The Templar Conspiracy

by Paul Christopher

  Suddenly a wire-covered fluorescent fixture in the ceiling flickered to life, buzzing and clicking for a few seconds before giving out a steady light. Holliday blinked and covered his eyes in the sudden glare. A moment after the light came on the metal door opened and three men appeared dressed in generic BDUs that didn’t look like any American camouflage pattern he’d ever seen. The caps were a little odd, too—the bills were quilted and they had fold-up earflaps. The design was clearly Eastern European—Russian, Czech or Bulgarian. He was somewhere behind what used to be called the Iron Curtain.

  The first two men were carrying a small metal table. The third man carried a pair of metal straight chairs. They set them down in the center of the room directly under the light fixture.

  “Holloa.” Nothing. Not Bulgarian.

  “Csak keveset beszélek magyaru.” No response. Not Hungarian.

  “Wyli¿ mi dupe, matkojebca.” Definitely not Polish.

  “Dobra Den. Do prdele.” A slightly turned head and a small look of surprise on one of the men carrying the table.

  Gotcha, thought Holliday. They were Czech. The last time he’d been in the Czech Republic had been more than a year ago with the Sinclair girl on a wild-goose chase that had almost killed him.

  The three men left the room. They also left the door open. Holliday didn’t move from his position on the floor. A reed-thin figure, cigarette in hand, appeared in the doorway.

  “Mrs. Sinclair,” said Holliday as Kate Sinclair walked into the dungeonlike room. The tip of her cigarette glowed. She was wearing a very expensive Chanel pin-striped power suit.

  “So nice to be remembered.” The elderly woman smiled.

  “You must be very pleased,” said Holliday. “A heartbeat away from the White House. Too bad he didn’t earn the position on merit.”

  “We’re not here to talk about my son, Colonel. We’re here to talk about you and something that rightfully belongs in our family.”

  “How did you find us so quickly?” Holliday asked, avoiding the subject of Brother Rodrigues’s notebook.

  “We’ve had you watched for weeks.” She paused, blew smoke and inhaled again. “Now, let us get down to business.”

  “This is the second time I’ve been kidnapped by your little group,” said Holliday, stalling. The Sinclair matriarch sighed.

  “I’d hardly call it a ‘little’ group,” she answered. “The membership of Rex Deus is considerably larger than you might think. We have a great many members in high places.”

  “People who can make other people disappear? People who can fake assassination attempts?”

  “You mean my son?” Sinclair shook her head. “That was easy in comparison to killing the Pope.”

  “If you were setting me up as some kind of patsy, why make me vanish now?” Holliday asked. “I should be brought down in a hail of bullets somewhere, with the media invited to the finale.”

  “All in good time, Colonel. We all have our parts to play in our little production.” She dropped the short end of her cigarette onto the concrete floor and ground it under her heel. “The notebook,” she said. “The Templar notebook. My notebook.”

  “It’s not yours, and you know I’m not going to tell you anything about it.”

  “Of course you will,” said the old woman. “Eventually. We have leverage, you see. Your cousin.”

  “What have you done with Peggy?”

  “Don’t worry, Colonel. She’s as much a part of the story as you are. You’ll be reunited later, I assure you.”

  “Your assurances don’t impress me much, Mrs. Sinclair. You and Matoon and the rest of your crazy friends are all traitors.”

  “Patriots,” answered Sinclair.

  “Crap,” snorted Holliday.

  “We’re taking this country back, Colonel Holliday.”

  “Back from who, exactly?”

  “Back from the mongrel hordes that have been bringing our nation to its knees without us even knowing about it, much less caring. It’s bread and circuses. People are watching reality shows about stupid women having eight or ten children at a time, parents are putting their children in balloons for publicity and meanwhile the country’s going to hell. They watch pansy movies about trees that are alive or trees that can walk and talk. Half the country is Mexican, Jew or Arab. Our borders are leaking blood in one direction and drugs and illegal immigrants in the other, our money’s been devalued and our foreign policy is all about appeasement. No one even speaks English anymore!”

