Templar 09 - Secret of the Templars

by Christopher, Paul

  He stepped back and looked down at the weapon before stuffing it into his pocket. It was a SIG Pro, standard issue for the French secret police. He found the man’s wallet in the left inside pocket of his suit jacket, and an ID folder in one of the sleeves identified the man as Paul Richard, a detective in the DST—Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire. So now the French were after him as well as the Company. He felt as if there was a target painted on his back. He hurried down the alley to the end. He was running out of time.

  With the inclusion of the French cops, everything had been thrown for a loop. It was a whole new ball game.

  He stopped and turned back the way he’d come. Whatever net had been thrown over the area had effectively been doubled now. He went back thirty feet into the shadowy alley. There was a small lane servicing the buildings that faced the Quai Saint-Michel. He squeezed down the narrow crevasse. It smelled like the garbage that was spilling out of the bins at the rear entrances of the buildings. A rat scurried. Holliday reached a bin marked “Hôtel du Quai.” The same name was stenciled on a gray steel door that was propped open with a brick. Holliday pulled it open and stepped into a short hall that led him to a kitchen area filled with steam, turmoil and the odors of half a dozen dishes being cooked. Men in paper hats and aprons were moving from station to station fetching, chopping, tasting and flambéing, while a fat man with sweat streaming down his face wearing a tall chef’s hat bellowed orders. A skinny man looked up, a bloody cleaver raised in his hand above a butcher block with a slaughtered suckling pig spread-eagle across it. He scowled. Holliday flashed the ID folder and the man dropped his eyes and his scowl.

  Holliday pushed out through the swinging doors into a dowdy restaurant that was barely larger than an average living room. The walls were yellowing and decorated with cheap prints of Parisian scenes. The floor was covered in carpeting that had probably been a rich red but had aged to an ugly dark brown after decades of use. There were three diners all eating soup and none of them looked very happy about it.

  Holliday threaded his way between the tables and left the room walking between two faux marble pillars and into the lobby. The lobby was small, dark, decorated in much the same manner as the restaurant. A dark-complexioned man was reading a magazine and sitting behind the counter. The man was reading Der Spiegel and smoking a foul-smelling cigarette. Holliday recognized the stink of the cigarette—it was an F6 brand. The man behind the desk was German.

  “Ein Zimmer. Keine Fragen gestellt,” Holliday said and flashed the ID folder again. The man behind the counter put down the magazine and slapped down a key with a tag on it. Holliday fished three fifty-euro bills out of the dead policeman’s wallet, put them down and picked up the key.

  “Danke,” he said.

  “Bitte,” replied the man behind the counter, and he picked up his magazine again. Holliday went up two flights and found his room, which faced out over the Quai Saint-Michel. It was small and narrow. The gray wall-to-wall carpeting was thin and burnt here and there by errant cigarette butts. The bed was a single and the art on the wall was surprising: a famous Ronald Searle cartoon showing café life in Montmartre. Searle, the creator of the infamous Girls of Saint Trinians, had lived in Paris for many years to escape onerous British taxation and wound up falling in love with the city. And despite his fame and wealth he lived out his life above a café on the Left Bank.

  Holliday went to the window and glanced down. The Quai Saint-Michel was a one-way street that headed west. The broad avenue as well as the parking lane directly below him were choked with traffic. He turned away and went to the house phone on a small beside table. He sat down on the bed and picked up the phone.

  “Desk.”

  “Do you have porters here?”

  “Sure.”

  “Send one up to 346.”

  “Sure.”

  Five minutes later there was a knock at the door. The bellhop was in his forties, balding and wearing a cardigan. His fingers and mustache were nicotine stained and he smelled faintly of wine.

  “You speak English?”

  “Yes, a little.”

  Holliday peeled off three hundred-euro bills from his own wallet. “You know where to buy cell phones around here?”

  “Oui.”

  “Get me two, bring them back here. Be back in less than half an hour and there’ll be an extra hundred in it for you. Understand?”

