Templar Legion

by Paul Christopher

  They were silent, their expressions serious, almost meditative. To Holliday it looked as though they were doing breathing exercises of some kind. An adult stood behind them, his long blowgun held like a stave. A broad X was drawn across his face in black. His eyes were an intense gemlike blue and, remarkably, his long, braided hair was as blond as corn silk.

  “The yellow-haired one is called umculisi, a teacher. His students are ibuso-sha, young warriors. At the moment they are practicing the breathing of la Sarbacana.”

  “Doesn’t sound very African to me,” said Peggy.

  “It’s not,” Limbani said quietly. “When Julian de la Roche-Guillaume left the Holy Land he traveled to the deeper East, perhaps even as far as Tibet, where he received the teachings of Drogön Chögyal Phagpa, the emperor who was also spiritual adviser to Kublai Khan. ”

  “He returned to France briefly, establishing a small secret school for the study of what he referred to as Sarbacana, the joining of breath, mind and sight. It was apparently ‘reinvented’ by a French quasi-mystic guru in the nineteen seventies but it is clearly the same art.”

  “This is beginning to get very weird,” muttered Peggy. “The Templar and his solid-gold tomb were strange enough, but now we’re in Tibet with Kublai Khan. Next thing you know we’ll have Olivia Newton-John singing ‘Xanadu.’ ”

  “We’re talking martial art?” Holliday said, ignoring his cousin.

  “Indeed,” said Limbani.

  “You really think this Sarbacana breathing can stand up to an AK-47?”

  Limbani nodded to the blond man with the X across his face.

  “Impumphuthe,” said the blond man quietly. All of the young people reached into a small pocket sewn inside the waistband of their tunics and withdrew a strip of cloth, which they then handed to the person beside them. Each student in turn blindfolded his neighbor.

  “Would you like to check the blindfolds?” Limbani said.

  “I’ll take your word for it,” said Holliday. “This is no circus act.”

  Limbani nodded to the blond man again.

  “Lungisela,” said the blond man.

  Each of the blindfolded students took a four-inch-long dart from his quiver and slid it into his blowgun. They then raised the blowguns to their lips.

  “In battle, of course, the tip of each dart would be dipped in a fatal neurotoxin,” Limbani explained. “Once upon a time the darts were made from iron, but we have found that aluminum nails ground to razor sharpness are a satisfactory and less labor-intensive substitute.” He nodded to the blond man again.

  “Dubulela,” murmured the blond man.

  There was a brief, rattling sigh, like raindrops on a metal roof, followed by a perfectly ordered series of thumps as the blowgun darts found their targets. Holliday stared, impressed. The students had fired in distinct, even sequence, blindfolded, and each of them had hit the stark white bull’s-eye of his target dead center.

  “Everyone, male or female, in this valley can do what you’ve just seen, some better and faster in the daylight or in the dark. There are four thousand people here, Colonel. They are the last of their kind and each one of them is willing to die for their freedom. How does that stand up to an AK-47?”

  “I wouldn’t like to give odds,” said Holliday. “Too close to call.”

  “Will you stand with us, Colonel? We could use the help and advice of a real soldier.”

  Holliday didn’t hesitate. It had been a long time since he’d had something worth fighting for.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll stand with you. We all will.”

  27

  Matheson chose room nine at the old Tate Gallery—Art and the Sublime—for his meeting with Lanz. The mercenary met him standing in front of John Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath, an immense apocalyptic painting of the end of the world, the artist’s favorite subject matter.

  “Do you know anything about John Martin?” Matheson asked.

  “Never heard of him,” said Lanz. For the mercenary, art was for chocolate boxes. He stared up at the six-by-ten-foot canvas. The horizon burned with orange hellfire, whole mountains slid into the abyss, while thousands of screaming, naked bodies came tumbling after. A single intense bolt of light ricocheted up the valley. Lanz supposed it was meant to illustrate the wages of sin, but it left him cold. He had as much use for religion as he did for art.

