Templar Throne

by Paul Christopher

  “This is the midpoint,” she said firmly. She dropped her pack onto the ground, unstrapped the folding shovel and took the headphones for the metal detector out of her pack and plugged them into the device’s console. Holliday followed her across the sand and did the same thing. Finally they were ready. Holliday looked at his watch.

  “We’ve got thirty-seven minutes to locate this thing and dig it up. If we haven’t hit pay dirt in half an hour we’re leaving. Agreed?”

  “Whatever you say.” Meg nodded absently, her attention focused on adjusting the metal detector’s arm brace.

  “I mean it,” warned Holliday. “One minute more than that and I’ll leave you here.” He nodded toward the massive storm front rapidly descending on them. “I don’t want to be here when that thing hits.”

  “I heard you the first time,” answered Meg. She scooped up her pack with her free hand and hung it over one shoulder. “I’ll go right, you go left.”

  “All right,” answered Holliday, but she was already moving, the headphones clamped around her ears. He shook his head, watching her go, then fitted on his own arm brace and put on his headphones. He turned and began walking, moving slowly and methodically, swinging the disc of the detector back and forth in a sweeping motion a few inches above the sand.

  The Sable Island book he’d read on the train had gone into minute detail about the geology of the place. Sable Island was a product of the last ice age. As the glaciers withdrew, sand was deposited in front of the retreating ice. In Sable’s case the formation was referred to as a sand dump, and a very large one, deposited over a thick layer of Tertiary Period sediment, which eventually produced pockets of oil, hence the offshore drilling platforms.

  The point being that there was no bedrock or any other kind of rock on Sable Island and hence no minerals. If the metal detector pinged and the LED gauge on the console gave him a reading, it was either the remains of an old shipwreck or Meg’s True Ark.

  He lifted his wrist and glanced at his watch yet again. He felt his jaw tighten. Ten minutes eaten up and the hurricane ten minutes closer; this had gone from insane to dangerous. A woman in the clutches of some sort of religious rapture was going to kill them all. There was no True Ark. He heard a sharp cry, dulled by the wind and the muffling headphones. He turned. Meg was standing three hundred yards away in the distance, waving her arms and yelling. He tore off the headphones as she yelled again. He barely made out the words.

  “I found something!”

  Holliday stared at the small, frantically waving figure in the distance.

  “You’ve go to be kidding,” he whispered. He saw her drop to her knees and begin to scrabble at the sand, digging it out with the little folding shovel. Holliday heaved the metal detector over his shoulder and ran. A minute later he reached her position, chest heaving. The sand was blowing in the freshening wind and stinging his eyes. He stared into the foot-deep hole in the sand.

  “It was like a miracle!” Meg said raggedly as she dug. “The meter went off the scale and the headphones went from a steady ping to a long tone in an instant and I knew it was here! I knew it!”

  “What metals?” Holliday asked.

  “All of them! That’s what is so incredible! Bronze, gold, silver! Even tin. It was reading some kind of heavy metals as well, probably copper or nickel or lead.”

  “Most likely lead; they used it for drainpipes back then, or tin maybe.”

  “Help me dig,” ordered Meg.

  Holliday stripped off his backpack and unlimbered his own shovel. He checked his watch. Twenty minutes left. He dropped down on his knees across from Meg and began to work at the caked, dark sand, widening and broadening the hole. At two feet Meg’s shovel hit something with a hollow thump.

  Holliday flopped forward onto his stomach. He reached down into the cavity and started sweeping the sand off whatever it was with his outstretched fingers. A few seconds later a carved design appeared, deeply carved into a dark gray metal slab. An engrailed cross, the ancient mark of the Saint-Clairs. Below it was an almost runelike series of letters. Some sort of motto: εν τoύτω νίκα.

  “That’s not Latin, or French,” said Meg, a confused look on her face.

