Templar Throne

by Paul Christopher

  The island was on the exact track of the first trade routes to the Atlantic Coast and the Caribbean, on the edge of the Grand Banks, where Basque fishermen had come to fish five hundred years before. The island had probably been first discovered by Eric the Red in the early eleventh century.

  It was also the first landfall of major storms, fog banks, hurricanes and rogue waves as they approached the North American continent, the furious winds, currents and tides altering its shape as the years went by.

  In modern times it had become the focus of oil exploration, and one failed rig had been established on the island years before. Several other working rigs were located nearby. The island’s only permanent residents were a team of four government workers who maintained the automatic lighthouses located at either end of the sandbar and also cared for the feral ponies that seemed to thrive there.

  The only other occupant was a lone researcher who lived in a makeshift shack and studied the strange ecology of the island. Visitation was banned without a permit and the only way on or off the island was via a special soft-tired small plane that landed on the beach. Any unauthorized approach resulted in a fine.

  The few people who did visit were usually ecotourists there to see the feral horses on tours organized by the Sable Island Trust. It didn’t quite fit the description of a desert island since there were several brackish ponds and small lakes, the largest being Lake Wallace close to the center of the sandbar. Without the fresh water, the ponies, about four hundred of them, would have been unable to survive.

  Although no one was quite sure of the horses’ origins, the best historical guess was that they were the result of the Great Expulsion of Acadians in the early seventeen hundreds. The horses were booty, their transportation to Sable Island organized by Thomas Hancock, uncle to the much more famous John Hancock, signer of the Declaration of Independence, a fact that seemed to interest Meg a great deal.

  “We have to go,” said Meg urgently. “As soon as possible. The ark is there, I know it.”

  “Hold on for a minute. We’re not running a race,” said Holliday.

  “You’ll have to sneak in,” warned Braintree. “You could land in jail.”

  “We’re past that, I’m afraid,” said Holliday.

  “It is intriguing,” mused Braintree, sitting back in his chair and putting his feet up on a rickety stack of books. “The True Ark is one of those juicy medieval urban legends that probably has at least its big toe based in fact. Maybe more.”

  “It’s quite real,” said Meg firmly.

  “So is the Shroud of Turin,” Braintree said and smiled, “except it’s a fake along with all those bits and pieces of the True Cross and miraculous vials of the True Blood you can find in cathedrals all over the world. If you put it all together the cross would have been as big as a skyscraper and Christ would have bled enough to fill a supertanker.”

  “You’re not a believer, are you?” Meg said.

  “I’m a medieval scholar,” Braintree said with a shrug. “I believe in history and what it can teach us.”

  “You don’t believe in God?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You don’t believe that the word of God is true as it is written.”

  “I’ve never seen anything God wrote,” Braintree said and smiled, obviously enjoying the argument. It was only irritating Holliday. Somehow tracking down an old Templar knight had taken him from the frying pan into some sort of murderous fire yet again, and now his companion was having a theological debate. On top of everything else, he wasn’t sure he liked the slightly fanatical tone in Sister Meg’s voice, or the true believer’s gleam in her eye. He’d seen the same look coming from Taliban suicide bombers in Afghanistan and Hutu machete killers in Rwanda.

  “You don’t believe that the Gospels are the word of God?”

  “They might be somebody’s interpretation of what that somebody thought was the word of God, but that’s as far as I’d go.”

  “And isn’t history just ‘interpretation,’ as you call it?”

  “Of course,” Braintree said and laughed. “In real terms neither the past nor the future exists, only the single ever-changing instant of the immediate present, so everything is open to interpretation.”

  “There’s that word again,” said Sister Meg, as though she’d scored some sort of point. “Interpretation.”

  “Why are we having this discussion at all?” Holliday said finally, standing up.

  “The True Ark is real,” said Meg firmly, almost as though she was trying to convince herself. “It exists! The Grail, the Crown, the Shroud and the Ring.”

