The Templar conspiracy t-4

by Paul Christopher

  "A lot of that gobbledygook, as you call it, still hasn't been logically answered," Holliday said.

  "So he wasn't shot by Aknikh?" Peggy asked.

  "He couldn't have been," answered Holliday. "He was definitely shot from above and from the left."

  "The balcony," said Jefferson.

  "What balcony?"

  "There's a balcony in the town hall. It's used for storage now."

  "Then he wasn't the shooter," Peggy said. "The whole thing was a setup."

  "It looks that way." Holliday nodded. He turned to Jefferson. "Who else has seen these photographs?"

  "A guy from the FBI came around and said he had a warrant to impound them all as material evidence. He asked me if I had copies but I said no."

  "You lied?" Peggy asked.

  "They're my pictures, aren't they?" Jefferson huffed.

  "They may be your death warrant," said Holliday. "If I were you I'd hop in that new Porsche of yours and get the hell out of town."

  "Why? I haven't done anything wrong. I have my rights."

  "Maybe they'll put that on your tombstone," said Holliday. "The fact is, people in high places are laying in a cover-up and you and your pictures are a loose end. These people snip off loose ends without even thinking about it."

  "Take his advice," said Peggy. "Pack your bags and run like hell."

  "Kate Sinclair had a script all along," said Holliday as they drove away. "First the Pope, which gets the vice president to travel to Rome, then the VP gets killed and then her son plays the wounded martyr."

  "And now he's the VP," said Peggy.

  "I've met Kate Sinclair," said Holliday, his tone grim. "She'd never go to all this trouble to wind up settling for second-best. The script doesn't have an ending… yet."

  They were less than a mile out of town when they were pulled over by a red-and-gold West Virginia State Police cruiser. Holliday waited for the inevitable; he had only his own identification and no papers for the old pickup truck. When they ran his name through the computers, all hell was going to break loose.

  As the trooper approached, bundled up in his uniform parka, Holliday rolled down his window. The trooper bent down and looked inside the car. The man had a hard, lean face, his eyes hidden behind aviator-style mirrored sunglasses.

  "Afternoon," said the trooper. Out of the corner of his good eye Holliday saw the cop's partner approaching Peggy's side. A woman. The female trooper rapped on Peggy's window with the knuckle of her index finger. Peggy rolled down the window.

  "What's the problem?" Holliday asked.

  "No problem, Colonel Holliday." He lifted up his hand and shot Holliday in the chest with an X3 Taser. In the passenger's seat Peggy was already going into convulsions. Within twenty seconds they were both unconscious.

  PART THREE

  INTERMEZZO

  26

  He knew very little. Wherever he was, it was windowless, utterly dark and concrete. He knew it was concrete because he could feel its surface under his hands. By his count it was twenty paces long and twelve paces wide. With his arms outstretched he couldn't touch the ceiling, which meant it was taller than eight feet. In the center of the unreachable ceiling was a blower vent that cycled off and on regularly. The air was cool, maybe a little less than seventy degrees. Chilly but bearable. There was a single door, a slab of metal with a felt strip glued to the foot to blot out any ambient light, with hinges on the outside. There was a metal, lidless, tankless toilet and a sink built into the end wall. He was in a large, purpose-built holding cell.

  He knew a few other things. There was a vague but clear scent of aviation fuel blown in through the vent system, which meant his jail bunker was part of or very close to an airport facility of some kind. They'd taken his clothes and he seemed to be dressed in some oversized boiler suit and rubber thongs. Prison garb. By his own estimation he'd been under for close to forty-eight hours, but it could have been longer. He had no recollection of anything after the powerful jolt of electricity he'd received.

  He didn't actually know but he was pretty sure what happened after that. The diplomatic term the State Department used these days was "extraordinary rendition" and it had been around since Reagan's day. The simple term was "kidnapping." Take a subject off his home turf and do whatever you wanted to him in places just like this: black sites. Another euphemism, for "torture chamber."