  “He was quite mad, of course,” murmured the industrialist. “Came from a mad family. Father was a fencing master. Martin was apprenticed to a painter of heraldic devices on coach doors. His older brother, also named John, was once known as England’s greatest arsonist. Martin painted almost as a hobby—his real passion was designing a new sewer system for London. Quite mad.”

  “Your point being, Sir James?” Lanz asked.

  “Sometimes great men are seen to be mad because so few people can appreciate the extent of their genius.”

  “Sir?”

  “Am I mad, do you think, Lanz?”

  “That’s not for me to say.” Lanz shrugged.

  “Allen Faulkener is dead,” said Matheson. “He was murdered in a hotel room in Vancouver, Canada. The same day the two little old ladies he was dealing with were killed in a fire. Although it later turned out they were actually killed by Faulkener’s own weapon.”

  “Presumably this had something to do with the situation in Africa?” said Lanz.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you wish to delay?” Lanz said.

  “I haven’t decided,” answered Matheson. He moved along to the next painting on the wall of the gallery. This one was small in relation to the John Martin, not quite three feet on a side. Death on a Pale Horse by William Turner, a smoky, amorphous horror. The horse was barely visible; Death was an articulated, hungry skeleton, grinning maw spread wide. Matheson stood transfixed. He knew he was seeing the future, but whose?

  “I’ve given guarantees,” said Lanz. “Most of these men won’t wait, and if we lose the dark of the moon we’ll have to set back the clock by almost a month. It will be expensive.”

  “How expensive?”

  “At least a million, maybe more. The men will all have to be paid for their wait time. If you want to be sure of your transportation, that will also be a premium.”

  The Brocklebank sisters were dead, their proxy held by someone as amorphous as Turner’s figure of death. He already owned most of the outstanding shares, but if he risked using the shell company the mysterious forces responsible for the murders of Faulkener and the Brocklebanks would simply exercise the option and take over the huge find in the tiny African country.

  If he simply ate the shares he’d purchased and did a separate deal with Nagoupandé, he could salvage the situation with a relatively small loss, but who knew how far Nagoupandé’s bought-and-paid-for loyalty would last?

  He didn’t have any choice. What was that ridiculous motto Faulkener was always quoting—Qui audet adipiscitur ? Who dares, wins. It hadn’t done Faulkener much good. According to the Vancouver city coroner’s office, the idiot had been killed by a common steak knife.

  On the other hand, if there was ever a time for daring it was now. He’d tell Lanz to keep a gun to Nagoupandé’s head until the mining concessions were turned over and loyalty ceased to be a factor. He turned away from the deathly vision on the wall. It had to be now.

  “We continue as planned,” he said. “No delays. At the dark of the moon.”

  Lanz nodded, his spine automatically straightening. “At the dark of the moon.”

  General Solomon Bokassa Sesesse Kolingba awoke abruptly and painfully, a blazing flare of sunlight spearing through a small space between the heavy velvet curtains that were usually drawn tightly together to avoid just such an event. He was not a man who met the day well, preferring instead to rise slowly, first slaking his thirst with several bottles of Mongozo banana beer and then spending at least half an hour in the bathroom voiding his bowels.

  Following this he generally ate a breakfast
of scrambled eggs, sausage, black pudding, bacon, mushrooms, baked beans, hash browns, grilled kidneys, a pair of Scotch kippers, three slices of fried bread and half a tomato for color, followed by several carafes of either hot chocolate or sweet black coffee, depending on his mood.

  This meal was generally eaten in his living room while sitting in his favorite reclining chair in front of an extremely large flat-screen TV while he watched CNN and the BBC on his satellite receiver. Sometimes if the news was boring he’d watch an old movie.

  At eleven he would get dressed in a set of camo fatigues and shoot skeet on the roof for an hour before lunch. Any variation on this routine was fraught with danger, and interrupting it without an extremely good reason could prove seriously harmful.

  On the twenty-sixth day of that month, two days before the dark of the moon, Oliver Gash entered General Kolingba’s private quarters at four fifty-one a.m., one minute before official sunrise. He stayed in the shadows close to the door and well away from the big, curtained four-poster bed that stood in a far corner of the room. The worst of it was that Kolingba never snored; he slept almost silently, an immense, immobile pile in bright yellow silk pajamas and a black silk mask.

