Hunt for the Holy Grail

by Preston W Child

  Olivia looked up and down the street. People were gathering across the road. Polizei cars shrilled in the distance.

  “Liam, where the fuck is you?!” Diggs bawled as he continued shooting at the assassins now trapped back in the restaurant.

  The team’s van careened out of an alley nearby. Diggs pushed Olivia. “Go, go, go!”

  The woman pulled away from Olivia and ran across the road. Olivia heard shots from behind her, and the woman fell in the middle of the road. Her little black box rolled away. Something bounced out of the box. It sparkled in the streetlight.

  Three men came out of the restaurant. Each had two guns, and they were shooting at the van.

  They were now back at the newspaper stand. The place was deserted. Diggs ducked behind the stand; from there, he continued to shoot. He got one of the assassins, and the other two jumped back beside the restaurant.

  Diggs looked around; wild eyes searched his surroundings.

  “Ma’am!” he called.

  Olivia peeped from behind an overturned old ice cream cart. “I’m here,” she hissed.

  The van's door slid open, and Miller was there. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here before the police show up!”

  Diggs carried Olivia, half running and walking, into the van, and they sped away.

  —

  Lin stowed his gun away.

  One of his men was dead in the trattoria, and another lay writhing in the street. The Asian walked up to that one, and picked his gun up off the dying man’s hand; he checked his pockets, found nothing. He put a bullet through the man’s head.

  People fled from the sound of the shot.

  A black van came down the street shortly. Lin and his surviving assassins entered it, and were gone.

  —

  12

  Father Andre took his disguise off; his false hair was attached to the flat cap. He shed the jackets—three of them had given him the bulk that gave him the look of an old geezer.

  Looking in the stained mirror in the bathroom of his hotel room, he could barely recognize himself too. He took out the fake teeth. It made a club in the toilet sink.

  After having his bath, he went into the room. He turned on the TV and turned off the light.

  The police had cordoned off the area from the Ospedale Santo Spirito to the Tre Pupazzi. They were saying on the news that the casualty had been three civilians and two gunmen of yet to be ascertained nationalities.

  Father Andre sat in the gloom, contemplative. He was bare-chested, his hair still wet. Father Andre sighed. He had underestimated the reach of the Templars and their cruelty. That happened all the time, underestimating people, that is.

  She had been wrong about the woman too.

  Andre recalled her face, the brown eyes, the strong jawline, and that long but thick neck. It was the neck of a stubborn woman. A woman with strong convictions who would never give up even though she was down.

  He would have to be more careful now.

  First he needed to rest, then he’d figure out his next move.

  —

  Tom Garcia was down in the department's engine room.

  Doug McCone, the tech guy for the Miami police department, named the small room in the basement after a Tarantino movie Engine Room. Tom hunched forward in his seat beside the nerdy cop. He was thirty, but he looked all of twelve, plus the acne.

  Doug wore huge glasses and lisped. His face was an infertile place lacking any hair except on the eyes.

  The computer screen was running matches of the figure coming out of an unused warehouse on Southwest 25th Avenue. It was registered to a company that had long gone into liquidation, Calco Calicos International.

  A different team was running a search into the company owner’s upstairs.

  Street cameras had picked up the side of the man’s face; he had gone into the warehouse approximately every day since the explosion in the Antarctic. Tom had gone through Olivia’s paper on that one.

  And two days ago, he had looked down the street for the first time. The camera had caught the top of his face as a truck without license plates stopped beside him.

  “Got it,” Doug quipped. “Boss, look at that face, did you ever think?”

  “Nope.”

  They were looking at the face of an Asian guy. Internal Affairs had him registered as Eiji Fumihiro. He had come into the US on a student Visa the previous month.

  “And geth whath?” Doug lisped. “He hath spenth mosth of hit time in Rome.”

  “He’s a Templar,” Tom mused.

  “And look at that, do you tee what he’s stuthing?”

