The Templar throne t-3

by Paul Christopher

  "Wild-goose chase or not, he should do his job," answered Holliday stubbornly. Another twenty-five minutes went by but still the young man was a no-show.

  "Maybe we should just go," suggested Sister Meg.

  "Not until I see that ledger," answered Holliday. "I paid to see it." He looked at his watch. It was past noon.

  "There has to be another way out of here. Maybe he's gone to lunch," said Meg.

  "Then I'll get the damned ledger myself," said Holliday. He fiddled with the computer, found the number he wanted again and jotted it down. He stood up and headed for the door leading back into the archive stacks. Sister Meg followed.

  "Nobody's forcing you to come," said Holliday brusquely. "If I see the little punk I can wring his scrawny neck on my own."

  "That's exactly why I'm tagging along," answered the nun.

  "Suit yourself," said Holliday. He pulled open the door and stepped through. Sister Meg was right on his heels.

  Beyond the doorway the long cloister was a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling racks of documents and papers, some loose and some in slipcase binders. Other fonds were in boxes and crates, some plastic, some wood and some cardboard. The shelves themselves were made out of wood or steel and were of varying lengths, creating little alleyways through the stacks at intermittent points like dead ends in a garden maze.

  There were also varying numbers of aisles, some abruptly ending, others looking as though they went on forever. There seemed to be no order to any of it-codes on one section of shelves appeared to be alphabetical, while the next set of shelves was divided numerically, or even by date or with some Italian version of the Dewey decimal system.

  "This is nuts," said Holliday. "I used to think the British Library system was a nightmare-this is truly insane."

  "It is confusing," agreed Sister Meg.

  "It looks like there's elements from every era of the archives' existence, bits and pieces that were popular at the time. It's incoherent."

  "Just like Italian politics, from what I understand," said Sister Meg.

  "Don't go wandering off," cautioned Holliday. "It would be like getting lost down Alice in Wonderland's rabbit hole."

  Sister Meg smiled at the reference.

  " 'Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!' " quoted the nun.

  "Pardon?" Holliday said.

  "It's from Alice in Wonderland," she explained. "The White Rabbit who leads Alice down the rabbit hole."

  "I never read it actually," confessed Holliday. "I saw it on my friends the Corbett twins' TV when I was seven or eight. They had the only TV in the neighborhood, color too; a twenty-one-inch RCA Aldrich model. Teddy loved Alice, Artie hated it. They were like that about everything. The only other thing I remember is the Jefferson Airplane song, 'Feed your head' and all that."

  "You should be ashamed of yourself," chided Sister Meg. "It's a literary classic."

  Holliday clasped his hands in front of himself, bowed his head and recited the entire Mea Culpa "apologia" in droning Latin.

  "Impressive," said Sister Meg, "and in Latin no less." She paused. "Although it lacked something in the way of sincerity."

  "I was an altar boy. Have you ever met an altar boy who enjoyed having the priest box his ears when he flubbed his lines?"

  "Your experience with the Church wasn't the best, was it?"

  "Nuns who whacked you, priests who whacked you and sometimes worse, various Popes who told you your genitalia would rot if you had premarital sex or masturbated, going to confession and having voyeuristic old men listen to your most private thoughts, and to top it all off, being forced to watch Bishop Sheen instead of Milton Berle on Tuesday nights at eight. Yeah, you might say my experience with the Church was pretty lousy."

  "Nothing more anti-Church than a lapsed Catholic," sighed the nun.

  "Being a lapsed Catholic has nothing to do with it," snorted Holliday. "I dislike any religion that believes it's the only true word of God. Catholic, Muslim, Jew and Evangelist alike." He shook his head. "This isn't the time for theological discussion. Let's find the little jerk and get out of here."

  They found him in the N 24 stack under a sign hanging from the ceiling that read simply Navi-Ships. He was sitting on his knees in front of the bottom Z21 shelf looking down at a ledger he'd laid out on the floor, its slipcase neatly put to one side. The young man's glasses had slipped down onto his nose. If it weren't for the trickle of blood dripping steadily from his right ear down onto the ledger, everything would have looked quite normal.

