The Templar conspiracy t-4

by Paul Christopher

  "Sinclair's son is hard to miss these days with all that crowing he does about the imminent threat of another 9/11 in the Senate, but you don't hear much from his mother," said Holliday.

  "She's retired," said Brennan. "On the surface it would appear that Rex Deus is in ruins, but I'm not so sure."

  "Is she still at that Hickory Hill place or whatever it was called?"

  "Poplar Hill," corrected Brennan. "No," he said, shaking his head. "She's got a private island in the Bahamas, a country place called Edinburgh House in Scotland, a huge spread in Colorado and some sort of estate in Switzerland. She's usually in one place or the other."

  "But why would she want to assassinate the Pope?" Peggy asked. "What does she get out of it?" She shook her head.

  "Forget about motive for the moment," said Holliday thoughtfully. "And forget her delusions of grandeur about her blowhard son. Let's look at some basic facts." He turned to Brennan. "Have the cops in Rome figured out anything?"

  "They've narrowed the search for the sniper's position to somewhere on the Capitoline Hill. It's the closest area that has the elevation for a clear line of sight to St. Peter's."

  "What's the range?" Holliday asked.

  "At least nine hundred meters-a thousand American yards. Possibly more."

  "Then he's a pro, just like I thought," said Holliday emphatically. "Military or private. You can pretty much guarantee he was military at one time or another; it's really the only way to get that kind of training. I'm also willing to bet that he's under forty. Much past that and the eyes and the hands start to go. You don't have the reflexes anymore. Carlos Hathcock did all his best work in his mid-twenties."

  "Who is Carlos Hathcock and what was his work?" Peggy asked.

  "He was a sniper in Vietnam. He killed people," answered Holliday. "I met him once, years later."

  "Nice friends you've got, Doc."

  Holliday ignored the comment. "The longest successful shot in modern times was by a Canadian at a mile and a half, but our guy is probably an American, Russian or a Brit. There's probably no more than twenty or thirty men in the world who could have shot the Pope from that distance and been sure of success. Whoever hired him would have gone for the best. He shouldn't be hard to track down."

  "Then why haven't the Italian cops already found him?" Peggy asked.

  "Because they don't believe such a shot is possible," answered Brennan. "Their ballistics experts tell them a thousand yards, but they think the shots came from much closer. Initially the medical examiner assumed the round had been a line-of-sight shot from straight ahead, so they concentrated their search to the east, assuming that the assassin had fired from some high ground like Castel Sant'Angelo. The bullet disintegrated on impact so the wound was a mess, but the examiner eventually found a concentration of fragments behind the left scapula-the shoulder blade."

  "Which means the shot hit at an angle from right to left. Southwest, not east at all," said Holliday.

  "Which means the range was a thousand yards," sighed Brennan. "The Italians love to complicate things."

  Across the coffee table Holliday could see Brennan's eyes begin to flutter. The priest was fighting jet lag and a six-hour time difference. It seemed he'd collapse where he sat any minute.

  "There's a guest room on the second floor," offered Holliday. "Turn left at the top of the stairs; it's the last door at the back."

  "No, no, I couldn't impose," said Brennan. "I'll just find a little hotel for the night."

  "I insist," said Holliday, thinking about the strangeness of bringing an old enemy into the house. "It's bad luck to kick a priest out of your home on St. Stephen's Day." He smiled. "Besides, a 'little hotel' on M Street will cost you close to five hundred bucks a night."

  "Good Lord," said Brennan. He stifled a yawn and got to his feet. "All right, Colonel, I'll accept your kind offer. No more than a few hours, mind; we're running out of time."

  Holliday was on the telephone in the study when a bleary-eyed Brennan appeared in the doorway at ten thirty the following morning.

  "Sweet Jesus, man, why did you let me sleep so long?" the priest said.

  "Because you would have been useless otherwise," said Holliday. He scribbled something on a yellow pad. From the rear of the town house came the smell of fresh-brewed coffee. A few moments later Peggy appeared with a tray in her hands. Brennan flopped down onto one of the old, worn club chairs.

  "Anything new?" Brennan asked.

