Templar 09 - Secret of the Templars

by Christopher, Paul

  “Except for your news about Holliday.”

  “Like the cockroach he is, he keeps on popping up everywhere, and no matter how you try to stamp him out, he returns just to spite you.”

  “Any idea why he’s chosen to reappear in France?”

  “Presumably because France is where he settled after meeting with Rodrigues the monk. There are some people in the government who think his massive hoard is still hidden there. They’ve even created a task force.”

  “You have access to it?”

  “Intimate access.”

  “Excellent. The Church is tearing itself apart, Hébert. These men must be stopped before it is completely destroyed. Sexual depravities with children and gross financial blunders are bad enough, but Holliday is taking aim at the very heart of things—our credibility that trusting the faith that can be honored and believed in. If the faith is rich, then the Church is rich.”

  The French cardinal shook his head. “It’s so difficult to believe—that one man and his friend could do such damage to an institution that has lasted for two millennia.”

  “It only requires a hole the size of a child’s finger to destroy an entire dam, Hébert. And we must remember that it was only one man who began the whole institution that we are a part of.”

  * * *

  Soon they were out of Rennes and heading for Le Mans and then Paris. The rental car hadn’t made it any farther than the ferry parking lot in Saint-Malo, where they’d exchanged it for an old Renault 4 provided by Carrie’s “people.” It had the name “Pleine Mer” on the side panels and a poor painting of a leaping trout logo.

  “We’ve got cops on our tail—two motorcycles coming up fast,” said Carrie.

  “Get off the main road,” said Holliday. The A81 was a broad, modern highway, but this early in the day there was very little traffic. “There,” said Holliday, pointing to an exit. Holliday looked over his shoulder. “Anything we can use back there, mi compadre?”

  “Nets, fish traps, floats for the nets, basura en su mayoría—mostly junk,” replied Eddie.

  “That could work.” Holliday crawled between the front seats and scrambled into the cramped back of the van. The truck had long oval windows on the doors. Holliday looked back down the side road. The motorcycle cops were closing in, less than fifty yards now, lights flashing and sirens howling.

  “Slow down just a bit,” called Holliday.

  Carrie lifted her foot off the gas and simultaneously tapped the brake. The men behind them were caught by surprise and in a split second they were less than fifteen yards behind the rear of the van. Then Holliday kicked open the rear doors while he and Eddie tossed everything they could into the path of the oncoming motorcycles.

  Both drivers were instantly tangled in net and other debris. The bikes, which were traveling at speed, smashed into each other, bounced and finally tipped over in a screeching spray of plastic parts and a dazzling fury of sparks, tossing the leather-dressed and helmeted drivers head over heels into a ditch at the side of the road.

  Carrie slammed on the brakes as Holliday and Eddie jumped out of the back of the van and ran back along the road. The bikes were ticking and rattling in their death throes, the smell of gasoline heavy in the air. They checked the two drivers. Both were dead, their necks broken.

  Carrie joined Holliday and Eddie.

  “These guys aren’t cops,” said Holliday. “The bikes are BMWs and the riders are carrying Glocks. Police Nationale drive big Yamahas and carry SIG Pros. The bikes, the uniforms—they’re phony.”

  “They were looking for us specifically,” Carrie said.

  “Who was?” Eddie asked.

  “The CIA. They issue Glocks,” said Carrie.

  “There you go.” Holliday nodded grimly.

  “Foxes and hounds, and we’re the foxes.”

  * * *

  The CIA’s Department D was located on two floors of the old Tour Albert in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris, one of the first high-rises in the city. Department D carried out some of the most covert work in Western and Eastern Europe as well as regular surveillance of anyone who was deemed a threat to U.S. national security.

  The director of Department D was a fifty-four-year-old named Elliot Foster, a career CIA man who had been recruited right out of Yale. Foster stood on the catwalk outside his second-level office and stared down into the bull pen, a crossword puzzle of cubicles, glassed-in conference areas and computer arrays all surrounded by large-screen displays and sealed off from outside electronic or visual surveillance. It was Foster’s domain.

