Red Templar

by Paul Christopher

  Breathing back to normal, he walked down the narrow, dimly lit corridor to the door of her room: 422. He knocked quietly. There was no response, so he knocked again.

  “Who is it?” Her voice was muffled but he could hear the irritation in it.

  He put on his best Dublin drawl. “John Drennan, Ms. Muller. The Irish Independent?” Bone was using the name of one of the paper’s political writers. “Your office said I could find you here.”

  The door opened and there she was. “They shouldn’t have done. .”

  He moved the blade in his right hand in a firm, continuous motion that slid easily through skin, flesh, arteries, veins, layers of cartilage, ligaments, muscles and mucous membranes that made up the trachea, all the way through to the muscles and glands at the back of the neck, finally scraping the C4 vertebra of the spine. The Muller woman’s instinct was to bring her hand up to the wound, but she only succeeded in pushing her fingers into the bloody ruin of her neck, tipping her almost severed head back at an absurd angle so that her last conscious vision was probably the nubby plaster of her hotel room ceiling. Bone pushed her back into the room with his gloved hand. She sank to the floor and toppled backward. He stepped into the room, careful to avoid the spreading lake of blood around the dead woman’s head. The room was small and utilitarian. A bed, a stand-alone wardrobe, an upholstered chair, a wooden chair and a plain desk under the window. The briefcase was on the desk. Bone opened it and saw that the Dell laptop was still inside. He closed the briefcase, picked it up and walked out of the room. Three minutes later he was back on the Damstraat; fifteen minutes later he was back at his own hotel. He phoned Derlagen.

  “It’s done; I have it.”

  “Good,” said the Dutchman. “I’ll meet you in the usual place.” The usual place was the waiting room of the Centraal Station. “I have another job if you want it.”

  “I was hoping to get home for the weekend. The girls have a choir concert on Sunday.”

  “Up to you. Priority fee if you want it.”

  “Where?”

  “How’s your Russian?”

  “Ochen’ horosho,” answered Bone in a Moscow accent. Pretty good. “Any competition?”

  “The locals. The Catholics and those mad Czechs they use from time to time.”

  “The Peseks? That crazy bitch and her knitting needle?”

  “The same.”

  “Bloody hell,” muttered Bone. He thought for a moment. “Triple fee and I’ll do it.”

  “I’ll see what I can arrange,” answered the Dutchman.

  Pierre Ducos, advocate in the little hilltop town of Domme, sat at his table in his favorite restaurant, the Cabanoix et Chataignes on Rue Geoffroy de Vivans, and enjoyed the hearty lamb stew that was the restaurant’s specialty, and for good reason. He would follow it with a sorbet and a coffee and then return to the office. Madame Beauregard the widow would be seeing him that afternoon on a matter that she deemed to be of extreme urgency, but probably had something to do with her fears that her grandson, a student in Paris, was actually a homosexual, and was there anything within the law that Advocat Ducos could do to stop it?

  He finished the last of the stew and sat back in his chair, waiting for Jeanette, the only server in the old, low-ceilinged place. She was also the owner’s daughter and was having an affair with the young chef. Ducos knew this because Jeanette, the young chef and the owner were all his clients. He smiled; sometimes it was difficult to remain objective in a small town like this.

  Jeanette appeared. “I’ll bring out your sorbet in a moment, m’sieul’avocat.”

  “No hurry,” answered Ducos. “I think I’ll step outside for a cigarette. I must make a call anyway.”

  “A votre service, m’sieu l’avocat.”

  Ducos smiled, stood up and made his way across the dimly lit and crowded room. Cabanoix et Chataignes was everything he liked about Domme-it was strong, with its dark oak rafters, thick plaster walls and slate floors as old as time. It was always crowded with people he knew, and more than anything else it was predictably excellent. The menu changed with the seasons and the whims of the chef, but whatever he chose from the menu he knew without doubt that it would be marvelous. If there was one thing Pierre Louis Rene Marie Joseph Ducos appreciated-nay, demanded-it was consistency. There was nothing he liked less than a thing out of place, time out of joint or an event unforeseen, and that was what he was faced with now.