  "I've been on the phone since eight," said Holliday. Peggy poured everyone coffee and sat down in one of the other chairs, tucking her legs under her like only women seem able to do. "I'm calling in markers and favors from old friends. We've got some names."

  "Bad guys?" Peggy asked.

  "The worst," said Holliday, glancing down at the pad in front of him. "It's like a top-ten list. Four of them stand out because they specialize in very-long-range targets." He paused. "Dimitri Mikhailovich Travkin, GRU Spetsnaz in Afghanistan and Chechnya. He'd be in his early forties, but no one has seen him in years. There's a rumor that he retired when he first showed the early symptoms of Parkinson's disease, which would rule him out. The second name is a Frenchman, Gabir Francois Bertrand, part Algerian, worked with the French Parachute Regiment, which is the equivalent of our Delta Force. Bertrand was involved in some sort of sex scandal involving a superior officer's wife and they turfed him. He's supposedly living in Switzerland and taking contract work, mostly mercenary jobs in Africa."

  "The third name?" Brennan asked, gratefully sipping his coffee and looking a little more alert.

  "Edward Adler Fox, the top sniper in the British SAS. He was cashiered for insubordination, refusing to leave the front lines in Afghanistan. He wanted to stay with his men. Lives in a remote corner of England like some sort of hermit. Word is he's a little wacky in the head. No indication that he's active in any way."

  "And the last?" Peggy asked.

  "The only American. William Tritt. A good old boy from West Virginia. Shot squirrels as a kid because that's all they had to eat. Wound up in the SEALs and got an education-chemical engineering, and then a second degree in mechanical engineering. Apparently a whiz with any kind of machinery. He's also a dead shot. He won the Wimbledon Cup at Camp Perry three years running."

  "Where is he now?" Brennan asked, helping himself to more coffee.

  "He's a 'consultant' to both the CIA and the National Counterterrorism Center. They find the terrorists; Tritt gets rid of them. They learned their lesson at Guantanamo; it's more cost-effective to kill terrorists than it is to capture them."

  "You're saying that one of these men is responsible for killing the Holy Father?" Brennan asked.

  "I'd bet on it," replied Holliday. "My sources are pretty sure of it, too."

  "Then why aren't they looking for them?" Brennan asked.

  "Maybe they are but no one seems to want to talk beyond the hypothetical. Something's scaring them off."

  "What could scare such people off?" Brennan said. "You'd think finding the killer of the Pope would be a coup for everyone."

  Peggy spoke up. "If nothing else, it's the politics of necessity," she said. "The Pope has been murdered. We in this room know there are four possible assassins-a Russian, a Frenchman, a Brit and an American. The last thing the governments of any of those countries want is to be associated with the assassin. The diplomatic damage would be enormous. Even the Italians are probably shying away from it. An Italian assassin killing the Pope? Absolute heresy. It would bring down the government." She took a sip of her coffee.

  Brennan lit a cigarette, his first of the day, and gave a great, racking cough. "You mean no one is looking for this madman?" he asked finally.

  "No more than they ever looked very hard for Kennedy's killer," agreed Holliday. "They had a convenient patsy in Oswald, who was just as conveniently murdered less than forty-eight hours later. Case closed and a potentially lethal diplomatic incident between the U.S. and the Russians was averted."
r />   "So any investigation is nothing more than a dog and pony show?" Brennan asked.

  "Until they find out who did the 'wet work' and who hired him," said Holliday. "You seem to think Kate Sinclair is involved. Among other things Kate Sinclair's father was a war hero who hit the beaches at Normandy, a senator himself and a deputy director of Central Intelligence during the Eisenhower years. He finished up his career as an ambassador. You're screwing around with the daughter of a true-blue American hero. Neither the present administration nor the CIA would like that particular piece of dirty laundry to be revealed, I can assure you. It's much tidier to simply say this is the work of jihad extremists and go with that."

  "So what do we do?" Brennan asked. "It's David and Goliath."

  "We gather irrefutable evidence," said Holliday.

  "And how, pray, are we to do that?" Brennan said.

  Holliday smiled. "We go to McDonald's for a Big Mac and fries and we ask the right questions."