  “There’s only one way to find out for sure,” said Holliday. “Let’s go and look for the damn thing and leave poor Professor Braintree to his Chaucer.”

  “Let me know how it all turns out,” said the long-haired young man as they said their good-byes. “Nothing I like better than being proven wrong.”

  They took the old cage elevator down to the main floor and went through the heavy oak doors and into the bright sunlight. They went down the wide granite steps to the sidewalk.

  Holliday saw the setup in a split second and knew there was absolutely nothing they could do about it. Two men at the corner walking toward them, both dressed in dark suits, dark shoes and dark glasses. Two more just like the first pair coming from the other direction.

  At the curb a dark blue Econoline blocked their way to the street, a man standing at the open sliding door with his hand tucked into the pocket of a windbreaker far too warm for the sunny summer weather. A man in jogger’s clothes coming down the steps behind them, hand in a fanny pack in front of him and what looked like an iPod earbud in one ear but was most likely a radio. He came up behind them fast, blocking their way back.

  “Into the truck, Colonel Holliday. You and the woman. Any arguments, any conversation at all and I’ll Taser the hell out of you. Got it?”

  “Got it,” said Holliday.

  The man behind them herded Holliday and Meg toward the open door of the Econoline. The man standing beside the sliding door took a step to the side. Six men and a truck, but no obvious show of official muscle. One of those quiet hijackings nobody noticed until they saw it on the news the next day.

  Three more steps and it would be too late. Who were they? Not cops. Cops were never this quiet about their work. The Blackhawk people? Maybe, but they were taking one hell of a risk. Canada might be America’s best friend, but it was still a foreign country and it wouldn’t take kindly to paramilitaries operating on sovereign soil.

  “What do we do?” Meg whispered, obviously frightened.

  “We do what we’re told,” said Holliday. “We get into the truck.”

  Which was exactly what they did.

  22

  “Hello? Is anybody there?” Meg’s voice came out of the darkness, croaking and dry from whatever drug they’d been given after getting into the van.

  “I’m here,” answered Holliday. His voice was just as scratchy as hers. He had a splitting headache and his tongue was glued to the roof of his mouth. The room was pitch dark. He had no idea how much time had passed since they’d been picked up off the downtown Toronto street.

  The back of the van had been dark and smelled of gasoline. Somebody had been waiting for them inside, and the man standing at the door had climbed in after them. They’d each been given a shot. Holliday had fought it off for long enough to hear voices speaking and somebody say, “Four-oh-one to four hundred and then north.” Directions obviously, but he had no idea where to. Presumably somewhere north of the city.

  “Doc?” Meg’s froggy voice again.

  “I’m here.”

  “Where are we?” There was a rattling sound. Holliday tried to move his arms and heard the scrape of metal on metal. He was handcuffed to a bed. From the sound of her voice Meg was about ten feet away.

  “Are you handcuffed to a bed?”

  “Yes, I think so,” she responded, her voice clearing a little.


  Holliday inhaled. Cedar, without a doubt, and lots of it. Overhead, forming vaguely out of the darkness, he could see roof beams. Outside there was a distant sound. Slapping water. A high-pitched whine. A boat? Water-skiing?

  “I think we’re on a lake or a river somewhere,” said Holliday. “Maybe a cottage. I can hear a motorboat.”

  There was a pause and then Meg’s voice again. “I can hear it, too.”

  Holliday turned his head left and right. To the left there was a faint, square outline of light. A boarded-up window perhaps. To the right, almost out of his line of sight, was a bright red dot of light. He tried to move his arms. Nothing but the metal sound and the harsh pinch of his wrists against steel. These weren’t joke- shop cuffs—they were the real thing; the only way out was going to be a key. Even so, somebody was being very careful—two sets of handcuffs per person. The same somebody who’d cuffed him knew his record. He could have done a lot of damage with even one free hand.

  Holliday kept listening. The motorboat sounds faded. He could hear wind blowing in trees. The softer rustling note you got with evergreens. No traffic noises. They were definitely off the beaten track.

