Templar 09 - Secret of the Templars

by Christopher, Paul

  “We’ve got a problem,” said Lazarus. “They almost certainly know what I look like. I guarantee you Blackthorn and Cole has cameras everywhere.”

  “Frankly, that applies to all of us,” said Holliday. “If these people are as powerful as we suspect, they’ll have file pictures of all of us. We’ve got to take the chance that Bingham is still in New York. Hopefully there won’t be anybody in the gallery able to identify us.”

  “So who goes in?” Lazarus said.

  “I do,” said Holliday. “I’m the one who got us into this.” He smiled. “Now, finish your Grand Slams, and we’ll get out of here. I want you guys to back me up with a getaway car.”

  * * *

  The Bingham Gallery was located on Worth Avenue, the Rodeo Drive of Palm Beach. It was a square two-story building with a windowless facade. The entry was through a pair of heavy glass doors. To the left of the doors was a simple brass plate that read “The Bingham Gallery. Established 1972.” Holliday pulled open the glass door and stepped inside. The interior of the gallery was remarkable. The walls, approximately twenty feet high, were done in claret red. Above the walls there was a curved ceiling containing dozens of lighting fixtures running on tracks. In the center of the gallery was a gigantic misshapen desk made from a slice of marble. At the very far end of the gallery was a doorway in the middle of the rear wall most likely leading to an office and perhaps a storage area for paintings. The paintings on view were a variety of canvases from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, each one ornately framed and hanging from a gallery rail high above.

  Seated behind the desk was an extraordinarily beautiful woman with long blond hair, high cheekbones and model’s figure draped in a black dress. Holliday approached her.

  “Is Mr. Bingham here?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir. He’s out of the city at the moment.”

  “How long is he gone for?”

  “I’m not sure. Is there anything I can help you with?”

  “Perhaps I’ll just look around,” Holliday replied.

  The blond woman handed Holliday a glossy four-color catalog. The cover had a photograph of James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne, a peaceful evening riverscape of the Thames looking toward Chelsea.

  Holliday tucked the catalog under his arm and wandered through the gallery, pausing briefly in front of each painting. Every one of them had been created by an artist Holliday knew. Everything from Gainsborough to Guérin and Rembrandt to Renoir. It was an amazing collection to be seen in one room, and Holliday smiled quietly to himself wondering how many of them had really been painted by Hannah Kruger or one her colleagues working for the Leonardo group.

  As he reached the end wall of the gallery he peaked through the open doorway. There was very little to see except an industrial metal stairway leading up to the second floor. As he continued his survey of the paintings, he was now looking for signs of any kind of security system or surveillance cameras. He saw none, but as he reached the front entrance he spotted a Chubb alarm system panel. He briefly noted that there were settings for pressure alarm, motion sensor and heat. He turned back to the blond woman, returned the catalog, thanked her, then left the gallery. He crossed the street to where the rental car was waiting, Lazarus behind the wheel. He climbed in on the passenger side and sat down.

  “It’s wired like a bank vault. We’re going to have our work cut out for us.”

  14

  Enoch Snow slipped his master key card into the lock on Holliday’s door in the Best Western on Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard. The lock clicked, the light turned green and the door opened. Snow stepped inside and walked to the sitting room of the suite. It was like any other high-end suite—bland, yet well proportioned and well laid out. Matching small tables flanked the couch. There were two lamps and two matching paintings above the sofa. Beside the couch there was an oversized club chair. Behind it was a wooden desk. The whole room was dominated by a large plasma-screen TV. The carpet was a neutral gray broadloom.

  Snow crossed the room and put the small black suitcase he was carrying onto the desk. He looked around the room, trying to imagine how it would be.

  Finding Holliday, Lazarus and Kruger had been a relatively easy task in Manhattan. Snow was on good terms with the young woman in the main Visa offices and she readily gave him the tracking code he could use to follow Holliday’s economic trail.