  He lit a cigarette and took out his cell phone. He tapped out a long series of numbers and waited. It answered after a number of rings.

  “Sir James? C’estDucos. . Quite well, thank you. We have a situation that must be resolved. It has to do with number five. . Yes, Sir James, the Rose. . Yes, Holliday. . Russia, I’m afraid. . I assume they are aware of this. . All right. I’ll inform Barsukov tomorrow. His people will deal with it, I assure you. . Of course I’m aware Barsukov is in prison. What does that have to do with anything? The prisons in Russia are run by the Mafia, Sir James. . Of course. Every step of the way, Sir James. There is far too much at stake to let it go on any longer. . And a good afternoon to you, Sir James.”

  Ducos closed the phone, pocketed it and stood there for a few moments enjoying the last of his cigarette, thinking about the Greek tragedian Aeschylus and his favorite quotation from the man: “God is not averse to deceit in a holy cause.” Smiling, Pierre Ducos stubbed out the remains of his cigarette on the cobbles and went back into the restaurant for his well-deserved sorbet and coffee.

  21

  The Red Arrow Express turned out to be the train once used by the local St. Petersburg party bigwigs and other members of the local apparat, complete with private and semiprivate compartments, ornate dining car, red velvet upholstery, fringes on the window blinds and the showers, all on a train that took only eight hours to reach its destination. Following Genrikhovich’s instructions they drove the rattletrap old Volga to Tosno and boarded the train without incident. They had purchased a four-bunk compartment even though there were only three of them. They wolfed down the contents of the little food boxes that were waiting for them on each of the bunks and then went to bed. Holliday stayed awake in the darkness, looking out into the night at the dark pastoral scene of birch trees and small farms as they sped past, and then he, too, fell asleep. He woke with the others just before the train pulled into Leningradsky station, exactly on time.

  They left the train with the other passengers and made their way into the terminal building, a tall, rectangular hall lined with small shops and restaurants. If there had ever been benches for waiting or lockers for luggage they were long gone.

  “We can’t stay here all day,” said Holliday. According to Genrikhovich, there were two daily trains to Yekaterinburg each day-the Ural Express, which left Moscow Kazanskaya station at four fifty in the afternoon, and the Rossiya, or Trans-Siberian Express, which left Moscow Yaroslavskaya station at nine oh five in the evening. Both trains took twenty-six hours to complete the journey.

  In the end they decided on the Trans-Siberian. It was larger, more anonymous and not as destination-specific as the Ural Express. They crossed the expanse of Komsomol Square, bought their tickets in the booming, eighteenth-century station, then had breakfast at a nearby McDonald’s, Holliday fascinated by Genrikhovich’s almost magical ability to eat endless amounts of junk food.

  They spent the rest of the day playing tourists and buying supplies for their trip, including backpacks, changes of clothing and a small digital camera to give their touristy playacting a bit of verisimilitude. They rode the magnificent subway, took pictures of one another in Red Square, rode a glass-topped tourist boat along the Moskva River and spent half an hour standing behind barricades on the Arbat watching Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brian Statham shooting a scene from Red Heat II.

  Every once in a while during the strangely pleasant day in Moscow, Eddie or Holliday would drop back to see whether they were under any sort of surveillance. Neither man could detect anything out of the ordi
nary. They had lunch at a Kentucky Fried Chicken on the Arbat, a Pizza Hut dinner off Red Square, and made it back to the station in time to load up on snacks and bottled water for the trip and then climbed on the train. They made their way to their four-berth compartment somewhere close to the front of the long blue-and-red train. It was barely six feet wide, the lower berth upholstered benches during daylight hours, the upper berths permanently made up as beds. The narrow window was covered by a plush fringed curtain that seemed to belong to another age. A narrow hinged table pulled up on a folding single leg between the lower berths. They were each handed a packaged meal of burger, nibbed wheat, sweet corn and peas in a plastic container by their provodnitsa, a female, uniformed carriage attendant. The provodnitsa told them that there was a samovar at the end of the carriage with hot water available at all times of the day as well as powdered coffee. The attendant told them that if they required more or different food it could be obtained in one of the two dining cars on the Rossiya. She then gave them a brief official smile, cast a single nervous glance in Eddie’s direction and withdrew. At nine twenty-five on the dot the Trans-Siberian Express gave a single long blast on its horn and eased smoothly out of the station. They were on their way.