  “Oui, m’sieur.”

  “Get going.”

  The man hustled out the door and Holliday settled down to wait. Twenty minutes later the bellhop handed Holliday the two cell phones still in their boxes, collected his bonus and left. Holliday called down to the desk again.

  “Find me the number for Peter Lazarus and connect me.” Holliday spelled out the name and hung up the phone. The Company might have the cell towers covered, but not the landlines. A moment later the house phone rang. Holliday picked it up. “Dr. Lazarus?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m a friend of Spencer Boatman. My name is John Holliday.”

  “He mentioned you. What can I do for you?”

  “I have to see you. Now. Spencer is in harm’s way and I put him there.”

  “Eighty-eight Avenue Foch,” Lazarus said, a note of dark humor in his deep voice. “You can recognize it easily enough. There’s a plaque on the entrance commemorating it as the Gestapo headquarters during the war.” Lazarus gave Holliday detailed information on how to find him.

  “I’ll need about an hour,” said Holliday.

  “I’ll be here.”

  * * *

  It took Holliday twenty minutes to find a room where housekeeping was still working. He slipped into the room as though he owned it, sat down in the armchair and made several mock calls on one of his new “burner” phones. The housekeeper finished, Holliday gave her a ten-euro tip and that was that. As soon as the housekeeper was out the door, Holliday was on his feet and going through the real occupant’s clothing.

  He found a cheap suit that fit him well enough, a white shirt and a pale yellow tie. His best find was a large wraparound pair of aviator sunglasses. He also found a formless old fedora on the shelf of the cupboard and realized the man was probably in the dining room. He quickened his pace. He went into the bathroom, removed his eye patch, put on the sunglasses and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. The glasses didn’t quite cover the scar tissue from the hit he’d taken at the Moscow Airport a few years back, but they were good enough. He dropped the fedora onto his head, which shaded his face even more. Satisfied, he left the room.

  As Holliday went down the stairs, he prayed he wouldn’t meet the stranger whose clothes he had just stolen, then crossed the small lobby and stepped out onto the street. The weather was cool and cloudy. Directly in front of him was a chunky, battered Mercedes taxi with an equally chunky and battered driver behind the wheel, who was reading a copy of Le Figaro. Holliday looked to his left and right, saw nothing suspicious and climbed into the rear seat. The interior of the taxi smelled of sausage and cheese. He gave the driver an address on Rue Pergolèse and ten minutes later they were there. He paid the driver, watched him go and then went back around the corner to Avenue Foch. It wasn’t much of a cover, but it would probably buy him a little time.

  Just as Lazarus had described, there was a narrow porte cochere leading to the interior courtyard. He walked down to the end of it, and instead of garbage bins and bicycles, there was a substantial two-story stone house, its roof covered with sooty clay tiles. The house must have predated the blocks of apartments all around it by at least a hundred years.

  There was a man in his late fifties standing on the steps, presumably waiting for Holliday. He was tall and more heavy-set than Holliday, with a square-jawed, clean-shaven face, hazel eyes and long, curly jet-black hair. He was, in fact, a remarkably good-looking man. He was wearing a black turtleneck, black jeans, expensive black
loafers and a shoulder holster with what appeared to be a Smith & Wesson .45 ACP automatic pistol.

  “Karl Bömelburg’s old place,” Holliday said, approaching the man on the steps.

  “You know your history, Colonel.”

  “I taught it once upon a time. You’re Lazarus, I presume.”

  “You presume correctly.”

  “Dressed for friendly chats, I see,” said Holliday, nodding at the shoulder holster and the weapon it contained.

  “I’m a cop. How else should I dress?”

  “Maybe you’re not the person I should be speaking to.”

  “I’m the right person. Come on in for a minute and I’ll explain.”

  Holliday went up the three steps and into the house. The main hall was wide and the white plaster walls were covered with million-dollar paintings.

  Lazarus led Holliday to a large room at the rear of the house, which was set up as a gentleman’s study: leather chairs, dark carpets, the smell of pipe tobacco and a large oak desk. There were more paintings on the walls—Sisley, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Braque.