  From the Holiday Inn he’d followed their car rental and their gasoline purchases all the way down to Palm Beach. Snow had been in the Denny’s at the same time they were having breakfast. Finishing his cup of coffee, he made his way to their hotel. Twenty years earlier, that kind of surveillance would have been impossible for a man like him, but computers, not to mention simple greed, had made the entire process remarkably easy.

  He dialed the combination on the suitcase lock and flipped it open. Inside, packed in hard foam, was a bomb maker’s traveling kit. It included a kilo of Semtex sealed in a lead-lined aluminum foil pouch, making it odorless, non-gas-emitting and effectively invisible to most security procedures. Also packed was an assortment of fuses, timing devices and several untraceable cell phones. He broke the seal of the Semtex package, tore off approximately half the Plasticine-like substance and began molding it into the shape and size of a child’s red rubber ball.

  * * *

  Vijay Sen, still dressed in the filthy clothes he had worn the night before and which in fact were the only clothes he owned, stood shuffling his bare feet on the thick carpet in Kota Raman’s office.

  “I could have you killed. You know that, don’t you, slumdog?”

  “Yes,” mumbled Vijay.

  “But you are not afraid,” replied Raman. “Why is that?”

  “I have nothing so I have nothing to fear,” answered Vijay.

  “Wise philosophy for a slumdog.”

  “The only one for a slumdog to have,” said Vijay, a trace of a smile appearing on his lips.

  “You don’t deny that you broke into my yard and killed my dog and my watchman?”

  “No, sir,” said Vijay. “I killed them both. I broke into your yard and I opened the gates.”

  “Why did you do this?” Raman asked.

  “Because the Bapat people paid me a thousand rupees to do so,” Vijay said plainly.

  The Rohit Bapat family was Raman’s equal in Mumbai but their influence only reached the borders of the immense city. The Bapat had risen from the slums, the same slums that Vijay had come from, and the stain of his upbringing hung to him like inescapable chains. He was blunt, stupid and used violence rather than any kind of intelligence to achieve his goals. This was the first time in Raman’s experience that Bapat had ever attacked him directly.

  “Which of Bapat’s people in particular came to you?” Raman asked.

  “Bobby Dhaliwal.”

  Raman leaned back in his chair. Bobby Dhaliwal was one of Bapat’s most effective soldiers. He was an old-fashioned Thuggee dressed in silks and leathers like a Bollywood film star. His trademark was a pair of giant mirrored aviator sunglasses. It was said that if Dhaliwal removed his sunglasses and you saw his eyes, it would be the last thing you ever saw. Oddly, Raman knew for a fact that Dhaliwal was a pakoli—that is, gay as a songbird twittering in the trees. If Bapat ever discovered this, he would lop off Dhaliwal’s head.

  “Interesting,” said Raman. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because when your people found me, I knew you would kill me one way or the other. Telling you or not telling you makes no difference except that if I didn’t tell you you would torture me until I did and then kill me.” Vijay shrugged.

  Raman sat forward in his chair, his hands clasped together. “What is your name, slumdog?”

  “Vijay,” said the fourteen-year-old.

  “How would you like to work for me?” Raman said, with his best fatherly smile.

  *
* *

  The remaining members of the CIA’s ghost unit once again sat in the safe house on Fort Myer Drive and once again Rusty Smart looked concerned.

  “Kitchen is worried about a mole in Leonardo and we all know what that means. Have we heard from Blackthorn?”

  Streeter shook his head. “Not a word, but the man we put on him saw somebody interesting going into the New York offices of Blackthorn and Cole. He took a photograph of him and we ran it through every database we have access to.”

  “Who is it?” Smart asked.