  A door opened and the room was flooded with daylight. Ten by twelve up under the rafters, wood plank floors and two single iron beds with ticking covers on thin mattresses. A baby minder on a night table, the source of the red light in the darkness. A man stepped into the room, alerted by their voices—the one in the jogging clothes, except now he was wearing denim shorts and a T-shirt that read Pizza in twenty minutes or a free lap dance. Now can I get into Canada? on the front. Some sort of inside joke.

  “Funny, I guess,” said Holliday, reading the shirt as the man took off one set of handcuffs.

  “Listen up,” answered the man in the T-shirt. “Get out of the other cuffs, get your friend out of hers and come downstairs. Breakfast in fifteen. There’s a bathroom at the top of the stairs if you have to go.” He tossed a small plastic key tag onto Holliday’s chest. The man’s accent was as flat and Midwestern as a Kansas cornfield.

  Breakfast. So at least a day had passed. Holliday picked up the key tag and got to work on his other hand.

  The main floor of the cottage was large and lavish. Holliday had seen places like it in Vermont and Connecticut; big family summer homes without families anymore, put on the weekly or monthly rental market to pay their way. The kitchen was immense, one wall of windows looking down onto a broad tree-lined lake. A set of steps from a large back deck led down to a dock. There was an old wooden Chris-Craft speedboat tied up, the kind that cost as much as a Bentley these days. The cottage appeared to be perched on a rocky outcropping surrounded by mature cedars.

  A man was at work at a butcher block cutting table between the stove and a large maple kitchen table. The chairs were well polished and original pine arrowbacks. Pricey antiques popular in the sixties or thereabouts. The table was set for three, two on one side, the third directly across from the other two. There were tall glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice at each place setting. In the center of the table was a complete coffee service and a large sterling silver toast rack already filled with thick slices, half buttered, half dry. There was nobody else in the room but there was a man in a suit sitting on an Adirondack chair on the deck. He had a short-stocked MAG-7 shotgun in his lap. Still no clue to the nationality of their abductors; the MAG-7 was made in South Africa.

  The man at the butcher block was chopping vegetables by hand. Green peppers, onions and celery. There was already a mound of diced ham and a pile of grated cheese off to one side. The man was wearing a blue-and-white-striped apron of the kind once seen on greengrocers in London’s Covent Garden. The man was in his fifties, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and with a graying military haircut. Under the apron he was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

  “The secret of a perfect breakfast is timing,” the man said. The voice was completely accentless, some kind of mid- Atlantic melding of English and American. The man had either been born in the States and educated in England or the reverse; it was impossible to tell which. Holliday found the voice oddly sinister, almost machine-like. “You’ve got to have everything set to go in perfect order.”

  As if to demonstrate his rule, the man scooped up ingredients from the butcher block on the end of a spatula and tipped them one by one into a large cast iron frying pan on the stove behind him. He seemed to have several other pans on the go. Even from the back his movements were quick and deft. He liked cooking and he was good at it.

  “Do sit down, Colonel,” the man said, his back to Holliday. Meg came down the stairs and stepped into the kitchen, her face scrubbed but still bleary-eyed. She was rubbing a line of chafed skin on one wrist. The cuffs. A reminder; he might be dressed in an apron but the man at the stove was still their kidnapper and jailer. Holliday sat down, poured himself a cup of coffee and waited. Sister Meg followed suit. The cups holding the coffee were Kutani Crane pattern.

  The man in the apron transferred food onto plates lined up on the counter beside the stove and carried them to the table, two on one arm, a third in his other hand. He laid them down as smoothly as an experienced waiter. Perfectly turned half moons of omelet, three rashers of bacon and a generous pile of pepper-and-onion-cooked home fries on the side. The man slipped the apron over his head, hung it over the back of his chair and sat down. He poured himself a cup of coffee, added cream and smiled at his guests, fork poised over his omelet.

