The Templar throne t-3 Page 6

  The boat slipped under the bridge and continued downstream, the immense looming fortress of Prague Castle on the high bluff on the far side of the river to their left, with the Lesser Town laid out below it. They rounded a bend, making their way through a near traffic jam of tour boats and sport fishermen, and then went under the low gray span of the Cechuv Bridge.

  "Just exactly where are we going?" Sister Meg asked. "Or is this some kind of mystery tour?"

  "No mystery," answered Holliday. "We're going to the train station without Cue Ball knowing where we're going. If he managed to follow us we'd know it. I was watching the gangway after we got on. He's not aboard."

  Stavice Island lies slightly off center in midriver about a mile downstream from the Lesser Town Bridge where they had embarked. Although awkwardly located, Stavice had been home to Prague's first professional hockey rink and grass tennis courts. The island was also where there had once been a series of dangerous rapids, now smoothed to a simple weir with no more than a three-foot drop and with a lock installed between the island and the nearside riverbank to make downstream navigation possible and as an aid to flood control, a perennial problem in the spring.

  Their tour boat entered the long lockway and waited for the enclosure to empty before the lock doors opened to let them through.

  "Come on," said Holliday. He grabbed Meg by the hand and pulled her over to the gunwale on the right-hand side of the boat, elbowing chattering passengers out of the way as he did so.

  "What are you doing!?" Meg yelped as Holliday quickly climbed up onto the broad steel gunwale. An older woman in a large floppy hat and enormous lime green sunglasses let out a squeaking shriek of alarm.

  "Getting off the boat," answered Holliday. He leaned out, grabbed an iron rung bolted into the stone wall of the lock and began to climb. Meg had no choice except to follow, acutely aware of the heavyset German in the Hawaiian shirt and his apple-dumpling wife who were getting a perfect view up her skirt.

  Using swear words she hadn't uttered since high school, she clambered up the iron ladder after Holliday. A furious-looking lockmaster came charging out of his little control booth yelling as Holliday hauled her up onto the walkway at the top of the ladder. He turned and yelled back at the man.

  "Policiye!" Holliday bellowed.

  Down in the lock the captain of the tour boat sounded his air horn. Confused, the lockmaster turned and ran back into his control booth to activate the big swing doors.

  "Run," said Holliday.

  They headed up a wide set of concrete stairs. At the top of the steps was a paved road, and on the far side a series of fenced-in clay tennis courts, all in use, the pock-pock hollow sound of tennis balls sounding like a metronome. Behind the open courts were the bloated science-fiction sausages of several canvas inflatable domes.

  "Where are we?" Meg asked.

  "Stavice Island. It's a big public sports complex."

  "Why here?"

  Holliday pointed to the left. Through a stand of trees Meg could see the approaches to a bridge.

  "That's Hlavkuv Most," said Holliday. "The Hlavek Bridge. Cross that and you're on Wilsonova, which is where the main Prague train station is. Satisfied?"

  "Wasn't there an easier way of getting here than by playing Tarzan?" Meg asked.

  "Just being careful," said Holliday. "When you're tailing someone you usually use more than one person. If there was a second tail on the boat we lost him, too."

  They began walking down the road toward the bridge.

  "Do you honestly think all this cloak-and-dagger stuff is necessary?" Meg asked, her tone sour. "It really does seem a little over the top, you know, climbing over walls into graveyards and jumping off boats. Bald spies skulking about looking suspicious. People following us halfway across Europe. Come on now, Colonel."

  "Come on, yourself," Holliday answered. "This ark you're looking for, how valuable would you say the contents are, if they exist?"

  "They'd be priceless, of course," she replied.

  "Right, and I've seen people killed for a lot less than 'priceless,' believe me, Sister."

  The Prague Hilton was located just off the multilaned, elevated Wilsonova on Porezni Street, only a block away from the river. It was a huge place with a glass-pyramid-enclosed atrium and everything a well-heeled international traveler could want. It took less than ten minutes for Holliday and his companion to reach the hotel from the island and half an hour more to shop for the things they needed, including a couple of small designer suitcases for their purchases.

