Thief on the Cross: Templar Secrets in America (Templars in America Series Book 2)

by David S. Brody

  Salazar shrugged. “Nothing earth-shattering about that. That’s what the Japs did at Pearl Harbor. So what’s your plan?”

  “What kind of car are they driving?”

  “Buckner and the woman drove up in a Chevy Suburban. The other guys have a Crown Victoria; the guy watching the motel is probably driving that.”

  “Where do you think their weapons are?”

  “Other than their side arms, and whatever is in the Crown Vic, probably locked in the Suburban. They wouldn’t take assault weapons into the Hampton Inn on a luggage rack.”

  “Okay then. This might work.”

  Five minutes later they pulled into the hotel parking lot. Salazar pointed to a black Suburban parked against a fence at the edge of the lot. “That’s it.”

  “Good, it’s not too close to the front door. Pull over in front of it; try to block the view from the hotel. And face the exit.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “You’ll see.” Cam slid from the car and pulled from inside his jacket a cheap hand-towel and wire coat hanger he had taken from the motel. He edged through the puddles and crouched next to the Suburban’s gas tank. His hand was shaking so he flexed his fingers like he had seen safecrackers do in the old Hollywood movies and removed the cap. Things seemed quiet, but that probably didn’t mean much when dealing with trained operatives. He dropped to his belly, his legs in a puddle, and peered under the Suburban. Allowing his eyes to adjust, he scanned the lot, looking for the movement of feet under the cars parked nearby. Nothing.

  Rising to one knee, Cam twisted the towel and, using the coat hanger, forced one end of the threadbare fabric deep into tank. The taste of gas settled in the back of his dry throat; he licked his lips and swallowed. The gas wicked up the towel, eventually soaking a portion of the fabric hanging outside the tank. He waved away any fumes, pulled a lighter from his pocket and lit the unsaturated end of the fabric, holding the flame far from his body. When he was sure the flame would not go out, he sprinted to the car.

  “Drive. Fast. We have about five seconds.”

  As Salazar screeched out of the parking lot a thunderous boom concussed the night air. A few seconds later a series of smaller staccato pops cut through the echo of the first explosion as the ammunition in the Suburban ignited. An orange glow illuminated the low clouds in the night sky behind them.

  Salazar nodded. “Nice work. But they’re going to be really pissed off.”

  Georgia waited until the sedan peeled out of the hotel parking lot before pounding on the door across the hall. “It’s the Suburban,” she yelled. “It’s on fire.” Good for them.

  Trey pushed past her and peered out the window. Flames shot high into the sky as the inferno popped like a summer campfire. “Weren’t you watching?” He glared at her.

  “I was. I just looked away for a minute.” She tried not to laugh as the vein on Trey’s forehead throbbed.

  “You didn’t see anything?”

  The hotel probably had a security camera, so she didn’t want to push her lie too far. “There was a sedan driving around a minute or so earlier. Silver, I think a Honda.” She made a show of scanning the parking lot. “I don’t see it now.”

  As Salazar drove, pushing the speed limit but not so much that they would get pulled over, Cam phoned Amanda. He put her on speaker and recounted how they blew up the Suburban. “Pack up our stuff. We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  “What about the guy watching our room?”

  Salazar responded. “My bet is we see him racing past us in a few minutes. They’ll reestablish surveillance in a few hours after they assess damage. Right now they’re pretty much unarmed.”

  “Hey, I know how they tracked us.” Amanda recounted her conversation with Astarte. “So Eliza must be somehow linked to Buckner and his hit squad.”

  “Eliza?” Cam said. “You mean the whole Mormon spinster thing is an act?”

  Salazar nodded. “Makes sense. There had to be someone inside that compound who had a hidden agenda.”

  “But what is that agenda?” Cam asked. It didn’t make sense. “Why would January coerce me to take his artifacts and go finish his mission, and then his sister turn around and try to stop us?”

  “Not just his sister,” Salazar said. “It’s the feds also. Buckner is following someone’s orders.” He paused. “Or he’s gone rogue and is working with Eliza clandestinely, maybe taking this further than his orders allow him to. That would explain why he’s trying to take you guys out.”

