The Templar Conspiracy

by Paul Christopher

  He’d rented a limousine from a local agency and made the trip from the air base to the Vatican twice, instructing the driver to proceed at a steady sixty miles per hour while Van Loan carefully processed each likely ambush spot along the way, seeing nothing that really looked like a weak spot. A sniper taking out a seated figure like the Pope was one thing; hitting an armored limousine traveling at sixty miles per hour was something else again. The moving target was the one thing that had always bothered him about the Kennedy assassination. Shooting downward at such an extreme angle was difficult, but hitting a perfect head shot while the moving target negotiated a curve was virtually impossible for anyone except a very experienced and talented sniper. By the end of the day, Van Loan was satisfied that all the bases had been covered. He went back to his hotel for a well-earned drink and a decent meal.

  The man who called himself Hannu Hancock, back in Rome after his meeting with his employer in Switzerland, stood atop the air-conditioning unit on the roof of the condominium building on the Viale America. Through a pair of binoculars he looked out over the reflecting pool to the Piazzale dello Sport, searching for a marker on the Via Cristoforo Colombo. He finally settled on a set of wide marble stairs leading up to the stadium parking lot.

  The point of entry into Rome had been well chosen by the Secret Service. The four-lane roadway was split around the stadium, the nearer side stretching south, the farther side heading north into the city. Dividing the one-way strips was a deep, heavily treed berm of earth to cut traffic noise.

  By his estimation, the range was about eight hundred meters, or a thousand yards, well within the weapon’s eight-thousand-meter range, but he didn’t need any accurate reading since the weapon ranged and sighted itself automatically.

  His own escape plan was relatively straightforward. A well-dressed man in an Armani suit and driving a black Audi A8 luxury sedan certainly didn’t fit most people’s profile of a terrorist assassin. Just in case, he packed the trunk of the automobile with a large sample case of upscale Swiss jewelry findings, and of course he carried the proper ID to back up the facade. By his estimation it would take the police the better part of forty minutes to establish roadblocks around the city; by then he’d be long gone. At an average highway speed of seventy miles per hour he could easily be back in Switzerland by the late evening and out of the country on the red-eye to New York by midnight.

  Standing on the rooftop and staring out over the prospective killing ground, he went over the plan of attack in his mind one more time. He saw no serious flaws. All he needed now was for his employer’s people to provide him with the final detail and the small piece of equipment necessary to making the whole thing work. Satisfied, he dropped down from the top of the air-conditioning unit, then went down the utility stairway to the elevators on the top floor.

  11

  The President of the United States nodded to Mattie, his secretary, and quietly walked down the carpeted hallway to his chief of staff’s office. He passed a mirror and noted once again the gray at his temples. It had happened to every president before him, but when he had entered office he thought he was going to escape it because of his youth. The First Lady said it made him look distinguished, but she was biased. It wasn’t six and a half years of being the leader of the free world that aged you—it was having all those people who hated you.

  An ordinary guy in his fifties had a few good friends, a bunch of acquaintances and maybe a few vague enemies. The President of the United States rarely had friends who didn’t want something from him, no acquaintances at all and all sorts of enemies, from wacko heads of state with unpronounceable names to members of his own senate and congress, to half the population of the country that didn’t vote for him.

  He’d never once been hung in effigy while he was teaching law at Yale, but now it happened somewhere at least once a week. It was a very pissed-off world out there, and a lot of people, rightly or wrongly, thought it was all his fault.

  He turned into his chief of staff’s office at the end of the hall. He liked it better than the Oval Office. Morrie Adler kept it messy, with papers piled everywhere and the whole place stinking of cigar smoke. Morrie also got to put his feet up on his desk—a luxury not allowed to presidents, at least not without criticism. Morrie had a fishbowl full of miniature Mars bars, which he occasionally sent down to the kitchens to be deep fried in batter—a habit from his days at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. It was funny how things worked out. Morrie’d gone to Oxford right after their time at the Abbey School in Winter Falls, while he’d gone on a backpacking tour of Nepal, but he was the one who wound up being President of the United States. He smiled. He’d long ago learned that life and politics were a crapshoot; you never knew how it was going to all turn out.