  Streeter swiveled around in his chair and punched up the photograph and an identification panel beside it. “His name is Enoch Snow. Born in Belfast right at the height of the Troubles.” Streeter turned back to the screen again. “At the age of fourteen he shot and killed a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary but his pals in the IRA managed to spirit him out of Northern Ireland before the RUC tossed him into Long Kesh. Ten years later he resurfaced with the assassination of a high-ranking member of the Unione Corse. From then on he reappears with regularity as a hired assassin all over the world, sometimes bombs, sometimes shootings, with the occasional slit throat thrown in for good measure. The guy is a sociopath—a stone-cold killer.”

  Rusty lit a cigarette. “So presumably Blackthorn has hired him to nail Holliday and his pals. Shit.” He shook his head. “One more monkey wrench into the works. Somehow we have to get to Holliday first, which means we’ll have to get rid of this man Snow in the process. This whole thing is turning into a shitstorm. If we don’t, the whole Leonardo project is going to be compromised, maybe even blown. The very fact that Kitchen thinks he has a mole is bad enough. But if he gets to Holliday before we do, we’re dead men. And frankly, I’d like to continue living a little while longer.”

  * * *

  Holliday, Lazarus and Kruger got off the elevator and walked down the carpeted hallway to their hotel suite. Holliday paused in front of the door, the card key poised over the lock. He stopped and crouched down, his eyes scanning the floor at the base of the door. In a variation on the old James Bond hair-in-the-crack trick, earlier that day he’d spit-glued a small black piece of paper from a magazine onto the corner of the doorframe. The paper was gone. He stood, thinking hard. He turned to Lazarus and Hannah, a finger to his lips.

  “Wait,” he said. He pushed the key card into the lock and went inside, leaving the door open behind him. He walked down the short hallway and stood looking into the sitting room. He let his eyes wander over the room, looking for anything that shouldn’t be there or things that should be there but weren’t. He scanned the room a second time and caught it. There had been a chip in the ornate frame of the picture over the left side of the couch. The chipped frame was now on the right. One thing led to another. The indentations of the legs on the couch were fractionally out of alignment. He stepped slowly backward and rejoined Lazarus and Hannah out in the hall. “Somebody’s been in the room. There are a few things off-kilter. Wait here while I check it out.”

  “Is it Blackthorn or somebody else?” Lazarus asked.

  “Hard to tell at this point,” answered Holliday. “I’ll let you know in minute.”

  Holliday went back into the sitting room once again, leaving the door open behind him. He took the painting off the right side of the wall and flipped it over. He immediately saw a small black box and a six-inch dangling wire. He carefully put the painting back on the wall. He went to the left-side painting and repeated the process. Another transmitter and wire. He hung the painting back on the wall and looked around the room again. The only other logical place for another bug was under the table. He crossed the room, went to the table, crouched down and looked beneath it. There was no transmitter. Smiling, he pulled out the chair and there it was: the third bug.

  The room had been thoroughly bugged. But why? Anybody on his trail already had all the information they needed. There had to be something else going on. He stood and turned around. Why had the couch been moved?

  He crossed to it and carefully lifted off the pillows. Nothing. Then he noticed a surgical split in the fabric covering the springs. He peered inside and saw the familiar shape of a small plastic pressure plate, its wires leading down to a spot underneath the couch. He found an identical switch in the fabric under the other pillow.

  Walking with extreme care, Holliday backed away. He went down the hallway again and motioned for Lazarus to join him, then whispered as softly as he could into his ear, “Pressure switch. Bugs.”

  Lazarus nodded.

  The two men stepped into the room. Holliday pointed toward the couch and Lazarus nodded again. They stepped forward and Holliday pointed out the familiar switches he’d seen so many times in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Holliday leaned forward and grabbed the back of the couch on the right side while Lazarus stepped up and grabbed the left. Very gently they eased the couch forward so that it was lying on its back. On the floor directly below the couch, where the couch had stood, there was a lump of plastic explosive wired to both the pressure switches and a cell phone.

  Holliday motioned for Lazarus to step back. The two men eased their way out of the room and went out into the hallway yet again.

  “Are you carrying a cell phone?” Holliday asked.

  “Yes,” Lazarus said.