  “Quite the collection,” said Holliday, seating himself in one of the leather chairs while Lazarus sat down behind the desk.

  “And each and every one of them is a phony. Part of an insurance scam from the eighties and nineties. Steal a painting from a museum, a gallery or a private home and ransom back the forgery in its place. Took us almost ten years to crack that one and then only because one of the forgers died.”

  “Us?”

  “I work for a backwater unit of Interpol called the Combined Art and Artifact Recovery Division. CAARD for short.” Lazarus laughed, his voice a cool baritone. “Short by name and short by nature. I’m the chief and only investigator and my only backup is a nice young lady named Molly Malone who’s half a computer genius and half an Asperger’s syndrome idiot savant who collects Barbie dolls that she uses in meticulously detailed dioramas of famous murder scenes.”

  “Molly Malone . . . you’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Her parents thought it was amusing.”

  There was a long pause. Finally Holliday spoke. “All right, you’re some kind of art cop. What does that have to do with me?”

  “We’ll talk about that later. First we have to pick up your friends and get you out of Paris.”

  “How about a clue?”

  “I want you to help me rob the Vatican.”

  5

  The old farmhouse rented by Lazarus was a few miles from the village of Brévonnes on Auzon Lake, a hundred miles east of Paris in the commune of Aube. The house was large, stone and thatch-roofed, heated with fireplaces in the upstairs rooms and a huge hearth on the main floor. The floors were broad slabs of honey-colored pine and the walls were rough plaster.

  The group was gathered around the kitchen’s old monk’s table drinking wine while Lazarus made them omelettes aux herbes on the massive wood stove in the center of the room.

  “We’ve had enemies in the past, but it seems as though everyone is suddenly on our case,” Holliday said, frustration in his voice.

  “Most likely because everyone is into everyone else’s business these days,” said Lazarus, sliding an omelet onto the plate in front of Eddie. “The world operates on corruption of all kinds now and there’s no way to tell them apart anymore. Fine art is used for currency transfers in terrorism and organized crime. Intelligence agencies use drugs to finance their black operations and to line their own pockets. It’s every man and woman for themselves now. Honor, truth, loyalty . . . words like that have no meaning anymore.”

  “Pretty cynical,” said Carrie Pilkington.

  “Pretty naive if you believe anything else. Especially for someone who works for an oversight group and thinks their own intelligence community is corrupt as a priest in a whorehouse.” Lazarus shrugged.

  Eddie looked up from his omelet. “I grew up under that kind of corruption, Señorita Carrie. Mr. Lazarus is right. It is pervasive. It leaks into every part of your life, from Castro, through the generals and the police who take, right down to the woman on every block who reports your every move to the secret police unless you bribe her with money or food. To live that way eventually corrupts your heart and soul. It eats you alive.”

  “But what the hell does that have to do with me?” Holliday asked wearily.

  “The notebook Brother Rodrigues entrusted to you,” said Carrie, “is not only a massive financial resource—it’s also its own self-contained intelligence system—one that crosses borders, religions and factions like a knife through butter. The CIA has been after it for years. They knew about it even before Rodrigues handed it over, and the Russians were sniffing around it as well. Half the reason the Company put me together with you on your escapade in Cuba was to find out more about it.”

  “And the Vatican wants you dead for two reasons,” said Lazarus, finally sitting down with his own meal.

  “So on that note let’s get down to brass tacks,” said Holliday. “Just what is it you want us to help you steal from the Vatican and why should we help you steal it?”

