Templar 09 - Secret of the Templars

by Christopher, Paul

  Carrie Pilkington guided the Vosper into a small cove on the west side of the island and then led them along the beach to a small fisherman’s cottage that had been built on a low rise above the beach. The dawn was just beginning to light the sea behind them and the fog was so thick it was unlikely that anyone saw them arrive.

  The cottage was a plain two-story affair with a living/dining area, a kitchen and a bathroom on the ground floor, and a narrow staircase leading up to a pair of small rooms. The roof was slate, the floors were wide planked and the small windows were covered with faded yellow curtains. It had that lonely feeling of a house that hasn’t been lived in for a very long time.

  Carrie went to the kitchen larder, brought out cutlery, a loaf of sourdough bread, a brick of cheese, a pot of mustard, some butter and the remains of a ham. “Dig in—we won’t be here long,” she said, sitting down. She began slicing up the bread.

  “Where exactly are we going?” Holliday asked, building himself a sandwich. He was starving and realized that he hadn’t eaten since the previous afternoon.

  “First Guernsey on the ferry and then to France by air.”

  “Without papers?”

  “Leave that to me.”

  “Last time I checked you were a CIA analyst working out of Langley. What the hell are you doing out in the field?”

  “As far as the Company knows I never made it out of Cuba alive, if you remember that little drama.”

  “Vividly,” said Holliday. He and Eddie had gone looking for Eddie’s vanished brother and found themselves in the middle of an invasion.

  “I was recruited by another group, and I’ve been working for them for the last two years.”

  “What group?”

  “Officially, it’s the Joint International Office of Intelligence Oversight, but it’s generally called JOI, when it’s called anything at all. In-house, it’s just called the Office,” she responded.

  “Another acronym.” Holliday sighed. “What’s this one supposed to do?”

  “Just what it says. The big intelligence agencies around the world have become their own governments—they do what they want to, and get what they want. They’re out of control. We’re supposed to rein them in, or at the very least gather intelligence about what they’re doing.”

  “So just who is the Office made up of and why is it interested in me?”

  “The Office is a joint committee of high-ranking government and military officials from the UK, the United States, Germany, France and Russia.”

  “Not China?”

  “Not to be trusted.”

  “Why me and why now?”

  “The Vatican has recently allied with P2, Propaganda Due, the old fascist paramilitary group that worked with the Pope after the war and into the late fifties. It was a P2 assassin that killed your cousin and her husband at Qumran—on the Vatican’s orders.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re afraid of what you’re looking for and they want the notebook given to you by Brother Rodrigues. They want the money and they want its power.”

  “Why should we believe you?”

  “Because you have no other choice.”

  * * *

  René Dubois, assistant director of operations for the DGSE—Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (General Directorate for External Security)—was sleeping peacefully in his family’s apartment in the Saint-Mandé district of Paris when the telephone on his bedside table screeched at him. He opened his eyes and looked at the illuminated numbers on his alarm clock. It was four thirty in the morning.

  Dubois sighed. Beside him his wife, Marguerite, didn’t even lose the rhythm of her snoring. She was used to such calls. Dubois picked up the telephone.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Leclerc, sir. We’ve just had a facial recognition alert from Saint-Malo. It’s the American and the Cuban.”

  “When did they enter France?”

  “Nine hours ago,” said Leclerc, Dubois’s assistant.

  “Fils de pute!” Dubois groaned. “We have the technology to pick their photographs out of thin air but we can’t get a message to Paris for ten hours? This is madness!”

  “Don’t swear, René. Remember the children,” muttered Marguerite from beneath the duvet beside him.

  “To hell with the children. They have a lifetime of sleep ahead of them. Leclerc, get me a car. I want it at my door in half an hour.”

