Christopher, Paul - Templar 01

by The Sword of the Templars

  “Derek Carr-Harris was hardly innocent,” laughed Kellerman, the sound hollow and utterly without humor. “He was a cold-blooded murderer, as was your uncle.”

  “That’s a lie!” Peggy said hotly.

  “My uncle was a medieval historian,” said Holliday. “During World War Two he was attached to the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Branch. It was an extension of the Roberts Commission set up by FDR. Their job was to protect objects of cultural value from plundering and destruction. Even German ones.”

  “True,” said Kellerman, “but the MFAA was also a cover for a variety of independent, intelligence-related actions by the British and the Americans at the end of the war.” Kellerman paused. A truck swept by in a rush of sound, washing the interior of the car for a moment with the beams from its headlights. “You’re something of a military historian, Doctor. Have you ever heard of something called Operation Werewolf by any chance?”

  “Sure,” said Holliday. “It was a last-ditch defense plan organized by Himmler and run by an SS-Obergruppenführer named Prutzmann. It was a left-behind partisan organization.”

  “Oddly, very much like the so-called Tribulation Force described in a series of popular Christian novels in your country,” nodded Kellerman. “But the Operation Werewolf I am referring to was a joint operation devised by a number of high-ranking intelligence officials in both America and the United Kingdom. It was jokingly referred to by Winston Churchill as the Kammerjäger Brigade. Do you know what a Kammerjäger is, Doctor?”

  “I can guess.”

  “It means vermin exterminator, Doctor Holliday. The Kammerjäger Brigade’s mandate was to find, hunt down, or otherwise discover the locations of names on a list of various high ranking SS officers and other important members of the Reich, and having found them their further instructions were to assassinate them.” Kellerman paused, and then spoke again. “ ‘What we do in life will echo in eternity,’ ” he quoted. “You know those words, Herr Doktor Holliday?”

  Who was this guy?

  “Russell Crowe in the movie Gladiator.”

  “Good words, Doctor, and true ones. Your uncle and his English friend wrote them in blood in the spring and summer of 1945. My father was one of the names on Churchill’s death list, Doctor, and both your uncle and Derek Carr-Harris were killers in the Kammerjäger Brigade. To my sure knowledge they were responsible for the assassinations of more than two dozen good men in Germany, Austria, and in Rome. They very nearly caught my father, and if they had, they would have killed him on the spot.”

  “You’re a liar!” Peggy snarled. “Grandpa never killed anyone!”

  The road ahead was completely dark. There was forest on either side of them. No traffic, not even distant headlights. There was no way to tell how long it would be before they reached their destination.

  Now or never.

  Holliday leaned forward slightly. The guard in the front seat tensed, his hand going toward his holstered weapon.

  “Kellerman?”

  “Yes?”

  Holliday whispered in his ear.

  “Fick’ dich selber, du Arschloch.”

  He let the pencil he’d palmed from Drabeck’s pocket in the parking lot drop down his sleeve and into his right hand. He swept his arm up back-handed across Peggy’s front, plunging the sharpened point of the pencil into Stefan’s right eye and deep into the frontal portion of his brain, killing him instantly. A single shriek died half-stillborn in Stefan’s throat. Fluid from the burst eyeball drained down his cheek.

  Leaving the pencil in place, Holliday dropped his hand into the dead man’s lap, prying the big automatic from his nerveless fingers. He thumbed down the safety, and, twisting his body while leaning over Peggy, covering her, he fired repeatedly into the rear of the front seat.

  Upholstery exploded and the bullets took the security guard in the groin and belly, the concussions from each shot filling the interior of the car with a sound like raging thunder. The man twisted and jerked, screaming as he flopped back against the dashboard. Lifting the heavy pistol above the back of the seat, Holliday fired twice more, hitting the security guard in the throat and face. There was a humpty-dumpty instant as the man’s head burst open, spraying the front seat and the windshield with blood, brains, and bone chips. Kellerman swerved, tires squealing as the car almost went off the road. Holliday jammed the muzzle of the pistol under Kellerman’s collar.

  “Pull over,” he ordered. “Now.”

  Silently, Kellerman did as he was told, guiding the big car onto the gravel shoulder. The inside of the car smelled like blood and gunpowder. Holliday worked his jaw back and forth; his ears were ringing. Adrenaline was rushing through his system, and his stomach was roiling. Most other times and places he would have been sick. He swallowed bile.

  “Unlock the doors,” he ordered. “Reach for some kind of weapon and I won’t even think about it.” Kellerman nodded, his head barely moving. He reached down and touched a button on his door. There was a dull clicking sound. Holliday glanced out the window. Dark woods on either side. They were in the middle of a forest.

  “You okay, Peg?” Holliday asked.

  “Yeah,” she answered, her voice choked. Stefan’s body was sagging against her like a sleeping lover.

  “Open the door and push out the body,” ordered Holliday.

  “I don’t want to touch him.”

  “Just do it, we don’t have much time.”

  “Okay.”

  She leaned over the dead man and tugged the door open. Pushing and straining, she toppled him outward. The corpse flopped half out of the car, legs and feet still inside. Peggy kicked and struggled, finally managing to get the rest of the body out. Holliday looked out through the blood-sprayed windshield. Still no traffic.