  Lazarus paused for a few moments, gathering his thoughts before he finally spoke. “For many years one of the few Gutenberg Bibles left in existence was located in the library in Saint-Omer, France. During the war it was stolen by Göering’s people for the fat man’s collection. It disappeared until it resurfaced in 1945. Remember that film with Burt Lancaster called The Train? Well, there really were trains like that, full of plundered art. One in particular was sent out of France under the command of an SS colonel named Rheinhard Huff. It was headed for the salt mines at Altaussee in Austria. But it never got there. Three months later Huff appeared at the Vatican. This was back in the days when the Kameraden network ODESSA had its famous ratlines for smuggling Nazis through the Vatican and out of Europe. Huff paid his way with the Gutenberg Bible and somewhere along the way a forgery was returned to Saint-Omer. Huff and the Bible disappeared, never to be heard from again.”

  “Presumably that’s not the end of the story,” said Carrie.

  “No. But to find that out we have to go to a small village in Tuscany and interview Huff’s onetime gay lover, an altar boy at the Sistine Chapel in 1945 named Antonio Nardi.”

  “And just how are we to get out of France and into Tuscany?”

  “On an Interpol jet, of course.” Lazarus smiled.

  * * *

  Doug Kitchen, chief of covert operations at the CIA’s National Resources Division, sat behind his big desk in his big office on the fifth floor of the Company’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, reading the report that had been given to him by his assistant, Rusty Smart. Kitchen looked almost exactly like the Prince of Wales, right down to the big ears, big nose and thinning gray hair. Rusty Smart didn’t look like anyone, which was in his favor. It didn’t do to shine too brightly around men like Kitchen.

  After twenty-five years with the Company, Rusty Smart knew that people who shone brightly were often targets. For instance, when the president was elected for a surprise second term in office, a lot of the bright and shining boys and girls had vanished overnight. Rusty himself had seen the handwriting on the wall when the president had given the kudos for capturing and killing Osama bin Laden without a single mention of the CIA.

  Kitchen closed the file. “No copies?”

  “No, sir,” answered Smart.

  “Thank you for your good work as always, Rusty.” It was a dismissal.

  “Thank you, sir.” He stood and left the room. Christ, how he hated the name Rusty. It had followed him from grade school, when his hair had been the color of a traffic light and his face was covered with freckles. Though it was half gone and a nondescript brown now, the name still stuck.

  Kitchen waited until his assistant slithered off to his little hole before he picked up the report and went down the hall to George Abramovich’s
office. George had replaced Harrison White as director of the Central Intelligence Agency eighteen months earlier. George was a player, which meant that whichever way the wind blew, he blew in the same direction.

  Abramovich’s office was crammed with nautical paraphernalia—model boats in glass boxes, a brass ship’s bell, bits of scrimshaw and even a bicorn hat that supposedly belonged to John Paul Jones. The walls were covered with pictures of Abramovich’s climb through the ranks all the way to secretary of the navy. Abramovich himself looked like a boxer gone to flab, his cheeks sagging and his skull retaining just a few wisps of hair. He looked uncomfortable in a suit, and was obviously missing his uniform, which was resplendent with gold and a lifetime’s achievement on the broad patch of ribbons on his chest. He looked up from something he was reading as Kitchen entered the room, and handed him the folder.

  “Give me the short form.”

  “Paris lost them.”

  “Any contacts?”

  “A man named Spencer Boatman.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Big-time academic. Oxford don, lot of pull in high places. He does work for MI6 every now and again. Codes mostly. IQ is in the stratosphere.”

  “How does Holliday know him?”

  “They met briefly at Georgetown University years ago. Boatman was a kid, some kind of superstar. Holliday was twice his age or more, working the GI Bill.”

  “Do we know what they talked about?”

  “No, sir. I’m afraid not.”

  “Find out. I don’t give a shit how you do it, just find out. This whole thing is getting out of hand.”

  * * *

  Rusty Smart left the office at six o’clock, his usual time, but instead of going home to his apartment in Georgetown, he headed out of McLean and into Fairfax County. He made sure his car’s GPS unit was shut off before he made his way to Earl Street and parked at the end of the residential backwater. Most of the large ranch-style houses were lit, their curtains pulled against the encroaching dusk. He took the Nikon from the seat beside him, climbed out of the car and headed down the trail into the park that led off the dead end. The small bridge was about two hundred yards in.