Templar Throne Read online

  “You’re blushing,” said Holliday.

  “I most certainly am not!”

  “Could have fooled me, Sister.”

  “You’re a boor,” answered the nun.

  “But you’re still blushing.”

  “Go away!”

  “France is still a relatively free country,” said Holliday. “Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood . . . or in this case sisterhood. You go away first. I’ll follow you all the way back to Prague. The Czech Republic is a free country now, too.”

  “You’re insufferable!”

  “Maybe, but that doesn’t change the situation.” Holliday held up a placating hand. “Listen, Sister, let’s call a truce here. We both want the same thing. We’re both historians. I know why Saint-Clair was considered to be the greatest navigator of his time and you’re determined to find the True Ark. Why not share our knowledge, join forces?”

  “I’m not sure I want to join forces with a man like you. I don’t even like you.”

  “I’m hurt,” Holliday said and grinned. “But we don’t have to like each other to reach a common goal. We didn’t much like the Russians during World War Two, either, but they were still our allies.”

  “I barely know you.”

  “It’s a long drive to Prague,” answered Holliday. “Your rental car or mine?”

  4

  Most movies, books and television shows refer to Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters as being located in Langley, Virginia. Appropriately enough, however, there is no such place; Langley was simply the name given to the old woodlot estate purchased by the federal government for the CIA’s new offices back in the 1950s. The actual location is in the suburban district of McLean, Virginia.

  The original CIA campus is now half a century old and looks it. Even the “new” addition is heading into its fourth decade of use. The huge computers, once state-of-the-art and requiring their own power lines, could now be replaced by a no-name knockoff PC from Wal-Mart. The most common physical ailment at the CIA is food poisoning and the cafeteria has been cited for more food and hygiene violations than any other government food service operation in the Washington area. The workers there simply cannot learn to wash their hands after using the toilet facilities.

  The director of operations was in his seventh-floor office and regretting his choice of the hamburger platter at lunch. Joseph Patchin was a career CIA man and had been in the clandestine services for the better part of thirty years, serving in stations from Berlin to Kuwait. He spoke half a dozen languages fluently and could get by in half a dozen more. He was married and had three grown children he had barely spent any time at all with while they were growing up. His wife put up with him for the security of his large salary, his pension and the mortgage-free, equity-heavy house they owned in Chevy Chase. He knew that when a heart attack finally killed him, she was going to move to Florida. She’d had a regular string of lovers for the past twenty years and he hadn’t really cared for the last fifteen.

  There was a sharp double tap on his office door, like the sound of a professional killer giving his victim two to the back of the head. The fact that he thought in terms like that sometimes bothered him, but not too often. It came with the territory. He kept a bottle of expensive Johnny Walker Blue Label in one desk drawer and an old Ruger Single Six .22-caliber revolver in another desk drawer specifically for killing himself if it ever became necessary. He kept it loaded with long rifle mushroom bullets, which would turn his brains into frappuchino but which didn’t have the velocity to exit the skull and wouldn’t make a mess. That was the kind of person he was: always thinking about the other guy.

  “Come,” he said to the tap at the door.

  His DDO stepped into the room. Deputy Director of Operations Mike Harris had the seamed, squintyeyed face of a Charles Bronson and the lanky, shuffling body of a professional boxer. He looked like everybody’s idea of a bad guy and he played up to his looks, wearing rumpled suits and Peter Falk trench coats. He had a surprisingly smooth baritone voice that made him sound like Al Martino, the Johnny Fontane character in The Godfather.

  “You called?” Harris said, sitting down in the comfortable chair on the visitor’s side of his boss’s desk.

  “I did,” said Patchin. “What do you know about Rex Deus?”

  “They’re the ones who think they’re the direct descendants of Christ. Most of them are supposedly descended from the ancient kings of Europe or something. They’re supposed to be allied with those excommunicated anti-Semitic types who think all of those photographs of Auschwitz and Buchenwald were faked. Nut jobs, basically.”

  “What about domestically?” Patchin asked.

  “Here in the States?”

  “That’s what domestically usually means.”

  Patchin’s second in command shrugged. “I have no idea. Why?”

  “I’m hearing murmurs.”

  “What kind of murmurs?”

  “White House murmurs.”

  “About Catholic fringe groups?”

  “About people with a great deal of money and power. In the final analysis their religious affiliation is irrelevant.”

  “So what does it have to do with the Agency?” Harris asked.

  “More murmurs,” said Patchin obscurely.

  “About what?”

  “Little birds are telling me there is a Rex Deus mole in Operations.”

  “Dear God, not another mole hunt,” groaned Harris. “The last one had the whole place tied up in knots for years.”

  “The last one led us to Aldrich Ames,” answered Patchin dryly.

  “Except the Cold War is over now.”

  “This isn’t about war, hot or cold. This is about a power grab.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “For the moment you don’t have to. Just find the mole.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “According to my source our mole is interested in a pair of historians who are snooping in places they shouldn’t.”

  “Snooping for what?”

  “We’re not sure. Find out. Do we have any assets in Prague?”

  “Sure,” said Harris. “Why?”

