Templar Throne Read online

  “A what?”

  “Alain Charnier, Popeye Doyle. Gene Hackman, Fernando Rey.”

  The nun looked at him blankly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “The French Connection?”

  The nun shook her head. She was much too young, of course. Holliday sighed, suddenly acutely aware of the age difference between them.

  “It’s a scene in a famous movie. A French crook fools a cop into getting off a New York subway, then hopping back on at the last second.”

  “And we’re going to do the same thing?”

  “We’re going to try.”

  A minute later they moaned smoothly into the next station, Andel. The doors slid open and Holliday started counting softly to himself.

  “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi . . .” At fifteen the sleepy voice of the announcement was heard; at twenty the doors slid shut and the train moved off again. The same happened again at Karlovo namesti and Narodni trida, the next stations on the B line.

  “Get off at the next stop and walk forward on the platform and slightly away,” instructed Holliday. “When I say ‘go’ turn around and get back on the train as fast as you can.”

  The nun nodded silently. The train moved off.

  “You’ve done things like this before, haven’t you?” Sister Meg said quietly.

  “Once or twice,” admitted Holliday. A few moments later they pulled into the junction station at Mustek and the doors slid open. Holliday stepped out, putting his hand on Meg’s back and propelling her onto the platform ahead of him. The lower-level platform was as bland as the one at Smichov, a set of stairs leading up to a flyover to the escalators taking you up to the A line level. There was a line of plain oval pillars running down the center of the platform.

  Holliday started counting as they joined the herds of commuters heading toward the stairs, keeping his hand on Sister Meg’s back, guiding her toward one of the pillars and circling behind it briefly. He watched as cue ball head blundered forward toward the stairs, searching the crowd for any sign of Holliday and the nun. He reached the stairs then stopped, turning his head left and right, looking more and more panicked with each passing second.

  “Fourteen Mississippi, fifteen Mississippi . . .”

  The chime bonged its ding-dong-ding three-note refrain.

  “Go!” Holliday urged, pushing Meg back toward the waiting subway train. She gave him a single, over-the-shoulder nasty look then did as she was told. Holliday followed. Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of the bald man as the man spotted him. The fat man surged forward against the flow of the crowd as the announcer went through her recorded advisory. Meg stepped through the doors of the car ahead of the one they’d been traveling in with Holliday right behind her. Cue Ball didn’t stand a chance. The doors closed with the bald man lumbering forward, elbowing people out of the way. He was still ten feet away when the train began to move. He stood impotently on the other side of the doors as Holliday gave him a smile and a little finger-waggling wave, just the way the French crook had done in the movie.

  “Bye-bye,” Holliday said and grinned.

  They headed into the tunnel and disappeared.

  7

  Cardinal Secretary of State Antonio Niccolo Spada sat in the ornate carved oak throne behind his equally ornate fourteenth-century Spanish desk. Across from him Father Thomas Brennan, head of the Vatican Secret Service, Sodalitium Pianum, paced back and forth across the immense silk rug that covered the floor in Spada’s office.

  The cardinal’s workplace was located on the top floor of the Governatorato, the Vatican Civil Administration Building located directly behind St. Peter’s Basilica. The lavish fourth-floor corner office also looked out across the Viale Osservatorio to the San Pietro Monument and the walled enclosures of the Papal Gardens. Next to the Pope’s own audience chamber there was no more important place in the Vatican.

  The voice of God might well whisper orders directly into the Holy Father’s ear, but the orders were interpreted and carried out by Antonio Spada. The Pope was God’s emissary on Earth; Spada was His enforcer. The baker’s son from the village of Canneto di Caronia on the road to Messina had come a long way, and not just from Sicily.

  “I think it’s a mistake,” said Brennan, pacing. As he walked back and forth he puffed on his inevitable foul-smelling Macedonia cigarette, spilling a continuous shower of ash across the carpet, even though the cardinal had a conspicuously placed crystal ashtray on the desk for his guests.

  “Why?” Spada asked.

