The Templar Cross

by Paul Christopher

  The train rumbled past, leaving them beside the empty track. Mario had taken his threat seriously, thought Holliday. He popped the magazine on the Walther and checked. Fully loaded. He pushed the magazine back into place, feeling it lock with an efficient Teutonic click.

  “What are we doing out here?” Peggy asked wearily.

  “This was Czinner’s escape route,” explained Holliday. “Now it’s ours.” He dug around in his pocket and found the suppressor. He screwed it onto the tapped muzzle of the short-barreled pistol.

  Rafi stared at the weapon.

  “Expecting trouble?”

  “You never know,” answered Holliday. “Czinner’s ride is down there. Maybe it comes with a driver.”

  “I don’t want Peggy hurt,” cautioned the Israeli, putting his arm around her shoulders. She shook it off.

  “I can handle myself, Rafi,” she said, annoyed.

  “Nevertheless, stay back, both of you. And keep back until I whistle Dixie.”

  “Dixie?” Rafi asked.

  “‘Hava Nagila’ for Southern crackers,” explained Peggy. Rafi looked confused.

  “Just stay back until I whistle,” said Holliday.

  Leaving them behind, he followed the path down between the bridges, turning under the low left-hand span. A dense row of willows and alders stood at the top of the bank, screening the path along the river edge. The arc lights beside the train track were behind Holliday now and the way ahead was lost in gloomy darkness. He could hear the water, a light lapping noise against the soft earth of the muddy riverbank and a different sound with it—the river slapping quietly against the hull of a small boat.

  A lanky figure rose out of the darkness directly in front of him. A man in a dark sweater with something slung over his shoulder. The shape was familiar enough: an old Colt Commando from the Vietnam War, the short version of the M- 16. The dark figure unlimbered the old assault rifle.

  “Padre?” the man whispered harshly. He was less than fifty feet away.

  Holliday didn’t wait for the sound of the rifle’s slide as a round popped into the chamber. He lifted the Walther in a two-handed grip, pointed the pistol at the man’s chest and fired six times in quick, evenly spaced succession, the silenced rounds sounding like someone snapping dry twigs.

  Whatever else Czinner had been, he was a professional when it came to his job. To be that quiet the rounds had to be subsonic. Given that they were in Italy that probably meant Fiocchi Super Match. The man with the rifle turned into an empty bag of flesh and slid to the ground, face in the dirt.

  “No,” said Holliday. “Not your murdering padre.”

  Holliday waited. Nothing stirred. The only sounds came from the river’s movement. He approached the fallen man, keeping the Walther pointed at the back of his head. He checked the pulse. Nothing, which was as he’d expected at that range. He stood up.

  Behind the man a sleek-looking old-fashioned wooden speedboat was tied up to a crumbling concrete dock that looked as though it might have been cast off during construction of the bridge piers. Holliday had seen one just like it in the ruins of Milosevic’s summer home on the Danube years before.

  The boat was an Italian Ravi Aquarama, the so-called Ferrari of cabin cruisers, a mahogany dream from the sixties built to challenge anything ever made by Chris-Craft. The twenty-eight-foot boat was fitted with Cadillac engines and could plane through the water at close to fifty knots.

  First things first. He unscrewed the silencer from the pistol and put both back into his pocket. He slid the rifle out from under the body and pitched it into the river. That done, he grabbed the dead man by the armpits and dragged the corpse across the shingled beach, then rolled him into the underbrush. Peggy had seen enough death; she didn’t need another body to add to the toll.

  When he was satisfied he turned back to the path and whistled the first few bars of the old minstrel tune that had somehow become the anthem for a losing army, long ago. As he whistled he felt the weight of the world settle on his shoulders and the strange sense of loss felt when a battle ends. He whistled another few bars then turned and went out to the boat.

  He stepped over the curving deck and took the leather key tag out of his pocket. He sat down behind the white Bakelite wheel, put the key into the ignition, then twisted the port starter to the On position. There was a coughing sound and then a deep-throated rumbling as the massive engine came to muttering life. He twisted the starboard starter and the second engine echoed its mate.