  “Applied physics, my ass.”

  “It all makes sense, Sheriff.”

  “It does.”

  Tom went back to his office to make a long-distance call.

  —

  “They knew we were going to be there.” Diggs glared at Olivia. “They knew. How did that happen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Olivia was even more shaken than she thought. The image of the woman in the restaurant, with her black box, was stuck in her head. And then she had been killed.

  She looked at the men in the van. The thought that any one of them could have been killed in the street clammed her up.

  They could still hear the distant wail of the Roman Polizei ambulance.

  “Thank you, Diggs,” she said to the former agent.

  “We have to hope the cleric must have seen it was unsafe, and he bailed,” Miller said.

  Looking at the screen of his computers, Diggs murmured, “He was there.”

  Olivia frowned. “You saw him? How’d you know that?”

  The van turned a corner hard, and they all swayed. Diggs held Olivia as she fell forward. Miller glanced at the gesture and looked away.

  Olivia stared at the former CIA agent.

  “I do this all the time, ma’am,” he said, “It's my job to see what isn’t there—”

  “Whatever that means,” Liam quipped from the driver’s seat.

  Diggs sat in front of the computer.

  “Did you notice anything unusual? Anyone talk to you, or anyone who appeared abnormal?” Diggs asked.

  Olivia frowned. “There was an old man, he made me buy the evening papers, dragged me into the church—”

  “And?”

  “Then he just disappeared, in the church—”

  Diggs snapped his fingers. “That’s him, that’s your guy!”

  “But he was just a bum.”

  “No, he wanted you to think that,” Diggs argued. “He must have seen the Asian before you did.”

  “What Asian?” Olivia asked, more confused.

  “The assassin. He’s good, actually.”

  Everyone stared at Diggs now. Anabia asked her if the old man carried a package with him, a bag, anything he might keep the Holy Grail in.

  “No, just the papers,” she said.

  For the first time, Olivia was in a situation where her perception was being questioned. Her recollection of the past one hour was, at best, a movie rerun, and she was a bystander in all the scenes.

  “But I gotta give it to you, you were brave.” Diggs’ steely eyes searched hers. “Dragging that lady with you, that was something.”

  Olivia’s hands trembled, and she closed them together. She shook her head and closed her eyes. The woman’s mascara-blotched face flashed.

  “I couldn’t help her, Diggs.”

  “She panicked, that wasn’t your fault.”

  Everyone said that but she wasn’t sure anymore. She sighed.

  The van pulled into a side street. The team walked down the dark and narrow alley. Olivia asked herself if all the streets in Rome had to be so circumscribed. They turned onto another one; this alley was very dark with high buildings on both sides, and some of them seemed to lean dangerously. Touching the walls, she wondered how old this street was, and if Templars once marched through it on their way to holy crusades.

  There was nothing holy ab
out the Templars now.

  —

  The team settled for the night, but none slept. A lamp burned in the middle of the room. Grey peeling paint spouted dust every time the occupants at the top stamped on the floor. Diggs had brought the team to the house. It was old, he said, but it was a perfect place to hide. He had inherited it from his days in the field as an agent. The place was a safehouse for CIA agents during the cold war.

  Olivia shook some dust from the wooden ceiling from her hair.

  The men drank beer and listened to Rome as it slept slowly.

  Miller paced the room, and Olivia followed his steps with eyes filled with questions for the billionaire.

  “Why did you leave the Order?”

  Miller stopped pacing and glanced at Olivia. He looked at the others too. Anabia Nassif shrugged. “We all do things, and then we realize we are wrong, you know.”

  “What happened tonight is one of my reasons,” Miller said.

  “What is the Holy Grail?”

  “No one knows,” the billionaire said. “The only man who knows you may have met tonight.”

  “Is he like you too, the priest?”

  Miller looked at Olivia. “Yes.”

  “A Dissident.”

