Sword of the Templars Read online

  “In March,” said Holliday.

  “That’s right,” said the elderly man.

  “That’s why we’re here,” said Holliday.

  “Ah,” nodded the old man. “You found the sword then. Well done, young fellow. Henry said you would, you know!”

  It was a long time since Holliday had been referred to as “young fellow.” He smiled.

  “You knew about the sword?” Peggy asked, surprised.

  “Of course I knew about the sword, young lady. I’ve known about it since Postmaster. Nineteen forty-one or thereabouts.”

  “Postmaster,” said Holliday, making the connection. “The photograph of you and Henry on the wall of his office.”

  “That’s right,” said Carr-Harris. “It was no great secret. Henry and I were working with that young Fleming lad in Naval Intelligence, the one who wrote all those dreadful penny dreadfuls.”

  “James Bond,” supplied Peggy.

  “Umm,” nodded Carr-Harris, polishing off his drink. He set the glass down on a small table beside his chair, then fumbled around in the pocket of his sweater and brought out a package of unfiltered cigarettes and a lighter. He lit one and took a deep drag, easing himself back into his chair.

  It was an odd sight; Holliday was used to seeing smokers in craven little huddles in their narrow ghettos outside of office buildings, not in mixed company, and he certainly wasn’t used to seeing smokers in their eighties. Carr-Harris was clearly a man from a different age and time.

  “What was Postmaster?” Peggy asked.

  “Like something from a Hornblower novel,” said Carr-Harris, chortling happily. “A cutting-out expedition.”

  Peggy frowned. “Cutting out what?”

  “A ship,” answered the old man. “An Italian liner called the Duchess of Aosta. We suspected her of being used as a mother ship for German U-boats. She was based on the island of Fernando Póo off the coast of Guinea in West Africa. I believe they call the island Bioko or some such now.”

  Holliday wondered what any of this had to do with the sword, but he kept silent and let the old man rummage in his memories.

  “The name Postmaster was something of a joke,” said Carr-Harris, puffing on his cigarette. “It’s what they call an undergraduate student at Merton College, and all of us were from Balliol. Silly. They were the ones who’d organized the whole thing, including Maid of Honour.”

  “Maid of Honour?” Peggy asked.

  “A Brixham trawler,” explained Carr-Harris. “Part of the Small Scale Raiding Force. Special Operations Executive, and all that lot. The sort of thing that Fleming and his sort thrived on, at least in the planning if not the execution.”

  “Leonard Guise and Donald Mitchie,” said Holliday, “the two other men with you and Uncle Henry in that photograph.”

  “That’s right.” Carr-Harris nodded. “At any rate the Duchess of Aosta was in Fernando Póo. Malabo, I believe the port is called. Filthy place. A swamp really. Anyway, the ship was there as well as a pair of German trawlers that were supposedly interned for the duration.

  “The main job was to take Maid of Honour into the port, put a line on the Duchess, and tow her off to Lagos down the coast. Henry and I went into the town to get the captain and the crew drunk while the rest of the crew hauled the ship away. What we were after were the codes of course, not the ship itself; that was a bonus.”

  “Codes?” Holliday asked.

  “Kurzsignalheft,” said Carr-Harris, “the German code books. We already had the Enigma by then, but the German Kriegsmarine had any number of codebooks and they kept on switching them. Cheeky lot. The Kurzsignalheft we managed to filch off the Duchess of Aosta were the first ones they had at Bletchley Park.”

  “The British cryptanalysis headquarters,” said Holliday, nodding.

  “That’s right,” said Carr-Harris. “They both worked there eventually, Guise and Mitchie. Ended up doing something frighteningly scientific with computers, I think.”

  “I really don’t see what this has to do with Grandpa Henry’s sword,” commented Peggy, clearly a little frustrated by the old professor’s roundabout tale.

  “Ah,” said Carr-Harris. “The letter.”

  “The letter?”

  “The Duchess of Aosta’s regular route was from Genoa to Argentina and back. It was in the mid-Atlantic on its return journey when war was declared and the shipping line ordered its vessels into neutral ports. In the case of the liner, that was Fernando Póo. One of the passengers on board was a man named Edmund Kiss, purportedly an archaeologist and a crony of Hitler’s. Kiss had been in Buenos Aires on behalf of the Nazis discussing some silliness about an Aryan race in Antarctica. We found the letter in one of the staterooms on the Boat Deck; Herr Kiss must have overlooked it when he disembarked.

  “He was a South American specialist, I believe, or described himself that way. The letter was from Hans Reinerth, Himmler’s so-called Director of German Prehistoric Studies, and mentioned another archaeologist, an Italian colleague named Amedeo Maiuri, and a sword he’d found during his excavations in Pompeii. Maiuri was convinced the sword was of Templar origins. Apparently Maiuri had talked about the sword with Mussolini himself, suggesting that it would be an ideal gift for Hitler on their next meeting. Henry was very excited by that bit.”