  The McDonald's in question was on a barren triangle of asphalt at the intersection of Old Dominion Drive and the Dolly Madison Parkway. Unlike the J. Gilbert's Wood-Fired Steaks and Seafood next door, McDonald's was unlicensed, which ruled out martini lunches, and it also had the advantage of three or four picnic tables for alfresco dining in the emission fog of the highways bordering the restaurant on all three sides of the triangle it occupied.

  From an intelligence officer's perspective, it was the perfect place to avoid surveillance-except for the chilly weather, which didn't seem to bother Holliday's companion at all. Unless you were in the parking lot you couldn't be seen from the street, and the constant drone of passing traffic only a few feet away beyond the sickly screen of trees would befuddle even the most sensitive parabolic microphones. The fast-food joint was almost exactly a mile away from the National Counterterrorism Center main entrance at the Dolly Madison Parkway and the Lewisville Road.

  "I've only got about half an hour," said Pat Philpot. Philpot was a senior domestic analyst at NCTC, which meant he tracked smaller fish that had slipped through the nets and traps set up by Homeland Security, covered the Mexican and Canadian borders, and kept his eyes and electronic ears out for a few potential Timothy McVeighs lurking in the backwoods of the continental United States.

  He opened up the first of two Quarter Pounders with Cheese and began to eat, alternating bites of the dripping burgers with slurps from his large strawberry shake. Pat was a walking commercial for a heart attack, and it was hard to remember that the man across the picnic table from him had once commanded a first-strike combat team for the Rangers.

  "So, what do you know about the Pope?" Holliday asked. He sipped his coffee and waited for Philpot to swallow an enormous wad of cheeseburger.

  "He wears a funny hat and he speaks Latin," the big man answered.

  "I don't need your bad jokes, Potsy. You wanted to talk to me here, not at the center, so that means you know something. Spill."

  "I'm not even supposed to talk to you, let alone divulge state secrets. You haven't had clearance for years."

  "How's Loretta?" Holliday asked, smiling. Loretta was Philpot's wife. A jealous wife. Like a lot of women Holliday knew, she didn't much care for her husband's old friends, especially those who knew him when.

  "What does she have to do with this?"

  "It's like John Lennon said-everyone's got something to hide."

  "This is about that thing in Panama, isn't it?" Philpot asked darkly.

  "I'm just saying…"

  "You're blackmailing me?"

  "Reminding you what friends are for," answered Holliday blandly.

  There was a long silence punctuated by Philpot dragging on his shake. "We put traces on them all. The only one we couldn't finger was Tritt," he said finally.

  "You're positive?"

  "The others all alibied out. Travkin is in Mariinsky Hospital in St. Petersburg with lung cancer and has been for the last three months; Edward Fox, the Brit, is doing something nasty in the Sudan at the moment; and Bertrand, the Frenchman, is in Fresnes Prison."

  "What's the last sighting of Tritt?"

  "Geneva passport control. There's no record of him having left Switzerland but that doesn't mean much." He finished off the first cheeseburger, wiped his mouth and his tie with a napkin, and started on the second burger. His body language told Holiday the man was suffering from a bad case of nerves.

  "You worried about something, Potsy?"

  "I don't like being used," said the heavyset man. He shook his head. "This is worse than it looks, Doc. Stay out of it."

  "That's it?"

  "Talking to you is what worries me. You've gotta understand, Doc-I work for the organization that invented the word 'paranoia.'" He looked around the parking lot furtively. "Other places, they give random drug tests. At NCTC they put you under random surveillance and give you pee tests. It's a brutal environment to work in."

  Something suddenly occurred to Holliday and he asked the relevant question. "Where was Tritt flying into Geneva from?"

  "Rome," said Philpot. "November sixth. We're assuming he was doing research for the shot."

  "Before Rome?"

  "Glasgow International, Scotland."

  "Before that?"

  "Orlando on Virgin Atlantic."

  "Before that?"

  "Nassau, Bahamas. He has a little place there, a house on Lyford Cay. All under his own name."

  "You don't find that a strange itinerary?"

  "We get everything except Glasgow," said Philpot. "What the hell does a man like Tritt find to do in a place like that for three days?"

