The Templar Conspiracy

by Paul Christopher

  He had overestimated the time it would take for the return journey. Five minutes after beginning the downward trip he reached the alley, locking the anonymous black door behind him. At six minutes, ahead of schedule, he climbed into his rental car and headed for the Roma Termini, the main railway station.

  As he drove he heard siren after siren heading for the Vatican, but no one paid him the slightest attention. He arrived at the train station eleven minutes after the assassination, caught one of the frequent Leonardo Express trains to Fiumincino Airport, where he caught a prebooked flight to Geneva on the oddly named Baboo, a short-haul company that used Bombardier Dash 8 turboprops.

  The elapsed time from kill to takeoff was fifty-four minutes. By that time neither the Vatican police nor the State Police had even established the direction the onslaught had come from, let alone any clue as to the identity of the assassin.

  The job was done. The Pope was dead.

  Crusader had begun.

  2

  “I should be there,” grumbled Peggy Blackstock, curled up in a cracked leather club chair in the very male study of a Georgetown row house, watching a plasma TV mounted above the tiny fireplace. The assassination of the Pope, as well as the deaths of two bishops, a cardinal, the Vatican’s official photographer and a member of the Vigilanza, was still very much in the news cycle as CNN commentators analyzed every second of the Pontiff’s blessing, running the same gruesome footage of the bullet hit over and over.

  Every news network had their correspondents reporting about every minimal forward motion of the investigation, no matter how insignificant, and the questions about the lax security around the Pope were flying in all directions. It was a tragedy of global proportions for a billion Catholics, but meat and potatoes for the media.

  “You should rest,” said Doc Holliday, Peggy’s quasi-uncle. Holliday was seated at the big old wooden desk at the far end of the room, marking a stack of term essays from his students. He was covering for a fellow medievalist who was on a year’s sabbatical from his position at Georgetown University, and the newly renovated nineteenth-century, classic row house was part of the deal. When Holliday had been offered the job, he jumped at it. The thought of a year spent in the quiet groves of academe sounded like the perfect answer to the summer of hell and violence he’d just endured. When Peggy’s husband, Rafi, had to leave Jerusalem for an extended archaeological expedition, Holliday had immediately offered her safe refuge in the Georgetown house to recuperate from her recent miscarriage.

  “Phooey,” snorted Peggy. “Much more rest and I’ll die of boredom. Besides, I knew Dario Biondi; he was a good friend.”

  “Biondi was the Vatican photographer?” Holliday asked.

  “Ever since Mari hung up his Nikon.”

  “What could you do that’s not already being done?”

  “I’ve got access at the Vatican. Favors I can call in. To my knowledge there’s never been a behind-the-scenes photo story about the funeral preparations for a Pope. Besides, by Friday of next week every world leader will be in the pews at St. Peter’s.”

  “Why Friday?”

  “A Pope has to be interred within six days of his death. I checked,” she said, and then smiled ghoulishly. “Did you know that on his death the Pope’s name is called out three times and they whack him on the head three times with a silver hammer to make sure he’s actually gone?”

  “No, Peg, I didn’t know that. I’ll file it for future reference,” Holliday replied dryly. He was less interested in the particulars of a papal funeral than he was in the motive for such an assassination. Watching the tape again and again, one thing was clear: this was no Lee Harvey Oswald amateur taking a shot of opportunity; this was the work of a trained killer, and that meant that somewhere along the line, politics were involved. But who except someone else in the Vatican could benefit politically from the Pope’s death?

  “It’s true. First they whack him with a hammer, then they smash his signet ring with another hammer and finally they steal his shoes.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “They take his street shoes and replace them with red slippers.”

  “You seem to know a lot about it,” said Holliday.

  Peggy shrugged. “I’ve been surfing the Net.” She sighed. “I really should be there, you know,” she said again. Then she put a serious frown on her face. “It would sort of be like a tribute to Dario.”

  “Horse puckie,” said Holliday, laughing. “You just want to get in on the action.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s that, too,” grumped Peggy.

