The Templar throne t-3 Page 12

  "What's a Yankee teacher doing running from the Gardai on St. Michael's Mount?" O'Keefe asked, raising a dark eyebrow.

  "I taught military history at West Point and it's a long story," answered Holliday.

  "It's a night and a day to Wicklow Town, which is where we're going, yeah?" said O'Keefe. "All the time in the world and nothing I like better than a good yarn, boyo."

  Meg came through the narrow companionway door behind the two men, wearing an old blue cotton boiler suit of O'Keefe's that was ludicrously large. The cuffs were rolled up and so were the sleeves. The word "cute" popped into Holliday's head. Better not go there, he thought.

  "Have I missed anything?" she asked brightly.

  "We were just getting down to it, my love," said O'Keefe. "Your friend Doc here was about to spin us a tale."

  They made their slow way along the Cornish coast while Holliday talked. The rain eased as they went around Land's End between the rocky coast and the Longship's Lighthouse. There they turned north for the long run up the Irish Sea. Running at a respectable eight knots, it would take them a full twenty- four hours. As darkness fell the exhausted pair were bedded down, Meg in the captain's cabin just behind the wheelhouse and Holliday in the smaller engineer's berth farther aft.

  As dawn broke O'Keefe awakened Holliday and gave him a short lesson in following a course, keeping the needle of the compass aligned to a single bearing along the Irish Coast, watching the radar screen for any errant blips, and if he did see anything in the fairly crowded sea lanes, always bearing to the right.

  While O'Keefe catnapped in his dayroom, Holliday took the plodding Mary Deare past Tremore and Rosslare Harbour, Wexford and Enniscorthy and up to Courtown, where O'Keefe took the wheel again.

  While the Irishman piloted the rust-streaked ship, Meg and Holliday cobbled together a meal in the little galley above the old boiler room, making fried egg sandwiches with rashers of streaky bacon and sliced tomatoes on thick slices of Irish soda bread, which O'Keefe had somehow managed to bake himself in the galley's tiny oven.

  They made coffee and carried everything up to the wheelhouse, where they picnicked on the small chart table in the corner. An hour after the early afternoon meal the town of Arklow passed on their port side and an hour after that they rounded Wicklow Head and reached the enclosing breakwaters of the old harbor. O'Keefe eased the Mary Deare between the breakwater groynes, backing the engine and warping into the dock as though he was parallel parking a car.

  "You make it look easy," said Holliday as a couple of wiry-looking men in heavy sweaters and rubber boots caught the mooring hawsers and snugged the boat in.

  "To me it is." The Irishman shrugged and glanced at his wristwatch. It was plain with a black dial and white letters, obviously very old. Holliday immediately knew what he was looking at. It was a Granta World War Two-vintage German military timepiece.

  "Interesting watch," he said.

  "My father's," said O'Keefe. "Took it off a German pilot down the road in Arklow."

  "What was a German pilot doing in Arklow?" Holliday asked.

  "Bombing it," said O'Keefe. "He ran out of gas and crashed into the estuary. My father rowed out and picked him up out of the water before the tide got him."

  "What happened to the pilot?"

  "My father shot him with his old pigeon gun, then took his watch. The bugger killed his brother in the bombing, yeah?"

  O'Keefe pushed the engine telegraph to All Stop, stood back from the wheel and stretched.

  "How long will we be here?" Holliday asked.

  "Long as you like," the Irishman said and shrugged. "I'm not on what you might call a strict schedule. Got a few things to pick up and drop off to the north, but nothing that can't wait a day or so."

  "I just thought it'd be nice to stretch our legs."

  "Be my guest. I'm doing an Irish stew and boxtys for tea, but that's not for a couple of hours."

  "We'll be back," promised Holliday.

  Instead of heading directly into town they turned past the lifeboat shed on the far side of the southern groyne and walked up a stony path to the bluffs above the harbor. There was the ruins of what might have been an old castle and a clear, brilliant view all the way across the Irish Sea to the distant smoky hills of Wales on the horizon. Holliday could imagine a Viking standing where he was now, looking out to sea and wondering what worlds there were left to conquer.