  “I think it all goes back to me seeing the devil’s rocks,” Amanda said. “January wanted us to follow the bread crumbs and find some kind of Holy Grail. But there must be something in the devil’s rocks that leads us, I don’t know, down a different path.” She paused. “Or maybe further down the path than they want us to go.”

  “Don’t you have one of these devil’s rocks?” Salazar asked.

  “It’s still in my pack. There’s been so much going on we haven’t had time to examine it closely.”

  A dark blue Crown Victoria with a single male driver sped past. Cam spoke into the phone. “We just passed the guy who was watching us, going the other way. So you’re okay to pack the car. See you in ten.”

  Amanda watched as Cam finished packing the SUV, the last item being Astarte’s softly snoring body wrapped in a sleeping bag. “Boy, when she sleeps she sleeps.”

  Amanda smiled. “Only two speeds on that one—off and full.”

  Salazar followed for a couple of miles as they ascended the mountain road; the mercenary pulled onto a side street to stand sentry in case Buckner and his cronies somehow tracked them. Cam found an old logging road near where they would be beginning their hike in the morning, pulled deep into it and covered the car with branches and underbrush.

  “Now what?” Amanda asked. “Where do we sleep?” She was wide awake, but they had a long day ahead of them.

  “I don’t want to make a fire,” Cam said, watching the steam from his breath in the moonlight. At least the weather had cleared. “And it’s too cold to sleep under the stars.”

  She shivered again. “Agreed. We could fold down the rear seat and sleep side-by-side in the back.”

  “Okay. We can stack our supplies on the front hood. But not the food—I don’t want to attract bears. We’ll leave that in the front seat.”

  Twenty minutes later they had arranged themselves atop a blanket under a pair of sleeping bags in the bed of the SUV, Astarte huddled between them in the nook of Amanda’s arm.

  Amanda shifted and turned, her mind racing. Cam’s breathing told her he was awake also. “You thinking what I’m thinking?” she whispered.

  “What, you want to fool around?”

  She reached over Astarte and cuffed him. “No. I want to look at the devil’s rock.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  While Amanda retrieved the stone and a flashlight, Cam cleared the food off of the passenger’s seat. She sat on his lap, shifting until she found a position that didn’t hurt her ribs, and rested the paperback-sized slab of white marble on her thighs. She ran the light beam across the carved surface of the marble. A female figure knelt naked beneath the sun, her hands upraised as if accepting the sun’s rays. The figure was simple but graceful.

  BURROWS CAVE ISIS STONE

  “The description card said this is supposed to be Isis. She usually has wings, but not always,” Amanda said. “But why would this be one of January’s devil’s rocks?”

  Cam studied it. “I assume this is a Burrows Cave piece—lots of them have Egyptian themes just like this, especially the white marble ones. And stylistically it’s similar. I really don’t see anything wrong with it.” He paused. “What about the fact that she’s kneeling? Or naked? Assuming it is Isis, would that be historically inaccurate?”

  “No, Isis was often displayed kneeling or naked. And sun worship was an important part of ancient Egyptian religion. Whoever carved this knew their Egyptian history, or at l
east knew enough to copy something authentic.”

  “Maybe there’s something about the stone itself? Maybe this kind of marble isn’t found in North America?”

  She shook her head. “Even so, the piece could have been brought here. Ancient travelers often carried religious icons with them. Or the slab could even have been part of ship ballast and the carving made after they arrived.”

  “Flip it over. Maybe there’s something on the back.”

  Amanda held the light at a low angle to the stone, slowly moving it along the rough surface. “Bloody hell, look at that.” She pointed at a couple of carved characters, faded but still visible. “That’s manmade.”

  She snapped a digital photo of the characters, downloaded the image to her laptop, magnified the marks and drew a red box around them.

  BURROWS CAVE ISIS STONE (back side)

  “It’s cursive writing,” Cam said. “Looks like an ‘h’ and an ‘e.’”

  “And I see a ‘t’ before the ‘h’. So we have ‘t-h-e.’”

