Templar Throne Page 14

  “The whole prayer was written as a code,” said Holliday. “The answer’s in there somewhere.”

  “Oh, dear,” the rotund minister said and sighed. “Must everything be in some sort of code? It’s all a bit much, don’t you think? Illuminati, the Masons, Opus Dei. Why is it that everybody sees religious conspiracies everywhere these days?” The minister shook his head. “Nobody cares that much for religion anymore, believe me.”

  “They did back in the fourteenth century,” said Holliday. “You don’t have to twist reality around to see the meaning of the prayer.” Holliday took the book from Meg. “Satan’s royal vengeance is King Philip of France killing the Templars. Mary’s holy wings are the sails of the Santa Maria Maggiore, their ship, and Arcadia’s pale enclosing arms almost certainly refers to Nova Scotia—new Scotland—in the Canadian maritimes, a place that was originally known as Arcadia. To top things off the inscription on Jean de Saint-Clair’s tomb in the old chapel at Mont Saint- Michel on the Normandy coast of France reads In Arcadia Est.”

  “That’s all very entertaining, but it still seems rather fanciful.”

  “It is rather fanciful,” Holliday said. “Imaginative as hell.”

  “So you agree then, your coded message and a few old rubbings could amount to nothing.”

  “Of course,” said Holliday, “but so far we’ve been led from Mont Saint- Michel to Prague, to the Venetian Archives, then to St. Michael’s Mount, and finally to here by the same kind of fanciful clues. There’s a pattern and a logic to it all.”

  “Coincidence,” argued Walker.

  “Maybe,” said Holliday. “But I’m betting on Jean de Saint-Clair’s imagination and the imagination of the Blessed Juliana. They were rescuing a treasure trove of relics, hiding them from a vengeful king and a power-hungry Pope. They wanted to get the relics as far away from both men as they possibly could, but they wanted to do it without starting a war.

  “If King Philip had attacked St. Michael’s Mount it would have been the perfect excuse for Edward the Second of England to attack his old rival. To have attacked Iona would have inflamed Scotland and incurred the wrath of the Irish, supposedly allies of the French as well as the not inconsiderable Scandinavian kingdoms.

  “On the other hand, neither Jean de Saint-Clair nor Juliana knew when, or even if, they would be back to retrieve the treasures. They had to leave some sort of clues behind; clues that would outlive them for a very long time, perhaps hundreds of years. What better place than the burial ground of kings?” Holliday smiled. “The Knight’s Prayer speaks for itself. It’s survived for more than seven hundred years in much the same way as the Lord’s Prayer has survived even longer.”

  The burly minister laughed heartily and clapped his hands.

  “Bravo, Mr. Holliday. You’ve almost convinced me.”

  “But not quite,” said Holliday.

  “Enough for me to take another rubbing for you of your mysterious knight here,” replied the Reverend Walker. “I can have it ready for you this evening. Perhaps you and the good sister would be my guests for dinner. I do a rather nice cabbie claw even if I do say so myself.”

  “Well,” began Holliday, speaking tentatively.

  “We’d like that very much,” said Meg. “We have a friend, the Irishman who brought us here. Perhaps we could bring him along.”

  “By all means.” The minister beamed. “Shall we say six o’clock, then? I live halfway between here and town. On your left, the cottage with the blue door and ducks in the yard. You can’t miss it. I’ve got quite a library of Iona lore; p’raps we can find out some more about this Jean de Saint-Clair of yours. I’m something of the island’s unofficial historian; if the Templar knight of yours is part of Iona’s past, then I should know about it.”

  It took them a few minutes to say their good-byes to Walker, and then they headed back to town and the Mary Deare. As they reached the main road leading away from the abbey they fell in with a straggling group of tourists coming down from Dun I, at three hundred feet the highest point on the island and a favorite vantage point for pictures. It felt a little odd to be walking in the center of a road without a car to be seen, but on the other hand, it gave Holliday a real feeling of what it had been like in the time of the pilgrims.

  They reached Reverend Walker’s house with its blue door, no more than a whitewashed cottage with half its slates missing. The ducks were there as well, perhaps a dozen of them herded behind a low stone fence that kept the noisy, angry creatures from attacking people walking along the road.

