Lost City of the Templars Read online

  “Such as?” Peggy asked.

  “We cross the river and find a way up the bluffs on the other side,” Holliday said. “There must be some crossing farther upriver.”

  “Shuar,” said Nenderu, shaking his old head. He and Tanaki spoke briefly, and then Tanaki translated for Holliday.

  “My grandfather said there are bands of Shuar on the other side. Very dangerous. They are headhunters and quick to anger. They have no lands of their own and steal from others to live.”

  “I thought the Shuars were only in Ecuador and Peru,” said Rafi.

  “This was true, and most have been ‘civilized’ by the white man, but some stay with the old ways, shrinking heads and eating marrow from cracked bones.”

  “Wonderful.” Peggy grimaced. “Head-shrinking cannibals.”

  “If I had a choice between Rogov and the cannibals, I’d take the cannibals every time,” Holliday replied. “Get the boats ready.”

  • • •

  Father Francisco Garibaldi arrived in Bartica and was pleased to see that the equipment he’d sent to Lord Grayle was ready and waiting for him, courtesy of White Horse Resources.

  At the rudimentary Bartica Airstrip, he found a man named Cyril Gomes, who owned a very old Cessna 185 Skywagon floatplane and was more than happy to take him anywhere he wanted to go. Gomes was dark and mostly bald, with a salt-and-pepper mustache and a face that looked as if it were made to be a mug shot. Garibaldi, dressed in full jungle gear, handed the Guyanese man a scrap of paper with the coordinates for Holliday’s last-known location.

  “This place, she’s in Brazil, you know?” cautioned Gomes.

  “I know.”

  “Going to cost you some more, man.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Maybe lots more.”

  “Whatever you want. Just get me there as soon as you can,” said Garibaldi.

  Gomes came up with a figure and Garibaldi paid him without hesitation, using the American dollars he’d converted at the hotel that morning. He stuffed his two duffel bags and the leather gun case through the cargo hatch, then climbed into the copilot’s seat while Gomes topped up the gas with a fifty-gallon drum and a hand pump.

  Garibaldi noticed that despite the aircraft’s age, it had a fully updated suite of avionics, including a Garmin GPS digital mapping screen, autopilot, digital weather radar and every other bell and whistle you could think of. Gomes climbed up into the pilot’s seat, hit the starter and gave the engine a moment to spool up.

  “You have a gun case, I saw.”

  “What of it?” Garibaldi replied.

  “Where you want to go is a preserve for the indios and the forest. Also it is illegal to bring weapons into Guyana.”

  “Are you trying to get more money, Gomes? You really think that’s the smart thing to try on someone who knows how to get guns into this kaka hole of jungle you call a country? Move your stink pokie, auntie man, and move it now.”

  Gomes stared at Garibaldi, utterly confused and equally afraid of this man who could suddenly speak Creole and who could look at him with such fury in his eyes. “Ah go di it, mon, right away, sure.” Without another word the Guyanese man hauled back on the throttle, and the little one-engine plane hurtled down the dirt strip. He slipped on his headphones and mumbled something incomprehensible into the microphone. Then at sixty-five miles per hour, Gomes hauled back on the yoke and the little plane jumped almost frantically into the air. As a pilot the nasty little man certainly left a lot to be desired.

  Gomes brought up the spindly landing gear into their slots on the floats, then slipped the Cessna to the west until he found the broad reaches of the Essequibo River. He turned due south before setting the Garmin GPS and the autopilot. According to the altimeter they were flying at three thousand feet, the river and the mangrove swamps on either bank of the endless snaking river nothing more than a blur.

  “We go like this for an hour, boss. That way we look like we’re running a tourist trip of fisherman to the tourist places. At least that’s what the radar at Boa Vista going to think. Then we drop down to five hundred feet like we’re landing and sneak over the border that way. Another forty minutes after that and we get you where you want to go, boss.”

  “Excellent.”

  They flew on in silence, Garibaldi lost in thought, preparing himself for the hunt that lay ahead. His orders from Grayle required him to find the exact location of the kimberlite pipe containing the diamonds and to assassinate Holliday and any other members of his party.

