The Templar throne t-3

by Paul Christopher

  As abbeys went there was nothing exceptional about it except for its isolated location. According to the Reverend Walker's guidebook it had been built on the site of St. Columba's original parish church in 1203 and expanded over the years to include a refectory, a nearby nunnery and even a scriptorium, in which it was said the magnificent illuminated manuscript known as the Book of Kells, Ireland's most prized possession, was created, even though it had originated on the little Scottish island.

  They found Walker in the refectory on the far side of the cloister. The big man was up on a ladder scrubbing what appeared to be a square of plastic wrap against something high on the wall between two narrow windows.

  The reverend was large in every sense of the word, tall, big-bellied, ginger- haired with a full beard and a thick curling mustache. Sensing their presence, the big man twisted slightly on the ladder. Like many men his size he was quite graceful. He wore old-fashioned tortoiseshell spectacles, his eyebrows riding over the lenses like furry red caterpillars.

  "Hi-ho," he said, his face breaking into a wide smile. "Come to see a man of the cloth fall from grace, have you?" He gave a snorting laugh. "Wouldn't be the first time, that's certain enough!" The accent was Scots but the burr had been softened after years elsewhere. At a guess Holliday would have bet on Cambridge or perhaps Oxford.

  "Reverend Walker?"

  " 'Tis I," said the big man. He came down the ladder and greeted them properly, hand extended. He shook Holliday's first and then Meg's. They introduced themselves.

  "Just taking molds of a few more Mason's Marks. One finds them in the strangest places. He held out his hand and showed them the small reverse impressions of the obscure glyphs: arrows, reversed number fours, circle letters, two Xs side by side.

  The minister had made the impressions with some sort of plasticine. "It's called flex-dough," explained Reverend Walker. "It's not dough at all, of course-it's some sort of plastic. It's usually used by stroke victims to exercise their hands with, but it makes a perfect matrix for taking mold impressions. I make plaster reproductions of all the marks with it."

  "What were they for?" Meg asked. "The marks, I mean."

  "Every master mason had a different mark," the minister explained. "Each block they laid was given the mark for payment. Sometimes they were also used for decoration or to show later masons who had come before them. They were used a great deal in Freemasonry, as well. Follow me and I'll show you some I took yesterday. It's quite a lot of fun, actually."

  The minister trotted off to the front of the refectory, where a large crucifix stood against the wall. Below the crucifix a table had been constructed, a door laid across two sawhorses. They followed and he showed them at least a hundred more of the obscure marks, graffiti from almost a thousand years ago. Suddenly Holliday froze.

  "That one," he said, pointing. "Where did it come from?"

  "That? Yes, it is a little odd. The first time I've seen one like it, as a matter of a fact."

  "It's the only one in the church?" Holliday asked.

  "As far as I know," said Walker. "What's the matter, young man? You look white as a sheet."

  Holliday almost laughed. It had been a long time since he'd been called young man.

  "I've seen a ghost," he said, smiling faintly. The little blob of bright red flex-dough bore the mark of Saint-Clair-an engrailed cross. It was unmistakable. "The cross, where did you find it?"

  "In the undercroft," answered Reverend Walker.

  "What's the undercroft?" Holliday asked.

  "A crypt if it's beneath a church, a basement storage area anywhere else," explained Meg.

  "Quite right, my dear," said Walker, impressed.

  "And here?" Holliday asked.

  "The refectory was once the abbey dining hall. Originally the undercroft was the kitchen. Eventually the undercroft was used as a crypt, as your friend said," replied Walker. "I took that impression from directly above one of the old burial slabs."

  "A knight?" Meg asked quickly.

  "Good Lord!" Walker said. "How on earth did you know that?"

  Meg slipped off her backpack, dug into it and pulled out the little book of prayers she'd purchased in Wicklow. She flipped through the pages until she came to the prayer she wanted, then began to recite: Lord God, in Jerusalem's temple crowned, We your steadfast soldier and your handmaiden ask Only for thy grace and favor found If as thy servants we complete the task. Save us from Satan's royal vengeance once more And give us Mary's holy wings to fly Us to the farther sable shore Then we shall keep thy treasures safe In Arcadia's pale enclosing arms once more.

