Red Templar

by Paul Christopher

  “You rest here for a minute,” said Holliday. “I want to look around a bit and then we’ll be on our way.”

  “Lo que usted diga, mi amigo-whatever you say,” the Cuban answered weakly.

  Holliday turned back and went into the study. There were windows on two walls and here the curtains were pulled back. It had snowed since they’d gone underground hours before, a thick, soft blanket of it at least six inches deep, the scattered birch trees throwing long, skeletal shadows. The study was filled with the strange blue light that comes when moonlight reflects off newly fallen snow, and the room had a surreal, almost sinister quality.

  The study was large, with open beams like the kitchen and a pine plank floor covered in carpets of various sizes. There was a fireplace, a huge wooden desk, a high-backed leather chair and two straight chairs in front of it. Dust coated everything.

  He went to the desk and stood behind the tall leather office chair. There was a circular brass pie rack complete with a sandpaper striker and a handful of wax-headed phosphorous matches, a photograph of an elderly woman and the most telling object of them all, one that Holliday had seen a thousand times before: a photograph of a bald-headed man wearing a white shirt, loosened multicolored tie and mirrored sunglasses sitting on a garden chair with a dark-haired young girl in ponytails, perhaps ten years old, sitting on his lap. The man had his arm possessively wrapped around her midsection. Behind him a secretary wearing headphones was transcribing dictation, and at a round rattan table a man in a gray uniform complete with Cossack boots was smoking a curved pipe and poring over a sheaf of papers spread out on the table in front of him.

  The man in the mirrored sunglasses was Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD, later to become the KGB; the young girl was Svetlana Stalin, Joseph Stalin’s only legitimate child; the secretary with the headphones was Otto Kuusinen, Stalin’s private secretary and one of the very few people to survive the vast Stalinist purges; and the man in the uniform smoking the pipe-the same tooth-scarred pipe sitting in the rack in front of him-was Joseph Stalin himself.

  Holliday breathed deeply. This was Stalin’s study in the “nearer dacha” at Kuntsevo, about thirty miles outside Moscow. Stalin had spent his last years here, and he had died here.

  Holliday dropped the machine gun and the knapsack on the desk. He pulled out the big leather chair and dropped down into it, giving in to his fatigue for a few precious seconds.

  He realized just how desperately tired he was, not only physically but mentally. The last years had taken their toll. Once upon a time he’d been a historian and a teacher, both roles that suited him well. Sometimes he yearned for the fresh faces of his kids at West Point, but he could see no way back along that path now. Ever since making his promise to the dying monk Rodrigues on that tiny volcanic island in the Azores, he’d gone down a rabbit hole of intrigue and conspiracy and into a dark world he’d never even suspected existed.

  He opened the bloodstained knapsack and took out the manuscript that Genrikhovich had removed from the ornate Ark of the Covenant in the treasure chamber. It was bound in some dark animal skin, probably goat, the cover stiff with age. He opened it. The first page had a single line of script in ancient Aramaic, the language most likely to have been spoken by Christ.

  Did it say what the Russian had read out so triumphantly-the Gospel of Yeshua ben Yusef, Jesus, son of Joseph? Holliday flipped through the long pages of small, neat script, the ink faded to a pale sepia. The upper and lower edges of the pages were roughly cut, which made sense if you assumed that such a document had originally been written on scrolls, then cut into pages sometime in the future.

  Were they really the words of Christ, perhaps written in his own hand? Unlikely. Holliday had never heard a discussion of the topic, but Jesus was almost certainly functionally illiterate-he most probably could neither read nor write; such a level of education wouldn’t have been available to the son of a carpenter, and there was no documentation in any of the other gospels about Christ attending any kind of school. The gospel could have been physically written by one or more of his disciples, several of whom were known to be quite well educated.

  Genuine, a fake, a fairy tale? And did it matter? One way or the other it was a time bomb and a document of immense power. Holliday traced a line of script with his finger. Was he touching the word of God?

  It was the same with all religions: Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Confucius, the Dalai Lama, the gods of popularity cults, like Mao, Che, even Eddie’s aging Fidel-before they were revered they were men, and one way or the other, over time the ideas of these men were taken, misused, abused and eternally reinterpreted for reasons of power and personal gain. The Gospel of Yeshua ben Yusef would be no different; it would be used for other people’s ends and to satisfy other people’s needs.