  He tugged the throttle just a little and the muttering became a muted roar. Holliday smiled. It was like having two tigers tugging on a leash. Emil Tidyman would have enjoyed this, he thought, his heart sinking a little. Then Rafi and Peggy appeared out of the darkness and, seeing them, Holliday’s heart lifted once again.

  Rafi stared at the speedboat.

  “Good Lord,” he said.

  “Neat,” said Peggy. “Can I drive?”

  “No,” said Holliday. “Unhitch the line and climb in. We’re going home.”

  And that’s what they did.

  29

  Holliday sat behind his desk in the study of the little house on West Point’s Professor’s Row. There was early snow on the ground outside and he had a fire burning in the grate. It was the day before Thanksgiving and once again West Point was almost empty. Anyone who had anywhere to go had gone. Home for the holidays. He looked around the room.

  The floor was stacked with boxes ready to go into storage and all the bookshelves were empty. The house was well on its way to becoming a barren shell of naked walls and vacant rooms, no longer anyone’s home.

  The inquiry into the death of the killer who’d attacked him on the same day Rafi had arrived at his door seeking help was done and Holliday had been completely exonerated.

  His term as the head of the History Department at the United States Military Academy was formally complete, papers signed, position resigned, re-up declined. As the old science fiction writers used to put it, life as he knew it was over. He was unemployed and homeless. Peggy was in Jerusalem with her new husband and he was alone.

  The funny thing was, he didn’t give a damn. In fact, he was looking forward to whatever was coming his way. His time tracking down Peggy halfway across Africa had taught him at least one good lesson: friends were precious, life even more so and time was the only real treasure.

  He sat in the firelight, remembering. They’d parted ways in Paris after taking the big speedboat downriver to the Adriatic coast and then south, away from Venice and down to Ravenna. From there getting to Paris had been easy.

  During a farewell meal in the Terminal R brasserie at the Radisson SAS hotel at Charles de Gaulle Airport, Rafi had asked him how he’d been tipped that the man posing as Czinner was an impostor. Holliday pulled the big West Point graduation ring out of his pocket and laid it down on the table.

  “What a cool jewel you got from your school,” said Holliday, smiling.

  “Pardonnez-moi?” Peggy said in an atrocious French accent.

  “That was Czinner’s reaction,” said Holliday. “He recovered very quickly, but not quickly enough. A West Pointer would know. I knew then that he wasn’t Czinner. I was ready for him.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Rafi. He picked up the big signet ring and looked at it closely, an archaeologist at work, trying to decipher the artifact.

  “It’s a ritual, a poem,” Holliday explained. He quoted the whole thing: Oh my gosh, sir, what a beautiful ring.

  What a crass mass of brass and glass.

  What a bold mold of rolled gold.

  What a cool jewel you got from your school.

  See how it sparkles and shines.

  It must have cost you a fortune

  Please, sir, may I touch it,

  May I touch it, please, sir.

  “Not the greatest poetry I’ve ever heard,” said Peggy.

  “I still don’t get it,” said Rafi. He put the ring back on the table.

  Hollid
ay picked it up and slipped it back into his pocket. The ring was engraved with Czinner’s names and dates, and eventually he’d send it to Vince Caruso at the embassy so he could get it to where it rightfully belonged. He finished his explanation.

  “Like I said, it’s a ritual. A hazing thing for freshman cadets. Back in the day every plebe at West Point had to learn that verse by heart, on pain of death, or at least a severe dressing-down and some punishment duty. When he saw a student from that year’s graduating class wearing his ring the plebe had to salute, fall to his knees and recite the poem. If you remembered any piece of poetry at West Point, that would be it. They still do it, only now you don’t fall to your knees.”

  “Your West Point is a very strange place,” said Rafi, grinning. “Its first commandant your country’s greatest traitor, assassination attempts, now young men falling to their knees and reciting awful poetry. It’s a wonder you’ve won so many wars.” He shook his head in mock consternation.

  “Yes,” agreed Holliday, “but there’s no place like home.”

  And now home was a thing of the past.

  Speaking of things from the past.