  Holliday threw down his red pencil and pushed away from the desk. “Come on,” he said. “It’s St. Stephen’s Day, and it’s a nice, brisk, sunny day out there. Let’s bundle up and find an expensive restaurant on M Street to celebrate.”

  “St. Stephen’s Day?”

  “The second of the twelve days of Christmas. Second Night. Boxing Day.”

  “Oh,” said Peggy brightly. “You mean Go out and Buy Batteries for the Kids’ Toys Day.”

  “That’s the one.”

  They both climbed into boots and ski jackets and left the house. The weather was crisp and the low gray sky promised snow, although so far it had been a totally green Christmas. They turned off Prospect onto Thirty-third and walked the one block down to M Street. From there they turned again and walked along M for half a dozen long blocks, looking for a decent restaurant that was open.

  They passed a few options, but Peggy didn’t want pizza and Holliday didn’t want Mexican. Eventually they crossed Wisconsin Avenue and finally reached Mie N Yu, which, unsurprisingly, was open and doing a roaring trade. The cutely named restaurant may have been expensive, but it had something for everyone. Supposedly serving “Silk Road cuisine” from Turkey to Hong Kong in half a dozen, long, narrow, themed rooms, it served everything from chorizo-stuffed dates and banana pesto hummus to Bombay peanut salad and Cuban jerk pork sandwiches. All of this was overseen by a distinctly non-Asian executive chef named Elliot.

  They settled on the Tibetan Tent Room, which was just that—the entire room was enclosed in a huge tent and furnished with plush couches and big leather ottomans. They found a reasonably quiet table and checked out the menu. Peggy chose the pupu mixed grill, because she thought the name was funny, as well as steak and egg fried rice, because it sounded impossibly odd. Holliday chose Virginia littleneck clams and the twelve-dollar Silk Road burger.

  Both ordered watermelon beer just for the fun of it. It also sounded disgusting, which it turned out to be. The food, on the other hand, although a little strange, was uniformly excellent. At the end of the meal Peggy ordered a pecan and chocolate croustade, a puff-pastry concoction, and coffee, and Holliday, a bit of an ice-cream addict, had coffee and the homemade lime gelato. The only thing missing was Holliday’s after-dinner Marlboro, but having quit more than ten years ago he barely noticed.

  “I really think you should stay away from Rome,” he said. He flagged down a waiter and ordered a coffee refill for both of them. “It’s going to be a zoo until they run down the killer.”

  “Look, Doc, I’m not some frail Victorian maiden. While you were in Afghanistan, I was in China, uncovering baby farms with a lot of Chi-com thugs looking for me. While you were in Mogadishu, I was cutting my teeth in the photojournalism business, doing stories about the Cuban mafia in Miami. You’re my cousin, not my father, Doc. I thought you were my friend. I need to do something right now, not sit around and mourn a child that never happened and probably wasn’t meant to be.”

  “I am your friend, Peg, but I worry about you.” He shrugged. “It’s natural.”

  “It’s overprotective. And it’s silly. I’m not the same little kid you taught to swim in the river behind Grandpa Henry’s house in Fredonia.”

  “What if I came with you? Held your camera bag or your lenses—whatever it is photo assistants do.”

  Peggy gave him a long, shrewd look across the table, enlightenment dawning.
Suddenly she broke into a huge grin.

  “That sneaky little devil! Rafi put you up to this, didn’t he?”

  “Of course not,” answered Holliday unconvincingly.

  “Liar.”

  “He told me to watch out for you while he was away, that’s all. And not to let you do anything foolish. Going to Rome immediately following the very public assassination of the Pope constitutes foolishness.”

  “I didn’t think you and the Vatican were on very good terms,” said Peggy. “It’s not like you haven’t had a few run-ins over the last little while.”

  “The same goes for you,” replied Holliday. “As I recall, your last contact with that esteemed organization involved your being kidnapped and held for ransom in a fishing shack on the banks of the Tiber.”