  Holliday saw something in her eyes then and he suddenly knew there was no point in trying to have a rational discussion or argument with this woman. Whether borne out of too much power or from something carried in the blood, Kate Sinclair was utterly and irrevocably mad, as mad as any fundamentalist Muslim putting out a fatwa on a cartoon show, as paranoid as Richard Nixon had been at his worst moments, as crazy as a loon.

  “You’re insane,” he said quietly. “And you’re an accessory to murder. You’re no better than Charlie Manson.”

  “I am the avatar of destiny,” said the Sinclair woman ponderously. “And history will absolve me.”

  Fidel Castro’s final remark in his own defense at his first trial, and a sentiment expressed by Hitler, Stalin and Rasputin. Good company. All dictators, all with God complexes and all utterly insane.

  “So what’s the plan?” Holliday sighed.

  “I intend to recover my birthright from you. To that end we are moving you to Pankrác Prison immediately.” Sinclair smiled blandly and lit another cigarette. “You’ve heard of it?”

  “A nineteenth-century hellhole on the outskirts of Prague,” said Holliday. “The Nazis used it and later on it was a KGB interrogation center.”

  “It’s now owned by Blackhawk Security.”

  “You, in other words,” said Holliday. He smiled wanly. “Presumably I can expect a little in the way of advanced interrogation techniques—a little waterboarding, maybe?”

  “Certainly.” Sinclair smiled. “But you won’t be the recipient. Miss Blackstock will.” She called out a single harsh command in Czech. Three guards suddenly appeared, two carrying automatic rifles, one carrying shackles and chains.

  “Your chariot has arrived, Colonel,” said Kate Sinclair. “Time to load you onto the bus.”

  The windowless old prison bus took the road from the old Pr̆íbram airport at Dlouhá Lhota north through the old forests of the foothill country in central Bohemia. The bus was like something out of an old chain-gang movie: driver and guard segregated from the prisoners by a chain-link grating with apertures just big enough to poke the barrel of a shotgun through.

  The prisoner entrance was through a heavily secured door in the rear of the bus with its own little caged enclosure for a second guard, who was also armed with a short-barreled riot gun and controlled the master lock that opened the threaded shackles and chains that secured the prisoners.

  The prisoners themselves occupied long benches that were bolted to the floor on either side of the bus. The benches in turn were divided into narrow cubicles by sheets of gray steel etched with the handcuffed graffiti of a thousand previous occupants. It was, in effect, a jail on wheels, walls made of armor plate, the windshield made of bulletproof double-thickness glass and the heavy tires puncture proof.

  Tonight there were seven people from the black-site bunker on the bus: Peggy, Holliday and five rumpled-looking young men with black cotton bags tied securely over their heads, babbling blindly together in Farsi, their voices strained with panic.

  Holliday was shackled directly across from Peggy on the bus in the forward section.

  “Are you sure about this Pankrác place?” Peggy asked.

  “There’s no reason for Sinclair to have lied.”

  “But what’s the point?” Peggy asked. “Why doesn’t she just get rid of us?”

  Holliday shrugged. “She will, as soon as she gets the information she wants.”

  Peggy shuffled her feet, pulling slightly on the sh
iny steel shackles threaded through eyebolts along the length of the bus. Her movements pulled on the chain around one of the hooded men’s ankles and his head jerked in her direction.

  “Ann ru sar et, kiram tu kunet cos eh lash jende!”

  “Torke char, arabe kassif!” Peggy yelled down the bus. The man who’d cursed at her turned his hooded head around and the other four laughed at her quick and unexpected comeback to the man’s insult.

  They could hear the ringing of a railway-crossing bell and the bus slowed to a stop. After several long minutes the guard and the driver began talking. Holliday leaned forward on the hard metal seat and peeked around the edge of the metal divider. He could vaguely make out the flashing red lights of the railroad crossing and the lowered red-and-white-striped barriers.

  “What’s up?” Peggy asked from the other side of the bus.

  “Some glitch at a railway crossing,” answered Holliday. “The lights are flashing and the barriers are down but there’s no train.”

  “What are they arguing about?” Peggy asked.

  “Whose responsibility getting off the bus and checking it out is, at least as far as I can tell,” replied Holliday.

