The Templar Conspiracy

by Paul Christopher

  He began firing, squeezing the trigger again and again, trying to concentrate his fire on the driver’s-side window. Halfway through the second clip there was a brief flash of sparks from a ricochet toward the center of the chassis. A split second later there was a flash and then a thunderous explosion as the thirty-gallon gas tank exploded, the concussion throwing the truck over on its side and igniting the trees all around it.

  Holliday stuffed the Beretta back into his jacket pocket and climbed into the Aston Martin again, slamming the door behind him. Peggy stared at the blazing truck and the trees turned into torches, her eyes wide and horrified.

  “There were people in that thing,” said Peggy, a ghastly look on her face made even more grotesque by the play of the shadows from the flickering flames.

  “Better them than us,” said Holliday, his voice cold. “Drive.”

  She dropped the Aston Martin into gear, then eased the car into a narrow turn and headed north toward Military Drive. Behind them the fiery truck faded into darkness. In the far distance they could hear the first sounds of approaching sirens. Holliday reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out his cell phone. He punched in the number for the Prospect Street house. On the sixth ring Brennan answered hesitantly.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Holliday. Get out of there now; the house has been compromised. No packing, no nothing—just go.” He paused for a second. “On second thought, bring my laptop. It’s in a case in the study. Make it fast. You probably don’t have more than a few minutes. Don’t wear your collar, nothing that identifies you as a priest. Walk down to M Street and get a cab. Tell the driver to get to the Capital Hilton on Sixteenth. It’s a couple of blocks from the White House. We’ll be registered under the name of Dr. Henry Granger.”

  “I don’t understand ...” began Brennan.

  “I’ll explain later. Go. Now.” He snapped the phone closed. For the rest of the drive into the city they traveled in silence, lost in their own thoughts.

  6

  “Why here?” Peggy asked as they crossed the discreet and dignified lobby of the Capital Hilton. The lobby was all low lighting and mahogany. It looked like the reception area of a high-priced law firm. Quiet was the order of the day.

  “The valet parks the Aston Martin in a garage somewhere nearby, which gets it off the street for the moment, and we have a place where we can lay our weary heads while we figure out what to do next.”

  “Why did you tell Brennan the Prospect Street house had been compromised?”

  “Because it almost certainly has been,” said Holliday. “We know it wasn’t Potsy’s people who came after us, ergo it has to be someone who knows what he knows, and which also means they almost surely know where we live. It’s got to be Sinclair’s people.”

  “Why couldn’t it have been this Potsy friend of yours?”

  “Why go to all the trouble?” Holliday said. “Why put a memory stick in the pipe if the dead drop was just bait? Why go through the charade at McDonald’s?” He shook his head. “It wasn’t Potsy’s people, so it probably wasn’t one of the other alphabet agencies either: CIA, NSA, DIA. Someone who wants to put us down because we know too much about the assassination that they want to keep to themselves. If the killer really was this William Tritt guy and he’s on Sinclair’s payroll, then she’d go to any lengths to keep it quiet. Rex Deus would be haunted by it for decades. They have to keep up this terrorist front.”

  They reached the long reservation counter and a pleasant lady with a brass-colored plastic name tag that read ANNE V. booked them into a suite on the sixth floor and then handed Holliday a note. It was from Brennan: In the lounge. It was signed with the scrawled letter B. Anne pointed out a curtained area at the far end of the lobby, and they found Brennan in one of the orange-curtained alcoves across from the bar. He was sipping from a fat glass filled with a rust-colored drink that was too dark for Irish whiskey and too light to be Bourbon.

  “I must admit a certain fondness for Canadian rye,” said the priest as Holliday and Peggy sat down. “It’s somehow a little bit uncivilized, like something you’d make in a bathtub.” Brennan looked forlorn without the white-notched collar of his profession. His usual ash-flecked black shirt was covered with a ratty green, ash-flecked sweater that had seen better days. “I always imagine grizzled farmers in Saskatchewan wearing bib overalls and sweating over a hot poteen still hidden in their barns.”

