"Come on," he said.
Still half asleep, Rafi and Peggy followed as Holliday went down the corridor to the door between the cars. He pulled it open and stepped out onto the little platform. Mario had awakened as the train halted and come out to see what was happening. He'd put down the steps and climbed down to see why the train had come to an unscheduled stop.
Mario saw Holliday and then Rafi and Peggy crowd in behind him. The steward shook his head and came forward, making a little pushing gesture with his hands as his shoes crunched on the gravel roadbed.
"No, no, please, signore, prego. Remain on the train. There is no cause for alarm. We have only stopped for the segnale di ferroviario, how do you say, the train signal, yes? Back on the train, signore, please."
Then he saw the blood dripping down from Holliday's arm and paled.
Holliday fished the Walther out of his pocket and pointed it down at the uniformed man.
"Signore?" the steward whispered.
"Back up," said Holliday, keeping the gun up as he came down the steps. The steward did as he was told, his eyes glued to the flat black pistol. Holliday waved Rafi and Peggy down with his free hand. He lowered the gun, keeping it at his side as they descended.
Holliday looked left along the train. The bridge was built with two side-by-side spans, each with its own track, the two tracks converging at a switch point and signal just in front of the waiting locomotive. The signal showed two red lights, one above the other. Suddenly the top light went out and the bottom light changed to green. The riverbank was two hundred feet beyond that. The train whistle blared.
"Mario, I want you to listen to me," said Holliday, his voice firm but calm.
"Yes, signore."
"I want you to get back on the train and go to your compartment."
"Yes, signore," Mario said and nodded.
"Stay there. If I see you again, or if the train stops or if anyone comes after us, I will kill you, capisce?"
"Yes, signore."
"Good. Do it."
"Yes, signore," agreed the steward fervently.
Holliday stood aside and let Mario pass. The whistle screamed again. Mario pulled in the steps and slammed the door. Holliday looked up at the train. Right now Mario was probably making a beeline for the conductor.
"What do we do now?" Rafi said.
"Run," said Holliday.
He led the way, pelting down the roadbed, heading for the river, trapped in the yellow glare of the industrial lights beside the twin bridge spans. Beside the running figures the train began to move. The whistle sounded for a third time and directly ahead Holliday saw the signal change to double green. Still no alarm. The train began to gather speed and Holliday felt a surge of hope. Maybe they were going to get out of this after all. The locomotive reached the bridge and the train began to thunder over it.
They reached the first bridge supports and Holliday saw the narrow footpath in the dirt between the twin spans, just as the false Czinner had described it. Holliday paused, hands on knees, panting as Rafi and Peggy caught up with him.
"What are we doing?" Rafi insisted. "I thought you were meeting Czinner. Now Tidyman's been killed."
"Czinner's dead, too, or at least a man posing as Czinner. He was one of the priest's crew. He was an impostor."
The train rumbled past, leaving them beside the empty track. Mario had taken his threat seriously, thought Holliday. He popped the magazine on the Walther and checked. Fully loaded. He pushed the magazine back into place, feeling it lock with an efficient Teutonic click.
"What are we doing out here?" Peggy asked wearily.
"This was Czinner's escape route," explained Holliday. "Now it's ours." He dug around in his pocket and found the suppressor. He screwed it onto the tapped muzzle of the short-barreled pistol.
Rafi stared at the weapon.
"Expecting trouble?"
"You never know," answered Holliday. "Czinner's ride is down there. Maybe it comes with a driver."
"I don't want Peggy hurt," cautioned the Israeli, putting his arm around her shoulders. She shook it off.
"I can handle myself, Rafi," she said, annoyed.
"Nevertheless, stay back, both of you. And keep back until I whistle Dixie."
"Dixie?" Rafi asked.
"'Hava Nagila' for Southern crackers," explained Peggy. Rafi looked confused.
"Just stay back until I whistle," said Holliday.