  "Astounding," said Walker. "The Knight's Prayer. Just about the oldest recorded prayer from the abbey."

  "From 1307, to be precise," said Holliday.

  "Curiouser and curiouser," muttered Walker, staring closely at them. "How could you possibly know when the prayer was written? Even I don't know that."

  "Because we know who the 'steadfast soldier' and the 'handmaiden' were and we know exactly when they came here and why," said Holliday. "Now, please show us where you found that particular Mason's Mark."

  19

  The refectory undercroft was a long, low-ceilinged chamber supported by a series of four heavy stone pillars down the center. There were stairs at the east end and a small root cellar at the west end. In between the steps and the root cellar twenty stone burial slabs were laid against the north wall, their upper surfaces all but worn off. A brass rubbing in white against black hung on the wall above each slab.

  Walker, Holliday and Sister Meg walked along the aisle formed between the slabs and the pillars, Holliday carefully checking the brass rubbings. At the ninth slab he stopped and stared at the rubbing.

  "This is the one," he said.

  "How do you know?" Walker asked, fascinated by the story he'd been told.

  "The shield is quartered," said Holliday, pointing to the faint image on the rubbing. "In the upper left you have Saint-Clair's engrailed cross, in the upper right you have the image of a Venetian ship with a lateen sail, and in the bottom quadrant you have two crescents, both facing inward. If it was in color the two crescents would probably be green-islands."

  "Fanciful, but how do you know they're islands? They could just as easily signify moons, or even Arabic crescents."

  "The poem," said Meg, suddenly seeing it the way Holliday did. "And give us Mary's holy wings to fly us to the farther sable shore," she quoted. "The farther shore-the other side of the Atlantic."

  "And sable?" Walker asked.

  "According to the book the poems were originally written in Gaelic-all except the Knight's Prayer. That was written in French," said Holliday.

  "That's right. French was the language of chivalry. Most of the aristocracy spoke it in medieval times," said Walker, still looking a little bewildered.

  "In French 'sable' means sand, as in a beach," added Meg.

  "Well, that's all fine and good," argued Walker. "That makes your quest quite simple then, doesn't it. Just find a sandy beach somewhere on the east coast of North America, that's all."

  "The whole prayer was written as a code," said Holliday. "The answer's in there somewhere."

  "Oh, dear," the rotund minister said and sighed. "Must everything be in some sort of code? It's all a bit much, don't you think? Illuminati, the Masons, Opus Dei. Why is it that everybody sees religious conspiracies everywhere these days?" The minister shook his head. "Nobody cares that much for religion anymore, believe me."

  "They did back in the fourteenth century," said Holliday. "You don't have to twist reality around to see the meaning of the prayer." Holliday took the book from Meg. "Satan's royal vengeance is King Philip of France killing the Templars. Mary's holy wings are the sails of the Santa Maria Maggiore, their ship, and Arcadia's pale enclosing arms almost certainly refers to Nova Scotia-new Scotland-in the Canadian maritimes, a place that was originally known as Arcadia. To top things off the inscription on Jean de Saint-Clair's tomb in the old chapel at Mo
nt Saint- Michel on the Normandy coast of France reads In Arcadia Est."

  "That's all very entertaining, but it still seems rather fanciful."

  "It is rather fanciful," Holliday said. "Imaginative as hell."

  "So you agree then, your coded message and a few old rubbings could amount to nothing."

  "Of course," said Holliday, "but so far we've been led from Mont Saint- Michel to Prague, to the Venetian Archives, then to St. Michael's Mount, and finally to here by the same kind of fanciful clues. There's a pattern and a logic to it all."

  "Coincidence," argued Walker.

  "Maybe," said Holliday. "But I'm betting on Jean de Saint-Clair's imagination and the imagination of the Blessed Juliana. They were rescuing a treasure trove of relics, hiding them from a vengeful king and a power-hungry Pope. They wanted to get the relics as far away from both men as they possibly could, but they wanted to do it without starting a war.