  One of Genrikhovich’s purchases had been a cheap two-liter bottle of KiN horseradish vodka, which he brought out and began to drink as soon as the train began moving. Holliday and Eddie each had one shot of the foul stuff, agreed that it tasted like someone burning truck tires and switched to the powdered coffee. Between shots Genrikhovich ate bites of his packaged meal-one shot for each bite. By the time he’d finished the meal the Russian was drunk and almost unconscious. Together Holliday and Eddie managed to lift him onto one of the top bunks. Fortunately the bunk had a built-in guardrail.

  With Genrikhovich snoring above them the two men sat on either side of the table drinking glasses of black instant coffee and staring out into the darkness. They had long ago left Moscow behind them as the long winding train clattered and rumbled its way east toward the distant Ural Mountains.

  Eddie turned the switch on the little ventilator fan and lit one of the cigars he’d purchased in the lobby of the infamous Ukraine Hotel. “Tell me, Doc, why are we doing these things? I like excitement, yes, but I think this is getting a little crazy.” The Cuban shrugged. “You have told me the story of this monk, Helder Rodrigues, and the promise you made him when he was dying, but even promises come to their end, companero; am I right?”

  “Well, in the first place our snoring, farting friend in the top bunk is right-we’ve gone too far to back out now. It’s simply a matter of survival, of getting out of this whole thing alive. We’ve got the FSB after us and God only knows who else.”

  “That is not what I meant, companero, and you know it.” The Cuban shrugged his powerful shoulders. “This thing, whatever it is, has a. . sujecion, a grip on you.” Eddie smiled broadly in the darkness. “You are my friend and I go where you go, do what you do, but I would like to understand better the reason for all of this. I am old-fashioned, Doc; if I die I would like it either to be as a very old man with a pretty girl in the bed with me or for some great cause.”

  Holliday stared out the window, the darkness broken every few minutes by the distant, dim light from farmhouses-lives lived that he would never know, dramas unfolding that he would never witness, nothing more than a passing wraith in the night. Finally he turned back to Eddie.

  “At first, when I discovered the sword in my uncle Henry’s house I thought I was part of something important, something ancient and good. Uncle Henry was the only real family I ever had, and I thought there couldn’t be anything better than following in his footsteps. That’s why I got my degree and my doctorate in history, to be like him. After getting out of the army I taught at West Point, a teacher like my uncle Henry. He was magic to me. He showed me that history was everywhere, from the blood-rich soil of Antietam to the seventeenth-century graffiti on the walls of the palace at Versailles. He showed me that there was sometimes more history in the writings of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain than there was in a hundred history textbooks.

  “When I learned of his connection to the Templar tradition and eventually of his role in protecting that great treasure in the caves of the Corvo volcano in the Azores, I loved him even more. He was truly a knight in shining armor to me.”

  “You are sounding like he is no longer the shining knight for you,” said Eddie.

  “I learned that he was only a man. A spy for his country and a man who killed more than once to get what he wanted. A man who crossed boundaries that perhaps should have been left uncrossed. And that was only my uncle. The more I investigated his fellow ‘knights,’ these new Templars, these holy men and their holy cause, the more I saw them for what they truly were-some of them, anyway-what they had always been: avaricious, greedy men piling up wealth and power for their own sake. It’s one secret society at war with another. This Order of the Phoenix, or whatever Putin and his oligarchs call it, and whoever or whatever the Templars are now-it is enormous power versus enormous power, and there can be only one left in the end. That’s what this fifth sword is all about. North, south, east and west, with the fifth sword in the middle, the Rose Sword and whatever secret it holds. The Rose Sword, the last sword, is everything to them.”