  The president gave a little knock on the doorframe and stepped into the room, closing the door behind him. Morrie was reading the New York Times op-ed section. The president dropped down into the only other chair in the room, a Barcalounger that Morrie’d had back in their days rooming together and taking One L.

  “Do I have to go to the Pope’s funeral?”

  “One of the Castros will be there. You want to be shown up by a graybeard commie commandant in his eighties?”

  “I’m serious,” said the president.

  “So am I,” said Morrie, putting down the paper. “Yes, you have to go. If for no other reason than protocol and tradition. The Prime Minister of Israel will be there. Muslims will be there. Even Tonto’s going.” Tonto was the Secret Service code name for the vice president. The president himself was the Lone Ranger. Morrie’s nickname was Bullet, the Lone Ranger’s faithful German shepherd, which was appropriate enough; they’d been best friends since high school.

  “Speaking of Tonto . . .”

  “I know,” said Morrie. “I heard. The party isn’t going to back his nomination. He’s too old and he’s too tired, among other things.”

  “He’s also too stupid,” said the president. “I mean, he’s a nice guy and all, but if we hadn’t needed Chicago so badly, he never would have been on the ticket.”

  “True enough,” said Morrie.

  “Any ideas who they’ll pick?”

  “Rumor says our esteemed secretary of state. A woman, maybe—there’s that California senator. And then, of course, there’s Senator Sinclair.”

  “You’ve go to be kidding,” said the president. “Put that trigger-happy lunatic within a heartbeat of the big chair? Sarah Palin was a pussycat in comparison.”

  “Sarah Palin couldn’t find Canada on a map of North America,” Morrie said, laughing. “Choosing her was the last act of a desperate old man. Besides, Sarah Palin didn’t have any money. William Sinclair does. Lots of it. And he’s also got his mother.”

  “He’s got to know I won’t endorse him. He’s the kind of knee-jerk, ‘Take my assault rifle from my cold, dead hands’ kind of idiot who gave us the hillbilly reputation that’s been keeping us back for the past few years. He’s a Glenn Beck, weep-for-joy wet dream. He’s got to be weeded out.”

  “Kate Sinclair doesn’t care and neither does the party. The other guys are putting together a slate of hardnosers and gun-toters, and that means we’ve got to do the same. In eighteen months you’re old news as far as they’re concerned.”

  “Where does that put you?”

  “Onto the lecture circuit with a seven-figure book deal, kemo sabe. That’s where it puts me.”

  They both laughed for a moment. The president leaned dangerously far back in his chair, a habit they used to take bets on back at Yale Law. Finally, almost sadly, the president spoke.

  “Can you imagine him in the Oval Office?”

  “No, but that’s not the point. Nominate him for vice president and it gives us a bit of breathing room to find a real candidate come election day. A candidate who’ll reflect your legacy.”

  The president stared out Morrie’s window. The view was pretty much the same as the one from the Oval Office, but here it wasn’t
obscured by drapery and thick, bulletproof glass. “You know what I really hate?” the president said finally.

  “Bad Chinese food? Those creepy vampire books the First Lady reads?”

  “Funerals. They depress the hell out of me.”

  “Get drunk on the trip home,” suggested Morrie.

  “You know I’m not much of a drinker.”

  “Sorry, kemo sabe, this one you can’t cut. It’s not like Tank Gemmil’s Latin class back at the Abbey.” There was another silence. The president folded his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. Morrie found himself thinking about the bottle of Glenlivet in his desk drawer. Was it half empty or half full? An alcoholic’s philosophical conundrum. One way or another the problem was always solved the same way and the bottle was eventually completely empty.