  "If King Philip had attacked St. Michael's Mount it would have been the perfect excuse for Edward the Second of England to attack his old rival. To have attacked Iona would have inflamed Scotland and incurred the wrath of the Irish, supposedly allies of the French as well as the not inconsiderable Scandinavian kingdoms.

  "On the other hand, neither Jean de Saint-Clair nor Juliana knew when, or even if, they would be back to retrieve the treasures. They had to leave some sort of clues behind; clues that would outlive them for a very long time, perhaps hundreds of years. What better place than the burial ground of kings?" Holliday smiled. "The Knight's Prayer speaks for itself. It's survived for more than seven hundred years in much the same way as the Lord's Prayer has survived even longer."

  The burly minister laughed heartily and clapped his hands.

  "Bravo, Mr. Holliday. You've almost convinced me."

  "But not quite," said Holliday.

  "Enough for me to take another rubbing for you of your mysterious knight here," replied the Reverend Walker. "I can have it ready for you this evening. Perhaps you and the good sister would be my guests for dinner. I do a rather nice cabbie claw even if I do say so myself."

  "Well," began Holliday, speaking tentatively.

  "We'd like that very much," said Meg. "We have a friend, the Irishman who brought us here. Perhaps we could bring him along."

  "By all means." The minister beamed. "Shall we say six o'clock, then? I live halfway between here and town. On your left, the cottage with the blue door and ducks in the yard. You can't miss it. I've got quite a library of Iona lore; p'raps we can find out some more about this Jean de Saint-Clair of yours. I'm something of the island's unofficial historian; if the Templar knight of yours is part of Iona's past, then I should know about it."

  It took them a few minutes to say their good-byes to Walker, and then they headed back to town and the Mary Deare. As they reached the main road leading away from the abbey they fell in with a straggling group of tourists coming down from Dun I, at three hundred feet the highest point on the island and a favorite vantage point for pictures. It felt a little odd to be walking in the center of a road without a car to be seen, but on the other hand, it gave Holliday a real feeling of what it had been like in the time of the pilgrims.

  They reached Reverend Walker's house with its blue door, no more than a whitewashed cottage with half its slates missing. The ducks were there as well, perhaps a dozen of them herded behind a low stone fence that kept the noisy, angry creatures from attacking people walking along the road.

  Just beyond the house, on the right, Holliday could see a narrow path leading to the marshy area known as Lochan Mor, the "Abbot's Fishpond," once an artificial lake dammed to provide power to the old granite diggings and now nothing more than a swampy marsh, cut through by a granite causeway that led into the moor-land beyond. The sky was steel gray. The rain had followed them across the narrow strait.

  "Colonel Holliday?" asked a polite voice behind them. Holliday stopped and turned. A young man with a marine haircut and wearing a black windbreaker and black chinos was standing right behind them. One of the paintballers. There was a pair of binoculars in a case slung over his left shoulder. The kid looked about eighteen. Too young to be one of his old students. He kept his right hand in his pocket.

  "Excuse me?" Holliday said. "Do I know you?"

  "You don't have to know me, sir. You just have to do exactly what I say." He pushed his hand forward in the windbreaker pocket and used it to open the jacket so both Holliday and Meg could see the small black metal submachine gun hanging from its sling. There was a fat sausage-shaped suppressor screwed onto the stubby little barrel.

  Holliday felt Meg grab his arm, clutching hard at the sight of the weapon.

  "Doc?" Meg said.

  Holliday kept his eyes on the young man. The gun was a U.S.-made MAC 11, the subcompact version of the MAC 10, once the weapon of choice for the bad guys on Miami Vice and shows like it. The MAC 11 had never found much acceptance with the police, the Secret Service or Special Forces. It was an open-block weapon that was hard to control, and with a small subsonic.380-caliber load it didn't have much stopping power and was only useful in closed environments like airplanes. Holliday couldn't think of any group for whom it was standard issue. All of which meant that the young man standing in front of him probably wasn't any part of the U.S. military.

  "Who are you, son?" Holliday asked, trying to engage the young man.

  "It doesn't matter who the hell I am," said the boy. "Just turn around and keep walking. When we get to the path turn right. And I'm not your son." There was heat in his voice and wire- taut moves. Holliday knew he was just as likely to squeeze the trigger of the MAC 11 out of fear as anything else. The kid was a firecracker and he was about to go off.