  Once more Holliday heard the dying words of Helder Rodrigues: Too many secrets, too many secrets. In that moment, with that memory clear and present in his mind, Holliday came to his decision, a decision that went against all the tenets of truth he’d ever been taught. A secret revealed was a secret that could never be made secret again, and some secrets were better left alone.

  He flipped the manuscript over and tented it on the desk. He pulled open all the drawers on both pedestals of the desk and pulled out reams of old paper, brittle and yellow and tinder dry. The irony of what he was about to do and where did not escape him. He was keeping the bright secret of a holy man by destroying it in a place once occupied by one of the most unholy men ever to have walked the earth.

  He reached out, took one of the wax-preserved phosphorous matches out of its holder and dragged it down the sandpaper strip. It sputtered for only a second, but then it burst into flame. Holliday gently touched the match to the brittle pages of the manuscript, watching them ignite, and in turn light the pile of papers he’d built up around it.

  He picked up the machine gun and stood up, stepping back. Soon the entire top of the desk was alight, pages and sheets of paper carried up into the roof beams on the hot air currents, more pages whirling and twisting over to the curtains. Within less than a minute the entire room was ablaze.

  Holliday went back to the hallway. He roused Eddie, stood him up, then managed to get one of the overcoats on the pegs onto him-a gray double-breasted thing with brass buttons and a fur collar. He chose another coat for himself, shrugged into it and guided Eddie toward the front door.

  “Something is burning, I think,” said Eddie blearily.

  “It sure is.” Holliday smiled. Holding Eddie under the arms, he managed to open the front door, where they were met by a blast of cold air. It was snowing again. “Let’s go find a ride, amigo.”

  40

  Unfortunately for Felix Fyodor Fosdikov, the sandwich he had eaten combined with the vodka and the overheated cabin of his big power grader had conspired to put him into a troubled sleep, his head tucked down to his belly, his snores rumbling like cannon fire. Had he stayed awake he would have seen the snow reach the ten-centimeter tape on the blade of his plow and would have gone off on his route. As it was he slept through the ten-centimeter mark, the twenty and the thirty before he woke up.

  At first he thought his heartburn dream had become some kind of hideous nightmare in which Stalin had come back to life as a black man and was sitting beside him in the cab. Beyond the black Stalin was another man with a patch over one eye like a pirate and a very nasty-looking machine pistol.

  The man with the patch over his eye said something unintelligible to the black Stalin, who appeared to be very sick and perspiring. Felix Fyodor Fosdikov was perspiring, too, and the heartburn was spreading everywhere now, turning his throat into molten lava. He fought to hold back the vomit while simultaneously clamping down on his bowels. This was no dream. The black Stalin turned to him and spoke.

  “Vy znaete sposob amerikanskogo poso’stva?”

  “Konechno.” Felix Fyodor nodded. Under the circumstances, telling the truth seemed like the best option. Out of the corner of h
is eye he could see a fiery glow somewhere behind the high fence that surrounded the dacha. Bad things were happening tonight. His heartburn cranked up another notch.

  “He knows,” said Eddie, turning to Holliday, crammed in beside him in the small, overheated cab.

  “Then tell him to go there now,” Holliday said, gesturing with his weapon.

  “Tuda, v nastoyashchyee vremya,” translated Eddie.

  Felix Fyodor didn’t need to be told twice.

  “Da,” he said, and threw the big power grader into one of its many forward gears. The tall, insectlike machine lurched forward into the snowy night. Behind it, in the birch woods beyond the fence, the dacha burned and the first sirens could be heard.