  For twenty of his thirty years with the Company, Foster had been a true believer, climbing the ladder rung by rung as he headed for the top. Everything could be sacrificed to the job, including two wives and three children. But in his twenty-first year, politics had snuck up on Foster, and once again he had become a sacrificial goat and was sent to Paris to prevent him from interfering with the career of a lesser man with better connections.

  After two years moldering in Paris, he was quietly introduced to the Ghost Squad, a CIA within the CIA using the Company’s assets, finances and people to increase its own power. It was a hyperintelligence group loyal to no one but its own members. And best of all, its leader was a fellow Bonesman.

  Kate Rogers, one of the unit liaisons, climbed up to the catwalk with a folder in her hand. She was in her thirties, seven or eight years on the job, and was being groomed as a field surveillance operative. Foster had made a play for her more than once and had been rebuffed each time. It didn’t seem to affect their working relationship, for which Foster gave her high marks. Give her a few more years, he thought, and he might consider taking a look at her for the Ghost Squad—if the others approved.

  “What’s up?” Foster asked as she approached him.

  “We were stealing eyes from that French Harfang drone they had up and we sent out a couple of bikes to follow a killer unit.”

  “This afternoon.” Foster nodded.

  “We haven’t heard from the bikes for almost three hours. They just missed another check-in.”

  “The Harfang?”

  “Frogs put it to bed. They were looking for the rental; we had the info on the fish truck.”

  “We have any assets in the area?”

  “Closest is Lyon.”

  “Get him down to Rennes and sniff around. I want some news. Fast.”

  * * *

  Holliday sat on the outside terrace of La Squadra Pizzeria and Café on Rue Jean-Boucher in the town of Hédé-Bazouges, eating the French version of pizza and planning the next move with Eddie and Carrie. The sun was going down now and heavy shadows were beginning to swallow the old stone buildings around them. The fish truck was hidden a few blocks away on a narrow side street, safely out of sight. Hédé-Bazouges was ten miles up the road from where they’d taken out the fake motorcycle cops, but everyone knew it wasn’t far enough. Not by a long shot.

  “The motorcycles will have pingers on them. They’ll have to know where they are by now,” said Holliday. He turned to Carrie. “How close is the nearest CIA station?”

  “They’ve got a small satellite station in Lyon. Half a dozen people at most.”

  “It’s been an hour. We don’t have much time left. We have to find some way out of here. The fish truck is marked.”

  “I have an idea,” said Carrie. She called the waiter over in a perfect Parisian accent.

  “Oui, madame?”

  “Pourriez-vous m’indiquer une maison funéraire?”

  “Madame?”

  “Mon oncle est très malade,” responded Carrie, shaking her head sadly and putting a tearful expression on her face.

  “Mes condoléances, madame. Un moment,” said the waiter. He disappeared into the restaurant and came back a moment later with a name and address written on a scrap of paper: Mercier et Fils
, 46 Rue de la Barrière. The waiter then proceeded to give Carrie detailed directions.

  Rue de la Barrière turned out to be a narrow side street on the western edge of town, its narrow sidewalks laid out with cut flagstone and its buildings two stories high, stone as well. Mercier et Fils had two curved barn doors with a long building beside it, and chapel-like windows set into the old walls. The barn doors had an old hasp and an immense lock.

  “I called the number the owner of the restaurant gave me,” said Carrie. “It sounds like he’s having his calls forwarded to his home. The person who answered sounded like a little girl.”

  “Eddie,” said Holliday, nodding at the lock.

  The Cuban slipped a pry bar from the fish van into the hasp of the lock and pulled. It tore off at the hinges and they eased through the doors.

  Holliday pulled the string of a naked bulb that was hanging from the roof of the garage. Stuffed inside the dark, cavelike garage was a 1955 Citroën hearse—which really looked like it was no more than an ambulance painted black and the words “Mercier et Fils” in gold Gothic-style script on the side panels. Holliday eased his way toward the left side of the boxy, high-roofed vehicle, opened the door and slipped behind the wheel. The keys were still in the ignition.

