Templar Conspiracy

by Paul Christopher

  “Put it this way: he’s not the kind who simply fades away.” She listened to the men arguing on the other side of the door. “I’d get as low as possible,” suggested Peggy. “There’s going to be bullets flying any minute now.”

  The priest lowered himself toward the floor.

  It wasn’t minutes; it was seconds. There was the sound of breaking glass and then a heavy thud. Two voices began screaming in Italian. More glass broke and then there was silence. Peggy could hear the men whispering. “Get over here,” she hissed at Brennan. The priest crawled across the room on elbows and knees. “What are they saying?” Peggy demanded.

  “One of them was shot and killed. The other two are figuring out what to do.”

  “Which is?”

  The priest listened and then translated. “‘Vittorio, go to the window and see where he is.’ ‘Feck you, Mario,’ or words to that effect. ‘Go see for yourself.’ ” Brennan paused. There was more panicky conversation.

  “Now what?”

  “Vittorio wants to kill us and try to get away. Mario is telling him he’s an idiot.” There was a pause. “Mario wants to use us as human shields.”

  “I don’t much like the sound of that,” said Peggy.

  “There’s not much we can do about it,” said Brennan.

  “We’ll see about that. Give me your shoes.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Your shoes damn it! Hurry!”

  Brennan untied his shoes and slipped them off. They were heavy black brogues that would have suited a cop. Peggy picked one up and threw it at the little window in the back wall. The old glass smashed loudly and the shoe disappeared into the night. Peggy yelled at the top of her lungs.

  “Doc! There’s two of them! We’re in a room at the back!”

  Both Peggy and Brennan clearly heard the raised voices outside the door.

  “Mario! Chiuso loro in su!” Shut them up.

  “Figlio di Puttana!”

  There was the sound of pounding feet.

  “He’s coming in!”

  Which was just what Peggy wanted. As the door opened she launched herself forward at a dead run, hurling herself at the doorway like a charging bull, head-butting the man named Vittorio in the groin and sending him flying backward to collide with Mario, who was standing in the middle of a small living-dining area.

  They went down in a tumbled heap of arms and legs, and Mario’s weapon went flying across the hardwood floor. Mario managed to throw off Peggy and crab walk his way across the floor toward the weapon while Peggy turned her attention toward Vittorio, who was screaming and holding his ankle, which was now twisted at a grotesque angle.

  Peggy went for Vittorio’s eyes, hooking her index fingers into his ears and her thumbs into the eye sockets just like Doc had taught her. She pressed hard and the razor-thin edges of her nails punctured both eyeballs, covering Peggy’s hands in a rush of warm fluid and changing Vittorio’s scream into a screech of terrified agony as he suddenly went blind.

  Out of the corner of her eye Peggy saw Mario reach his pistol and turn it toward her. Off to her left the front door opened and Mario swung the weapon toward the new threat. Holding the pistol two-handed he pulled the trigger, but it was too late. Holliday came into the room in a low roll, stitching an entire clip of fifteen 10mm bullets in Mario’s direction. Mario’s shots had gone high. Holliday’s were low, almost cutting the kneeling man in half. Peggy head-butting Mario to the gruesome blinding of Vittorio and Mario’s execution had taken no more than thirty seconds. The room was full of the hot-sharp smell of gunfire and Vittorio’s screaming. Peggy clambered to her feet.

  “Honey, I’m home!” Holliday grinned from the doorway.

  Peggy stumbled toward him. “That’s the worst Ricky Ricardo I’ve ever heard.” She threw herself into his arms, then burst into sobs.

  Brennan came out of the back room, frowning. “Now, which one of you is going to fetch me my other shoe?”

  16

  Lieutenant John Charles Fremont sat at the communications center in the basement of the Pentagon, scrolling through that day’s orders from the Joint Chiefs. The particular bunker he and a dozen other men and women occupied was officially known as a Crisis Control Operations Center, and on this particular midnight-to-eight shift he was the designated communications watch officer. In other words, in Pentagon-speak he was the DC-CWO of the JCS CCOC. Unofficially, he was King Rat of the Big Cheese Rat Hole. Sergeant Knox Bellingham, the man seated beside him, was a senior console operator, more simply known as a Big Rat.

