The Templar Conspiracy Page 21

  “I might have one more card to play,” Holliday said thoughtfully.

  “It better be an ace,” said Peggy.

  Kate Sinclair was over the mid-Atlantic on her way back to the United States for her son’s formal investiture as vice president when her companion’s satellite phone pinged insistently. Excusing himself, Mike Harris took the call. He listened for less than a minute and then ended the call.

  “Anything important?” Sinclair asked, smoking a cigarette and sipping a glass of her own red wine.

  “Pyx reporting in as you requested. He’s given everyone passports and Visa cards. The Visas have GPS locators under the hologram, just as he said. We can find them anytime we want.”

  “Good,” said the old woman. “I always knew bribing that man was a good idea. Knowing who’s looking for false IDs can be quite useful at times.”

  30

  Holliday and Peggy picked up their passports at the Canadian Embassy in Paris, took a cab to Charles de Gaulle Airport and arrived in New York twenty-three hours after boarding the TGV in Lyon. Surprisingly, everything had gone without a hitch. The passport officer at the embassy gave them smiles as he handed them their phony passports, the cab driver to Charles de Gaulle talked about how much he had enjoyed a recent trip to New York to visit his married sister in Brooklyn, and the food on the Air France jumbo was terrific. The security people at JFK barely gave them a second look even though they didn’t have any luggage, and they waved down a limo heading into the city on their first attempt. They booked two adjoining rooms at the newly refurbished Gramercy Park Hotel and by lunchtime they were in the Rose Bar, snacking on Kobe beef burgers with hand-cut fries and green tomatoes.

  “So who exactly is Max Kessler?” Peggy asked, dipping a fry into a blob of ketchup. “And why are we going to see him?”

  “He’s kind of like a shadow Henry Kissinger,” answered Holliday. “He was a geek before the word was invented. An information freak, a people collector, a scholar, a schmoozer. On top of that he’s been a private counsel and intelligence adviser to the last four presidents.”

  “I’ve never heard of him.” Peggy frowned. She popped the fry into her mouth and chewed appreciatively.

  “That’s the point,” said Holliday. “He’s like the phantom of the opera, always the behind-the-scenes guy.”

  “Why so secretive?”

  “I think it has something to do with his father.”

  “Who was his father?”

  “An SS Colonel, Rhinehard Gehlen’s executive assistant.”

  “You lost me. Rhinehard who?”

  “Gehlen. A Nazi spymaster in charge of their Soviet desk. He traded his information to the OSS in return for him and his family being brought to the States under Operation Paperclip. He worked for the CIA for decades. He went back to Germany and became head of West German Intelligence until the late seventies. Hugo Von Kessler stayed here along with his wife and his son. Max just carried on the family tradition. There are still whispers about Max’s access to secret information but nobody really cares as long as he comes up with the goods.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “We helped each other out a few times over the years,” said Holliday vaguely. “The point is, Max Kessler knows everything and everybody when it comes to the CIA and anything to do with intelligence. If Philpot’s playing us or Tritt is involved with some kind of plot he’ll know about it.”

  Max Kessler occupied what had once been Boris Karloff’s gloomy apartment on the sixth floor of the Dakota, overlooking Central Park. The building was famous for being the location used in Rosemary’s Baby and the place where John Lennon was assassinated.

  Kessler’s apartment had a living room, a dining room converted into an office, two bedrooms and an enormous kitchen. There were an awful lot of dark wood paneling, crystal chandeliers and heavy Victorian furniture that was brought over from England by the container load and sold as “important antiques” during the fifties and sixties. There were doilies and dusty-looking Persian carpets everywhere and bad paintings of horses and battles from forgotten wars on expensively papered walls. It could have been the home of somebody’s dowager aunt.

  Kessler looked like an undertaker. He greeted them at the door, wearing a three-piece, dark blue pinstripe suit, a blue-and-gold Harvard Law silk tie and expensive-looking, tasseled shoes. He wore round horn-rims balanced on a long nose that mimicked his overlong chin. The cheeks were a little sunken, and his forehead arched up into thinning steel gray hair swept straight back in shiny Prussian perfection. The eyes behind the glasses were like lumps of coal, and when he smiled a greeting it looked as though the slight movement of his thin lips would crack his entire face like a boiled egg.

