The Templar Legion t-5

by Paul Christopher

  Even the sound of the river was different, deeper and louder, the roar echoing off the hills that were beginning to rise from the jungle. As the sun rose behind them on the morning after seeing the child warriors, Holliday saw the shimmering magic light of a rainbow in the distance.

  “Waterfall ahead,” he called, turning back to warn Rafi and Peggy in the trailing dugout. “Next time I spot a likely place we’ll get off the river and take a look.” There was no way of telling on which side they’d make landfall, so Holliday and Captain Eddie kept them centered in midriver, feeling the strengthening of the current with each stroke of the paddle.

  Fifteen minutes later Eddie called out and pointed to the starboard shore with his dripping paddle. “?Ahi!” There.

  Two hundred yards ahead on their right-hand side Holliday saw the spot Eddie had pointed out, a tiny patch of light green, a little paler than the surrounding foliage. Holliday jammed his paddle on the left and the bow of the lead dugout swung around, taking them out of the current at a shallow angle. He and Eddie paddled hard, Rafi and Peggy following suit. Just as they approached the little beach Holliday reached back and pulled the quick release on the tether that bound the two crude boats together. Both dugouts made it to a barely visible swirl of calmer water and they drove the boats up onto the rough sand.

  Holliday and Eddie stepped out of the lead dugout and pulled it even higher out of the water. Then the two men dropped down onto the sand for a much-needed break. From where they sat they could hear the steady distant thunder of the waterfall.

  “We are not the first to stop here,” said Eddie, reaching into the long grass at the edge of the tiny strip of sand as Rafi and Peggy pulled their dugout completely out of the water. The Cuban held up a crushed green tin of Sparletta cream soda.

  “The kiddie soldiers?” Peggy said.

  “?Los ninos? Si.” Eddie nodded.

  “Who are they going to fight for, I wonder,” said Holliday.

  “Presumably Kolingba, or someone against him.” Rafi shrugged.

  “It could be that they are only on a raid,” said Eddie. “Borders mean nothing to them. They could be, how do you say, reclutamiento, recruiting. They go to the villages, take the children. If the parents object they kill them. Sometimes they kill them anyway.”

  “I don’t care what they’re doing,” said Holliday. “The question is, How do we get ourselves out of their way? Right now we’re trapped. They’re ahead of us and behind us.”

  “We could hide the boats and wait for the ones behind us to go past, then go back upriver,” suggested Rafi.

  “They’ll have scouts on land as well as in boats. The jungle is their home. They would almost certainly find us,” said Eddie.

  “There’s no way of telling how far ahead they are,” said Holliday. “Or if they’ve already arrived at their destination.”

  “How would we know?” Peggy asked.

  “First we must portage the boats below the falls. Maybe they will have left some sign?” The Cuban held up the can. “A trail of Sparletta, like the two children of la bruja and her casa de pan de jengibre.”

  “ ‘ Hansel and Gretel.’ ” Peggy laughed.

  “Si.” Eddie nodded. “They cook her in the oven, yes?”

  “Yes,” said Holliday grimly. “And that’s what those kids with the AK-47s will do if they catch us. Rafi and I will see how far it is to the fire. Peggy, you stay here with Eddie and watch our backs. Maybe unload some of the gear from the boats to make them lighter.”

  “Will do,” said Peggy.

  Holliday and Rafi followed the narrow trail into the jungle. It had clearly been used as a portage for a very long time: logs, some old and rotten, lay half buried in the dark, rich soil at six- or seven-foot intervals to make it easier to slide the dugouts overland. As they made their way down the pathway the trees around them broke into chatters and screams of animals warning one another of the approach of possible predators. Beyond those warning calls there was the normal chaotic sound track of the jungle: the shivering whisper of breezes through the high canopy, the eerie singing of insects calling to prospective mates and the barely audible slip and slide of other creatures, climbing, twisting and digging their way through ground and trees.

  “It’s never quiet, is it?” Holliday said.

  “Spooky,” answered Rafi, his voice edgy. “Especially when you stop and imagine what kind of things are alive all around you and how easy it would be for them to make a meal out of you if they were given half a chance. This morning I woke up and saw a centipede on the ridgepole of the tent that had to be six or seven inches long. Nasty bastards, and they bite, too.” He shook his head. “I’m just a desert kind of guy, I guess.”