  He knew he could be almost anywhere. The CIA and the Joint Chiefs maintained black sites in almost every country in Europe and in a dozen or more sympathetic countries around the world. They used everything from Gulfstream Vs to Lears and even a couple of Boeing "Biz" Jets wearing phony tail numbers and registrations.

  The whole system had a whiff of Nazism to it and from the first time he'd encountered it back in Afghanistan it had offended Holliday's sense of military honor. You fought wars out in the open, not by skulking under rotting logs and damp stones. The CIA for its part was supposed to gather intelligence, not act like a modern-day version of the Spanish Inquisition.

  Suddenly a wire-covered fluorescent fixture in the ceiling flickered to life, buzzing and clicking for a few seconds before giving out a steady light. Holliday blinked and covered his eyes in the sudden glare. A moment after the light came on the metal door opened and three men appeared dressed in generic BDUs that didn't look like any American camouflage pattern he'd ever seen. The caps were a little odd, too-the bills were quilted and they had fold-up earflaps. The design was clearly Eastern European-Russian, Czech or Bulgarian. He was somewhere behind what used to be called the Iron Curtain.

  The first two men were carrying a small metal table. The third man carried a pair of metal straight chairs. They set them down in the center of the room directly under the light fixture.

  "Holloa." Nothing. Not Bulgarian.

  "Csak keveset beszelek magyaru." No response. Not Hungarian.

  "WyliA? mi dupe, matkojebca." Definitely not Polish.

  "Dobra Den. Do prdele." A slightly turned head and a small look of surprise on one of the men carrying the table.

  Gotcha, thought Holliday. They were Czech. The last time he'd been in the Czech Republic had been more than a year ago with the Sinclair girl on a wild-goose chase that had almost killed him.

  The three men left the room. They also left the door open. Holliday didn't move from his position on the floor. A reed-thin figure, cigarette in hand, appeared in the doorway.

  "Mrs. Sinclair," said Holliday as Kate Sinclair walked into the dungeonlike room. The tip of her cigarette glowed. She was wearing a very expensive Chanel pin-striped power suit.

  "So nice to be remembered." The elderly woman smiled.

  "You must be very pleased," said Holliday. "A heartbeat away from the White House. Too bad he didn't earn the position on merit."

  "We're not here to talk about my son, Colonel. We're here to talk about you and something that rightfully belongs in our family."

  "How did you find us so quickly?" Holliday asked, avoiding the subject of Brother Rodrigues's notebook.

  "We've had you watched for weeks." She paused, blew smoke and inhaled again. "Now, let us get down to business."

  "This is the second time I've been kidnapped by your little group," said Holliday, stalling. The Sinclair matriarch sighed.

  "I'd hardly call it a 'little' group," she answered. "The membership of Rex Deus is considerably larger than you might think. We have a great many members in high places."

  "People who can make other people disappear? People who can fake assassination attempts?"

  "You mean my son?" Sinclair shook her head. "That was easy in comparison to killing the Pope."

  "If you were setting me up as some kind of patsy, why make me vanish now?" Holliday asked. "I should be brought down in a hail of bullets somewhere, with the media invited to the finale."

  "All in good time, Colonel. We all have our parts to play in our little production." She dropped the short end of her cigarette onto the concrete floor and ground it under her
heel. "The notebook," she said. "The Templar notebook. My notebook."

  "It's not yours, and you know I'm not going to tell you anything about it."

  "Of course you will," said the old woman. "Eventually. We have leverage, you see. Your cousin."

  "What have you done with Peggy?"

  "Don't worry, Colonel. She's as much a part of the story as you are. You'll be reunited later, I assure you."

  "Your assurances don't impress me much, Mrs. Sinclair. You and Matoon and the rest of your crazy friends are all traitors."

  "Patriots," answered Sinclair.

  "Crap," snorted Holliday.

  "We're taking this country back, Colonel Holliday."

  "Back from who, exactly?"