  “Because that’s where they’re snooping next.”

  “So these historians are bait?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Who are they?”

  “One’s an ex-colonel in the Rangers who used to teach at West Point. The other’s a nun.”

  “Anything else I should know?”

  “We’re not the only ones interested in these two.”

  “Who else, the FBI?”

  “The Vatican,” answered Patchin.

  “Oh dear,” said Harris.

  Cardinal Antonio Niccolo Spada, Vatican Secretary of State, and like the Holy Father himself once the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, better known as the Holy Inquisition, sat on the private dining terrace of the Hotel Splendide Royal in Rome and looked out over the twinkling lights of the city. Spada was dressed in the red-buttoned “ordinary” cassock of a Catholic cardinal complete with its scarlet cummerbund, marking him as a Prince of the Church. He was a man in his mid-seventies, lean, dark and hard, betraying his Sicilian peasant heritage. The look was deceptive; Spada had a mind like a steel trap and a temper to match. Priests who crossed him, or caused him any kind of grief, usually found themselves trying to convert obscure Indian tribes somewhere up the Amazon.

  Across from him at the table was a dark- haired priest with heavy, gray-specked five o’clock shadow. He was known as Father Thomas Brennan, but Spada doubted that was really his name. Brennan was the head of Sodalitium Pianum, the organization that passed for the Vatican Secret Service. It had been initiated by the ultraconservative Pope Pius X before the First World War, and although officially disbanded in the early 1920s it still quietly went about its business, as much a watchdog of the Vatican’s own piety as an outside espionage agency. Brennan had been a fixture at the Holy See for years
and predated Spada’s own climb through the ranks by a decade or more. The pale, cadaverous Irishman was more than happy to play the simple priest while others wore the gaudy robes of state. Brennan’s power lay in his vast knowledge of the Vatican’s darkest secrets, not in his position within the Church.

  The cardinal sliced his bistecca all’ erbe with the precision of a surgeon, blood from the rare tenderloin leaking into his patate alla griglia. He tucked neat, small pieces of the expensive meat into his mouth, staring across the starched tablecloth in the five-star private dining room as he chewed, his pale blue eyes watching Brennan, always the Irish peasant plowing through a large serving of “bisna” polenta made with beans, sauerkraut, and onion. His breath would stink when the meal was over, but those sorts of niceties never bothered Brennan.

  “I gather you’ve had dealings with this man Holliday before,” said Cardinal Spada, taking a sip of Barolo from the generous tulip glass by his plate.

  “I have indeed, Your Eminence, and a right bastard he is.”

  “This involved the problem we were having with the bullion deposits, did it not?”

  “Yes. Earlier he was part of the situation regarding the Templars. Apparently his uncle had been part of their inner circle since before the Second World War.”

  “A longtime member, as I recall.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he present a problem?”

  “He is very resourceful and he has the power of the order behind him.”

  “The order doesn’t really exist. It hasn’t existed for more than seven hundred years,” argued the cardinal with an exasperated sigh. “The Order of the Temple of Jerusalem is a fantasy kept alive by a few old men and conspiracy theorists on the Internet.”

  Brennan shrugged. “Orders come and orders go, but assets remain. Money never disappears, it simply changes hands. Holliday has access to a great deal of power if he wishes to use it.”

  “Is he using it?” Spada asked.

  “It has come to our attention that Holliday has become involved with the political machinations of Rex Deus.”

  Spada laughed. He patted his lips with a starched napkin, his lips curving up in what passed for a smile.

  “It really is extraordinary how things take hold,” said the cardinal. “A man writes a silly novel based on the premise that a homosexual Italian artist from the sixteenth century would have the slightest interest in the concept of the divine feminine and would waste his time encoding obscure references to it in an obscure fresco in an even more obscure church in Milan. Da Vinci’s drawing of Vitruvian Man is just that—a man, not a woman. The idea is farcical but the book sold tens of millions of copies.”

  The cardinal shook his head. “Rex Deus and the idea that there is a family tree for Jesus Christ is just as silly as the plot for The Da Vinci Code, but people still believe it, just like Shirley MacLaine and her followers believing they’re all descendants of Cleopatra. Have you ever wondered why none of them find out that in a past life they were one of the slaves who built the pyramids? It’s always Cleopatra, or Napoleon, or Jesus, never the plumber from down the street. Rex Deus is like the Templars: wishful thinking.”

  Brennan shoveled another mouthful of food into his mouth, then washed it down with a slug of wine. He dug into the pocket of his jacket and took out a crumpled pack of Macedonia cigarettes, fished one out and lit it with a kitchen match he’d taken from his other pocket. He dropped the dead match into what was left of his polenta.

  “You may well be right, but the reality is that this man Holliday is capable of causing us a great deal of trouble.”

  “So what would you have me do? Sanction his murder?” The cardinal let out a barking laugh. “Unleash the Vatican’s secret army of albino monks on him?” The man in the red silk skullcap shook his head. “Assassination is bad for the Church’s image, especially with a German Pope occupying Peter’s throne.”

  “It’s not Peter’s throne that concerns me,” grunted Brennan.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Spada asked irritably.