  “Because Holliday is too far above the horizon. He has friends in high places, he knows people.”

  The cardinal shrugged. “Accidents happen.”

  “Accidents that happen to men like Holliday are investigated,” argued Brennan.

  Spada allowed himself a small, knowing smile. “You’re frightened of this man.”

  “You’re bloody right I am, begging your pardon, Eminence,” Brennan said and nodded, continuing his pacing. “He’s dangerous. He upsets the balance of power, he interferes where he has no business.” Brennan paused. “Not to mention the fact that he’s caused a great deal of trouble for us in the past. And a great deal of money as well, I might add.”

  “All the more reason for us to rid ourselves of him now,” murmured the cardinal.

  “But why?” Brennan insisted. “He and the woman are looking for a box of relics that probably don’t even exist.” The priest eyed his superior. “Besides which the Church forbids the worship of such things. The twenty-fifth session of the Council of Trent, I believe. As are the purchase or sale of such relics.”

  “Don’t presume to teach me about Church dogma, Father Brennan,” the cardinal said coolly.

  “Then tell me why we’re interested in this so-called True Ark or whatever it is.”

  “A relic is as a relic does, Father Brennan,” said the cardinal obscurely.

  Brennan frowned. “You’ll have to explain that, I’m afraid,” said the priest.

  “The True Ark is said to contain the Holy Grail, the Crown of Thorns, the Holy Shroud, and the Ring of Christ.”

  “The fecking jackpot then,” snorted Brennan.

  “Nevertheless,” said Spada.

  “You can’t believe it’s true,” said Brennan, astounded.

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe, Father Brennan,” the cardinal answered. “Perception is everything. It’s like the story of the emperor’s new clothes: if enough people say the emperor is wearing silk, then he might just as well be wearing silk. If enough people say Paris Hilton is beautiful, then she is beautiful—even though it’s patently untrue. She’s far too skinny, she’s flatchested, her nose is too large and her ankles too small.” The secretary of state paused. “Whatever they find, we must have. That rag in the cathedral in Turin has been scientifically proven to be a fraud, but that doesn’t stop tens of thousands coming to see it.”

  “If they find anything,” grumbled Brennan. He butted his cigarette in the ashtray and lit another. Cardinal Spada let out a long-suffering sigh. He was tired of discussion. Why didn’t Brennan just do as he was told?

  “The best way to guarantee that they find nothing is to stop them looking,” the cardinal said. “Besides that, if what you told me earlier is true, then this man Holliday has been entrusted with the true secret of the Templars—the numbers for their bank accounts. A bonus, although the money rightfully belongs to the Church, anyway.”

  “If we do this thing we can’t have this coming back on us,” warned Brennan.

  “I understand that,” Cardinal Spada said and nodded. “Hire outside help if you wish.” The man in the scarlet skullcap stared across the desk. “Holliday is important, but remember who the woman is, as well.”

  “They’re in Prague. I know just the people.”

  “Then get on with it,” said Spada.

  It was a dismissal.

  Brennan left Spada’s office and went down two flights of ma
rble stairs to his own, much smaller office on the second floor. It was a plain square room with bare wooden floors, a metal desk, some black metal filing cabinets and a plain cross on the wall.

  The only other decoration was a photograph of his long-dead sister Mary, a Magdalene nun, standing in front of St. Finnbar’s in Cork City, smiling into the camera, squinting in the sunlight. The picture was from the late sixties, faded to sepia.

  She’d worked as a supervisor of the indentured girls at the Magdalene Laundry on Blarney Street, above the North Mall and the River Lee with its famous swans. She’d so loved to feed the swans. She’d imagined they were the souls and spirits of ugly girls come back to the world as something beautiful. She’d died of some terrible respiratory sickness a year after the photo was taken, coughing her lungs out and praying to a heedless god.

  The priest sat down at his desk, flipped through his old-fashioned Rolodex and came up with a number with a 420 prefix. He dialed and almost immediately the Vatican switchboard broke into the call. He gave the male operator the number, and then a name. There was a pause and then the double tone of the call ringing through in Prague. The phone rang three times and then was answered.