  “Who’s winning?” Peggy laughed,

  “The driver, I think,” said Holliday.

  Sighing melodramatically the guard got up from his seat and the driver pushed a button on his control panel. The hydraulic double doors hissed open and the guard went down the three steps to the outside.

  The high, explosive round came through the open door, vaporized the guard and kept going until it detonated against the far side of the driver’s compartment, sending a long spray of blood, debris and yellowish bony shrapnel the length of the bus.

  “Oh, crap,” whispered Peggy, ducking back into her narrow little cubicle.

  Holliday knew what she meant. Someone was trying to break the hooded men—probably Afghani Talibans or Al-Qaeda—out of custody, and to their rescuers he and Peggy would be useless baggage, and infidel baggage at that. Holliday pulled hard at the chains of his shackles but nothing budged. A second explosion rocked the bus on its heavy wheels. Holliday risked a peek. Someone had blasted open the rear prisoners’ doors. The rear guard, protected in his cage, poked the barrel of his riot gun out through the grate and fired blindly. There was a brief moment of silence and then Holliday heard the familiar rasp and ping of a hand grenade pin being pulled. There was a faint knocking sound and then a flat, crumpling explosion. The chains shackling him to the floor went slack.

  There was a final, smaller explosion from the front of the bus and then absolute silence. In a single, surrealistic moment Holliday could actually hear the sound of crickets outside in the forest. He stayed well back in his little metal enclosure and silently motioned Peggy to do the same thing.

  The strange silence went on for a long minute, and then there was a harsh whispering voice: “Yellah! Yellah!” Someone speaking Arabic.

  The hooded prisoners began to chatter, some of them laughing, and Holliday felt a slackness in the chains threaded through the I-bolt at his feet. There was more chatter and then silence. Only a few seconds passed and then there was the stuttering hammer of an automatic weapon.

  “What’s happening?” Peggy whispered.

  “I don’t think our Farsi friends got the reception they were hoping for,” said Holliday.

  There was another period of silence and then the sound of booted footsteps coming in their direction. Three men appeared, all carrying folding stock Czech Skorpion submachine guns and all dressed identically in black, wearing Kevlar body armor and black balaclavas covering their faces. One of them appeared to be a woman.

  One of the men stopped in front of Holliday’s little enclosure. He slung his light machine gun over his shoulder, then took a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters off his belt, silently snipped the shackles at Holliday’s feet and threaded the chain through his handcuffs. He took the bolt cutters and slid them back onto his belt, then reached into the side pocket of his combat trousers and took out a small key. He unlocked the handcuffs and took a step back.

  “You’re free, Colonel Holliday.”

  Holliday looked at him strangely. There was something in the rasping voice that seemed familiar.

  “Don’t recognize me, Colonel?”

  The man reached up and pulled off the knitted balaclava that covered his head. He smiled down at his old adversary and quoted from the New Testament: “And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And Lazarus walked.”

  The man standing over him laughed, the scar on his throat as thick as a curled red worm. “I was in bandages for months.”

  It was Antonin Pesek, the Czech assassin he’d shot and killed in Venice more than a year before.

  27

  The Penzion Akát was a tobacco-colored, stucco-fronted hotel that overlooked the railway tracks and the streetcar terminal at the Smichov metro station in western Prague. The building was without any architectural distinction whatsoever—one step above a flophouse where a noisy night’s sleep could be had for a few crowns, and where the cracked china rattled on the tables in the cafeteria-like dining room every time a streetcar rumbled by. It was totally anonymous, a place for traveling salesmen and tourists without much money.

  “He’s dead?” Holliday asked, coming out of the hotel room’s coffin-sized bathroom.

  “Double tap: one to the heart; one to the head. Very professional,” said Pat Philpot, munching on a chicken leg from the KFC down the road. Peggy was sprawled in an overstuffed armchair on the opposite side of the room and Antonin Pesek, their savior on the road to Pankrác Prison, stood beside the grimy window, watching the street below.

  “But why kill him? He didn’t know anything. He was a local photographer who didn’t know what he had.”