  “Nevertheless, Dario was my friend and someone murdered him indiscriminately. He was nothing but collateral damage. Everybody’s concentrating on the Pope—nobody cares about the little Italian guy with the big camera.”

  “They’re one and the same, Peg.”

  “No, they’re not,” she answered hotly. “It’s all about the killing of His Holiness. Dario is doomed to be a footnote in history. Nobody’s investigating for him.”

  “I see what you’re getting at,” Holliday said with a nod, “even though it’s pretty subtle. It’s like Lee Harvey Oswald killing J. D. Tippit. They were so busy focusing on J.F.K.”

  “Tippit was the cop Oswald shot for no particular reason, right?”

  “That’s right,” said Holliday. “Nobody ever bothered to find out why.”

  “Just like Dario.”

  “I’m afraid so,” Holliday said unhappily. On his tours of duty as a soldier he’d seen collateral damage from entire villages bombed out of existence in Vietnam to children with their hands and feet lopped off by machetes in Rwanda and the hellhole of the Congo. Enough for a lifetime of bad dreams and horror-filled memories.

  “So I’ve proved my point,” said Peggy.

  “Sure,” said Holliday. “Maybe Dario was the intended victim all along; the Pope was just collateral damage.”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time one crime was used to cover another one. Like Shakespeare said: ‘There are more things on heaven and earth. . . .’”

  “I’m not a baby and I’m not an egg that’s about to crack. I can take care of myself, Doc.”

  “I know that.” Holliday shrugged. “I just worry about your safety, that’s all. Strangers poking around in the Italian State Police’s investigations aren’t going to be welcome. I guarantee it.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Peggy suddenly. “I need some fresh air.”

  Holliday paid the bill; then they slipped into their coats and headed home. It was finally snowing and the traffic on M Street had already begun to snarl. They made the walk back down M to Thirty-third in silence, both lost in their own thoughts, the whirling snowflakes settling everywhere. They finally reached Prospect and turned the corner.

  Sitting on the top step of the old, wrought-iron stairs was a middle-aged man dressed in a plain black suit and a priest’s collar. He was smoking a cigarette and he looked like he was freezing. There was spilled ash all down the front of his jacket, which was buttoned to the neck against the snow and the cold.

  “My old Irish bones aren’t used to this bloody arctic weather,” he said in a heavy, almost theatrical brogue. “Maybe you could invite me in for a cup of tea in the hand or something a little stronger, Colonel Holliday?” Like most Irishmen, he made every statement a question.

  “As I live and breathe,” said Doc, staring up at the priest. “If it isn’t Father Thomas Brennan.” Holliday paused, thinking about the hell this man, the head of the Vatican Secret Police, had put both him and Peggy through not so long ago. Then his curiosity got the better of him. “Much as I’d like to put a bullet between your scheming, beady little eyes, hospitality prevents me. You’re welcome to a cup of cheer and a seat by the fire while you tell us what brought you here.”

  “Ah, it’s a grand fellow you are, Colonel,” said the priest, standing up, his arms wrapped around himself, the stub of the cigarette dangling from his mouth. “And how are you, Ms. Blackstock?”

  “Nauseated, since I saw you,” answered Peggy.

  “Now, isn’t that a shame and all?” said Father Brennan.

  The front living room of the house on the corner of Prospect and Thirty-third had probably been called a parlor by its original owners. It was a pleasant room, and since it was on the corner it had windows on two sides, making it very bright. There was a gas fireplace on the interior wall, and like every other room in the professor’s house it was lined with bookcases all stuffed with volumes on every subject imaginable. The furniture was mostly leather dating back to the eighties, the rugs Ikea sisal and the art on the walls a mix of quite nice nineteenth-century landscapes and a serious collection of horses in battle, mostly from the Napoleonic Wars.