  “General,” said Gash quietly from the other side of the room. There was no response, but Gash heard a faint clicking sound from behind the curtains surrounding the bed. The sound of one of the silver-plated presentation Colt .45s being cocked. He squeezed his own hand a little harder around the butt of the cocked Glock 17P in the pocket of his jacket.

  “General?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Have you come to murder me in my bed, Gash?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I can see in the dark like a cat. I would kill you first.”

  “Yes, sir, I know that.” From Rwanda to Banqui to Baltimore to here; it really was a long and winding road.

  “I am uSathane-umufo, a devil man. I know your thoughts,” said Kolingba out of the darkness.

  “I know this, too, General, and I would never have disturbed your sleep without the most important of reasons.”

  The heavy curtains on the side of the bed facing Gash were thrust aside and Kolingba appeared out of the gloom, throwing back the black satin sheet that covered his huge body. He swung his legs over the bed, planting them wide apart like a Sumo wrestler. In his right hand the silver-plated pistol glinted. Kolingba lifted one giant buttock and broke wind explosively.

  “Speak,” said the dictator, yawning.

  “There are several things, Your Highness. Together they point to a single conclusion.”

  “What things?”

  “Saint-Sylvestre has disappeared.”

  “The policeman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why should I care about a policeman disappearing? This is not enough to wake me from my dreams, Gash. My dreams are prophecies. They guide me as I guide my country.”

  Oh, jeez.

  “He disappeared while he was following a man he believed was a mercenary, Your Highness.”

  “What sort of mercenary?”

  “He was traveling on a Canadian passport, but Saint-Sylvestre was sure he was German.”

  “Why would a mercenary come here?”

  “Saint-Sylvestre thought there was a good chance that he was reconnoitering Fourandao.”

  “Reconnoitering? Why would anyone want to do that, Gash?”

  “For a coup-d’état, Your Majesty.” Gash waited for the reaction. There was none except for Kolingba’s fingers tightening a little around the big automatic in his hand.

  “That is impossible,” said Kolingba. “My enemies are gone. My people love me.”

  “Perhaps, Your Majesty, but there have been reports of a mining engineer who showed an interest in the area around the Kazaba Falls.”

  “There is nothing there. Only swamp and jungle.”

  Gash summoned up his courage and spoke. “Limbani has been seen.”

  “Don’t be foolish,” scoffed Kolingba. “Limbani is isipokwe, a ghost.”

  “I’m afraid Limbani is no ghost, Your Highness. He has been seen at the first cataract talking to a group of white men. He is very much alive.”

  Kolingba bolted up out of the bed, eyes bulging in the semidarkness, a yellow mountain of flesh waving an automatic pistol, screaming. “Then find him! Find him! I will have him, Gash! Do you understand me!? You must kill him! I must kill him! He is a scourge! An infestation! Kill him!”

  Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the anger vanished. Kolingba threw the pistol on his night table. “What are you going to do?” Kolingba asked.

  “I thought we could take one of the helicopters and look for any signs of him upriver. It is clear that any attempt on Fourandao will come from the east—we would have heard about it long ago if it was coming from Banqui.”

  “My dreams tell me that the danger comes from the west. Perhaps from Banqui, or even farther.”

  “You could go yourself and see,” replied Gash, knowing what the reply would be.

  “You know I will not fly in one of those things, Gash,” said the general petulantly. “Go for me.”

  “Of course, Your Majesty. I have your full authority in this, I presume?”

  “Of course, of course!”

  “In writing?” Gash asked. If there was to be a coup Gash would have to be the one who prepared against it.

  “Yes! Yes!” Kolingba said, waving Gash from the room, his face twisted angrily. Gash had to stop himself from laughing as he suddenly understood Kolingba’s urgency—he was desperate to get to the chamber pot beneath the bed.

  Gash backed toward the door; the pistol was only a foot or two away from Kolingba’s hand. “And have my breakfast sent here today, would you. I must think about all of this,” the general added.