  “Clearly not ancient writing. But the word ‘the’ isn’t much of a clue.”

  “No, but ‘the’ as part of ‘mother’ or ‘father’ is. As in ‘dearly departed.’ Dear old mum or dad, buried under a marble slab.”

  Cam chuckled. “You’re right. It’s part of an old tombstone. Probably from some abandoned frontier cemetery.”

  “So someone took an old grave slab, roughed up the epitaph, turned it over and carved an Isis figure on the reverse face. And then left it for Russell Burrows to find, not realizing they botched the job and didn’t completely erase the backside.”

  “Or Russell did it himself.”

  “Either way, it’s a fake. And that calls into question the whole Burrows Cave lot.”

  Cam nodded. “That’s why January hid this one away. It undermines his whole theory.”

  She put the marble slab on the car floor and leaned back against him. “So all this is for nothing? These stones are fake, the Codex is fake, the secret history is fake?”

  “Maybe. But we don’t know the Codex is fake. And don’t forget January knew about this fake carving and still thought the other stones, at least some of them, were authentic enough to devote his life to them. I don’t think the John the Baptist stone is fake—why would January fabricate something like that?”

  “January was delusional.” She sighed. “It’s one thing to get shot at over something truly remarkable.” She gestured at the Isis carving. “But this is just rubbish.”

  “Unfortunately the guys chasing us don’t know that yet. Or if they do, they don’t care. I don’t see how this really changes anything. I think we still have to go up the mountain tomorrow and figure this all out. They’re going to hunt us down, fakes or not.”

  “Jolly wonderful.” She turned and kissed him gently, allowing her body to sink further into his. She felt his manhood stir beneath her. But he often allowed her to set the tone and pace for their lovemaking, and he waited for her to determine whether the kiss was meant as the cap to the end of a long day or rather the prologue to one final climax.

  There was no doubt in her mind—they might be dead by tomorrow, and fat chance she would waste her last night on sleep. Lucky for them Astarte was such a deep sleeper. She moved her lips slowly up his jaw line, nibbled an ear, then tongue-flicked her way down to his neck and chest. He moaned lightly, his eyes closed, and she slipped off her jeans as she moved her lips back up to his face and opened her mouth to his.

  They kissed for a few minutes before she shifted her body and unbuttoned his pants. He entered her slowly, their mouths still together, their eyes open and focused on some spot deep within each other’s soul. Quietly they moved together, a slow, sweet dance at the end of a long day. The music climaxed and then stopped, but they held each other for another few minutes, a dance without music, until she felt herself drifting off to sleep.

  She considered just staying in the front seat, atop Cam, for the entire night. But they needed at least a couple of hours of real sleep. “Come on, darling.”

  Five minutes later they nestled together in the back of the SUV. But the walk around the car had taken the edge off her fatigue, and her mind raced. She was frightened of the assassins pursuing them, and angry at the stone being a fake, and anxious about the climb tomorrow. But being with Cam made it somehow bearable. She laughed to herself—‘bearable’ probably was a bad choice of words. “You were joshing about the bears before, right?”

  “Hopefully they’re hibernating by now,” he mumbled. “But these mountains are probably full of them.”

  She sighed and rested her head on his shoulder. “That’s okay. Astarte and I don’t have to outrun the bears.” It was a favorite joke of theirs, dating back to when they had first met and were being chased by Salazar and his henchmen. “We just have to outrun you.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Eliza turned down the volume on an old John Wayne movie as the phone rang. With Jefferson dead and Astarte missing and the security staff dismissed, she didn’t have to keep up appearances and watch those stupid preachers all day. “It’s two in the morning, Trey. I assume this is important.”

  She didn’t like this, didn’t like having to sit by the phone and wait for updates while the men did the dirty work. But it had always been this way with the women of her family—they controlled things quietly, subtly, puppeteering behind the scenes while the men blustered about thinking they were in charge. Obviously God did not oppose the idea of female control; he allowed the family matriarchs to hatch a plot after the Civil War to both prove the validity of the Book of Mormon and elevate a female into a position of worldwide spiritual authority. The Age of Aquarius dawned. Just as the Age of Pisces had ushered in King Jesus so too would this new age usher in the reign of Princess Astarte.

