Hunt for the Holy Grail

by Preston W Child

  Olivia sat at her cubicle, trying to piece everything up until this moment together. The emails came from the only place in the state where someone would know the truth about the Templars. It was also the place where two people who knew about the secret lab in the Antarctic were.

  Peter and Ted Cooper.

  She hadn't seen or heard from Ted since their time on Frank Miller's ship. Ted Cooper had simply slipped out of her life as quietly as he had come.

  She shook her head. "No," she mumbled.

  Olivia opened her mailbox again shortly after eating lunch alone and got two more emails from the same address. She reasoned that if the sender wanted to hide, he'd have taken more precautions.

  "He wants me to find him," she murmured as she read the new emails. The two letters had come in within four hours of each other.

  This may be the last emails I send you, Ms. Newton. They follow me now, I think. They'd stop at nothing to get the Holy Grail. You have to stop them. Get the Grail.

  The second read:

  I won't last more tonight. They know. They will kill me, but I don't care. Don't care anymore.

  She took a cab home as dusk gathered and got off three blocks from her building. She missed her car, which lay under a black tarp in the local car pound behind the police quarters. She had lost her license shortly after the expedition.

  A sly wind blew across the street, and even though the street wasn't quite as deserted, shadows seemed longer, and sounds echoed abnormally. Olivia crossed the road when she was two buildings before hers. She passed a dark alley, and she thought she saw someone watching her from there.

  When she went by, there were a couple of men there, regulars on this side of town. They were homeless men loitering, getting ready to settle down in the corners in sleeping bags. She went on, relieved.

  As she went in through the street door, someone jumped into the shadows beside her building. The blood froze in her veins. She grabbed her bag and pulled out her cell phone.

  Tom Garcia answered the call on the second ring.

  "There is someone following me, Tom."

  "What?"

  A cop car rolled down the street. The hobos watched it as it went by, their cigarette smoke steamed from the shadows. A clothes store a block away was closing for the night, a woman talked animatedly in front of it with a girl holding a dog by its leash.

  The shadow was still in the alley by Olivia's building. And now the fellow seemed bent on being seen. Olivia tried to relax.

  "Olivia?" Tom was still on.

  "He's in the alley, Tom. He's watching me." Olivia started trembling when she saw something shiny catch the light, something the man held in his hand.

  "I think he's armed," she said, rooted to the spot on the steps.

  "Now I want you to go inside and lock the door, shut the windows, and pull the blinds," Tom instructed her. "I'll be there shortly."

  Olivia rushed in just as the figure of the man was coming out of the alley.

  4

  Sheriff Tom Garcia pulled up in his unmarked car, followed by two squad cars, their lights on and turning.

  Olivia went to the window when she heard the siren. She opened the door when Tom knocked. The sheriff told her two cops had gone ahead to check the alley.

  Tom Garcia went around the apartment. With his gun held up, he checked the kitchen, the room, and bathroom. When he came back, he asked Olivia to describe what she saw.

  “I didn’t see his face,” she said.

  Tom’s talkie hissed. “Sheriff, I think we’ve got something.”

  “Proceed carefully, Steve. I’m coming down now.” To Olivia he said, “Stay here, Steve’s found something.”

  —

  Two cops were at the head of the alley beside the building. They had both their torches and guns pointed in the alley. Tom joined them and asked what the situation was.

  “There’s someone back there behind the dumpster,” the cop called Steve said.

  A dog started barking somewhere on the other street.

  Tom Garcia looked around the street. A curious crowd had gathered; the hobos huddled together close by. Tom announced that he was the sheriff and that they should all stay away from the alley.

  “Come on,” he invited the other cops.

  But as they stepped into the semi-darkness of the alley, swallowed by the subterranean walls where the smell was so awful that Tom and the other cops coughed, the figure behind the dumpster rose suddenly.

  The man was big and tall. He was fast too.

  “Freeze!” Tom Garcia shouted.