  His orders from the Vatican differed only slightly; when he’d discovered the kimberlite deposit, he was also to confirm the presence of the relics, and after killing Holliday he was to assassinate Grayle and as many of the members of the White Glove Society as he thought feasible.

  In his mind’s eye, Garibaldi kept on seeing the fleeting image of Archbishop Gilday, robes fluttering as he was tossed off the spiral staircase in the Vatican Museums. Not as far from the truth as most people thought, and much further from the truth than he’d ever imagined when he was ordained a priest.

  As Gomes promised, a little more than an hour after taking off he slipped on the headset, muttering into the microphone, then flipped off the autopilot. “I tell them we are going to land at Lethem on the Takutu River; it will look just so on their radar.” He pushed forward on the yoke and the plane swooped down until the jungle seemed to be stretching just under their wings like an endless, unrolling magic carpet. Flights of startled rainbow-colored birds took screeching, panic-stricken flight as the roaring of the engine invaded their domain in the rainforested canopy.

  “I am taking us a little south of the position you wanted. It is much easier for me to land upwind and against the current,” Gomes explained as Garibaldi glanced at the slightly veering compass bearing.

  “Fine.” The priest nodded, putting his hand into the right pocket of his Vietnam-era ripstop jungle jacket, wrapping his fingers around the small object there. Garibaldi spotted the widening course of the Xingu and a mile or two ahead he could see the green ledges and the cascades of the Garden of Babylon, just as Grayle had shown him in his copy of the Fawcett notebooks.

  Roughly ten minutes later Gomes brought the old floatplane down in the center of the river and slowed the engine so that it had just enough power to slowly cruise upriver toward the waterfall.

  “There is the place where your friends await you,” said Gomes, nodding toward a muddy beach two hundred yards away. He steered the Cessna toward the starboard bank.

  As he did so Garibaldi took the already prepared Biojector from the pocket of his jacket and jammed it against the pilot’s carotid. There was a hiss of CO2 as two hundred milligrams of Zemuron was injected into the man’s bloodstream. The drug, usually administered in much smaller doses, was a paralytic used in delicate surgery where mechanical breathing is required.

  Gomes was paralyzed instantly, and when Garibaldi pushed him out the pilot’s-side door, every muscle in his body had been immobilized, although he was still fully conscious. He slipped into the river, eyes staring and mouth wide open. Either the drug overdose would kill him, he would drown or something unpleasant in the river would eat him. Garibaldi didn’t care which. He had his escape plan and he had the plane. He took over the copilot’s controls and guided the aircraft to the muddy shore.

  14

  Reaching the other side of the Xingu and hiding their boats once again, Holliday and the others were astounded to discover a set of broad steps leading upward beside the cascading waterfall. The steps had been hidden from the eastern side by an overgrowth of brush and vines, but it was easy enough to cut through with their machetes. Beside the steps in a man-made V-shaped cut in the earth, logs, now rotted with age, had been placed in the ground. At the top of the steps, they found the rusted remains of an iron hand-cranked winch and a long rusted chain.

  “The crafty old devil,” said Rafi. “He never did follow the eastern trail from the falls; he came and made a port
age here with the winch.”

  “What about the steps?” Holliday asked. “Fawcett didn’t make them—that’s for sure—and neither did the Indians around here.”

  “The Templars?” Eddie suggested.

  Rafi cleared away a patch of moss at the top step, revealing a symbol carved deeply into the stone:

  “Looks like one of those doodles you made on your notebooks when you were a kid,” said Peggy. “There was usually a bunch of other doodles figuring out a neat logo using your initials.”

  “It’s the Phoenician symbol for Venus,” said Rafi.

  “You’re saying the Phoenicians were here before the Templars?” Holliday asked. “Is that possible?”

  “Why not?” Rafi shrugged. “The Phoenicians were the ones who invented celestial navigation, after all, so they had the skills to reach South America. They also had huge oceangoing ships, and bear in mind that it was the Phoenicians who built the original Temple for Solomon.”