  Holliday seated the priest on a couch in front of the fire and fetched him a good-sized glass of Irish whiskey, making sure it was the Catholic Jameson rather than Protestant Bushmills. He then settled into a chair on the priest’s right, while Peggy took the one on the left. Brennan stared into the bluish flames of the fire and sipped daintily at the whiskey, holding it cupped in both hands.

  “It’s a myth, you know,” said the priest at last. “Jameson was made by a Prod and so was Bushmills. Everyone thinks Bushmills is Prod because it’s made in the north and Jameson is Catholic because it’s made in Cork, down south. It’s all mother’s milk to me, mind.”

  “Get to the point, Brennan. My Christmas hospitality goes only so far.”

  “Ah, Colonel, brusque and right to the point as usual.”

  “So get to it.”

  “You are aware of the recent tragedy in the Holy See, I suppose?”

  “Of course,” said Holliday.

  “Are you aware of the rituals surrounding the death of a Pope?”

  “Among other things, he has to be interred within six days of Cardinal Camerlengo declaring his death,” answered Peggy.

  “Quite so, Ms. Blackstock. Four days from now, to be exact. Friday.”

  “I’m sorry for the loss of your boss,” said Holliday, “but what does any of this have to do with us?”

  “We’ve heard things,” said Brennan.

  “Don’t be coy,” said Holliday, his tone sharp. “What things?”

  “We have a number of informants, one of whom is peripherally involved with the CIA.”

  “So?”

  “Our informant tells us that the assassination was the work of a new terrorist group. Fringe Jihadists. Copycat Al-Qaeda.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “I think it’s possible.”

  “Is it plausible?”

  “Is blowing up a subway in Moscow plausible? The only motive for such things is madness.”

  “So why are you here on my doorstep?”

  “Because I think the Pope is only the beginning.”

  3

  “What makes you think that?” Holliday asked calmly. Every intelligence officer he’d ever dealt with had something of the paranoiac in him. James Jesus Angelton, counterintelligence head of the CIA at one time—whom Holliday had worked for briefly—was one of the worst, conducting a search for a mole within the CIA for twenty years and never finding one, and tearing the very fabric of the agency to shreds in the process. Holliday doubted Brennan was any different.

  “Our source is a priest,” said Brennan. He stared down into his empty glass. Holliday took the hint, stood up and fetched the bottle of Jameson. He poured a generous amount into the glass and set the bottle down on the priest’s side of the coffee table. Brennan took another hefty swallow.

  “Who is he?”

  “Father John Leeson.”

  “This is like pulling teeth, Brennan. Who is Father John Leeson?”

  “He was a visiting
priest at St. John’s Church in MacLean, Virginia. Old Dominion Drive. Father Connelly was off taking care of his ailing mother; Father Leeson was filling in. He normally worked at the office of the bishop.”

  “Okay, we’ve got the domestic background. Let’s get to the assassination.”

  “Father Leeson was doing confessions after late Mass.”

  “And?”

  “It makes me a little uncomfortable discussing matters of the confessional,” muttered Brennan.

  “Bull,” answered Holliday. “I was born and raised in the faith, Brennan. The confessional is only sacrosanct to people who aren’t priests. It’s one of the best control and intelligence mechanisms the Church has. Subtle blackmail on an enormous scale. We know all your secrets but you don’t know any of ours, including which of your children we’re sodomizing.”

  “That’s not fair, Colonel. The Church has done enough great works in its time to mitigate its foibles.”

  “The only group who have started more wars and killed more people in the name of their god was Genghis Khan’s armies. Now, what about this confession your priest heard?”

  “A parishioner entered the confessional but Father Leeson didn’t recognize his voice. But why would he? He’d only been there a few days.” Brennan hesitated.

  “Go on,” urged Holliday.

  “According to Father Leeson the man was either drunk or on drugs. He was babbling about killing ‘our father’ and then the ‘poor doomed bastard in the White House,’ and there was nothing anyone could do about it now that the Crusader was in play. Then he said something very odd. He said the killing of the Holy Father was nothing but the thimblerig. For the entire project.”