The Last Templar

by Raymond Khoury

  “Only by a couple of thousand years, give or take a continent.” She grinned. Her expertise was in Assyrian history. The Templars were way off her radar.

  “You need to talk to a Templar geek. The ones I know of that are knowledgeable enough to be of use to you are Marty Falkner, William Vance, and Jeb Simmons. Falkner must be eightysomething by now and probably a bit of a handful to deal with. Vance I haven’t come across for ages, but I know Simmons is around—”

  “Bill Vance?”

  “Yes. You know him?”

  William Vance had dropped in on one of her father’s digs while she was there. It was around ten years ago, she remembered. She’d been working with her father in northeastern Turkey, as close as the military would allow them to get to Mount Ararat. She recalled how, rare for her father, Oliver Chaykin had treated Vance as an equal. She could visualize him clearly. A tall, handsome man, maybe fifteen years her senior.

  Vance had been charming and very helpful and encouraging to her. It had been a rotten time for her. Lousy conditions in the field. Uncomfortably pregnant. And yet, although he barely knew her, Vance had seemed to sense her unhappiness and discomfort and had treated her so kindly that he made her feel good when she felt awful, attractive when she knew she looked terrible. And there had never been the slightest hint that he had an ulterior motive. She felt mildly embarrassed now to think that she had been a little bit disappointed at his obviously platonic attitude toward her, because she had been rather attracted to him. And, toward the end of his brief stay at the camp, she had sensed that maybe, just maybe, he had started to feel the same way about her, though just how attractive a seven-months-pregnant woman could be was, in her mind, highly questionable.

  “I met him once, with my dad.” She paused. “But I thought his specialty was Phoenician history.”

  “It is, but you know how it is with the Templars. It’s like archaeological porn, it’s virtually academic suicide to be interested in them. It’s gotten to the point where no one wants it known that they take the subject seriously. Too many crackpots obsessed with all kinds of conspiracy theories about their history. You know what Umberto Eco said, right?”

  “No.”

  “‘A sure sign of a lunatic is that sooner or later, he brings up the Templars.’”

  “I’m struggling to take that as a compliment here.”

  “Look, I’m on your side on this. They’re eminently worthy of academic research.” Edmondson shrugged. “But like I said, I haven’t heard from Vance in years. Last I know he was at Columbia, but, if I were you, I’d go for Simmons. I can hook you up with him pretty easily.”

  “Okay, great.” Tess smiled.

  A nurse popped her head around the door. “Tests. Five minutes.”

  “Wonderful,” Clive groaned.

  “Will you let me know?” Tess asked.

  “You bet. And when I’m out of here, how about I buy you dinner and you can tell me how it’s panning out?”

  She remembered the last time she’d had dinner with Edmondson. In Egypt, after they’d dived together on a Phoenician shipwreck off Alexandria. He’d got drunk on arak, made a halfhearted pass, which she had gently rebuffed, and then he’d fallen asleep in the restaurant.

  “Sure,” she said, thinking that she had lots of time in which to come up with excuses and then felt guilty at her unkind thought.

  Chapter 13

  Lucien Boussard paced cautiously across the floor of his gallery.

  He reached the window and peered out from behind a fake ormolu clock. He stayed there for several minutes, thinking hard. Part of his brain registered that the clock was in need of cleaning and he carried it back to the table and stood it on the newspaper.

  The one with the pictures of the Met raid, staring up at him.

  He ran his finger over the photographs, smoothing the newspaper’s folds.

  There’s no way I’m getting involved in this.

  But he couldn’t simply do nothing. Gus would kill him for doing nothing just as easily as he would kill him for doing something wrong.

  There was only one way out and he’d already been thinking about it while Gus was standing there in his gallery threatening him. Turning Gus in, especially knowing what he had done at the museum, was dangerous. But given Gus’s swordplay outside the museum, Lucien felt reasonably sure he would be safe. There was no way the big man would be coming out of prison to take revenge on him one day. If they didn’t change the law and give him the needle, Gus was looking at life without parole. Had to be.