  “Jefferson knew you, Doc. That’s what got him killed. Originally you were meant to be a fall guy. Now you and Ms. Blackstock are flies in the Sinclairs’ ointment.”

  “The whole thing is too Byzantine,” said Peggy. “It’s a fairy tale, something out of the Brothers Grimm.”

  “The world is a Grimm place.” Pesek smiled, briefly turning away from the window. “In the sixteenth century a Bohemian countess named Elizabeth Báthory liked to bathe in the blood of virgins she lured to her castle. As a serial killer she was much more prolific than your Theodore Bundy. Now that is truly Byzantine, my friend.”

  “So, where do you fit in the grand scheme of things?” Holliday asked Philpot.

  The CIA analyst picked up a piece of chicken, then thought better of it and dropped the battered lump back into the bucket on the table. He wiped his lips with a napkin and belched discreetly.

  “The Sinclair family has been a plague in D.C. since the beginning. They’ve got links and connections that go back to Donovan and Dulles and the old OSS boys—the Ivy League spies. They stuck themselves on the intelligence community like a flea on a dog and they never let go. There’s been a cadre of Rex Deus members in Congress, the Senate, Justice and the Pentagon for decades. The old senator was too corrupt to ever make a move on his own—like Joe Kennedy and the bootlegging years. But he had the right connections and before he died he passed the mantle on to his grandson, and he passed it on to his wife, the venerable Kate. Now she’s finally making the move that the old man dreamed about.”

  “Putting her son in the White House.” Holliday nodded.

  Philpot gave a hollow laugh and tossed a chicken bone into the wastebasket beside him. “The White House? That’s just the beginning.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Peggy asked.

  “There was a movie a long time ago, back in the early sixties,” said Philpot. “It was called Seven Days in May.”

  “Never heard of it,” said Peggy.

  “Ah, youth.” Philpot smiled, judiciously plucking another piece of fried chicken from the bucket.

  “I remember. It was about a military coup d’etat,” said Holliday. “A general
doesn’t like the way a milksop president is dealing with the Russians over some missile treaty, so he plots to take over the United States by force of arms.”

  “That’s the one,” said Philpot. “And Kate Sinclair’s about to do the same thing with the help of her little buddies in the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon, General Angus Scott Matoon in particular. She doesn’t care much for the way the present administration is giving away the store. She thought she had the power on Capitol Hill to get the poor bastard impeached. Now she’s trying a back door to put her son on the throne and her behind it.”

  “In the movie the reason for the coup d’etat was a lily-livered missile treaty the general honestly believed was crippling America’s power. What’s Kate Sinclair’s excuse?”

  “What do you think was the best thing that ever happened to George W? What got him elected for a second term and allowed him to start a phony war in Eye-Raq. The best thing that could happen to any president you can name?”

  “Bin Laden and 9/11,” offered Peggy. “Saddam Hussein and the phantom weapons of mass destruction.”

  “A common enemy,” said Holliday.

  “A rallying cry. One if by land, two if by sea, the English are coming! The English are coming!” Peggy said. “Jihad al-Salibiyya.”

  “The whole thing’s crazy,” said Holliday. “Does she really think her son getting winged by a fake terrorist is enough leverage to overthrow the government?” He shook his head. “There isn’t one politician in the U.S. of A. who is that stupid.”

  “Which is saying something,” rasped Pesek, still standing by the window. “Since there are many very stupid politicians there. More than here.”

  “She’d need another 9/11 to pull it off,” said Peggy. “Something huge.”

  “Which is precisely what she intends.” Philpot nodded, leaned back in his groaning chair, wiped his hands on a napkin and lit a cigarette. “Except this time it won’t be a rich Saudi Arabian with daddy issues and a teeny-tiny weenie. This time it’ll be a homegrown, Kansas-corn-fed, little-mosque-on-the-prairie domestic rag head, just like the poor martyred Senator Sinclair has been fog horning about for the past couple of years. The prez will be pressured by Matoon to declare martial law and if he won’t do it he’ll be impeached and replaced by the young senator. He’s already in the VP’s chair. There’s only one thing left.”