  “It’s ancient Greek,” said Holliday, who’d seen the phrase before. “In Latin it’s usually rendered as In hoc signo vinces—By this you shall conquer—meaning the cross. The Emperor Constantine saw the phrase in a dream the night before the Battle of Milivian Bridge in A.D. 312. He won the battle and the phrase became his motto thereafter. It was also the motto of the Knights Templar.”

  “It’s the True Ark,” whispered Meg, her voice reverent. “We actually found it.”

  “My, my,” said Holliday. “Imagine that.” Sister Meg gave him a sharp look.

  “Help me dig,” she said.

  They swept away more sand, then dug carefully around the slab. It took ten minutes, half the remaining time, to reveal that the slab was actually a rectangular box roughly three feet long, eighteen inches wide and a foot high, about the size of an ossuary coffin used for relic bones in the medieval era and apparently made with sheet lead, the inset lid tightly soldered. They managed to lift the surprisingly lightweight container out of the hole and set it down. Both Holliday and Meg examined it closely. The box was perfectly sealed.

  “A simple carpenter’s cup,” whispered Meg, eyes wide.

  “Sorry?” Holliday said.

  “The Grail,” said Meg. “It was a simple carpenter’s cup, not some fine jewel. The True Ark is like that.”

  “I thought you were quoting from an Indiana Jones movie, the one that had Sean Connery in it.” Holliday looked at his watch. Five minutes left. Good timing. He stood up and brushed sand off his jeans. He’d been an utter fool.

  “How can you be so blasphemous at a time like this?” Meg asked, scowling, still kneeling in front of the box.

  “Because I don’t believe any of it,” said Holliday, his voice bitter. “The whole damned thing has been impossibly convenient. The bald guy in Prague to give it all a sense of urgency, the Irishman O’Keefe and the Mary Deare just where they needed to be, the rubbing in Iona, the hymn, and then you find exactly what you’ve been searching for after looking for ten or fifteen minutes and only buried a couple of feet deep. There’s a saying for it: if it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t.” Holliday shook his head wearily. “Let’s cut the crap, sweetheart. This whole thing has been a crock right from the start and I fell for it hook, line and holy sinker.” He reached down, picked up his pack and slung it over one shoulder. He looked down at Meg. She was rummaging for something in her pack. “It was all window dressing, and pretty expensive window dressing at that,” he said. “I don’t know quite what you’re up to, but I hope it was worth it.”

  He began to turn away as Meg stood up and then he froze. She had a heavy Stechkin APS 9mm pistol in a two-handed grip, rock solid and pointing in the general vicinity of his heart. It was the pistol of choice for Russian Special Forces in Afghanistan. He’d seen plenty of them in the hands of Taliban insurgents himself. Trophies from a lost war.

  “Mother warned me that it wouldn’t work,” said Meg, the gun never wavering. “But I thought it was worth a try.”

  29

  “Pick up the ark,” ordered Meg. Holliday did as she instructed, grabbing the lead box and lifting it with both hands. It weighed about forty pounds, too light to be lead sheet unless it was very thin or just a protective veneer over something else, probably wood. Not the heaviest load he’d ever carried but it was going to slow them down.

  “We won’t make it back to the boat with me carrying this,” said Holliday, looking at Meg. Her red hair was flying wildly in the rising wind, her eyes squinting against the whirling sand. She picked up her pack and shrugged it over one arm. The pistol never wavered and she never looked away. She barely blinked.

  The religious fervor was gone, replaced by something cold and hard. It was an entirely different creature than the pretty,
defensive, red-haired nun he’d met at Mont Saint-Michel. This Sister Meg was capable of putting a bullet between his eyes without a second thought.

  He was no shrink, but crazy seemed like a good enough diagnosis. Behind them the ocean roared and crashed as the gigantic rolling waves battered themselves to death on the broad beach, each one clawing itself a little higher up the sand.

  “To hell with Gallant and his stupid boat,” Meg answered. “We’re setting our own timetable. Get moving.” They began to walk back along the hardpan, then veered left at exactly the place where they first walked down to the edge of the lake. He could tell because he could see their boot prints in the broken crust of the sand. They followed their own footsteps to the base of the low, hill- like dunes and found the deep cut trail that had led them here. They began heading up the path.