  His voice bounced off the walls, careened down the alley, and so did the man. They watched as the figure scaled the wire fence that separated this side of the street and the other.

  And he was gone.

  —

  “I’m gonna leave two cops downstairs,” Tom Garcia told her as he drank black coffee that Olivia made.

  “You have nothing to worry about, I think we scared him away,” he added.

  “I think he had a gun, Tom.”

  Olivia was still wide-eyed. Her hands trembled, and her teeth chattered when she tried to sip from her cup of coffee. She wrapped herself up in a thick bed cover. Tom shut all the windows and dropped the blinds.

  “You don’t open the door for anyone who isn’t me, alright?”

  Olivia nodded.

  “You rest now.”

  “You too, Tom.”

  Tom gave a small beeper. “Press this button here if you notice anything strange or if he comes up here.”

  When he was gone and the locks were in place, Olivia thought that the sheriff was aging every day now.

  She turned off the lights, put away the dishes, and rechecked the locks. She checked the cop car on the street. It was there; cigarette smoke rose from the cop car. The hobos were still there, she could hear their murmuring. She cuddled with her cat and watched the room by the glare from her open computer.

  She waited, but there were no emails that night.

  —

  When she came down in the morning with microwaved hamburger and steaming espresso, the cops were there in the car, laughing.

  The cop named Steve was Italian with bushy brows, dark eyes, and a bristled chin that made him look darker than he was. The other cops at the wheel looked Irish. He talked through the corner of his mouth.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” they chorused.

  “How did you guys sleep?”

  “We didn’t.”

  They chuckled. The cops said they’d be there on the street again that night. But they weren’t.

  —

  Olivia didn’t go out to eat with Peter Williams, though she had promised the professor that she would love to see a movie and eat shrimps and ice cream at the Flying Deuces, a café Peter had been going on about.

  She had stayed up late at work, capitulated, and wrote the column on Matt Brolin. Helping her meet Emily Tozier was enough consideration. Cohen had been pleased with the column. Then she had gone down at about 8:00 pm. Again, Olivia mourned the absence of her car. She would have to talk to Tom about it.

  Again, the taxi dropped her off two blocks away. And once more, there was the nagging premonition that she was being followed. From up the street, she could see that the cop car was missing. That wily breeze was blowing as well, and the street whispered its own secret in the alleys.

  No cop cars rolled down the road. A few street people moseyed along on both sides of the street, lights from open shops wet the street.

  As she crossed the street, a man wearing a dark baseball cap, dark jacket and pants, and white shoes popped out from the back of a small car, a Ford Pinto. He had been crouching back there, waiting.

  Olivia started squeezing the small device that Tom Garcia had given her.

  She stopped walking.

  Her phone rang, and she answered.

  “Where are you, Olivia?”

  “He’s here, Tom.”

  “Stay in the open and make no conta
ct.”

  Sirens sang in the distance, and in minutes a cop car was cruising down the street. Olivia turned around and waved frantically.

  The man in the baseball cap broke into a run

  but the two cops were already jumping out of the car. As Olivia watched, she thought she saw another figure in the alley by the Ford. Olivia raised her hand to her mouth when she saw the hooded person pointed something at the men running down the street.

  She heard the cops call out, “Freeze!”

  There was a coughing sound, barely audible, and then a tiny flash from the man’s hand. She saw the man the cops were pursuing fall. Just then, another car pulled in behind Olivia. Tom Garcia jumped off the vehicle.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked her.

  “No, but I think the man is.”

  When Olivia looked in the alley again, there was no one there. She ran over to the place in time to see the dark shadow of the hooded guy jump over the fence and was gone.

  Tom said, “Stay back,” as she joined the two cops standing over the body that was now on the floor.

  “Olivia, you better come see this,” Tom called.

  Olivia scurried over. As she approached the body, she began to see that the man on the floor looked familiar. The outline of the jaw, the hair, and the way he lay on his back, moaning.

