Red Templar

by Paul Christopher

  “You seem to know the words quite well, Your Holiness,” said Putin.

  “I hear it when I go to the radio station for my Sunday sermon to the people. It distresses me.”

  “What on earth is a ‘black boomer,’ I wonder?” Medvedev asked, sipping from his glass.

  Putin shrugged. “According to my daughter Yekaterina, black boomer refers to the pistol the man is carrying-a black boomer. On the other hand, my daughter Maria says the ‘black boomer’ in question is the young man’s vehicle, a black BMW. I tend to agree with Maria.”

  “Perhaps we should get down to business,” said Bortnikov, putting his half-filled glass down on the side table beside his chair.

  “Ah, yes.” Putin nodded. “What have you to tell us, my dear Alexander Vasilyevich?”

  “The American we were told about and his Cuban companion crossed the Turkish border and went with an unidentified third man to the monastery of Saint Simeon the Plowman at Ahtopol in Bulgaria.”

  “The place Beria went to in 1945.” His Holiness nodded. “And where he retrieved the secret sword.”

  “Which told us nothing,” said Putin. “Only gave us more riddles to solve.”

  “At any rate they went there and were observed by several CSS thugs.”

  “They were followed?”

  “Of course.”

  “By the Bulgarian State Security people?” Putin asked.

  “No, by our men.”

  “And?”

  “They were killed.”

  “The American and his friends?” Medvedev asked nervously. “They killed an American?”

  “No,” said Bortnikov, blood coming into his face, not from embarrassment but from rage. He reminded himself about his doctor’s warnings concerning his blood pressure and lit a cigarette to calm himself down. “Our people,” he said after a moment, drawing on the cigarette. He took a swallow of vodka. “All of them.”

  “This American has. . how do you say it in English. . skills?” Putin said. He’d been working hard to improve his English for the past two or three years and was now reasonably fluent. His daughters were always teaching him little colloquialisms.

  “I would say he has excellent skills,” said His Holiness, raising an eyebrow.

  “Where are they now?”

  “We lost track of them for a while and then they showed up in Odessa. He visited a document thief and was provided with everything he needed.”

  “You know the names they are traveling under now?”

  “Not yet, but there are not many Americans in Russia at this time of year. Somewhere along the line he will have been required to show his identification. We know he did not enter Russia through any known airport or train station, so in the end it will simply be a process of elimination.”

  “How long?” Putin asked.

  “A matter of days. Maybe less.”

  “We don’t want them harmed,” cautioned His Holiness, pouring himself a foaming glass of the potent Russian beer. “You have a tendency to be overzealous in your actions.” He paused. “And perhaps your people are not as good as you have boasted on more than one occasion. You are not a street policeman anymore, Alexander Vasilyevich.” The primate’s tone was chiding, and the FSB director bristled.

  “No, Your Holiness, and neither are you a parish priest taking the confessions of your people and then passing them on to Vladimir Vladimirovich anymore,” replied Bortnikov, glancing at Putin. He turned back to the primate. “I leave the running of the Church to you, Preeyatyel Papa. You leave the running of the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki and the FSB to me.”

  “We should stop arguing like children in the schoolyard,” said Putin. “This is about neither the Church nor the Foreign Intelligence Service, nor the FSB. It is about the four of us in this room and our great duty, and it is about the Order of the Phoenix. Most important, it is about Russia, our motherland, the Rodina and her future. Remember that.”

  Bortnikov’s cell phone chirped loudly. He slipped it out of his breast pocket, thumbed it on and held it to his ear. His face brightened as he listened. Finally he ended the call and put the phone back in his pocket.

  “They have discovered who the third man accompanying Holliday and the Cuban is. His name is Victor Nikolaevich Genrikhovich, and he is a curator of documents at the Hermitage.”

  “Dear God,” whispered Medvedev, the president. “We could be ruined.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Bortnikov. “He is being arrested as we speak.”

  14

  The telephone trilled. Genrikhovich stared at it as though the plastic device were a scorpion. It rang a second time. He picked it up and listened. The blood drained from his face and Holliday thought he was going to faint. Genrikhovich hung up the telephone and dropped into his old wooden chair.

  “We have been betrayed,” said the curator, his face the color of ash.