  “Right.” Holliday laughed. “A desert kind of guy who likes his on-campus Aroma Espresso Bar venti caramel macchiatos, stirred, with extra caramel sauce and toffee nut instead of vanilla.”

  “How did you know that?” Rafi asked, looking a little affronted.

  “Peg does about a five-minute skit of you ordering. It’s like something off an old episode of Frasier except in Hebrew.”

  “Well, at least I don’t whine because they closed all the Starbucks outlets in Israel.”

  “I could never figure that out,” said Holliday. “Starbucks is like the plague-it’s everywhere except Israel.”

  “The secret power of the Viennese coffee cartel,” said Rafi.

  The trail came to an end and they stepped out onto a slab of stone half the size of a city block. Directly in front of them they could see a steep, treacherous set of rapids that no one in their right mind would attempt to run.

  “Not your Lost Templar’s vision of Eden,” said Holliday.

  “It’s too soon to be the Kazaba Falls,” said Rafi. “We’ve got a long way to go yet.”

  The frothing pool beneath the rapids turned into a misty reed-edged lake a thousand feet in diameter feeding into the low-banked river again, far below. The jungle was like an unbroken, undulating carpet of yellow and green that stretched to the horizon. Holliday took the military binoculars he’d liberated from the assault team and looked downriver. In the middle distance and close to the winding river he could just make out several thin curls of white-gray smoke rising above the jungle. It was either a riverside village or the camp of the child soldiers. The river at that point appeared to be less than two hundred feet wide. There wasn’t the slightest chance of slipping by keeping under cover of the opposite bank. He handed the glasses to Rafi.

  “Maybe it’s just a downstream village,” suggested the archaeologist.

  “I doubt it. That smoke is about five miles off. The kiddie soldiers are a day and a half ahead of us. They would have raided the village by now if they were still on the water and you’d be seeing a lot more smoke. If they haven’t raided the village that means they’re in the jungle somewhere between here and there.”

  “So what do we do?” Peggy asked.

  “Get rid of the dugouts and anything else we can’t carry,” said Holliday. “Take the tents, the dry food and the weapons. That’s about it.”

  Peggy and Rafi started going through the packs while Eddie took Holliday aside.

  “Those men who attacked us by the river. They had granadas, yes?”

  “That’s right,” said Holliday. “Two of the men had a half dozen each.”

  “I need four,” said Eddie. “And some of those plastic drinking glasses.”

  “What for?”

  “A welcome present for whoever our friends are back there,” he said, cocking a thumb upriver the way they’d come.

  “A welcome present?”

  “A farewell present, too.” Eddie grinned. “Hola and adios.” The Cuban laughed. “The hello will be explosivo; the good-bye will be los angeles cantando.?Lo captaste, mi amigo?”

  “Lo entiendo, amigo,” said Holliday, smiling. “I understand.”

  Jean-Luc Saint-Sylvestre had no affection for mountains. If he couldn’t see the sun rise over some
kind of horizon it made him nervous. He didn’t like Switzerland at all, where sunrises were in very short supply and there were mountains everywhere.

  He flew out of Heathrow in the early morning, caught the eleven-thirty train from Geneva to Zurich and arrived at exactly two thirty in the afternoon. He rented a Europcar VW Passat and drove the twenty-five miles to Aarau, a town of seventeen thousand clustered around the banks of the Aar River at the foot of the Jura Mountains. It was exactly what you’d expect of a classic Swiss town.

  Saint-Sylvestre had a lunch of lamb and egg noodles in the Restaurant Laterne on the Rathausgasse, then walked two blocks to number eleven, the address on the business card.