  A waitress appeared and took their orders. Holliday asked for a Beck’s beer and Peggy settled on a Jäger Bomb—an Australian monstrosity that consisted of a shot glass of Jägermeister German “digestif” tipped into a larger glass of Red Bull energy drink. The waitress went away to fetch their orders, and they got down to business.

  Holliday filled Brennan in about the snowplow attack as the priest worked his way through a second Crown Royal on the rocks.

  “I didn’t know you were such a driver,” commented Brennan.

  “Me neither.” Holliday laughed. “I was hanging on for dear life.”

  “I took the photos for an executive protection article for the New York Times Magazine a few years back, so while I was there I took the whole course. That’s the first time I ever used what I learned.”

  “Well,” said Brennan, “we should give thanks that you could use it when you needed it.” He lifted his nearly empty glass. “Slainte,” he said, pronouncing the ancient Irish toast as “slancha.” He put his glass down on the table. “So, now what, Colonel?”

  “We see if there’s anything on that memory stick,” answered Holliday. “Did you bring the laptop?”

  “Right here,” said Brennan, patting the seat beside him.

  “Then let’s go.”

  The suite was standard upscale Hilton: two generic prints above the beds in each of the bedrooms and everything in muted shades of rust and pink and beige. Tasteful and inoffensive. There was a Wi-Fi connection, a sitting room between the bedrooms and big screen TVs everywhere except the bathrooms. Holliday set up the computer on the little desk in the room and booted it up. He plugged the USB drive into the appropriate port and waited a few seconds for the menu window to open. There were three files on the memory stick: “Tritt,” “Sinclair” and “Itinerary.”

  All three files were CIA reports from what had clearly been a much larger file under the project name Crusader. From what Holliday could tell, Crusader was a classic arm’s-length Delaware company like Evergreen International Airlines and In-Q-Tel, a high-technology dummy corporation whose main function was to monitor traffic carried on telecommunication satellites. According to the file numbers, Crusader had been in operation, although inactive, for two years.

  “If Crusader involves Kate Sinclair, how come it pre-dates that whole episode during the summer—Sable Island and buried relics and all that?” Peggy asked.

  “Sinclair’s main objective was to put her son in the White House,” said Holliday. “Those phony relics were just a means to an end. I think Crusader might well be her version of Plan B.”

  “How does assassinating the Pope accomplish that?” Peggy asked.

  “That’s what we have to find out,” said Holliday.

  He went back to Tritt’s resume.

  A graduate of the U.S. Army Sniper School at Fort Benning, Georgia, William Spenser Tritt spent the early part of his career in Afghanistan “advising” the mujahideen rebels, then moved on to Bush Senior’s war in Iraq. After mustering out of the army with an honor-able discharge he immediately found employment with the DEA and their Condor Group assassination squads operating in Cambodia, Thailand and Central and South America. From there it was a simple step to the CIA. Sometime during his sojourn with Central Intelligence he was offered a great deal of money by one of the Colombian cartels to assassinate one of his rivals. From that point on he freelanced, working for anyone who could meet his exorbitant price. He took assignments from Mexican drug lords, the Russian mafiya, African despots and even his old friends at the CIA. He was th
e perfect candidate to murder the Pope, but there was no clue to the benefit his death would have for anyone, with the possible exception of a cardinal who desperately wanted to be Pope himself, which seemed unlikely. There were lots of intrigues and jealousies at the Vatican, but to Brennan, at least, none that would justify murder.

  The Sinclair file was filled with details of the family’s high-profile life, including their long association with Rex Deus, but that rumor was in the public domain for most people and fodder for Internet conspiracy theorists. Like the Bush family’s membership in Skull and Bones, the Sinclairs’ membership had just about as much effect on their image: none. If anything it gave them a certain cachet. Once again there was no perceived threat. Senator Sinclair was mentioned, as were his extreme conservative philosophies, but he certainly wasn’t the only one in the senate who had the same views.

