off the farther along you went. If it hadn't been for Lieutenant Caruso's detailed directions none of them would have ever found it. On the other hand, it was the perfect spot for a rendezvous; if anyone was following you they could be spotted a mile off. The boat was a small converted passenger ferry named, not surprisingly, the M.V. Horatio. She had three wedding-cake decks outfitted with restaurant-style booths set beside large tinted picture windows.

  Holliday arrived first and waited on the dock, receiving updates from Caruso on his cell phone every few minutes. As far as the young lieutenant could see everything was going according to plan. Father Thomas had successfully retrieved the cell phone left for him in the potted shrub by Tidyman and had begun his wild-goose chase. According to Caruso there was no sign of the bald Father Damaso.

  At eleven forty Emil Tidyman arrived, improbably dressed as a tourist in a Hawaiian shirt, a straw hat and big sunglasses with both binoculars and a camera hung around his neck. Ten minutes later Rafi appeared on the dock. As far as Holliday could tell neither man had been followed. He waited until they were about to pull in the gangplank before he boarded the broad-beamed, top-heavy ferry, and shortly afterward the M.V. Horatio eased out into the turbid green water and began making its ponderous way downstream.

  They made their way along the sinuous snaking river for an hour. It wasn't very exciting as sightseeing trips went; the great buildings and monuments of Rome had been built farther upstream, centered on the city's seven hills. For the most part all there was to see was the pastoral weed-choked banks of the river and the spans of various modern bridges. The advantage to Holliday and his companions was that taking the sightseeing boat made pursuit unlikely, if not impossible.

  The Horatio eventually turned in toward shore and docked at a comfortably ramshackle pier at Ostia Antica. The ruins, an entire city of them, were spread out over hundreds of acres. The buildings, no more than crumbling walls and tiled floors, were silent testament to the ancient port city's violent end.

  In A.D. 67 bands of roving pirates had descended on the city in ragtag fleets, burning everything as they went, eventually leading to the enactment of the Lex Gabinia, the law of Gabianus, its creator, giving the emperor of Rome far-reaching and completely arbitrary powers that were reminiscent of the panicked regulations enacted after 9/11.

  Power corrupts, Holliday reminded himself as he stepped off the boat, and absolute power corrupts absolutely; Father Thomas and his minions were proof enough of that. The pastoral teachings of a wandering prophet had been perverted into a tool of war.

  Instead of following the rest of the passengers up the path toward the ruins, Holliday, Rafi and Tidyman turned right, taking a barely visible dirt track that ran beneath the old trees along the riverbank.

  "This is like something out of a really bad Disney movie," said Tidyman. "Tales of the Riverbank or something. You expect Bambi to come out of the trees or bluebirds singing a merry tune and dropping daisies on our heads."

  "What do you know about Disney movies?" Holliday asked.

  "I used to run home from school every day just to watch Annette Funicello's breasts grow on the Mickey Mouse Club," said Tidyman. "Zorro. Davy Crocket."

  "Thumper," added Holliday. "Bambi."

  "Just remember what happened to Bambi's mother," cautioned Tidyman, laughing.

  "You've got a very strange sense of humor for an Egyptian," said Holliday.

  "What are you old men mumbling about now?" said Rafi, bringing up the rear of the little procession filing through the trees.

  "I think it is called whistling in the dark," said Tidyman. "Smiling in the face of adversity."

  A hundred feet farther along the low bank they came upon an old man fishing with a long pole, just as Vince Caruso had described. The man had white hair as fine as a baby's over a spotted skull, white stubble on his chin. Probably one of the army of relatives that Caruso seemed to have just about everywhere. There was a plastic bucket of squirming silver-bellied eels beside the man.

  "Qual e il tranello?" Holliday asked, carefully repeating the phrase just the way Caruso had told him. "What's the catch?"

  "Oggi c'e la pesca del salmone," the old man answered with a gap-toothed grin. "Salmon is the catch of the day." It was the correct response.

  "La barca?" Holliday asked. "The boat?"

  "Li," said the man, pointing with his sandpaper chin.

  They found it a little farther along the bank, half hidden by artfully concealing shrubbery and weeds. It was a sixteen-foot classic drift boat with a high pointed bow and a narrow transom fitted with an oddly shaped outboard motor.

  The boat was filthy, with a pile of rancid-looking throw net in the bow and half a dozen long bamboo poles hanging off the sides. The seats were covered in fish scales and the paint on the sides was peeling. There was a pair of scruffily painted oars shipped along the gunwales and a variety of tackle boxes, boat hooks, gaffs and other equipment littering the flat bottom. The boat smelled of dead, rotting fish left too long in the sun.