  The sense of the Stechkin aimed between Holliday’s shoulder blades was almost physical, like a sudden flash of sunburn or an itch. If he remembered correctly the tough little automatic had a twenty-round magazine and a rate of fire that was somewhere around six hundred rounds a minute. That meant she could empty the pistol into his back in two seconds.

  “Smart,” said Holliday, speaking to the empty air in front of him. “Using lead. There’s no real way of dating it and I’m sure whatever little things you’ve got tucked away are nice and authentic.”

  “Shut your mouth,” snapped Meg.

  “You’re not going to shoot me,” said Holliday, who wasn’t quite sure he believed it. “If you were going to kill me you would have done it by now. For whatever reason you still need me.” He paused. “By the way, who is your mother?”

  “You never thought to ask me what my last name was, did you?” Meg said behind him.

  “I didn’t think nuns had last names,” said Holliday.

  “Nuns were ordinary people before they took their vows, and anyway, who said I was a nun?”

  “Are you?”

  “I was once, not anymore.”

  “So what’s your last name?” asked Holliday.

  “Sinclair. My mother’s name is Katherine, if that makes things any clearer.”

  Holliday remembered a piece he’d read in Time magazine a few months ago, something about there being only a dozen female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Kate Sinclair had been number four in a list headed by Angela Braly at WellPoint, Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo and Irene Rosenfeld at Kraft Foods. Kate Sinclair ran an amorphous multinational that had something to do with water.

  “The water lady?”

  “I doubt she’d take too kindly to that description,” said Meg Sinclair. “Mother is the CEO and majority shareholder in the American Fluid Dynamics Corporation. A utilities provider. Her son, my brother, is Richard Pierce Sinclair.”

  “The senator?”

  “That’s him,” said Meg. “The next president of the United States.”

  “In your dreams,” said Holliday. “He’s the junior senator from some backwoods state like Tennessee.”

  “Kentucky,” she corrected. “But you’d be surprised what three years and a billion dollars can do for your image. Stop here.”

  Holliday stopped. They were at the summit of the dune. He looked down onto the narrower north beach and the sea beyond. The Deryldene D was invisible, more than a mile away up the beach. Behind him he heard movement. It sounded as though Meg was looking through her knapsack, maybe distracted. Somehow he doubted it, and it wasn’t worth the risk of trying to find out.

  He heard something vaguely familiar and then he remembered where he’d heard it before—it was the sound of someone breaking open the cylinder of a revolver, then snapping it back into place again. What was she doing? The Stechkin was basically a machine pistol; what did she need a revolver for?

  There was a loud, explosive blast behind his back and then a white-hot hissing that sounded reminiscent of a roman candle going off on the Fourth of July.

  Holliday looked up as a trail of white smoke arced up into the dark sky overhead, drifting and smudging in the wind. At the top of the arc it exploded into a bright red ball of light. Of course, thought Holliday, a signal flare. He wondered about Gallant. He’d see the flare, of course, and wonder what it was all about, but he doubted that the lobsterman would do anything about it.

  “Move,” ordered Meg. Once again Holliday did as he was told and began moving down the sloping face of the dune.

  “What was that all about?”

  “You’ll see,” said Meg.

  Holliday’s arms were beginning to ache from the weight of the ark. He glanced down at the lead veneer of the box and its inscription. By this you shall conquer. Maybe he could fake a fall, go head over heels and drop the box on his way down and make a run for it. Suddenly, from overhead he heard a faint droning sound, the familiar whine of a prop plane, and a fairly large one at that.

  “That your ride?” Holliday asked without turning around. He gripped the box more tightly. If there was going to be a chance of getting out of this it would be now. He tensed, trying to judge the exact moment.

  “Shut up,” Meg said, her voice flat and unemotional. Overhead the buzzing grew louder and suddenly he could see the plane. It was some kind of high-winged utility aircraft like the Defender, the one used by the British military. It was obviously about to use the beach as a runway. “And don’t think about making a break for it,” continued Meg. “Your body English is betraying you. All that tension in the shoulders and turtleing your neck down like you are.”