  “Dissi-what?” asked Anabia Nassif.

  Miller gestured at Lawrence Diggs. “And him too.”

  “Is that like an Order too, some kind of sects from a religion?”

  Diggs rose from the corner suddenly. He put a finger to his lips. “Shush,” he whispered.

  Olivia’s heart missed a beat, then it started thundering madly in her chest. They all froze. The only one moving was Diggs. A pistol had materialized in his hand. He went to the door and listened.

  Olivia heard it too when she was sitting against the wall. It sounded like someone was trying to pick the lock. When she turned to the door, she saw the knob turn, on its own, and the muzzle of Diggs’ gun touching it.

  Diggs had shown the team a groove on the floor when they came in earlier that night. He called it the emergency exit. It led down to the catacombs of the city’s underworld.

  He pointed at that groove, he made a fist, then he wore his five fingers.

  Olivia was on the move. They had five seconds to get to the groove in the floor.

  Miller rolled the carpet off and pulled the cover open, with as little noise as possible. The doorknob kept turning clockwise and anti-clockwise. Diggs took two magazines from somewhere on his body, he removed an old one from the gun, and drove a new one up the butt.

  He nodded at the team.

  Olivia went down the hole first, followed by Anabia Nassif, then Liam Murphy. When it was Miller’s turn, he signaled the former agent.

  Diggs withdrew from the door slowly. The knob stopped twisting. Diggs’ body tensed. He picked up his bag from the floor and dropped it into the hole. He gave Miller a thumbs-up, and the man disappeared down the hole.

  With his gun in one hand and a grenade in the other, the former agent gave the room one last affectionate look.

  “So long, baby,” he mumbled.

  As he dropped into the hole, he pulled his trigger twice and then threw two grenades in the room.

  —

  13

  The explosion ripped the door from its frame. The street shook under Diggs’ feet; the assassin was not caught by surprise, though.

  From the look of the house, Lin knew that it was a safe house. Which meant the American was either CIA or he had help from the agency. But Lin had to show the other that he was working.

  So, he had one of the stooges the Order sent to assist him, do it. Actually, three of them.

  He had taken cover under the awning of the next house.

  Covered in dust, he rushed into the rubble, gun and torch pointed everywhere. He found nothing but a broken bed.

  “Shit!”

  He had been sloppy again.

  —

  They were huddled under in an underground room. It was cold and dark. Olivia touched the stone walls, scraped her shoes on the floor. Roman soldiers marched through these alleyways thousands of years ago. They were about a mile from the safehouse.

  The wall here was older, reminiscent of history book pictures that Olivia had seen before. There were markings on it, religious symbols. They had come down dusty steps that looked like they hadn’t been used in a century.

  “What is he doing?”

  Diggs was setting up his rig. Miller was helping out.

  “Those guys could be coming down that hole as we speak,” Olivia queried. “Are you kidding me?”

  “How’d they know when to find us?” Diggs asked her. “First, that guy knew you were gonna be at that church, then they are back on our asses like what, thirty minutes later? Do they have a homing device on you?”

  “Makes sense, Olivia.” Anabia nodded.

  The others looked at her.

  Olivia looked back the way they came. There were noises back there. It sounded like someone dropped something in a pool of water. But it was just some audio illusion.

  “Are we gonna stay here or what? Is it safe here?”

  “It's not safe anywhere until we find out how they find us,” Diggs said.

  “And how are you gonna do that?”

  Diggs said, “Give me your cell phone, your cell phone, please.”

  He connected Olivia’s cell phone to a device that looked like a pager. The green screen lit up, and numbers flowed down the screen. The team huddled around the man and his gadget.

  The rumbling sound up top had stopped. But Miller kept looking back that way.

  Diggs returned Olivia’s cell phone to her.

  Liam Murphy asked, his voice acerbic, “Well, is the cell phone tapped or what?”