  “Prosim?” The voice was a slightly phlegmy baritone.

  “Pan Pesek? Antonin Pesek?”

  “I am Pesek,” said the voice. “Who are you?”

  “This is Romulus,” said Brennan, staring blankly at the photograph of his sister as he ordered the killing. “I have a job for you.”

  The Convent of St. Agnes of Bohemia is located on Milosrdnych Street in the Josefov, or Jewish Quarter, of Prague, the eleventh-century center of the original city that had grown on the banks of the Vltava River a thousand years before. The convent, now part of the National Gallery of Prague, was a collection of meticulously refurbished fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Gothic buildings centered around the old vaulted cloisters that now contain one of the finest collections of Baroque and Renaissance art in the world.

  Holliday and Sister Meg got off the Metro at the Namesti Republiky stop and climbed up into the sunlight. The square was crowded with tourists and local shoppers, and there was a festive feeling in the air. People were eating cotton candy and popcorn as they strolled along, talking and laughing. Uniformed cops walked in pairs, doing as much window-shopping as the people around them. There was a line out the door at McDonald’s.

  Holliday and the nun walked north up Avenue Revolucni, a wide thoroughfare noisy with rumbling street-cars and lined with shops of all kinds, interspersed with ATMs every hundred yards or so just to make sure you had lots of Czech crowns in your pocket.

  They turned west a block short of the river and took a shortcut through a government building parking lot to Rasnovka Alley, a narrow cobbled lane that led them down to the main entrance to the old convent. They paid their hundred and fifty koruna, roughly six dollars, and went into the thousand-year-old building.

  The cloisters that made up the gallery were almost empty, and except for an old man dozing on a bench and a young couple more interested in each other’s anatomy than the paintings on the wall, Holliday and Sister Meg had the place to themselves.

  “I came for the archives, not the art,” said Holliday. “Shouldn’t we be next door at the monastery?”

  “There’s something here I wanted to show you,” said the nun, eager excitement in her voice. “Something I remembered last night.” After their escape from their bald pursuer Holliday was willing to indulge her. The paintings, the religious statuary and the extraordinary carved wooden altarpieces were certainly worth looking at, even if they had nothing to do with their objective.

  They went up a narrow set of steps to the upper floor of the cloisters and down a long arched hall. Meg led Holliday to a large gilt-framed painting hanging on the plain, off-white plaster wall.

  A man in armor stood on the left, a veiled woman on his left wearing a cowl on her head, throwing her face into shadow, a long black gown obscuring her figure. The man was wearing a full-length chain mail hauberk that came down to his ankles. He had a long sword sheathed at his waist and an overshirt with the familiar Saint-Clair engrailed cross coat of arms, while his shield bore the red Maltese cross of the Templar order.

  The knight was holding what appeared to be a wooden engrailed cross in his free hand. Behind the two figures was a heraldic portrayal of a winged gold lion with a sword held in its right front paw and standing on a rippling blue field of water. In one corner, like the illustration from an ancient tarot card, six monks in their white habits prayed as they stood around a well. In the opposite corner of the painting was a stamped symbol of a heart with a cross in it.

  Sister Meg read the description of the painting on a small plinth next to it. “The Blessed Juliana With Her Protector, painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1427.” She stared up at the near life-sized figure of the woman in the painting. “She always appeared veiled so men wouldn’t be distracted by her great beauty,” said Sister Meg, awe clear in her voice. She turned to Holliday. “Does her protector remind you of anyone?”

  “It’s Jean de Saint-Clair,” said Holliday. “And that’s a Jacob’s Quadrant in his hand. The navigation instrument I told you about.”

  “Do you know the significance of the lion with the sword?” Sister Meg asked. “I couldn’t figure it out, or the six monks around the well.” She shrugged. “I even ran it through Google. There are lots of lions with swords but none that quite match up. The closest was the old imperial crest of Persia.”