  “So maybe it was the Phoenicians who sailed up the river first, built the steps … and Fawcett found them.”

  “There’s not a word about it in the journals, though,” Rafi said.

  “Secrets within secrets,” Holliday muttered, the truth finally dawning. “I don’t think anyone paid Percy Fawcett—I think he was a member of the White Gloves himself.”

  “But what about your famous Templars?” Eddie asked. “Why did they come here?”

  “The famous Santo Antonio de Padua, the Santo Ovidio de Braga and the Santo João de Deus. With their holds full of loot,” said Peggy. “I thought we dumped that theory.”

  “I’m starting to think it was the right one all along,” said Holliday. “The Templar ships came up the Xingu to take something away, not bring it. Something the Phoenicians had carried here almost three thousand years before the Templars even existed.”

  The theory was borne out three days later, after they’d made their way through the relentlessly noisy rain forest jungle on the eastern side of the Xingu River. Eddie’s eagle eye caught a strangely even disruption in the current about a mile above a set of steep rapids, and further investigation by Rafi identified it as a roadway just under the surface. The road went from one side of the river to the other and was thirty feet wide.

  “Amazing,” marveled Rafi, standing ankle-deep in the water. “The stone is quarried and each one is held together with a dovetail joint. There’s even an upstream cutwater beveled into the stone so the water flows evenly over it. This was meant to last.”

  “Phoenician again?” Holliday asked.

  “Without a doubt.” Rafi nodded. “The locals couldn’t have done this; they’re barely out of the Stone Age now, and their focus was always nature, not empire building.”

  “God bless ’em,” said Peggy under her breath. “The stones have evenly placed runnels carved into their upper surfaces, probably to keep some kind of wheeled cart or something steady as it crossed the river. What would you want a wheeled vehicle in the jungle for?”

  “I don’t even want to think about it,” said Holliday.

  “Neither do I,” said Rafi.

  “You think it’s the Ark of the Covenant, don’t you?” Peggy said.

  “Why did you have to say that?” Rafi asked with mock sadness. “It’s not what an archaeologist is supposed to think of. An archaeologist is supposed to be objective and not mix emotions in with his work.”

  “Bullshit,” said Peggy. “Why on earth would the Phoenicians, who had a religion with more gods and goddesses than the Egyptians, carry the Ark of the Covenant across an unknown ocean for a man who wasn’t even their own king?”

  “Money, of course,” called Rafi. He had walked out onto the road until he was midway across the river. “The Phoenicians were merchants above anything else.” He bent down and examined something at his feet, then pointed to the northeast. “There’s an arrow carved into the stone; I think I know exactly where they were going.”

  Holliday’s gaze followed Rafi’s pointing finger. In the distance, at least fifty or seventy-five miles away, a cliff-sided tabletop mountain thrust up out of the surrounding rain forest. A tepui as it was called in the ancient language here: “House of the Gods.”

  Roraima, Professor Challenger, The Lost World of Arthur Conan Doyle’s imagination, fueled by Percy Fawcett’s early expeditions. A place where prehistoric creatures still roamed, where giant dragonflies like Meganeuropsis permiana still thrived. “Sweet Jesus,” breathed Holliday. “It was all true.”

  • • •

  Cardinal Arturo Ruffino, attired in his favorite silk dressing gown, sat at the breakfast table in his luxury apartment looking down on the Piazza di Spagna, “the Spanish Steps,” while Vittorio Monti, his lover and the head of the Vatican Secret Service, wearing his boxer shorts and an undershirt, stood at the stove and made scrambled eggs and bacon to go with the cornetti and the strong Italian coffee already on the table.

  Ruffino folded his copy of La Repubblica and set the newspaper down beside his coffee. The two men had been lovers for many years, but the cardinal always felt a deep and very powerful sense of “rightness” to their relationship. It defied the Holy Father, it defied the doctrines of the Church, it defied the holy scriptures and it defied God, but between them, two men supposedly given the gift of free will, it was the way the cardinal wanted to feel.