  Just as important, Lucien had problems of his own. He had a cop on his back. A relentless salopard who’d been after him for years and was showing no signs of going away or even easing off. All because of a goddamn Dogon statuette from Mali that turned out to be more recent than Lucien had said it was and that was, consequently, worth a fraction of what he’d sold it for. Its septuagenarian buyer had, luckily for Lucien, died of a heart attack before the lawyers got their act together. Lucien had wormed his way out of a very tight spot, but Detective Steve Buchinski didn’t let go of it. It was almost like a personal crusade. Lucien had tried feeding the cop a few tips, but they hadn’t been enough. Nothing would ever be enough.

  But this was different. Feed him Gus Waldron and maybe, just maybe, the leech would let go.

  He looked at his watch. It was half past one.

  Sliding open a drawer, Lucien rummaged through a box of cards until he found the one he wanted. Then he reached for the phone and dialed.

  Chapter 14

  Poised outside the heavy, paneled door to a fifth-floor apartment on Central Park West, the leader of the FBI tactical unit held up one hand, all fingers splayed, and glanced at his team. His number two reached out a cautious arm and waited. On the opposite side of the hallway, another man brought a pump-action shotgun up to his shoulder. The fourth man in the team flicked the safety off a stun grenade. The remaining pair who completed the unit gently eased the safety catches on their Heckler & Koch MP5 machine guns.

  “Go!”

  The agent nearest the door rapped firmly with his fist and yelled, “FBI. Open up!”

  The reaction was virtually instantaneous. Gunshots ripped out through the door, spitting splinters of teak across the hallway.

  The FBI shotgunner returned the compliment, racking his weapon in a blur of action, blasting away until he had torn several head-sized holes through the door panel. Even with the earplugs she wore, Amelia Gaines felt the jarring shock waves in the confined space.

  More shots erupted from inside, splintering the door jambs and punching through the plasterboards across the hallway. The fourth man moved forward, flicking the stun grenade through the opening blown in the door. Then the shotgun took out the rest of the central door panel and moments later the two men with the H&Ks were inside.

  A momentary pause. Echoing silence. A single shot. Another pause. A voice called out, “Clear!” More “Clears” followed. Then a casual voice said, “Okay, party’s over.”

  Amelia followed the others into the apartment. It made the word “plush” sound cheap. Everything about it reeked of money. But as Amelia and the unit leader checked the place out, it quickly became apparent that this particular reek was of drugs.

  The occupants, four men, were swiftly identified as Colombian drug traffickers. One of them had a serious gunshot wound in his upper body. Elsewhere in the apartment, they found a small hoard of drugs, a pile of cash, and enough leads to keep the DEA happy for months.

  The tip-off, an anonymous phone call, had spoken of money to burn, weapons, and several men speaking in a foreign language. All of that was right. But none of it had anything to do with the museum raid.

  Another disappointment.

  It wouldn’t be the last.

  Disheartened, Amelia looked around the apartment as the other Colombians were handcuffed and led out. She compared this place with her own apartment. Hers was pretty nice. Tasteful, classy, if she said so herself. But this one was
simply stunning. It had everything, including a great view of the park. As she looked around, she decided that overstated opulence was not her style and she didn’t envy any of it. Except maybe the view.

  She stood at the window for a moment, looking down into the park. She could see two people riding horses along a track. Even at this range, she could see that both the riders were women. One of them was having trouble; her horse looked to be high-spirited or maybe it had been spooked by the two Rollerblading youths gliding by.

  Amelia took another look around the apartment, then left it to the tactical unit leader to wrap things up, and headed for the office to deliver her somber report to Reilly.

  REILLY HAD BEEN BUSY scheduling a succession of low-key visits to mosques and other gathering points for the city’s Muslims. After a brief preliminary discussion with Jansson on the politics of this side of the investigation, Reilly had decided that these visits would all be exactly that. Simple visits, by no more than two agents or cops, one of whom was, as often as possible, Muslim. Not the merest hint of them being raids. Cooperation was what they sought and, mostly, cooperation was what they got.