  “Open the garage doors,” he whispered. Once it was done, he switched on the ignition, scratched the unfamiliar shift into reverse and backed out onto the narrow street. Eddie and Carrie closed the doors and then squeezed into the forward passenger compartment.

  “Now what?” Carrie said as they puttered out of town at an appropriately somber rate.

  “Now we go and visit my old friend Professor Spencer Boatman.”

  4

  Professor Spencer Maxwell Boatman sat at the tiny table set outside the Cour de la Huchette drinking café au lait, occasionally dunking his pain au chocolat into the milky coffee. In most cities, the Rue de la Huchette would have been called an alley, but this was Paris and nothing here was done as other cities. Directly across from where he sat was an even narrower thoroughfare leading down to the Seine called Rue du Chat-Qui-Pêche—Street of the Fishing Cat—which was named hundreds of years ago for the cats who went there to fish for carp when the river regularly flooded in the spring.

  Boatman was in his mid-forties but he still had the air of a tall, slim figure from a Renaissance painting by Raphael. His face was long, the features as smooth and sculptured as a statue by Cellini, his hair black but tinged with streaks of silver, his large eyes suffering from heterochromia—one eye a bright blue, the other startling green.

  Today he was wearing a pale linen suit, a small blue-checkered handmade Egyptian cotton shirt and Russian calf loafers. He was the kind of middle-aged man who young girls fell in love with as easily as taking in a deep breath. The kind of man people his own age knew to keep away from their daughters. On top of that, he had an IQ of 224, an eidetic memory, doctorates in everything from chemistry and physics to archaeology and psychology as well as a background that included more wealth than several medium-sized countries. To make matters worse, Spencer Boatman had never changed his personality from the friendly unassuming kid he’d been when Holliday had met him at school during his first year at Georgetown when Boatman was graduating with a master’s degree in chemistry at sixteen. The scholar was reading C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man when Holliday sat down across from him.

  “Doc. Strange place to meet.”

  “I keep the apartment above the bar as a safe house when I’m here in Paris. My two friends are getting some well-earned sleep.” Holliday paused. “You weren’t followed, were you?”

  “I should think not. I’ve had the bloody CIA, MI6 and the idiots at GCHQ Cheltenham following me around and wooing me for years. I’ve even had the froggies and the Russian FSB sniffing around me just to make sure I’m not working for someone else. I know how to give them the slip.”

  “I need to ask you a question.”

  “So you said when you called me in the middle of the night.”

  “Have you ever heard the phrase ‘The King of the Jews is dead. The Messiah is risen in the East’?”

  It was the Aramaic phrase carved into the wall of the cave at Qumran, where Peggy and Rafi had been murdered.

  Holliday could see Boatman’s mind at work, the sounds of Quai Saint-Michel fading away in his ears until there was nothing except that memory working in the deepest part of his brain. Suddenly Boatman’s eyes lit up. Holliday could almost see a lightbulb coming on above his handsome head.

  “The traitor at the feast is given the robe, the feast is eaten and the greatest is least,” said Boatman. “It’s a quotation from Scroll 59 of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the one that was stolen in 1949 by a professor from the École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem. It suggests that Judas wore the kittel, the robe that marked him as Christ during the Last Supper, and that it was Christ who took Judas’s place. Since there was no way of identifying people during that period, it’s more than likely that the story is true: Judas took the place of Christ, thus allowing the prophecy of the Resurrection to occur and for Christ to continue his teachings and his travels to the East. As I said, the scroll containing the facts of this story was taken by an archaeologist from the École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem.”

  Holliday nodded. The Judas-Christ switch was a theory he’d heard more than once before. “Does anyone know where Scroll 59 is now?”

  “There are lots of stories, but there’s one man who might tell you for sure. He’s here in Paris. His name is Peter Lazarus. He knows a great deal about stolen and looted art and artifacts. In fact, that’s his job.”