  Showered and shaved, Dubois was standing on the curb in front of his building when the big black Peugeot 607 pulled up with Leclerc behind the wheel. Dubois climbed in the back and found a large cup of steaming black coffee in the holder and a thin dossier in a red cover on the seat beside him. He lit a cigarette and leaned back in the seat, closing his eyes and wondering about the idiotic intricacies of a bureaucracy created by the nation that had invented the very word. After a few moments of self-indulgence he opened his eyes, picked up the dossier and began to read.

  The headquarters of the DGSE is at 142 Boulevard Mortier in the twentieth arrondissement, just beyond the Père Lachaise Cemetery. It is a château-style fortress on three sides with a high wall and guard stations on the boulevard side. Beyond the entrance, a gravel drive leads around the treed courtyard to the main doors of the building. At this time of the morning, the entire building was bathed in the light of a score of mercury-vapor lamps throwing the courtyard trees into stark silhouette. Leclerc left the car for the attendants to care for and he and Dubois walked up the steps to the main lobby. There was a security post and two ornate staircases. They passed through security and took the right stairway to the third-floor conference room. Dubois, like any other bureaucrat in France, reported to a committee. In his case the committee consisted of four men: Deputy Foreign Minister François Picard, Deputy Minister of Justice Émile Redon, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Jean Granville and Deputy Minister of Transportation Henri Jarre. None of the exalted politicians was happy about being dragged from his bed at such an early hour, and their faces showed it.

  Dubois entered the room, paused at the door to offer a short, polite bow and then took his regular seat at the foot of the table. Picard, the man from the foreign ministry, was the first to speak. He was a tall, shallow-cheeked man, and of all the deputies around the table he was the only one dressed in a three-piece suit and a perfectly knotted tie.

  “I hope you have a good reason for taking us from our homes at this hour, Dubois.”

  “I believe I do.” Dubois flipped open the folder in front of him. “Colonel John Holliday and his Cuban friend have been spotted coming through customs at Saint-Malo.”

  “Merde,” said Jarre, the bald-headed deputy from Transportation. “When was this?”

  “Seven thirty o’clock yesterday evening.”

  “That is intolerable!” Redon exclaimed. He was a big man with unshaven jowls and a very large nose. The red explosions of color on his cheeks marked a man who drank too much.

  “These men did not come into France on their own passports, Deputy Redon. They were identified through facial-recognition software. By the time the red flag went up they had been gone for some time.” He didn’t add that the bureaucracy of the Justice Department was so unwieldy that it was a miracle he’d been notified at all.

  “Do we know where they are now?” Picard asked.

  “No, Deputy Picard, but we almost certainly know why they have come to France.”

  “The notebook,” said Picard flatly.

  “We searched the castle Holliday purchased in Talant and found nothing. There was only one small apartment there that had ever been used. The notebook is not there,” Dubois said.

  “Then it must be somewhere else,” said the heavy-set Redon, his tone snide as he looked down the table at Dubois.

  “Yes, this was a conclusion I had reached as well,” said Dubois.

&nb
sp; “And what do you intend to do about it?” Picard asked.

  “Find them and then follow them.”

  “We are talking about a trillion-dollar asset that arguably belongs to France,” said Granville, from Internal Affairs.

  “There are several Bourbon kings and Napoléon Bonaparte who might argue that, Deputy Granville, but by the law of uti possidetis it is fair game.”

  “But you have to possess it first.” Dubois smiled.

  “So go and find it,” said Picard. “If everyone is agreed, we shall all meet here at six o’clock each evening for further briefings.”

  It was an obvious signal to break up the meeting and everybody stood. But before he could slip out of the room, Dubois was cornered by Picard.

  “This must have your full attention, Dubois. Nothing else is to be entertained while this notebook or whatever it is remains out of our possession. If you need anything, ask my assistant, Jobert. Anything you need. You understand this?”

  “Of course, Deputy,” answered Dubois.

  Picard nodded.

  Dubois had been dismissed. He went down to his small, drafty office one floor below. Leclerc was waiting for him.

  “Well?”