  Computers at the FBI offices at Federal Plaza had been spilling out data nonstop, adding to the rising tidal wave of information coming in from the NYPD, Immigration, and Homeland Security. Databases that had mushroomed after Oklahoma City were awash with names of homegrown radicals and extremists; those following 9/11 were overflowing with names of Muslims of many nationalities. Reilly knew that most of them were on those lists not because they were suspected by the authorities of terrorist or criminal acts or tendencies, but simply because of their religion. It made him uneasy; it also made for a lot of unnecessary work, sifting out the few possibles from the many who were innocent of everything except their beliefs.

  He still felt the bubba route was the way to go on this, but one thing was missing. The specific grudge, the link between a group of heavily armed fanatics and the Roman Catholic Church. To that end, a team of agents was scouring manifestos and databases for the elusive common thread.

  He took in the open floor, absorbing the ordered chaos of agents working their phones and their computers before making his way to his desk. As he reached it, he spotted Amelia Gaines coming toward him from across the room.

  “You got a minute?”

  Everyone always had a minute for Amelia Gaines. “What’s up?”

  “You know that apartment we hit this morning?”

  “Yeah, I heard,” he said cheerlessly. “Still, it did buy us some brownie points with the DEA, which isn’t a bad thing.”

  Amelia shrugged the notion away. “When I was in there, I was looking out the window into the park. A couple of people were out riding. One of them was having some trouble with her horse and it got me thinking.”

  Reilly pushed a chair over to her and she sat down. She was a breath of fresh air in the male-dominated Bureau, where the percentage of female recruits had only recently risen to the lofty height of ten percent. The Bureau’s recruiters made no secret of their wish for more female applicants, but few applied. In fact, only one female agent had ever reached the rank of SAC, earning herself the mocking nickname Queen Bee in the process.

  Reilly had worked with Amelia a lot over the last months. Amelia was a particularly useful asset when it came to dealing with Middle Eastern suspects. They loved her red locks and freckled skin; a well-timed smile or a strategic flash of skin often got more results than weeks of surveillance. Although no one at the Bureau went out of their way to hide their attraction to her, Amelia hadn’t incited any cases of sexual harassment; not that it was easy to imagine anyone victimizing her. She was raised in a military family where she had four brothers, she was a karate black belt at the age of sixteen, and she was an expert markswoman. She could pretty much take care of herself in any situation.

  Once, less than a year ago, they had been alone at a coffee shop and Reilly had come close to inviting her out to dinner. He had decided against it, knowing that there was a good chance, in his hopeful mind anyway, that it wouldn’t end with dinner. Relationships with coworkers were never easy; at the Bureau, he knew, they simply didn’t stand a chance.

  “Keep going,” he now said to her.

  “Those horsemen at the museum. Watching the videos, it’s pretty obvious that those guys weren’t just riding the horses, they were skillfully controlling them. Riding them up the steps, for instance. Easy for Hollywood stuntmen, but in real life that’s a pretty hard thing to do.”

  She sounded as if she knew; she also sounded uneasy.

  Amelia saw his glance and smiled tightly. “I can ride,” she confirmed.

  He immediately realized she was onto something. The connection with horses glared at him. He’d had an inkling in the first few hours when he’d thought of how Central Park Precinct officers used horses, but he hadn’t developed the thought. Had he done so, they might’ve been onto this sooner.

  “You want to look into stuntmen with rap sheets?”

  “For a start. But it’s not just the horsemen. It’s the horses themselves.” Amelia moved a touch closer. “From what we heard and what we’ve seen on the videos, people were screaming and shouting and there was all that gunfire. And yet those horses weren’t panicking.”

  Amelia stopped, looking across to where Aparo was picking up a phone call, as if unwilling to add her next thought.

  Reilly knew where she was going. He made the uncomfortable connection for her. “Cop horses.”

  “Right.”

  Damn it. He didn’t like this any more than she did. Cop horses could mean cops. And nobody liked to contemplate the possibility of the involvement of other law enforcement officers.

  “It’s all yours,” he said. “But go easy.”

