Sword of the Templars

by Paul Christopher

  “I can’t put your life in danger,” said Holliday. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Do I detect a note of sexism here?” Peggy said. “A bit of patronizing from my overprotective cousin?”

  “Maybe,” he admitted. “It’s hard enough in the kind of situation we were in yesterday without . . .” He let it dangle, afraid of putting his foot in his mouth. Peggy did it for him.

  “Without a woman along?” she said, finishing the unspoken sentiment.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you were going to,” grinned Peggy. “Admit it.”

  “Never,” said Holliday, grinning back.

  “Believe me, Doc, the people who were shooting at us yesterday aren’t sexist; they’ll kill anyone who gets in their way or has something they want.”

  “Who are they?” Holliday asked. “Some kind of neo-Nazi group? I thought that kind of idiocy went out with the whole skinhead thing.”

  “Old Nazis never die,” said Peggy, picking up her fork again and prodding a sausage on her plate. “They just change their names.” She put the fork down again and pushed the plate away from her slightly. “There’s lots of them around. The British Nationalist Party, Combat 18, the BNP’s armed division, the Nationalist Party of Canada, Aryan Nations back home. France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, even Germany.”

  “What about the Russians?” Holliday suggested, remembering the Bizon submachine gun.

  “There used to be a bunch called Pamyat back in the early nineties, and there’s been an upsurge of Russian neo-Nazis in Israel,” said Peggy. “The Russian National Socialist Party is an offshoot of Pamyat. They released a video a while back showing somebody being beheaded in a forest.”

  “You can’t be serious,” said Holliday.

  “Dead serious,” said Peggy. She shrugged. “They run a newspaper called Pravoye Soprotivleniye or Right Resistance with a circulation of at least a hundred thousand. The paper used to be called The Stormtrooper.”

  “Are they big enough to have organized the attack on Carr-Harris?”

  “Almost certainly,” answered Peggy. “The neos these days are very computer savvy; they’ve even got an electronic clearinghouse on the Internet called ‘Blood and Honour’ and their own version of Wikipe dia called ‘Metapedia.’ Spooky stuff.”

  “You seem to know an awful lot about it,” said Holliday.

  “I did the pix on a series of articles for Vanity Fair last year,” she answered.

  “So what do we do now?”

  Peggy glanced down at the various remnants of fried food congealing on her plate.

  “Buy the Irish version of a roll of Tums and figure out our next step.”

  “Carefully,” said Holliday.

  “Very carefully,” agreed Peggy.

  12

  Doc Holliday and Peggy Blackstock stood on the upper deck of the small car ferry and peered out across the broad lake as they neared the German side of the water. Here the lake was called the Bodensee; on the Swiss side it was called Lake Constance.

  They were within a mile or so of the dock at Friedrichshafen, but there was nothing to be seen ahead except a gray wall of fog, the horizon stolen and the sun invisible. Every few seconds the ferry’s foghorn would moan, the sound repeated back to them out of the featureless gloom like the unrequited mating calls of vanished sea creatures. Barely visible, the inky waters of the ancient alpine lake broke thickly against the sides of the ferry.

  “The Twilight Zone,” said Peggy, the sound of her voice flattened by the heavy mist. There were other people nearby on the deck, but they were as invisible as everything else, no more than shadows appearing and disappearing as they went by. When people spoke it was in murmurs and low whispers, like children afraid of the dark unknown.

  Six days had passed since the firefight at L’Espoir and the murder of Carr-Harris. They’d stayed in Dublin for most of that time, waiting to see what the fallout would be from the death of the old Oxford professor at his country home.

  There seemed to have been no consequences at all; it was as though the whole thing had never happened. Nothing in any of the newspapers that Holliday looked through and nothing on the radio or television. No hue and cry, no be-on-the-lookout-for-these-fugitives, no policeman hammering on their hotel room door, no ringing of the telephone. Nothing.

  In the end the only conclusion that Holliday and Peggy could make of it all was that their opponents, whoever they were, had carefully cleaned up after themselves either to keep the police off their tails or to ensure that they would find the two Americans before the authorities. One way or another they were only buying themselves a little bit of time; eventually the crime would be discovered.

  Peggy and Holliday hadn’t been idle during their brief hiatus in Dublin. Peggy had spent some time re-outfitting themselves from stores at the St. Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre while Holliday followed the few frail leads they had, researching the names Carr-Harris had mentioned at an Internet café at the foot of bustling Grafton Street, a crowded pedestrian mall that ran between the corner of St. Stephen’s Green and the entrance to Trinity College on Nassau Street.

  Holliday concentrated on tracking down the three names involved with Carr-Harris’s Postmaster escapade off the coast of West Africa during the early days of the war: Edmund Kiss, Hans Reinerth, and the Italian, Amedeo Maiuri.