  Just beyond the house, on the right, Holliday could see a narrow path leading to the marshy area known as Lochan Mor, the “Abbot’s Fishpond,” once an artificial lake dammed to provide power to the old granite diggings and now nothing more than a swampy marsh, cut through by a granite causeway that led into the moor-land beyond. The sky was steel gray. The rain had followed them across the narrow strait.

  “Colonel Holliday?” asked a polite voice behind them. Holliday stopped and turned. A young man with a marine haircut and wearing a black windbreaker and black chinos was standing right behind them. One of the paintballers. There was a pair of binoculars in a case slung over his left shoulder. The kid looked about eighteen. Too young to be one of his old students. He kept his right hand in his pocket.

  “Excuse me?” Holliday said. “Do I know you?”

  “You don’t have to know me, sir. You just have to do exactly what I say.” He pushed his hand forward in the windbreaker pocket and used it to open the jacket so both Holliday and Meg could see the small black metal submachine gun hanging from its sling. There was a fat sausage-shaped suppressor screwed onto the stubby little barrel.

  Holliday felt Meg grab his arm, clutching hard at the sight of the weapon.

  “Doc?” Meg said.

  Holliday kept his eyes on the young man. The gun was a U.S.-made MAC 11, the subcompact version of the MAC 10, once the weapon of choice for the bad guys on Miami Vice and shows like it. The MAC 11 had never found much acceptance with the police, the Secret Service or Special Forces. It was an open-block weapon that was hard to control, and with a small subsonic .380-caliber load it didn’t have much stopping power and was only useful in closed environments like airplanes. Holliday couldn’t think of any group for whom it was standard issue. All of which meant that the young man standing in front of him probably wasn’t any part of the U.S. military.

  “Who are you, son?” Holliday asked, trying to engage the young man.

  “It doesn’t matter who the hell I am,” said the boy. “Just turn around and keep walking. When we get to the path turn right. And I’m not your son.” There was heat in his voice and wire- taut moves. Holliday knew he was just as likely to squeeze the trigger of the MAC 11 out of fear as anything else. The kid was a firecracker and he was about to go off.

  “Doc?” Meg asked.

  “Do as he says,” answered Holliday. At the path they turned off and headed for the marshy area. As they left the road it began to rain, a light hard spit with promise of a harder downfall in the low dark clouds overhead.

  “Where are you taking us?” Meg asked.

  “Shut up!” snarled the boy with the MAC 11.

  “Boro Bacheh Kooni,” said Holliday quietly. “Khar Kos seh, maadar jendeh.” There was no response from the young man behind them. Considering what he’d just said to the kid in Farsi, it was unlikely that he’d ever been in Afghanistan or Iraq. “Madar-e-to Gayidam,” he added, just to be sure. No reaction from the boy in the windbreaker. A hired gun. A mercenary, but one without much experience. It began to rain harder, gusting sheets rolling across the marshland. The visibility was only a few feet ahead, so presumably they were now invisible from the road as well.

  “You haven’t been doing this very long, have you?”

  “Long enough,” the young man answered briefly, his voice tense.

  “How old are you, seventeen, eighteen?”

  “I’m twenty-one!”

 
“Sure you are,” snorted Holliday, his voice dripping with derision.

  “I told you! Shut the hell up!”

  Holliday slowed. It was time to play soldier. He took a deep breath; the young man with the submachine gun was way out of his depth. Holliday blinked the rain out of his eyes and spoke.

  “One thing you should know if you want to live to see tomorrow, kid: the slide safety in front of the trigger on a MAC 11 should be in the rear position when you’re so close behind your prisoner.”

  Holliday heard the sudden indrawn breath and the faltering step as the young man hesitated. His eyes would have dropped and his right hand would be coming out of his pocket to check the safety. Perhaps a three-second advantage.

  Holliday pivoted on his left foot and brought the right around in a side kick to the boy’s thigh, pushing him off balance and making him stumble. He lashed out with his left hand, palm outward under the young man’s chin, snapping his head back brutally, sending the kid backward. Without even thinking about it he bent his knee and dropped down with all his weight on the boy’s chest.

  The sound of breaking ribs was audible, bone splintering, as Holliday’s knee forced the shattered end of the third rib into the pulmonary artery, rupturing it. The young man gagged, blood spurting from his mouth and nose. He was dead almost before he knew he was on the ground. The boy’s bright blue eyes rolled back in his head and he went limp. Holliday stood up.