  “It’s the fortieth reunion in a few weeks,” murmured the president.

  “It’s been that long?” Morrie said. The fact was enough to make him take the bottle and its accompanying shot glass from his drawer and pour himself a wee dram.

  “I’ll go to the funeral if you’ll come with me to the game,” said the president, opening his eyes.

  “The game?” Morrie said. And then he remembered. “Not the Abbey School-Winter Falls High game?” The chief of staff groaned.

  “Glory days,” the president said with a grin.

  “For you, maybe,” said the chief of staff. He snorted. “You were the star, the captain of the team. I was a third-string goalie because I had weak ankles.”

  “It’ll be fun,” said the president.

  “Shannon O’Doyle,” said Morrie. He poured himself another shot.

  “Shannon O’Doyle.” The president nodded, remembering the Winter Falls Snow Queen as though it was yesterday. All that long blond hair and the whisper of her panty hose when she crossed her legs.

  “You sure you want to remind the electorate you went to a fancy prep school?”

  “What have I got to lose?” the president said.

  12

  They woke early, asked for a car to be delivered from Hertz, had a quick breakfast and were on the road to Aigle by nine. They took Highway 1 out of Geneva and headed north, staying close to the shoreline of the long, silt-colored lake. They were almost halfway to Aigle before anyone spoke.

  “Remind me why we’re going to this place,” said Peggy.

  “Aigle is the area code on that number on the back of Tritt’s desk. When I called the number it was for a vineyard called Chateau Royale des Pins. I did some checking on the computer; it’s about two miles outside the town. Apparently they make a nice Chablis.”

  “Never cared much for white wine,” said Brennan from the backseat.

  “It sounds like a bit of a wild-goose chase,” said Peggy. “If there’s anything to find it will be at that private garage on the French side.” She shook her head and stared out the window at the passing landscape. There was a dusting of snow on the ground and a cold wind was blowing in gusts, pushing a flotilla of sailboats around the lake. “We should be in Rome,” she grumbled softly. “That’s where the action’s going to be.”

  “That would be your veritable needle in a haystack.” Brennan laughed. “There’s two and a half million people in Rome. How do you propose we track him down?”

  “You got a picture of him in that file from your friend in counterintelligence, didn’t you?” Peggy said.

  “Tritt must know there’s a CIA file on him at the very least,” said Holliday. “It’s easily a decade old. He’ll have changed his look since then.” The photograph in the computer file showed a handsome, narrow-faced man with aristocratic features and neatly parted honey blond hair. If he was an actor he could have played the part of an Oxford student or the ne’er-do-well son of an English lord.

  “Still, it’s a photograph of the bastard; it’s something to go on.”

  Holliday couldn’t fault Peggy’s enthusiasm, but after half a lifetime in intelligence he’d learned that enthusiasm, intuition and hunches had little to do with it. Finding and identifying Tritt would be a matter of hard, slogging work, assembling small pieces of information like a jigsaw puzzle until the whole picture took shape. Privately he gave them one-in-a-million odds on finding the assassin before the president arrived. They simply didn’t have enough time.

  Even though traffic was fairly light, it took them the better part of two hours to make the fifty-mile trip around the lake to Aigle at the head of the Rhône valley. The town was a quaint little Alpine village of eight thousand, named for the eagles that circled on the upward air currents of the valley below, looking for rabbits taking shelter under the camouflaging grapevines in the summer months and foxes in the winter.

  Aigle had been the seat of government for the canton since the eleventh century. Still the seat of municipal government for the district, now the town relied heavily on tourism and the vineyards in the area. They stopped at the Place de la Gare in the center of town to ask for directions and were told to follow the Chemin du Fahey to its end two and a half miles east of the town.

  Fifteen minutes and two wrong turns later they reached Chateau Royale des Pins. Less a chateau than a full-blown castle, it sat at the summit of a large, flat-topped hill. It was surrounded by pruned grapevines that made it look like a gigantic military cemetery filled with makeshift, gnarled crosses, dark against a recent fall of fresh snow.