  "You'd think there would be a plaque or something," commented Meg, looking at the black stone ruins of the ancient fortress.

  "The Irish aren't too good at that sort of thing," said Holliday. "I went to a conference once at University College in Cork. They were putting up a parking garage near the river, and during the excavations for the foundation they came upon the remains of an entire Viking settlement, perhaps the first settlement in Cork. Instead of calling in a team of archaeologists they simply put down a sheet of heavy plastic and built right on top of it. Pretty crude."

  They walked along the bluffs down to Wicklow Head. It was a cruel and bitter place, dark hills and jutting cliffs running down to the sea. In a storm it would be foul and in a fog it would be dangerous, both to ships and to anyone stupid enough to walk along the cliffs.

  "Wuthering Heights." Meg smiled, looking out over the sparkling water. "Catherine calling for Heathcliff across the moor."

  "Makes you wonder why people live in places like this," said Holliday.

  "You could say the same thing about Minnesota in the wintertime. It depends on what you're used to."

  "I suppose," grunted Holliday. They turned and walked back to the Dunbur Road and headed back into town. "What do you think of O'Keefe?" he asked finally.

  "It was lucky he was there at St. Michael's Mount," answered Meg.

  "Luck's hardly the word," said Holliday.

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Think about it," said Holliday. "You don't organize a raid of SWAT cops like that on the fly. It has to be organized and that takes time. Someone knew we were going to be there."

  "Who?" Meg said. "These mythical Vatican spies of yours?"

  "Someone who could track us through my credit card," said Holliday. "It's the only way they could have known."

  "Who could do that?"

  "The only people I can think of is the police in Venice," said Holliday, "but that's a stretch."

  "What about that bald man in Prague, or the man you… killed on the boat. The one you said was an assassin?"

  "I suppose, but that doesn't make much sense, either."

  "What does any of that have to do with Mr. O'Keefe?"

  "Don't you think it's a bit of a coincidence that the Mary Deare was anchored fifty feet offshore just when we needed it?"

  "It happens," said Meg.

  "Only on reruns of Columbo," snorted Holliday. "O'Keefe was waiting for us just as sure as that SWAT team knew we were going to be there. We were meant to get on board. We were meant to escape."

  "Maybe you should get help for these paranoid delusions of yours," said Meg skeptically.

  "I don't think it's a delusion at all. I think it was meant to take us out of the loop, convince us that we were fugitives on the run. Someone is keeping track of us and what we're up to. Someone who wants us to keep unraveling clues until we find what we're looking for."

  "That's just plain old- fashioned nuts," said Meg. "We don't even know what we're looking for."

  "Just keep your wits about you when you're talking to O'Keefe; he's not the happy-go-lucky leprechaun he pretends to be," Holliday cautioned. "He's just too good to be true."

  The actual town of Wicklow had the look of an old man or woman desperately trying to imitate youth. Every storefront was painted a different bright color but each slate roof was sagging and there wasn't a building on the High Street less than a hundred and fifty years old. Charles Dickens would have felt right at home. For a town of ten thousand it had an extraordinary number of restaurant-bars, seventeen by Holliday's count.


  The sidewalks were narrow, the traffic was crushing and everything looked like it needed repairing. There were so many blobs of pressed old bubble gum on the sidewalks it looked like some sort of inlay. If for nothing else Holliday stood out for his size; it seemed that the average Wicklownian male was short and the average woman was both short and tending to fat. A pack of teenagers in magenta and gray forced Holliday and Meg off the sidewalk as they powered onward, three-quarters of them smoking, all of them talking and none of them paying any attention to anyone else.

  They stopped at the local Cead Mille Failte-a hundred thousand welcomes-Tourist Office and picked up a brochure.

  "It says here the Gaelic name for Wicklow means Church of the Toothless One," said Meg.

  "Toothless one," said Holliday, looking at the dreary collection of pastel buildings. "That sounds about right."

  "Boxtys are potato pancakes."

  "Pardon?"

  "What Sean's cooking for dinner," answered Meg.

  "I bet his name isn't Sean at all. It's probably John but the girls like Sean better." Holliday shook his head. "Toothless," he muttered.