  Like John McCain before him, Senator Sinclair was a “maverick,” voting whichever way the wind was blowing, and whichever way suited the aggrandizement of his own career. There had been a number of articles over the years about his mother’s influence over his voting, but none that had ever done him serious damage.

  The “Itinerary” file was just as Philpot had described it, but with more detail, including flight numbers, airlines and an annex that turned out to be security camera video clips that showed Tritt leaving one place and arriving in another. The only ones of these not in the file were the clips showing the assassin’s arrival and departure from Rome.

  “There’s nothing here that implicates Tritt as the Pope’s killer,” said Holliday. He shrugged. “All we have is the name Crusader and its association with the Sinclairs, and that could just as easily be coincidence.”

  “That truck with the snowplow was no coincidence. Whoever was driving it was trying to squash us like a bug,” said Peggy.

  The vague doubts he’d had about Philpot at the Mc-Donald’s scuttled across his mind again. What was it he’d said? Something that didn’t fit. The thought began to sink into his subconscious again. Then he had it.

  “Philpot,” he said.

  “What about him?” Peggy asked.

  “He said, ‘This is worse than it looks, Doc. Stay out of it.’”

  “What did he mean, d’ya think?” Brennan asked.

  “He was playing me, but Potsy’s not one to betray his old friends. It was as close as he could get to warning me off.”

  “But what is worse than it looks?” Peggy asked. “And why is counterintelligence playing you?”

  “Potsy’s under orders,” said Holliday. “And I don’t think it’s the NCTC, either. The National Counterintelligence Center is joined at the hip with the CIA. It’s really nothing but an excuse for the Agency to do business domestically.”

  “You think the CIA conspired to hire Tritt to kill the Holy Father?” Brennan said. “Why on God’s green earth would they want to do that? The risks would be enormous.”

  “Like I said before, forget about motive. The facts all add up. The man who confessed to Father Leeson was CIA, Tritt was CIA and so was Philpot. There’s been talk of a rogue CIA faction since the Kennedy assassination. Why not a CIA faction involving Rex Deus? Why couldn’t Sinclair’s people have a foothold in the Agency?”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Peggy. “Now you really are talking like some loony Internet conspiracy theorist.”

  “Look,” said Holliday grimly. “I sat around a conference table in Kate Sinclair’s house with a televangelist, a member of the Joint Chiefs, two congressmen, one congresswoman, and I think a presidential national security adviser from the previous administration. There were half a dozen others present. Why couldn’t one of them have been CIA?” He shook his head. “Sometimes there really are conspiracies out there.”

  “Do you have any proof that one of them was CIA?” Peggy asked, still playing devil’s advocate.

  “There’s no proof that one of them wasn’t with the Agency, either,” answered Holliday. “It’s a theory that fits the information we have.”

  “Actually it’s a hypothesis. A theory has to be proven,” said Peggy, her voice prim. “And we’re just going around in circles now.”

  Holliday gave her a withering look but Peggy just smiled.

  “I’m still not entirely sure why your friend Philpot or the organization he works for want you involved,” said Brennan.

  “Like I said before,” stated Holliday, “they want to distance themselves from Tritt. I can’t prove that, either, but they could sure as hell prove that I’ve got a history with Kate Sinclair. If there is a rogue group within the Agency they’ll almost certainly warn their pet assassin. I think Philpot’s people are using us as a Judas goat to bring him out in the open and then take him out with the minimum of fuss.”

  “We’re bait?”

  “Something like that,” Holliday said with a nod.

  “I still don’t see it, Colonel. Much as you’d like to ignore it we need to address the question of motive. Cui bono, as the solicitors and the detectives in crime novels say. Who gains—Kate Sinclair in particular?”

  “The only thing she truly cared about was installing her son as both the head of Rex Deus and President of the United States,” said Holliday. “And she failed.”

  “There’s nothing to stop her from trying again,” suggested Peggy. “Like you said, Plan B.”