  “Eat up,” he said pleasantly in that strange, flat voice. “Before it gets cold.” He carved off a precise piece of omelet and popped it delicately into his mouth. Holliday followed suit and so did Meg. The omelet was excellent, perfectly cooked. The coffee was dark and strong without being bitter. Pressed, not dripped.

  “You know who we are, obviously,” said Holliday. “Who are you?”

  “Are you enjoying your breakfast?”

  “It’s fine. Who are you?”

  “My name is Quince, like the jelly. Nathan Quince.” The man smiled. “I’m sure my mother had a fantasy that I’d grow up to be a gay English professor at a little college in some place like Nebraska. Perhaps write a book of poetry or two. Something low-stress. Alas, her dream hasn’t come true.”

  “So what are you then?” Holliday went on, eating his omelet. “If you’re not a poet from Nebraska?”

  “I’m a facilitator. I make things happen. I give history a nudge now and again, that’s all. You’re a historian. I’m sure you can see the value in that.”

  “And we’re in the way of a nudge, is that it?”

  “Not necessarily,” said Quince. He plucked a slice of toast from the rack and tore it in half. He loaded a piece of omelet onto one of the toast halves and put it in his mouth. He chewed, looking across the table at Holliday. He swallowed and spoke again. “We’re just keeping an eye on you.”

  “Is that why you kidnapped us?”

  “It’s a stormy world out there, Colonel Holliday. Sometimes it’s best to come in out of the rain.”

  “I didn’t feel any rain.”

  “You would have,” said Quince. “There are a great many parties interested in your little quest.”

  “Including you.”

  “Including us,” Quince said and nodded. He took a sip of coffee. Outside on the lake the water-skiing boat was back.

  “So who is us?”

  “An interested party.”

  “One of the three- letter boys, CIA, DEA, NSA, or one of the new crop that’s sprung up over the past ten years?”

  “Not federal at all,” said Quince. “The world has changed. Think globally. Corporately.”

  “You’re private then, whoever you are.”

  “Contract employees. As I said, facilitators. Problems arise; we solve them.”

  “Thugs,” said Holliday, sipping his coffee.

  “Certainly,” said Quince pleasantly. “If thugs are necessary.”

  “But why us?” Holliday asked.

>   “According to my information you and the good sister are looking for something called the True Ark. To some people this relic has certain symbolic value well in excess of its monetary worth. It is our task to ensure that this True Ark—if it exists at all—not fall into the wrong hands.”

  “What constitutes the wrong hands?” Holliday asked.

  “Any hands other than my client’s.”

  “And who is your client?”

  “I can’t say. Security reasons.”

  “Logjam,” Holliday said. He picked up a piece of toast and started spreading it with preserves from a little pot beside the toast rack. The pot had a small paper label: Moira’s Plum Jam. He bit into the toast. Moira was to be congratulated.

  “Why kidnap us?” Meg said, speaking for the first time.

  “To my sure knowledge you have five separate police agencies and the Vatican Intelligence Service looking for you. You’ve left a litter of bodies in your wake. We’re just trying to differentiate ourselves from the crowd, so to speak. Our sources tell us that your friends from the Vatican were getting very close. We decided to remove you from the playing field for a while. For your own safety and for the safety of your undertaking.”

  “So you’re on our side?” Holliday asked.

  “Until I’m told differently by my client.”

  “So for you it’s about the job. No loyalties to anyone. It’s all about the money.”

  “Don’t be naïve, Colonel. It’s always all about the money. Wars are fought for all sorts of reasons by all sorts of people, but inevitably it is the people who sell the warriors their bullets who get rich. Life, Colonel Holliday, is a retail event, just like Christmas.”

  The water- skiing boat was visible now, no more than fifty feet off the dock below them. The skis of the man being towed behind the boat slapped the water noisily and the roar of a pair of big twin engines was enough to drown out conversation at the kitchen table. Everyone looked toward the lake, including the guard on the deck. There were four people in the speeding towboat, all wearing black life jackets. Directly in front of the dock the man being towed suddenly let go of the tow-rope and the boat throttled back to almost nothing. The four men on the boat turned toward the shore.