  “You been noticing a lot of traffic for something called Prairie Fire?” Lieutenant Fremont said.

  “Yes, sir,” said Bellingham. “I’ve got personnel tickets for a whole bunch of people en route to Colorado Springs, Houston, and Sunnyvale, California.”

  “You notice anything weird, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, sir,” answered Bellingham, squinting at the screen in front of him. “They’re all O-one to O-six. And they’re all SOCOM.”

  Fremont sat back in his chair and looked at the screen pulsing in front of him. All of them on duty were officers, from lieutenant to lieutenant colonel, and all were part of the Special Operations Command. Colorado Springs was NORAD and the Consolidated Space Operations Center, Houston was NASA and Sunnyvale was the Air Force Satellite Test Center. Put them together and you had the complete command-and-control capabilities for every military communications satellite in the sky.

  “What’s the transit coding on the orders?” Fremont asked.

  “USTRANSCOM.” Bellingham responded, checking the file on his screen. That made sense, sort of. USTRANSCOM stood for United States Transport Command.

  “Subcoding?”

  “DCS/AMC.”

  That made sense, too—Defense Courier Service, Airborne Military Command, the people who transferred sensitive material from one place to the other.

  “What about the unit budget line?” Every individual unit within a larger command had its own designation for defense budgeting purposes. It was where the buck stopped, literally.

  “STRATCOMCON.”

  “Never heard of it,” Fremont said, frowning. In Pentagon-speak STRATCOMCON probably stood for Strategic Communications Control, and Prairie Fire was probably some kind of operation it was running. Given the number of officers being shifted around, it was going to wind up costing the taxpayers a load of dollars. He made a query note about it in the computer log and then forgot all about it. The weekend was coming up and he was going hiking with his girlfriend in Cunningham Falls State Park in the Catoctin Mountains. One more night of being cooped up in the bunker and he’d be out in the fresh air. He couldn’t wait.

  “So, what do we do now?” Brennan asked from the backseat of the big VW luxury car. They were heading south just beyond Les Contamines, ninety minutes away from the Geneva airport.

  “I’m phoning Pat Philpot in D.C., and you’re calling your people at the Vatican and any bigwig antiterrorist cops you know in Rome,” said Holliday from behind the wheel. “We’ve got to get to the cops with what we know about Tritt and our so-called Jihadist friends. The funeral is the day after tomorrow.”

  “They took our cell phones,” said Peggy.

  “Mine, too,” said Holliday. “They’ve got satellite phones at the airport. We’ll call from there.”

  “You have an address book?” asked Brennan. Peggy turned in her seat; the priest had that feral, Gollum-like tone in his voice again.

  “I keep some numbers in my head. I know Pat’s by heart,” Holliday answered.

  “By the time we get to the airport it’ll be past midnight in the States,” said Peggy, checking her watch. It was almost five a.m., Geneva time.

  “So I’ll get his big, fat ass out of bed,” replied Holliday.

  When the satellite phone pinged, General Angus Scott Matoon was over the mid-Atlantic aboard one of the army’s blandly designated C-37 transports, which was a drab military euphemism for a leather
-chaired and whisper-quiet Gulfstream G650. The Pentagon, for whatever reason, had 120 of the forty-seven-million-dollar aircraft.

  He unlimbered the receiver from its mount on the bulkhead. “Yes?”

  “Neville, sir.”

  His adjutant—a bloodless, lickspittle, brownnoser forced on him by Kate Sinclair, more a spy for her than an assistant to him. As Matoon had long ago discovered, Sinclair had little moles like Neville everywhere, even in the White House, although no one was absolutely sure who that was. Sinclair was a firm believer in the adage that good intelligence was the basis of a good offense.

  “What is it?” Matoon asked brusquely. The ice was melting in his glass of Bourbon on the table in front of him. The interior of the aircraft was dark except for the pool of light over his comfortable leather swivel chair and the glow of the computer screen in its niche across the aisle.

