Christopher, Paul - Templar 08

by Lost City of the Templars (v5. 0)

  “Can this man Rogov be trusted?” asked Ruffino, the rotund Armani-suited Italian.

  “Of course not,” said Ducos. “But his evidence can.” Ducos picked up his worn leather dispatch case and put it on the table. He withdrew a heavy object swathed in a covering of black velvet, then opened the cloth. Gleaming on the cloth was an oblong ingot of gold eight inches long, three inches wide and an inch thick. Stamped crudely in the center of the ingot was a Templar Cross. “There is no doubt this comes from one of our three ships. From Rogov’s data, it was most likely the Santo Antonio de Padua, the smallest of the three.”

  “The other two reached their destination?” Sir Adrian asked.

  “According to Rogov, there is no sign of either the Santo Ovidio de Braga or the Santo João de Deus at the wreck sight. Both ships had a shallow enough draft to reach far up the Amazon, and both carried barges to get even farther. According to Mrs. Sinclair’s connections with American remote sensing satellite corporations, there is evidence that both ships did reach the Lost City.”

  “So let us go and retrieve what is ours.” Tancred the German master shrugged. “What is the problem? Frau Sinclair certainly has the resources in the area, and funding is certainly not a problem.”

  “The problem, I am afraid, is a dead monk named Helder Rodriguez and the potential involvement of his chosen acolyte, Lieutenant Colonel John Holliday.”

  “This man Holliday, he haunts us at every step,” said Tacred bitterly.

  “He has cost us a great deal of money, certainly,” said Ruffino.

  “He cost me a daughter and a son,” said Kate Sinclair. “I want him dead.”

  “We all share your pain, Madame Sinclair, and also your desire to see him dead. The question is, how do we accomplish such a goal?”

  “Perhaps my brother the cardinal can help us there.” Ruffino smiled, folding his hands across his ample belly.

  • • •

  In 1959, at the age of sixteen, Arturo Bonnifacio Ruffino, second son of Angelo Ruffino, one of the largest shoe manufacturers in Italy, made a momentous decision. He knew well enough that while he would have all the wealth he could ever desire, his brother, Antonio, would inherit the company now controlled by his father and, with it, the power.

  Although he didn’t have a religious bone in his body, Arturo knew that the next best place for him to gain the power, the desire for which was a constant need more addictive than any drug, almost certainly lay in the Church. With that in mind he enrolled in the archiepiscopal seminary of Milan that eventually and inevitably led him toward the Vatican.

  The inevitability of his destination was predictable; his father was already a good friend to the Church, and after his son was ordained that friendship became even stronger. By twenty-five Ruffino was secretary to a bishop, and by thirty-five he was a bishop himself, active on more than one powerful committee. By fifty he was Holy See representative for the Vatican at the United Nations.

  By fifty-eight he was elevated to cardinal and on the recent death of Cardinal Spada he was made the Vatican secretary of state. With the present Holy Father clearly ailing, there was only one final rung on the ladder. Along with the secretariat came the reins of Sodalitium Pianum, the Vatican Secret Service, its longtime director, Father Thomas Brennan, recently gone to his heavenly reward in less than godly circumstances in the middle of an at-home massage given by a therapist who also happened to be an assassin. His choice to replace Brennan was a priest named Vittorio Monti, a friend from his first days at the seminary and also his longtime sexual partner.

  Like Spada and Brennan before them, the two men rarely had confidential conversations in either man’s office. During his first few months as director of Sodalitium Pianum Monti, acting on Ruffino’s instructions, had tapped every important phone line and bugged every important office and conference room in the Vatican with an assortment of high-tech audio and video devices. The walls of the Holy See really did have eyes and ears.

  For totally private discussions the two men generally met early each day for prayer in the Sistine Chapel, four of Monti’s men scattered around the church to ensure that no one except Michelangelo’s God and all His saints were there to overhear them.

  “My brother has a request,” said the cardinal.

