Templar Throne Read online

  The boat lurched across another wave and Holliday rammed his knee into Pesek’s groin. The killer twisted to one side, taking the blow on his hip, and brought the knife up again, slashing at Holliday’s eyes, forcing him back against the gunwale again.

  The oil tanker now completely filled Holliday’s field of view; another few seconds and they’d be nothing but splintered plywood wreckage spread across the water. An earsplitting air horn blasted as someone on the tanker’s bridge saw the approaching cabin cruiser.

  As Pesek came after him again, Holliday dropped to the deck, then rolled back toward the transom, scrabbling for the gun.

  “Grab the wheel!” Holliday bellowed to Sister Meg. His fingers found the hard weight of the weapon and he rolled onto his back just as Pesek’s boot smashed down toward his face.

  Suddenly the Casanova went into a wide lurching turn, the hull hammering into the enormous wave thrown up by the tanker’s bulbous, half-submerged bow. Pesek’s foot came down into a tangle of rope and Holliday squeezed the unfamiliar trigger of the compact, Czech-made 9mm automatic, firing upward. The round took Pesek under the chin and drilled up into his brain, killing him instantly. He folded silently, like a suit of clothes without a body to hold it up.

  Holliday clambered to his feet and lurched toward Meg as the boat virtually surfed along the hull displacement wave of the tanker. High above them a small group of spectators had gathered at the ship’s rail to take a look at the idiots who’d almost powered into them.

  Holliday reached around Meg and took the wheel, his hands covering hers. She turned her head, eyes wide and flashing. They broached the churning wake of the tanker and headed into open water. Directly ahead of them a mile or so distant Holliday could see a jumbo lifting off from one of the two runways that ran parallel to the water.

  “Is he dead?” Meg asked, turning to look over her shoulder.

  “Very,” answered Holliday.

  “Good!” said Meg, a savage note in her voice. She sagged back against Holliday, slipping her hands off the wheel, glad to give up control.

  “An eye for an eye?” Holliday said, enjoying the feel of her body against his, every altar boy fiber of his adult body screaming “sacrilege!”

  “Something like that,” said Meg. She wasn’t making the slightest attempt to wriggle out of Holliday’s embrace. He stepped back, taking one hand off the wheel to let her go before the situation got too complicated.

  Suddenly embarrassed, Meg ducked out from beneath Holliday’s enclosing arm. She stared at Pesek, crumpled on the garbage-strewn deck a few feet away. Holliday followed her glance. The entry wound under his chin was totally hidden and there was no exit wound; the bullet was still lodged somewhere in the dead man’s brain. He looked oddly peaceful, eyes open as he stared up at eternity and the blue sky overhead.

  “Mrs. Pesek is going to be pissed,” said Holliday.

  “I believe you’re right,” said the nun.

  14

  Cornwall is the dangling foot of England, toes tentatively dipping into the English Channel at Land’s End and the Lizard. It has always been a place apart, a place of lonely moors, strange sights and fog, the birthplace of mythic kings, druids and magicians. The language is secretive and musical and history is its stock in trade. Once it was a land of wrecking beaches on its cruel black coast and mines cutting deeply into the rock and peat, the miners looking for precious tin and silver.

  It was Meg’s turn at the wheel of the Peugeot rental. They’d left the airport hotel at Heathrow shortly after breakfast. It was noon now and they still had a hundred miles or so to reach their destination. They were roughly in the center of Dartmoor, just past the village of Two Bridges. In the distance the sky was a dark mass of roiling clouds the color of tarnished silver. The first few drops of rain were already spattering the windshield.

  Holliday sat in the passenger seat beside the young woman, staring out the window at the dreary, almost sinister landscape. This was the Dartmoor of Her Majesty’s Prison and Conan Doyle’s infamous Hound of the Baskervilles. It was a long way from Venice.