  “Get the guy out of the front seat,” he said to Peggy.

  “Aw, come on!”

  “Do it, Peg!”

  She climbed out of the car, stepped over Stefan’s body and opened the front passenger-side door. Gri macing, she grabbed the nearly headless body by the arm and hauled it out of the car.

  “Now what?” Peggy called from the side of the road.

  “Get the gun out of his holster. There’s a little lever with an S on it on the left-hand side. Push it down. Aim it at Kellerman. If he does anything that makes you nervous, squeeze the trigger and keep on squeezing until you don’t feel nervous anymore.”

  “Okay,” she answered. She crouched down over the guard’s body and retrieved his weapon, taking off the safety and aiming the pistol back into the car.

  Holliday turned his attention back to Kellerman.

  “I’m getting out of the car and so are you. Make any kind of stupid move and I will kill you, understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do it. Slowly.”

  The two men climbed out of the car. The open air smelled like pine needles. A breeze sighed through the trees. The moon was rising. The forest looked like something from a fairy tale.

  “Walk around the front of the car and stand on the shoulder,” ordered Holliday. Kellerman did as he was told. So far he had barely spoken. Less than five minutes had passed since the tables had abruptly turned. Holliday followed Kellerman around the big car, the .45 aimed squarely at the small of the man’s back. Kellerman glanced down at the crumpled bodies of his security guards.

  “Stefan has a two-year-old son. Hans was about to be married.”

  “Spare the sentiment,” said Holliday. “It doesn’t suit you.”

  “I will kill you for this,” pledged Kellerman.

  “So what?” Holliday said. “You were going to kill us anyway.” He turned to Peggy. “Search him. Weapons and cell phones.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Yes. Give me the gun.” She handed him the weapon. He popped out the magazine and put both pistol and magazine into the pocket of his jacket. Peggy searched Kellerman. She came up with a Deutsche Telekom iPhone and a palm-sized Beretta Tomcat .32-caliber automatic. Holliday
put both into his other pocket.

  He turned back to Kellerman. “Roll your friends into the ditch.”

  The German gave Holliday a long appraising look but said nothing. He dragged the bodies to the edge of the ditch that ran beside the shoulder of the road and pushed them over.

  “And now?” Kellerman asked sourly.

  “And now we go,” said Holliday. “When the next Autobahnpolizei patrol comes by you can explain how your two dead employees got that way.”

  Peggy stepped forward, looked into the front seat at the mess, and then got into the back. Keeping the big automatic trained on Kellerman, Holliday got behind the wheel and switched on the ignition.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” said Peggy weakly. “Please get me out of here.”

  Holliday spun the wheel, making a U-turn and heading them back toward Friedrichshafen. He stepped down on the gas. In the rearview mirror the tall figure of Axel Kellerman receded and then was swallowed up by the darkness.

  “We lost the pictures,” said Holliday.

  “No, we didn’t,” said Peggy from the backseat. She poked her hand into the back pocket of her jeans. She pulled out a slim piece of plastic a little bigger than a piece of Juicy Fruit gum and held it up for Holliday to see. The word “Sony” was imprinted on the side.

  “What’s that?” Holliday asked.

  “A flash memory stick,” she answered. “I downloaded the pictures while we were still in Kellerman’s Batcave. We’ve got them all. Like I said, Doc, welcome to the digital age.”

  16

  “How are you doing?” Holliday asked. It was shortly after the lunch-hour rush, and they were sitting in an outdoor café just off the Piazza del Gesů Nuovo in the coastal city of Naples, Italy. Peggy was drinking from a green bottle of ice-cold Nastro Azzuro, and Holliday was on his second cappuccino. The crusty remains of an excellent margherita pizza lay between them on a serving platter. It was hot, bright sunlight shining down out of a brilliant blue sky. Traffic roared loudly around the square. Two days had passed since their gruesome adventure in Friedrichshafen.

  “How am I?” Peggy said. “I’m still trying to figure out how we got from there to here.”

  “By train.” Holliday smiled.

  “I didn’t mean that,” she said.

  “I know,” he said quietly. He glanced out across the piazza. In the center of the slightly tilted cobble-stone square loomed the soaring, ornate, rococo Guglia dell’Immacolata obelisk, erected by the Jesuits in the seventeenth century to commemorate the Immaculate Conception and to consecrate their new basilica, after which the piazza was named.

  The piazza was the historic center of the old city by the sea, but its importance had faded long ago, and now, instead of praying priests and monks from holy orders, the streets were lined with bars and clubs and by-the-slice pizza shops, the sidewalks thronged with tourists, the roadway jammed with trucks and cars and rushing scooters, their sewing machine engines whining like enraged mosquitoes as they threaded their way dangerously in and out of the rushing traffic that circled endlessly around the enormous spire. It was a long way from the lonely roadside in the Bavarian Alps.

  After leaving Kellerman in the darkness, they’d driven back toward the Schloss, retrieving their rental from where they’d parked it on the far side of the bluff that held the castle ruins. There they abandoned the Mercedes with Drabeck’s body in the trunk.