  “About this man Holliday you mentioned to me?” Monti asked.

  “Yes,” said Ruffino. “We’ve had a watcher on him since Brennan’s time. He also wants you to keep a close eye on Sir Adrian Grayle.”

  “And who is Grayle?”

  “A British industrialist who does a great deal of business in Brazil. My brother is financially involved with him. He has heard rumors that Grayle is up to no good.”

  The Secret Service director was not an ugly man, but he had a permanent and ungainly limp from a bout with childhood polio. Entering the seminary a year behind Ruffino, the slightly older boy had immediately taken the crippled and very self-conscious Monti under his wing. It was this early bond that had cemented Monti’s loyalty to Ruffino and made him totally trustworthy.

  “Where is Holliday now?”

  “London, with his cousin, her husband and his friend, a Cuban named Cabrera. Grayle is in America, but he’ll be back in London tomorrow.”

  “The cousin recently discovered a number of potentially valuable notebooks. We need the notebooks and we need Holliday and his little entourage removed as a threat.”

  “I’ll get on it immediately.” Monti laid a small, smooth hand over the cardinal’s. “Tonight, Arturo? It has been too long already.”

  “We’ll see, Vittorio. I have a great deal of work to do.”

  “I suppose you’re right. I have work to do myself. I have to see Garibaldi.”

  “Who is he?” Ruffino asked.

  “You don’t want to know. There is still such a thing as plausible deniability.”

  “In a Church built on lies and betrayal? The Vatican has less plausible deniability than Richard Nixon ever did.”

  “All right. Garibaldi is a member of the Assassini.”

  “Good God, I didn’t think they still existed,” said the cardinal.

  “There aren’t very many.”

  “They are truly assassins still?”

  “More like field operatives.”

  “Vatican James Bonds?”

  “I suppose you could call them that.”

  “With licenses to kill.”

  “If it comes to that.”

  4

  They made their way to Manaus from Heathrow in grueling hops with stopovers in Washington, D.C., Houston, Texas, and Caracas, Venezuela. By the time they reached the Park Suites Hotel in Manaus, a little more than twenty-four hours had passed. They all managed to shower, then stagger into bed, and that was that for their first day in Brazil.

  The next morning, Holliday and the rest of the still-groggy crew made their way to the Alpaba Restaurant, the hotel’s attempt at haute cuisine with a view out over the Rio Negro.

  “It’s kind of hard to concentrate on eggs Benedict when you’re looking out at a river full of things big enough to swallow you whole or rip the flesh off your bones,” Peggy said.

  “It’s not that bad,” said Holliday. “All that stuff about vampire fish swimming up your genital tract and sticking there is a lot of bunkum.”

  “You shouldn’t be eating hollandaise anyway.” Rafi grinned. “It’s not good for you.”

  “Is that another comment about my weight?” Peggy bristled.

  “I’m just teasing,” answered her husband. “You haven’t gained an ounce since Doc and I rescued you from those Tuareg bandits.”

  “Took you long enough,” said Peggy, grumbling. “And there are monster snakes out there. I saw it on the Discovery Channel.”

  “We’ve got more than monster fish to worry about,” Holliday said.

  “He’s right.” Rafi nodded. “If Rogov’s not here, he soon will be.”

  “This man, he is so dangerous?” Eddie asked.

&nbs
p; “He usually travels with a bunch of Turkish and Syrian thugs—tomb robbers most of them. Hard men.”

  “How would they get passports or visas to get into Brazil?” Peggy said.

  “Not hard with Grayle and his people behind him,” Holliday said.

  “Why would they come here?” Rafi asked. “I thought all the stories about Fawcett have him traveling down the Xingu River on his last expedition.”

  “Grayle’s no fool,” said Holliday. “The Xingu is famous for its rapids. Most of it’s too shallow for even the Santo Ovidio de Braga or the Santo João de Deus. If he’s following the ships, he’d follow the Amazon, and the Rio Negro is a ‘blackwater river’—deep and calm, more than deep enough for those shallow-draft ships. Not to mention the fact that Grayle’s people may already be on our trail. Rogov wasn’t trying to get that chest for no reason.”