  Several things quickly became apparent, linking the men above and beyond the letter Uncle Henry had discovered on the captured ocean liner: all three men were somehow involved with archaeology, and all three men were deeply involved in mysticism, Kiss and Reinerth with the Nordic roots of the German race and culture, Amedeo Maiuri with the essence of the Ancient Roman military ethic.

  Kiss and Reinerth had both become SS officers during World War II, and Maiuri had held equivalent rank in the Fascist Black Brigades. Maiuri had been one of the founding members of the School of Fascist Mysticism in Milan and both Reinerth and Kiss had been high-ranking and important members of the “Study society for primordial intellectual science ‘German Ancestral Heritage,’ ” commonly referred to as the Ahnenerbe , the fundamental source and rationalization for Hitler’s race laws and the annihilation of the Jews.

  All three men survived the war and escaped serious prosecution. Kiss faded from view without a ripple, while Reinerth had been intimately involved with the creation of a museum of Stone Age culture still thriving today and located not far from where they were right now on the Bodensee. But eventually he, too, slipped into obscurity. Maiuri, his reputation carefully sanitized soon after Italy’s capitulation in 1943, continued in his previous occupation as director of the archaeological dig at Pompeii until his death in 1960.

  Digging even deeper as he ricocheted across the Internet from one linking Web site to another, Holliday eventually found the common thread that bound all three: they had all been members of a secret society formed by a man named Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, a former Cistercian monk. The name of the society, organized in 1907 in Burg Werfenstein, Austria, was “The Order of the New Templars.” Originally adopting a right-facing red swastika as its symbol, the Order used the same icon later adopted by the officially recognized Ahnenerbe: a sword, its blade enclosed by a loop of gold and surrounded by a band of runic letters; exactly the same design Holliday had seen on the wrist of the dead man in Carr-Harris’s hallway.

  Seeing the image on the screen brought him up short. Was it possible that some arcane bit of old folklore still existed? More likely that the symbol was being used again for some other twisted purpose.

  The Order of the New Templars apparently went underground after the war but reemerged in Vienna during the fifties with an ex-SS officer named Rudolf Mund as Prior of the Order. Mund spent almost twenty years trying to resurrect his version of the organization but failed. Nazism was a forgotten enterprise; Communism had replaced it as the world’s enemy.

  Digging deeper still, Holliday followed the faint trail left by Mund, eventually connecting him to another SS officer, the man who had in fact been Mund’s superior during the war, SS-Gruppenf
ührer General Lutz Kellerman. Kellerman had also been a member of the Order of the New Templars as well as being a close friend of Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS and the Gestapo who was in turn the sponsor of both Edmund Kiss and Hans Reinerth. Wheels within wheels.

  Kellerman vanished after 1945, presumably escaping through the Vatican “ratlines” and with the help of the near-mythical ODESSA, the Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, the Organization of Former SS Officers.

  Kellerman’s family enshrined his memory and rose to some wealth and notoriety as exporters of farm machinery to Brazil and Argentina. For years there had been rumors that the SS officer had escaped to South America with a fortune in looted gold and jewelry, but no one had ever found any hard evidence.

  Kellerman’s son, Axel, had tried unsuccessfully to purchase himself a career in postwar German politics, but even the ultra-right-wing Republikaner party refused to endorse him. Axel Kellerman, now in his fifties and using the name “von Kellerman,” ran the family enterprises from the ancestral castle estate just outside of Friedrichshafen.

  Friedrichshafen was a small city of roughly sixty thousand, its main industries being the revitalized Zeppelin works and Friedrichshafen AG, a manufacturer of transmissions for farm machinery and heavy equipment. On the surface the town appeared to be a bright, modern tourist-oriented location far from the bustling industrial centers of Munich, Stuttgart, and the Rhine-Ruhr industrial area, but the city by the lake had a much darker past.

  During the war the Zeppelin works manufactured components for the V2 rocket with labor provided by slaves from a satellite of Dachau concentration camp located on the outskirts of the town. Most of the old city center had been completely destroyed during the Operation Bellicose bombing raid of June 20, 1943.

  “Do you really think this man Kellerman is going to have any useful information?” Peggy asked as they stood together on the upper deck of the ferry. “And more importantly, if he does have any information is he going to give it to us?”

  Holliday shrugged. His brain was getting tired, stumbling over names, dates, events, possibilities. History for him was usually clear, a set of absolutes, set in stone. Now it was something different, vague and without a coherent order. He’d spent a lifetime in the military, where goals were achieved by direct action; there was nothing direct at all about the problem of Uncle Henry’s sword.

  “He’s all we’ve got,” said Holliday finally. “Kellerman’s father knew all the parties involved, and he was close to Himmler. He would have known about the sword, I’m almost certain of that. Lutz Kellerman is the link to it all, not to mention the tattoo on that guy’s wrist.”

