Valley of the Templars ts-7 Read online

  The resultant still photo from the expatriate bar’s security cameras after the rousting of the bar owner by the Militaire Inlichtingen en Veiligheidsdienst, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service commonly known as the MIVD.

  After she’d compared it to the computer dossier, the still photo was the icing on the cake. Carrie plucked all the Post-its off her cubicle wall, rearranged them in order just to make sure, then put them into her personal shredder one by one. Then she turned to the telephone.

  “Tell him what you told me,” said Rufus Kingman, deputy director of operations. Kingman was the replacement for Mike Harris after that man’s defection to the dark side and his consequent dark and violent end in the bowels of central Africa. Kingman was a young man trying to be old school: dark suits, white shirts, ties with small knots and razor-cut hair. Joseph Patchin, director of operations, really was old school and he didn’t like Rufus Kingman one tiny little bit. On the other hand, Kingman’s father was a onetime White House chief of staff and a big stick in the Pallas Group and it never hurt to have a soft place to land when you finally pulled the rip cord on the civil service parachute. Pensions weren’t what they used to be, and his divorce was eating him alive.

  The young woman standing in front of him was young, pretty and dark-haired. She had the Irish good looks and long legs he’d found so attractive in his wife once upon a time, but he’d been married too long and was getting too old to care very much, which was a depressing thought all on its own.

  Apparently the young lady was an analyst out of the Western European Section, an area of the Company he rarely thought about and almost never visited. Her name, according to Kingman’s quick and dirty briefing over the telephone, was Carrie Pilkington.

  “Yes, Miss Pilkington?”

  The girl was very straightforward and spoke without hesitation. “Colonel John Holliday and his friend Eddie Cabrera are in Cuba. Cabrera’s older brother, Domingo, has disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Domingo Cabrera is a member of the Dirección de Inteligencia, or DI, and the bodyguard and driver for Deborah Castro Espin, Raul Castro’s eldest daughter.” Carrie Pilkington paused. “Both Holliday and Cabrera are traveling on forged passports.”

  “How sure are you of this information?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “We know Cabrera phoned from Ramstein and discovered that his brother had disappeared. We know Holliday was in Amsterdam at Darby’s expatriate bar and that he inquired after fresh documents. We know a document forger named Dirk Hartog was killed in his own workshop with his own nine-millimeter Walther PPK. Presumably he’d tried to cheat or otherwise betray Holliday and his friend.” The girl paused again. “Just before coming up here, I received confirmation from the RCMP’s Canadian Security Intelligence Service that two men answering the descriptions of Cabrera and Holliday boarded an Air Canada direct flight to Havana.”

  “Is that it?” Patchin asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Thank you for your input, Miss Pilkington.” It was a dismissal. The young woman smiled and turned with one of those pleasant little skirt flips some women’s hips can manage so easily and then she was gone. “Who’s head of analysis for the European Section?”

  “His his name is Compton, sir,” said Kingman, as though the question was beneath him.

  “Well, tell Compton to either fire her or transfer her because she’ll have his job in a few years.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Kingman.

  “That was a joke.”

  “Yes, sir, very amusing.”

  “Find out if the Cuban has settled in, would you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And tell Black I’d like to see him at his convenience.”

  “Yes, sir.” This time it was Kingman’s cue to leave and he did, leaving Patchin alone with his very unpleasant thoughts.

  10

  The Chullima Shipyards were located at the mouth of the Almendares River on the western side of Havana just past the swing bridge and close to where the Malecon breakwater and promenade ended.

  Eddie piloted the old Russian motorcycle across the swing bridge, then turned down the dirt track that led down to the sheds and wharves of the shipyards. He pulled to a stop in front of a tumbledown shed and switched off the key. It was noon and brutally hot and Holliday could feel the sweat trickling down his spine as he climbed out of the sidecar. The waterfront here was bustling and the snap of welding torches and the droning of industrial belt sanders filled the dusty air. There seemed to be a lot of laughter as men called back and forth to the tinny sound of Lady Gaga doing “Paparazzi” coming from a radio somewhere.