  “I don’t think you’ve got it in you,” said Holliday, knowing that his moment had gone. “Maybe you think you’re some kind of hard case, but I don’t think you’re a cold-blooded killer.”

  “Who knows?” Meg Sinclair answered. “Try me and see.”

  Off to the left the aircraft was in its final approach, its tail wagging back and forth with the force of the gusting wind. Holliday and Meg reached the bottom of the dune and stepped out onto the beach. Meg Sinclair stayed behind Holliday, giving him no chance to move on her. Carrying the lead-covered box was almost as good as being handcuffed.

  The first fat drops of rain were hitting the sand. The drops were large enough to dig their own little craters when they hit. Gallant was going to have a hell of a time, his only advantage being that he would be running before the wind.

  “How did the plane know when to pick you up?” Holliday asked.

  “Satellite phone, an Ericsson R-290,” answered Meg. “They’ve been flying in circles for an hour, waiting for my signal.”

  “A satellite phone? Where on earth did you pick up one of those?”

  “Think about it,” said Meg. Holliday could tell that she was grinning from ear to ear. “It’ll come to you.”

  Holliday thought and then he had it. It was the only answer.

  “Quince,” he said finally. “He was one of yours.” He cursed silently. He should have put it together long ago.

  “Got it in one, Professor,” Meg said and laughed, obviously greatly pleased with herself. “The whole abduction was just to make sure you were still off balance and not questioning things too much. Besides, I had to update Mother and her friends. Quince gave me the weapon and the phone while you were still knocked out.” There was a pause. “We weren’t prepared for an assault at the lake, however. That wasn’t part of the plan at all.” The twin-engined turboprop touched down, its sticklike three-wheeled undercarriage and fat tires barely making an impression in the sand. The livery was stark black and white and the name on the side was Skybus Air Express.

  “One of Mommy’s companies?” Holliday guessed.

  “Move,” said the young Sinclair woman.

  “Why don’t I just put the ark down and walk away?” Holliday suggested. “No harm, no foul. You’ve got what you want.”

  “Not yet,” answered Meg. “We need you to authenticate the find.”

  “What makes you think I’ll do that for you?”

  “You have an incentive,” said Meg Sinclair.

 
“What incentive would that be?” Holliday asked.

  “Your so-called niece Peggy Blackstock and her archaeologist husband.”

  “What about them?” Holliday asked, his heart beginning to race. He turned around to face Meg Sinclair, sour bile rising in his throat. Sinclair’s face was blank and the gun was still unwavering in her hand. “Tell me what you’ve done,” said Holliday.

  “How touching, such family concern.” She paused. “Oh, of course! Peggy’s pregnant, isn’t she?”

  “Tell me!”

  “At noon today, local Israeli time, Peggy and her husband were kidnapped. For the moment they are safe and unharmed. How long that condition lasts is entirely in your hands.”

  Holliday froze. “So help me God . . .”

  “God can’t help you,” said Meg Sinclair. “But I can. Cooperate and they’ll stay alive. One wrong move and they’ll be dead. All three of them. Now move.”

  Holliday stared at her. Never in his entire life had he experienced the utter fury and rage rising in his soul, not even in the heat of battle, not even when he’d felt the meaty slip-slide of his knife sliding across the exposed throat of a picket guard on the edge of an opium plantation outside of Garmsir in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

  “If you harm them in any way, when this is over I will hunt you down wherever you are and I’ll see you dead and in the ground, you psychotic bitch.”

  “You’d kill a woman?” Meg Sinclair asked, batting her eyes and smiling. “I wouldn’t have thought your chivalrous code would allow it.”

  “In your case I’ll make an exception.”

  “Fine,” said Meg Sinclair. “You’ve had your moment of heroic male posturing, but right now I want you to walk down the beach and get on that plane.” The rain began to fall harder. Holliday gave himself another second to burn her face into his mind and then turned away and did as he was told.