Leaving them behind, he followed the path down between the bridges, turning under the low left-hand span. A dense row of willows and alders stood at the top of the bank, screening the path along the river edge. The arc lights beside the train track were behind Holliday now and the way ahead was lost in gloomy darkness. He could hear the water, a light lapping noise against the soft earth of the muddy riverbank and a different sound with it-the river slapping quietly against the hull of a small boat.
A lanky figure rose out of the darkness directly in front of him. A man in a dark sweater with something slung over his shoulder. The shape was familiar enough: an old Colt Commando from the Vietnam War, the short version of the M- 16. The dark figure unlimbered the old assault rifle.
"Padre?" the man whispered harshly. He was less than fifty feet away.
Holliday didn't wait for the sound of the rifle's slide as a round popped into the chamber. He lifted the Walther in a two-handed grip, pointed the pistol at the man's chest and fired six times in quick, evenly spaced succession, the silenced rounds sounding like someone snapping dry twigs.
Whatever else Czinner had been, he was a professional when it came to his job. To be that quiet the rounds had to be subsonic. Given that they were in Italy that probably meant Fiocchi Super Match. The man with the rifle turned into an empty bag of flesh and slid to the ground, face in the dirt.
"No," said Holliday. "Not your murdering padre."
Holliday waited. Nothing stirred. The only sounds came from the river's movement. He approached the fallen man, keeping the Walther pointed at the back of his head. He checked the pulse. Nothing, which was as he'd expected at that range. He stood up.
Behind the man a sleek-looking old-fashioned wooden speedboat was tied up to a crumbling concrete dock that looked as though it might have been cast off during construction of the bridge piers. Holliday had seen one just like it in the ruins of Milosevic's summer home on the Danube years before.
The boat was an Italian Ravi Aquarama, the so-called Ferrari of cabin cruisers, a mahogany dream from the sixties built to challenge anything ever made by Chris-Craft. The twenty-eight-foot boat was fitted with Cadillac engines and could plane through the water at close to fifty knots.
First things first. He unscrewed the silencer from the pistol and put both back into his pocket. He slid the rifle out from under the body and pitched it into the river. That done, he grabbed the dead man by the armpits and dragged the corpse across the shingled beach, then rolled him into the underbrush. Peggy had seen enough death; she didn't need another body to add to the toll.
When he was satisfied he turned back to the path and whistled the first few bars of the old minstrel tune that had somehow become the anthem for a losing army, long ago. As he whistled he felt the weight of the world settle on his shoulders and the strange sense of loss felt when a battle ends. He whistled another few bars then turned and went out to the boat.
He stepped over the curving deck and took the leather key tag out of his pocket. He sat down behind the white Bakelite wheel, put the key into the ignition, then twisted the port starter to the On position. There was a coughing sound and then a deep-throated rumbling as the massive engine came to muttering life. He twisted the starboard starter and the second engine echoed its mate.
He tugged the throttle just a little and the muttering became a muted roar. Holliday smiled. It was like having two tigers tugging on a leash. Emil Tidyman would have enjoyed this, he thought, his heart sinking a little. Then Rafi and Peggy appeared out of the darkness and, seeing them, Holliday's heart l
ifted once again.
Rafi stared at the speedboat.
"Good Lord," he said.
"Neat," said Peggy. "Can I drive?"
"No," said Holliday. "Unhitch the line and climb in. We're going home."
And that's what they did.
29
Holliday sat behind his desk in the study of the little house on West Point's Professor's Row. There was early snow on the ground outside and he had a fire burning in the grate. It was the day before Thanksgiving and once again West Point was almost empty. Anyone who had anywhere to go had gone. Home for the holidays. He looked around the room.
The floor was stacked with boxes ready to go into storage and all the bookshelves were empty. The house was well on its way to becoming a barren shell of naked walls and vacant rooms, no longer anyone's home.
The inquiry into the death of the killer who'd attacked him on the same day Rafi had arrived at his door seeking help was done and Holliday had been completely exonerated.