  “So, tell me about this man Arango,” said Holliday as they made their way down the boardwalk by the riverbank.

  “Montalvo Arango is a disgusting pig and a criminal,” answered Eddie, smiling broadly. “He stinks like an old fish—he drinks too much ron and smokes very cheap cigars. He is the true viejo hombre del mar, this man.” The Cuban paused and winked. “But he has a boat.”

  They found both the man and the boat at the far end of the shipyard, closest to the mouth of the river. In the distance Holliday could see half a dozen men fishing from the stony beach with hand lines and rods. According to Eddie, under Cuban law what they were doing was a crime for which they could be sent to prison, the arrest and imprisonment deferred if they handed over half their catch to the policeman who caught them.

  “Buenas tardes, Montalvo,” said Eddie. The man looked up from what he was doing. He could have been anything from seventy to a hundred and seventy. His eyelids drooped in folds over watery brown eyes and his mahogany-tanned narrow face was seamed and cut by wrinkles as deep as scars. The skin of his cheeks drooped over a bristly chin, and his neck had as many wattles as a turkey. The parts of his face not cracked and slashed by wrinkles were sprinkled with dark moles and warts from being in the bright sun for most of his life. The butt of a cigar hung wetly from his thin pursed lips. From what Holliday could see of his sideburns and the foliage sprouting from his flat, saucerlike ears, his hair was white. The top of his head was covered by a stained and ragged fedora that looked as if it came out of a thirties gangster movie.

  “Buenas tardes, Capitaine Cabrera,” said Arango. He took the cigar stub out of his mouth and hawked a dark, mucousy mass off the side of the wharf and into the water. It was the first time Holliday had ever heard Eddie being called by his military rank.

  “Qué pasa?” Eddie asked, although it was obvious what the old man was doing. Kneeling on the concrete boardwalk with a worn blade in his gnarled hand, he was gutting a fish that had to be five feet long, thick tendrils as long as eels hanging from its wide, rubbery mouth. Holliday had seen a documentary about this kind of creature—it was a wels catfish, probably introduced by some well-meaning Russian aquaculturist as a food source years before. At thirty pounds, they were a good source of protein, but let them get into the food chain and they could live for thirty years and reach lengths of nine feet and weights of over three hundred pounds. They were cannibals, happy to eat their own kind and also the occasional fisherman or swimmer who got too close.

  “Estoy limpieza de las tripas de este grande barbo repugnante ahora,” said the old man. His sun-bleached cotton pants and ancient, laceless sneakers were covered with blood and bits of flesh and his wifebeater undershirt was streaked like a butcher’s apron.

  He glanced at Holliday, his eyes squinting upward. “I catch at the river mouth this morning, when I am coming in from the sea,” he said in English. His voice was as rough as his cigar and his mouth was missing a few teeth here and there. He turned to Eddie. “Su amigo pirata hablaba nada de español?”

  “His pirate friend speaks enough Spanish to get by,” said Holliday.

  “Then we get along okay,” said the old man, and spit into the water again. As he gutted the fish he tossed the already flyblown trails of slimy offal into the water and then bega
n cutting the giant fish into large fist-sized pieces and throwing them into a pair of old foam coolers beside him. “Cebo,” he grunted. “Bait.” He nodded toward the boat clewed to the wharf a few yards behind him.

  The boat looked almost as old as Arango. Once upon a time the hull had been white with a light blue superstructure, but sometime in its life it had been painted deep blue fading up to gray. On the horizon she would disappear against the sea and the sky, and Holliday had a fairly good idea why.

  She was filthy, paint peeling everywhere. The stem was battered with its varnish worn off down to the bare wood from decades of turbulent passages, and the canvas sunshade on the flybridge above the cabin was gray and torn. To Holliday’s eye she looked to be about thirty-five or forty feet long and lay squat in the water as though she was bottom heavy. For a wooden boat of that weight, it was odd that the whole side of the hull for two feet above the waterline was so beaten up and scratched. That kind of wear and tear usually meant the boat was used to traveling at brutally high speeds. The name on her transom was in red picked out in black:

  TIBURON BLANCO

  Even his basic Spanish was good enough to translate that: White Shark.