  The first alarm from the Kremlin had gone out at two fifteen after a forty-minute discussion between members of the special Kremlin Spetsnaz unit about the loss of face that would occur if they asked for help. But help was clearly needed, and the first calls were broadcast. The first went out to the Moscow Metropolitan Police, who, recognizing a political hot potato when they saw one, immediately passed responsibility over to the FSB. The FSB, in the way of all large bureaucracies, spent a great deal of time calling people and playing pass-the-buck for a full ninety minutes. It wasn’t until three thirty that a request was made to the army for several of its attack helicopters, which then joined the four Kremlin Spetsnaz choppers, all of which spent a further forty-five minutes coordinating their approach and attack on the dacha in Kuntsevo. A unit of special Kremlin guards was dispatched along the subway line, and a further forty local police vehicles were also roped into the party. When a fire was reported on the old abandoned estate, four local fire stations sent their various vehicles to Kuntsevo as well. At four ten in the morning the first FSB unit arrived at the scene, almost half an hour after Felix Fyodor and his passengers had joined the ubiquitous scores of snowplows and graders out on the Moscow streets and highways. Any trace of the power grader’s presence at the Kuntsevo property was long since covered by the freshly fallen snow. At four thirty-five Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, the patriarch of Moscow, and Vasilyevich Bortnikov, head of the FSB, had all been individually woken from their beds and advised of the situation. Putin, standing by the phone in his silk dressing gown, summed it up succinctly for the others.

  “Ebanatyi pidaraz!”

  “Vladimir!” said his wife, Lyudmila. “Such language!”

  It was two hours earlier by Vatican time when Cardinal Spada’s sleep was interrupted by a knock on the bedroom door of his lavish apartment. The Vatican secretary of state came fully awake to the smell of freshly brewed espresso. He rolled over and saw the bland face of his servant, Brother Timothy, a smart, extremely pretty and well-connected young man who hoped for better things through his attachment to the great Cardinal Spada.

  Spada took a sip of the scalding coffee, then set it down on the night table beside the enormous four-poster bed that was said to have belonged to one of the Borgias. He pulled himself up against the scrolled headboard while Timothy adjusted his pillows. The young man offered Spada his wire-rimmed spectacles, and the cardinal slipped them on.

  “Presumably there is good reason to interrupt my sleep, Timothy. The pope isn’t dead, is he?”

  “No, Your Eminence, it’s Father Brennan.”

  “That old bugger’s dead?” Spada said hopefully.

  “No, Your Eminence, he’s outside, and he’d like to speak to you on a matter of some urgency.”

  Spada gave a heartfelt sigh and picked up his coffee from the bedside table. “I suppose you’d better send him in.”

  “Yes, Your Eminence.” The monk shimmered away, closing the door behind him. Spada sipped his coffee.

  The Irish priest who was also the head of Spada’s intelligence network appeared a few seconds later dressed in a rumpled suit with a stained clerical collar and smoking what was probably his tenth cigarette of the day. He didn’t beat around the bush.

  “They’ve found bloody Pesek with a bullet in his eye stuffed into a refrigerator in an apartment off the Arbat. The apartment was rented by a Russian Orthodox priest named Ivanov who was somehow connected to Genrikhovich.”

  “Dear me,” said Spada.

  “There’re also several unconfirmed reports of some sort of attack on the Kremlin. Bodies and such.”

  “Holliday and his friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “The book?”

  “No.”

  “Porca troia!” Spada said, reminding himself almost instantly to say ten Our Fathers and twenty Hail Marys for his use of foul language.

  At roughly the same time Cardinal Spada was uttering blasphemous oaths in Rome, Pat Philpot, national counterterrorism liaison at the Moscow embassy, was sitting at his desk in the secure cube, with Whit Havers standing on the other side of it. Pat Philpot, inevitably known by friends and enemies alike as Potsy, was not a happy man. He liked his sleep, for one thing, and his banishment to the Moscow boonies after the catastrophe of eighteen months before at least had the benefit that he could basically do nothing through his working days and still collect a salary. It also took him eight thousand miles away from his nagging ex-wife and his children, who were always asking him for money. Four thirty in the morning was not his idea of a good start to the day. He was also hungry, which was why he was now working his way steadily through four McDonald’s Big Breakfasts from the Red Square outlet. Some people would have said Philpot had an eating disorder; Pat would have told you he was a big man who wanted to get bigger. Brinsley Whitman Havers, who hadn’t had so much as a roti in fifteen years, was simply disgusted.