  Holliday smiled to himself, staring into the crackling fire and listening to the November wind rattling angrily at the windows. At least he’d know how to find his way to the new one. And to find his way back to Alhazred’s hidden gold. Gold that he’d find again and make sure got back to its rightful inheritors.

  He opened the drawer and pulled out the only memento he had of his terrible time in the desert. Two shaped strips of wood, dark with age, both eight-inch squared rods carved with tiny symbols, numbers from thousands of years before. One of the strips was drilled with a square hole that exactly fit the dimensions of the other.

  Put together it formed a slightly mismatched cruciform with the inner arm able to slide up and down within its mate. The same cruciform the figure of Imhotep held in the boat fresco on the wall of his hidden tomb. The cruciform object he found, forgotten within the huge stone sarcophagus.

  He’d realized instantly what the little wooden objects were and somehow he’d managed to keep them with him and hidden for the rest of his journey. Two strips of ancient wood more valuable than the tons of bullion on the underground chamber floor.

  Two strips of wood that would have given the archaeologists from Jerusalem, or Rafik Alhazred, almost unlimited fame. Two strips that gave the ironic lie to the old name for Father Thomas’s covert organization, Organum Sanctum, the Instrument of God.

  Holliday fit the two little squared rods together and slid them up and down. Almost as elegant as Imhotep’s translation of the beehive tomb design of his native land into the gigantic pyramids of his adopted home. As simple and perhaps almost as brilliant in its own way as the most famous equation in the world: E = mc2.

  The two little sticks, brought together in the correct way, its symbols read as degrees of angle when pointed toward the sun, was the first navigation instrument that allowed men to leave the shore and travel the ocean. A true Instrument of God to a man like Imhotep, whose greatest god was Ra, the sun, and whose private god was knowledge.

  Effectively the two sticks joined were a simple version of a Jacob’s Staff, named for the man who had invented it, Jacob ben Machir ibn Tibbon, a Jewish astronomer living in Provence in the thirteenth century. Except Tibbon had not invented it—Imhotep had, approximately four thousand years before him. The invention, and the fresco in the hidden tomb, brought up another possibility:

  What if the landscape in the fresco wasn’t the near-mythical land of Punt? What if the island in the fresco was Manhattan and the river was the Hudson, flowing a few hundred yards from where he sat, down to the invisible Atlantic, hidden beyond the hills? What if Imhotep had sailed his long-keeled boat across the Ocean Sea three thousand years before Christ, let alone Columbus, and claimed the land for his great pharaoh, Djoser?

  Only a year or so ago they’d found funerary boats buried in the sands near the Tomb of Ramses in the Valley of the Kings, boats twice as long as any Columbus sailed to the West Indies. The pieces put together made it quite possible. Now wouldn’t that turn history on its complacent ear?

  He picked up the wooden cross and put it back in the drawer along with the Templar notebook with the bloodstained cover he’d inherited from the old monk Rodrigues. He watched the fire in the hearth die down as the room grew cold. He thought about Imhotep, about the gold and about the past. And then he thought about the future.

  Emil Tidyman had been right: gold and power brought out the worst in almost everyone. A lot of people had died because of Rauff’s bullion and Holliday could bet it wasn’t over yet. He was fairly certain that Father Thomas wasn’t finished with him. That battle would almost certainly go on, wherever he went. There were scores to settle.

  And letters to write.

  He took a few sheets of paper from his drawer along with a felt pen and a brand-new moleskin notebook he carried. It had taken some time and a lot of phone calls, but he’d eventually discovered the names of the four men who made up the crew of the ill-fated B-17, Your Heart’s Desire:

  Major-Fleigerstabsingenieur Johann Biehl, the pilot; Captain-Fleigerhauptsingenieur Hugo Dahmer, the copilot; Lieutenant-Fleigerobersingenieur Gerhard Fischer, the flight engineer/navigator; and, finally, the radio operator, Lieutenant-Fleigerobersingenieur Willi Noller.

  He’d also discovered the names of their nearest relations, all surviving sons and daughters, and he’d decided to write them each a letter telling them of the plane’s discovery and the fate of their forgotten fathers. It was the least that he could do.