  “What was so exciting?” Holliday interjected.

  “I’m not entirely sure. The propaganda value, perhaps. Like Hitler’s supposed reliance on astrologers, or that utterly apocryphal story about his lack of testicles. There was some folderol in the letter that mentioned that the sword could well have been forged from the Spear of Destiny, the spear that pierced Christ’s side at the Crucifixion, and might have occult powers like the granting of eternal life.”

  Carr-Harris made a sound that might have been a laugh. “Clearly it didn’t work for Mr. Hitler.” The professor shrugged. “That was the first we ever heard of the sword. There were other rumors about it throughout the war, and then of course Henry and I discovered it when we were sent to Berchtesgaden.”

  “Did you ever meet a man named Broadbent when you were there?” Holliday asked, still searching for a connection between the two men.

  “Not that I recall,” said Carr-Harris.

  “Why would Grandpa keep the sword’s existence a secret?” Peggy asked.

  “And why all the sudden interest now?” Holliday added.

  “I’m not entirely sure,” mused Carr-Harris. “I do remember him swearing me to secrecy when we discovered it. Order of the New Templars. Black Shields and White Shields or some silliness like that. He seemed very serious about it.”

  The old man clambered to his feet and picked up his empty glass.

  “Drink?” he said, gesturing toward a simple wet bar on a table beneath one of the big lopsided windows to one side of the fireplace. There were half a dozen bottles of various liquors, a seltzer bottle, and several glasses.

  Holliday and Peggy both declined. Carr-Harris shuffled across the room and poured himself another whiskey, adding a noisy spritz of soda. He turned and headed back to his seat, the ash on his cigarette now dangerously long.

  The high-powered rifle bullet took the old man between the shoulder blades, exploding through his spine and bursting out of the center of his chest, blood spraying. His arms spread and the whiskey glass flew from his hand, his eyes already sightless as he fell. A heartbeat later the sound of the window breaking filled the room in a sudden, tinkling clatter, and then there was only silence.

  10

  They threw themselves onto the floor. In front of them the body of the old professor bled into the oval rug. A second shot entered through the already shattered window and thumped into the back of the couch. There was no other sound.

  Suppressor, thought Holliday. Maybe an M4A1 like they’d used in Iraq. Mean suckers. A big-bore rifle for special operations, dead silent, dead accurate, and just plain deadly.

  “Holliday?” Peggy said. Her voice was quiet and controlled. No panic. She’d taken her cameras into firefights before. She was waiting for some direction. There was a crash as another bullet smas
hed into the gun case on the far side of the room and another window blew out. A second shooter.

  “Stay down,” said Holliday. He crabbed to the left, pulling himself around to the far side of the couch. A steady flurry of shots stitched their way across the bookcases, shredding the spines of books and sending a confetti storm of paper into the air. Bullets struck the side of one of the picture frames on the wall, splintering it and sending the painting spinning into the air. The bottles on the bar suddenly exploded, and the smell of liquor filled the air. The room was being steadily and inexorably eviscerated in absolute silence. It was terrifying. It was meant to be. Holliday stared at the gun case.

  A bullet had hammered through the doorframe, exploding the lock and striking the stock of one of the standing rifles. It looked like an old Grulla Armas over and under shotgun from Spain. Several other weapons were still intact, including a Martini-Henry lever action dating back to World War I and a Lee-Enfield carbine.

  There was one pistol, a Broomhandle Mauser with a heavy box magazine and the lumpy-looking polished wood grip that gave the weapon its name. On the shelf beneath the semiautomatic there was a blue and gold box of Serbian Prvi Partizan custom 9-mm parabel lum ammunition. The same stuff the bad guys used in Kosovo. From the illustration on the box it looked as though the bullets were preloaded onto stripper clips. Another flurry of shots and the crashing of another window, this time on his right. Firing from three sides now.

  “What are you doing?” Peggy whispered, nervous now.

  “Thinking,” said Holliday. “Hang on.”

  “Doc? What’s going on?”

  He didn’t bother answering. Instead he closed his eyes and tried to visualize the property. The fireplace was behind him: south. There was an open flower garden and patio on that side separating the house from the screening trees. He could see the patio through the shattered window.

  The hallway they’d entered through was on his right: northeast. The oak-plank door, the side yard, and the car. Beyond the vehicles was the Dutch barn. No cover there, so that meant the shooter was in the trees. The window they’d fired through to hit the gun cabinet was on his left: west. The densest part of the windbreak and the closest to the house. Directly ahead of him there was an open archway leading into the old country kitchen. No windows that he could see, so no shot. Maybe a side door.