  Holliday drove them into Friedrichshafen, just managing to catch the 10:40 ferry, the last one of the day. They reached the Swiss side of the lake forty-five minutes later and arrived in Zurich two hours after that. Peggy found a twenty-four hour Internet café where they accessed the memory stick and printed out the diary photographs in ninety-four double-page entries.

  They checked the sheets one by one, looking for a familiar word or name. They found what they were looking for in the entry for Monday, September 27, 1943: the word “Naples” and a name—Amedeo Maiuri, the Italian archaeologist who’d originally discovered the sword during his excavations in Pompeii, a few miles south of the city in the shadow of Vesuvius, the towering volcano that loomed over the Neapolitan landscape.

  It was enough for Holliday. They boarded the morning high-speed train to Milan, and then took the slower overnight train to Florence, once the home of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and, much later, Salvatore Fer ragamo, shoemaker to the stars. In Florence they took the requisite pages from Lutz Kellerman’s wartime diary to the people at the local Berlitz office and had them translated. Translations done, they continued on to Naples.

  Peggy nursed her beer and stared blankly out at the whirling traffic and the chattering crowds on the sidewalks. Her time in Friedrichshafen had taken its toll. She looked worn, tired, and depressed. Holliday wasn’t surprised; he wasn’t faring much better. Since the beginning of their pell-mell escapade he’d seen five men die and had been directly responsible for the violent deaths of three of them. Whether they deserved it or not was irrelevant; he’d been the one who’d snuffed out their lives. Their blood was on his hands, and the responsibility for that weighed heavily on him.

  “Do you want to quit?” Holliday said.

  Peggy turned to him, startled. “What?”

  “Do you want to quit?” he repeated. “We can stop right now, you know. Get on a plane and be back home in time for breakfast tomorrow.”

  She frowned and took a little sip of beer. She put the bottle down, picking at the paper label with her thumbnail.

  “I’m not like you,” said Peggy finally. “I’m not a soldier. I see bad things in a viewfinder, not for real.”

  “Believe me, kiddo, I don’t feel any different than you do,” responded Holliday.

  “I want the bad stuff to be over,” she said. “Is it?”

  Holliday shrugged.

  “There’s an old saying that dates back to the Bourbon kings—‘Vedi Napoli e poi muori.’ ‘See Naples and die.’ ” He paused and shrugged again. “Bad stuff begets bad stuff, battles breed more battles, and one war leads to the next. There’s no guarantee that it’s all going to be clear sailing from here on out.”

  “What about Kellerman?”

  “What about him?” Holliday replied.

  “Is he going to quit now?”

  “He knows what’s in his father’s diary. He’s connected. It wouldn’t be hard for him to track us down.” Holliday shook his head. “No, he won’t quit.”

  “Then neither should we.”

  They drove the bright red Fiat 500 rental inland from the Bay of Naples, skirting the brooding base of a sleeping Mount Vesuvius then headed into the rolling countryside beyond. All around them were neat vineyards and stands of walnut trees, hazelnut trees, apricots, and centuries-old groves of olives. The entire area was supposedly controlled by the Camorra, a homegrown Neapolitan version of the Mafia, but there was no sign of it here.

  It was hard to imagine such a pastoral and beautiful landscape as a war zone, but on the ninth of September, 1943, the Allies landed on the beaches of Salerno, fifty miles south, and by the middle of the month they were pressing inland and up the coast to Naples while the German Army under Albert Kesselring slowly withdrew to the north.

  According to his diary, on September 28 Lutz Kellerman, leading a small company of crack soldiers from the 1st SS Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, arrived in the town of Nola, approximately thirty kilometers northeast of Naples. They were equipped with a number of half-track armored personnel carriers mounted with heavy machine guns, some Kettenrad tracked motorcycles, half a dozen Panzer IV tanks, and a Kübelwagen command car for Kellerman. Their official mission was to harass the enemy wherever possible, gather intelligence and forage for supplies, sending out three man “brandschatzen” pillage and burn patrols into the countryside. Kellerman, however, had his own agenda.

  Having met with Amedeo Maiuri at a private rendezvous at the archaeologist’s villa in the suburbs of Naples two days before, Kellerman left the bulk of his men to secu
re and pacify the town while he and a handpicked platoon of men went to the place Maiuri had discussed with him at their meeting.

  The location in question was a large, seventeenth-century Palladian palazzo on a hilltop just outside the tiny village of San Paolo Bel Sito a mile or so to the south. The Villa Montesano, as it was called, had a long and illustrious heritage going back to the Cistercian Order of the Knights of Calatrava, who were closely allied with their Cistercian brothers, the Templars.

  The villa, built more like an abbey than a private home, had been passed down through a number of families over the centuries and was now owned by Signora Luisa Santamaria Nicolini, widow of Henry Contieri, whose uncle Nicola had been Archbishop of Gaeta. The ties with the Church and the Templars were clear, but more importantly, the entire Naples Archives were now being stored for safekeeping in the villa; 866 cases in all, containing more than thirty thousand precious volumes and fifty thousand parchment documents dating back to the twelfth century and the time of the Crusades.