  “And the secret of this sword’s location is somehow in the egg of the Faberge given by the czar?” Eddie asked.

  “That would seem to be the accepted idea. Find out the secret of the Kremlin Egg and you find the sword. Find the sword and you find the real secret the Templars have been hiding from the world for the last seven hundred years.”

  The two friends sat in the dark together talking, sharing their pasts, their glories and their tragedies. Eddie spoke of being black in Cuba, and even after Castro’s revolution how white and separate the country remained, without one black minister in the government or black general in the military.

  He joked about his early days as a criminal, stealing mangoes off the trees that lined the main boulevard of Miramar, the police hot on his trail, of being beaten and bullied for his strange name in his early school days, and fabricating makeshift weights from cans full of cement and iron bars. On the other hand he spoke well of his education-a university engineering degree-and of his early military career, learning to fly anything from little single-prop Zlin Z 26 trainers to massive MiG-29 Fulcrum fighter jets.

  Finally he spoke of his days in Africa, his final disillusionment with a revolution that supported other, poorer countries with multimillion-dollar aircraft and pilots while simultaneously being so corrupt at home that the government was unable to feed its people a daily meal of beans and rice, and where nurses and secretaries and even doctors became prostitutes in the evening to make ends meet. A country where everything was blamed on the “embargo” and where tomatoes rotted in the fields for want of the machinery to pick them, while in Havana the black market thrived and people with the right connections watched Miami satellite TV on wide plasma screens.

  For his part Holliday spoke of growing up poor, of his early escape into books given to him by Uncle Henry and of his drunk and often abusive father. He spoke about the army as another kind of an escape, the training making a man out of a boy and how the wars he’d fought had seemed to steal small parts of his soul. He spoke about his love for his wife, Fay, and her sudden passing, and of his love for teaching history. He talked about his niece, Peggy, and Rafi Wanounou, the good man she’d married, an Israeli archaeologist. He talked about his regret at not having had children, and together the two men talked of their mutual love of baseball.

  Both men fell asleep around one thirty in the morning just after leaving Vladimir, Eddie’s namesake and the first station stop and locomotive change for the Trans-Siberian. The rocking motion put an already tired Holliday into a deep and dreamless sleep that was suddenly and forcefully interrupted by Eddie seemingly only a few seconds later. Holliday craned his neck and saw a weak line of light com
ing through the break between the curtains covering the window. He remembered Eddie pulling them closed just before oblivion reached up and grabbed him. He looked at the glowing dial of his old Hamilton wristwatch. Five o’clock in the morning Moscow time, dawn wherever they were right now.

  Eddie was shaking him by the shoulder. “Wake up, mi coronel; we have a problem.”

  “What problem?”

  “It is Genrikhovich, the Russian.”

  “What about him?”

  “He is gone.”

  22

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  “I woke up to use the excusado. . the toilet. When I came back I heard no snoring from above me, so I looked and he was not there. I thought perhaps he’d needed the toilet himself and went to the one in the next car along, but he was not there either.”

  “What about the provodnitsa, or whatever the hell they call her?”

  “Asleep, presumably. She was not at her post by the samovar at the end of the car.”

  “It’s a train, for God’s sake. He’s got to be somewhere.”

  “I have looked from one end of the train to the other, mi companero. He is vanished. Desaparecido.”

  “Where the hell are we?” Holliday asked, sitting up groggily.

  “Somewhere between Nizhniy Novgorod and Yoshkar-Ola.”

  “Where the hell is that?”

  “Nowhere,” said Eddie.

  “Have there been any stops since we went to bed?”

  “Nizhniy Novgorod.”

  “Could he have gotten off the train there?”

  “It is very doubtful, mi coronel. He would almost surely have awakened me.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive. When I got up for the toilet he was snoring. When I returned he was not. I was gone perhaps three minutes at the most.”