by Gregg Loomis
The knight gave us that laugh as he handed his bloody sword, hilt first, to Phillipe. “Praise God, as well as a man can be who has just sent scoundrels to their proper place in hell. We must hasten to find the rest, for surely their encampment is nearby.”
I am ignorant as to how he knew this to be so but it was not my station to question the judgement of a knight of God. And as the land became flat, we smelled smoke. A trace of it could be seen against the sky, now brilliant with morning’s full light. At the edge of the road, he bade us be quiet, took a fresh mount and led us into a forest so thick it was as if twilight had come.
Shortly we came a clearing. A few mean twig huts were gathered around a central fire over which a hind was roasting, poached from the local lord. These varlets ate far better that those in the service of God.
About the fire were a number of women, some suckling infants. The only men to be seen were old or visibly disabled, no doubt from a life of knavery. Upon seeing our knight, those that could scattered like a covey of partridge. The balance retreated into the crude shelters.
Guillaume de Poitiers disdained following those who had fled. Instead, he leaned from his great warhorse, taking a burning faggot from the fire with which he lit the hovels. As we left, I could hear the screams of those trapped with the conflagration.
“Sir,” I asked, “I can understand your putting to flight those who would have robbed us, but is it not unchristian to put to the torch those who have done us no evil?”
He inclined his head as he stroked his beard before replying. “Those who would have robbed us are succored by those we have destroyed. They are but vile creatures, serfs illegally escaped their master who intend to live a life causing mischief to travelers such as we. Their destruction is no more than the killing of vermin in the grain house.”
This did not comport with my understanding of the teachings of Our Lord that even the lowest among us are as brothers. But I was young, ignorant and in the company of a man who had fought and bled for Christ, so I changed the direction of my query.
“But sir, you did not look into the eyes of those you killed here,” I said, remembering the remark he had made about his wound. “They died in their huts, baking like so much bread.”
He nodded, that smile on his lips. “You remember well, little brother. But there are exceptions to every rule. Those men in their shelters died of fire, one of God’s four elements.”
I knew the four elements consisted of fire, water, wind and earth, but I knew not what pertinence this had to killing. I indulged myself in the sin of pride. I was ashamed to admit I knew not.
Within a few hours we entered the city of Trapani, the name meaning “sickle” in Greek because of the crescent shape of the harbor there. As I have said, until this time I had never been more than a day’s journey by foot from my home. I had, of course, heard of the sea, but that is different from seeing it. Thinking of those waters like those on which Our Lord walked and in which His apostles fished, I had not imagined anything like what greeted us. I am ashamed to admit my faith was so little that I could not have imagined the fashioning of anything so deeply blue, so restless or so vast. I had been used to seeing hills and mountains, trees and streams. But here I could see to the very edge of the earth.
Nor had I seen ships before, huge carts that floated upon the water with great white sails, each vessel with enough cloth to blanket the abbey I had left. There seemed to be thousands of these craft, crowding each other as they rose and fell with each breath of the mighty ocean.9 This huge fleet, I was told, belonged entirely to the Templars who, after paying what amounted to extortion to the Venetians to leave the Holy Land, had decided to purchase their own ships.10 Those members who had not already done so had gathered here to journey to their home temples.
For days we waited for a wind that would take us northward along the coast of Italy to Genoa and then to the coast of Burgundy. But even the size of these craft to the vastness of the sea, even my faith did not prevent me from becoming trepidant. This I recognized as my weakness, my failing, that I was unable to be comforted that God’s will would be done.
During the time in Trapani, I came to realize Guillaume de Poitiers was not alone different from the poor monks with whom I had lived. All his Templar brethren lived well. Although it is hardly man’s place in God’s scheme to judge, I noted humility and poverty did not number among their attributes. They enjoyed great quantities of unwatered wine (which they were quick to condemn as inferior to the wines of other regions) and were profligate in their habits. Gaming was as common among them as prayer as was recounting stories in which the narrator was the hero, usually a little bit more so than his predecessor.
I was to learn a number of the Holy See’s rules did not apply to this Order. This may well have carried the seeds of its fall from grace, a fall as disastrous if less spectacular than Satan’s from Heaven.
Translator’s Notes
1. Armour shielding leg and foot
2. Armour covering the arms, shoulders and upper body
3. A device for throwing large rocks, like a catapult
4. The Italian equivalent of William is Guglielmo
5. 1091–1250
6. Approximately 650 meters
7. The word Pietro uses is cycgel, Frankish for either a short heavy club or a weapon used to beat upon an opponent. In this context, it is doubtful these people would have weapons more sophisticated than could be fashioned from readily available material.
8. The author uses liste, a Frankish word which later came to include the areas used for knightly competition. Since the sport of jousting between knights was unknown at the time of Pietro’s narrative, the earlier meaning of the word is used.
9. The hyperbole here is Pietro’s, not the translator’s.
10. There are no consistent records as to the number of ships owned by the Templars, but it is unlikely that the entire fleet would have been at an obscure Sicilian port at once or that all the ships in port would have been theirs.
CHAPTER FIVE
1
Atlanta
The same day
Morse was slouched in his chair, studying another fax, this one from the Department of Defense, Bureau of Records, St. Louis.