  Beside Holliday, Sister Meg made a gentle noise in the back of her throat. When she spoke there were tears in her voice.

  "The poor boy!" she whispered quietly. "A cerebral hemorrhage?"

  "A hatpin," answered Holliday, who'd seen a wound just like it once before. The ear that time had belonged to a gold smuggler named Valador. "Plastic, so it goes through airport metal detectors. She pushes it into the middle ear and then through the temporal bone to the brain via the internal auditory nerve canal." Holliday squatted down for a better look. "Apparently it takes a great deal of skill."

  "She?" Sister Meg said.

  "Her name is Daniella Kay, the Canadian spouse of a Czech assassin-for-hire named Antonin Pesek. They're a husband-and-wife team."

  "The boy was murdered?"

  Holliday pushed his hand into the open neck of the young man's shirt and pressed his palm against the bare skin over his heart. It was still warm to the touch. He withdrew his hand, forcing himself not to reach up and close the kid's staring, still bright eyes. The dulling and shrinking of the eyeballs hadn't even begun yet.

  "Murdered, and not too long ago. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen."

  Sister Meg stood there, stunned, staring at the kneeling corpse.

  "Why would anyone want to kill an archive clerk?"

  Holliday leaned forward and looked at the ledger on the floor. Blood had pooled into a sticky mass in the center of the page, staining the spidery handwriting on the facsimile, but it was still easy enough to see the ragged tear running down the spine.

  "Someone's torn out a page," said Holliday. He pushed himself up.

  "They killed him for a ledger entry?"

  "It's about the third or fourth page in the next Zeno ledger," said Holliday. "It's almost certainly the entry for the return of the Santa Maria Maggiore to Venice."

  "Someone knows what we're researching?"

  "Not someone. The Peseks. They got the kid because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but someone hired them to kill us. We're the target."

  "We have to tell the police."

  "Not on your life, Sister. We'd be in the glue for days, maybe weeks if we call the cops. They generally follow the line of least resistance in an investigation, which means us. We've got to go back to the workstation, wipe it down for prints, then find a back way out of here and a taxi to the airport. When they find this kid it's going to hit the fan with a bang. I want us on a plane to London before nightfall."

  12

  They barely got out of the building undetected, let alone to the airport. Eventually Holliday and the nun found what must have been one of the original winding narrow stairways in a distant corner of the big rambling convent cloister. The dust on the worn stone steps had been recently disturbed. A woman wearing low- heeled shoes; Holliday could see the outline of the square heel and the pointed oval of the sole clearly in the dust. The shoe prints were coming and going. She'd left the way she'd come in.

  Holliday could visualize it easily enough: a young man sees a good-looking woman where she really shouldn't be, but he doesn't get angry because her smile is so friendly. It wouldn't have taken her much to get close enough. They would have talked for a moment, standing over the ledger he'd pulled from the shelf.

  Daniella Kay would have flirted with him mercilessly. She'd be good at that, hypnotic as a snake. The young man would have barely noticed her slipping the deadly plastic stickpin from her hair, and by then it would have been too late. He
'd have died almost instantly, the stickpin skewering into his brain, his head full of the glorious fantasies of older women that only young men believe in.

  Holliday and the nun reached the bottom of the narrow spiral staircase. It ended in a tiny dusty alcove and a door that had obviously been recently jimmied, the old wood around the latch splintered and white. Pushing out through the doorway, they found themselves in a small overgrown patch of garden between the wall of the cloister and the building next door.

  "Which way?" Sister Meg asked.

  To the left, through the trees, Holliday could see the end of one of the canal branches, or ramo. To the right a pathway led out to the plaza around the Church of San Rocco. Either way was dangerous; the water route meant they would be trapped in a motorboat being piloted by somebody else, and to go out through the San Rocco plaza meant crowds of people.

  "This way," said Holliday, gripping Sister Meg by the arm and guiding her down the path toward the plaza. If the Peseks were waiting for them they'd have a better chance of escaping through a crowd. He frowned. On the other hand, if the alarm went up about the murdered archivist, the plazas of San Rocco and the Frari would be the first place the cops would look. He was fairly sure the guard on duty at the entrance to the archives would recognize them, and so would the girl with all the languages. "We have to get as far away as we can in the least amount of time."