  He led them into the small living room and gestured toward a sofa upholstered in black and yellow stripes that might have suited someone’s grandmother. He lowered himself into a tall-backed armchair upholstered in the same fabric, tenting his fingers like an old-fashioned schoolmaster surveying a roomful of students. Peggy suddenly realized the role he was playing: it was a combination of Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett doing Sherlock Holmes. When he spoke he even had a faintly British accent, when by rights it should have been German.

  “It has been some time, Colonel. I was rather surprised by your telephone call.” He smiled thinly. “Presumably it is a matter of some urgency.”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  “Before we begin, there is the matter of the telephone given to you by our mutual acquaintance Mr. Philpot.”

  “I took out the SIM card and the battery.” Holliday said.

  “A wise precaution. The use of GPS transponders in most telephones these days is a matter of some concern to me. It seems faintly Orwellian. A bit too 1984 for my tastes.”

  “What’s your take on Philpot?” Holliday asked, getting to the point.

  “He could easily be playing both sides.”

  “But both sides of what?” Peggy asked.

  “You were involved in that affair with Rex Deus and the Sinclair woman some time back, were you not, Colonel?”

  “I didn’t think it was common knowledge,” answered Holliday, surprised.

  “Common knowledge isn’t my stock-in-trade,” said Kessler, his voice dry.

  “What about Sinclair?” Holliday said.

  “A murdered Pope. A priest and his male lover found dead on a back road in suburban Virginia. Two dead Blackhawk Security operatives in an apparent fatal automobile accident in Rock Creek Park, but with a dozen bullet holes in the remains of the immolated vehicle. An assassinated vice president. A national warrant for your arrest in Italy; an incident at the Canadian border involving a man and woman who match your descriptions. An assassination attempt by an unknown terrorist group on a United States senator, a murdered photographer burned to death in his new Porsche, and finally a federal warrant here, which begs the question of how you returned to the United States without alerting the authorities. You and Ms. Blackstock have cut quite a swath in the past week, Colonel.”

  “You left out the part about being kidnapped and flown to an American black site in the Czech Republic,” said Peggy.

  “Ah yes, the melodramatic rescue by Pane Pesek and his little ninja crew. I didn’t think it was worth mentioning.”

  “Easy for you to say,” snorted Peggy.

  “I am a spider in a web, Ms. Blackstock. I stay in my little lair and morsels of information eventually make their way to me. Sometimes the morsels add up to a tasty meal; sometimes they do not.”

  “And in this case?” Holliday asked.

  “In this case they add up to Kate Sinclair, which in turn leads us to her Rex Deus compatriot in the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  “And who might that be?”

  “Michael P. Harris, deputy director of operations. The P stands for Pierce. He’s Kate Sinclair’s brother. As I said, crumbs of fact that sometimes go unnoticed.”

  “That could explain a great deal,” murmure
d Holliday, trying to piece it together.

  “Or nothing at all,” replied Kessler. He smiled. “In this case, however, it explains almost everything.”

  “Do tell,” said Peggy.

  “By this time, at least according to Mr. Philpot, you are aware of Madame Sinclair’s ambitions for her son, and thus for a Rex Deus hegemony in the United States. But Kate Sinclair needs more leverage. Having her son receive a flesh wound from a so-called terrorist and playing second lead in the White House isn’t good enough to push her agenda over the top. I would suggest that she needs a bigger bang, and she needs it to come soon.”

  “Who, what, where and when?” Holliday said. “Those are the missing crumbs, as you call them.”

  “The who is simple,” said Kessler. “Kate Sinclair can do nothing on her own and neither can her son—not that he has the sense. No. The who is definitely Mr. Harris. As to the rest—look for an event or a person, a time or a place where havoc would reap the most benefit. And look for it soon. Time is of the essence. It must come before our new vice president leaves the news cycle. Put Mr. Harris in such a place at such a time and you will have your answer.”