His term as the head of the History Department at the United States Military Academy was formally complete, papers signed, position resigned, re-up declined. As the old science fiction writers used to put it, life as he knew it was over. He was unemployed and homeless. Peggy was in Jerusalem with her new husband and he was alone.
The funny thing was, he didn't give a damn. In fact, he was looking forward to whatever was coming his way. His time tracking down Peggy halfway across Africa had taught him at least one good lesson: friends were precious, life even more so and time was the only real treasure.
He sat in the firelight, remembering. They'd parted ways in Paris after taking the big speedboat downriver to the Adriatic coast and then south, away from Venice and down to Ravenna. From there getting to Paris had been easy.
During a farewell meal in the Terminal R brasserie at the Radisson SAS hotel at Charles de Gaulle Airport, Rafi had asked him how he'd been tipped that the man posing as Czinner was an impostor. Holliday pulled the big West Point graduation ring out of his pocket and laid it down on the table.
"What a cool jewel you got from your school," said Holliday, smiling.
"Pardonnez-moi?" Peggy said in an atrocious French accent.
"That was Czinner's reaction," said Holliday. "He recovered very quickly, but not quickly enough. A West Pointer would know. I knew then that he wasn't Czinner. I was ready for him."
"I don't get it," said Rafi. He picked up the big signet ring and looked at it closely, an archaeologist at work, trying to decipher the artifact.
"It's a ritual, a poem," Holliday explained. He quoted the whole thing: Oh my gosh, sir, what a beautiful ring. What a crass mass of brass and glass. What a bold mold of rolled gold. What a cool jewel you got from your school. See how it sparkles and shines. It must have cost you a fortune Please, sir, may I touch it, May I touch it, please, sir.
"Not the greatest poetry I've ever heard," said Peggy.
"I still don't get it," said Rafi. He put the ring back on the table.
Holliday picked it up and slipped it back into his pocket. The ring was engraved with Czinner's names and dates, and eventually he'd send it to Vince Caruso at the embassy so he could get it to where it rightfully belonged. He finished his explanation.
"Like I said, it's a ritual. A hazing thing for freshman cadets. Back in the day every plebe at West Point had to learn that verse by heart, on pain of death, or at least a severe dressing-down and some punishment duty. When he saw a student from that year's graduating class wearing his ring the plebe had to salute, fall to his knees and recite the poem. If you remembered any piece of poetry at West Point, that would be it. They still do it, only now you don't fall to your knees."
"Your West Point is a very strange place," said Rafi, grinning. "Its first commandant your country's greatest traitor, assassination attempts, now young men falling to their knees and reciting awful poetry. It's a wonder you've won so many wars." He shook his head in mock consternation.
"Yes," agreed Holliday, "but there's no place like home."
And now home was a thing of the past.
Speaking of things from the past.
Holliday smiled to himself, staring into the crackling fire and listening to the November wind rattling angrily at the windows. At least he'd know how to find his way to the new one. And to find his way back to Alhazred's hidden gold. Gold that he'd find again and make sure got back to its rightful inheritors.
He opened the drawer and pulled out the only memento he had of his terrible time in the desert. Two shaped strips of wood, dark with age, both eight-inch squared rods carved with tiny symbols, numbers from thousands of years before. One of the strips was drilled with a square hole that exactly fit the dimensions of the other.
Put together it formed a slightly mismatched cruciform with the inner arm able to slide up and down within its mate. The same cruciform the figure of Imhotep held in the boat fresco on the wall of his hidden tomb. The cruciform object he found, forgotten within the huge stone sarcophagus.
He'd realized instantly what the little wooden objects were and somehow he'd managed to keep them with him and hidden for the rest of his journey. Two strips of ancient wood more valuable than the tons of bullion on the underground chamber floor.
Two strips of wood that would have given the archaeologists from Jerusalem, or Rafik Alhazred, almost unlimited fame. Two strips that gave the ironic lie to the old name for Father Thomas's covert organization, Organum Sanctum, the Instrument of God.