  “Full speed ahead. We’ll need more computers, a coffee machine and one of those folding beds from the guards’ barracks in the basement. This will be a twenty-four-hour-a-day job for at least several weeks. You have no wife, so that will not be a problem. Mine will probably enjoy being without me.”

  Leclerc smiled.

  “Why are you standing there? Get going. But find the coffeemaker first.”

  * * *

  The target was a three-story villa on the shores of Lake Como in northern Italy owned by the designer Max Feramiglia. The villa was stuccoed in yellow with a slate roof and brown shutters. There was a large pool in the rear; the lawn leading down to the water was perfectly manicured by a local gardener. The entire place was surrounded by pine trees sculpted into perfect tall cone shapes.

  Paulo and Tonio Broganti had been thieves since they were small children in Rome. Over the years they had become more specialized and were now robbers on commission only, stealing specific items from particular people. Mostly it was art, as was the case this afternoon.

  In the absence of maestro Feramiglia, the estate by the lake was taken care of by Mr. and Mrs. Tucci. Emilio Tucci took care of the pool and grounds while Helena Tucci was the cook and housekeeper. There was a complex alarm system to cover insurance qualifications, but it was always turned off during daylight hours. This, of course, was the reason the Broganti brothers preferred daytime robberies to those at night.

  They drove up to the estate in a van with a magnetic sign saying they were plumbers and went to the side of the house where they knew Mr. and Mrs. Tucci usually enjoyed a light afternoon meal sitting at a small patio table. Both brothers carried bright red toolboxes, which they set down on the patio and opened.

  “We’re here about the pipes,” said Tonio.

  “I didn’t call a plumber,” said Mr. Tucci.

  “No, you didn’t,” said Tonio.

  He and his brother reached down into their toolboxes and each withdrew a Pneu-Dart tranquilizer pistol and shot a single dart into the Tuccis’ chests. They were unconscious in seconds and would remain that way for several hours.

  The two thieves went through the side entrance and made their way to the main salon. There were a number of paintings that hung there, but the brothers went to one in particular, a Giotto Madonna and Child.

  The painting, like many of Giotto’s mature works, was done on board with tempera. It was held into the frame by eight iron staples, which Tonio quickly clipped using a pair of short-handled bolt cutters. They popped the painting from the frame, then carried it out to the van, where they put it into a foam-lined case specifically built for it. They were at the villa for exactly twelve minutes.

  The brothers drove away from the lake and traveled due south to the little town of Lucino. There they switched the sign of the van so that it now advertised a courier service based in Rome and put the painting into a hidden slot in the rear of their own Peugeot estate wagon.

  At Lucino they split up, Tonio heading back to Rome and his brother heading to Tuscany for a meeting with the winemaker Meucci.

  The Meucci Vineyards were located just north of Siena in the sunlit Tuscan hills. The vineyard had been in the Meucci family for more than two hundred years, producing a Chianti Ruffino called Chianti Meucci.

  Meucci himself was every inch the Tuscan: round faced, gray, curly balding hair with a bushy mustache, broad shoulders, strong square-fingered hands and the build of a wrestler. He was sitting in the vineyard office going over bottling receipts when the telephone rang.

  “Meucci.”

  “Is it there?” The voice was familiar to the vintner. Clearly Parisian.

  “Yes.” Meucci glanced up from his desk. The painting in its special container was resting on top of a row of filing cabinets.

  “A man is coming from Geneva. His license plate is GE90619. Give him the painting.”

  “The financial matters?”

  “Already taken care of.”

  “As you wish.”

  3

  Cardinal Pierre Hébert, Archbishop of Paris, sat in the vestry office of Nôtre-Dame Cathedral after saying a requiem Mass for a dead premier who couldn’t even remember his own name in the end. With him was a priest from Saint-Sulpice.

  “Tell me exactly what was said,” ordered the cardinal.