  It was three in the afternoon by the time they finished, so they took a taxi for a short ride to the station. They picked up tickets in the new belowground station and then walked down the long concourse to the original Art Nouveau station, which had been turned into a large kavarna, or cafe.

  They sat in the big stained-glass-domed restaurant drinking excellent coffee and snacking on jam-filled palacinky, the Czech version of crepes. At four fifteen the early boarding call for sleeping car passengers on the through train to Venice via Vienna was called and they went back down the concourse to the main station and boarded.

  Neither Holliday nor Sister Meg had noticed the slight, neatly bearded man and his attractive companion seated on the concrete bench next to the waiting train, and they wouldn't have recognized them even if they had noticed, although Holliday had once seen them from a distance in front of a hotel on the Cote d'Azur more than a year ago.

  Like Cue Ball, the bearded man and the woman had been waiting outside the convent that morning and had followed them to the Vlatava restaurant as well. They'd seen Holliday and the nun do their little vanishing act and had watched, amused, as Cue Ball panicked.

  The man and the woman hadn't bothered to keep up their surveillance. The man had already correctly deduced Holliday's eventual destination and the woman concurred. They might go back to their hotel, but from the look on their faces it was clear that they'd discovered something in the gallery-convent, and it was equally clear that they'd assume that the airport at Ruzyne just outside the city would be under surveillance as well.

  The train station was the most likely answer. They'd arrived well before Holliday and Sister Meg, and they'd been behind them in the line when the ex-Ranger and the nun bought their tickets to Venice. They followed suit, purchasing a double berth two doors down from Holliday's compartment. The bearded man then bribed a porter to let him wait for the train to be called at trackside and they watched as the couple boarded the train.

  Calmly, Antonin Pesek, Father Thomas Brennan's chosen arm's-length assassin, and his Canadian wife, Daniella Kay, got up from the bench and stepped aboard themselves. A few minutes later amid a flurry of horns and clanging bells the lumbering overnight train to Venice left the station.

  9

  Venice stinks like an open sewer. Although rarely mentioned in the brochures, this is a simple, smelly fact of life in that otherwise beautiful city; household waste is flushed out with the tide every day, but some of the backwater canals remain stagnant and repulsive. Serenely beautiful Venice is not quite as romantic as it's cracked up to be.

  Holliday and Sister Meg arrived at the Venice Mestre train station on the mainland just after eight in the morning and took a double-decker commuter train to the Santa Lucia station on the far side of the Liberty Railway Bridge. The day was already blisteringly hot by the time they arrived and the vaporetto they hired had no canopy. By the time they reached their hotel Holliday had a flaming headache and Meg was showing the first flushed sign of sunburn.

  They booked two single rooms at the Rialto, the only hotel Holliday knew in Venice. He'd been to the city only once before, honeymooning with his late wife, Amy; married at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, where he'd been based at the time, honeymooned in Italy.

  They'd laughed when it had rained throughout their precious ten days-while Hawaii was having perfect weather-but they didn't really care. It had been hideously expensive fifteen years ago; it was a nightmare now.
Almost sixteen hundred dollars a night for two junior suites overlooking the Grand Canal and the Rialto Bridge for which the hotel was named, the only available accommodation in the hotel.

  But it was familiar and that was all that counted right now.

  "I can't afford a place like this," whispered Sister Meg, looking around the ornate marble and woodpaneled lobby. The floor was laid out in black and white marble squares like a chessboard and polished to a brilliant sheen. It made you want to take off your shoes.

  "Neither can I, at least not for long," Holliday whispered back. It wasn't entirely true, but Holliday wasn't about to reveal that he had access to the various Templar numbered accounts he'd discovered in Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Malta, and Cyprus.

  Their suites were side by side on the fifth and top floor of the pink stucco hotel; the decor was something out of a Merchant Ivory film with lots of dark furniture and gauzy curtains on four-poster beds blowing in the breeze coming in from the balcony, except for the fact that the arched doors leading to the narrow balcony were closed and the only breeze was coming from the air conditioner, which was set at arctic levels and was making Holliday's headache even worse.