  Liam was trembling. Miller slapped him on the shoulder gently. “Cut it, Liam.” To Diggs he said, “Are you on her phone?”

  Diggs put his device in his bag.

  “It didn’t say, I don’t know. But I don’t think it's bugged.” Diggs took another device, like a pen, from his pocket. He ran the beeping end all over Olivia, the way the security fellows do at airport terminals.

  He put his pen away. “Neither is she bugged.”

  Liam paced, ruffled his sandy-colored hair.

  “What do we do now?” he asked.

  “Do you trust this guy, this priest?” Diggs asked Olivia.

  “I don’t know, I have never met him before.”

  “Then we hole up and wait for him to call you. When he does, you keep him on so I can track his location.”

  Olivia nodded without much conviction.

  —

  Lin watched the black dot that showed that Olivia was nearby. He listened on a device to her cell phone.

  No calls had come in.

  He would wait. The Holy Grail was even more important than the journalist, though he would very much like to drop her, and that American.

  “Keep me posted,” he said to the technician with the huge earphones.

  He took a walk down the street and entered a narrow pathway. He hated working in Rome. The alleys were so tight they barely fit around his broad shoulders.

  Lin went into a small guest house and paid for a room. It was just about five minutes from the operation. He’d get some sleep and be off when the technician called.

  —

  At midnight, the team was still waiting for the cleric to call. He didn’t.

  A little after midnight, Tom Garcia called.

  “Hey, I've been trying to reach you all night,” he gripped. “What’s going on out there?”

  “We just got shot all over Rome, Sheriff.”

  “I saw it on the news, a woman dead on the street and shit,” Tom said.

  “Is Betty alright?”

  “She’s pretty bad tonight, I just came from the hospital not long ago.”

  “I’m sorry, Tom.”

  “Yeah, I found your green sedan, it was registered to an Asian—”

  “Asian!?”

&
nbsp; “Wait, you met him?”

  Olivia glanced at Diggs, who was reading a weapons magazine. Sprawled before him was an open sack of strange equipment and his arsenal. He looked at Olivia with eyes that never smiled.

  “He killed the woman you saw on TV,” she said.

  “His name is Eiji Fumihiro, and he’s supposed to be studying applied physics up at the university, and not shooting people up in Rome. What do you need me to do for you?”

  Olivia repeated the name for the benefit of the CIA man.

  “Nothing, for now,” she said. “Give Betty my love.”

  And then she sent the sheriff a text: Lawrence Diggs, former CIA. Verify.

  —

  At 3:00 am, Olivia’s cell phone started ringing again. She had fallen asleep in the corner of the room. Diggs was staring at her in the middle of the room, where he had set up his small control center.

  He looked at Olivia sharply, she nodded, and Diggs waved her over. He stuck a black cord to the phone.

  “Go,” he whispered, and opened his laptop.

  Olivia hit the green icon on the screen of her phone.

  “Hello.”

  “I take it you are still alive.”

  “I was this close to losing my life,” she said in a tight voice, “and you didn’t show up.”

  “I had to make sure it is safe, as you can’t see, it was not.”

  “You were there?”

  Diggs twirled his finger in the air and mouthed, “Keep him on the line.”

  “Three people died tonight, Father, and we barely got away,” Olivia snapped. “I hope you say a prayer for them.”

  “The price of peace, Miss Newton. And I see you have capable hands helping you.”

  “What is the Grail, Father? What does it do?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Diggs raised three fingers in the air. “Three minutes,” his mouth contorted again.

  “What you need to know is, be careful—”

  “They have my friend, Father. Does that mean something to you?”

  “I called you first, didn’t I?” he said calmly. “The world is hanging in the balance. Your friend or the Grail.”

  “I need—”

  “Tomorrow, at 12:00 pm. Now listen attentively,” the Father said. “Hell is on the left, heaven is right, Corte Suprema Cassazione in the middle, you will find me in the heaven of the pagans, right.”