  The Gesler Bank was a small, discreet gray building with small shuttered windows and an arched doorway with a brass door. There wasn’t even a plaque announcing the building’s purpose, only a carved number 11 above the door. There was, however, a state-of-the-art CCTV camera on a bracket in the doorway arch angled to cover anyone pressing the white porcelain button on one side of the doorframe. Saint-Sylvestre pushed the button, ignoring the cameras. There was a brief pause and then the brass door clicked and came slightly ajar. Saint-Sylvestre stepped inside and the door closed behind him. He found himself in a glassed-in security portal, the brass door at his back and floor-to-ceiling glass panels all around him. Through the glass he could see into a small wood-paneled lobby, the walls hung with oil paintings, all portraits. A guard in a pin-striped suit sat behind a small desk. The guard leaned forward and spoke into a microphone.

  “Ihr Unternehmen wenden, Sie sich bitte,” said the voice, coming from a speaker above Saint-Sylvestre’s head.

  “I’m here to see Herr Leonhard Euhler,” answered Saint-Sylvestre, speaking in French.

  The man behind the table didn’t hesitate for a moment and replied in clear French with a Paris accent. “What business do you have with Herr Euhler?”

  “Private business. I am here under the authority of the Moroccan government.”

  “One moment,” said the guard, still speaking French. Keeping his eyes on Saint-Sylvestre in the security portal he reached down to his belt and lifted up a little speak-to-talk unit, then clicked for an answer, which Saint-Sylvestre couldn’t make out. “He’ll be right down,” said the guard.

  There was a buzzing sound from within the glass booth that Saint-Sylvestre assumed came from some sort of built-in metal detector. A few moments later a narrow elevator door on the wall behind the guard opened and a slight man in his late forties or early fifties appeared.

  He was medium height, and wore a dark suit, a pale blue shirt and a bright red tie. His shoes looked expensive. As he crossed the lobby Saint-Sylvester saw that he was round faced, with a high forehead, thinning hair and a thick toothbrush mustache that covered his upper lip above a wide smile. He wore stylish black plastic circular eyeglasses. He looked more like an aging, homosexual British bureaucrat than a banker. The diamond stud cuff links, the silk tie and the manicured and clear-polished nails were just a little too fey.

  The security portal slipped open noiselessly and Saint-Sylvestre stepped out. “I am Dr. Euhler,” said the smiling man, extending a hand. “How may I be of service?”

  Why were all German-Swiss doctors? Saint-Sylvestre wondered. He shook the extended hand. “My name is Tarik Ben Barka,” he said, speaking English and using the name that appeared on the passport a recent visitor to Kukuanaland had “lost,” and which now carried Saint-Sylvestre’s photograph. He took the sand-colored passport out of the inside pocket of his suit and extended it to Euhler, who waved it off.

  “You are here on behalf of the government of Morocco?”

  He could feel the man’s pale blue eyes looking him over.

  “Not exactly. I am here on behalf of several clients of the Banque Populaire du Maroc.”

  “They are Moroccan, these clients?” Euhler said.

  “No,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “They are not.”

  “Ah.” Euhler nodded. “Perhaps we should continue our conversation in my office.”

  Euhler led Saint-Sylvestre to the narrow elevator, passing the guard at the table. Despite the tailoring of the guard’s suit Saint-Sylvestre could detect the slight pull at the shoulders that marked a weapon sling; probably a German MP9 machine pistol or some other room sweeper like it.

  The elevator was wood paneled and marble floored. It whined upward for a few seconds and then opened into a narrow hallway manned by another guard. Saint-Sylvestre followed Euhler to the end of the hall. The banker put his palm onto a biometric pad by the door, standing aside politely to let Saint-Sylvestre enter.

  The office looked more like a Victorian living room than a banker’s office. The chairs were ornate and velvet covered, the desk was a giant, deeply sculpted thing, and the display case behind the desk was filled with what appeared to be ancient pottery. The paintings on the walls were all baroque Swiss landscapes of the sort that Sherlock Holmes would have liked-all lonely meadows and craggy peaks in serried rows.

  At first glance you could easily make the mistake that the man behind the desk was some airheaded romantic, someone who’d likely inherited his position from a relative who was one of the bank’s directors and, considering that there was no ring on the third finger of his left hand, either a confirmed bachelor or more likely gay, as he’d thought before.

  Saint-Sylvestre wasn’t quite so sure. Gay or not, Euhler gave off the impression of someone acting out a role but whose mind was carefully ticking somewhere behind the jolly, smiling mask, assessing and calculating, thinking about each move like a master chess player.