  “I don’t know about the well and the monks but a golden lion with a sword standing on water is the coat of arms of Venice,” said Holliday. “It’s also a quadrant on the coat of arms on the Zeno family crest, the ship-builders who leased the Templars most of their fleet during the Crusades. According to this I’d say your Juliana and Jean de Saint-Clair went to Venice together, probably to rent a ship.”

  8

  They found a little terrace restaurant on the other side of the Jewish Quarter and sat at a shaded table out of the direct sunlight. The restaurant was called U Vltavy, probably because it was only a block from the river. They had an odd menu—part Mexican, part Austrian and part Czech. Sister Meg had gazpacho and some sort of pork dish with freshly ground horseradish, while Holliday settled on beef stroganoff with rice and some of the same horseradish. They ate in silence for a while, enjoying the summer warmth and watching the tourists go past.

  For some reason he didn’t quite understand, Holliday had always enjoyed Prague more than any other city in Europe, east or west, even during the Soviet era. The locals had a sense of humor and seemed innately curious about everyone and everything. They’d use any excuse to engage tourists in friendly conversation, and a favorite game on the subways was to trade language—a few words of Czech in exchange for a few words in English. There was even a television channel that showed nothing but English movies with Czech subtitles as a language teaching aid.

  Perhaps it had something to do with a few thousand years of being the western end of the Silk Road. With a few rare exceptions the city had been remarkably tolerant and welcoming to people of all races. It came as no surprise to Holliday that the Czechs were the first to rise up against the Soviet regime in 1989.

  Thinking about that year always brought a smile to his face. After seventy-odd years of Soviet hegemony and the Iron Curtain, it had all turned out to be smoke and mirrors. The vaunted power of the Soviet army with its thousands of tanks turned out to be invested in so many inert chunks of rusting, immobile steel, silent for want of enough gasoline to run them a hundred feet, let alone a thousand miles into the heart of NATO territory.

  The guidance systems in half their intercontinental ballistic missiles were years out of date, the people of Moscow were running out of toilet paper and the armed forces hadn’t been paid in a year. It was all a lie, and the United States’ supposedly all-knowing intelligence community hadn’t seen it coming. Not even close. It was just as much a crock as the Russia
ns’. Apparently you certainly could fool all of the people all of the time.

  “What are you smiling about?” Sister Meg asked, patting her lips with her napkin, her face pleasantly flushed by the fresh horseradish. His smile broadened; maybe that old paranoid story was true; maybe we never really did land astronauts on the moon; it was all a story cooked up on a back lot somewhere by Richard Nixon and his cronies.

  “Things never work out the way people think,” answered Holliday. “Reality gets in the way or something comes flying in from left field and upsets the applecart.”

  “Nice mixed metaphor,” the nun said and smiled.

  “There’s an old Jewish saying—Man plans, God laughs.”

  “You’re talking about the painting?” Sister Meg said.

  “It changes everything. It proves that Saint-Clair really did have the Quadrant and Lucas Cranach thought it was important.”

  “There’s nothing in the archives about the Blessed Juliana going to Venice; not a mention.”

  “Someone knew,” said Holliday. “Cranach must have known or he wouldn’t have painted them like that two hundred years after the fact.”

  “But how?” Sister Meg asked.

  “It’s not hard to figure out. Dig deeply enough into history and you can always find the degrees of separation between people. Cranach was a painter with a number of important patrons, including kings. Royalty during the Renaissance was a tight little group. Contemporaries boasted about their patronage. Cranach could have easily known a Venetian painter. Some of his early work looks a lot like Domenico Ghirlandaio, for instance. Maybe they shared stories looking for subject matter.” Holliday shrugged. “Maybe one of Ghirlandaio’s patrons was a member of the Zeno family. They were rich enough.”

  “So now you’re an art expert?”

  “Not really, but paintings were the Middle Ages equivalent of news footage or photographs. A lot of information about battles and tactics can be found on the walls of major art galleries.”