The Templar Throne

by Paul Christopher

  At the base of the cliff the terrain flattened to a layered shingle of rock that ran down to another sandy shelf, which stood less than a foot above the present sea level and was obviously submerged at full high tide. The heavy rain had flattened out the sea and it was absolutely flat without any swell at all.

  “Look!” Meg yelled, raising her voice over the drumming chatter of the pounding rain. She pointed. Two hundred feet farther along the dark slick shingle and barely visible in the drifting sheets of rain, Holliday could make out a set of stone steps that led down to the narrow beach.

  The steps were roughly cut and probably as old as the castle. A smugglers’ beach, ensuring that his lordship in the castle had a ready supply of French brandy in both peace and war. A wreckers’ beach as well; Cornwall was famous for its wreckers and their famous prayer:Oh please Lord, let us pray for all on the sea

  But if there’s got to be wrecks, please send them to

  we.

  “Come on!” Holliday said. They ran down the plateaulike shingle, slipping and sliding on the rock until they reached the steps. They paused for a moment, getting their bearings, then started down. The visibility was getting worse by the minute. The only way Holliday knew they’d reached the bottom of the steps was when his foot crunched on the pea gravel of the beach. The rain slowed briefly, and out of the gloom, hanging between sea and sky, an apparition loomed.

  A man in a classic old sou’wester and a sloping rubber rain hat stood in the center of an eighteen- foot lapstrake-planked lobster boat, hauling on a steel-bound wire jigging line with two canvas- gloved hands. An enormous gray-bellied conger eel of perhaps twenty pounds appeared on one of the triple barbed hooks.

  Deftly the man doubled up the line around one elbow, taking the strain, freeing the other hand to pick up a three-foot gaff and catching the barbed hook in the snakelike creature’s gill, just behind the small stiff pectoral fin. Barely pausing, the man twisted his wrist with one smooth motion and flipped the two- foot-long conger into the bottom of the boat. The fisherman was no more than fifty feet from shore.

  Holliday turned and looked back the way they’d come. The cliff and the castle high above were barely visible, no more than shadows in the rain. He couldn’t see them but he knew the armed response team was there, in the castle, going from room to room. There wasn’t much time. He turned back to the man in the fishing boat, hailing him.

  “Hey!” Holliday yelled, cupping his hand beside his mouth. The fisherman paid no attention.

  “The rain is coming in from the south,” called Meg. “He can’t hear you.”

  “Unless he looks this way in the next minute or two we’re going to be screwed.”

  In answer Meg extended her lower jaw a little, stuck her thumb and index fingers into the corners of her mouth and blew out a classic, three- note come-hither whistle. The fisherman looked up instantly, startled by the familiar school yard call, eyes scanning the shoreline. He had the dark-eyed, black-haired and faintly Basque good looks of what Holliday’s uncle Henry used to call Black Irish.

  Holliday raised his arm and gestured for the man to bring the boat to shore. The fisherman balked at first, but Holliday dug into his pocket, pulled out his wallet and took out a hundred-euro note, waving it over his head. The fisherman shrugged, brought in the rest of his jigging line and then pulled up a small aluminum Danforth anchor. It seemed to take forever.

  “Come on, come on!” Holliday whispered.

  He gave another anxious look toward the castle battlements; still nothing. He turned back toward the dark waters of the English Channel.

  The fisherman sat down, fitted the pintles of his oars into the locks and let the blades fall into the flat gray sea. He backwatered, turning the oars in opposite directions, and the boat turned smartly, bow toward the shore. The fisherman pulled strongly and the boat headed inshore, slicing through the water.

  The man at the oars neared the beach, and after a single look back over his shoulder he backwatered the boat again, this time bringing it all the way around so the stern of the boat was facing Holliday and Meg, a tantalizing ten feet away. Holliday could see the neatly painted name on the transom: Mary Deare.

  Even from a distance Holliday could see the twinkle in the man’s black eyes and the smiling narrow face. The fisherman reminded Holliday of Otter in The Wind in the Willows. Charm was second nature to a man like this.

  “What can I do for you two soggy castaways?” The accent was definitely Irish but not the Dublin lilt that Holliday was familiar with. “Two” became “tuh” and “soggy” became “saggy” in a sleepy, easy drawl.