  “Who?” Holliday said quickly, getting up from the drafting chair.

  “One of the secretarial people staffing the basement level. She is an informer for the FSB. The file boy must have told her I was here.”

  “Who warned you?”

  “A friend. It is not important.”

  “How long do we have?”

  “According to my friend, not long. They are sending a squad of OMON.”

  “Shit,” breathed Holliday. OMON Black Beret squads could be armed with anything-AK-47s, PK machine guns, Bizon folding-stock submachine guns, AN97 assault rifles with under-barrel grenade launchers. Their motto was, “We know no mercy and do not ask for any.” Their unit insignia was the roaring head of a white Siberian tiger. Not exactly comforting news. “How many exits?”

  “Dozens, scores,” answered Genrikhovich. “I have never counted.”

  “How will they come?”

  “Probably the same way we did. Either that or through the courtyard entrance to the basement level.”

  “What’s the quickest way out?”

  “Those two exits. The others lead onto the square or onto the Neva Embankment.”

  “Do they have a boat unit?”

  “In St. Petersburg, yes. They will be waiting.”

  “That’s out then,” said Holliday. Something was niggling at him in the outer suburbs of his brain, but he couldn’t quite see it through the clutter of a billion other pieces of useless historical information. Who really cared if the thing they used to pull back the spring on a French crossbow was called a goat’s-foot lever? And why was he thinking about key lime pie? Or Orson Welles, the theme music for The Third Man echoing furiously in his head like a burrowing earwig?

  “We are running out of time, compadre,” urged Eddie calmly.

  Key lime, Harry Lime, the character played by Orson Welles in The Third Man. The cats. The Hermitage cats. Where did the rats come from?

  “Are there any old tunnels down here, maybe left over from World War Two?” he asked suddenly.

  “My father never told me of any. . ” Genrikhovich paused for a moment, then nodded. “St. Petersburg has always had terrible problems with sewage. Hundreds of years ago houses would connect their wastewater pipes to the small storm sewers. Everything became terribly polluted. Nothing was done until 1924 or 1925. They began building outfall tunnels on the embankments. The war stopped the system, and when the war was over they began an entirely new system.”

  “Is there one of those embankment outfall tunnels near here?”

  “One was dug directly beneath Palace Square to connect the Neva with the outflow from the Moika Canal. It was built between the Hermitage Theatre and the Old Hermitage.”

  “Can we get to it from here?”

  “I expect so.” Genrikhovich nodded.

  “Then let’s get the hell out of here,” said Holliday, grabbing Genrikhovich by the arm and pushing him toward the door.

  “The file!” Genrikhovich wailed.

  “Bring it, amigo,” Holliday said to Eddie as he thrust Genrikhovich forward.

  “Si, companero,” ans
wered the Cuban, stuffing the transparencies into the pink accordion folder, along with any other documents on Genrikhovich’s desk. He followed Holliday’s back as he went through the door.

  “Left?” Holliday asked, still gripping Genrikhovich’s arm.

  The older man nodded mutely, his breath coming in short, unpleasant-sounding pants.

  Turning left, they headed down a narrow, linoleum-floored corridor. It was green to the wainscoting and yellowing dirty white above, like everything else Holliday had seen of the Hermitage. On the floors above him were the treasures of centuries, and all he could see was green-and-white walls and tangles of pipes and conduits overhead. They reached a stone wall about a hundred yards along, probably some sort of supporting buttress. A gouged hole had been hacked through the stonework and a tall metal door fitted, the masonry roughly patched around it. Holliday hauled it open and they stepped through into another blank, empty length of corridor. As they set foot in the passage, red lights in the ceiling every twenty-five feet or so began to blink furiously, and Holliday could hear the distant sound of a wailing siren.

  “They are locking the place down! We are trapped!” Genrikhovich moaned.

  “They haven’t caught us yet,” said Holliday. He grimaced, imagining what would happen if and when they did. In the old days it would have been a quick trip to the cellar of the Lubyanka at 19 Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow and a single tap to the back of the head with a nine-millimeter Makarov. Now he wasn’t sure what the procedure would be. Certainly nothing pleasant.