  “But so what?” Peggy said. “How does that help us?”

  “What we need to find out is the location, if it still exists, of the right copy of the letter written by Alberic to Hugues de Payens, the founder of the Templars. Without the letter the code on the gold wire is useless, like Braintree told us in Toronto.”

  “D.L.N.M. De laudibus novae militiae,” said Peggy.

  “Your Latin is improving,” smiled Holliday.

  “And the fog is lifting,” answered Peggy.

  Ahead of them, a few hundred yards away across the water, the harbor front of Friedrichshafen appeared through the thinning mist. On the right there was a large, modern-looking marina; a forest of sail-boat masts rose like sharp splinters cutting through the shredding fog.

  There was a heavy stand of trees coming down to the shore on the far left, the twin onion-domed towers of a church rising up through the greenery. In the center was the harbor itself, with the ferry dock and the updated Bauhaus-style glass and steel Medienhaus, the town library, directly behind it. Strung along the old seawall Holliday could see an assortment of older, red-roofed buildings that had survived the bombings. Rising behind it all were the steep, lushly forested hills and valleys of the Bavarian Alps.

  “Postcard time,” said Peggy.

  “We’ll see,” said Holliday. Baghdad had been a Disney location before it turned into a war zone.

  The ferry nosed between the jutting arms of the harbor breakwater and moved toward the docks. People around them began heading down to the main deck and their automobiles. The engines on the ferry reversed in a growling throb, the sound vibrating up through the hull. The fog was quickly disappearing and the sun was shining down on the town. Peggy was right; it was a postcard.

  “We’d better go,” she said. The ferry had almost reached the pier.

  “All right,” nodded Holliday. They turned away from the rail and headed for the companionway stairs behind them. Perhaps now they’d find out why Uncle Henry’s house had been put to the torch and why his friend Derek Carr-Harris had been murdered. First they’d find a cheap hotel in town, and then they’d lay siege to Axel von Kellerman in his castle.

  13

  According to the brochure Holliday and Peggy picked up at their Friedrichshafen hotel, the original Schloss Kellerman had been built in A.D. 1150 by the Grafen von Kellerman-Pinzgau, feudal lords of the area. The castle was destroyed during a peasants’ revolt in 1526 and had lain in ruins ever since.

  The “new” Schloss Kellerman, an exquisite manor house in the Baroque style of the times built at the foot of the hill on which the ruins still stood, had been constructed in 1760 by Count Anton von Öttingen-Kellerman, a reigning Bavarian prince of Pinzgau and a descendant of the original owners.

  The Schloss had been in the possession of the Kellerman family ever since, and as well as still being the family residence it was also a museum and occasional venue for seminars dealing with European Stone Age and Bronze Age studies.

  The Kellerman estate was located four miles north of Friedrichshafen, set at the foot of a steep, heavily wooded hillside and reached by a twisting road that wound between the trees, eventually opening up into a broad meadow, part of which was a planted orchard while the other part had been laid out as a formal ornamental garden complete with animal topiary and a high hedge maze. Beside the maze there was a pea gravel parking lot.

  “Creepy,” said Peggy, climbing out of the Peugeot they’d rented two days before in Zurich.

  The weather was sunny and warm, without a hint of the gloomy fog that had greeted them on their arrival the day before. Holliday locked the car, and he and Peggy walked up the path toward the house.

  The manor was a sprawling series of two-story buildings arranged in an elongated L shape, the red tile roof-lines broken here and there with turrets and towers, all of it done in whitewash over stucco, some of the walls overgrown with ivy. The windows were arched and recessed, outlined in strips of fancy brickwork, and the towers were finished with Lego-like stepped fretwork.

  The lawns surrounding the estate were golf course groomed, the flowerbeds neatly edged with six-inch-high retaining walls, the beds themselves ablaze with flowers and dense with perfectly manicured shrubbery. It was all like a giant dollhouse owned by a dainty princess, an unflawed dream you only saw in Architectural Digest.

  “No littering around here,” commented Peggy. “Someone’s a bit of a neat freak.”

  They went up a broad series of granite steps and reached the main entrance. The capstone in the arch over the open doorway had been carved into an armorial shield: a single upright sword, bound by a twisted ribbon.

  “Isn’t that interesting?” murmured Holliday, looking upward.

  They stepped through the broad entrance and into the manor house. A female uniformed attendant took their money, handing them each a yellow plastic squeeze badge and a pamphlet in return. The pamphlet was trilingual: English, French, and German. They walked down a long entrance hallway, their feet echoing on the black and white tiles of the marble floor.

  A few people were wandering in and out of rooms, all wearing the same expression of bored expectation common to tourists already overburdened with more information than they needed. Judging by the minimal crowds, it didn’t look as though Schloss Kellerman was very high on anyone’s “must-do” list.