  She didn’t have time to answer. Aparo was rushing over.

  “That was Steve. We’ve got something. Looks like the real deal this time.”

  Chapter 15

  As he turned onto Twenty-second Street, Gus Waldron began feeling jittery. Okay, so he’d had the jumps since Saturday night, but this was different. He recognized the signs. He did a lot of things on instinct. Betting on the horses was one of them. The results? Lousy. But other things he did instinctively sometimes worked out for the best, so he always paid attention.

  Now he saw that there was a reason for his jitters. A car, plain and ordinary. Too plain, too ordinary. Two men, looking carefully at nothing in particular. Cops. What else could they be?

  He counted off the steps and stopped to look in a window. Reflected in it, he saw another car nosing around the corner. Just as unremarkable, and as he risked a quick glance over his shoulder he saw that two men were in this one as well.

  He was boxed in.

  Gus immediately thought of Lucien. He flashed on any number of gruesome ways he would end the miserable French prick’s life.

  He reached the gallery and suddenly dived for its door, storming in fast and rushing across the floor to where a startled Lucien was now rising out of his chair. Gus kicked the table aside, sending the big ugly clock and a can of cleaning fluid crashing to the floor, and smacked Lucien hard across the ear.

  “You ratted me out to the cops, didn’t you?”

  “No, Gueusse—”

  As Gus raised his hand to hit him again, he saw that Lucien twisted his head, his eyes popping as he looked toward the rear of the gallery. So the cops were out back too—then Gus realized that he could smell something, gasoline maybe. The can he had knocked off the table was leaking onto the floor.

  Snatching up the can, Gus pulled Lucien off the floor and thrust him ahead toward the door, where he kicked him behind the knees, sending the skinny weasel down again. Keeping him down with his boot, he tipped the can over Lucien’s head.

  “You know better than to mess with me, you little shit,” he barked as he kept on pouring.

  “Please!” The Frenchman sputtered, his eyes burning from the liquid when, too fast for the terrified man to res
ist, Gus yanked open the door, picked Lucien up by the scruff of his neck, pulled out a Zippo, ignited the fuel, and booted the gallery owner into the street.

  Flames flared blue and yellow around Lucien’s head and shoulders as he stumbled across the sidewalk, his screams mingling with yells from shocked onlookers and a sudden blare of car horns. Gus emerged close behind him, eyes darting left and right, fixed like a hawk on the four men, two at each end of the block, rushing out of their cars now and with guns, and all more concerned with the burning man than with him.

  Which was exactly what he needed.

  REILLY KNEW THEY’D BEEN spotted as soon as he saw the man bolt off the street and dive into the gallery. Yelling, “He’s made us. We have a go, I repeat, we have a go!” into the mike tucked into his sleeve, he chambered a round into his Browning Hi-Power handgun and scrambled out of his car with Aparo emerging from the passenger side.

  He was still behind the car’s door when he saw a man stagger out of the gallery. Reilly wasn’t sure he was seeing straight. The man’s head seemed to be on fire.

  AS LUCIEN STAGGERED ALONG the street, his hair and shirt ablaze, Gus followed him out, keeping close enough so that the cops wouldn’t risk shooting.

  Or so he hoped.

  To make them think twice about getting too close, he loosed off shots in both directions. The Beretta was fucking useless for this kind of action, but it sent the four men diving for cover.

  Windshields shattered and screams of panic echoed in the street as the sidewalks emptied.

  REILLY SAW HIM RAISE the handgun in time to duck behind his car’s door. The shots thundered in the street, two bullets crunching their way into a brick wall behind Reilly, a third lodging in the left headlight of his Chrysler in an explosion of chrome and glass. Darting a glance to his right, Reilly spotted four bystanders crouching behind a parked Mercedes, clearly terrified out of their wits. Reilly could tell they were looking to make a run for it, which was not a good idea. They were safer behind the car. One of them looked his way. Reilly made an up-and-down gesture with an open palm, yelling, “Get down! Don’t move!” The nervous man nodded his shocked acceptance and curled away out of sight.