  “Get us off the island. Fast!” Holliday called out.

  “And wha’ whou’ tha’ be wirt to ya?” The fisherman grinned.

  “Name your own price,” called back Holliday. “Just get us the hell out of here.”

  “That’s the sort of price a poor fisherman wants to hear,” replied the man at the oars. “What’s the matter, the Devil himself on your tail?”

  “Worse,” yelled back Holliday, hoping that the guy was as Irish as he sounded. “British Specials with machine guns.”

  “Bugger me, Jack,” said the fisherman, eyes widening. “Is that for true?”

  “In about two minutes they’re going to start coming down that cliff behind us on ropes like something out of James Bond, and that is most definitely for true,” answered Holliday.

  “Never did have much use for the feckin’ limeys, ’specially the Bluebottles; climb aboard, friends, and step lively.” The fisherman gave three hard backstrokes with the oars and the stern of the boat ground its way onto the beach. Holliday and Meg stepped into the boat.

  Half a dozen conger eels were writhing in an inch or so of rainwater in the bottom of the dinghy, mouths gasping for air, the long slimy bodies thrashing hard as they suffocated. Lying flaccidly between the footboards were small bulbous squid. The bait. Holliday and Meg sat down and Meg drew up her feet, looking at the giant, slug-shaped fish.

  The fisherman pulled strongly on the oars and they moved off, the Irishman grimacing with exertion. Within two minutes the island had vanished behind the cloak of rain. A stubby rusted hulk began to take shape in front of them. It was no more than sixty feet long with a high wheelhouse amidships and a raised afterdeck behind. A short, dark funnel rose from the middle of the afterdeck. There was a mast crane and rig close to the bows; it was some kind of coastal trawler.

  “What’s that?” Meg asked.

  The fisherman glanced over his shoulder then turned back to face his passengers, his features smiling proudly.

  “That’s me old girl the Mary Deare, last of the old Clyde puffers, and I’m her captain, Sean O’Keefe, yeah?”

  17

  “Aw and well, it’s just a culchie from Cork City, County Cork, that I am and all, yeah?” O’Keefe said, pronouncing Cork as “Caark” and adding the particularly Irish query at the end of his sentences. He was sitting comfortably in a padded swivel chair bolted to the steel deck of the wheelhouse as he piloted the Mary Deare southwest across Mount’s Bay toward Land’s End, running blind through the gray, dreary sheets of rain, one eye on the radar screen to his left, the other eye on the floating compass needle in front of the old- fashioned wooden wheel. Holliday stood at O’Keefe’s side, dressed in borrowed clothes from the Irishman’s wardrobe. They were close to the same size, although the arms on the red-checked flannel shirt were a little short.

  “You run the ship alone?” Holliday asked. They’d been aboard for almost an hour and he’d seen no sign of any crew.

  “Mary’s more a boat than a ship, yeah?” O’Keefe said. “But yes, there is no crew, if that’s what you’re asking. We’re quite alone.”

  “Must be tough,” said Holliday.

  “Not so much. Mary’s displacement is no more than an outsized cabin cruiser. It’s not that I do much heavy lifting, yeah? If there’s no harbor they send out a lighter and a crew to take off cargo, and if there is a harbor they
send out a bum boat with a couple of mooring hands and there’s stevedores on the quayside. That’s the way of it, yeah? Puffer’s been going up and down the coasts along the Irish Sea for a hundred and sixty years. Victualling boats they called them, yeah? Supply boats in the Aran Isles and the Hebrides, out-of-the-way places. Everyone has to eat, yeah? They had a shallow draft and were narrow across the beam, less than eighteen feet so they could travel in the canals.”

  “Surely the Mary Deare isn’t that old?” Holliday said.

  “Nah, nah,” O’Keefe said and laughed. “Mary’s a young colleen. Built 1944 by J. Pimblott and Sons on the river Weaver in Cheshire. She was used as a water carrier at Rosyth during the war and then laid up by the Admiralty. For a while she was a cargo ferry from Ardrossan in North Ayrshire to the Isle of Man, which was where I bought her for a song, yeah?”