  He pulled the heavy drapes closed, blotting out the view, and kicked off his shoes. Twenty minutes flat on his back with his eyes closed would fix him right up. He dropped down onto the gigantic bed and was sound asleep within seconds of his head hitting the soft down pillow.

  Holliday heard a faint knock on his door and opened his eyes. It was dark in the room and for a moment he was disoriented. Then he realized the drapes had been drawn shut.

  "Coming," he said groggily. He yawned, then stood up and half staggered to the door. Probably the nun wanting to rant at him about something. He yawned again and cracked open the door an inch. It was Sister Meg. She was dressed in jeans and a man's white shirt, although she'd kept on the idiotic head covering.

  "I was getting worried," she said.

  "About what?"

  "You."

  "Why?"

  "Do you have any idea what time it is?"

  Holliday glanced at his watch. Eight fifteen; that couldn't be right.

  "Eight?" He frowned. "Time for dinner?"

  "Breakfast. Eight in the morning. You've been asleep for almost twenty-four hours."

  "You're kidding."

  "I am not."

  Holliday stared at her for a moment, blinking away sleep.

  "Give me a few minutes," mumbled Holliday.

  "I'm going down to the dining room," she said. "I'll order you some coffee."

  "And an orange juice," added Holliday. "A big one." His mouth tasted like the bottom of a birdcage. His breath had to be atrocious.

  The nun nodded, still looking worried, and turned away. Holliday retreated into his suite and headed for the bathroom, stopping briefly to get his toothbrush and toothpaste out of his bag. He splashed water on his face and began brushing his teeth, staring at himself in the mirror. If he didn't know better he might have thought someone had drugged him, but in his heart he knew that it was simply age catching up to him.

  There was a scattering of gray at his temples now and his one good eye had dark circles beneath it. He didn't have a chicken neck yet, but the caliper lines around his mouth were getting deeper every year. You didn't fight as many battles as he had without bringing home a few scars, both on your body and in your heart.

  He had a brief flashing image of Helder Rodrigues, the Portuguese monk, dying in his arms in the rain on that tiny island in the Azores and then he thought about West Point and the classes he'd taught. A few years ago he'd wondered if he was going stale, and he was certainly bored with being off the battlefield; now he wasn't so sure.

  He'd left the Point almost a year ago, packing his life away into boxes that were now entombed in a self-storage locker in New York. He'd considered rebuilding his uncle's house in Fredonia, reduced to ashes shortly after his death, but in the end he felt the old wanderlust tugging at him.

  He'd spent part of his time in England but most of it half freezing to death in Edinburgh, rummaging through the Scottish National Archives. He'd rented a room in an old stone house on nearby Cowgate Street, run by a certain Mrs. McSeveney, although there was no sign that a Mr. McSeveney had ever lived there or existed at all. Mrs. McSeveney had a son named Tommy, unfortunately stricken with cerebral palsy and confined to the little house.

  In the evenings Mrs. McSeveney smoked unfiltered Players cigarettes, drank gin and watched reruns of Rab C. Nesbitt, an odd, dark, Scottish sitcom about an unemployed man who did his best to stay that way. Holliday often read to Tommy aloud, usually classic stories like Treasure Island and The Count of Monte Cristo. Tommy could barely speak, but by the gleam in his eyes and the tug of a smile on his face Holliday knew he was hanging on every word.

  Late in the spring, working at the archives, he'd stumbled onto the story of Jean de Saint- Clair and his dimly recorded voyage into the unknown. Holliday had traced the tale to Rosslyn in the Midlothians, seat of the Saint-Clair family for more than five hundred years, and from there he'd found his way to France. Then Prague, now Venice, and once again he found himself involved with a mystery, and by the looks of it, a dangerous one.

  He finished brushing his teeth, put on a fresh shirt and then headed down to the hotel restaurant. He spotted Sister Meg at a table on the far side of the room and joined her. As promised there was a silver carafe of coffee on the table and a large tulip glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. He took a long slug of the juice, poured himself a cup of coffee and sat back in his chair.