  There was more intimacy for him in his moments with Vittorio, even simple, innocent moments like this, than he had ever felt receiving or giving the Sacrament. Even thinking such a thing would send him to the innermost circle of hell and damnation, but at this stage in his life he wasn’t sure he believed in the hell and brimstone of Revelation any more than he believed in Jesus’ Paradise with its many mansions.

  Sometimes hell was a mansion like the Vatican, disposed to the most sordid conspiracies, betrayals and even murders, and sometimes paradise was breakfast with Vittorio.

  In the end, of course, it was the cardinal who destroyed his small paradise. He watched as the priest lifted the eggs onto waiting plates, added generous portions of bacon and then sat down. Monti poured more coffee for them both, then tore a flaky cornetto in half and slathered each piece with butter and the tart fig balsamic jam both men enjoyed so much.

  “How bad is it?” Ruffino asked.

  “Worse than we could have imagined,” answered Monti.

  “Who?”

  “Just about all of them,” the head of the Vatican Secret Service responded. He chewed on a piece of the Italian-made croissant, then gently licked a spot of jam from the corner of his mouth. Ruffino found the action almost violently erotic, but he pulled his mind back from prurience and back into the more perfidious world of Vatican finances.

  “Neri, Abanndando, the fat little archbishop who plays the stock market too much for his own good, Mancini, who’s up to his neck in it. Even Lamberto. The only way for them to recover is to pray that White Horse completes the dam so the diamond and mineral holdings can be used on all the alluvial soil exposed by the draining of all the tributaries to the river.”

  “As chairman of the bank, you would think, Lamberto might have learned his lesson after the Assassini hung Roberto Calvi from Blackfriars Bridge.”

  “I don’t think a wholesale lynching from the Ponte Sisto would be useful. The Holy Father would never live it down.” Monti smiled, putting more jam on his cornetto.

  “What about your man tracking Holliday?”

  “The miniature GPS tracker we implanted while he was at Ramstein is working perfectly,” said Monti. “Our man as you call him knows exactly where he is.”

  “When the time comes will he be able to do the job?” Ruffino asked.

  The innocent, angelic look of his friend and lover lifted for a moment and the cardinal saw something else for a fleeting instant.

  “He would put a bullet through the Holy Father’s brain if I ordered it.”

  • • •

  Francisco Garibaldi checked the signal coming from Holliday, t
hen referred to the waterproof topographic map in his hand. He looked up again, nodded to himself, then took the satellite phone out of its holster. “I know where they’re going. Send the help you offered to coordinates twenty-six-nine by thirty-four-seven for pickup. I should be there in an hour.”

  15

  Holliday stood at the foot of the enormous cliff and stared upward. The top of the tepui was at least a mile above him, and there was only vegetation clinging to the mountain wall for the first two or three hundred feet. Beyond that it was an unclimbable fortress.

  “Why wasn’t there a word about this place in Fawcett’s notebooks?” Rafi asked, astonished.

  “That is easy enough to answer,” said Eddie, staring up at the mountain. “He did not want anyone who read them to know that this was his final destination.”

  “I presume there’s a way up to the top,” said Peggy.

  “There is,” said Tanaki. “But I cannot take you.”

  “Why not?” Holliday asked.

  “This is the Montanha de Deus, the Mountain of God. It is taboo to our people. My grandfather and I will show you the cave and la Garganta do Diablo. From there you must find your own way.”

  “La Garganta do Diablo?” Peggy asked.

  “The Devil’s Throat,” translated Tanaki.

  “What on earth is that?” Rafi asked.

  “You will see, I am afraid,” the Indian replied ominously.

  The tepui was enormous, not only in height but also in its circumference. According to Tanaki it was almost thirty miles around—an upthrust of Precambrian quartzite more than three billion years old. The only fossils it contained were single-celled entities and single proteins. The stone they were walking past literally represented life at the very beginning of life, and had seen a billion species come and go. The tepuis had been here before the oldest organism climbed out of the primordial ooze, and even predated the ooze itself.

  It took more than another hour of trekking around the perimeter on the mountain before they reached the entrance to a cavern unlike any of them had ever seen before.

  “Caca Santa!” Eddie breathed.