  They headed down the pathway through the high, broad plane trees and finally stepped onto the small plaza, the church the square was named for on their right along with the Scuola di San Rocco beside it, once a private religious fraternity and now a municipal building famous for its Tintoretto paintings. The rear of the looming brick Frari was on their left. The only way out lay directly ahead, straight across the plaza at the end of a narrow street, where a tour boat was loading passengers at the foot of a set of stone stairs.

  "Head for the tour boat," said Holliday, craning his neck, checking the crowd on the plaza. There was an undeniable sense of imminent danger ringing alarm bells in his head; they were being watched. As they stepped out onto the neatly flagstoned campo Holliday reflexively looked upward, checking for open windows and rooftop sniper positions.

  The escape route across the relatively small open space reminded Holliday of Matar Baghdad Al-Dawli, the Baghdad airport road, once an eight- lane boulevard processional route between luxury hotels and high-rises. The war had changed all that. Now it was a gauntlet to be run holding your breath and praying not to be blown to bits by an IED or turned into a target for someone in the shadows with a hate-on for Americans and a Russian-made RPG.

  The danger there was to look too far down the road and lose your concentration. In Baghdad, death was always in the details, and Holliday had that same skin-crawling feeling now.

  Five steps into the plaza the sky overhead opened and it began to rain, a sudden downpour that seemed to have caught everyone off guard. Holliday breathed a sigh of relief. Gripping Sister Meg's arm even tighter, he urged her forward, squinting through the deluge.

  "Run!" Holliday hissed in her ear; the rain made a perfect excuse. He was careful to keep them close to groups of other tourists running for cover; if the Peseks were out there watching, he wanted to offer the smallest target.

  They reached the far side of the campo drenched but unharmed and kept on going down the street to the canal. They were the last ones to board the canopy-covered tour boat. A plastic banner drooped from the canopy: "Brooklyn Italian-American Hospital Workers Auxiliary Annual Cruise."

  "Biglietto, per favore," said a tired-looking man in a very old officer's cap with a gold anchor stitched into the crushed and stained peak.

  "Uh, we left them at the hotel," muttered Holliday. "Albergo, hotel? Do you understand what I'm saying? Capisci quello che sto dicendo?"

  The man in the sailor's cap shrugged. "Quarantasette euro," he said. "Per uno."

  It took him a second but Holliday finally figured it out. Forty-seven euros each. He dug into his wallet and took out two fifty-euro notes. He handed them to the tired sailor.

  "Tenere il resto," said Holliday, hoping he'd got it right.

  The man looked down at the two bills, then up at Holliday.

  "Grazie," the man grumbled sourly, clearly not impressed with what he perceived to be a measly tip. He wearily hauled in the little gangplank, slammed the boarding gate shut and blew a bosun's pipe within a foot of Holliday's ear. The shrill note was earsplitting. A few seconds later there was a rumbling cough from somewhere in the rear of the big bargelike party boat and they began to move ponderously away from the stone dock. The ticket taker in the sailor's cap sat down on a stool and lit a cigarette. He leaned back and stared at the striped canvas canopy a few feet above him. From the front of the tour boat somebody started talking incoherently into a bullhorn. Rain tapped on the canopy loudly. People milled around on the deck, chattering happily in the rain, sipping complimentary drinks with umbrellas and eating soggy canapes arranged on a table forward of where Holliday and the nun were standing.

  "Where are we going?" Sister Meg asked.

  "Away from here, that's all that counts," answered Holliday.

  His sense of direction completely vanished as the boat lumbered through the sheeting rain along the narrow canal. The vessel was so wide it forced several soaking stripe-shirt gondoliers to give way, the slim, elegant vessels squeezing past them, rocking heavily in the tour boat's backwash. Holliday was fairly sure the flat-bottomed craft had no business being in such a narrow thoroughfare but he wasn't about to complain. There had been danger in the plaza of San Rocco, he was sure of it, and it was only luck that had saved them.