  “We have a situation, General.”

  The satellite phone on a jet used by a member of the Joint Chiefs was probably as secure as you could get, but there was always the possibility that the NSA simply monitored and recorded all government and military calls as a matter of protocol. It was perhaps far-fetched, but not impossible, and Matoon hadn’t gotten to his present position by being sloppy. Discretion, especially with the home office, was the rule.

  “What kind of situation?”

  “A prairie fire, sir.”

  “A bad one?”

  “It’s spreading slightly.”

  Which meant that somebody within the Pentagon had made a nominal query about either Prairie Fire or its big brother, STRATCOMCON. Nominal or not, any leakage at this point could be disastrous.

  “Is it likely to get worse?” Matoon asked.

  “It’s possible.”

  “Can you put it out?”

  “Yes, of course, General. There might be collateral damage, however. Should I put the fire out completely?”

  Which meant that there was a civilian involved. “Would extinguishing it completely be difficult or hazardous?” Matoon asked.

  “Not at all, General.”

  “Then do it,” said Matoon. He hung up the phone and picked up his drink. He took a sip, cracking an ice cube with his teeth. Another sacrificial lamb for Kate Sinclair’s cause.

  “Shit,” said the general. The jet flew on through the night.

  17

  Early on the morning of the sixth day following the assassination of the Pope, dignitaries of varying status began arriving at Pratica di Mare Air Force Base, lining up in their positions on the overlong single runway like so many preening pheasants. By dawn there were two dozen heads of state and their aircraft on the tarmac, from France’s Airbus A330 to Moldova’s Yakovlev Yak-40. At precisely seven thirty in the morning United States Air Force One, carrying the president, the secretary of state and half a dozen guests in its distinctive blue-and-white livery, came lumbering down the runway and pulled to a stop. Two big C5 transports had arrived the night before, carrying two presidential limousines and four Cadillac Escalades, all black, all armored and all twice the weight of their civilian counterparts. Other than the Americans only the Russians and the Chinese brought along their own ground transportation; everyone else relied on local embassy vehicles.

  There was no movement on the runway, and the only sound was the steady whining of engine start generators. This was a visit of obligation, and as little time as possible would be spent on the niceties of state. The motorcades would move out in protocol order, and within an hour of the conclusion of the funeral almost everyone would be on their way back to the military airfield. By midafternoon all the aircraft would have departed for home.

  Peggy, armed with her brand-new Nikon and a long lens, stood with Brennan and Holliday on the domed roof of the PalaLottomatica, the sports complex that stood on the little garden island between the two enclosing arms of the Via Cristoforo Colombo. In their estimation, the PalaLottomatica roof was the most likely place for the assassin to strike from, but when the Vigilanza and the local Rome police had checked, there was no sign of the man, past or present.

  On the off chance that Brennan and his friends were right, the Italian police, in cooperation with the Vatican authorities, had established their own lookout point on the roof. After being woken out of a dead sleep Pat Philpot had cleared the way with his people in Rome and expressed his fears of a tangible threat to the Secret Service, although he hadn’t mentioned Tritt’s name or his onetime affiliation with the Company.

  While Peggy took a few shots of the observation post with her Nikon, Holliday paced around the very summit of the clamshell roof and Brennan listened to his police scanner. At ten past ten he looked up and spoke.

  “The American motorcade just pulled off airbase property. They’ll be here in less than fifteen minutes.”

  “This is a waste of time,” said Peggy. “We should be doing something, not standing around waiting for the sky to fall.”

  “We’ve still got the car,” said Holliday. “Philpot’s team is on the ground, keeping their eyes open for an Audi A8 with Swiss plates. There can’t be too many of them in town.”

  “We still haven’t managed to trace all this back to the old witch, Sinclair,” said Peggy, swinging her camera and its huge telephoto lens around. So far she’d noticed nothing even mildly suspicious.

  “First we stop her plan; then we stop her organization.”

  “I’m still not sure about what she’s doing,” said Brennan, monitoring the scanner. “It all seems insane to me.”