  "Doc?" Meg asked.

  "Do as he says," answered Holliday. At the path they turned off and headed for the marshy area. As they left the road it began to rain, a light hard spit with promise of a harder downfall in the low dark clouds overhead.

  "Where are you taking us?" Meg asked.

  "Shut up!" snarled the boy with the MAC 11.

  "Boro Bacheh Kooni," said Holliday quietly. "Khar Kos seh, maadar jendeh." There was no response from the young man behind them. Considering what he'd just said to the kid in Farsi, it was unlikely that he'd ever been in Afghanistan or Iraq. "Madar-e-to Gayidam," he added, just to be sure. No reaction from the boy in the windbreaker. A hired gun. A mercenary, but one without much experience. It began to rain harder, gusting sheets rolling across the marshland. The visibility was only a few feet ahead, so presumably they were now invisible from the road as well.

  "You haven't been doing this very long, have you?"

  "Long enough," the young man answered briefly, his voice tense.

  "How old are you, seventeen, eighteen?"

  "I'm twenty-one!"

  "Sure you are," snorted Holliday, his voice dripping with derision.

  "I told you! Shut the hell up!"

  Holliday slowed. It was time to play soldier. He took a deep breath; the young man with the submachine gun was way out of his depth. Holliday blinked the rain out of his eyes and spoke.

  "One thing you should know if you want to live to see tomorrow, kid: the slide safety in front of the trigger on a MAC 11 should be in the rear position when you're so close behind your prisoner."

  Holliday heard the sudden indrawn breath and the faltering step as the young man hesitated. His eyes would have dropped and his right hand would be coming out of his pocket to check the safety. Perhaps a three-second advantage.

  Holliday pivoted on his left foot and brought the right around in a side kick to the boy's thigh, pushing him off balance and making him stumble. He lashed out with his left hand, palm outward under the young man's chin, snapping his head back brutally, sending the kid backward. Without even thinking about it he bent his knee and dropped down with all his weight on the boy's chest.

  The sound of breaking ribs was audible, bone splintering, as Holliday's knee forced the shattered en
d of the third rib into the pulmonary artery, rupturing it. The young man gagged, blood spurting from his mouth and nose. He was dead almost before he knew he was on the ground. The boy's bright blue eyes rolled back in his head and he went limp. Holliday stood up.

  "Is he dead?" Meg asked in a dull voice.

  "Yes," answered Holliday.

  "Couldn't you have just… disarmed him?"

  "No," said Holliday without any more explanation or justification. Kid or not the young man with the submachine gun had threatened their lives. The boy was supposedly some kind of soldier, and thus had automatically entered into the contract that had existed between enemies since Cain battled Abel: tit for tat, no quarter asked and none given. Kill or be killed.

  "So now what?"

  "Roll him over and get his jacket off," instructed Holliday.

  Meg did as he asked. Holliday looked around. They were well out of sight of the road and no shots had been fired. The only potential problem was someone rushing along the pathway from the other side of the island, anxious to get out of the cold, stinging rain.

  Meg finished taking off the kid's jacket and stood up. Holliday squatted down beside the body and stripped off the King Arms Bungee sling and holster, then went through the dead boy's pockets. Keys, a few coins, English and American mixed, a fat Swiss Army knife with all the bells and whistles. A wallet identified him as Ian Andrew Mitchell, twenty-one years old and a resident of Wilmington, Delaware. He also had a Delaware concealed-carry permit, a Beretta.380-caliber mousegun in an in-the-pants holster against his spine. The permit was made out to Mitchell under the authority of Blackhawk Security Systems of Odessa, Delaware. The passport was made out to Andrew Mitchell and listed him as a security consultant.

  There was three hundred euros in cash and several credit cards, all of which Holliday took. He stood up and threw the wallet and the rest of its contents as far into the marsh as he could. He put the mousegun and its holster against his own spine, slipped into the gun sling and reattached the MAC 11 to the straps. Finally he shrugged on the black windbreaker and slung the binoculars over his shoulder.