  And then there was Tabia, Emil Tidyman’s daughter. It had taken even longer to discover her whereabouts, but he’d pulled some strings and called in some markers and eventually he had the name and address of a cutout who would eventually get the letter to the people taking care of her.

  Perhaps someone would read Tabia the letter now, or perhaps she’d read it herself somewhere far in the future. It didn’t matter. Since coming back to West Point he’d had a lot of time to think about what he’d say and now the words came easily.

  In the dark of a chilly New York night he began to write, his pen moving easily across the blank paper, forming letters and words that told a story of friendship and family love, a story of a rogue but a rogue redeemed, and the story of a friend who believed in friendship at any cost. Above all it was the memory of any child’s hero, her father, a man she could be proud of. Holliday wrote for a long time and when he was done he smiled. He put down the pen and leaned back in his chair. Perhaps, for Tabia at least, the bad times were over.

  Outside, the winter wind shook its fist at the moaning eaves and the frost-rimed glass, reminding the world of things to come, like cold bad dreams. Holliday’s smile slipped away and became a thoughtful frown. Sitting there with the fire no more than dead ash in the hearth, he knew that while Tabia’s troubles were done, his own were just beginning.

  READ ON FOR A SPECIAL SNEAK PREVIEW

  OF THE NEXT PAUL CHRISTOPHER

  THRILLER

  THE TEMPLAR THRONE

  AVAILABLE SOON FROM SIGNET

  Colonel John “Doc” Holliday, U.S. Army Rangers (retired), most recently a professor of Medieval Military History at the United States Military Academy at West Point (and retired from that, too), sat on the glassed-in terrace of La Brasserie Malakoff, an upscale café in the prestigious 16th arrondissement of Paris. His companion was Maurice Bernheim, director of the Musée national de la marine, the National Maritime Museum of France.

  Both men were eating a lunch of salad and croque monsieur, the Parisian version of a Reuben sandwich that might as well have come from an entirely different universe. The Parisians looked down their noses at everyone else on the planet, but when it came to food they were right. Even a Royale avec Fromage at a Paris McDonald’s was vastly superior to a Big Mac sold anywhere else in the world. Bernheim had been lecturing him on the subject for the better part
of an hour, but a good lunch on a spring day in Paris made up for a lot of things.

  Holliday had crossed paths with Bernheim previously when he was in the midst of tracking down the secret of the Templar sword. The chubby little historian who smoked the foul-smelling cigarettes called Boyards had helped him then, and now Holliday was hoping he’d help him again.

  “I must say it is too bad that your charming niece could not be with you today,” said Bernheim. He finished the sandwich and hailed a waiter, ordering crème caramel and coffee for both of them.

  “Cousin,” corrected Holliday. “She’s too busy being eight months pregnant in Jerusalem.” Peggy and the Israeli archaeologist Rafi Wanounou had married last year shortly after their adventures in the Libyan desert. The same adventures that had eventually led Holliday to his high-cholesterol lunch with Maurice Bernheim.

  “Such a pretty young woman,” sighed the middle-aged man.

  “Her new husband thinks so,” Holliday said with a smile. “Speaking of which, how’s your wife and kids?”

  “Pauline is well, thank you. Fortunately for me her dental practice keeps me in the style to which my little hellions and I have grown accustomed. The twins of course must also have the latest running shoes. La vie est tres cher, mon ami. Life is very expensive, yes? Soon it will be makeup and matching Mercedeses.” Bernheim flicked an invisible bit of fluff off the lapel of his very expensive Brioni suit.

  The crème caramel arrived and the museum director stared at it reverently for a moment, as though it was a great work of art, which, to Bernheim, it probably was. Holliday ignored the dessert and tried the coffee. As with everything else at Malakoff’s it was excellent. At least with the ban on smoking in Paris restaurants he didn’t have to endure Bernheim’s Boyards.

  “So,” said the nautical expert. “What brings you to Paris and my humble little museum?” He took another bite of the crème caramel and briefly closed his eyes to savor the flavor.

  “Have you ever heard of a place called La Couvertoirade?” Holliday asked.