  "Is this somebody's idea of a joke?" Rafi asked, staring at the boat tied up to an overhanging willow branch. "Because I don't think it's very funny."

  "It's not a joke," said Holliday. "It's protective coloration. My course in the history of camouflage was the only thing Vince ever got an A in." He grinned broadly. "I always knew the kid would go far even though he got such lousy marks." Holliday shook his head. "It's perfect-what do you do on a river? You fish. That's an electric outboard, a trolling motor, which means it'll be silent. Look at the current out there: the tide is going out; we'll be sucked down the river like a freight train." As if to prove his point a waterlogged tree limb went swirling by in the rushing center of the river.

  "How far?" Tidyman asked.

  "According to Vince, two miles," answered Holliday. He undid the line from the willow branch. "Climb aboard, gents, this is the endgame. Let's go get Peggy."

  26

  "How will we know the place?" Rafi asked, sitting in
the bow of the drift boat as they slid rapidly down the ever-widening river.

  Tidyman answered the question.

  "It's called a chiesetta, a chapel. They're like little fishing cottages on stilts. There's dozens of them built on the breakwaters at the mouth of the river. They've got these purse seine nets they hang into the water at the end of huge pole cranes. The chiesetta we want is the last one nearest the open sea on the left bank. It's bright red with a brand-new sheet-aluminum roof."

  As the river broadened the color changed, going from a silty brownish green to a deeper blue as they neared the sea. The terrain on both sides of the river was mostly reclaimed marsh, the land divided into neat fields of grain. The banks of the river were lined with long rows of sailboats and small sport cruisers moored against short-piered docks. There were fishermen in boats like theirs everywhere, mostly following the gentler currents closer to shore. No one paid the three men the slightest bit of attention.

  The Tyrrhenian Sea was visible now, a darker shimmering blue against the cloudless sky directly ahead. The banks of the river were lined with huge tumbled rocks used as breakwaters to prevent erosion, the ramshackle chiesetta fishing shacks standing like shabby long-legged insects poised above the boulders. They all looked much the same, standing closely together, each one with a rickety decklike balcony fitted with one, two and occasionally three of the fifty-foot-long cranes dangling over the water, cantilevered, braced with long guy wires connected to the roofs of the shacks. Now, with the tide rushing out, the cranes and their nets had been hauled up. As the tide reversed itself and the water flowed upriver once again the poles and nets would be lowered into the water.

  "What do they catch?" Rafi asked.

  "According to Vince, mostly mullet and eel, like the old man back there."

  "Gross," said Rafi, making a face. "Who eats eels?"

  "Eel pie," murmured Tidyman wistfully. "What a treat. Jellied they are very good, too."

  Seated in the narrow stern, Holliday started up the little outboard and silently eased the boat out of the main current and to the northern bank of the river, now more than a hundred yards wide.

  "Drop the anchor," said Holliday.

  Tidyman hauled the pile of netting to one side and uncovered the heavy little Danforth anchor. He eased it overboard, letting out the nylon line slowly and steadily until the anchor flukes bit and held in the silt. The boat swung around to face the current and they were at the mouth of the river, the sea behind them. A thousand feet away across the river was the red chiesetta, its shiny roof flashing in the sun, a red spider with twin pole cranes swung inboard like long antennae.

  Tidyman took the binoculars from around his neck and passed them up to Rafi, who handed them on to Holliday.

  "Look busy," said Holliday. "I'm going to check the place out."

  "Aye, aye, Captain," said Tidyman. He and Rafi pulled long bamboo poles out of the bottom of the boat and they both dropped their hooked and unbaited lines over the side.

  Holliday raised the binoculars.

  The fishing shack was about twenty by thirty, the narrower end facing the river. There was a wide opening in the front leading out to the balcony deck where the swinging pole cranes were set up. The flat corrugated aluminum roof sloped front to back. The only proper entrance appeared to be from the rear of the shack via a walkway that crossed the boulders to the unpaved street behind. Half hidden by the building Holliday could see part of what appeared to be a compact closed-sided white van parked at the end of the dirt road. The opening facing the sea was lost in shadow. No one appeared to be watching.

  He shifted the glasses to look beneath the building. There seemed to be a homemade ladder that dropped down from the floor of the shack to the boulders below, probably used when the net was snagged or there was some other problem that needed attention. He shifted the glasses again. The nearest neighbor was fifty feet away. On the other side of the shack was the stone breakwater and then the open sea.

  "We either go in through the trapdoor in the floor or from the back," said Holliday. "I don't see much in the way of options here."

  "Why not both?" Rafi asked, trying to keep his attention away from the shack where Peggy was being held. "Why not split up and come in both ways?"

  "Too dangerous," said Holliday. "That kind of two-pronged attack almost never works. You wind up shooting each other. Go in that way and it's going to be difficult to tell who is who."