  They reached a massive industrial boiler room, machinery already clanging and booming as the ancient furnaces began the long, ponderous chore of heating a building the length of a football field with a thousand drafts and leaks from a time when peasants, coal and entire forests of firewood were cheap and accessible.

  A dozen men in blue coveralls and wearing goggles and hard hats swarmed over a maze of interconnected up-and-down catwalks, tending the machinery like something out of Metropolis or 1984, worker ants tending a series of fat, ancient and rusty brown queens. Steam rose everywhere, and the hot, wet air echoed with the sounds of men calling to one another above the clatter of the pipes. Nobody noticed Holliday, Eddie and Genrikhovich, or if they were noticed they were ignored.

  “There,” said Genrikhovich, pointing. Holliday looked. At first glance it appeared to be the remains of what once might have been a coal bin, but then he saw. Behind a bulbous electrical generator there was a man-high vent covered by a heavy mesh grille. Holliday herded Genrikhovich toward the opening with Eddie following, the Cuban’s sharp eyes watching the workers carefully.

  Holliday reached the grille, Genrikhovich crowding in behind him. “We must hurry, please,” he said, his voice whining, one hand clutching Holliday’s wrist. Holliday shook it off. He could feel warm air pushing on the back of his neck and knew, intentionally or not, that the big vent was exhausting the hot air out of the boiler room. Somewhere there’d be a big white plume of condensation riding the cool air outside.

  The vent was about eight feet in diameter, hinged on one side and locked on the other with a padlock through a tongue and hasp. The metal was iron and it was flaked heavily with layers of rust and grime. If Genrikhovich was right, this had been intended as one of those 1925 outfalls and never used. The padlock was a long laminated brass shackle style with the name VARLUX along the bottom, and clearly a copy of an American Master brand lock. The padlock looked fairly new. He checked the bottom of the lock. There was a faint MADE IN CHINA stamp. Everything was made in China these days. It wasn’t a good sign.

  Holliday looked around. A long, adjustable spring-handled monkey wrench lay on top of the generator casing. He picked up the wrench, put the short, flat-sided grip into the shackle of the lock and pulled hard. There was a dry snapping sound as the tongue of the hasp snapped off the vent grille. Eddie darted forward and caught the lock before it hit the floor.

  “Gracias,” said Holliday.

  “No es nada, mi amigo,” replied the Cuban softly. “Your Spanish is becoming muy fluido.” He handed the lock to Holliday, who slipped it into the pocket of his jacket.

  He dug the short arm of the wrench through the grille and pulled. There was a ratcheting squeal and it opened six inches. He looked over his shoulder but no one seemed to have noticed. He pulled again. There was a second high-pitched grinding sound from the hinges and the screen opened two feet. “Go!” Holliday whispered to Genrikhovich, pushing him through the opening. He turned to Eddie, but the Cuban was already moving behind the big generator. “What the hell are you doing?” Holliday hissed at his friend.

  “Momentito,” whispered Eddie, disappearing behind the big piece of electrical equipment. Still, no one paid any attention to them. Holliday waited, his nerves winding up like a clockwork engine. He could feel the fear tickling the hairs at the back of his neck, and out of the corner of his eye he could see one of the blinking red lights, which no one else seemed to have noticed. His mouth was dry as sand. In a few seconds one of the workers would turn and see the light, even if the sound of the siren was buried under the hum and drone of all the machinery in the boiler room.

  Finally the Cuban returned. He was holding a giant six-volt dry-cell searchlight.

  “I saw this. I thought perhaps it would be good to see where we are going, no?”

  “Yes.” Holliday grunted. The Cuban was right. “Go and find Genrikhovich,” he ordered, “He won’t have gone far. I’ll stay here and close things up.”

  Eddie nodded. Still holding the monkey wrench, he slipped through the opening and disappeared into the darkness. Holliday followed, then turned and eased the grille until it was open only three or four inches. He fished the lock out of his pocket, hung the shackle over the remains of the hasp and eased the door shut. If anyone gave it a casual look the vent would have appeared to be locked. He turned and stumbled into the darkness.

  15

  Wearing white gloves, as required, Cardinal Antonio Niccolo Spada, Vatican secretary of state, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, better known as the Holy Inquisition, sat in the private manuscript reading room of the Vatican Library, carefully turning the pages of the original manuscript on vellum of The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin or al-Nawadir al-Sultaniyya wa’l-Mahasin al-Yusufiyya by Baha’ al-Din Ibn Shaddad.