  “So what is our next move, amigo?” Eddie asked.

  “We find a way to get up the Rio Negro to an ancient little place called Barcelos.”

  • • •

  They reached Barcelos aboard a Piper Comanche of indeterminate years, the pilot and copilot apparently flying using a photocopied map they had taped to the windshield. Below them was a solid carpet of dense rain forest broken only by the wide black line of the Rio Negro as it snaked its way northward. There wasn’t a road to be seen.

  Two hours later after a remarkably smooth ride, they landed at Barcelos Airport, which seemed to be quite busy. There were even a few executive jets parked on the hardstands outside several hangars. A minibus was pulled up beside a Hawker 4000 and taking on passengers, all of them carrying long tubes. The sign painted on the minibus said RIO NEGRO FISHING TOURS. The name on the side of the jet was White Horse Resources.

  “British,” said Holliday.

  “A long way to come for a fish,” grunted Eddie.

  “More money than brains,” agreed Peggy.

  “Y que lo digas,” said Eddie.

  “What?”

  “You can say that again,” translated Holliday. “White Horse is one of Grayle’s companies.”

  Their taxi this time was a sagging Ford Taurus driven by a giant sausage of a man with a few tufts of gray hair over his ears and the gurgling wheeze of someone with end-stage emphysema. He managed to get them to their destination, a three-story hotel called Rio Negro that looked as though it had once been a nineteenth-century warehouse with a residence above it. The building was within a block or two of the Porto Velho, the Old Harbor.

  The manager of the hotel, who gave his name as Mr. Carlos, also seemed to be the maître d’ of the family-style dining room, and while an aging bellboy took their luggage to their rooms Mr. Carlos sat them at a table covered with a gingham tablecloth and a real candle in an empty bottle of port.

  They had a pleasant enough meal of cordonizes, which was supposed to be quail but looked suspiciously like pigeon, served with an odd combination of rice and french fries, followed by something called manjar branco, a coconut pudding that was served with a sauce of pitted prunes poached in port wine. They finished off the meal with coffee.

  “Pigeons, pudding, prunes and port,” said Peggy. “A completely alliterative meal.”

  “So, what’s the plan?” Rafi asked. “Rent a boat of some kind?”

  “The last bit of civilization Fawcett mentioned in the journal is a town called São João Joaquin. It’s at the junction of the Rio Negro and the Rio Icana, which flows up into Venezuela. This São João place was Fawcett’s jumping-off place for heading into the jungle. It’s about two hundred miles upstream.”

  “No roads?” Rafi said.

  “Nope,” said Holliday.

  “Riverboat?” Eddie asked.

  “There are a few, but even Fawcett didn’t take one.”

  “He flew?” Peggy said.

  “He flew.”

  • • •

  His name was Yachay of the Hupda Indians and he was shaman of his village in the forest. Of his particular branch of the tribe, there were less than could be counted on the hands of ten men left. Once, a long time ago, there had been many, many more, but the traders and the missionaries had killed them with their spirit sicknesses and his village had moved ever deeper into the jungle that was their home. Still, there was danger and this time Yachay feared it would not come from any spirit sickness; it would come from the great gray monster that drank at their rivers.

  He was old, although he didn’t know how old. He had fought a hundred battles and won most of them, lost sons and wives and nephews and untold friends. Now his only solace was in the taking of the ipadu abiu and the powder of the xhenhet and the visions they brought him and which he used to guide his people. He had taken the paste of the ipadu before beginning his journey, and it had foretold great danger.

  His bare feet sank into the rich earth, and in his way he had become part of the forest and not an intruder in it. He could hear the crackling of dead leaves as the beetles foraged and the sound of the birds and monkeys and other creatures in the canopy above him. He could taste the drying air in his mouth and knew by the sun on his back how far he had come and how far there still was to go. He was as sure of this as his taking of breath and just as sure, somehow, that he would not let the monster kill his people.