  “Kill the president, who’s a little too liberal for her tastes, which installs our esteemed hard-hat vice president. A real ‘whites of their eyes’ type. When the Indian ambassador came over to arrange a state visit the VP asked the man if he was in the Cherokee caste or the Apache. He becomes president and appoints the young Senator Sinclair as his VP. Two terms later he backs our boy for the presidential nomination. She gets what she wants with a bullet, not an election.” Holliday shook his head. “It is insane, but if you get enough insane people together who’re still fighting the Civil War, it changes from insanity to political conspiracy.”

  There was a burst of crackling Italian from the scanner.

  “What is it?” Holliday asked.

  “Masterpiece is eight miles out.”

  “Masterpiece?”

  “The president’s code name. The First Lady is da Vinci.”

  “Where did that come from?” Holliday asked.

  “They must have liked the book. The secretary of state is called Symbol.”

  “How long is eight miles, timewise?”

  “Five minutes, maybe six.” The priest shrugged. “Motorcades can be pretty ponderous even under the best circumstances.”

  Presidential motorcades are often made up of up to thirty vehicles, including two identical Cadillac limousines, both armored and with bulletproof glass. These are inevitably followed by several Secret Service Escalades, a communication vehicle and a number of other cars for the press and invited guests. Since the twin presidential limousines are identical, there is no sure way to know which one is occupied by the president at various times. The limousines and the Secret Service vans are known as the secure package and can separate from the rest of the motorcade within seconds.

  The radio crackled again. “Vigilanza Twenty-nine.” One of Brennan’s.

  “Vigilanza Twenty-nine, andare.”

  “Confermato Automobile nero, Audi A8, Targa Svizerri SZ193.”

  “He’s got the car!” Brennan hissed.

  “Where?” Holliday asked.

  “Dove?”

  “Viale Europa. Davanti Gioielliere Brusco.”

  “Got it,” said Peggy, the big Nikon in her hands. “One block up, one block over, once you get over the bridge. No action on the roof so far.”

  “Give me your gun,” demanded Holliday.

  Brennan hesitated for a moment, then handed it over. “I’ve never seen that gun in my life,” said the priest. In other words Ho
lliday was on his own if he was caught with it. “I’ll stay with the radio.”

  Holliday took the small transmitter-receiver out of his pocket, looping it over his ear like a Bluetooth device. Peggy had slipped the telephoto off and was snapping on a standard lens.

  “I’m going with you,” she said. There was no room for argument in her voice and Holliday didn’t even try.

  “Come on, then,” he said.

  They scrambled around the roof to the maintenance stairwell, went to the shipping elevator and rode down to the main floor of the gigantic, empty arena.

  “Masterpiece now five miles out. Four minutes,” said Brennan’s voice in Holliday’s ear. Holliday found their rental car and climbed in, Peggy hard on his heels. He cranked up the little Fiat and, tires spinning, zoomed across the empty parking lot to the exit ramp. Barely slowing, he threw the car into traffic. They tore across the bridge, over the artificial reflecting pool, then hurtled down the Viale America ramp and went into the brief darkness of the underpass. They popped out into the sunlight and headed west.

  “Masterpiece at two miles. Ninety seconds, maybe less.”

  “Shit,” said Holliday. Dead ahead in the far distance was the dome of the enormous Peter and Paul Basilica.

  “There!” Peggy yelled. She’d spotted the jewelry store.

  They went through the yellow light and through the striped crosswalk, Holliday blessing his good luck at renting one of those ridiculous smart cars. He slipped into an empty spot across from the jewelry store on the corner and jumped out of the car without bothering to lock it. He ran across the wide street, setting up a symphony of horns and shouts as he dodged through the oncoming traffic, Peggy right beside him.

  They reached the sidewalk. To the left of a pair of graffiti-covered recycling bins there were two doors, one leading into Brusco’s watch and jewelry store, the other into a miniature lobby with nothing in it but an elevator door. The outer door was locked. Directly in front of the jeweler’s was a sleek black Audi A8.