  “Any ideas?” Holliday asked.

  “One or two,” said Kessler, smiling thinly.

  PART FOUR

  FINALE

  31

  The Abbey School in Winter Falls predated the entire concept of tourism, and had been established in the early 1800s by a group of monks fleeing from the charred remains of what had once been the Petit Clairvaux Abbey in France. Over the previous centuries Petit Clairvaux had been ravaged by everything from plague and murderous kings to the destruction of the Templar Order, Napoleon Bonaparte’s distaste for the monastic life and organized religion in general, and finally by fire.

  The twelve remaining monks set sail for the new world, found an out-of-the-way spot in the forests of New Hampshire and settled down to a contemplative life and the making of cheese from sheep’s milk.

  Unfortunately the rich, smoky cheese they produced proved to be unpopular, and by the early 1900s St. Joseph’s Abbey transformed itself into a tuberculosis sanitarium and survived as such until most of the monks and their patients died during the deadly second wave of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918.

  In 1920 the Abbey transformed itself once again and became the Abbey School, a Catholic boarding school with the explicit mandate to produce priests and monks who would extend the Benedictine creed in America. That didn’t work any better than the sheep’s milk cheese, and in 1930, as Winter Falls itself became a popular summer retreat for the rich and powerful, the Abbey School, by now a sprawling compound of hundred-year-old buildings and more modern structures, opened its doors to the children of anyone with the means to pay the hefty tuition and boarding fees, regardless of race, creed or color—with the exception of members of the Negro race, the Chinese and above all members of the Jewish faith. It was, in fact, relentlessly male, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant for the next half a century.

  During those fifty years the Abbey School attained a certain level of prominence as a prep school where A-list celebrities, politicians and the superwealthy of nations around the world sent their not-quite-A-list sons. The school had a number of advantages: it stressed sports—or games, as the school called them—rather than academics; it was in out-of-the-way New Hampshire, which meant it was both difficult for the school’s privileged students to get into too much trouble with drugs, sex or alcohol, and it was distant enough to provide an excuse for parents not visiting except under the most extreme circumstances.

  By the sixties there was regular limo service from New York and Boston and there was floatplane service from both those cities for parents who couldn’t wait to see their sons ensconced behind the mossy granite wall that surrounded the old monastic compound.

  It was the perfect spot to send a World War Two naval hero and retired admiral’s son with a relentlessly B-plus average and utterly average SAT scores whose father wanted him to become president. Likable, handsome and with a great smile, but basically just an ordinary guy with a good haircut and great hockey skills.

  Hockey was the only thing he’d ever excelled at, beyond being heir to a billion-dollar oil fortune on his mother’s side. The game was, in the end, the real reason for his attendance at this fortieth reunion. More than his eventual graduation from the Abbey and his nudge-and-a-wink entrance into Yale, it had been his win over the Winter Falls Wolves as captain of the Abbey Argonauts and the winning of the coveted St. Joseph’s Cup that had been the proudest moment of his pre-presidential life. As Morrie Adler had once put it in a Charlie Rose interview, “It gave him the green light for the rest of his life.”

  In his heart of hearts he’d known it was the single thing that finally spurred him on to success; if he could win that game he could win anything. It was one of his biggest benders, too, as he got bombed out of his gourd on the foul crabapple moonshine Morrie Adler made in his hidden basement still, and compounded by Lucky Strikes rolled in Polaroid film emulsion, a dimethyltryptamine, acidlike high discovered by his cousin, Mickey Haines.

  Now, with his presidential library being built in San Diego, his $200,000-a-year pension, travel budget, office expenses, a decade’s worth of Secret Service protection and top-of-the-line health insurance coming out of the taxpayer’s pocket all ready to go and waiting for him at the end of his term in a year and a half, it only seemed right to cap it all off with a visit to the Abbey.