  Holliday stared at the computer screen for a long moment, as though it could somehow give him the answer.

  “What was it the man in the confessional said to Leeson? Something about the White House,” said Holliday.

  “He talked about killing Our Father, about it all being a ‘thimblerig’ and the ‘poor, doomed bastard in the White House,’” answered Brennan.

  “Who were the last three Popes?” Holliday asked suddenly.

  “If you don’t include John Paul I, who died after only a month, there were Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.”

  “Who was invited to the funeral?”

  “Every head of state in the world.”

  “The president?”

  “Of course.”

  “He was in attendance for all three?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that’s got to be it,” said Holliday.

  “That’s got to be what?” Peggy asked, frustrated.

  “Dear God,” whispered Brennan, seeing where Holliday was going. “They’re going to kill the President of the United States.”

  7

  “I don’t get it,” said Peggy. “How is killing the president going to help the Sinclair woman?”

  “You were barely a toddler when Watergate happened, but even before that Nixon already had a scandal,” said Holliday. “His vice president, Spiro Agnew, was charged with accepting bribes when he was governor of Maryland. Agnew resigned and Nixon appointed Gerald Ford out of Congress. Then Nixon resigned and Ford became president. Ford in turn appointed Nelson Rockefeller, who had been governor of New York State. That meant that neither the president nor the vice president were elected. They were both appointed.”

  “If the president is assassinated the vice president automatically takes over and then appoints his choice for VP,” said Brennan.

  “And you can bet that Kate Sinclair’s got that all locked up. It’ll be her son the senator, Richard Pierce Sinclair, one of those ‘Pry my gun from my cold, dead hands’ types.”

  “How does she manage that?” Peggy asked.

  Holliday lifted his shoulders. “Lots of ways. Blackmail for some past sin, favors owed, contributions. It’s a lame-duck administration. The VP will have a shot at the nomination.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Brennan. He plucked an errant fleck of tobacco off his lower lip. “I just don’t think that Sinclair would expend the amount of money she has or take the risk just for a shot at the nomination. She strikes me as the kind of person who bets only on a sure thing.” The priest shook his head. “At least she’d want better odds. As it stands now she’d have to make sure
everything went exactly according to plan. I think we’re missing something.”

  “Well,” said Holliday, “as our Scots friend Robbie Burns once said, ‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft agley.’”

  “What does that mean?” Peggy asked.

  “It means we follow in William Tritt’s footsteps and look for mistakes.”

  “Shouldn’t we warn someone?” Peggy insisted.

  “Who’d believe us?” Holliday replied. “When you get right down to it we do sound like Internet wackos. And who’s to say we’re not telling someone with a direct pipeline back to Kate Sinclair? Think about it. I talk to Potsy at McDonald’s and a few hours later a giant truck tries to run us down.”

  “Your rogue CIA unit?”

  “Or Kate Sinclair.”

  “Or they’re one and the same,” offered Peggy.

  Holliday turned back to the laptop and booted up Expedia. com.

  “There’s a US Airway red-eye to Nassau in the Bahamas leaving from Ronald Reagan in an hour. If we hurry we can just make it.”

  The three-hour flight got them into Nassau’s Lynden Pindling airport just after midnight. They picked up a cab outside the main and only terminal and booked themselves into the old Royal Bahamian on West Bay Street. After renting a car for the next morning they all retired to their rooms and tried to sleep, slowly acclimating themselves to the hot, humid weather.

  They met up at breakfast on one of the sea-view terraces. Biting into a freshly baked scone and sipping her excellent Jamaican coffee Peggy looked out over the turquoise ocean.

  “I could get used to this,” she said, eyes hidden behind a pair of Ray-Bans. Lloyd, their white-jacketed waiter, appeared just as the first sterling silver pot was running out and replaced it with a fresh one. From somewhere farther into town there was the massive booming of an air horn. Peggy could have sworn the tune it was playing was the first four bars from “When You Wish upon a Star.”

  “What the hell is that?”