  “Is he dead?” Meg asked in a dull voice.

  “Yes,” answered Holliday.

  “Couldn’t you have just . . . disarmed him?”

  “No,” said Holliday without any more explanation or justification. Kid or not the young man with the submachine gun had threatened their lives. The boy was supposedly some kind of soldier, and thus had automatically entered into the contract that had existed between enemies since Cain battled Abel: tit for tat, no quarter asked and none given. Kill or be killed.

  “So now what?”

  “Roll him over and get his jacket off,” instructed Holliday.

  Meg did as he asked. Holliday looked around. They were well out of sight of the road and no shots had been fired. The only potential problem was someone rushing along the pathway from the other side of the island, anxious to get out of the cold, stinging rain.

  Meg finished taking off the kid’s jacket and stood up. Holliday squatted down beside the body and stripped off the King Arms Bungee sling and holster, then went through the dead boy’s pockets. Keys, a few coins, English and American mixed, a fat Swiss Army knife with all the bells and whistles. A wallet identified him as Ian Andrew Mitchell, twenty-one years old and a resident of Wilmington, Delaware. He also had a Delaware concealed-carry permit, a Beretta .380-caliber mousegun in an in-the-pants holster against his spine. The permit was made out to Mitchell under the authority of Blackhawk Security Systems of Odessa, Delaware. The passport was made out to Andrew Mitchell and listed him as a security consultant.

  There was three hundred euros in cash and several credit cards, all of which Holliday took. He stood up and threw the wallet and the rest of its contents as far into the marsh as he could. He put the mousegun and its holster against his own spine, slipped into the gun sling and reattached the MAC 11 to the straps. Finally he shrugged on the black windbreaker and slung the binoculars over his shoulder.

  “Help me drag the body behind that patch of gorse,” said Holliday, pointing toward a mound of low shrubbery a few yards away to the right. Meg took one of the boy’s wrists and Holliday took the other, and together they dragged the body facedown through the spongy mud and turf, then made their way back to the path. They were both soaking wet, but the steady downpour would hide any evidence of a struggle within a moment or two.

  “You seem so calm,” said Meg, a note of bitterness in her voice. “As though killing children comes naturally to you.”

  Holliday gritted his teeth, her words unlocking a memory so vivid and fresh it could have been yesterday. “I happened to be at the Assassin’s Gate in Baghdad one morning when a nine-year-old girl came through the checkpoint. The Iraqi soldier with me said it was rare for kids that young to wear the full burqa, complete with a veil. The Iraqi soldier told the kid to stop where she was but the kid began to run right at us. The Iraqi soldier shouted at her again but the little girl kept on coming. I was carrying an old .45-caliber automatic as a sidearm. The Iraqi soldier was hesitating so I shot the kid in the chest.”

  “Did it make you feel better?” Meg said coldly.

  He could almost feel the talcum powder sand on his skin, the kind that had made him feel grimy ten minutes after he showered.

  “The kid was maybe fifty feet away when I hit her. The suicide vest she was wearing under the burqa blew a crater in the road ten feet across and three feet deep. Bits and pieces of shrapnel from the vest killed the Iraqi soldier. Two women running a fruit stall outside the gate were killed by the explosion, as well. I was blown out of my combat boots by the blast. So don’t tell me about killing children, sweetheart.”

  For a second it looked as though the red-haired nun was going to say something in reply but then she thought better of it.

  “So what do we do now?” Meg said finally, standing there in the rain, her long hair hanging in stringy tangles around her face.

  “The kid wasn’t a killer,” said Holliday. “He was a delivery boy.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “He was taking us to someone,” answered Holliday. “I intend to find out where and to whom.”

  20

  “I knew it,” said Holliday angrily. He was looking through the big Steiner military binoculars he had taken off the dead kid. He and Sister Meg were lying on the stony bluffs above the Bay at the Back of the Ocean, the rough, curving beach that ran along the western shore of Iona.

  He handed the binoculars to Meg, pointing and keeping his head low just in case someone was watching. It was still raining and they’d both given up any thought of drying out a long time ago. Drawn up on the beach itself was an old red-painted dory, its bow turned toward the flat, featureless ocean, the stern pulled up on the sand, a big old Mercury outboard flipped up on the transom.