  “You are a Muslim, Mr. Ben Barka?” Euhler asked.

  “Why do you ask?” Saint-Sylvestre said, taken a little off guard.

  “I usually have coffee around this time along with an aperitif. I would not like to offend you by offering you liquor.”

  “Very thoughtful.” Saint-Sylvestre nodded. “But I am of the Lemba religion. Coffee and an aperitif would be very pleasant, thank you.”

  Euhler beamed and called for coffee on his intercom, then stood and went to an armoire on the other side of the room. For the first time Saint-Sylvester noticed the lack of street sounds outside Euhler’s office window and it occurred to him that the window was bulletproof.

  “Kummel?” Euhler offered, holding up a bottle of the caraway-and-cumin-flavored liqueur.

  “Certainly.” Saint-Sylvestre nodded. The coffee arrived, brought on a silver tray with a silver service and small porcelain cups by a male secretary. The secretary left the office and Euhler returned to his desk with the drinks in their tiny crystal glasses. He then went through the coffee-pouring ritual, offering Saint-Sylvestre sugar, which he accepted, and cream, which he did not.

  Saint-Sylvestre sipped the kummel while Euhler sat back in his ridiculous velvet-covered office chair.

  “So tell me about these clients of yours,” he said, smiling pleasantly from beneath his mustache.

  “They would like to open accounts at your bank. Private accounts.”

  “All our accounts are quite private.”

  “There have been rumors of Swiss bank transparency, the so-called G-twenty blacklists,” said Saint-Sylvestre mildly. He watched as Euhler’s complexion reddened slightly.

  “And after all the loud talking is over and the dust settles you will see that we are in fact on no one’s blacklists, let alone the G-twenty, who I must say have enough to answer for on their own.” Euhler shook his head. “The world is in a terrible economic slump and they look to place the blame on whomever they can. Switzerland is convenient. It is hardly our fault that our ability to manage financial affairs is better than theirs. It is nothing but jealousy, Mr. Ben Barka.”

  “My clients can be guaranteed complete discretion?”

  “Certainly,” said Euhler a little ponderously.

  Saint-Silvestre allowed himself a long pause, then spoke. “You are aware of the situation in Cuba?”

  “Fragile.” Euhl
er nodded.

  “ ‘Explosive,’ I think would be a better word,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “The Western press applauds Raul Castro’s opening of free markets in that country as a turn toward democracy, but it is not. It is an act of desperation. The country is bankrupt and the revolution is dead. The younger generation watches Miami TV on wall-sized televisions and lives almost completely within the black market. Corruption is rife.”

  Saint-Sylvestre smiled at Euhler and went fishing for a moment, an idea forming in the back of his mind. Then, clearing his throat, he spoke aloud several lines from William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming.”

  Euhler’s face lit up. “Ah, Yeats, one of my favorites,” he said, cooing like a dove. He recited the next verse, then said dramatically, “I’m afraid those times have come ’round again.”

  Saint-Sylvestre nodded. “Which is why I am here, of course.”

  “I take it your clients are Cuban, then?” Euhler said.

  “And have been since Angola,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “They are farseeing men and women, most of whom have chosen Spain as their country of choice when the situation becomes too tenuous at home.”

  “Yes.” Euhler nodded.

  “The Spanish banking regulations are compliant with all forty of the G-twenty regulations regarding money laundering. The Moroccan banking system is not. They are referred to as ‘serious shortcomings’ by the G-twenty financial task force.”

  “Loopholes,” said Euhler.

  “Yes,” answered Saint-Sylvestre.

  “And Morocco and Spain are separated by a mere seven nautical miles.” Euhler smiled.

  “Quite so,” said Saint Sylvestre. “Getting the funds to Morocco is easy enough, but once there my clients would like to see their funds invested in a broader number of opportunities than we can offer.”

  “Could you give me some idea of the amounts we are talking about?” Euhler said. The German had sniffed around enough and liked what he smelled.

  “Approximately half a billion dollars, perhaps more.” The object was to put him on an equal playing field with Matheson and MRI.