  “All right, kid,” said Philpot, chewing his way through his third wedge of hash browns. “You’ve managed to get every security officer in the embassy in a tizzy, so spill. I need to know it all-start to finish. You’re the case officer; who the hell are you running that’s causing all this shit to hit the fan?”

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible, sir,” said Whit as Philpot wiped his fingers on the hash brown bag and started in on some scrambled eggs. “I’m afraid it’s the national security adviser’s operation.”

  Philpot belched and took a sip of black coffee. He grimaced. “Don’t give me that White House West Wing crap, son; it doesn’t cut any ice with me. Besides, I know the kind of crap your boss Kokum gets up to, and I also know where all his bodies are buried. Spit it out or you’re on the next flight out.”

  “It’s a blue operation. . sir,” said Whit stiffly.

  “An assassination?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who’s the target?”

  Whit hesitated. “A man named Holliday, sir,” he said finally.

  Whit had heard the phrase “he turned white as a sheet” before, but he’d never actually seen it. The blood seemed to drain out of the fat man’s neck. It was amazing; he looked like he was going to have a stroke, which wouldn’t have been surprising, all things considered.

  “Lieutenant Colonel John Holliday? He’s the one responsible for all this crap?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Whit.

  “Oh, shit,” said Philpot, his appetite gone with almost a complete Big Breakfast to go.

  Twenty-five minutes after Eddie and Doc had left the burning dacha, an alert policeman noted the strange behavior of a snowplow in the middle of a snowstorm that wasn’t plowing any snow. When he reported to his superiors, it was discovered that the plow in question was well off its normal route, which began close to the gates of the dacha. Fifteen minutes later somebody put two and two together, and within another ten minutes there was a trail of police cars behind the power grader, sirens wailing. There was very little a one-ton police car could do to stop a massive grader like the one piloted by Felix Fyodor Fosdikov, and eventually air support was called in. One of the attack helicopters that had gone to the dacha headed for the location of the errant snowplow with orders to fire at will.

  At four fifty-one a.m. Moscow time, Felix Fyodor Fos
dikov turned the big power grader off the Ulitsa Novy Arbat and onto Novinsky Perulok, the trail of police cars following behind, the distant thunder of the helicopter getting louder by the second, its giant searchlight swinging back and forth less than half a mile away, searching for its target in the driving snow.

  A hundred yards ahead at the bottom of the hill was Deviations Boulevard. On the far side of Deviations at the intersection of the two streets and lined up right in the crosshairs of a gun sight were the front gates of the United States Embassy.

  “Tell him he’ll be fine as long as he does exactly as he’s told,” said Holliday.

  Eddie told him.

  “Tell him to drive slowly down the hill and stop in front of the gates; as soon as we’re outside and on the street he’s free to go.”

  Eddie told him that as well.

  “Does he understand?”

  “Vy ponimaete?”

  “Da,” answered Felix Fyodor. He threw the grader into a lower gear, eased his foot off the brake and pushed the throttle forward slightly. He felt terrible, and he didn’t believe his two passengers for a second. They were clearly terrorists, and he was going to be involved no matter what he said or did. To make things worse, his heartburn had reached levels of pain he never thought could come from sauerkraut. He was sweating rivers, his bladder was close to voiding and he suddenly had a terrible pain in the back of his neck. And his right eye started to have black spots dancing in front of it. He blinked, gritted his teeth and tried to concentrate on what he was doing. Suddenly his right hand spasmed and jerked the throttle forward. The grader began to speed up, its monstrous transmission growling.

  “Tell him to slow down!” Holliday yelled.

  And then it was all irrelevant to Felix Fyodor Fosdikov. A dozen or so hibernating arteries in the Russian’s head all conspired to blossom into bright flower, while at the same time his already elevated heart rate went into full-on tachycardia. Felix Fyodor’s brain and heart both stopped functioning at the same instant. He dropped dead over the controls, his hand pushing the throttle forward to its limit and his jerking knee hitting the blade control, dropping both plows into the snow. By the time the grader reached the bottom of the hill it was going its full forty-two miles per hour. The attack helicopter, finally in range, saw where the grader was headed and instantly sheered away, not wanting to be the root cause of World War Three by firing at the American embassy.