  An unidentified man was huddled in the back of the boat, protected by a small tarpaulin that was probably meant for the motor. From their vantage point Holliday could see that the man in the dory was wearing a black windbreaker that was a mate to the one they’d taken off the body in the swamp. Presumably another employee of Blackhawk Security, which was something else to think about: Who the hell was Blackhawk Security and why were they trying to kill him?

  “Sean,” said Meg, surprise in her voice as she looked through the binoculars. “That’s the Mary Deare.”

  Holliday nodded, his jaw set in anger. “If Sean is his real name,” he said, looking out to sea. Without the binoculars the little ship was nothing more than an indistinct blob on the rain-filled horizon. With the Steiners he could make out individual patches of rust and primer paint on the hull. The Mary Deare was lying about a mile from shore anchored fore and aft, waiting. For what? The only logical answer was that O’Keefe’s old ship had left the little port on the east shore of Iona and come around to the west shore for a rendezvous with the red dory.

  The red dory, on the other hand, was waiting in the pouring rain for Ian Andrew Mitchell to arrive with his freshly captured prisoners. Somebody had it all neatly planned out. But why go to all the trouble? Why not simply wait until they returned to the ship on their own? It wasn’t as though they had anyplace else to go.

  “I don’t understand any of this,” said Meg, passing back the binoculars. Holliday took them from her and slipped them back into their case.

  “Somebody’s trying to stop us any way they can,” said Holliday. “Your boyfriend O’Keefe is working for whoever’s got us targeted. Odds are we were supposed to go back aboard the Mary Deare without anyone seeing us. Whoever was waiting on board would torture us to find out what we know and then drop us
into the ocean.”

  “Sean is not my boyfriend, and I find it hard to believe he’d do a thing like that,” said Meg.

  “You can have whatever the hell kind of fantasy you want,” said Holliday. “The harsh reality is sitting in that red dory wearing the same Blackhawk Security windbreaker as I am,” he added. “And he already has done a thing like that.”

  “All right,” answered Meg. “What are we supposed to do about your so-called harsh reality?”

  “Fake it,” said Holliday.

  They argued back and forth for five minutes and then Holliday and Meg stood up in full view and walked slowly down the shallow-sided dune below the higher bluff, Meg in the lead, Holliday close behind her. Seeing movement on the bluff, the man in the red dory looked up and peered into the gray curtain of rain. He stood, the tarpaulin around his shoulders, one hand shielding his eyes. Holliday and Meg reached the bottom of the sloping dune and walked toward the boat drawn up on the shore. As they walked both Meg and Holliday kept their heads down.

  “You promised you wouldn’t hurt him,” reminded Meg, keeping her voice low as they stepped toward the boat, their feet digging into the wet, gritty sand.

  “Not unless he tries to hurt me first,” said Holliday, wishing the nun would shut up and let him concentrate on the next few seconds.

  “You really are some kind of bastard,” said Meg bitterly.

  “Hey!” the man in the dory called out. “There was supposed to be two of them! Where’s the other one?!”

  Holliday and Meg kept on walking toward the boat. All he needed was another ten feet or so.

  “Hey!” the man in the dory yelled again. He swept back the tarpaulin and reached for the sling under his windbreaker. He was armed just like the first one.

  Holliday used his left arm to sweep Meg out of the way. She stumbled and fell to her knees. He fired the little Beretta .380 through the slit he’d made in the pocket of the windbreaker with the Swiss Army knife, trying for the left shoulder and arm, hoping to immobilize the shooter. The Beretta had an eight- round, single-stack magazine and one in the chamber, nine rounds in all. Holliday kept firing until the man fell down, dropping forward over the transom of the dory and flopping out of the boat and onto the beach. Any blood was invisible against the black of the windbreaker. The man was writhing on the sand, his left hand clutching his right elbow. He wouldn’t be signing any contracts for a while but he’d live if they got him to a hospital within the next half hour. Holliday had fired seven rounds and hit the man with four, one in the elbow, one in the meat of the upper arm and two in the shoulder. Three out of the four were through and through; the fourth was still lodged in his biceps. His face was pale and his teeth were chattering. He was going into shock.