  Their escape had been utterly anticlimactic. They’d taken the homemade cabin cruiser across the muddy shallows at the airport end of the lagoon, finding a twisting path through the marsh, glad of the plywood’s springy flat bottom. Eventually they ran the boat up on the beach and Holliday stuffed Pesek’s body into the makeshift forward cabin. It was already a warm day and the little cabin was even hotter. The assassin’s body would be a maggot-infested, bloated carcass within a day; if they were lucky nobody would find him until much later, at which point the body would be much more difficult to identify. As a precaution he’d taken the man’s wallet, passport, and inscribed gold Patek Philippe watch and tossed them all overboard.

  With the body hidden, Holliday and Sister Meg clambered off the boat and walked a quarter mile across a few farmers’ fields to the village of Campalto on the main road to the airport. There they bought toiletries and fresh clothes, putting their purchases in a pair of old Alitalia flight bags they found in a thrift store.

  From there they continued down the Via Orlando, the village’s main street, had some lunch in the hotel dining room, then caught a cab and went on to the airport, less than five minutes away. At three in the afternoon they were on a British Midlands flight to Heathrow, and an hour after that they were crossing the big glass-and-steel atrium of the Heathrow Hilton. Everything had gone without a hitch.

  “What I don’t understand is why,” Holliday said finally, looking out at the blurry countryside; the rain was coming down hard now, the wipers thumping back and forth rhythmically.

  “Pardon?” Meg asked, concentrating on the narrow two-lane highway unwinding across the moor.

  “We were nothing but tourists at Mont Saint- Michel, yet we get tailed across Europe by Cue Ball. In Prague Antonin Pesek, an expensive contract killer, picks up our scent and tries to take us out an hour after his wife skewers a junior clerk at the Venice Archives. The Peseks are pricey, and I’ll bet Cue Ball wasn’t cheap, either. And the big question is where are they getting their intelligence? Until I nailed Pesek on the boat they were always one step ahead of us. How are they managing that?”

  “According to you, this so-called Vatican spy network has had it in for you for quite a while,” suggested Meg.

  “Maybe it’s you they’re keeping an eye on,” answered Holliday, looking carefully at the young woman behind the wheel.

  “Why would they be interested in me?” Meg asked. “I’m an obscure nun doing some historical research into a religious who was only beatified in 1985; she’s not even a saint yet.”

  “Maybe it’s this True Ark of yours,” replied Holliday. “Could it have some real historical significance to anyone except the Catholic Church?”

  “You said it yourself,” the nun said and shrugged. “The True Ark is more myth than anything else. I’m sure the Blessed Juliana was trying to keep something entrusted to her safe, but there’s no real indication of what it was. It could just have easily been love letters she wrote to her onetime fiancé, King Hedwig of Austria.”

  “Well,” said Holliday, “somebody’s after something and we’d better find out what it is before it gets us both killed.”

  Joseph Patchin, Director of Operations for the Central Intelligence Agency, stood in the half-acre backyard of his enormous stone colonial on Upland Terrace in Chevy Chase, orchestrating the three hired chefs at work in front of his Beefeater built- in barbeque and stainless steel outdoor kitchen. He had one hand in the pocket of his Gatsby-style cream-colored linen trousers and the other hand wrapped around a glass of vodka and tonic that was really just tonic. Had to keep your wits about you at parties like this, even if you were the one throwing it.

  The half-acre corner lot of the Upland Terrace house was surrounded by mature pines and cedars, as well as a six-foot cedar plank fence and an inner chain- link fence to comply with the neighborhood’s strict codes about pool safety. The pool in
question was a twenty-by-forty-foot concrete monster that had been installed when the house was built in the early 1950s and had been lovingly maintained by its various owners ever since. Pools in Chevy Chase were de rigueur because it meant you had the money to heat and maintain them and the time to make use of them. Patchin hadn’t swum in the damn thing for a couple of years but he still enjoyed the happy asthmatic chugging of the automatic Kreepy Krauly pool cleaner blindly doing its job. The pool was just as much a status symbol as the car and driver that took him to and from the office every day. Conservatively, the house was worth about two million six.

  Patchin’s wife, Karin, was standing by the steps at the shallow end with a martini in her hand, talking to Ted Axeworthy, the senior partner at Axeworthy, Tate, Zwicker and Lyle, the firm she worked for. Axeworthy had been one of her first lovers outside of their marriage, back when Karin was a young associate.