  • • •

  The headquarters of the Pallas Group is located in McLean, Virginia, in a complex of buildings just off the George Washington Parkway and is surrounded by forestland on all sides. From his penthouse office on the twenty-eighth floor of the main building, Charles Peace, the CEO of Pallas, could see the headquarters for the Anti Terrorism Center, the CIA, the Pentagon and the Capitol building—virtually all the elements that made the Pallas Group tick.

  Along the only wall in his office that wasn’t made of glass, there were seven violins encased in glass and kept in perfect humidified and temperature-controlled conditions. In his collection there was a Guarneri, a Maggini, a Gasparo di Salò, an Amati e Bergonzi and two Stradivariuses. In monetary terms the collection was worth between seventy-five and a hundred million dollars, but in actuality the violins were priceless. At one time or another, Peace had played all of them. It was a favorite expression of his that generals and politicians were like the strings on a great violin: stroke them well and they would make beautiful music for you.

  Sir Adrian Grayle, a gray-haired man in his midfifties, stared out at the stunning view from the penthouse office window, then turned back to Peace.

  “In the very center of power, I see,” said Grayle, coming back to the comfortable armchair in front of Charles Peace, who was seated behind his massive desk. The desk had originally been used by F.D.R. in the Oval Office and a number of presidents who came after him. It had cost Peace a fortune.

  “Being at the center of power is a requirement of the business,” answered Peace, “and I like to see my enemies coming.” Peace was older than Grayle, with dark hair in a widow’s peak. A pair of neon red half-frame bifocals was perched on the end of his nose.

  “As I told you on the telephone, Mrs. Sinclair suggested that I see you before I returned to England about helping to solve my current problem.”

  “Yes, she mentioned you’d be calling.” Peace smiled thinly. “What exactly is your problem?”

  “I assume you know I’m the chairman of White Horse Resources, and I’m sure you also know that we have invested several billion dollars in the Itaqui Dam Project in northern Brazil.”

  “I know something about the project. I understand you’re having problems with the locals.”

  “Forty-eight hundred assorted Hupda Indians and a territory that has recently been internationally recognized as a nature conservancy and also as a reserve for the Hupdas.”

  “How does the Brazilian government feel about these people?”

  “Noncommittal. They’d like to see them go away as much as I would.”

  “We could probably arrange something,” said Peace.

  “It can’t be something as overt as
President Belaúnde napalming the Matsés in Peru back in the ’sixties,” Grayle cautioned. “That would sink the Itaqui Project on the spot. The whole world can look over your shoulder these days.”

  “In which case you show them something acceptable,” said Peace calmly.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” said Grayle.

  “Pallas controls a company called Firebreakers. It provides water bombers to countries all over the world as well as domestically. It owns one hundred and twenty Canadair CL-215 aircraft.”

  “What does this have to do with my problem?”

  “Twenty of those aircraft are held in reserve for the aviation arm of our security division. Those twenty aircraft have been retrofitted to drop something other than water.”

  “Such as?” Sir Adrian asked.

  “The quickest and most effective you have already mentioned—napalm—but the aircraft can also be fitted with tanks of liquid cow manure infected with E. coli O157: H7, an enterohemorrhagic strain. The manure would be dropped into the water supply, whatever river the group was closest to. All their children would be dead within twelve days, as would any pregnant woman. The entire village would be infected and most elders would die, as well.” Peace coughed lightly into a closed fist. “If you’re looking for a near-one-hundred-percent kill rate, there is always anthrax, of course.”

  “Good Lord,” murmured Grayle.

  “Well, Sir Adrian, which is it going to be?”

  “I’ll have to think on it for a bit, I think, perhaps consult my board.”

  “Take as long as you want, Sir Adrian, but you know the saying—time is money.”

  “I’m well aware of the fact,” said Grayle. “Speaking of which, how are things going with our other project?”