  "Sorry," he said. "I guess I'm getting too old for leaping off tour boats and catching night trains to Venice. I was truly pooped."

  "I was getting a little worried," said Meg. A waiter approached, gave a little bow and offered them enormous menus. There were about ten different egg dishes available. Holliday chose asparagi Florentine and Meg settled for cantaloupe and yogurt.

  The food arrived and they began to eat. The muted conversations of a few other hotel guests served as a vague, comfortable backdrop, like the bubbling of a passing stream, punctuated by occasional and discreet laugher; it was Venice, after all, not Sioux Falls, Iowa.

  "So what were you up to while I snoozed?" Holliday asked as he wolfed down the delicious meal.

  "Scouting the territory," said Sister Meg, carving a slice of melon into bite-sized pieces. "I found the archives. It took most of the day; this city is not big on signs."

  Holliday smiled faintly. He and Amy had spent most of their time in Venice getting lost. He never did get a real sense of the city; the narrow, badly numbered streets and winding canals made that almost impossible.

  "Is it far?" he asked.

  "Miles if you're walking. About a ten- minute ride in one of those vaporetto motorboat taxis. There's a canal that takes you within fifty feet of the front door."

  "Did you check it out?"

  She nodded. "It's open to the public during regular business hours. There are miles of stacks. It used to be a convent attached to the cathedral next door. It's all computerized apparently, and if what we're looking for isn't available in the original you can probably access it on microfilm. Everyone I talked to there spoke English."

  "Sounds good." He'd cleaned his plate, mopping up the last of the bechamel sauce with half an English muffin from the basket in front of them on the table. Sister Meg clearly didn't approve. Holliday poured himself a second cup of coffee and sat back in his chair, sighing with approval.

  "Tit for tat, Colonel. Tell me about this Zeno family we're digging for."

  Holliday gave the nun a magnanimous smile. "Not until you stop calling me Colonel. It's Doc, or John, or Holliday, or even hey you, but not Colonel. Not anymore. I'm retired."

  "All right… Doc."

  "Much better."

  "The Zeno family?"

  "Ah, yes, the mysterious Zenos. Mention of them usually refers to the Zeno brothers' map of the world, which they supposedly con
cocted in the late thirteen hundreds. The family was part of Venetian aristocracy and had the transportation franchise for bringing Christian knights to the Crusades. They basically leased ships to the Templars, who then provided captains and crew. There's some question of their origins; I suspect they were Greek or Turkish from the name. It means 'stranger' or 'foreigner.' It's where the term 'xenophobia' comes from. There's always been some question about the vanishing of the Templar fleet, but there's no mystery-the ships simply went back to the Zeno family."

  "What about this map?"

  "A lot of people think it's a fake, although why anyone would fake a map in the fourteenth century is beyond me. It's not as though they were trying to convince a king or a queen to send out an expedition like Columbus and Queen Isabella."

  "Do you think it's fake?"

  "Yes, but not for the reason most people do. The accepted view among historians is that the map is a preposterous hoax. I think it was a hoax that was concocted by later Templars to cover up rumors of the real Atlantic voyage made by Jean de Saint-Clair-John Sinclair, the knight in the tomb in the chapel where you and I met. Pure obfuscation. You start an argument among historians about the validity and provenance of the map and you stop right there and don't dig any deeper. It's sleight of hand, covering up one thing with another.

  "A map like that is exactly what you'd get if you were using an old-fashioned Jacob's Cross, the navigation instrument I told you about: a series of sightings showing foreshortened distances based on time spent at sea and no relative sizes of land masses-latitude without longitude."

  "I always get them mixed up, like stalactites and stalagmites."

  "Latitude are lines that go up and down; longitude goes left to right."

  "So the map is real?"

  "One like it. The biggest flaw most people give as proof that the Zeno map is a fake is the fact that the place names are wrong and some of the islands simply don't exist. I think the names were changed on the Zeno map and a few islands were drawn in to make the map look like a phony."