  “What sort of cargo do you carry?” Holliday asked. Somehow he suspected that it wasn’t always legal. A boat with the Mary Deare’s shallow draft could snuggle very close to shore on Moonraker nights.

  “Whatever a person is willing to pay for,” answered O’Keefe, turning to Holliday, black eyes twinkling, his small mouth puckered in a smile.

  “An itinerant tramp steamer captain then.” Holliday nodded.

  O’Keefe lowered his voice into a rich baritone and recited: “I have been a king, I have been a slave, nor is there anything, fool, rascal, knave, that I have not been, yet upon my breast a myriad heads have lain.”

  “William Butler Yeats,” answered Holliday promptly, and then proceeded to quote the entire text of “The Second Coming.”

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” said O’Keefe, eyes wide and obviously impressed. “You memorized the whole bloody thing and even better you pronounced his name good and proper.”

  “I used to teach ‘The Second Coming’ in my World War One classes. I still think it’s one of the greatest pieces of poetry ever written. Easily as good as any Shakespeare.”

  “What’s a Yankee teacher doing running from the Gardai on St. Michael’s Mount?” O’Keefe asked, raising a dark eyebrow.

  “I taught military history at West Point and it’s a long story,” answered Holliday.

  “It’s a night and a day to Wicklow Town, which is where we’re going, yeah?” said O’Keefe. “All the time in the world and nothing I like better than a good yarn, boyo.”

  Meg came through the narrow companionway door behind the two men, wearing an old blue cotton boiler suit of O’Keefe’s that was ludicrously large. The cuffs were rolled up and so were the sleeves. The word “cute” popped into Holliday’s head. Better not go there, he thought.

  “Have I missed anything?” she asked brightly.

  “We were just getting down to it, my love,” said O’Keefe. “Your friend Doc here was about to spin us a tale.”

  They made their slow way along the Cornish coast while Holliday talked. The rain eased as they went around Land’s End between the rocky coast and the Longship’s Lighthouse. There they turned north for the long run up the Irish Sea. Running at a respectable eight knots, it would take them a full twenty- four hours. As darkness fell the exhausted pair were bedded down, Meg in the captain’s cabin just behind the wheelhouse and Holliday in the smaller engineer’s berth farther aft.

  As dawn broke O’Keefe awakened Holliday and gave him a short lesson in following a course, keeping the needle of the compass aligned to a single bearing along the Irish Coast, watching the radar screen for any errant blips, and if he did see anything in the fairly crowded sea lanes, always bearing to the right.

  While O’Keefe catnapped in his dayroom, Holliday took the plodding Mary Deare past Tremore and Rosslare Harbour, Wexford and Enniscorthy and up to Courtown, where O’Keefe took the wheel again.

  While the Irishman piloted the rust-streaked ship, Meg and Holliday cobbled together a meal in the little galley above the old boiler room, making fried egg sandwiches with rashers of streaky bacon and sliced tomatoes on thick slices of Irish soda bread, which O’Keefe had somehow managed to bake himself in the galley’s tiny oven.

  They made coffee and carried everything up to the wheelhouse, where they picnicked on the small chart table in the corner. An hour after the early afternoon meal the town of Arklow passed on their port side and an hour after that they rounded Wicklow Head and reached the enclosing breakwaters of the old harbor. O’Keefe eased the Mary Deare between the breakwater groynes, backing the engine and warping into the dock as though he was parallel parking a car.

  “You make it look easy,” said Holliday as a couple of wiry-looking men in heavy sweaters and rubber boots caught the mooring hawsers and snugged the boat in.

  “To me it is.” The Irishman shrugged and glanced at his wristwatch. It was plain with a black dial and white letters, obviously very old. Holliday immediately knew what he was looking at. It was a Granta World War Two-vintage German military timepiece.

  “Interesting watch,” he said.

  “My father’s,” said O’Keefe. “Took it off a German pilot down the road in Arklow.”

  “What was a German pilot doing in Arklow?” Holliday asked.

  “Bombing it,” said O’Keefe. “He ran out of gas and crashed into the estuary. My father rowed out and picked him up out of the water before the tide got him.”

  “What happened to the pilot?”

  “My father shot him with his old pigeon gun, then took his watch. The bugger killed his brother in the bombing, yeah?”