  They reached what passed for a town square in Wicklow, a pocket-handkerchief-sized triangle of grass with a wrought iron two-foot-high fence around it and a statue in the middle. The statue was of a dour- faced bearded man in an old-fashioned ship captain's outfit. He looked constipated, but most Victorian men and women seemed to look that way. According to the brochure he was the captain of the Great Eastern, the ship that laid the first transatlantic cable. Someone had spray-painted Pat Kenny is a git amp; a wanker! in fluorescent pink all over the base of the monument.

  There was a miniature department store on the square and they managed to buy some clothes and backpacks to put them in, then continued their walk. They turned down Bridge Street and headed back down the hill to the port. They went into Bridge Books, a cottagelike building with apartments above the store, the whole place painted a horrible shade of robin's egg blue. They asked if there was anything in the store about the island of Iona.

  Holliday wasn't expecting anything at all and he was surprised when they actually had two volumes: a history of Iona from its founding in the sixth century to the present, including a detailed map, and a book of prayers from Iona Abbey. Holliday bought the history and Sister Meg bought the prayers.

  Having toured Wicklow they went back to the ship and helped O'Keefe with the dinner. They stayed the night in port and headed north the following morning at daybreak.

  18

  Iona, according to the Reverend James Walker, author of the book The Wild Geese Fly: A History of the Sacred Isle of Iona from Ancient Times to the Present, is an island five miles long and two miles wide lying a mile offshore of the Island of Mull, a much larger but equally windswept and lonely place in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland's western coast.

  It is, to the Scots Presbyterian minister, "a thin place," so isolated and distant from the world that it exists in a very narrow space between reality and things spiritual, thus bringing it that much closer to God. Its first occupant after man's Stone Age forebears was a saint from Ireland, St. Columba, an exiled priest-soldier kicked out of the country for leading the losing side during the Battle of Cul Dreimhne in A.D. 561.

  Columba arrived on Iona two years later, bringing twelve men with him and establishing a monastery. Each monk was required to build a cairn of stones on the beach equivalent to the sins of his life, and the remains of those cairns can still be seen on the beach, now romantically known as the Bay at the Back of the Ocean.

  After St. Columba came the Vikings and after the Vikings a flock of Benedictine nuns, complete with a priest and a prior and then an abbey, built in 1202. The nuns built a nunnery to go along with the monastery, and a village, Baile Mor, which ironically translates as Large Town. No crops grew on the stony, boggy ground, but sheep could be bred on the windblown gorse and stunted grass, and the resulting wool harvested and spun. A poor living was all the island offered, and a poor living was all that was needed.

  As the decades and the centuries passed, Iona spread the word of God, first to the craven, pagan English, and then to France and the rest of Europe. By the time Jean de Saint-Clair and the Blessed Juliana arrived at Iona in 1307 on their Venetian ship the Santa Maria Maggiore, the island was already deemed holy and at least fifty-six kings of Scotland and Norway had been buried there, not to mention four Irish kings, one saint, and one former leader of the British Labour Party named John Smith who had enjoyed holidays on Iona several times.

  The Mary Deare came upon the Holy Isle two hours after dawn on the following morning, the mist still lying along the narrow strait between Iona and Mull, the island itself no more than a thin green line rising only a little above the darker green of the sea. As they neared the island and the mist cleared, Holliday could see a scattering of houses at the foot of a low, twin- humped hill.

  The houses looked like so many perching gulls spread out along the shore, their roofs dark slate and the walls a brilliant washed white that glowed in the rising sun. At the northern end of the island they could see a second hill, much smaller, but much higher than the one with the houses huddled below it. The second hill had to be the famous Dun I, Iona's Hill, called Mt. Zion by St. Columba and Temple Mount by the nuns and priests who came after him. According to Reverend Walker in his book, the summit of Dun I was St. Columba's favorite place to meditate as he vainly looked back for a sight of his beloved Ireland. The next nearest landfall was actually seventeen hundred nautical miles away on Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula, home to the first European settlement in the New World.