  The man’s flat cap had fallen off, and she could see the brown hair, the clean-shaven jaw, and those terrible lips.

  “Ted!?”

  “Yeah, I thought I’d seen his face somewhere too.”

  Olivia buckled, and her knees hit the concrete street. She touched the face, and Ted turned his head to her.

  Steve asked, “You know this man, boss?”

  The other cop said, “Someone shot him before we got to him.”

  Tom Garcia ordered the cops to check the alley for any presence, and the cops sauntered off.

  Ted Cooper was mumbling something. Blood pooled under his head. It seeped out of his right ear. His carotid was busted, blood spurted out of the exit hole under his neck, and every time Ted exhaled, gore splurged in the air.

  Olivia held back nausea that washed over her. Her head reeled with the new reality. The drama of the first harmless email from the man now dying before her unfurled. As if from a faraway place, she heard Tom’s voice over the police connection, requesting an ambulance. From the corner of her eyes, she saw the two cops trying to keep the street folks off the scene.

  The ambulance soon began wailing in the distance, that mischievous breeze was carrying the sound of it in and beyond.

  “Ted, hold on, please,” she sobbed. “Help is coming, you’re gonna be alright.”

  But she knew that was a lie. Olivia remembered the taste of that lie on her tongue because she had said it before to someone. And that man had died on the spot.

  Her tears were streaming down her face, onto her lips, where the salty taste of loss once left despair and depression in its wake.

  Ted Cooper suddenly grabbed Olivia’s hand; the eyes that were glazed moments ago now alive, boring into hers.

  “Find the Holy Grail, Olivia,” Ted hissed and gargled. “If they find it first, they will bring the apocalypse—”

  “Who are they?”

  Olivia's reporter sense quickly went into gear.

  “They hid it in the lab, in the Antarctic, they took it—”

  “Then they tried to cover their tracks,” she whispered.

  His eyes grabbed some of the light off the street, his pupils dilated, Ted Cooper’s hold tightened. He pulled Olivia even closer, and with the last of his strength, he gasped, “The Templars, they are back. And they are cleaning up relics from the world. They lost the Holy Grail last month; they want it back. The Half-face wants it back, it will give him power overall. They are everywhere, trust no one. They want the Holy Grail. You can stop them, Olivia—”

  Confused the more, Olivia pressed, “Who’s the Half-face?!”

  “He leads the Templars now. He is here, in Florida, and he's—” Ted’s body jerked twice, he twitched.

  Two holes smoked in his chest. Olivia looked up to see the cop named Steve standing over her, the dark tunnel of his gun’s silencer in her face.

  Ted Cooper had been reshot, right before the police and the crowd, by an officer of the law. Her feet suddenly gave, and she sat down on the floor just as Ted drew his last breath.

  Olivia’s mouth worked, but nothing came out as the killer cop escaped through the unsuspecting crowd.

  —

  Tom dropped her off. The sheriff would not let her out of his sight, and he would not allow any other cop to accompany her up to her apartment. Tom took the lead, so he saw it first.

  Olivia’s door was open.

  He put out his hand and pushed Olivia back. Tom Garcia pointed out his gun.

  “What Tom?”

  Olivia saw it too. She covered her mouth in shock.

  Tom went in, switched on the light, and said, “Shit.”

  The place looked like a tornado had gone through it.

  Her furniture had been punctured in places; tufts of soft mattresses were everywhere. Her table lay on its back, two of its legs were sticking out of the couch by the window. Her books had been torn and they littered the place.

  Olivia rushed past Tom. “Smokey! Smokey!” she cried.

  The cat wasn’t in the kitchen, where the utensils were all on the floor. Olivia's fridge was open, the light burned yellow on the floor, and her food was all in the sink.

  “Smokey!”

  She opened the oven below the stove; it was empty. She opened the cupboards. The cat wasn’t there.