  O’Keefe pushed the engine telegraph to All Stop, stood back from the wheel and stretched.

  “How long will we be here?” Holliday asked.

  “Long as you like,” the Irishman said and shrugged. “I’m not on what you might call a strict schedule. Got a few things to pick up and drop off to the north, but nothing that can’t wait a day or so.”

  “I just thought it’d be nice to stretch our legs.”

  “Be my guest. I’m doing an Irish stew and boxtys for tea, but that’s not for a couple of hours.”

  “We’ll be back,” promised Holliday.

  Instead of heading directly into town they turned past the lifeboat shed on the far side of the southern groyne and walked up a stony path to the bluffs above the harbor. There was the ruins of what might have been an old castle and a clear, brilliant view all the way across the Irish Sea to the distant smoky hills of Wales on the horizon. Holliday could imagine a Viking standing where he was now, looking out to sea and wondering what worlds there were left to conquer.

  “You’d think there would be a plaque or something,” commented Meg, looking at the black stone ruins of the ancient fortress.

  “The Irish aren’t too good at that sort of thing,” said Holliday. “I went to a conference once at University College in Cork. They were putting up a parking garage near the river, and during the excavations for the foundation they came upon the remains of an entire Viking settlement, perhaps the first settlement in Cork. Instead of calling in a team of archaeologists they simply put down a sheet of heavy plastic and built right on top of it. Pretty crude.”

  They walked along the bluffs down to Wicklow Head. It was a cruel and bitter place, dark hills and jutting cliffs running down to the sea. In a storm it would be foul and in a fog it would be dangerous, both to ships and to anyone stupid enough to walk along the cliffs.

  “Wuthering Heights.” Meg smiled, looking out over the sparkling water. “Catherine calling for Heathcliff across the moor.”

  “Makes you wonder why people live in places like this,” said Holliday.

  “You could say the same thing about Minnesota in the wintertime. It depends on what you’re used to.”

  “I suppose,” grunted Holliday. They turned and walked back to the Dunbur Road and headed back into town. “What do you think of O’Keefe?” he asked finally.

  “It was lucky he was there at St. Michael’s Mount,” answered Meg.

  “Luck’s hardly the word,” said Holliday.

  “What’s t
hat supposed to mean?”

  “Think about it,” said Holliday. “You don’t organize a raid of SWAT cops like that on the fly. It has to be organized and that takes time. Someone knew we were going to be there.”

  “Who?” Meg said. “These mythical Vatican spies of yours?”

  “Someone who could track us through my credit card,” said Holliday. “It’s the only way they could have known.”

  “Who could do that?”

  “The only people I can think of is the police in Venice,” said Holliday, “but that’s a stretch.”

  “What about that bald man in Prague, or the man you . . . killed on the boat. The one you said was an assassin?”

  “I suppose, but that doesn’t make much sense, either.”

  “What does any of that have to do with Mr. O’Keefe?”

  “Don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence that the Mary Deare was anchored fifty feet offshore just when we needed it?”

  “It happens,” said Meg.

  “Only on reruns of Columbo,” snorted Holliday. “O’Keefe was waiting for us just as sure as that SWAT team knew we were going to be there. We were meant to get on board. We were meant to escape.”

  “Maybe you should get help for these paranoid delusions of yours,” said Meg skeptically.

  “I don’t think it’s a delusion at all. I think it was meant to take us out of the loop, convince us that we were fugitives on the run. Someone is keeping track of us and what we’re up to. Someone who wants us to keep unraveling clues until we find what we’re looking for.”

  “That’s just plain old- fashioned nuts,” said Meg. “We don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

  “Just keep your wits about you when you’re talking to O’Keefe; he’s not the happy-go-lucky leprechaun he pretends to be,” Holliday cautioned. “He’s just too good to be true.”

  The actual town of Wicklow had the look of an old man or woman desperately trying to imitate youth. Every storefront was painted a different bright color but each slate roof was sagging and there wasn’t a building on the High Street less than a hundred and fifty years old. Charles Dickens would have felt right at home. For a town of ten thousand it had an extraordinary number of restaurant-bars, seventeen by Holliday’s count.