  “Rex Deus is having a convocation of its members sometime later in the summer. Kate Sinclair is involved.”

  The cardinal suddenly looked concerned.

  “The senator’s mother?”

  “The presidential candidate’s mother,” corrected Brennan. “There’s a rumor about the True Ark going around. Sinclair’s looking for it.”

  “The True Ark is a myth.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “And Holliday?”

  “He’s one of the people looking for it.”

  “Hired by Sinclair?”

  “I have no idea, but we need to find out. If Holliday’s connections to the new Templars ever join forces with Rex Deus it could give us serious problems. Financial ones. Since the global economy took a turn for the worse the Vatican Bank has become stretched very thin. It can’t be allowed to be stretched any thinner.” Brennan took a deep drag on the cigarette. Below the terrace the sounds of heavy nighttime traffic could be heard.

  “What are you proposing?” Cardinal Spada asked.

  “Nothing more than a watching brief for now. Find out why Kate Sinclair is looking for a relic that probably doesn’t exist and find out what Holliday’s involvement is. Apparently he is on his way to Prague in the company of one of ours—a Clare Sister from the Agnes of Bohemia convent.”

  “What do we know about her?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Find out,” suggested Cardinal Spada.

  5

  They crossed the Czech border at Rozvadov. Before the Soviet Union fell apart, Rozvadov had been a gloomy place in the forest with a no- man’s-land of tree stumps, barbed wire, land mines and guard towers full of armed men. Now it was a modern waypoint with lines of bored truckers waiting for their bonded loads of Mercedes parts and beer to be passed through customs.

  As they were waved over the line after showing their passports, Holliday glanced to his left. The no-man’sland was still there, a healed gash like the path of a whirl-wind through the dark trees, but the stumps were gone and so was the barbed wire and the guard towers. It was like the old Civil War battlegrounds back home—rolling green sod. Picnic parks where the blood of thousands and sometimes tens of thousands had been spilled, and for what? Emancipation? Breaking the Southern cotton cartels? A difference of attitude? A hundred and fifty years later whatever it was didn’t really seem to matter anymore and the hundreds of thousands of soldiers were still just as dead and gone.

  He drove the big rental VW sedan through the pleasant rural countryside beyond the forest and thought about soldiers and wars and dying for your country. They’d asked him to pose for a recruiting poster once because he looked so romantic with his weathered, outdoor, Marlboro Man face, not to mention the rakish look of adventure the patch on his eye gave him. He turned them down because it was all a lie.

  The army wasn’t a ticket to travel and adventure and anyone with a brain in his head knew it. The army was a gamble. You got a free education if you wanted it, in return for the strong possibility of having your legs or your arms or your head blown off by an Iraqi or an Afghani or a Pakistani with a stick of dynamite, a RadioShack detonator, and a bag of rusty nails for a payload.

  The truth of it was most people who joined the army or the navy or the air force or the marines didn’t have a brain in their heads; they were too young and wet behind the ears. And they didn’t join up to protect their country or make the world safe for democracy—they joined up because they couldn’t get a job anywhere else, or they were trying to get away from something the way Holliday had been trying to get away from his drunk, abusive old man when he joined up.

  And there certainly wasn’t anything romantic about his eye, or lack of it. Like an idiot he’d been riding with his head up out of the hatch of a Humvee on a road outside Kabul, and like a forgetful idiot he hadn’t been wearing his protective goggles. A piece of gravel thrown up by the tires had scratched his cornea
and it became infected and eventually he’d lost the eye.

  “A penny for them,” said Sister Meg, sitting primly in the passenger seat, hands folded in her lap.

  “You don’t want to know,” said Holliday.

  “It’s still a hundred and fifty kilometers to Prague; we have to talk about something.”

  Holliday knew she was trying to be friendly but he wasn’t in the mood.

  “I was wondering why soldiers become soldiers,” he said finally. “And I couldn’t come up with one good reason.”

  “I expect it’s the same reason priests become priests and nuns become nuns,” answered Sister Meg instantly. “Because they believe in what they’re doing.”

  “Bull,” snapped Holliday coldly. “You’re talking about heroic gestures. Heroes are generally pretty stupid, in my experience. And on a battlefield the last thing you’re thinking about is belief in anything beyond your own immediate survival. If you’re thinking about anything other than pissing your own pants and saving your own skin maybe you’re thinking about the buddy you’re sharing your foxhole with, but that’s about it. In war the operative emotion is fear, believe me.”

  “You’re a very cynical man, Mr. Holliday.”

  “I’ve been in a lot more wars than you have, Sister. True believers and heroes make the worst soldiers. They take foolish unnecessary risks and they get people killed.”

  The red-haired nun gave him what was probably her most withering look.

  “If everyone thought that way there never would have been an American Revolution,” she argued. Her hands were balled into fists on her lap now and there were red, flushed circles on her cheeks.

  “And maybe there shouldn’t have been,” Holliday said and shrugged, beginning to enjoy baiting the young woman. “Canada became a nation on its own quite peacefully. They never had a crippling civil war and they abolished slavery thirty years before we did without killing more than half a million young men in the process.”