  When she was made partner three years later the relationship came to an end, the only codicil to the affair between them being Karin’s promise not to sleep with anyone else at the firm. She’d faithfully kept to the agreement and had begun an endless marathon of sleeping with someone from just about every other firm in Washington, D.C.

  The result was that she built up an enviable network of moles providing her with crucial intelligence concerning legal matters in the nation’s capital, not to mention lots of gossip. Karin was a slut, but she was no fool; it was that gossip that had greased the rails of Patchin’s career within the Agency and would, they both hoped, end with Patchin being nominated to replace the incumbent and ailing attorney general as soon as the pancreatic cancer forced him to step down.

  There was very little chance that the nomination wouldn’t be approved; thanks to Karin he had enough dirt on enough congressmen and senators to make him a shoo-in. He smiled; it was funny how things worked out. It was a nice symbiotic marriage: she got status and a chance to erase a scholarship past at an Idaho law school and he got what he’d craved since Harvard, raw power.

  He watched one of the chefs flipping a pair of ten-ounce fois-gras-and-truffle-stuffed burgers on the grill. Fifty bucks a pop at Dean & Deluca, and he was serving them to a hundred or so Washington bigwigs on a Saturday afternoon. With the burgers flipped the chef turned his attention to the Kobe beef hot dogs. Buns made to order by Patisserie Poupon in Georgetown.

  Patchin caught a glimpse of Mike Harris, his deputy director. He was standing in his wife’s glass conservatory-greenhouse attached to the side of the house. The lanky man was dressed in cargo shorts and a Tommy Bahama shirt over a white tee. There was a Toronto Blue Jays cap crammed down onto his head. He’d taken the “casual dress” note on the invitation a little too seriously. Patchin’s craggy-faced second in command was deep in conversation with an Agency “gnome,” one of the faceless horde of CIA worker bees, whom Patchin vaguely recognized. He thought for a moment. Toby something or other from the Italian Desk down on Five.

  A few seconds later the conversation ended, the gnome turned and headed back into the house, and Harris stepped out of the conservatory and onto the patio. He took enough time to light a cigarette then started walking toward his boss. Patchin turned his attention from the barbeque and met him halfway.

  “I saw you with the gnome, what’s up?” Patchin asked.

  “Somebody lit the fuse on that Rex Deus thing you asked me to look into.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Looks like the Pope’s team brought in a heavy hitter, Antonin Pesek, a contract killer. Ex-Státní bezpečnost out of Prague.”

  “The weird husband-and-wife team?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What about him?”

  “It looks like he tried to whack Holliday and his new nun friend. Holliday whacked him first. They found him in an old cabin cruiser run up on the beach close to Marco Polo Airport. Venice.”

  “I know where Marco Polo Airport is, Harris,” said Patchin.

  Harris took a drag on his cigarette, knowing perfectly well that Patchin wouldn’t have admitted not knowing it was Venice Airport even if you pulled out his fingernails with red-hot tongs. Patchin was the kind of man who had to know everything, whether he knew it or not.

  “Yeah, well,” Harris went on. “Holliday’s bad luck. Couple of kids looking for a good fishing hole found Pesek while he was still warm. One in the throat from very close range. Looks as though they were duking it out and Holliday got the upper hand. According to his file Holliday was something of a whiz at unarmed combat. We logged Holliday and the nun getting onto a flight to London an hour later. We’d already had a passport advisory posted worldwide. We knew about it right away. It also looks like there’s a connection to a murder at the Venice Archives. A clerk was killed and an old book was damaged.”

  “Where is Holliday now?”

  “He and the nun just stopped in a place called Marazion in Cornwall. It’s on the coast, near Penzance.”

  “And you know this how?” Patchin quizzed.

  “They rented a car from Hertz. All the Hertz cars have Tracker units.”

  “Tracker?”

  “English version of LoJack.”

  “Ah.” Patchin nodded. “Any idea about where they’re going? I mean, what’s in this Marathon place?”