  “Is the GPS turned on?”

  “Certainly not.” Lazarus seemed a little angry.

  “Good,” said Holliday. “Crack it open and give me the chip.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to take apart the bomb,” replied Holliday.

  “I’m going with you,” said Lazarus.

  “No, you’re not,” said Holliday. “It’s far too dangerous.”

  “If I don’t come with you, you don’t get the chip.”

  “This is not the time for goddamn heroics,” said Holliday. “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “I’m not trying to be a hero and I’m not an idiot. It just makes good sense. You may need an extra hand in there.”

  Holliday thought for a moment. Lazarus was probably right. “All right. Let’s go.”

  “So I’m supposed to stand here in the hall singing German beer hall songs?” Hannah said.

  “You’re more important than either of us. You know more about this whole business than we do. If that thing in there goes off, you run like hell to the nearest FBI office and spill your guts.”

  Hannah didn’t look happy about it, but she nodded.

  The two men went back in the room.

  “Good luck,” Hannah whispered.

  The two men reached the end of the short hallway and Holliday paused again. He slipped off his shoes and Lazarus followed suit. Once again he gestured for silence. He had now figured out why the room had been bugged. Whoever was after them needed to know that they were all in the same room together before he triggered the bomb. The killer was clearly a very careful man. The pressure plates would have been enough, but he had a fallback trigger with the cell phone. If they made too much noise and alerted the killer, he would dial the cell phone. The tiny current from the ringtone would be enough to set off the explosive. They were going to have to do this very quickly.

  Using a thumbnail, thick and calloused by his many years of being a soldier, Holliday began to crack open the lethal cell phone. Out of nowhere came the bellowing, screaming siren of a fire engine followed immediately by the electric wail of an ambulance. Holliday froze for an instant, the faceplate of the cell phone half open and half closed above the mechanism below. He took a deep breath, waited until the sound had faded and then removed the faceplate. He immediately pulled the chip and replaced it with the one Lazarus had given him. As he did so, he gestured to his companion to simultaneously pull the wires leading from the pressure plates. Holliday grabbed the now inert ball of plastic explosive in his hand and stood up.

  He spoke lou
dly, “I spy with my little eye a bomb that doesn’t work anymore. Whoever you are, you screwed up big time.” Holliday took the ball of explosive to the desk, flipped over the chair and removed the transmitter. He stuffed it into his pocket and crossed to the two paintings and removed both of the transmitters. With the other two transmitters in his hand, he went through to the suite’s bathroom, ripped the wires out and flushed all three transmitters down the toilet. He went back into the sitting room.

  “That was interesting,” said Lazarus. “I thought I was going to wet my pants there for a moment. How many of those things have you defused?”

  “Actually,” said Holliday, “that was my first time. We had a course on it behind the wall in Baghdad, but that’s about it.”

  “Mother of God,” Lazarus whispered.

  15

  It took Holliday and his companions exactly seven and a half minutes to check out of the Best Western; Holliday timed it with his wristwatch. Driving the rental, they headed toward the restored Spanish colonial Amtrak station on Tamarind Street. Holliday made a stop along the way at a Chase Bank to get twenty-five thousand dollars off his American Express Centurion card.

  As with all of his credit cards, he had received the Centurion card using the old notebook he’d been given by the monk Rodrigues. The manager of the bank, a Mr. Harold Bloom, although quite used to platinum cards, had never seen one of the rare black cards when he came out to do Holliday’s banking for him.

  “Are you enjoying our little town?” Bloom asked.

  “A bit hot for me,” Holliday answered.

  “May I inquire why you need such a large amount of cash?” Bloom asked. He kept smiling, but that kind of cash usually went along with either drugs or money laundering, and carrying this kind of transaction on his books might very easily tinkle a few federal bells he didn’t want tinkled. Bloom wasn’t so much a stickler for rigid banking practices as he was for keeping some of his wealthy but less than palatable clients happy.