  “Right away.” Gash nodded. He found the door at his back and slipped quickly from the room. As he headed to the kitchens he found himself thinking about the cash hidden behind the wall in Kolingba’s office and how it could be accessed quickly if it became necessary. As he made his way down the stairs he began to whistle the theme music from the old A-Team series, his favorite back in Baltimore. He smiled broadly as he reached the ground floor of the main compound building. He really did love it when a plan came together.

  28

  Sir James Matheson, Ninth Earl of Emsworth, maintained two official residences in England. One was Huntington Hall, the enormous seventeenth-century ancestral estate in Derbyshire. The other was a magnificent seven-bedroom apartment in Albert Hall Mansions located between Albert Hall and the Royal Geographical Society on Kensington Gore overlooking the Albert Memorial and Kensington Gardens.

  The earl and his wife, the Countess Edwina, formerly Lady Edwina Talbot, had a long-standing marital agreement that neither party would arrive at the other’s residence without an invitation and at least twenty-four hours’ notice. The twins, Justin and Jonathan, had been packed away to Barlborough Hall School since their fifth birthday and still had another six years to go before being packed away once more to Oxford or Cambridge, and thus presented no particular problem to either parent.

  Neither Sir James nor Countess Edwina professed the slightest interest in what the other was doing and each left the other alone, except for formal occasions such as Royal Garden Parties, the Grand National and Royal Ascot. For the most part, Huntington Hall was the countess’s fiefdom and London belonged to Sir James.

  Like most titled people in England with reputations to sustain, both the countess and Sir James had their various appropriate charities, and those charities required fund-raising. On the advice of his accountants, Sir James Matheson’s cultural charity was the Royal College of Music—even though he was known to have a tin ear that had difficulty getting the tune for even “God Save the Queen” right. He sponsored several dinners, concerts and cocktail parties for the college each year to raise money.

  Unfortunately the date for one of those parties fell just forty-eight hou
rs before the dark of the moon in Fourandao, Kukuanaland, and the launch of Matheson’s private invasion of that country. Even more unfortunate was the fact that these cocktail parties invariably took place at his apartment in Albert Hall Mansions.

  Matheson’s apartment was on the fourth floor of a five-and-a-half-story building, and dwarfed both the Royal Geographical Society and Albert Hall itself. Matheson’s father, the eighth earl, either through great good fortune or liberal applications of money, had managed to purchase one of the center apartments, which had an arched, recessed balcony that stretched the width of the entire apartment and could be used in inclement weather.

  A large black-and-white-tiled entrance hall led to a thirty-by-forty-foot reception room on the right. Kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms and a sitting room were on the left. The first reception room led to a second reception room, which led out to the arched balcony; beside the reception room was a master bedroom that Matheson had renovated into a study-library, also leading out to the arched balcony. At the last tax evaluation, the apartment had been valued at eight million, two hundred thousand pounds.

  At the present moment it was crammed with well over a hundred people grazing on several thousand pounds’ worth of mini Parmesan baskets filled with cauliflower puree, wild-strawberry-and-cucumber jam on toast, wild mushroom palmiers with creamed goat cheese, dragachelio baby quail egg Florentine with pink pepper hollandaise and, last but not least, the eight-pounds-a-mouthful seared miso-infused tuna. On top of that were forty strategically placed crystal vases of cut flowers spread through the entrance hall, the two reception halls and the three bathrooms designated for guest use that evening, not to mention the endless spigot of expensive French, German and Italian wines and the full bar, all of it serviced by more than two dozen waitstaff, bartenders, presenters and a ten-person cleanup crew for after the party.

  In the smaller of the two reception rooms a tuxedo-wearing deejay had hooked into Matheson’s own apartment-wide Bose system, providing selections of classical music interspersed with jazz that nobody was paying the slightest attention to. There was a six-man armed security team, all dressed in tuxedos—provided by Kate Sinclair’s Blackhawk Security—to make sure that no one stole the family silver or got into violent arguments about the respective merits of Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov and Carl Heinrich Carsten Reinecke. All of it was giving Sir James Matheson a violent headache. He really did have much more important things on his mind.