Holliday fit the two little squared rods together and slid them up and down. Almost as elegant as Imhotep's translation of the beehive tomb design of his native land into the gigantic pyramids of his adopted home. As simple and perhaps almost as brilliant in its own way as the most famous equation in the world: E = mc2.
The two little sticks, brought together in the correct way, its symbols read as degrees of angle when pointed toward the sun, was the first navigation instrument that allowed men to leave the shore and travel the ocean. A true Instrument of God to a man like Imhotep, whose greatest god was Ra, the sun, and whose private god was knowledge.
Effectively the two sticks joined were a simple version of a Jacob's Staff, named for the man who had invented it, Jacob ben Machir ibn Tibbon, a Jewish astronomer living in Provence in the thirteenth century. Except Tibbon had not invented it-Imhotep had, approximately four thousand years before him. The invention, and the fresco in the hidden tomb, brought up another possibility:
What if the landscape in the fresco wasn't the near-mythical land of Punt? What if the island in the fresco was Manhattan and the river was the Hudson, flowing a few hundred yards from where he sat, down to the invisible Atlantic, hidden beyond the hills? What if Imhotep had sailed his long-keeled boat across the Ocean Sea three thousand years before Christ, let alone Columbus, and claimed the land for his great pharaoh, Djoser?
Only a year or so ago they'd found funerary boats buried in the sands near the Tomb of Ramses in the Valley of the Kings, boats twice as long as any Columbus sailed to the West Indies. The pieces put together made it quite possible. Now wouldn't that turn history on its complacent ear?
He picked up the wooden cross and put it back in the drawer along with the Templar notebook with the bloodstained cover he'd inherited from the old monk Rodrigues. He watched the fire in the hearth die down as the room grew cold. He thought about Imhotep, about the gold and about the past. And then he thought about the future.
Emil Tidyman had been right: gold and power brought out the worst in almost everyone. A lot of people had died because of Rauff's bullion and Holliday could bet it wasn't over yet. He was fairly certain that Father Thomas wasn't finished with him. That battle would almost certainly go on, wherever he went. There were scores to settle.
And letters to write.
He took a few sheets of paper from his drawer along with a felt pen and a brand-new moleskin notebook he carried. It had taken some time and a lot of phone calls, but he'd eventually discovered the nam
es of the four men who made up the crew of the ill-fated B-17, Your Heart's Desire:
Major-Fleigerstabsingenieur Johann Biehl, the pilot; Captain-Fleigerhauptsingenieur Hugo Dahmer, the copilot; Lieutenant-Fleigerobersingenieur Gerhard Fischer, the flight engineer/navigator; and, finally, the radio operator, Lieutenant-Fleigerobersingenieur Willi Noller.
He'd also discovered the names of their nearest relations, all surviving sons and daughters, and he'd decided to write them each a letter telling them of the plane's discovery and the fate of their forgotten fathers. It was the least that he could do.
And then there was Tabia, Emil Tidyman's daughter. It had taken even longer to discover her whereabouts, but he'd pulled some strings and called in some markers and eventually he had the name and address of a cutout who would eventually get the letter to the people taking care of her.
Perhaps someone would read Tabia the letter now, or perhaps she'd read it herself somewhere far in the future. It didn't matter. Since coming back to West Point he'd had a lot of time to think about what he'd say and now the words came easily.
In the dark of a chilly New York night he began to write, his pen moving easily across the blank paper, forming letters and words that told a story of friendship and family love, a story of a rogue but a rogue redeemed, and the story of a friend who believed in friendship at any cost. Above all it was the memory of any child's hero, her father, a man she could be proud of. Holliday wrote for a long time and when he was done he smiled. He put down the pen and leaned back in his chair. Perhaps, for Tabia at least, the bad times were over.
Outside, the winter wind shook its fist at the moaning eaves and the frost-rimed glass, reminding the world of things to come, like cold bad dreams. Holliday's smile slipped away and became a thoughtful frown. Sitting there with the fire no more than dead ash in the hearth, he knew that while Tabia's troubles were done, his own were just beginning.
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