Reilly’s dates of service matched what Morse remembered him saying, even confirmed a bullet lodged between the seventh and eighth cervical vertebrae. If Morse understood the medical jargon correctly, the examining doctor had adopted an attitude of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Attempting surgery to cut the damn bullet out could sever some nerve with a long name. Made sense.
Morse sat up so suddenly the casters on his chair slammed against the gray carpet with a thud, causing the detective in the cubicle next to his to look up from her computer with a glare.
“C-seven and C-eight?” he said to no one in particular before he picked up the phone and dialed the medical examiner’s number from memory.
The first person he spoke to confirmed his suspicion: There was no eighth cervical vertebra. The thoracic spine began after the seventh cervical disk.
Mistake?
Could be.
He reached into the inside pocket of the suit coat draped over the back of his chair and produced his notebook. It didn’t take long to find the number for Reilly’s office. Now, if he could just get the minimal cooperation if the lawyer’s secretary . . .
2
Atlanta: Offices of Arnold Krause, M.D.
Morse hated doctors’ offices even when he was not a patient. The worn and outdated magazines and the cheap furniture were almost as bad as the receptionist’s, “The doctor’ll be right with you,” a promise uniformly and cheerfully given but rarely kept. He had a theory that there was a school somewhere that recycled lobotomy patients to work the front desks of physicians’ offices.
His badge made a difference. He hardly had time to settle in with a month-old copy of People before he was ushered into an office where diplomas and certificates covered more of
the walls than the dark paneling.
“Arnold Krause.” A short man in a white coat entered the room right after Morse and circled him to stand behind a desk and extend his hand. “Understand you’re interested in Mr. Reilly’s records.”
Morse savored the nervousness most people exhibited around policemen. “That’s right, Doctor. There be no doctor-patient privilege in Georgia. . . .”
Krause plopped into a leather chair behind the desk and slid a manila folder and a large envelope across the polished mahogany. “As I’m well aware. Still, we don’t usually turn over medical records without a subpoena. But where a patient is subject to an investigation . . .”
Morse sat in a wing chair across the desk and began to thumb through the file. “I appreciate your not insisting on the formalities.”
“We try to cooperate with law enforcement,” the doctor said, closely watching where Morse directed his attention.
Morse read the typed notes of last fall’s physical. Reilly seemed to be in good health. Impatiently, he opened the envelope, dumping X rays onto the desk. He held them up one by one to the light from the office’s only window until he found the one he was looking for.
He handed it to the doctor. “This be the neck, right?”
Krause whirled in his chair to place the X ray on a viewer built into the wall. Fluorescent light flickered and came on. “The bottom of the cervical spine, yes. Actually, the picture is a chest X ray.”
It was obvious the doctor wanted to ask why Morse wanted to know.
Morse ignored the implicit question. “And there be no foreign objects imbedded in Mr. Reilly’s cervical spine, right?”
The doctor’s face wrinkled into a puzzled frown. “Foreign object? Like . . . ?”
“Like a bullet.”
The doctor paled visibly. “A bullet?”
Morse leaned across the desk. “What I said, a bullet. If one were there, we’d see it, right?”
Krause nodded. “I’d certainly think so. But why . . . ?”
“In your examination of Mr. Reilly, you never saw a scar, anything that would indicate he’d either been shot there or had a bullet removed?”
The doctor shook his head. “No, nothing. But why . . . ?”
Morse stood, hand extended. “You’ve been very helpful, Doc.”
Krause took the extended hand gingerly, as though he thought it might break. “You think Mr. Reilly has been shot in the neck?”
Morse turned to go. “Somebody sure does.”
3
Atlanta: Parking deck of Piedmont Medical Center
Morse handed over a wad of bills and the gate out of the parking lot lifted. It was one of the rare times he didn’t count his change. He was too preoccupied with a wound shown by records but not by physical exam.
He had no trouble with a man making up a military career. Lots of men did that, pretended they had been in combat when they hadn’t gotten any closer to the enemy than the officers’ club. Or claimed military service when they hadn’t worn a uniform since the Boy Scouts. But he’d never seen the service itself fabricate a Purple Heart.
Why would they do that?
He fiddled with the air-conditioning in the unmarked department-issue Ford, grimacing when warm air came out of the vents. He sighed and rolled down the window.
They would do that because Mr. Reilly had never been a SEAL, probably never been in the navy, because someone preferred Mr. Reilly’s past not be subject to scrutiny.
That was the only answer Morse could come up with.
He grimaced again, this time from the thought of the can of worms that thought opened up. If some nameless, faceless bureaucrat had given Reilly a bogus past, his real past would, most likely, come under the huge and ill-defined umbrella known as national security. In a word, Mr. Reilly had been some sort of a spook. Or still was.
And if Mr. Reilly was still in the spook business, he didn’t have to have a reason to kill Halvorson. Or throw the other guy from his balcony, either, for that matter. Somebody in Washington could have decided the doorman was actually an agent for some terrorist cell and ordered him terminated. Or that the alleged burglar was bin Laden’s brother-in-law, for that matter.