  With half a lifetime spent in critical situations, Holliday knew a great deal about luck, good and bad, and either way it never lasted. The only thing you could be sure of was that the needle was always in motion; the trick was to know the difference between the upswing and the down. The Peseks were pros of the first order; if their contract included himself and the red-haired nun beside him, then the assassin couple would be relentless. The biggest problem was that his only sight of them had been a brief glimpse across a dark road in Le Suquet, a collection of narrow twisting streets in the old section of Cannes on the west side of the famous yacht basin. He vaguely remembered Antonin Pesek as a well-dressed man with a graying, neatly trimmed goatee and Daniella as a good- looking woman in her fifties with the slightly aristocratic strut of a woman who rode horses. He doubted that he'd recognize either one if they were standing right beside him.

  The tour boat slowed as it made a wheeling turn out into the broad reach of the Grand Canal, and even in the rain Holliday got his bearings straight; they were heading east and slightly north, a course that would take them to the Rialto Bridge and their hotel. He was tempted to bribe the man in the sailor's cap to let them off at the dock beside the bridge, but Holliday followed his better judgment and said nothing; there was nothing at the hotel they couldn't live without, and whoever was on their trail was almost sure to have the place under surveillance.

  That was the question of the day: Who was on their tail and why? The Peseks didn't kill people just for the hell of it; someone was paying them. Holliday was on the trail of an obscure Templar knight who was using an even more obscure navigation instrument; it might upset a historical applecart or two, but it wasn't earth-shaking. Sister Meg was filling in the blanks in the life of a mother superior at a relatively obscure convent of Irish nuns in a Czech convent; hardly the stuff of James Bond and Jason Bourne.

  At first he'd thought it was the Vatican Secret Service, Sodalitium Pianum, but that didn't make sense either. The bald guy in Prague was clearly a contract investigator, and the Peseks were hirelings, as well, and as Holliday knew from personal experience, the Vatican had plenty of assassins of their own. Somewhere in the lives of two dead lovers from four hundred years ago there was an answer.

  The tour boat and its well-oiled partying passengers made another turn, this time to the right onto a
narrower canal that ran alongside the elegant facade of a massive old palazzo, its half-submerged foundations stained a crumbling, putrid brown by the effluent in the water and a thousand years of twice-daily tidal fluctuations.

  Sister Meg tugged at his arm.

  "What?"

  "I just overheard a conversation; I know where we're going."

  "Where?"

  "Some place called the Isola di San Michele. That's the third reference to Saint Michael that's come our way."

  "Maybe it's an omen," Holliday said and smiled.

  "You're making fun of me," said the nun, color rising in her cheeks.

  "I'm making a joke," said Holliday, exasperated.

  "At my expense."

  "Don't be so sensitive," said Holliday. "We don't have time for it. There's a dead kid back there with a hole in his head, remember?"

  Sister Meg lapsed into silence. Overhead the rattling of the rain on the canvas canopy slowed and then stopped altogether. As quickly as the storm had come it vanished, the clouds rolling back and letting in broad, slanting beams of sunlight. On their left the canal widened considerably and a forest of masts appeared-a large marina, and beyond it the sudden sweep of the Venice ship channel between the islands of the archipelago and the mainland.

  "Sacca della Misericordia," said the tired man in the sailor's hat, still slumped on his stool.

  "Sacca," said Holliday. "What the hell is a sacca, a bag of some kind? That doesn't make any sense."

  "Cove, I think," said Sister Meg. "Cove of the sheltering virgin."

  The man in the hat pointed to an island to their right about half a mile out into the broad ship channel. "Isola di San Michele, una isola del muerte."

  Holliday squinted. The island looked almost artificial, a wall surrounding it with towers at the corners. A prison?

  "Cimetero di Napoleon," the tour guide explained.

  "It's a cemetery," said Holliday. "We're going on a tour of a cemetery."

  13

  At one time in its history the Isola di San Michele had actually been two islands divided by a canal. During Napoleon's brief occupation of Venice he decreed, quite rightly, that the mainland cemeteries were unsanitary, their swampy "vapors" almost certainly the cause of the endless rounds of cholera and plague epidemics that regularly visited the tiny republic on the shore of the Adriatic. If there was one thing Napoleon was good at, it was cemeteries. He'd moved dozens of local cemeteries during the reconstruction of imperial Paris and he did the same thing in Venice.