  "Back from the mongrel hordes that have been bringing our nation to its knees without us even knowing about it, much less caring. It's bread and circuses. People are watching reality shows about stupid women having eight or ten children at a time, parents are putting their children in balloons for publicity and meanwhile the country's going to hell. They watch pansy movies about trees that are alive or trees that can walk and talk. Half the country is Mexican, Jew or Arab. Our borders are leaking blood in one direction and drugs and illegal immigrants in the other, our money's been devalued and our foreign policy is all about appeasement. No one even speaks English anymore!"

  Holliday saw something in her eyes then and he suddenly knew there was no point in trying to have a rational discussion or argument with this woman. Whether borne out of too much power or from something carried in the blood, Kate Sinclair was utterly and irrevocably mad, as mad as any fundamentalist Muslim putting out a fatwa on a cartoon show, as paranoid as Richard Nixon had been at his worst moments, as crazy as a loon.

  "You're insane," he said quietly. "And you're an accessory to murder. You're no better than Charlie Manson."

  "I am the avatar of destiny," said the Sinclair woman ponderously. "And history will absolve me."

  Fidel Castro's final remark in his own defense at his first trial, and a sentiment expressed by Hitler, Stalin and Rasputin. Good company. All dictators, all with God complexes and all utterly insane.

  "So what's the plan?" Holliday sighed.

  "I intend to recover my birthright from you. To that end we are moving you to Pankrac Prison immediately." Sinclair smiled blandly and lit another cigarette. "You've heard of it?"

  "A nineteenth-century hellhole on the outskirts of Prague," said Holliday. "The Nazis used it and later on it was a KGB interrogation center."

  "It's now owned by Blackhawk Security."

  "You, in other words," said Holliday. He smiled wanly. "Presumably I can expect a little in the way of advanced interrogation techniques-a little waterboarding, maybe?"

  "Certainly." Sinclair smiled. "But you won't be the recipient. Miss Blackstock will." She called out a single harsh command in Czech. Three guards suddenly appeared, two carrying automatic rifles, one carrying shackles and chains.

  "Your chariot has arrived, Colonel," said Kate Sinclair. "Time to load you onto the bus."

  The windowless old prison bus took the road from the old Pr?ibram airport at Dlouha Lhota north through the old forests of the foothill country in central Bohemia. The bus was like something out of an old chain-gang movie: driver and guard segregated from the prisoners by a chain-link grating with apertures just big enough to poke the barrel of a shotgun through.

  The prisoner entrance was through a heavily secured door in the rear of the bus with its own little caged enclosure for a second guard, who was also armed with a short-barreled riot gun and controlled the master lock that opened the threaded shackles and chains that secured the prisoners.

  The prisoners themselves occupied long benches that were bolted to the floor on either side of the bus. The benches in turn were divided into narrow cubicles by sheets of gray steel etched with the handcuffed graffiti of a thousand previous occupants. It was, in effect, a jail on wheels, walls made of armor plate, the windshield made of bulletproof double-thickness glass and the heavy tires puncture proof.

  Tonight there were seven people from the black-site bunker on the bus: Peggy, Holliday and five rumpled-looking young men with black cotton bags tied securely over their heads, babbling blindly together in Farsi, their voices strained with panic.

  Holliday was shackled directly across from Peggy on the bus in the forward section.

  "Are you sure about this Pankrac place?" Peggy asked.

  "There's no reason for Sinclair to have lied."

  "But what's the point?" Peggy asked. "Why doesn't she just get rid of us?"

  Holliday shrugged. "She will, as soon as she gets the information she wants."

  Peggy shuffled her feet, pulling slightly on the shiny steel shackles threaded through eyebolts along the length of the bus. Her movements pulled on the chain around one of the hooded men's ankles and his head jerked in her direction.

  "Ann ru sar et, kiram tu kunet cos eh lash jende!"

  "Torke char, arabe kassif!" Peggy yelled down the bus. The man who'd cursed at her turned his hooded head around and the other four laughed at her quick and unexpected comeback to the man's insult.