Morse slammed on the brakes, almost running a red light.
National security or not, people didn’t get away with murder, not on Morse’s watch. He’d report his suspicion to the federal boys to add to their international alert. Maybe they could pry something out of the cloak-and-dagger crowd, find out who Reilly knew in Rome, where he might be hiding.
Part Three
CHAPTER ONE
1
London
The next day
The ping of the seat belt and “no smoking” lights woke Lang from a deep sleep. He rubbed stinging eyes and leaned across Gurt to peer out the window. A sea of dirty clouds was rising to meet the MD 880. Across the narrow aisle, a young couple of Eastern European origin were unsuccessful in comforting a howling infant. The British Airways flight attendants were scurrying to collect the last plastic drinking cups before trays were ordered back into their upright positions.
He let the seat up and ran a finger across his upper lip, making sure the moustache was still glued into place. Graying hair and thick glasses aged him a bit, Lang hoped. Bits of foam rubber stuffed into cheeks made his face match the jowly photograph of Heinrich Schneller on the German passport in his pocket.
Gurt and Lang had the picture taken at a photographer’s shop a block from the embassy. The glue on it had hardly been dry when she applied a copy of the official stamp to the blank passport.
Facial hair was a new sensation for him. He had always believed it silly to cultivate on an upper lip what grew wild elsewhere.
The ticket clerk at Milan’s Malpensa Airport had given their documents a cursory glance before wishing them a cheerful arrivederci. The only attention from the gray-uniformed Policia with their gloss polished gun belts and boots had been appreciative stares at Gurt.
A blunt-cut dark wig and a slight stoop to minimize her height were the only disguise to which she would agree. There was, after all, no reason to think They had ever seen her face. Still, she was worth the unabashed gaping for which Italian men are notorious.
Herr Schneller and his wife, the much younger-looking Freda, had departed Milan on a flight to the relatively new City Airport in Docklands just outside London. Had anyone checked with the company whose name was on the credit card paying for the tickets, Frau Schneller was accompanying her husband on a trip to price carpet-grade wool in Milan and then London, from where they would proceed to Manchester.
Lang had no idea if the address for Herr Schneller’s employer even existed, but he knew from experience the Hamburg telephone number would be answered by someone speaking credible Hochdeutsch and probably sitting in a room in Virginia. He also knew the passports and drivers’ licenses would pass scrutiny. Anyone attempting to verify the Visa or American Express cards would find valid accounts, although he had had to promise not to use them for anything other than identification. Gurt had called in a number of favors to get the paperwork and plastic. Making charges to the account would overstep whatever agreements she had made.
It was comforting to have the chicanery of professionals on his side.
As the aircraft trembled, Lang cinched himself tighter into the seat, a Pavlovian response to the airlines’ implicit assurances that no problem could not be solved by a fastened seat belt. On a rational level, he knew the plane’s bucking and groaning was due to the deployment of flaps and landing gear, and that the aircraft was the consummate product of American engineering. Still, he could take little comfort from the quality of American-made parts that would litter the countryside should something go wrong.
Lang had become no fonder of flying.
The landing and subsequent taxi to the terminal were uneventful and blood began its normal circulation through Lang’s hands once he relinquished his death grip on the arm rests.
As a
nticipated, there were neither customs nor immigration facilities. Within minutes, Lang and Gurt were handing their bags to a smiling cabby for storage in the boot of his shiny black Austin Motors taxi. Lang gave him the destination, thankful London cab drivers were not only required to speak English but also to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of the city.
It might have been April in Italy, but winter was reluctant to release its hold on England. The sky was the color of the bottom of a cookie sheet, with burned spots for clouds. The cab’s wiper moaned across wet glass as they headed for the West End.
London had not been a favorite of Dawn’s. That had been largely Lang’s fault. He had brought her there for Christmas with visions of a Dickensesque holiday, complete with fresh snow, plum pudding and yule logs. Instead they got fog, darkness at three-thirty in the afternoon, and runny noses from a cold induced by their hotel’s archaic heating system.
Even the Victorian opulence of one of the Savoy’s River Suites, exquisitely furnished and oval shaped, could not compensate for the gloom that met every morning’s glance from the window. Lang and his wife spent an afternoon at the Tower, watched the changing of the guard, and endured overcooked beef at Simpson’s, all the tourist activities he thought she would enjoy.
The weather was a blanket that smothered any enthusiasm she could muster.
The couple had dinner with Lang’s friends from MI6 at their clubs, evenings of drinks and war stories; they spent an afternoon of extravagance at Harrods. Neither lifted Dawn’s mood, as dark as the view from the window.
Lang had been frustrated. London had been one of his favorite cities in the world. He and Dawn had their first and only fight. They went home early, on Boxing Day, notwithstanding Ben Jonson’s observation that he who tires of London has tired of life. According to Dawn, Dr. Jonson obviously enjoyed beastly weather and worse food.
The day they left, the weather was as bad as the day they arrived.
Lang remembered that trip with particular pain, for it had been only a week later that Dawn experienced menstrual cramps that curled her into a fetal position. Another week and she was under the doctors’ death sentence.