  “Holliday and the Cuban are in France, Your Eminence.”

  For a moment the cardinal looked surprised. But surprise quickly changed to anger, his lean, austere features hardening.

  “Where did they enter and how?”

  “Saint-Malo. The ferry.”

  “When?”

  “Two days ago.”

  “Have they been found?”

  “Not yet, Your Eminence. But a task force has been organized.”

  “Who have they got heading it?”

  “René Dubois, assistant director of operations for the DGSE.”

  “Find out everything you can. I want reports daily.”

  “Yes, Your Eminence.”

  The man bowed out of the vestry, closing the door behind him. Cardinal Hébert dressed in simple black priest’s daywear, then stepped out of the side door of the vestry. He walked down the short hall until he reached a second door, this one leading into the alley beside the famous cathedral. He stepped into the black Citroën, which was already waiting for him, and settled back into the soft leather seat.

  “Paris–Le Bourget,” said Hébert.

  The car moved off. The traffic was heavy and it took them the better part of an hour to reach the airport. He wasn’t concerned; his flight wasn’t going to leave without him.

  When they arrived at the airport, they drove through the private jet entrance, drove across the tarmac and stopped at the lowered stairway of a dark blue Gulfstream G650 with the gold crown insignia of Hébert et Cie. on the tail.

  Cardinal Hébert exited the limousine, climbed the steps up into the plane and settled into his seat. As the engines spooled up, a male steward in a blue uniform fitted his place with a table, laid out cutlery and went to fetch the cardinal’s meal, while a second steward opened a bottle of 2010 Domaine de la Côte de l’Ange Châteauneuf-du-Pape. He offered the cardinal a small sip and at Hébert’s nod he filled the glass. A moment later the first steward appeared carrying a plate holding a meal of chateaubriand, haricots verts and gratin dauphinois potatoes, Hébert’s favorite. He waited for the jet to take off and settled down to eat. He would be in Rome before he finished dessert.

  The cardinal was the younger of the two sons of Jean Hébert. Even before World War II, Hébert was a name to conjure within France. The elder Hébert own
ed Cément Hébert, the largest concrete plant in the country, in addition to several oil refineries and a fleet of transport ships among many other enterprises. The war itself only served to increase the company’s wealth. Hitler’s supposedly unbreakable Atlantic Wall was built with Hébert concrete and Hitler’s panzers were fueled with Hébert’s gasoline. Most war profiteers would have been hung after the war for such gross collaboration, but the truth was Hébert was too important and knew too many people in high places to make any charges stick.

  As with many younger brothers of wealthy families, the only way to gain power and prestige in the world was through the Church. With his family’s money behind him, Hébert had risen quickly, working hard to cultivate relationships with the right people in the right places and proving himself to be an asset to both the Church and to France. He spent six years in the Vatican working as an assistant to important figures while simultaneously refining his own goals and objectives. When he was named cardinal of Paris, most people thought he’d reached the pinnacle of his career. They were wrong. Hébert was just beginning.

  Cardinal Hébert was just finishing his coffee when the jet landed at Ciampino Airport. He stepped down and was ushered into a waiting Lancia Thesis limousine bearing Vatican City plates and began the half-hour journey into the center of Rome. Exactly forty-five minutes later he was being ushered into the Vatican secretary of state’s office in the Apostolic Palace.

  “Cardinal Hébert,” said Ruffino, standing up and coming around his enormous seventeenth-century Spanish desk, hand extended.

  “Arturo.” Hébert smiled, taking Ruffino’s hand. “It has been too long.” The Frenchman pointed an index finger upward. “How goes it with our new leader?”

  “Our Argentinian Papa wanders around with his big brown eyes wide, wondering how he got here. He speaks good English but poor Italian, despite his name, which means he has no friends in his own court. In the end I think we’ll find that he’s as much a conservative as his predecessor.”

  “It sounds like you’re not having an easy time of it,” said Hébert.