  They could hear the ringing of a railway-crossing bell and the bus slowed to a stop. After several long minutes the guard and the driver began talking. Holliday leaned forward on the hard metal seat and peeked around the edge of the metal divider. He could vaguely make out the flashing red lights of the railroad crossing and the lowered red-and-white-striped barriers.

  "What's up?" Peggy asked from the other side of the bus.

  "Some glitch at a railway crossing," answered Holliday. "The lights are flashing and the barriers are down but there's no train."

  "What are they arguing about?" Peggy asked.

  "Whose responsibility getting off the bus and checking it out is, at least as far as I can tell," replied Holliday.

  "Who's winning?" Peggy laughed,

  "The driver, I think," said Holliday.

  Sighing melodramatically the guard got up from his seat and the driver pushed a button on his control panel. The hydraulic double doors hissed open and the guard went down the three steps to the outside.

  The high, explosive round came through the open door, vaporized the guard and kept going until it detonated against the far side of the driver's compartment, sending a long spray of blood, debris and yellowish bony shrapnel the length of the bus.

  "Oh, crap," whispered Peggy, ducking back into her narrow little cubicle.

  Holliday knew what she meant. Someone was trying to break the hooded men-probably Afghani Talibans or Al-Qaeda-out of custody, and to their rescuers he and Peggy would be useless baggage, and infidel baggage at that. Holliday pulled hard at the chains of his shackles but nothing budged. A second explosion rocked the bus on its heavy wheels. Holliday risked a peek. Someone had blasted open the rear prisoners' doors. The rear guard, protected in his cage, poked the barrel of his riot gun out through the grate and fired blindly. There was a brief moment of silence and then Holliday heard the familiar rasp and ping of a hand grenade pin being pulled. There was a faint knocking sound and then a flat, crumpling explosion. The chains shackling him to the floor went slack.

  There was a final, smaller explosion from the front of the bus and then absolute silence. In a single, surrealistic moment Holliday could actually hear the sound of crickets outside in the forest. He stayed well back in his little metal enclosure and silently motioned Peggy to do the same thing.

  The strange silence went on for a long minute, and then there was a harsh whispering voice: "Yellah! Yellah!" Someone speaking Arabic.

  The hooded prisoners began to chatter, some of them laughing, and Holliday felt a slackness in the chains threaded through the I-bolt at his feet. There was more chatter and then silence. Only a few seconds passed and then there was the stuttering hammer of an automatic weapon.

  "What's happening?" Peggy whispered.

  "I don't think our Farsi friends got the re
ception they were hoping for," said Holliday.

  There was another period of silence and then the sound of booted footsteps coming in their direction. Three men appeared, all carrying folding stock Czech Skorpion submachine guns and all dressed identically in black, wearing Kevlar body armor and black balaclavas covering their faces. One of them appeared to be a woman.

  One of the men stopped in front of Holliday's little enclosure. He slung his light machine gun over his shoulder, then took a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters off his belt, silently snipped the shackles at Holliday's feet and threaded the chain through his handcuffs. He took the bolt cutters and slid them back onto his belt, then reached into the side pocket of his combat trousers and took out a small key. He unlocked the handcuffs and took a step back.

  "You're free, Colonel Holliday."

  Holliday looked at him strangely. There was something in the rasping voice that seemed familiar.

  "Don't recognize me, Colonel?"

  The man reached up and pulled off the knitted balaclava that covered his head. He smiled down at his old adversary and quoted from the New Testament: "And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And Lazarus walked."

  The man standing over him laughed, the scar on his throat as thick as a curled red worm. "I was in bandages for months."

  It was Antonin Pesek, the Czech assassin he'd shot and killed in Venice more than a year before.

  27

  The Penzion Akat was a tobacco-colored, stucco-fronted hotel that overlooked the railway tracks and the streetcar terminal at the Smichov metro station in western Prague. The building was without any architectural distinction whatsoever-one step above a flophouse where a noisy night's sleep could be had for a few crowns, and where the cracked china rattled on the tables in the cafeteria-like dining room every time a streetcar rumbled by. It was totally anonymous, a place for traveling salesmen and tourists without much money.