  * * *

  Elliot Foster stared down into the bull pen and scowled. He’d sent out one of his best teams of field men on the tip they’d received from their mole in the French Police Judiciaire and the two men had missed several of their scheduled call-ins.

  Foster heard a clattering of heels behind him and turned. It was Maggie Teal, the hard-faced sixtysomething head of station for Paris. She was wearing expensive heels, a Prada suit and a remote headphone. Like Foster, Teal had risen to power the hard way with years of hard work, dedication and an ability to sidestep any political shitstorms that came in her direction. Her hair was a steely gray, and there was never even a wisp of a rumor of her involvement with a man. She was as sexless as a hammer but, oddly, had a husky, almost erotic voice, like an echo of Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. The only problem was she was still one of the good guys and Foster knew that there was no armor more impervious than that worn by the true believer.

  “What is it?” Foster asked.

  “We’ve got a hit. I put out a surveillance tag on all our video links and put in all of Holliday’s known acquaintances in Paris. His name is Spencer Boatman.”

  “Where?”

  “Rive Gauche.” Teal paused and spoke into her headphone. “Put it on the grid. I want video and audio and boots on the ground ASAP. Boundary is Quai de Gesvres on the north, Saint-Germain on the south, Pont Neuf on the west and Pont d’Arcole to the east. Cover all the Métro entrances and report every five minutes into Central.” Teal turned her attention back to Foster. “Ten minutes and we’ll have him in the bag.” The woman frowned. “Although I’m still not sure why we want him so bad.”

  “Above your pay grade, Maggie. Just get him.”

  “Consider it done.”

  * * *

  The disposable in Holliday’s pocket buzzed. It was Carrie, her voice urgent. “Get out of there—they had a tag on your friend. You’ve got about six minutes before the net starts to close.”

  “What about you and Eddie?”

  “Already moving. Get to the Saint-Michel Métro entrance and then get a train at Châtelet to Nation. Walk to the open-air farmers’ market at Saint-Mandé. We’ll meet there. Go. Right now.”

  Holliday stuffed the phone ba
ck in his pocket. “We’ve been rumbled. You go any way except the direction you see me going in.”

  Boatman looked stunned and began to speak but Holliday wasn’t listening. He picked up an empty wineglass, wrapped it in a linen napkin, then stuffed it into the pocket of his jacket. He crossed Rue de la Huchette and slipped into the narrow alley across from the bistro. Lost in the shadows, he could see all the way down to the Seine.

  Over its thousand-year history, the eight-foot-wide space had gone from being a drainage ditch for human waste to an alley and eventually achieved its final nomenclature as a bona fide rue. It had been a home to slit purses and petty thieves, a shortcut for Picasso from his studio on the quai and a way for resistance fighters to disappear during World War II.

  Suddenly Holliday’s view of the Seine was blocked. There was someone else in the alley coming toward him from the north. A coincidence? Highly unlikely. He took out his linen package and smashed the goblet against the old stone wall beside him. There was a muffled shattering sound as the goblet broke, but Holliday felt the stem firm in his grip. He dropped the linen, and any pretense of being a passerby vanished. An ordinary person walking up the alley, seeing a man approaching him with a broken glass in his hand, would have fled, but this man continued toward him. So much for coincidence.

  When he was twenty feet away, the approaching man reached threateningly into the inside pocket of his jacket. A normal reaction would have been to pause, but instead Holliday sprinted forward, the broken stem of the glass raised to the level of the man’s crotch. The man’s eyes flickered and suddenly Holliday lunged forward, stabbing at the man’s exposed throat. The splintered stem dug into the stretched skin and then swept over the right carotid, gouging through the thick, rubbery artery.

  Holliday pushed harder, setting the stem in the man’s windpipe. With his free hand Holliday gathered up the cloth of the man’s jacket and turned him against the left side of the alley, flattening him against the wall, keeping him standing with the force of his hip as the man bled out against the ancient stone. He let go of the broken glass, pushed his hand under the man’s jacket and pulled a pistol out of the hidden shoulder holster.