  Seated across from the hawk-faced cardinal, smelling like an ashtray as usual, was Father Thomas Brennan, head of Vatican foreign intelligence, once known as Sodalitium Pianum, its name now changed to that of a much more bureaucratic and thus anonymous group, the Committee for Doctrinal Research and Investigation.

  “North, south, east and west,” murmured Cardinal Spada. “Four holy swords, Polaris, Octanis, Aos and Hesperios. Hesperios, the Sword of the West, was given to Adolf Hitler by Mussolini after it had been discovered on an archaeological dig near Naples, and eventually found its way into Colonel John Holliday’s hands seventy-odd years after it was dug up. Aos, Sword of the East, was held by the monk Helder Rodriques, in the Azores. Polaris was hidden in a Bulgarian monastery; in 1944 it was given to Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD, who in turn gave it to Stalin. They have learned nothing from these three swords, and what is worse, we have learned nothing.”

  “So the secret must lie with the fourth, Octanis, Sword of the South,” said Brennan. “Sounds like something out of Harry Potter or Lord of the bloody Rings-four swords to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.” The Irish priest snorted. “What a load of bleeding bollocks, boyo,” he said. He scratched at the gray-white stubble on his cheeks with three stubby fingers yellowed with nicotine. “It’s fantasy, Your Eminence. Fecking silly fairy tales from a thousand years ago. A Thousand and One Arabian fecking Nights, yeah?”

  Spada frowned, staring across the old scarred table at Brennan, wondering what on earth could have called such a man to God and holy orders, and, even more dumbfounding, what seminary could have educated him, and what bishop could have poss
ibly seen fit to ordain such an uncouth, foulmouthed lout from the wilds of County Offaly.

  Brennan caught the look and smiled, showing off his small and nicotine-stained teeth. “I know what I am, and who I am, and where I came from, and where I am now, Your Eminence, believe you me. I know all that and I know what you think of me. But that doesn’t matter, really; does it, Your Eminence? Because when you get right down to it, you and me are the very same. I know all your dirty secrets and you know mine.”

  “That wouldn’t be a threat, would it, Father Brennan?” Spada said mildly.

  “Certainly not, Your Eminence!” Brennan said in mock horror. “God’s blood, Cardinal! It’s just my way of saying I know who the shark is and who the feckin’ remora is in this relationship, and I’ll happily clean the bits of flesh from between the shark’s teeth, and I’ll be your Gollum searching for your precious Sword of the South for as long as you want me to, because that’s my fecking job, yeah?”

  “That may not be necessary, in point of fact,” said Spada. He nodded toward the old vellum manuscript on the table in front of him. “This particular book of Arabian Nights, which is a biography of Saladin by one of his closest advisers, mentions not only the Four Swords of Pelerin; it also mentions a gift of Saladin to the eighth grand master of the Templars, Odo de St. Amand. It was a fifth sword, Al Husam Min Warda, the Sword of the Rose. When Odo and King Baldwin the Leper, king of Jerusalem, were trapped after a battle, Odo gifted it to Reginald of Sidon, the man who rescued them. The Sword of the Rose was never heard of again.”

  “More fairy tales,” said Brennan.

  The cardinal could see that Brennan desperately wanted a cigarette, so he kept on talking, just to draw things out a little longer. Brennan could do with a dose of history anyway. Spada smiled. “Sidon was a territory in the Holy Land during the Crusades. But what you may not know, Father Brennan, is that it is also the origin for the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fictitious Prieure de Sion, the Priory of Sion, and half a dozen other misuses, large and small. The misinterpreting of a single word can sometimes be very important.” He gestured at the book on the table in front of him. “For instance, Saladin’s biographer was very careful to use the word ‘husam’ for sword, rather than ‘saif.’Husam is the word used for an ordinary soldier’s weapon, a real sword, while saif could be misinterpreted as a metaphorical sword-Saif al-Haqq, the Sword of Truth. Saif al-Islam, the Sword of Islam. The Christian Sword of the Lord. He was telling us that the fifth sword, the Sword of the Rose, is very real.”