  The President of the United States thought about that while seated in the luxuriously appointed passenger’s compartment of Marine One as it droned across the late-afternoon Vermont sky on its way to Winter Falls. Beside him, Morrie was going over the most recent intelligence reports on the jihad slayings, trying to make sense of it all and coming up empty. Below them the snow-mantled forest stretched to the horizon. Morrie lit a Cohiba, took a deep drag and leaned back in the butter-soft leather armchair, a cut-crystal glass of 107-proof Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve on the rocks in the holder by his right hand.

  “You think Shannon O’Doyle will be at the game?” Morrie asked wistfully.

  “The Snow Queen?” The president laughed. Shannon O’Doyle had been the sexual fantasy of every boy at the Abbey and at Winter Falls High. Naturally ash blond and shy, her nylons made that terribly erotic whispering sound when she crossed her legs. “She’s probably a gray-haired old lady by now.”

  “So what?” Morrie replied. “Some dreams go on forever.” He smiled around the fat Cuban cigar. Those really were the good old days. “And, anyway, we’re gray-haired old men.”

  The president sighed. Why was it that it took so long to get where you were going but the time spent after arriving was so brief? It was the one real problem with the American Dream: inevitably you woke up. The helicopter rumbled onward over the trees and the president stared out the window, thinking about Shannon O’Doyle’s nylons and the shivering, dangerous sound of skates rushing on ice.

  “What are the odds this Kessler guy is right?” Peggy asked. They were sitting in the back booth at Gorman’s, overlooking the dock and the flat, bright white of the lake ice, turning gold now with the fading light of the winter sun. The iceboats were drawn up in a row, their sails furled, the roaring wind off the lake sending up a strange, cicadalike hum through their taut rigging.

  Holliday sipped his coffee and stared out the window at the bleak, frozen scene. In the summer the docks and the lake probably looked about their best at this time of day. “Pretty good,” he said, feeling as bleak as the frigid scenery. “He seemed pretty convincing.”

  “He sounded convincing in his living room at the Dakota in New York,” said Peggy. “Reality is a little different.” She lifted her shoulders. “It could just be coincidence. There’s nothing going on here, I swear.”

  “Kessler doesn’t believe in coincidence any more than I do,” answered Holliday. “He believes in synchronicity.” He put down the coffee and began to tick off points on his fi
ngers. “A president is coming to visit. Conveniently assigned to the event is Mike Harris, who’s also a direct relation of Kate Sinclair. The timing is right—these days it’s a short news cycle, and our new, distinguished vice president, Richard Pierce Sinclair, is soon to go off the radar. Winter Falls was voted the safest place in America, which makes it a perfect target. Easy to crack and shocking to see destroyed. If Sinclair and Rex Deus want to make a statement, this is the moment and this is the place.”

  “And if we’re wrong?”

  “Then we’re wrong and we look somewhere else. Nothing wasted.”

  “Except time,” muttered Peggy. “Time we could have spent elsewhere.”

  “JFK said something about assassination: ‘If anyone is crazy enough to want to kill a president of the United States, he can do it. All he must be prepared to do is give his life for the president’s.’”

  “What’s your point?”

  “This country has spent a trillion dollars on antiterrorism since 9/11 and yet we couldn’t stop a guy with a bomb in his crotch on a flight to Detroit. You just have to do your best. Nobody appointed us the president’s saviors; that’s what the damned Secret Service is for.”

  “And what if Kate Sinclair and Rex Deus have infiltrated the Secret Service? It’s not impossible, you know. She seems to have wormed her way into everything else in Washington. Why not the Presidential Detail?”

  “Does that make it our responsibility?” Holliday said.

  “Officially, no. Morally, maybe.”

  “I’m not the nation’s moral arbiter,” said Holliday, a note of bitterness in his voice.

  “Maybe you should be,” said Peggy. “We certainly need one. And even a voice in the wilderness eventually gets heard.”

  “Kessler’s given us a bit of an edge—believe me, Peg, he knows more than he’s telling. Max Kessler’s manipulated his way through every administration since Reagan. He wants us to be here. He knows something’s going to happen in Winter Falls tonight and he’s hoping we can stop it.”