  He opened his eyes and lifted his head an inch or two. They were shooting from the trees and not from the roofs of any of the outbuildings. No possible high ground. The terrain dropped slightly toward the north, but not appreciably. The ballistics decreed that the trajectories of the bullets would be flat unless they were up in the trees, which he doubted.

  Holliday gritted his teeth in frustration. It had been a long time since he’d done this kind of thing for real. Too long. Old soldiers didn’t just fade away—they got rusty, as well.

  He forced himself to stay calm and concentrate. He was boxed in on three sides. The two shooters east and south would keep them pinned down in a crossfire while the guy in the northeast would come in and take the oak-plank entrance. They wouldn’t wait too long. Another minute or two and they’d be coming in the windows, blasting away.

  “Go to your right,” he called out. “Keep down. When you get beyond the couch, head for the archway and see if you can get into the kitchen. Wait for me.”

  “What then?”

  “Just do it.”

  He heard her begin to move. There was another barrage of silent shooting that tore into the walls and smashed into furniture. Holliday rolled sideways across the floor and finally banged into the gun cabinet. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Peggy scoot by.

  “Keep going!” he urged.

  He watched her go past through the archway into the kitchen, and then he reached up blindly until his fingers closed on the cold metal of the old Mauser. He pulled the gun down and then reached up and fumbled for the box of ammunition. He tore it open and pulled out one of the twenty-round clips.

  He retracted the bolt and felt it lock into place, then pushed in the clip from the top, loading the pistol like an old M1 Garand. The bullets clicked down against the magazine spring until the clip had fully loaded. He pulled out the empty strip and tossed it aside, then eased back the bolt. The gun was ready to fire. He jammed a couple of stripper clips into the pocket of his jacket, then lifted his head again, the Mauser gripped firmly in his right hand.

  “I’m in the kitchen!” Peggy called.

  “Coming,” said Holliday. He pushed up onto his hands and knees then sprinted for the archway into the kitchen. Too late. The oak-plank door at the end of the short hallway was thrown open on his right. A figure in hiking boots, jeans, and a dark green pullover surged into the hallway, a long-barreled weapon in his hand. Russian, a Bizon submachine gun with all the bells and whistles including a suppressor, a POSP sniper scope on the upper rail, and a sixty-four-round helical feed magazine slung under the barrel. Enough to start his own private war but clumsy to handle in the confines of the hallway.

  The man wasn’t wearing a vest. He raised the big assault rifle as he jumped forward, but the extra-long suppressor snagged a bookcase on his left, losing him half a second of response time. And his life. Holliday aimed center of mass and started squeezing the trigger on the old Mauser again and again at a range of about ten feet.

  The bullets punched into the man’s chest, the Mauser barking loudly. Six rounds, six hits, four more in the magazine. The man with the big assault rifle made a brief sighing noise and then toppled over. Holliday stepped forward and caught him, dropping the Mauser and taking the rifle out of the dead man’s unresponsive hands, feeling the corpse’s last rattling breath on his cheek. There was a tattoo on the inside of the dead man’s right wrist: a sword, its blade enclosed by a ribbonlike loop and surrounded by a band of runic letters.

  Holliday eased the body to the floor, then stepped forward and kicked the door shut. He walked backward, stepping over the dead man, the assault rifle locked and loaded in his arms. He bent down and picked up the Mauser, dropping it into his jacket pocket, then backed out of the hall and crouched down.

  Still three shooters, or only two now? There wasn’t a sound. However many men were still out there, they would have heard the unexpected, harsh report of the Mauser and they’d know that something was wrong. Holliday hefted the Bizon in his hands and smiled grimly to himself. Something was wrong, but not with him. Rusty maybe, but an old soldier armed to the teeth.

  “You okay?” he called to Peggy.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  He listened. Silence. “I’m coming in.”

  He scuttled forward in a crab walk and went through the wide, oak-truss archway. The kitchen was obviously very old. There was a huge fireplace of hand-cut stone and ballast bricks with a beehive oven to one side against the back wall. A massive maple cutting block stood on hand-hewn peg legs in the center of the room, with pots and implements hanging overhead as well as a forest of garlic and drying herbs.

  The ceiling was some dark wood, blackened with age, and the floor was made of pine planks, pegged, at least a foot wide. There was one small, deeply inset window to the left of the fireplace and very high on the wall, and a row of Victorian kitchen cabinets against one wall.

  Only the appliances were vaguely modern: a white-enameled refrigerator with a drum top from the forties and an older Aga gas cooker and range. No dishwasher. The counters were tarnished zinc. The sinks were galvanized metal.

  There was an oddly placed narrow door between the sinks and the window. It faced north, toward the trees that lined the lane leading to L’Espoir. There was a heavy ring of keys suspended from a spike hammered into the frame. Peggy was standing with a meat cleaver raised in her hand beside the maple chopping block. She stared at the assault rifle in Holliday’s hands.