  “It’s important,” Trey said, “but it’s not good news.”

  “Tell me.” Trey was Eliza’s sister’s son, one of the few men entrusted with secrets the matriarchs of the family kept. Brigham Young himself had approved the matriarchs’ original post-Civil War plan, which gave the women of her family more power than was normal in Mormon society. In the intelligence community Trey was an accomplished operative. But within the family he took his orders from Eliza—even if those orders ran contrary to those he received from Langley.

  “They escaped.” Trey described the attack on the Suburban. “I’m assuming they’re up in the mountains now. But we’ve lost the trail. I could ask for help from the locals—”

  “No,” she interrupted. “We need to keep this quiet. We’ve involved too many people already.” She paused. There was no sense being cross with Trey; he was loyal and competent, and sometimes God scuttled even man’s best plans. “I assume you can control your team?”

  “They have no idea what’s going on, only that we need to retrieve some stolen contraband. The only issue is the Johnston woman. Hayek insisted she come along. She’s an expert in Middle Eastern history and politics. So far she hasn’t been a problem, but obviously she doesn’t share our sense of urgency that this be kept quiet.”

  “Yes, urgency. Which brings us back to our lovebirds. It may not be the worst thing to let them climb the mountain and find the scroll and artifacts. It actually saves you from having to do it.” Perhaps that was what God intended; perhaps it was Astarte’s destiny to retrieve her family heirlooms. Imagine the headlines: Eight-year-old princess recovers 800-year-old artifacts deposited in mountain cave by her ancestors. If that didn’t capture the world’s attention, nothing would.

  “So I’m just supposed to wait for them, hope they come driving through town on their way home?”

  “Of course not. There is no more room for error. They must not leave the Catskills alive—they know too much, and they have one of the devil’s rocks. You have a team of trained operatives. Go find them. But make sure Astarte is not harmed. I don’t think God would appreciate it.” She paused. “Apparently he has big plans for her.”

  Cam didn
’t sleep much, his ears tuned to any break in the rhythm of the forest and his body wedged against the side door of the SUV. At 4:30 he crawled out the back hatch to boil water for their dehydrated breakfast, shielding the small propane stove with a blanket. No doubt Buckner and his team would be on the road at first light; Cam wanted to stay ahead of them. It was a seasonably cold November morning, and the ground was still wet from the rain, but at least it would be clear.

  Astarte woke up cheerfully, as she always seemed to. “What’s for breakfast?”

  “Turkey, stuffing, all the fixings. It’s Thanksgiving.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Really, what are we having?”

  “Well, the package says scrambled eggs and bacon.”

  She scrunched her nose. “In that bag?”

  “Yup.”

  “Are you a good cook?”

  “The best.” He handed her a plate as he drained the excess water from the pack.

  Amanda hugged him from behind and kissed his cheek. “Actually, he’s a horrid cook. But he can boil water with the best of them.”

  They ate quickly by the light of the fire. Cam glanced at the eastern sky. “We need to get moving. I told Salazar we’d meet him at 5:30.” They had discussed ditching the mercenary, as Cam didn’t trust him and he gave Amanda the willies. But what chance did they have against Buckner and his team without him?

  The plan was to meet Salazar at a trailhead five miles down-mountain from the trail they actually planned to climb. After abandoning the SUV Salazar would drive them in his Toyota to the trail shown on January’s map. Hopefully Buckner would find the SUV and fall for the ruse.

  The plan required Cam to carry the stone artifacts and the Clairvaux Codex, adding about 65 pounds of weight to his pack. The items were too valuable to leave in one of the vehicles, and Salazar couldn’t take them, even if they did trust him with them, as he needed to stay nimble to conduct surveillance and perhaps even track the operatives. Amanda, her ribs wrapped, would carry the other supplies necessary for a day hike, but at Cam’s body weight of 175 pounds the 65-pound pack exceeded the recommended pack weight by almost a third.