  They parked in the lot at the bottom of the hill and trudged up the narrow path to the top, snow crunching under their shoes. They reached the old gatehouse at the entrance to the huge stone building. Left and right were turrets and arrow slits in the heavy walls. Here and there Holliday could actually see rusted cannonballs embedded in the walls that probably dated back to Napoleonic times. They went through a pair of imposing oak, iron-strapped doors and stepped into the castle.

  They found themselves in a large foyer with La Boutique de Chateau on one side and the requisite suit of armor on display to the right. The boutique was really nothing more than a souvenir shop selling castle key chains, wine-bottle key chains, bottle-opener key chains, eagle key chains, assorted postcards, a Swiss Post Office first-day cover of a stamp to commemorate the castle and View-Master slide sets that looked as though they’d been on the shelves, untouched, for decades.

  Feeling the beady eyes of the concierge staring at him suspiciously, Holliday bought a wine-bottle key chain and gave the woman, a faint mustache distinguishable on her lip, a smile. The woman took his money and didn’t smile back.

  A bored-looking tour guide who was probably the concierge’s husband levered himself up off his stool and started giving them the tour, not bothering to see if they were following. Finally he turned and spoke.

  “English?”

  “American,” answered Holliday.

  The man nodded. “American. Of course,” as though it should have been obvious to him.

  Holliday spent the next hour learning far more about Chablis than he ever wanted to know; it was made from high-altitude Chardonnay grapes that were slightly more acidic than the grapes grown in a warmer, lower valley environment. He also learned that Chateau Royale was a traditional winemaker, storing the wine in oak casks rather than the more modern stainless-steel tanks. When Holliday asked a simple question about Chateau Royale’s ownership he was basically told it was none of his business.

  The tour was confined to the main floor, which contained the shop and a viticulture museum, and the old dungeons in the basement, now used as the actual manufacturing, fermentation and storage area. The upper floors of the castle held the private apartments housing the owners, who demanded strict privacy.

  Holliday began thinking that Peggy had been right—the whole thing was a waste of time. He didn’t see how he was going to find any proof of a connection between whoever owned Chateau Royale and William Tritt, the onetime CIA assassin.

  The tour finally ended with a quick run through the museum and a brief history of the Chateau Royale label, carefully skirting the who
le matter of ownership. The little group exited the suite of expansive rooms that made up the museum and stepped out into the looming entrance hall with its inlaid marble floor and tapestries on the walls.

  As they headed back to the shop, Holliday thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye and turned slightly. He recognized the man instantly. The last time they’d met Holliday had elbowed him in the throat hard enough to crush his windpipe.

  He tried to keep his expression neutral and carefully turned his face away. The man kept on coming down the stairs, then turned and went into the museum. Five minutes later the trio was back out in the cold again, heading down the steep path to the parking lot.

  “Well, that was a bust,” said Peggy.

  “I thought it was quite educational myself,” said Brennan. Peggy shot him a look to make sure she wasn’t being mocked.

  “I found out exactly what I needed to know,” said Holliday, dropping his little bombshell.

  “Which would be?” Brennan said.

  “As we were going out in the main hall, did you see the man coming down the stairs?”

  “Big man. Jowls, distinguished-looking. Gray tips at the temples. Maybe seventy or so,” answered Peggy.

  “That’s the one.” Holliday nodded.

  “And who would he be to us?” Brennan asked.

  “His name is Angus Scott Matoon,” explained Holliday. “He’s one of the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon. He’s also Rex Deus. He was at that meeting where I was supposed to play pet archaeologist. I hit him pretty hard when I made my unceremonious exit from Sinclair House.”

  “Did he see you?” Brennan asked.

  “I don’t think so,” said Holliday, shaking his head. “And if he did, he didn’t recognize me.”