  “Marazion,” corrected Harris.

  “Whatever.”

  “Mount St. Michael is about half a mile offshore. Presumably that’s their destination.”

  “I thought Mount St. Michael was in France.”

  “That’s Mont Saint-Michel,” explained Harris. “This is the English version, kind of like twin cities.”

  Patchin took a thoughtful sip of his virgin vodka tonic. “I see,” he said, not seeing at all. Neither did Harris.

  Harris took another drag off his cigarette. He could smell the hot dogs and the hamburgers grilling. He looked around at the crowd. Bureaucrats and lawyers, a lot of them from the AG’s office. The rest were D.C. power players. He looked back at Patchin and wondered if Patchin knew who was screwing his wife these days, or if he cared.

  Being one of Karin’s little trophies was something he’d avoided. That kind of pillow talk was currency in Washington and you didn’t want to become an ear in the blond woman’s network of jungle drums. It was like a sexually transmitted disease: you had no idea who was going to be the ultimate recipient of your unfortunate whispers. This city was like that, and so were Chevy Chase parties like this one. Harris wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the patio lanterns and the trees themselves were wired. Suddenly, out of nowhere he remembered a stanza from a book of poetry he’d found in a Princeton bookstore a long time ago. It was a chant, maybe the first rap song. The epitome of gossip:Walk with care, walk with care,

  Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo,

  Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,

  Beware, beware, walk with care,

  Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom.

  “Pardon?” Patchin said, frowning.

  Harris blinked, abruptly aware that he’d quoted the poem out loud. “Sorry. A verse from my misspent youth.”

  “What the hell does that have to do with Holliday and Rex Deus?”

  “Nothing, I suppose.”

  “You’re sure it was the Vatican that sicced Pesek on Holliday?”

  “I can’t think who else it would be,” Harris said with a shrug. He looked around for somewhere to butt his cigarette but there was nothing nearby. He had an urge to put it out in Patchin’s drink but thought better of it.

  “What about the shadow we had on him?”

  “Lost him and the nun in Prague. Our man said that it looked as though Holliday made him.”

  “You’d think with all these unemployed commie spies around that we could hire better help.” Patchin sighed.

  “It’s the recession,” said Harris, managing to keep a straight face.

  “Do we have anyone in the neighborhood? Someone a little more subtle than our fat ex-Stasi friend?”

&nb
sp; “We used to have a couple of babysitters in that area,” answered Harris. “Toby’s checking into it right now.” A babysitter was exactly what it sounded like, a freelance or occasional Agency asset sent into an operation to covertly protect a warm body that the Agency was interested in.

  “That’s not the only problem,” said Harris. “Holliday left fingerprints everywhere. The AISI goons in Rome already had a file on him.”

  “What the hell is AISI?” Patchin said. “It sounds like something you get from a toilet seat.”

  “Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Interna,” replied Harris. “The Italian FBI. They’d like to talk to Holliday as a ‘person of interest.’ They’ve already called the Home Office in England. Holliday’s going to have cops all over him before you know it.”

  “Shit,” said Patchin succinctly.

  “Exactly,” said Harris. There was a hoot of laughter from the pool. The first guest of the afternoon had tripped and fallen in. It was going to be that kind of party. Patchin felt a headache growing like a time- lapse tumor.

  “Get someone on them as fast as you can,” said Patchin. “I don’t want the Holy Father or anyone else to have their way with our Colonel Holliday until we find out just what the hell it is he’s doing.”

  15

  St. Michael’s Mount lies four hundred yards off the southern end of Cornwall, connected to the mainland by a narrow granite causeway, geographically making the round, high-topped and craggy island a tombolo, or tied, landform.

  St. Michael himself was said to have liked such places for their strategic military value—their isolation and high ground made them easy to defend from the demons and dragons he specialized in smiting with the sword of the Lord. Originally, the island had been the center of the Cornish tin and copper trade and was known as the Grey Rock. St. Michael’s was founded as a religious sanctuary by an Irish cult of the vengeful “Warrior Archangel” in the ninth century.