  Tom went into the bedroom, his gun still raised, his eyes searched for the intruder.

  The cat was under her bed.

  “Olivia?”

  She barged into him as she came in. She bent down gently and picked up the brown cat and embraced it.

  “Oh God, thank goodness you are safe.”

  Tom put away his gun and called the station.

  “There’s been a 21R…” Tom grumbled on his radio.

  Olivia walked back into the living room, shivering. She put the cat down and turned the table around. Her computer was smashed, the CPU was broken, and her library of storage discs was missing.

  Hot tears threatened to break through, but she pushed them back. The damage in the bedroom was minimal. The intruder had only pulled her clothes down from the racks. The wall, back there, was scratched with something hard and pointy. She stared at the marks in wonder.

  Tom appeared behind her. “They were looking for something,” he observed.

  “The Holy Grail, that’s what they’re looking for.”

  Tom went back to the crackling radio, giving orders.

  “Can you manage tonight by yourself?” he asked her.

  Olivia picked up her cat that had come to her in the room. She looked around, pursed her lips, and nodded.

  “The house is open if you need to get away from here, Olivia.”

  “I’m gonna stay here.”

  When Tom left, a police officer Olivia had seen many times at the station knocked on the door. He was a big guy, about Tom Garcia’s age. The cop assured Olivia they’d have to go through him to get to her. Then he went down to the squad car in the street where another cop smoked.

  Olivia wished she had taken Tom’s offer.

  5

  The death of a Florida university professor appeared in a small column in the Miami Daily the next day. It had been written by an intern, a rock and roll character from the same institution. A funeral was scheduled for the following week.

  The paper said the university community was in shock. Olivia found the line itself amusing as she read the paper she had refused to even touch until Peter bought one off the stand on the street.

  Another thing of interest in the newspaper was that the chump, Matt Brolin, won the sweepstakes at the polls. He was going to congress a second time. And if he succeeded, the Democrats just might wi
n the presidency.

  Matt Brolin was a man to watch, Peter had said with a wily grin.

  Olivia found Peter’s enjoyment of partisan discussion cute.

  Peter slouched as usual. He wore a white shirt and red tie; his suit was slung over the back of the chair. He was headed for a faculty meeting when he left Olivia.

  “The family is taking Ted’s things from his apartment today,” he said.

  Curious, Olivia asked, “How about the police, aren’t they gonna check on it later?”

  “Why? It’s not a crime scene.”

  Olivia thought that was true. Still, she wished she could have a run at Ted’s apartment to see if there was something to corroborate his claims.

  “Such a mess, this thing.”

  “Do you believe him?” Olivia asked.

  Peter shrugged, he leaned forward, and cupped his plastic cup of espresso. “It doesn’t matter, Olivia. But if it gives you some consolation, Ted does not enjoy a sterling reputation among his peers. Present company included.”

  Olivia hadn’t touched her espresso all morning.

  Dark cloud masses hovered over downtown, the air tasted bland and humid. Even though Olivia hadn’t fancied Ted Cooper’s personality in the past, she resented Peter’s nonchalance.

  Peter was biting a dog that had bitten him.

  “What are you gonna do now?” he asked.

  “I’ll do my job.”

  “Which is?”

  Olivia stared strangely at him. Suddenly she wanted to hug this man. It was an awkward feeling that stemmed from a shaky foundation. She didn’t even know what she felt for him. But she wanted to cuddle with him now.

  Peter exuded nonchalance, a next-door guy aura. It would be a change from her humdrum life.

  “I mean, now you’re going to drop this thing and move on, right?”

  “Whatever that means, moving on.” Olivia rolled her eyes and gazed at a van with the head of Brolin printed on the side.

  The van stopped by a water hydrant. The driver wore a blue overall and baseball cap. Matt Brolin stared back at her with his white teeth, dimpled chin, an oval face with cerulean eyes.

  “Whatever Ted was mixed in, Olivia, I don’t want you getting involved in it.”