  Arango sucked on his cigar, gave Eddie a look and picked up the first of the foam containers, the sinews on his wiry sun-blackened arms leaping out like stretched cables. He hauled the cooler back to the boat and heaved it over the gunwale and into the cockpit at the stern. Taking the hint, Eddie picked up the second bait box and followed suit.

  The old man straightened, arching his back. He took a long puff on the cigar, the pull making a dry, crackling sound. He looked up at the sky and blew the smoke upward. Lady Gaga had been replaced by Pittbull doing “Ay Chico.” Arango looked down at Eddie again. He hawked and this time the blob of nicotine-colored phlegm landed within an inch of Eddie’s feet.

  “Qué quieres, cabron? What you want with a poor old man like me?”

  Eddie took out a Romeo y Julieta Short Churchill he’d purchased at the hotel tobacconist’s and lit it with his old Zippo.

  “Because I want your boat, cabron—quiero alquilar su barco maldito, maldito el hombre de cerdo.”

  “How much you pay me? Dollars.”

  “How much do you want?” Holliday asked.

  “Two hundred a day.”

  “Fine.”

  “Three hundred?”

  “A hundred and fifty,” answered Holliday.

  “No, no, two hundred,” said Arango hastily.

  “Sí,” said Eddie.

  “Plus diesel.”

  “Sí.”

  “And food.”

  “Sí.”

  “Ron.”

  “One bottle a day.”

  “Cerveza, así.”

  “Fijado.”

  “And cigars like those?” Arango said, pointing a bony finger at the Short Churchill Eddie had just fired up.

  Eddie grinned, turned to Holliday and winked again. He turned back to Arango and handed him the already lit cigar. The old man carefully took the juicy stub of the cigar from his mouth, stuck a fat tongue on the end to make sure it was dead and stuck the thing behind his ear. He put the Churchill into his mouth, chewed happily and wiped his hand on his undershirt before extending it to Holliday. A little apprehensively Holliday shook the man’s hand, surprised at its strength.

  “We got a deal, American. You drive a hard bargain.”

  “Vete a la mierda, viejo. Let’s get aboard.”

  Oak Lawn Farm is a two-hundred-acre secluded estate at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains near Covesville, Virginia, and about a two-hour drive south of Washington, D.C. The home sits on a gentle knoll, surrounded by elegant hardwoods and ancient boxwoods overlooking pastoral and mountain views in every direction. The main house was constructed in 1780 and added onto throughout the 1800s. It has four bedrooms, two full bathrooms, a powder room, five working fireplaces, a country kitchen, an upstairs sun porch and greenhouse, a wraparound porch and a pergola on the main floor, a three-bedroom guest cottage and a smaller two-bedroom studio. The whole thing had been picked up by the CIA for $3.2 million. At most it is used three times a year, usually for high-level management conferences with allied agencies and the occasional off-the-books Fourth of July picnic or barbecue.

  William Black sat on the wooden bench under the two-hundred-year-old oak tree that had given the estate its name, and smoked a cigarette. He remembered his father telling him about the old OSS training school he’d gone to just before the Americans fell pell-mell into World War Two. He was with some woman other than his mother then, and not for the first time Will Black found himself thinking about the fact that children never really knew their parents, nor the parents their children. It was one of those timeless conundrums, like why is there war.

  He’d been in the States for five days now, all of them spent with dear Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein here at Oak Lawn. So far there hadn’t been any time to see his son, Gabriel, or even spend an hour with him at the school. Selman-Housein had to be encouraged for taking every small step closer to revealing what he knew, like an infant child being potty-trained. Not only was the task frustrating and time-consuming, but it was also boring.

  The MI6 officer sighed. Maybe Dick Cheney, bless his evil, black heart, had the best idea—pour water down the irritating bastard’s throat until he coughed up what you wanted him to tell you.