  "All of this is dangerous," argued Rafi.

  "I'm afraid I agree with our young friend," said Tidyman. "Whatever we do will be dangerous. If we come over the walkway we will lose the element of surprise. If we climb to the trapdoor there will be a bottleneck."

  "We have to do something," said Rafi. "We can't stay out here much longer."

  Holliday thought for a moment, then looked back over his shoulder.

  "There was a little marina back there," he said. "Did anyone notice if it had a gas pump?"

  Holliday crouched in the shadows under the fishing shack next to their objective. An onshore breeze thrust in from the sea, making the big pole cranes above him creak and moan. Water lapped against the boulders all around him and the air was full of the rich scent of the sea.

  The drift boat had moved on silently and disappeared beyond the end of the breakwater. Holliday checked his watch, frowning. The whole thing was going to depend on perfect timing. If he or Tidyman and Rafi screwed it up, Peggy was as good as dead. Both of the other two had done compulsory military service, Tidyman mostly to get more hours as a military pilot and cement his Egyptian citizenship status, Rafi because that was simply what you did if you were a Sabra-a native-born Israeli. Holliday on the other hand was a professional; he'd react on instinct born of years of experience in hot zones all over the world. He wasn't too sure about his companions.

  There was Peggy to consider as well. If she froze up at a critical moment they all would be as good as dead. Hopefully she'd figure out what was happening and put her head down and get herself out of the line of fire in the first few seconds of the action. Holliday closed his eyes for a second and sent up a silent prayer to all the gods of war. Worst of all, they were going in blind; they had no idea how many men were guarding Peggy in the fishing shack a few yards away.

  He looked at his watch again, then leaned down and picked up the five-gallon gas tank of outboard fuel mix he'd bought at the little upstream marina. It was time to go. He listened, his senses at full alert, nerves tingling. He swallowed, feeling his mouth go dry and his heart begin to pound.

  The feeling was a familiar one: part fear, part anticipation and part rising bloodlust. It always surprised him that he felt so comfortable with the desperate feeling deep in his gut, and every now and again he wondered if there was a pathological need for it with soldiers-junkies for battle and the dangerous game of jousting with death. He'd known a few like that in his time, soldiers who re-upped again and again because they simply couldn't deal with the sudden withdrawal into the passive routine of life out of the kill zone.

  Holliday forced all conscious thought out of his mind, tuning his senses to the world around him, willing every part of himself to fuse his actions into a slow-motion psychedelic dreamscape where everything he did was perfectly synchronized with everything else.

  He heard the muffled sound of a man and woman arguing in the fish shack directly overhead, heard the squeak of a cable shifting in the breeze, saw the riffled feathers of a kite as the giant bird soared above the estuary water, heard the chatter of a motorboat far away and the constant pulsing whisper of the sea.

  There were no windows on the side wall of the shack, only a rudimentary ventilation grille. If the workers in the shack fished through two turns of the tide per day it probably meant the catch was stored somehow, most likely in galvanized steel tanks. On a hot day like today the tin-roofed huts would be turned into ovens. The stink would be awful.

  Carrying the gas can Holliday stepped out of the shadows and made his way between t
he two chiesettas, moving quickly but carefully beneath the stilts of the last shack in the row. Looking out across the breadth of the river mouth he could see the squat shape of the gray- and-white-striped octagonal lighthouse that gave the rocky beach its name.

  The red-walled chiesetta was supported on a total of six stilts, three long, three short. The stilts were made of four-by-fours clewed together to make foot-square columns to support the weight of the floor above. Looking upward Holliday could see that the floor itself was nothing more than sheets of plywood laid over widely spaced fir rafters that were really only two-inch planks turned on end. Flimsy didn't begin to describe it.

  He unscrewed the top of the gas can, reversed the spout and screwed it down again. He divided the contents between all three front columns, then set the empty can down beside the center post. He checked the time. Two minutes.

  Holliday took out a package of matches and lit the posts one after the other without pause, leapfrogging across the boulders. He watched as the flames took hold, barely visible, little more than rippling heat vapors in the clear air. He turned away, scrambling up the rocks, then started to climb the makeshift ladder up to the trapdoor in the floor.

  He reached the top of the ladder a few moments later and suddenly, blindingly, had a terrifying thought. He cursed himself for a fool. What if the trapdoor was bolted from above? It was the kind of stupid oversight that got men killed. He turned on the ladder. The flames had reached the tops of the columns and were starting to lick across the underside of the floor. Any second now. There was a quick, sharp detonation as the vapors in the empty gas can exploded. There was a second or two of almost deafening silence, then the sound of running feet overhead. Black smoke began to billow. A cry went up.