  O'Keefe radioed the harbormaster and they eased into the tiny bay, warping into the simple stone and concrete pier that jutted out from the rocky shore. On the other side of the pier the MV Loch Buie, a small passenger and car ferry, was loading up with walk-ons going back to Fionnphort on the Island of Mull, a mile away across the narrow strait to the east.

  From the look of the steel gray clouds and the silvery curtain that lay over Mull, it was raining cats and dogs, but Iona was graced with a kind, warm sun with just enough breeze to puff out the sails of a Sea Scout squadron of Bug-class Lasers on a race round the small island.

  "It's beautiful," said Meg as they stepped off the boat, Holliday behind her. He looked back at the wheelhouse of the Mary Deare and saw O'Keefe was still standing at the wheel. He'd told them he had work to do in the engine room when he declined Meg's invitation to come with them, but there he was talking into the radio microphone.

  Holliday didn't bother mentioning his growing suspicions to Meg; she was completely taken by the man's smooth and smiling charm. Yesterday, standing at the wheel, he'd crooned a succession of maudlin Irish ballads, like "Four Green Fields" and "The Rising of the Moon." Holliday had tried to bait O'Keefe into revealing his true colors by casually mentioning that in his opinion the Irish fought so much simply because they enjoyed it; after all, they were the only nation in the world who had a district of their capital city named for a style of drunken brawl: Donnybrook. O'Keefe had just smiled and said, "Now isn't that the bloody truth then, yeah?"

  Holliday turned again, following Sister Meg down the pier. O'Keefe was no Hollywood Irishman; there was something deeper and darker going on there. When they got back to the Mary Deare he was going to find out just what it was. The first step perhaps was a look in the old puffer's cargo hold.

  They cut through the crowd of outgoing and incoming passengers and reached the end of the pier. Ahead of them a dozen or so men sporting marine haircuts and carrying identical enormous black sports bags were laughing and talking together.

  Holliday kept well back and watched them carefully until he saw that they were wearing matching black windbreakers with "48th Fighter Wing Paintball Team, Lakenheath" emblazed on the back. Flyboys from the Statue of Liberty Wing down in Suffolk. Holliday and Meg reached the end of the pier and asked a likely-looking local wearing gum boots and a tattered roll-neck sweat
er for directions. He pointed to a small white building close to the shore to the left of the pier.

  "Tha's post office," the local drawled. "E'll tell ye were to go all right." The man laughed at his small joke, hawked and spit into the water. They went to the post office. A grave-looking man named Mockitt gave them directions to the abbey where the Reverend Walker was working. Holliday bought a Mars Bar from a display on the counter and they left the post office.

  They walked up a gravel pathway to the main north-south road. There wasn't a car to be seen; the road was full of walkers with a few wobbling, hired bicycles here and there. The wind picked up and Holliday looked back toward Mull. Then he broke the gooey Mars Bar in half and handed the larger piece to Meg.

  "They deep-fry Mars Bars here," commented Holliday. He took a bite of the tooth-achingly sweet candy bar.

  "No way!" Meg responded.

  "No word of a lie. Same oil as the chips."

  "That's disgusting!" Meg answered.

  "When in Rome and all that," Holliday said and grinned. He took another bite from his portion and smacked his lips. "Yum-yum."

  "Now you're being disgusting."

  The Sea Scouts had disappeared behind the sheeting rain off the coast of the larger island. He grinned; they'd be soaking wet and enjoying every minute of it, safe from their mothers' anxieties about catching their death.

  The cadets at West Point had been just the same, thriving on muddy maneuvers in the rain or on the obstacle course, their uniforms filthy, their faces even dirtier, their eyes bright.

  He missed his kids and the teaching. He missed West Point, something he hadn't thought possible. Most of all he missed Amy, as he knew he would as she lay dying, more than ten years in the past. He turned to the road ahead, Meg a few steps ahead of him now, and thought about Amy all the way to the abbey.

  Mockitt's directions had been correct; the abbey stood on the slightly sloping ground a mile or so from the town, a group of gray stone buildings huddled on the sparse land, a low stone fence running along beside the road for a hundred yards or so, enclosing an anonymous field of gorse.