  "Checks in with his employer," replied Holliday.

  "You actually know who hired him to make the hit? Want to share? I've been doing all the talking so far."

  "How about Katherine Pierce Sinclair?" Holliday said. "She owns a country estate called Edinburgh House within driving distance of Glasgow and a place in the Bahamas, as well."

  "So does Sean Connery. So what?" Philpot asked. "I would have thought you'd have had enough of Sinclair since your run-in over the summer." Philpot shook his head. "You should have seen them dancing around, trying to clean up that mess. We called in the Israeli ambassador, who's from Queens, by the way, and tough as nails, but he just stonewalled us." Philpot took a last bite from the second burger and sucked on the straw in his milkshake.

  "I'm going to need a few files," said Holliday as Philpot drained the last of the bright pink concoction. There was so much exhaust from passing cars and trucks that Holliday was getting a headache. "Quickly."

  "Don't push it, Doc. I am absolutely, positively not giving you official files and that's final."

  "Tritt, Kate Sinclair and whatever you've got on the senator."

  "You're crazy. They could lock me away forever in one of those secret jails they've got in Colorado. You're talking treason."

  "You owe me, Potsy."

  Philpot picked up his garbage, lumbered over to the refuse bin and dumped the paper and plastic into it. He turned and walked back to the picnic table.

  "You ever been to Rock Creek Park?"

  "Sure."

  "You know where Ross Drive is?"

  "I can find it."

  "Half a mile in off the Ridge Road there's a dry culvert and a bridge. Three steel pipes and concrete abutments. On the west abutment some kid has sprayed his tag with black paint. If it's safe there'll be a bright red strip sprayed under the tag. What you need will be rolled up in the middle pipe closest to the spray-painted abutment."

  "You're a peach, Potsy."

  "You know where you can put your peach, Holliday. Consider my debt repaid." He turned on his heel and went back into the McDonald's. A minute or so later he reappeared, biting savagely into an apple turnover.

  "One more thing," said Potsy, his mouth full.

  "Shoot."

  "Bad choice of words," said the pudgy intelligence officer.

  "Sorry."

  "Our people found the kill site in Rome."


  "Before the Italian cops?"

  "Uh-huh," said Potsy. "It wasn't all that hard."

  "And?"

  "We found something," said Potsy. He finished off the turnover and brushed the crumbs from his hands.

  "Don't be coy."

  "It was a solid gold coin from the time of the Crusades. A dinar, I think it's called. It had Saladin's name on it in Arabic."

  "And?"

  "NSA has been hearing from all sorts of Al-Qaeda cell phone and e-mail chatter about a group calling itself Jihad al-Salibiyya. They've secretly been taking responsibility for whacking the man in the big hat."

  "And you've been keeping it quiet?"

  "We don't want to start up another shit storm like bin Laden and his pals. At least until we know more about them." He looked at Holliday carefully. "The name ring a bell?"

  "No," lied Holliday. "Not even a faint one."

  "Well, that's it, then," said Potsy. "Rock Creek Park."

  "I'll be there."

  Potsy got back into his car and drove off.

  Half an hour later, Holliday was back at the house on Prospect Street, the faint chemical scent of the hamburgers clinging to him like a fog. Brennan and Peggy were in the kitchen, drinking more coffee and reading the Washington Post.

  The picture above the fold on the front page was probably the last photograph of the living Pope taken by Dario Bondi, the official Vatican photographer and Peggy's friend. Brennan and Peggy both put down their sections of the newspaper as Holliday appeared in the kitchen doorway.

  "So, how did that go?" Peggy asked. "Pick up any juicy rumors?"

  "It was a setup," answered Holliday. "We're being played like a violin."

  "Why do you say that?" Brennan asked.

  "A group calling itself Jihad al-Salibiyya is taking responsibility for the Pope's assassination."

  "Fundamentalists?"

  "Yeah, but not the Muslim kind. Al-Salibiyya was the name for the Templar Knights who defected to the infidel side. The sworn enemies of the true Templars. It literally means 'Enemies of the Cross.'"

  "Crusaders," said Peggy.

  "Kate Sinclair," said Brennan.