  So far the skittish and extremely irritating little Cuban had told Black, Kingman and the Pilkington girl they’d been lumbered with very little. According to Selman-Housein, Fidel was on his deathbed, but Castro had been on his deathbed ever since Juan Orta, a corrupt government official who often had lunch with El Comandante and his cronies, tried on six occasions to poison the Bearded One’s favorite midday meal, his perrito caliente—hot dogs. Black shook his head—hot dogs! The useless twaddle you learned working for MI6. Military intelligence indeed. Spying reduced to bureaucratic folderol and nitpicking.

  Black heard footsteps behind him and turned, expecting to see Kingman. It was Pilkington.

  “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t see you there. I came out for a smoke, as well.”

  “Feel free,” said Black, shifting down the bench. The young woman took out a package of Marlboros and shook one out. Black lit it with his father’s old World War One Imco foxhole lighter.

  She took a deep lungful of smoke and then blew it out gratefully. “Very politically incorrect of me, I know,” she said. “Drinking makes me dizzy, smoking pot is kind of boring after a while and I get sleepy reading Nicholas Sparks. I have no other vices.”

  “What about sex?” Black asked pleasantly.

  “I thought the Brits didn’t have sex,” she said.

  “Only members of the royal family,” answered Black. “Answer the question; I’m a professional interrogator. I’ll wheedle it out of you eventually.”

  “To be honest,” said the Pilkington girl, “I can’t remember.”

  “First rule of interrogation—when a person begins a sentence with the phrase ‘to be honest,’ it’s odds on she’s lying.”

  The Pilkington girl gave him a long look, took another drag on her cigarette and let it spin out of her nostrils. “He’s stalling,” she said finally, changing the subject abruptly.

  “Pardon?”

  “Selman-Housein. He’s stalling.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s no dummy. He’s been Castro’s doctor since the first stroke in 1989. You manage to stay on Fidel’s A team for twenty years, you’ve got to know how to shuck and jive if you want to survive. Know too many of El Comandante’s secrets and you usually wind up in a car accident, a plane crash or having a massive heart attack for no good reason. Get real close like Che did and you wind up with the boss sending you on a hopeless mission to Bolivia and then siccing the CIA on you.”

  “You know your history,” said Black.

  The pretty young woman shrugged. “I read a lot and I do my homework.”

  “So, why
did he defect?”

  “I don’t think he did,” she said quietly.

  “Then what’s he doing in a Virginia farmhouse eating chicken pot pie and apple brown Betty or whatever it is you Americans call bread pudding?”

  “I think he’s a messenger.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Black.

  “Think about it. The good doctor goes to conferences all over the world, all the time. Why now and why Ireland of all places? He was in Montreal a month and a half ago—it would have been a lot easier for him to defect from Canada, but he didn’t.”

  “All right, why now and why Ireland?”

  “The Dirección de Inteligencia has one of the best foreign intelligence operations in the world. They know who the CIA chiefs of station and the MI controllers are for each and every U.S. embassy and British embassy, as well. I think he defected in Ireland because of you, Mr. Black.”

  “Why on earth would he do a thing like that?”

  “Because I think it’s true. The DI in Havana probably has a file on you six inches thick. They know your mother was American, they know you have a special relationship with the agency and they knew if the doctor defected in Dublin you’d almost certainly rendition him to us, but he’d have MI6 as the middleman and he wouldn’t be ‘disappeared’ to some black site in Lithuania, pardon the pun.”

  “You really have done your homework,” said Black, impressed. “But it’s all a bit fanciful, don’t you think?”

  “Not really,” she said. She finished her cigarette and stubbed it out in the small glass ashtray between them on the bench. She took out another Marlboro and Black lit it for her.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Well, we knew that Holliday and Cabrera left Toronto for Havana—we have them on surveillance video from Pearson International. Backtracking from there, I found out they’d been staying at the Park Hyatt in downtown Toronto. Holliday made one telephone call of consequence while he was there setting up an appointment with a man named Steven Braintree, a professor of medeival studies at the University of Toronto. Braintree’s office is a hundred yards from the Park Hyatt, by the way.”